Editor's Notebook: 2007

Here comes Black Pete

     Santa Claus is real, as real as our hearts make him, or so I tell my skeptical daughter.
     I believe in superstition. Not in a literal “step on a crack, break your mother’s back” kind of way, but in the small rituals and playful household notions make life more fun.
     It's no accident that TV is loaded with programs about alcoholic cops with personal angels, vampire private eyes, cheerleaders with superhuman powers, beautiful antique-store owners who talk to ghosts, Welsh alien-fighters and, last but not least, Dr. Who. We all have a hunger for enigmas, for realities beyond this one that demands we postpone adventure in order to buy new tires for the pickup. Television lets us inhabit somebody else’s imagination, spoon feeding us a set of absurd quasi-mythologies with little connection to our real lives and longings.
     Weighed against so much insincerity, why not choose to believe in an elf king with a somewhat creepy ability to tell when we’ve been naughty? I might not admit it in the midst of a business meeting, but I have no trouble at all imagining elves ducking out of sight as I walk in the ancient woods of Cape Disappointment.
     My Santa, it’s safe to say, is not your Santa. Mine isn’t the harmless red-suited fat man immortalized in generations of Coca-Cola commercials, or even the St. Nicholas upon whom our jolly St. Nick is based, though this fourth century bishop was an undeniably darker and more substantial figure than his latter-day incarnation. It is “from the legend that he resuscitated two or three boys whom a wicked innkeeper had chopped into small pieces and cast into a brine-tub to sell as pickled pork [that] he is the patron saint of children,” according to the Oxford Companion to the Year.
     More entertaining, I think, to believe in the Sinterklass of the Netherlands, who rides a white horse and is accompanied by his slave Black Pete, who delivers not presents but consequences to all bad boys and girls. Perhaps based on the old northern god Odin, a bearded warlord who traveled through the night delivering presents to his followers, nobody better leave stale cookies for this Santa-on-steroids.
     The Christmas we celebrate today is a frothy mix of pagan and Christian traditions. Set on Dec. 25 by Roman order in 354, it was possibly a deliberate rebranding of “The Birthday of the Unconquered Sun,” a festival formerly devoted Mithras and other sun gods. In Britain and northwestern Europe, Christmas religious rites eventually mingled with Yule, the pre-Christian celebration marking the lengthening of days after Dec. 21.
     The word Christmas first appeared in the year 1038, so we are in a sense nearing the holiday’s 1,000th anniversary. But our Christmas traditions mostly date from the 19th century, a time when people sought to recreate a half-imagined golden age of innocence from before the Industrial Revolution. The first Christmas tree in America, for example, was put up by a German professor at Harvard in 1832.
     But other traditions/superstitions are far older. Mistletoe, for example, was revered by the Druids, who held it sacred because it grows without need of soil. We should, however, at least try to get it right: “Mistletoe is hung up, and any woman who passes underneath may be kissed, provided a berry is plucked, giving both good luck. No kisses may be offered when the berries are gone, and to refuse a kiss means certain spinsterhood,” according to the Chronicle of Folk Customs. Swallowing the berry, inscribing her lover’s name on a mistletoe leaf and sewing it into her corset guarantees fidelity.
     Although it’s easy in some cases to understand why they faded away, I’d love to see the return of other traditions, like the Christmas Eve game of snapdragon: “Raisins are put in a broad, shallow bowl, brandy poured over and lit. All try to pluck out and eat a raisin without burning themselves.” Not for the timid or particularly hairy.
     Others might more easily pass muster with safety inspectors. I like the Sussex, England tradition of the first person up on Christmas morning opening the door and sweeping the coming year’s bad luck out over the threshold.
     Maybe the best Christmas superstitions deal with babies born that day. If you’re so lucky, you’ll be glad to know you cannot be drowned or hanged, or see ghosts or spirits. And if your babe is born this Christmas Tuesday, he or she will be strong but covetous.
     Let’s hope not too covetous, or Black Pete may visit.

Cavemen

     It’s a mystery why I recall the theme song to a ridiculous 1966 TV-sitcom flop but can’t instantly clutch the name of some long-term acquaintance encountered in the grocery aisle. The latter situation reminds me of the frustrating “claw” arcade game in the lobby of the Astoria Gateway Cinemas, for which my 10-year-old futilely begs quarters in a quest to snag Chinese-made stuffed-animal toys using a deliberately unwieldy remote control.
     The lyrics recently dancing around my flickering campfire of a mind are “It’s about time, it’s about space, it’s about two men in the strangest place.” “Gilligan’s Island” creator Sherwood Schwartz used this idiotic tune to define his unsuccessful series about two Gemini astronauts accidentally flung back into caveman days.
     I may still cherish “It’s About Time” and another short-lived 1966 show, “The Time Tunnel,” because like many people I’ve always been intrigued by time travel. As a teenager I must have read H.G. Wells’ “Time Machine” a dozen times.
     Aside from stealing Adolf Hitler from his crib and placing him for adoption in an Orthodox Jewish home, we all wish we could travel back and leave ourselves little anonymous notes: “You fool! Put the book down. A girl is awaiting your call.” “Beer is not liquid bread.” “Your haircut really does look silly.” “Hey dummy! Don’t date college women who have posters of Edvard Munch’s ‘The Scream’ taped up above their beds.” “Starbucks. Microsoft. Google.” “Apply sunscreen.”
***
     Sitting in the dark last week, wrapped in a blanket with an LED light Velcroed to my fuzzy wool jacket, it struck me as accidentally appropriate to be studying “The Oxford Illustrated History of Prehistoric Europe” by archaeologist Barry Cunliffe.
     Like most people, my conception of cavemen has been more “Flintstones” than facts. Turns out, for one thing, that many of them didn’t live in caves. Arriving in Europe about 40,000 years ago — some 65 million years after the dinosaurs died out, by the way — they somewhat resembled the Plains Indians of North America in nomadically following seasonal game herds. This founding population probably numbered about 1,500 individuals, according to just-published genetic research.
     They lived in huts constructed with mammoth bones, wood and hides, sod and stones, and yes, occasionally caves — when they were conveniently located. Their population rapidly increased.
     Art of astounding sophistication blossomed in our thousands of years of hunting and gathering. There is, for example, a remarkable mammoth-ivory statue of a man with a lion’s head. Dating from 30,000 to 34,000 years ago in Germany, it would be completely at home in King Tut’s tomb, a good 27,000 years closer to our time.
     Our ancestors’ aesthetic sense, their ability to adapt and thrive in a strange new land, their beautiful flint tools — all speak of amazing, strong people on a sharp upward trajectory. So why weren’t we using cellphones and chuckling at Geico insurance’s caveman commercials 100 centuries ago and golfing on Mars by now? Why did we stall?
     Those who scoff at humanity’s role in warming the atmosphere have one thing right: Earth is naturally prone to huge climatic swings. The most recent ice age reached its maximum extent about 20,000 years ago, forcing Europeans back into refugia along the unfrozen southern fringe of the continent. But we adapted.
     Then a warming process began 13,000 years ago, leading to a change in most of Europe from open tundra and steppe-like landscapes to dense forests. “The effect of this crucial ecological transition could hardly have been more profound,” Cunliffe writes. You would think that a warmer, woodier world would be wonderful for our ancestors, but quite the reverse. Forests can only generate about 20-30 percent as much meat as can be maintained in open habitats.
     A balmy continent produced a “sharply reduced overall food supply.” Humanity suffered a dramatic population crash, sadly reflected in artifacts that are simpler, less varied, smaller and less carefully made. We regressed.
     Our history is littered with such episodes, accident scenes doubtless highly unpleasant for those living and dying at the time. A stable climate is a rare treasure that we have taken for granted. Preserving it is worth nearly any sacrifice. We sampled climate chaos last week. Did you enjoy it?

