In the winter of 1610, a gruesome period simply known as the "starving time" in the area of Jamestown, Virginia.
Hundreds of colonists would succumb and perish under frozen blankets of powdery snow, some from hunger and hardships, while others would be flat out murdered.

Two legged meat sacks to be salted and barbecued once you had bled them dry.

  
That was not how life used to be, but this winter in Jamestown, Virginia had provided a different kind of hardship, the coldness broke their souls, and the autumn drought had destroyed their harvest and the blanket of ice and snow had swept in to tease them over to the long eternal sleep.

People either starved to live through another death or ended up dead victims, devoured like savory chicken meat, boiled over slow cooking fireplaces in what some historical data suggest was, up until that point in time, the worst drought and winter in 800 years of American history.







Historical records tell a tale surely made more fit for our modern day horror movies, or perhaps it simply is the nights mares of old wives tales come to life. One thing is for sure and that is that the historical accounts read like it was meant to scare little children and grown men to obey their elders for fear of the bogeyman which their primal imagination insists keep lurking outside their homes, waiting in the dark unknown to claim their heart and soul.



  
Words and fictional events meant to plaster our screens of white light and thrilling books that send chills down our spine as we carve our way through words on paper and translucent OLED screens.






The Hollywood-like scripts and dialogue behind the words of Jamestown colony leader George Percy whom wrote of a "world of miseries" were however not delusional fantasies of madmen and naughty priests.


  
No, it was in fact, the gruesome reality of starving citizens who had to suffer life another day as they unearthed rotten corpses from their cold and icy graves.
  
Not to burn them.
Not to fend off the black plague or other mounting diseases.



Instead what they did was dig the dead back up from the icy soil, just so they could carve the rotting flesh off of their decaying corpses.
Armed with pitchforks and knives, and driven by empty, hungry bellies they had but one goal each day, to feed upon the ones that had already died with the hope of seeing yet another day of misery.
Poverty and misery at its worst.








Days of despair and the digging of graves as they battled the cold relentless grip of winter.
Perhaps as they gathered around the burning logs and fireplaces nothing was said. Perhaps all the sounds and dialogue that could be heard inside their minds was spoken wordlessly of hell and death, all while father winter whispered to them in its soothing voice, clearly singing with a hollow wind, a cold, comforting lullaby that painted real life nightmares upon their minds in daylight and even colder nights.

Cold kisses from the depth of winter, telling them to simply fall asleep for all eternity.



Was it the end of humanity?
Perhaps not a thought to grace their mind, but surely.
The thoughts that end of life had come clad in winters veils, this winter had to rang within their growling tummies and fearful minds.



And sometimes, somehow things got even worse.
At one point, not even the feeding of the dead sufficed, and starving to death, not even finding enough dead corpses to feed upon, some soon resorted to killing each other as the ever increasing hunger turned men and girls into what could be likened to living zombies.

Having carved flesh from the dead at first, these people now looked for life in the warm bodies of the living, killing each other with the purpose of transforming their warm and gutted bodies into their own late night suppers.


  
Nothing was spared to maintain life this winter.
And with each passing hour, humanity and compassion were stripped away by the burning snow and empty insides.

In one case, perhaps the worst kind of real life nightmare you can imagine.
Hauntingly documented in writing by Percy Jameson and Captain John Smith a man had in rage filled desperation killed, salted, and began eating his own pregnant wife and the fetus within her body.

  
The man was of course later executed for the insanity of his wrongdoings.
But the thoughts remain, what drives a man to such horrors to suffer through just another rising sun. What beast lurks within with such ferocity that it makes you turn what should have been love and compassion for your partner into a predator that kill and eat your own pregnant wife just so you can feast upon her still pounding heart and warm flesh like a bbq chicken.


  
Jamestown held many such secrets this winter. Of that you can be sure.
It had once been a thriving outpost of thousands of new Americans from around the world before the winter came. They had danced in the summer, full of hopes of spring and Christmas time. Newly arrived that had crossed the ocean in hopes of a better life.

But now, trapped in ice and the slow death of father winter their numbers, and humanity rapidly dwindled.






This settlement was at the start of the winter made up of 6000 living people.
But under the next few months, it would see hundreds of people first die from starvation, cold and disease.
And beyond that point, many more would end up butchered and fed upon by their own.





And you have to wonder upon the lives denied and their survivors.
To feast upon your own humanity as you carve the bones of others with pitchforks and knives. A ceremony of devolution which always go hand in hand with their own souls dying with each borrowed breath, the death of their humanity, paid by the life of others, a price to pay as old as humanity.
Repeated before and after as surely as you breathe and read these words.






Who really knows what they individually suffered through tho. Today all we can do is read the historical remains and clues that time and life left behind, like a team of historical CSI detectives we can interpret and make deducted conclusions based on science and ever growing knowledge, and a pinch of guesswork too of course.

But what they felt, their thoughts, their pain, and suffering. Their own emotional death, all those truly important and defining things remain hidden in the pages of history.









But we do know that it was not how life should have been.
It was not a winter or deeds that any of the citizens of Jamestown, Virginia deserved.







But that was then, and now is now.
And where do we stand?


You and me, we walk down streets and lush meadows, lives and moments filtered with the abandoned, beneath our neon signs that force feeds information about incremental and tiny, quite pointless short term upgrades which someone feels the need to force feed down our synapses and firing neurons. We all live in a global society which spends its every waking hour creating a need to feed, no matter if you travel down the digital highway of google and fake FB news about Trump and Hillary and all sorts of deranged made up beliefs.

It does not matter if what you see and taste is the concrete of big city streets and the gravel of the jungle.



Society today is primed to feed your need for more.





Yet beneath the floodgates of the skin deep, there lies insight and knowledge, far better and wiser than ever before in the history of mankind.
A sea of real progress and kind people in this ocean of information and instant gratification, that is where we stand.
The potential for real joy, real things and a better life for all and everyone.
With each insight, with each progress, there is always the promise of a slightly better world than yesterday. Not often realized, but in a tech like incremental path of upgrades, life, slowly do improve, and right in the now, for all its horrors, life improves more rapidly than ever before.


Not in a straight and linear path, not always obviously, and sometimes yes, sometimes life do take a detour, sometimes even a step back.
But, buried in life's avalanche of lies, and pain, the mockery of greed and selfishness life becomes better for humanity as a whole.
While the rivers still remain polluted, like leafs of black plastic bags that keeps floating by on the surface of still water, with the dead and the decayed hidden inside. All through the lies of god, religion, and politics, the ideology of stupidity, the name of Antichrist, and all sorts of gods, and revenue.




The tiresome me vs you, all those degrading things that are equal parts of this altar upon which real humanity and real life and equality keep getting bloodied and sacrificed.

Life do get better. That is one indisputable fact.
It is clearly lacking, but also improving despite the ever warming climate that some still stoke the fossil fuel fireplace to heat up even faster.


So at large I have high hopes.
Perhaps even the utopic promise of clean and nearly unlimited energy from fusion will have joined the everyday reality of sustainable energy production by 2053.



So you know what.
If no more lessons are learned in the next 40 years of time by the world, I will still believe and have faith in a better world and enough lessons learned by enough people - some day, because that is simply put human evolution and progress, shit happens, it always did, it always will, but we do get better, more humane, more caring, thinking and better behaving. It is easy to believe the opposite at times, but while we all falter at certain points in life, we all get better with time, individually aswell as a globally connected species :).

Writer and photography

Mike Koontz
To the daisy that is my sun and inspiration