winding down
Originally posted December 18, 2007
Everything is winding down here, or winding up. Soon I’ll be leaving the subarctic and return to the temperate rainforest.
This repurposed car, built into a retaining wall, is parked in front of the car in the photo “the use of refuse” but it was impossible to get them both in the same picture. In fact there are at least three cars built into that wall, and probably other repurposed junk as well.
There are many things still to do, and I have more or less given up trying to do everything, facing the realization that not everything can be done. One local specialty which only recently caught my eye is carvings made from mammoth ivory. Mammoth bones come up out of the ground from mining or from melting and the ivory is used for jewelry and ornamental carvings. I was drawn into the store by a spectacular flying bear x-ray carving, a combination of living and dead, a shamanic transformation depiction carved from antler. That however was pricy.
Can you imagine? Consumer products made from mammoth ivory. Everything is recycled in one way or another.
Surprisingly, mammoth ivory is not as rare a commodity as you might think. Mammoth ivory is brought to the surface as a by-product of mining and by global warming melting the permafrost. Sometimes whole woolly mammoth carcasses come out of the permafrost, but more commonly just tusks or bones. Teeth and bones are more rare to find than tusks. Lots of places here have mammoth tusks as decor, and the broken pieces are carved into jewelry. For whatever reasons, thousands of mammoths died here and in Siberia and are still coming out of the ice.
