Monday, September 26, 2011

IT’S AN ELEMENTARY CONCLUSION…

So, the other night, I finally got to see a movie I’d been wanting to catch for quite a while now, another Sherlock Holmes piece, I love those.  It made me think again that what Holmes did was so like what we’re doing.  As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had Sherlock put so aptly, “when you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, is inevitably the truth…”
That simple concept seems to utterly elude people, turning them aside from what is hiding in plain sight, fight under their noses …
And just like what we found in Elsah’s tiny town museum…
And then it would be off to one more place, one a little closer to home, where we found an impossible thing we had thought we’d never see in person ... but that story I’ll set aside for the moment…
Back to Elsah first…
It was several months later, and as I said last time, this time with my husband and I and our two youngsters on board, we set out for Elsah a second time…
The yearly season had started for Elsah’s converted one room school house, now historical society museum, to be open to the public on a regular basis.
We drove the staff crazy in  mere seconds.  The two teenage girls working that day’s shift can’t be held too accountable for their consternation.  From the thickness of the layers of furniture polish that had glued that desk lamp in place, I could tell it hadn’t been shifted even an inch from its resting place in years, or possibly decades.  The sharp, ringing “poing!” I heard as it popped free of the spot it had been adhered to stands as a definite clue to that.
Sorry, sometimes the little surface things in life just have to get moved around in the pursuit of the deeper details.  I did put the lamp back in the original spot afterwards…
 At least, I think I did …
Didn’t I?  Oh brother, I don’t really remember …
Oh well, whatever, it didn’t seem all that important ...
But as for what was under that …
Boy, oh boy, pay dirt…
The old topographically delineated map of Elsah that had lain hidden from clear sight for years under the lamp said it all.  In a relatively large but quaint typeface were the words “Piasa bluffs”… We got very, very excited… the girls were sadly clueless as to what all the big fuss was about.
The girls had never bothered to look closely at what their own town museum held. 
Sad...
Typical…
We bought a local guide book that had a copy of the old maps providing concrete verfication of the authentic original location of the Piasa.  Looked closely at other pictures all around the museum, and saw at least one picture that I would kill for an explanation of.  It showed what looked like a huge boulder (judging by the two men standing to either side) that had been carefully smoothed and showed a carving of a strangely splayed inhuman “paw” with five fingers.  I took picture of that one.  I could cry for the total absence of any kind of label to explain it.  And then we fled back to whence we’d come, the two teeny-boppers were starting to look like they were going to get difficult about our “total weirdness.”
We figured it was time to leave before they called someone who might get cranky and not let us sneak back in again if we deemed that necessary in future.
Besides, we had other stuff to do…that paper for Nanjing wasn’t going to write itself, Quint had yet to translate it prior to our submitting it in time for the big conference, and we had to find one more thing to make it perfect…
I started the hunt for the final element we knew we had to have for the Nanjing paper on-line.  We had to have a proper high resolution picture of the Lewis lithograph…
I went to the web site for the library of congress and started hunting.  Eureka! There WERE copies of it in this country.  I was thrilled, but not as thrilled as I would be very soon thereafter…
I put in a request for location information for the folio, thinking that somebody could take a picture or scan it and or had a postcard of it or something or a microfilm or microfiche, and included, as requested, my phone number.  And then, I waited.
A librarian called me back directly…
I freaked out, wow, this was too cool for words… and then I started crying when I heard her reason for calling me …
There was a copy of Lewis’ Das Illustrite Mississippithal in Saint Louis, not even a half day’s drive away. 
The poor librarian was stunned that I was crying and so happy to hear her news. I think I may have made her whole week.
Now, we would not just have another feeble lo-res copy of Lewis’ work to work with, we would be seeing it as he intended it.  In an original copy…
My husband arranged to get an afternoon off as soon as possible… 
We were going dragon hunting, and it looked like it would be in a target rich environment, and what we were looking for had been, as always, hiding in plain sight all along!

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