The Sorting

Friday, August 01, 2025

The curve around Canyon Crest Road was as usual. Lined with valley oaks that shed their yellowing leaves year round, they hide the deep canyon that would make a wide turn tragic. On the opposing slope of  the canyon lay the huge nexus of engineers and scientists buzzing around their nest at Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

It would be hard to reconstruct that January night if you weren’t there. A torrid wind and too warm temperatures for a bone dry winter day. A spark, flames, fire, alarms. Calls for evacuation. Randy hustling an aged and somewhat confused Bill into his car as they fled down Lincoln Avenue out of Altadena with embers flying, pillows of smoke swirling around them, and a fearsome red glow visible in the rearview mirror. Three a.m. and somehow Randy found them a hotel in Glendale to rest the 95 year old Trousdale.

Then seeking information. From friends, neighbors, official sources. The fire burned for days, so even an initial reprieve was not really a reprieve. Did their neighbors make it out? Were the two houses burned to the ground? Were they safe in Glendale?

It took several days before it became clear that their western edge of Altadena was spared while most of the rest of the city was destroyed. The giant map outside a community center today shows the geometry of the 7000 homes that burned down.  The same map shows the 31 fatalities of those who couldn’t or wouldn’t leave.

Bill had been in tough spots before. Driving the desert nights in Sistan and seeing headlights of several cars bounding in our direction in the distance on the dirt track. You didn’t want to meet anyone there. Smugglers, military, or bandits were the options. Any one of them could make a quick end to you. A quick turn behind a tall sand dune, lights and engine off, and the tense wait until the cars passed.

We had windy nights like this in Sistan too. That last 1975 weekend along the Helmand when the storm shredded our tents and scattered our carefully drafted fieldnotes along its banks. Staggering in a blinding sandstorm to where we remember leaving our Land Rovers.  Sleep was not possible in the heavily rocking vehicle until dawn came and the winds decreased.

But the Altadena fire had been half a year and Sistan half a century ago. Today  I made the languid cruise around several corners to get to Bill’s house. But not for the usual visit. On previous occasions, I had packed my laptop and presented Bill with the results of my latest research on our project, 50 years overdue for publication. I’d sit him at one edge of the dining room table and pull up the powerpoint that I had carefully constructed, partly for the audience I had addressed at the archaeology conference the previous month, and partly for Bill. His name was always the first one listed on the first slide. This was, after all, his life’s project.

With aphasia keeping his responses non-verbal or nonsensical, I was always delighted to see his eyes narrow, his hands reach out, a few jumbled spoken phrases showing that he was engaged in the work I was doing for us. I could see the sparks reigniting in his face, no matter how disinterested Randy said he had become on most days. Sistan was still alive for him. That life was now gone. A brief email from Randy a month earlier had given me the bad news. Bill passed away in the middle of the night in his bed at home in the two hours between checkup visits by his overnight caretaker.

His  next-door neighbor had became a friend and caretaker over the last few years. Randy was  overwhelmed by Bill’s endless stories of places that no normal suburban LA resident had ever seen. He was the constant of Bill’s last chapter and regularly joined to hear my lectures to the retired archaeologist.  Bill’s collection of files, books, artifacts, and dig gear was a mystery to this TV cameraman, accustomed to dealing with the issues of Hollywood, not Helmand. He was anointed to handle the Trousdale estate, but I knew he could use help from someone who knew what of Bill’s professional work was worth saving and what not. The invitation from the National Anthropological Archive to include Bill’s papers had been made almost a decade earlier. Only when the always-suspicious Bill departed our world could we attack the shelves and drawers and decide what to retain for the next generation of American archaeologists working to Afghanistan, a year or a century from now.

The task was much simpler than the first time I visited Bill’s Altadena home. I had just retired and hoped he would let me write up the results of our Afghan field research that he hadn’t completed over the previous 40 years. He had recently moved onto Canyon Crest from Washington DC and books and files were stashed in a pyramid of boxes in the garage. My first excavation in this century took place in that garage looking for the Helmand Sistan Project field notebooks, photos, slides, and maps. Amid the endless boxes of books, gardening tools, and rats nests, we found that material, including several boxes of artifacts that he had snuck out of Afghanistan when the country fell to the Soviets. It represented the few physical remains of 10 years of research.

