I won't clutter the list with the output of the commands you suggested or the dmesg, because I figured out what happened, based on your suggestions. Pilot error.
The installed kernel was from mid April, but /bsd has creation date-time from yesterday. I used a USB key that I had last prepared correctly in April. But in the dd command I did this time, I had forgotten the trailing 'c' in the output device (of=/dev/sd1 instead of of=/dev/sd1c) (I wondered why the dd command completed so quickly and apparently I failed to notice that the usual message from dd about bytes copied was missing or not correct -- I don't recall what the response was). The current image did not get copied to the key and I was updating the system with the image from last month. I just dd-ed the snapshot image correctly, updated, and now, of course, the pkg_add works properly. Sorry for the noise, but thanks for the help. /Don