Modern-day gold rush

     Like rumors of a wagonful of high-kicking chorus girls newly arrived in their mining camp, gold now selling at $800 per troy ounce is the sort of extravagant news that might bring my great-great-grandfathers tumbling back from the dead.
     Two were in the California Gold Rush and one made it big by age 34, bringing $60,000 home to the Midwest where he wed an 18-year-old before foolishly returning to the Sierra Nevada and losing most everything but the girl. At the then-prevailing $16 an ounce price in San Francisco, this means he dug up more than 250 standard pounds of gold, about $3 million today.
     My other 49er endured a more typical Gold Rush experience, working at it for nearly 20 years before throwing down his pickax and moving back to his parents’ Michigan farmstead with nothing to his name but stories, which he neglected to commit to paper. Luckily, the 1860 U.S. Census pins him down in Red Dog, Calif., commemorated by no less than Mark Twain.
     Here’s Twain’s account of his visit while on a lecture tour: “It was in a log house, a large school-house, and the audience occupied benches without any back, and there were no ladies present. They didn’t know me then; but all were just miners with their breeches tucked into their boot-tops. And they wanted somebody to introduce me to them, and they pitched upon this miner, and he objected. He said he had never appeared in public, and had never done any work of this kind; but they said it didn’t matter, and so he came on the stage with me and introduced me in this way. He said: ‘I don’t know anything about this man, anyway. I only know two things about him. One is, he has never been in jail; and the other is, I don’t know why.’”
     With too little intellectual stimulation to otherwise occupy their nitroglycerine-fueled imaginations, the miners came up with marvelous names for their towns: Besides Red Dog, there were Poverty Hill, Jackass Gulch, Gouge Eye, Hangtown and Murderer’s Bar. They explained Red Dog with a tall tale about miners who were rattled out of bed by “a giant red howling dog accompanied by a wild and beautiful woman in tattered clothes.”
     In the winter of 1867-68, Red Dog washed away during a mighty flood made worse by hydraulic cannons that stripped the surrounding hillsides of vegetation. Survivors abandoned the ruins of Red Dog and decamped to the neighboring town of You Bet.
     Looking back at the 1850s, historian Benjamin Avery wrote in 1893 that “At night the tents shone through the pines like great transparencies, and the sound of laughter, shouting, fiddling, and singing [rippled through the still air]. ... It was a wild, wonderful scene.”
***
  Here where fishing and logging are the near-universal ancestral occupations, I’ve learned to stand by silently and nod occasionally when old gillnetters of my acquaintance begin talking of drifts and mesh sizes. In my family, it was just as natural to discuss the relative merits of ball mills and stamp mills, and to sit around after Sunday dinner learning about quartz lodes and tunneling techniques.
     Our favorite setting for such esoteric chats was our historic gold mine, a 15-acre complex of rough-hewn timbers and two-room miner’s houses perched at 7,000 feet near Wyoming’s Great South Pass, the overland wagon-train route over which my great-great-grandfathers presumably passed in 1850. It was an amazing place in which to grow up, with every corner packed with giant engines, “bottomless” mine shafts, and the weird glass beakers and poisonous chemicals used to assay ore — testing to see whether it contained enough gold to justify putting it through the elaborate refining process.
     Recently revisiting it with my daughter Elizabeth, older brother Greg and Uncle Tom was a sad though anticipated lesson in the ravages of passing time. Vandals and hard winters are inexorably tearing the old mine apart. Always more viable as a means of scalping Eastern investors than actually producing bullion, its most scenic structure is now shored up with pressure-treated beams, its echoes of the roaring past ever more feeble.
     Even $800 ounces won’t reopen any of our old mines in five states. But I’ve been casting glances anyway at the rusty gold pan down in my garage. There is, after all, gold in them thar hills.

