The Valley of the Kings is a massive trove of hidden treasures that were riffled long before the 1900’s. As a woman who hiked through it in the largely unvisited period six weeks after 9/11, I can tell you It hums with the feeling of undiscovered things even though Howard Carter and his buddies before him pretty much took everything away but the pictures on the walls. There are 62 identified tombs, to date. To share the wear and tear of visitors, different tombs are open to the public each day. You buy a ticket that allows you to visit three, although often a kindly bribe will get you into more. KV5’s only claim to fame was the massive dumping of clutter from the excavation of the nearby tomb of KV3 (more famously known as the tomb of Tutankhamun).
In the 1980’s Kent Weeks left UC Berkeley to take a job as curator at the university of Cairo. He envisioned a massive photography and mapping project that would record the dimensions of every tomb. He even introduced hot air balloons to check the area from the sky. To get the specifics of unimportant KV5 he started to remove the clutter and check the tiny site thorougly. Sometimes little laborious actions have huge unintended consequences. He found a massive corridor lined with more than 70 tombs of the sons of Rameses II, and filled with some of the most important treasures ever discovered.
I tell you this story (and its a fantastic story if you’re interested) because every now and then in beaver-dom, a hundred separate unsuccessful excavations where we’ve forever been toiling without sunlight or water, suddenly touch upon treasures all at the same time. There is this massive and startling outpouring of good will, and we have to take a moment just to compose ourselves, make sure we’re in the right place, and appreciate our good fortunes.
This is a KV5 kinda week, with good luck, unlooked for friends, and wild coincidences. I will start from the top in no particular order. This weekend a sighting of five beavers was reliably reported. The voice of John Muir (Lee Stetson) called me up for a beaver tour late friday night. The editor of Bay Nature said at the awards ceremony that Worth A Dam had done amazing work and he was very excited about pursuing the overlap between beaver dams and salmon. Sunday we had a great conversation with JMA conservation award winner about a project he would like to take on that could benefit Worth A Dam. The physician from Los Altos who has expressed interest in our beavers has taken on the thankless job of editing and updating our Wikipedia entries. A new beaver friend has taken on the significant job of organizing a newsletter to distribute to our supporters twice a year. Our volunteer contractor doing the tile bridge project will be meeting with the director of public works this week.Thinking we needed a logo for the organization we placed another ad on craig’s list for an unpaid graphic designer and got a bevy of fantastically gifted artists who cared about these beavers and wanted to be included. I have a presentation for the Rotary Club of PH tomorrow and it looks like I’ll be in charge of the entertainment portion of JMA’s Earth Day event which will likely be a great way to connect with potential performers for the Beaver Festival.
As we flutter around in all this good fortune, I like to think of the excitement Weeks and his team felt when they stumbled into that first corridor. Can you imagine? Finding a place that no one knew existed with treasures that no one had dared imagine? And seeing the corridor stretch in front of you long beyond the shadowed lighting could possibly reach? Did he stop and check one room thouroughly? Or did he run along the corridor and see as much as he could?
Or did he just stand there in awe and thank the spirit of Amun-Ra?
