It was a moving day for a very important family for our survival, having a qualified doctor in town would seriously increase our chances of success. Getting him to work with the Pawnee and African healers would go even further. Home remedies such as willow bark are basically the same thing as what you find lining the shelves of the modern drug store. Yet Bayer, with their Aspirin product, built a pharmaceutical empire that in the future modern day was busy poisoning all of the crop fields. Meanwhile extract of willow bark provided the same relief for free to knowledgeable people around the world. Willow bark has been in use since long before baby Jesus pissed off the cow by shitting in her food that Christmas morn; the Sumerians documented it’s uses quite extensively. The list of effective remedies growing in the wild is stunning yet people in the modern world continue to ignore them and purchase a derived and shrunk wrapped version of the same thing. Quite amazing over all.
Another important discovery was inoculation against disease, smallpox was the culprit easiest to address. Inoculation simply required you to sniff a tiny bit of powder up your nose, you then got slightly ill for a day or two and after that remained immune for the rest of your life. The powder was easy to make, it was simply smallpox scabs ground up finely with a mortar and pestle. So easy and effective was this that Gen. George Washington required that all volunteers be inoculated before they were allowed to serve. The fact that this joyful disease had a mortality rate of between twenty and thirty-five percent made it an easy decision, not to mention just how horrific and painful the disease itself was. But still, sniffing dried pox scabs is a pretty nasty concept.
Cholera should be manageable for us with good sanitation and care of our drinking water, the odds of us copying the vaccine itself were pretty damn low. However I was quite sure that ‘Death by Diarrhea’ which is what cholera offered was not high on anyone’s list of preferred exit scenarios and our sanitation work would be well received by all.
The diseases were in my mind as I rode into town after breakfast, mostly because one of our new Marine House residents was badly scarred by the pox. The early morning sight of his ruined visage rattled home the significance of not having vaccinations around in this era, all of the twitchers were well vaccinated but nobody from this era was. We would definitely suffer through several nasty epidemics over the coming decades and the best we could hope was to alleviate symptoms and prevent the preventable.
Rather moribund thoughts to start a busy day and definitely not the mood I wanted to be in while welcoming our new doctor recruit and his family. Like anyone else shifting my mood from a mentally stubborn subject like disease and other misfortune wasn’t easy to do. It took concentrated effort and a lot of focus to keep myself from sliding back into the ‘What could go wrong’ mentality. The human mind seemed to be hard-wired to expect the worst and if you let it run wild it could really get you down.
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By the time I made it down to the docks my mood had lifted considerably. It was a heck of a nice day and I had a steam boat to ride north, things were actually improving quickly – regardless of what my doomsayer side was trying to tell me. Perhaps having a full belly helped my mood, maybe it was the idea that I was almost done travelling for the season but it assuredly had a lot to do with that boat sitting down their dockside with smoke coming out of it’s stack pipe.
I was the late comer to the casting off, my lollygagging riding in had put us slightly behind schedule. True, it was my schedule. Regardless, if I do set a schedule I should keep to it. I had to set the example and be mindful of others that were waiting on me. I had always hated it in the Marine Corps when the commanding officer was late for a formation he had called – nothing like standing around in formation for a half hour or so while some terminal O-3 discusses dinner plans with his wife. We’d be out there in the weather, sweltering or freezing, waiting out his little chit-chat session. It didn’t help that we’d be dressed all in green camouflage uniforms and when formed up we looked like gigantic green hedges; granted that in the desert we wore brown and simply looked like hedges that were way over due for a good watering.
Regardless, I was the delay that morning and while nobody said a word out-loud I personally felt like a numbskull showing up late. I would have called ahead but cell coverage was spotty at best in that era of existence.
I grabbed my gear and handed off my rent-a-horse to a waiting dock hand, shortly after that we had pushed off and where on our way to St. Charles to pick up our new Doctor and family. We were really running light that morning without overly much in the way of cargo. I expected the good doctor to have need of space for his families belongings even if they already knew not to try and bring too much right away.
Even with a light load getting away and headed north bound and then dealing with the confluence took a while. This boat might have had the little engine that could but it was still the little engine that would take a while doing so. We ended up crossing to the far bank and headed up the Mississippi until we were well past the confluence. Sven then swung the boat around and recrossed the current so we came down river on the inside of the fork and skipped the worst of the confluence altogether.
There was still heavy work to be done by both pole and paddle-wheel and while we avoided a lot of traffic this way there was still plenty of risk to be had. For Amos, Brin and I there was mostly a lot of holding on tight and keeping an eye out for snags and waving to other boats.
The little steam engine chugged on and half a day later we were gliding up to dock in St. Charles. Not great time but a whole lot faster than by poling or walking.
Of course in the future that would be a half hour commute if traffic was light.