Listen to your heart and be thankful

     “For the Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts, four heavy turkeys were bought and fattened for weeks: Eugene fed them with cans of shelled corn several times a day, but he could not bear to be present at their executions, because by that time their cheerful excited gobbles made echoes in his heart. ...
     “Eugene feasted from a high chair by his father’s side, filled his distended belly until it was drum-tight, and was permitted to stop eating by his watchful sire only when his stomach was impregnable to the heavy prod of Gant’s big finger. ‘There’s a soft place there,’ he would roar, and he would cover the scoured plate of his infant son with another heavy slab of beef.”
     Thomas Wolfe’s words in his autobiographical novel “Look Homeward, Angel” have a resonance beyond their charming peek into the quirky and frequently inconvenient nature of human affections. Thanksgiving opens onto a corridor of powerful emotions, a white-water cavalcade of celebrations from which we will be summarily ejected back into the unforgiving gravity of reality and credit card bills on Jan. 2.
     I prefer to suppose that most people truly do have happy holidays, but have seen enough to acknowledge that not much need go awry for the whole festive works to spiral into a kamikaze dive of mean words and DUIs. There was the memorable Thanksgiving during law school when our most diminutive and manic-depressive classmate lobbed a television through the window at her roommate at the bitter end of our afternoon revelries. And don’t even get me started on the year a friend incorporated grapes in the stuffing. What was she thinking!?
     Only in 1941 did Thanksgiving become the congressionally mandated and fondly regarded nationwide family reunion that it is today. Nearly up until the Civil War, it was sneered at in the South as the Puritan Christmas, an uptight New England affair, according to the indispensable “Oxford Companion to the Year.”
     It is too churlish for my taste to dismiss, as some historians do, the pilgrim antecedents of the holiday as pure hokum. Although one of the pilgrims’ first acts in the New World was stealing the stored winter corn of some Cape Cod Indians, there was much genuine friendship between the colonists and natives for half a century until the blood bath of King Philip’s War. Another few decades later, soured relations are well encapsulated in 1714 by the 40 lashes ordered for Pequot, an Indian man unfortunate enough to supply a Connecticut Thanksgiving banquet with venison hunted on Sunday Sabbath. (Actually, 39 lashes were administered — one was subtracted in the spirit of holiday forgiveness.) Their consciences thus sated, the whites proceeded to relish their illicit deer meat.
     At the beginning, though, there was room for hope. Writing of the first Thanksgiving, decreed for the end of a drought in 1623, Plymouth Gov. William Bradford forever commemorated a joyous assembly of settlers and Native Americans. After prayers for rain, God “was pleased to give them a gracious and speedy answer, both to thier owne and the Indians admiration, that lived amongst them.
***
     “For all the morning, and the greatest part of the day, it was clear weather and very hotte, and not a cloud or any signe of raine to be seen, yet toward evening it begane to overcast, and shortly after to raine, with shuch sweet and gentle showers, to give them cause of rejoyceing and blesing god. It came, without either wind, or thunder, or any violence, and by degreese in that abundance, as that the earth was thorowly wete and soked therwith. ... For such mercie (in time conveniente) they also sett aparte a day of thanksgiveing.”
     We should be neither so modern nor complacent about our blessings as to be unthankful for our own good rain. In a parched world, we are bathed in the healing goodness of storms. Even the wind, for all the hell it plays with powerlines and gutters, is in its rightful season and place. “Time’s Telescope for 1831; or a Complete Guide to the Almanack,” says of the ancient Saxons that, “November they termed wint-monat, to wit, wind-moneth ... and it was the ancient custome for shipmen then to shrowd themselves at home, and to give over sea-faring ... until blustering March had bidden them wele to fare.”
     Except for our hardy crabbers, this remains good advice; it is time to keep ourselves snug at home, till spring again makes it pleasant to fare out upon the sea and shore. Until then and for all your years beyond, both enjoy and bestow mercy by the warm fire, all the while listening to echoes in your heart.

My mountain sister

     Family secrets stagger on with a bedraggled life all their own, defying reason and laws of physics, dogged monstrosities fleeing torch-armed villagers. And so it was that my father put himself in a “gulp deeply and just say it” situation, like a teenager confessing to totaling the station wagon, coming to me when I was 10 and spilling that I had an 18-year-old sister who would be visiting in a week.
     I smile as happily and unjudgmentally today as I did then. After all, how often does any child get to wrap his complicated little heart around a gloriously fresh, unimagined loved one? Especially one with your cherished daddy’s own infinitely warm eyes shyly peeking out of an enchanting Ohio girl? Looking at photos of myself back then — was I really ever such a Dumbo-eared hick? — reminds me of how grateful I was to suddenly have such a sister. In an instant, it was possible to imagine a genetic trajectory in which I might possibly grow up into something other than a goofy scarecrow. (The jury’s still out on that one.)
     Depending on which of them was telling the story, Dad and Kathie’s mom were either blameless victims of a wartime romantic mismatch, or sacrificed hostages to Dad’s bull-moose pride. The way he framed the tale, she was a fragile potted palm uprooted in the high country, a society girl finally confronted by one absurdity too many, the spectacle of a bawling herd of tick-bit cattle being driven down the monochromatic main street of the little Wyoming town where Dad had transplanted her. She was on the phone to her own devoted daddy that afternoon and plucked from Dad’s life days later, their little wiggle of a daughter safe in her belly. In truth, neither stood a chance of comprehending what ended their marriage — two decent people raised on “Singing Mountie” movies, with mistaken expectations on a pitiable but slightly hilarious scale.
     Whether it was endlessly longing for a father who selected the West, or that the West’s limitless horizons were branded into her from the instant she winked into existence, Kathie eventually gravitated back toward Wyoming for good. Chronically joyful, the kind of unpretentiously lovely woman who passing strangers wish they knew, on the inside a mute and blackened reservoir of sadness has always lapped upon her unseen shores. It is a combination that matches well with Wyoming, a sublime height where mysteries of every shade hide in plain sight under the pale blue vastness of heaven.
     Our eyes don’t change. Oh, they may not be able to make out the fine print on a toaster warranty as well as they once did, but fundamentally, an old man peers out at the universe with the same eyes as he did when he was seven, and tried to count every glittering planet and star. So it was no surprise but extraordinary nevertheless that I looked into my sister’s eyes two weeks ago after too many years apart and still saw the beauty who arrived in my life fully formed, a bewitching princess self-rescued from 18 years of divorce-induced solitude.
     Aside from a beloved parent, we’ve always shared a wildness quite at odds with how others perceive us, a now-sublimated outlaw streak with tendrils in the DNA of our smuggler ancestors back in Britain. In our all-too-privileged way, we’ve looked for danger. Occasionally, it has found us. Coyote-slender and etched in lines like those that make priceless porcelain even more exquisite, my sister’s life now orbits tightly round her lung cancer, a dance in the ashes. Cigarettes, each a miniature courtship with suicide.
***
     Like the air, reality itself is thinner in the mountains. After dark, as day sighs its last warm breath up into the sequined embrace of flirtatious stars, even a pioneer’s lost and rusted butterknife is keen enough to slice through the lacy ribbons that bind together the undulating strands of the material world. Innumerable possibilities tremble in anticipation, agitated as lambs gamboling at the pasture gate on a magnificent May morning.
     There is a reclusive aspen grove I know, stunted by snowdrifts in its cramped gorge and unhandsome by the snobbish standards of quakers, where the world you come out at is not the same as the one you entered. Its entrance is guarded by grasping sagebrush, themselves nearly large as trees and outlandishly shaped, perhaps a pillaging warband of ogres shackled to the dirt by the forest’s protective spell. Only reluctantly do the aspen reveal a path, an ancient tattoo tapped into earth’s flesh by the hands of men.
     Filtered green sunlight showers through the forest’s swaying upturned fingers, splashing on the Indian paintbrush and tiny wild strawberries that stitch the soil with slender runners. Step by step down a ragged aisle, the light is further purified and ordinary expectations fall away like an innocent young rattler discarding his outgrown skin. With a gasp and a blush, a sky laughing at its own awkward strength slides back into view, excited to see you again.
     In the clean, sweet light of day, dragonflies whir along invisible threads, navigating angular courses on inexplicable missions, at turns whimsical and sinister. Mirror-like beaver water doesn’t so much reflect the cloudless sky as ensnare it, so that you wonder if you’re really standing upright on soil or hanging suspended below it in a secret world that splays downward from the pond’s deceptive surface, a vast cavern lit from above. Escaping here and there over the thin woven-wood rim of the dam, water sings its freedom, earth’s most precious sound. Feeling safe as a baby at grandma’s house, a rolled-up Levi jacket for a pillow, a nap comes easily and benevolent spirits sculpt your dreams.
     Look long enough and you can see a kind of brightness folded within the night there, a cracking aurora of strange energy excitedly arcing into the void from your outstretched palm. Extend a hand into absolute darkness, and something will shake it, ignite it. You’d better have a strong grip.
     Long ago I took my sister to see the night lights in the aspen grove where occasionally you can silently and respectfully slip into another realm, or another, or another. We’ll meet there again some fine tomorrow, breathing deeply and well in the perfect simplicity of youth.

