Dust to Dust: A Memoir by Benjamin Busch

Author:Benjamin Busch
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Harper Collins, Inc.
Published: 2012-03-20T07:00:00+00:00

My wife and I flew to London in 2001 for a New Year’s vacation. We went down onto the shore of the Thames River where I was told not to touch the riverbed because its alluvial soils still held the plague. The river had served to clean the city since it was Roman Londinium, and the history of London’s occupation lay sordid in the Thames’s wet bed. The city, once darkened by soot from the burning of coal, had emptied all of its tarnish, murder, shit, disease, and intrigue into the passing water, and as the river slowed against the incoming sea, much of the debris sank, settled, and remained perpetually drowned at the bottom. The tide was out and the wide channel that cut through the Greenwich Pier section was allowed to drain, exposing the edges of its guts. The shore that always stayed above water was pressed against the stone walls of the city in front of the Old Royal Naval College. This was common ground, and the piles of sand and polished pebbles were picked clean of artifacts. Below the waterline the mud, almost black with the condensed filth of offscourings, was dense with the evidence of man. Scattered in between rocks were pieces of clay-pipe stems, and I went about collecting them in a bag. They began to appear in the 1600s and were popular through the 1800s. A dozen pipes could be bought for a shilling and came packed with tobacco with the expectation that they would be smoked once and then discarded. As I got closer to the water I began to slide on the muck. The river had stopped receding toward its center and had pulled far away from the land of footsteps. It was in those last few feet of retreat that it gave up its dead. I thought, at first, that the strange pattern of bulges under the water was just sunken sticks, but it was the offal of London, now a tight blackened puzzle of bones packed into the clay. Ribs, joints, vertebrae, and the sawed-bone remains discarded by butchers and cooks had been embedded in the riverbed for as far as I could see. I imagined them continuing under the sullen current all the way to the opposite shore and then all the way to the sea.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.