It all began innocently enough. Whilst manning the gift shop at work one day, as I am wont to do, I received a phone call from National Geographic. Apparently, they had at last exhausted the world’s supply of cinematically interesting animals (Next Up: Gerbils of the Serengeti) and had decided to branch out into the lucrative and silly field of early colonial history (of which, in
So it came to pass that this last Saturday a crew of National Geographic people showed up, and though sorely lacking in pith helmets and elephant guns, they did bring a five pound carton of goldfish and a bottomless cooler of cool and refreshing sport beverages, so things got off to a smooth enough start. Most of what they were working on the first day seemed to involve a bunch of Indians trapped in a longhouse with a massive bonfire, and, owing to my severe case of chronic whiteness, it was pretty much assumed that I would play no part in the matter. Come evening however, we got the chance to reenact the historic groin injury of John Smith, which, though sadly left out of the Pocahontas movie (along with any semblance of reality) is really probably one of the wackier things to occur during the frequently dark and depressing early days (the only other high point, in terms of sheer ridiculosity, was the time that Christopher Newport tried to pick his nose with his hook hand and ended up in the hospital for a month and a half, thus earning himself the apt appellation “Johnny One Nostril”). At any rate, we ended up spending the better part of three hours pouring gunpowder into a log, and then setting it on fire right next to John Smith, who was supposed to be asleep at the time, but really just looked moderately stricken with malaise, which was, in truth, rather surprising, since we kept setting off about half a pound of black power right next to his leg. By way of a historical footnote, after being sent back to England, John Smith made a very comfortable living by writing a series of best-selling books about his experiences in Virginia (such as John Smith and the Sorcerer’s Stone and John Smith and the Enormous Royalty Check).
Before I get any further though, I would be remiss to overlook one very important and completely unnecessary detail of the weekend, namely, the ubiquitous fog machine. Seriously, just about every single scene they did, they had someone circling the site with an industrial-sized fog generator, spewing out a constant stream of fog that made it often seem as if we had accidentally stumbled into some kind of a B horror movie, and that at any moment Walter Mondale, or some other hulking, inhuman abomination would come shambling out of the woods and eat one of our militia volunteers. Really, hardly a scene went by where we weren’t positively inundated with a nearly palpable pall of fog. John Smith would be having his thigh sabotaged, and there, roiling about him would be an epic amount of fog. I’d be getting shot in the leg for the 347th time, and there, like a tiny little hurricane about me would be a ridiculous amount of fog. There would be one of the chickens, just chillin’ out and hating me from afar, and swirling around it would be, of course, an ungodly amount of fog. I honestly believe that I may have the dubious distinction of being involving in what is quite possibly going to be the spookiest looking National Geographic special ever. Why did they decide to do this? I theorize that they, like many novice historians, mistakenly believed that early Virginia was the site of nigh-perpetual raves, thus necessitating all the fog (in fact, recent archaeological evidence suggests that the first Virginian rave was not held until 1632 at Bermuda Hundred (where, due to an unfortunate paucity of glow sticks, it failed to really catch on).
Tune in tomorrow for the thrilling conclusion!