The last man

     In two decades or three, with the cruel relentlessness of blitzkrieg and inevitable grace of winter rain, the last will fall.
     On TV, irritatingly handsome teleprompterites will have sincerity contests, misting up on cue as they intone long-planned obituaries pre-approved by corporate executives and advertisers. The president will lay a pretty wreath at Arlington.
     Much later in the century, unnoticed by any but our closest relations, even the last of us to personally know an American veteran of World War II will drown beneath time’s ever-rising tide. And then the GIs will truly pass into legend, beyond the ken of all who breathe.
     Our culture is so obnoxiously guilty of over-hyping things that it can be difficult deciding when somebody or an event is only a marketing department’s idea of what we ought to care about. Every trial is the trial of the century, each technological innovation earth-altering. Habitual exaggeration slowly chips away at genuine historical touchstones, threatening to dilute our vivid red heart-blood into tepid broth.
     The miracle of miracles is that America’s essential authenticity preservers, ultimately unpolluted by the corrosive exploitation of entertainment or politics. Despite everything, we still have real heroes, real principles, real dreams, a real tomorrow.
     The best that America is, the truth so true it cannot be spoken, is exemplified by our World War II vets. All in their seventies and older now, they are swiftly vanishing like pure mountain snow instantly transformed into weightless vapor on a windy April morning, shining atoms whisked away into the clear heavens. Our proudest boast should be that we walked among them once, and heard their stories of fear and honor.
     You can buy video-editing software that mimics Ken Burns’ trademark swooping and panning techniques that lend an illusion of motion to old photographs. But though he is in some ways easy to caricature, there are valid reasons why Burns is our era’s best-appreciated documentarian. Foremost of his attributes is an ability to distill vast topics into their most potent spirit. He pays court to our patriotism and national pride but does so in ways that neither pander nor condescend.
     Watching bombs shatter the ancient monastery of Monte Cassino in The War — which I TiVoed and am slowing imbibing whenever my wife and daughter briefly abdicate control of the remote control — brought me as about as close I’ll ever come to staring through my uncle’s bombsights. Seeing so many young men wrecked and slain on the battlefields of Europe reminds me of my family’s good luck. Uncle Tom left only a ruined eye in Italy, not his life. My father and other uncles all made it home with no scars, at least on the surface.
     Tom, a fierce publisher and retired rancher who was once a proud Republican, burns with white-hot fury at how the legacy of freedom he paid for with his flesh has been endangered in recent years. Consider recent news that President Bush secretly endorses prisoner interrogation techniques that any sane person would identify as torture. Panicky to paper over their revolting inaction in the months leading up to the 9/11 attacks, Vice President Cheney and other senior officials pushed our hapless CIA into moral quicksand far more hazardous than any our nation has previously encountered.
     “With virtually no experience in interrogations, the CIA had constructed its program in a few harried months by consulting Egyptian and Saudi intelligence officials and copying Soviet interrogation methods long used in training American servicemen to withstand capture,” the New York Times reports, based on interviews with more than two dozen past and present counterterrorism officers. Can anyone image this? Americans, AMERICANS, copying the Soviet KGB? This despicable behavior puts every serviceman and woman at increased risk of torture and death in every future war. Never have elected leaders so recklessly squandered our reputation.
     A group of retired American veterans who were in charge of interrogating captured high-ranking Nazis joined in reputiating Bush policies earlier this month. “We did it with a certain amount of respect and justice,” one 81-year-old told the Washington Post. “During the many interrogations, I never laid hands on anyone,” a proud 87-year-old said.
     Thankfully, American heroism didn’t end on the joyous days in 1945 when dignified men and women who don’t like talking about it defeated fascism. As The War’s marvelous theme song concludes, “For those who think they have nothing to share, who feel in their hearts there is no hero there — know each quiet act of dignity is that which fortifies the soul of a nation, that will never die. Let them say of me, I was one who believed in sharing the blessings I received. Let me know in my heart, when my days are through, America, America, I gave my best to you.”
     It’s up to us to live up to America’s highest ideals.

Genetic science doesn’t lie

     Tests of mitochondrial DNA (or mtDNA) trace our mother’s mother’s mother’s direct maternal line without genetic alteration by male spouses along the way. To put it another way, this type of DNA is passed along by mothers to sons and daughters alike, but only daughters pass that identical mtDNA along to their children.
     Mitochondria regulate energy production in our cells and may have started out as a simple independent organism at the dawn of life on earth. This tiny bacterium formed a symbiotic relationship with other living things and eventually became a part of them, and more recently of us. The genetic code written inside mitochondria slowly accumulates minor copying errors that are usually harmless. Like a trail of crumbs left to guide us along a dark forest path, these distinct mtDNA patterns allow everyone alive today to be linked with women and men who lived decades, centuries and millennia ago.
     The CBS news show 60 Minutes last weekend cast some doubt on the usefulness of this test in discovering exactly where a test subject’s family originates. For those of us who are heavily involved in genetics, this is a familiar straw-man argument. Current databases are frustratingly but admittedly limited in their ability to pinpoint the migratory paths of individual families.
     When it comes to tracing from which tribe an African-American’s immigrant ancestor was kidnapped and enslaved — the case study selected by 60 Minutes — mtDNA research is still a work in progress. Similarly, European-Americans may wish they could prove descent from the Vikings or Etruscans. But for now, in many instances, not enough people have been tested back in Africa or Europe to allow us to stab a pin into a map and say “Aha! This is where my family started out.”
     I’ve previously written about Y-chromosome DNA testing that tracks our father’s father’s father’s (and so on) genetic signature back through time. With both Y-DNA and mtDNA, only a slender thread of genetic information is revealed. But in both cases, the results are considerably more meaningful than was credited by “60 minutes.” Particularly in our nation of immigrants, the ability to say much of anything about distant ancestors is revelatory. There is a quantum difference between complete ignorance and having even a little solid information.
     In fact, it is possible to find some anthropological satisfaction even in today’s mtDNA testing, which is primarily used to find genealogical connections between living people. Professional geneticists believe most European people are descendants of as few as seven real women who lived in various times and places thousands of years ago. To personalize them a bit, they’ve been dubbed with honorary names. For instance, Helena (Greek for ‘light’) is the source of nearly half of the maternal DNA present in modern people of European origin, including my family.
     As with Y-chromosome testing, geneticists are in the process of refining their understanding of how people in the Helena clan differ in our geographical and ethnic origins. My family’s place on the mtDNA outline is called H4a, a minor subgroup that comprises about 1/500th of the total Helena population. H4 as a whole is found both in Europe and in the Near East, from where the overall H clan first began migrating 20,000 to 25,000 years ago. Preliminary research suggests that my distant H4 ancestors may have moved into Europe at about the time glaciers were at their most recent maximum, around 18,000 years ago, and/or during the Neolithic, or new stone age, that followed the final retreat of the glaciers roughly 10,000 years ago. Among other places, they settled in what would become Germany, where my earliest identifiable maternal ancestor was born 300 years ago.
     There’s nothing about my family’s story that is more special than anyone else’s. Everyone has an epic adventure concealed in their genes, and for a couple hundred dollars you can begin unlocking these mysteries. Science undoubtedly will continue refining our understanding of humanity’s heroic migration out of Africa, into the Near East and then across Europe before our greatest leap — to America. But even today, there is plenty to learn and appreciate.
     Just think of what our ancestors saw and did as they moved forward into lands just springing back from the crushing weight of glaciers! Their struggles and survival deserve to be honored and celebrated, now and forever. Bless them.

