Snowflake #13

[melannen]

I didn't really know what to do with this one, because: emotions? connected to memories? Look I'm lucky enough to be able to connect an emotion to the present ok. Plus - and this has tripped me up before with prompts like this - I feel like most people expect a "favorite memory" to be a thing that you enjoyed while it was happening, but the emotions I have connected to remembering a thing aren't necessarily the same emotions I felt while experiencing a thing? So one memory that sticks is the teacher in fifth grade telling me "the assignment said to write about a good memory, but these are all about times you cried and were sad!" Well yeah, the day I had wasn't fun but the memory I made out of it is, what don't you understand?

(Not to say that I don't also have terrible memories of terrible days when bad things happened and I was sad. But I also have memories of good days when I was happy that are bad memories because of what they're connected to. And when I'm prompted for a "favorite memory" good days that I have good memories of are never the first things I come up with.)

Anyway! That's way off topic so let's just say this prompt is hard, which is why it's one I got stuck on, so here's something that doesn't really fit the prompt, but I had it on my mind, and it's about imperialism, avoidable tragedy, death, rotting ice mummies, and cannibalism, all the sort of things that immediately come to mind when somebody asks me for good memories.

Four reasons I know more than anybody ever should about the lost Franklin Expedition (and one reason I don't.)

1. When I was in elementary school, there was an annual event where the Girl Scouts got to have a campout in the big science museum, and the year I was old enough, I went and I was very excited! As you would be. Unfortunately, when it came time to lay out our bedrolls, the room with the neato physics deelybobbers and thingamajics was already claimed, and so was the room with the models of the Solar System, and the one with the gorgeous math sculptures demonstrating topology and tesseracts, and the one with the jellyfish. So we ended up in the room with the exhibit on mummies. No, this was not the ideal place for a bunch of nine-year-old girls to try to sleep. On the plus side I don't remember any actual mummies. On the other hand, it was one of those exhibits that was mostly giant backlit signs on the walls, and they stayed lit all night. Specifically, I was positioned so as to spend the entire night looking at a blown-up backlit image of one of the Beechey Island ice mummies (Do not google for those photos! Please! it was the one of William Braine that's on Mummipedia I recognized it immediately) alongside text about how the expedition had gone mad with mercury poisoning and then eaten each other.
   
   I didn't sleep that night.


2. Reasons that don't need exploring at this juncture


3. Several of my friends from the heady days of post-movie Les Miserables fandom have spent several years deep in the fandom of AMC's The Terror. This kind of makes sense, if you were in Les Mis fandom because it was a historical costume drama about a bunch of attractive people forced by circumstance into bad choices who all die tragically in the end. (That wasn't why I was in Les Mis fandom.) Weirdly I don't think any of them were even aware of the dS connection and nobody active in that fandom on Tumblr seems to even know who Stan Rogers is??
   
   As a result while I was never particularly interested in watching the show, too much horror in the wrong way for me, I am in fact all in for terrebus-fc fandom (which is one of the only reasons I was able to follow what's going on in Ted Lasso fic.)


4. One of my non-DW fandom friends has a long-standing interest in the Franklin expedition - unrelated, as far as I can tell, to either childhood trauma or dueSouth fandom. I think it might have started with her picking up Lady Franklin's Revenge on a whim? Anyway, she reads all the books that come out and follows the archeology news, and since I was possibly the first other person she mentioned it to who had any idea what she was on about, I am her Talking About The Franklin Expedition person. (Yes, she knows about the childhood trauma, it's fine.) In return she puts up with me telling her all about the lost apocryphal Mallory/Irvine photos, the mysteries of Green Boots, and the Rainbow Valley, so it works out.


5. Here's the thing though: Shackleton and Amundsen were both immeasurably cooler. Scott's expedition was more tragic and everything Vilhjalmur Stefansson did more entertainingly shambolic, not to mention those guys with the hot air balloon for sheer ridiculousness, or Matthew Henson and his crew for a complicated story of heroism, imperialism, and race. And if what you want is ice mummies, unsolved mysteries, and Englishmen dying with a stiff upper lip for an abstract ideal of exploration and honor, let me tell you about Mallory and Irvine.
   Okay, admittedly none of those have the "going mad with mercury poisoning and then eating each other" aspect, but I think the childhood trauma has ruined that for me, and the mercury poisoning probably didn't happen anyway.
   
   I think the most interesting thing about the Franklin expedition - and it's one of the things that fascinates my friend - is that it's still interesting. The lost expedition, and Lady Franklin's dogged attempts to keep it unforgotten, gripped the public imagination in a different way than any of the others firmly enough it keeps bobbing back up to the public consciousness in odd new ways every decade or so. It's a pointless tragic disaster that's always had a fandom, and that's so strange and uncomfortable and interesting.

Comments

[kore]

I don't know why but if you find out you can tell me why I did too! //FACEPALM

"ROTTING ICE MUMMIES, DO NOT GOOGLE" I don't know what I expected

[melannen]

Tbf most people's experience of ice mummies is mostly Otzi, and he's not even a little horrible in comparison to Them.