Today I sat at Bill’s old desk, remembering the ancient Dell he used when he could still write me emails, now packed up for wherever old computers go to die. While there were rooms and rooms full of books—some quite rare and valuable—my greatest contribution would be to go through Bill’s correspondence files to decide what was enduring and what could go to the shredder. The hundreds of photocopied articles, a fortune of Smithsonian paper and ink, fit the latter. The scrawled handwritten notes stuck to metal clips that I hadn’t found in previous visits to his home describing Afghan archaeological sites were included in the former. Too late to record some of Bill’s insights. Volume 1 of the field report has already been published.

Then there was the rest of Bill’s treasure. His fetish with BMX and skateboarders. Do we save that correspondence with tournament organizers and flyers for competitions he may (or may not) have attended? How about the endless documentation of military schools in America, notebooks in which he manually recorded the names of every graduate of the Soreze School in France over most of a century. He loved their buttons, patches, and pins as well. Fox Union, VMI, Hargrave, Carson Long. There was a whole box of them. Who would want those?

Bill went deep into Chinese art, but the books were all in Chinese and appeared recent, probably accessible to any good China library collection. He was also passionate about British cemeteries in Asia, documenting and photographing hundreds of graves from Lahore to Lucknow. That work was never published and, unlike his Sistan archaeology, I wasn’t going to finish it for him. But I saved his research notes and photos for someone else who might. I found the documentation of the times he sued the Smithsonian over age discrimination. Was documentation of those battles, which clearly swallowed his time for months on end, worth saving? His one encounter with Lee Harvey Oswald led to Bill opening a file with interviews of Oswald’s family and a photocopy of his diary. That file was in the drawers as well.

Not knowing which drawer held what, I accidentally found myself deep in Dr. Marion Trousdale’s papers as well.  Bill’s wife was a renowned Shakespeare scholar and wrote extensively about Elizabethan stage, her 16^th century Bill as a poet, and the social conditions of England 400 years ago. Those photocopied articles also were sent to the recycler. Her class notes and discussions with colleagues? Saved. Her students’ papers from 2 decades ago… a moment’s hesitation before they too were discarded. But I’m not as confident that I saved the right stuff and only discarded what was of no value to future scholars. An apology to future Shakespeare scholars if I got it wrong.

Following a lengthy day of sorting, Randy, his daughter, and I drove to one of the few remaining restaurants in the center of town. The nightmare that was Altadena was clear to see here. Block after block of empty lots with brightly ribboned wooden stakes fluttering in the breeze—most things had been cleared but rebuilding has hardly begun. A side street featured a flatbed stacked high with fried cars that had obviously been rotting on the street for the past six months. Some trees were untouched, others were charred leafless skeletons of walnut or oak. Nancy’s Greek Café was in a partially opened shopping center. The Italian dining place across the street was still shuttered. The owners were uneasy about how quickly people would return and whether they could stay afloat until Altadena was occupied again.  

The most hope for Altadena came the following evening when we took dinner at the popup grill next to the Good Neighbor Bar at Alberta Street. The wooden picnic tables were filled with families eating burgers and fries, chatting in English, Spanish, and Vietnamese, while kids and dogs roamed between tables. Five years from now, these families will all be planting their shrubs and roses in new homes along Ventura Street or Marengo Avenue. 

Bill won’t be among them. His time in Altadena is past. What will be left will be his collection of hundreds of 19^th century English traveler books donated to a rare book library. His shelves of published field reports will be in my bookcase. Marion’s collection of English novels will be scattered around the world.  Her professional papers, hopefully, will be safely buried at the Folger Museum.

That graduate student curious about how archaeology was practiced in the mid-20^th century will be sitting at a table at the Natural History Museum warehouse in Suitland, fluttering through Bill’s papers. I still must sort and metatag them before shipping them to Washington.  Maybe that student will page through Bill’s 1971 field notebook of the survey at Kurkoray, the excavation at Khane Gohar, and his first impressions of the massive fortress city of Shahr-i Gholghola, to which we went back year after year. Perhaps she will be stuck trying to translate my unreadable 1974 notebook, made even more challenging with the occasional stain of a post-dinner spilled glass of Dry Sack. Or Bill’s correspondence with Louis Dupree. His transcribed copy of the Backhouse diary. The list of everyone who served the British Army in Kandahar in 1880, including unit and rank. The warm thanks from the military school to which he donated funds for a perpetual scholarship. The correspondence with Klaus Fischer in Bonn about Islamic bronze mirrors. That’s how history works. We don’t know today what our academic descendants will want to know about. 

But it generated one more sobering thought. What will my children do when it comes to sorting through the dozen file cabinets of papers I have saved. Will there be a knowledgeable guide to help them determine if anything had enduring intellectual value? Or will it all go to the shredder?  

Sorting of my file cabinets should start this week. I know how to do it now.

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