Harvest-home

     Buried deep in my head is a peach-pit sized “primitive” brain that this Sunday’s autumnal equinox reawakened to a vision of Europe’s tribal past. There I proudly trudge with smelly pals behind our wobbly oxcart, rapping rowdy verses old as the dirt. We’re sweat-burnt and marrow-tired, but sore muscles do nothing to subdue cheerful randiness at the prospect of dancing with our women far into the fast-falling night. I can tangibly feel my lungs swell with the dry, sweet, grassy aroma of fall harvest in Saxon England.
     All this is more than a daydream but less than Jungian racial memory. Maybe it’s just the slenderest thread of genetic code, braided into my DNA by the complaining of hungry children, the deliciousness of cold water, the belly-pleasing heat of hard-wheat bread. Slipping even farther into the long-ago, for a thousand generations these were the prized weeks of plenty — of ripe fruit and plump young swine. After painfully scraping past the “starvation gap,” the warm but barren months between the depletion of winter stores and arrival of a new summer’s crops, at last this was the time of frenetic gathering, of reaping whatever rewards could be had from strong-hearted prayer and soul-bending labor.
     At our core, we all are peasants. Calluses thick as leather buckets. The kind of people who eat nettle soup. A name for each weed and wiggling creature, real and imagined. Malicious elves lying in wait behind every twisted oak, armed with plague-tipped arrows. (A surprising number of the rare surviving writings from England’s Dark Ages deal with countering poisonous elvish darts and enchantments.)
     Our origins in the soil may come as an insult to those genealogists who fancy themselves directly descended from William the Conqueror, or New Age reincarnationists who, through remarkable coincidence, all were once exalted members of the warrior and priestly classes of fabled Atlantis. The fact is that even here in America you have to climb up only two or three branches of any family tree before coming to an unpruned tangle of humble farmers. We all have dirt under our fingernails.
     There is, of course, a vast gulf between a farmer and a peasant, for all their shared reliance on the earth. It is a matter of ownership. Many of our forebears didn’t even truly own themselves, far less the land on which they labored. Up until a scant few centuries ago, peasants in England, Germany and Scandinavia were little more than serfs, bound to a particular property for life, living and dying within a mile of their birthplaces. And outright slavery once was common among native-born people in northwestern Europe. There was a time, for example, when “Welsh” and “slave” were virtually synonymous terms.
     A good way of gauging the harshness of rural life in the Old World is to compare it with what people experienced once arriving in the New. It is a misconception that the pilgrims suffered horrendously in comparison with their supposedly cushy lives back in England and Holland. After a couple distinctly dangerous years at the start, life expectancies soared in Massachusetts Bay Colony, and child mortality plunged. Many first-generation colonists lived into their 80s and beyond, bearing gaggles of kids. Owning enough acres of productive farmland transformed our lives.
     It has always seemed to me that this is the best time to give thanksgiving for all we treasure from this richly endowed continent, as opposed to a holiday at the stormy end of November, apparently designed to facilitate shameless Christmas merchandising. The pilgrims, no fans of revelry or Christmas, basically stripped the fun out of the traditional English equinox festival of Harvest-home, subtracting the laughter and begrudgingly leaving the feast, along with church ... and more church. (Historian Roger Thompson notes that their former English neighbors saw the pilgrims as “interfering, self-righteous, directive, strident, neurotic, arrogant, excluding, aggressive, uncompromising, humorless, somber; a swarm of busybodies, bores, prigs, and interminable nasal droners.”)
     Called Harvest-home for the very good reason that it’s when people brought home the last of the harvest, it was witnessed and described by a German traveler in 1598, a few decades before the brief Puritan takeover in England wiped away Harvest-home, May-poles and a host of other folk practices.
     “We happened to meet some country people celebrating their harvest-home, their last load of corn they crown with flowers, having besides an image richly dressed ... men and women, men and maid servants, riding through the streets in the cart, shout as loud as they can till they arrive at the barn.”
     If all this sounds a lot like my genetic memory of the equinox, it’s no accident. More than nearly anything, I’d love to travel back along the lost road to meet our country folk. To learn our long-forgotten family stories, listening to their tall tales and ancient dreams would fill me with joy — assuming I could talk them out of promptly burning me at the stake as a magician.
     Wouldn’t it be something to sit among these bright people as autumn’s crystalline, slanting light set the hilltops ablaze? I know we would find plenty to laugh about and much in common, sharing the warmth of a smoky fire on a chilly equinox night, as the northern hemisphere silently slides into its fallow months.

Me and Juliet

     Becoming who we will be is a process ripe with comedy, drama, danger and fulfillment. And yet we’re so entangled in our own bodies and stories that we only occasionally catch clear sight of this entertaining and enigmatic adventure.
     Some theoretical physicists believe many dimensions beyond the three we perceive are enfolded inside ordinary reality. These secret vistas hiding within every atom may contain the mysterious, missing dark matter that at this very moment is making the unimaginably massive galaxies fly apart like startled green-winged teal. It sometimes feels our own most essential selves play hide-and-seek around just such corners.
     All this is a fancy way of saying that I was surprised to observe myself learning something last week, how our lives are never really stale and inert unless we permit them to be. Too often, I fall into a dismissive habit of thinking people are like snowballs that become progressively slower, larger and ponderous as they roll downhill. This need not be so.
     Age 10 is a safe space for figuring out clues, for tentatively beginning to decipher the invisible instruction booklet to life — the encrypted code of adulthood — which we grownups all know is written in badly translated Chinese and lost amidst the wrapping paper anyway in a thoughtless rush to play with our newest toys.
     No matter how difficult and fraught this exploration is, I was eager to see what my inquisitive daughter Elizabeth would make of “Romeo and Juliet” at the Shakespearean Festival in Ashland last week.
     My parents undoubtedly had similar “cultural enrichment” motives for allowing/insisting that my big brother Greg take me along to Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version of the play, when I was 10 myself. Aside from getting promptly ditched so Greg could go make-out with a flesh-and-blood teenage girl, it was a movie that cut an indelible impression regarding the possibilities for passion and the irresistible cascade of consequences it may capriciously unleash. Growing up in a remote mountain valley with one fuzzy TV channel, it was a revelation — and not merely because of Olivia Hussey’s awe-inspiring nude scene. Thus far exposed only to my parents’ chaste kisses and polite hugs, “Romeo and Juliet” was a vivid if misleading path toward sexual awareness and the relentless flood tide of maturity.
     So I stole glances at my daughter as September bats flitted through the stage lights at Ashland’s open-air Elizabethan theater, searching for something in the light of her eyes. It was a funny production of the play, one seemingly designed for audience weaned on the teen and “tween” comedies of Nickelodeon and Disney Channel — Mercutio’s death scene was hilarious, something I distinctly do not recall in the movie. But whether emotionally intrigued or simply entertained, Elizabeth sat enraptured through the whole three hours. I hope she came away with a richer understanding of the volatile and indispensable possibilities of love, and not so much with the Bard’s soap-operatic excesses.
     This possibility of capturing gossamer yet profound lessons from one another came spinning down powerfully over me the next morning, which we spent chasing lizards in Oddfellows Cemetery, looking for Mother Giles. My great-grandparents, William and Kitty Giles, are buried in Grants Pass, where they retired in 1919. Though I’ve long desired to pay my respects and I offered Elizabeth a $20 finder’s fee, they somehow eluded us.
     But in another sense, I found my great-grandmother, in an obituary in the Grants Pass Daily Courier archives. Defying the “just the facts” policy of many newspaper obits today, hers actually told me something I yearned to learn about her: “‘Mother Giles,’ as she was known to all her neighbors, will be missed more than words can express. She was mother to all with whom she came in contact. Her interest in the affairs of her neighbors, her cheerful greeting, kindly and helpful advice and sympathetic understanding, endeared her to all.”
     Nearing the end of her long and storied life, Kitty was interested in and connected to the people around her. This vital bond is sorely lacking in so many of us today, ensconced behind our strong doors and bright computer screens, with their flickering illusions.
     Life, so rich and tasty, is something we must daily renew in each other, eye to eye and heart to heart. Life is not a stage. This I resolve to remember.

Camp food

     My straight-backed, twinkling-eyed Grandma Bell had a magician’s talent, unsurprising among country women of her generation — whipping up ridiculously delicious hot meals way out where the only shade was provided by a patch of sagebrush slightly taller than the rest.
     After mornings spent meandering along cow trails looking for arrowheads and fossils, usually pocketing nothing better than the countless smooth oval rocks that our parents assured us were dinosaur gizzard stones, we’d be famished. With an almost-cartoonish bustling efficiency born in his grandfather’s gold camp on Oscar Creek in Josephine County, Dad dug a fire pit and had a roaring blaze going in under 20 minutes.
     Into the coals went a sooty Dutch oven loaded with a dearly departed young fryer harvested from the henhouse the night before. Bringing precooked, store-bought chicken would no more have entered Grandma’s mind than painting herself blue and running naked down Main Street singing tunes from Lawrence Welk, the schwing-king on whom she harbored an innocent crush. After the first whiff of her chicken wiggled through the heavy sage perfume of the high desert, it was obvious why she believed in chicken from scratch — if a scent could be carved upon a headstone, this would be her epitaph.
     She and my mom’s homemade-is-always-better manifesto often even extended to the baked beans — entirely unlike those out of the can with the minuscule symbolic cube of pork fat congealed in the middle. Homemade sweet- and dill-pickles from Grandma’s best friend’s larder were vital, as were my mother’s yeast rolls — easy to her as rolling out of bed and hard as staying atop a rolling log to everyone else. The adults topped it all off with coffee boiled up over the fire. I don’t know how any of them ever slept — maybe they didn’t.
     Forty years on from these picnics in another age of the world, the simple, delicately seasoned love in these meals still fills me up. A mechanical hay-mower was a murderous clanking contraption that sometimes instantly decapitated half a flock of plentiful but not impressively smart wild sage hens crouching in my grandfather’s meadow in the hungry mid-Depression years. Now 81, this week Mom still nurtures a crisp memory of Grandma preparing them on the ranch woodstove with milk and sliced onions so the sage became a welcome and not overwhelming flavor.
     In stark contrast, dinner for Elizabeth and I on our recent first camping trip of the summer consisted of half-cooked, half-black hot-dogs warmed over a Presto-log fire. Maybe it’s gender thing? Can’t see putting a lot of effort into camp food when we could be playing at the beach.
     It’s one of those little-known local places I hesitate to mention out of fear it’ll become harder to get reservations, but we love Skamokawa’s Vista Park. Just off Washington State Route 4 between Naselle and Longview, it is one of the beneficial unintended consequences of Corps of Engineers’ dredging, several acres of grass-stabilized sand and sediment sloping gently down to the navigation channel.
     Only a quarter mile from the highway, life on the riverbank is a throw-back to a more innocent America, a comfortable place where kids invent games that have nothing to do with TV and Nintendo. As the sky darkened, we told scary stories about ghostly Indian warriors summoned back to life by their totem animals to exact vengeance on those who disrespect the forests and waters we’ve inherited. Respectful and unafraid, we slept soundly as you can with rain dripping through the top vent, which a more sensible grown-up would have covered with the rain-fly that was lying cozy and dry in the pickup.
     Soon after I write this, we’re heading back for Vista Park. We’ll be using the rain-fly and eating fried chicken. Sorry, Grandma — store-bought, but I’ll surely be thinking of you.

Life’s rich library

     “What’s the best part about being a dad?” is one of my 10-year-old’s conversational gambits to delay saying goodnight at bedtime. (Before getting to our relatively quiet “visit” time, her favorite activity lately is being tossed across the room to her bed — a miniature skydiver whooping from the pit of her belly and always wanting just one more time.)
     I tell her every moment of it is my favorite thing, which is true, but upon reflection I know that among my most treasured memories of fatherhood will be reading the Harry Potter series to her.
     It’s been “all Harry, all the time” for the past couple weeks, so let me assure anyone who has read this far that this column is mostly not about him. But if you read fiction at all and dismiss J.K. Rowling’s books as just kids’ stuff, they have long since flowered into complex themes and intriguing characters.
     Tragically, the mere idea of reading for pleasure is an increasingly alien concept to most of our countrymen. This means a lot of daddies and their boys and girls will never experience the snuggling closeness that comes with sharing imaginary adventures together.
     (A decade-old report in The New York Times found Americans spent 1,100 hours a year watching TV and 105 hours reading books, a ratio that is certain to have eroded further since then. One oft-cited survey, which I hope is grossly incorrect, asserted that 58 percent of U.S. adults never read another book after high school and 80 percent of U.S. families hadn’t bought or read a book in the previous year.)
     Perhaps any book that uses magic as a plot device will inevitably embody our culture’s underlying archetypes, the traditions and stories that are so fundamental to who we are that they invisibly shape how we think about the world. Without diminishing Rowling’s creative achievements, she clearly owes a great debt to English folklore, which her books — and those of J.R.R. Tolkien — have done much to enliven.
     Here are a few examples, mostly cribbed from the delightful “Sutton Companion to British Folklore, Myths & Legends:”
     • Wizards: Until recent centuries, wizard was not a word often applied to male practitioners of magic, “he-witch” being the more common term. Unlike witch, which generally carried negative connotations, “wizard” literally means a “wise man” or a practitioner of wisdom. (A similar word is drunkard, though it is in a playful sense nearly the opposite of wizard. The Middle English word sweetard has evolved into the modern sweetheart.) The students and professors at Rowling’s Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry have more in common with what old English people called cunning men and women, adept at healing the sick, predicting the future and fighting evil.
     • Boggarts: “Although Boggarts were often thought of as malevolent fairy creatures, some were so affable that they would sometimes help farmers to thresh their corn.” One farmer rewarded his boggart with desserts of cream, but this supernatural farmhand turned against the farmer’s son, who tried after he inherited the farm to economize by substituting skim milk. Eventually fleeing the boggart’s noisy mischief in the night, he and his wife loaded their possessions in a cart and sneaked away at dawn. A villager recognized them and asked where they were off to. “Before they could answer, the Boggart’s voice came from a milk churn in the cart, ‘Aye, neighbour, we’re flitting!’“
     • Broomsticks: These became linked with flying witches in the public’s mind after publication of an illustration in 1612. Folk tradition had witches riding pitchforks, plant stems and pig-troughs, which might have made for funnier Harry Potter movies!
     • Dobby: A friendly house elf for Harry, for our ancestors these were wild swamp creatures capable of controlling deer and prone to jumping on passing travelers.
     • Giants: Legend says the island of Britain was once ruled by the giant Albion, whose entire race was exterminated by Trojan warriors who fled Troy after it fell to the Greeks in about 1250 BC. (Albion also is the ancient name of Britain.)
     In these and other ways, Elizabeth and I have been enriched and rewarded by Rowling’s reminders of our deep cultural heritage. We still have several hundred pages to go — don’t tell us how it ends!

Maps are the food of our imagination

     Long before there was a travel channel, there were maps. It may seem odd to place maps and popular TV programming in the same continuum, but maps are to travel documentaries as books are to movies. Both are the essential foundations of our imagination.
     A National Geographic subscription was a luxury my family didn’t contemplate during my early school years, when Dad was an idealistic lawyer laboring 70 hours a week to establish a small-town practice. But by fifth grade, our economic climate had thawed a few degrees and NG’s bright maps became one of my passions — along with the Hardy Boys mystery series, basketball, Norse myths and the neighborhood beauty who lived a block up the hill.
     Although its summit was even less attainable than my secret “crushee,” I whiled away many afternoons studying the shortest routes up Antarctica’s Mount Erabus. I searched for the possible real-world inspirations of the fictional valley of Shangri La hidden in the countless folds of the Himalayas. Letting my fingers do the walking, I slogged through the uncharted jungle that crept anaconda-like across upper reaches of the Orinoco.
     As a young Army captain, Dad helped build the Alaska Highway across Canada. I still treasure his huge wall map of the Yukon and Northwest Territories. As a boy, I traced the missions he penciled through the wilderness at the time, almost feeling his frostbite steal my toe-tips along the shores of Great Bear Lake, where we obtained the uranium for the first American A-bombs.
***
     Just as faster and faster Internet connection speeds are the compulsion of our time, maps of ever-finer resolution were the ardent goal of generations of explorers and chart-makers. From maps that encompassed continents at scales of 1-to-20 million, I graduated to U.S. Geological Survey quadratic maps. Known as 7.5-minute quad maps, these classic hiking/hunting aids cover a four-sided area of 7.5 minutes of latitude and 7.5 minutes of longitude, a scale of 1-to-24,000. Crisscrossing Wyoming’s Wind River Mountains, there is no greater satisfaction than being able to point at a specific gradient at a valley’s head and saying “This is where we are.” (Global positioning satellite receivers have rendered this treasured skill nearly obsolete.)
     The nautical equivalent of USGS maps mark their 200th birthday this year, with the anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Coast Survey in 1807. Ferdinand Hassler, a young Swiss immigrant, was chosen by President Thomas Jefferson as a direct consequence of the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Jefferson’s goal of a nation that would stretch from sea to shining sea. Facilitating this dream eventually led to the publication of an annual series of reports to Congress, each brimming with dozens of amazing nautical charts.
     As sketched in the current issue of the Columbia River Maritime Museum’s publication The Quarterdeck, the men who literally charted our Pacific Northwest coastline starting in 1849 were anything but desk-bound draftsmen. The report for 1852 speaks of an imminent danger of Indian attacks, for example. But even the ordinary routine of surveying this wild coast was an arduous adventure, requiring triangulation — physically battling through the underbrush to set up fixed stations that build one upon another in a series of huge adjoining triangles.
***
     Another of the many things I collect, one of the original 1851 charts of the Mouth of the Columbia hangs above my desk. It demonstrates another aspect of this back-breaking endeavor, showing hundreds of soundings in the dozen or so miles of river east to Tongue Point. Each sounding represents a crew of men rowing or sailing to a spot, casting a lead line in time after time, and recording the results. The labor and care involved are astounding.
     You can see another example of this chart for yourself at the Maritime Museum, along with the impressive traveling exhibit, “Mapping the Pacific Coast: Coronado to Lewis and Clark, the Quivira Collection.”
     Digital images of all U.S. government nautical charts, including historical ones, are available in an easily searchable database at http://historicals.ncd.noaa.gov/historicals/histmap.asp
     The annual reports of the heroic U.S. Coast Survey are available online at the NOAA Central Library: http://docs.lib.noaa. gov/rescue/cgs/data_rescue_cgs_annual_reports.html

Do-it-yourself money

     Seventy-five years ago, the humble town of Tenino, Wash., helped launch what would become a nationwide response to a perplexing problem nearly unimaginable today. There was no money.
     With the Great Depression buffeting America’s economy like a Force 5 hurricane roaring toward landfall, over-extended banks began collapsing like so many cardboard cutouts on a Hollywood movie set. With no such thing as federal deposit insurance, people’s life savings went “poof” quickly as Glinda the good witch. Men would show up at Pacific Northwest lumber mills to find their pay slashed to $2.60 a day. They’d be lucky to get three or four days of work a week, and might not actually see any cash for months at a time.
     School teachers and other public employees were paid with warrants — basically IOUs — next to useless unless you could find someone wealthy enough to trade them for cash. In modern terms, this would be like being stranded in an impoverished foreign village with nothing in your pockets but $100 traveler’s checks.
     Why this mess happened and what made it so hard to escape are details best left to university students studying economics. But it remains a cautionary tale about what can result when the curtain is ripped away to show the empty hucksterism that underlies much the world’s money system.
     When you stop to think about it, money is a funny thing. Civilization devotes obsessive energy to piling up and moving around what is, after all, only a hollow symbol that represents time labored, products sold, commodities created and other “real” things. It takes a kind of mass self-hypnosis to convince ourselves that this value is somehow entrapped within pieces of papers decorated with pictures of dead white guys — and even more imagination to consign our hard work to electrons encoded in anonymous bank computers.
     Well, before I start ranting about returning to the gold standard, let’s get back to Tenino. In December 1931, the Tenino Chamber of Commerce decided that if the neutered fat cats in D.C. were incapable of dragging money back onto Main Street, the town would just create currency of its own. Printed on fragile scraps of wood veneer, this “Depression scrip” represented part of the small fraction of their deposits that chamber members eventually expected to get back from a failed bank.
     The editor of the Raymond (Wash.) Herald was one of many who sat up in attention. Noting many of the veneer bills were snapped up by souvenir hunters and would never be cashed in, he wrote “There’s no moral to this story, unless perhaps it is that finally there has been discovered a way to sell lumber at a profit.”
     Raymond, South Bend and Ilwaco, Wash., joined the scrip bandwagon in 1933. South Bend modeled its on Tenino’s, by using fir, spruce and cedar veneer on different denominations. On the Oregon side, the Astoria Daily Budget printed Budget Beaver Pelts and a semi-official scrip was created to pay national guardsmen at Camp Rilea. Clatskanie merchants issued Windmill Scrip.
     Interestingly, the creation of local currency is an idea that seems to be swinging back into fashion in this new age of dysfunctional central governments. In “Rethinking Our Centralized Monetary System,” law professor Lewis Solomon persuasively argues there is nothing illegal about printing local money.
     “As long as you don’t turn out quarters and you don’t turn out something that looks like the U.S. dollar, it’s legal,” Solomon told Reuters news service in June.
     The town of Great Barrington, Mass., has been making headlines in recent months by taking Solomon’s advice to heart. It has issued 844,000 BerkShares, worth $759,600 at a fixed exchange rate of 1 BerkShare to 90 U.S. cents. Accepted by local merchants at par value with the dollar, using BerkShares results in receiving a 10 percent discount. Backers claim the program builds local pride while helping to keep profits and control of wealth within the community.
     Closer to home, in Portland “Cascadia Hour Exchange Hours” is another program that aims to cut the federal-government middleman out of transactions. Its scrip says “This note entitles the bearer to receive one hour (or other units of time) of free labor or mutually agreed upon discount in goods or services.”
     It’s motto? “In Each Other We Trust,” a reassuring sentiment now at least as much as in the 1930s.

Of death, departed dogs and druids

     Craig Thomas, a relaxed U.S. senator From Wyoming who died a few days ago, was a genuine supporter of national parks including ours. He also was a truly nice guy.
     I got to know him as a cub reporter when he first ran for the state legislature from our town of Casper. He wasn’t a complete political novice, being executive director of Wyoming’s homegrown rural electric association, but was green enough to be pleasantly surprised when my story about his candidacy was correct and unbiased. We remained friendly acquaintances over the years, especially during the time my good friend Liz Brimmer worked as his chief of staff.
     Thomas’ core political beliefs were not to my personal taste then or now, but he exemplified a certain type of Western politico, a dwindling breed of libertarian conservative who endeavors to keep government out of people’s business. In part, this doubtless stems from a sincere if rather silly belief that East Coast elites are on a holy quest to mess with the blameless ranchers, miners and wildcatters of the interior Mountain West — who are all busily profiting from the exploitation of public property.
     Thomas hewed to the party line with regrettable zeal. His steadfast support of virtually every GOP-sponsored bill reflected an unfortunate tendency to put party loyalty ahead of independent thinking — something not unique to him or to Republicans.
     Though he voted aye anyway, I have to believe he was privately uncomfortable, at least, with George W. Bush’s bloated budget deficits and reckless foreign policy. I wish he had been more like Nebraska’s Chuck Hagel in rejecting Bush’s more obvious stupidities.
     Still and all, Craig was a decent and honorable man. He eschewed the personal attacks and corporate-sponsored social life of the capital, remaining married for life to the same wife and raising four kids. Many Western politicians are all hat and no cowboy; he was the opposite.
     On a completely different scale, i had the scare of my recent life last week when our new puppy came within an adorable whisker of getting himself flattened by a fire truck.
     Seeing dogs get run over is a profound personal phobia of mine, ever since I was 7 and saw my older brother’s little terrier die on the busy highway that ran past our grandparents’ farm. Our family pets seemed to have an accursed attraction to car tires; I was out of college before we had a dog who managed to die of old age.
     Our bright 10-week-old wheaten terrier, Duncan, was startled by a siren and tore off across the street on a direct intercept course with a huge red engine racing to a boat fire at the port. Of course, my running after him shouting “Puppy!” at the top of my lungs didn’t help calm the situation. Nor did my combination tackle/trip have any hope of nabbing Duncan; perhaps I unconsciously preferred to plant my face in the gravel rather than watch him die.
     Bless his heart for quick reflexes and keen eyesight, engineman Dave Glasson of the Long Beach Volunteer Fire Department slowed down just in time save my little rascal’s life. Thanks!
     Closing on the theme of death and near-death experiences, one of my favorite magazines has been covering an unusual aspect of the burgeoning initiative to reinter the remains of ancient people previously dug up in the cause of science.
     I don’t mean to offend those who feel otherwise, but to me a dead body — though certainly a powerful symbol of the person who once inhabited it — possesses little more inherent significance than an empty seashell has to the departed organism that created it. If we can learn interesting things about ancient people by examining their bones, I figure no harm done. On this basis, I was unsympathetic to Native Americans who wanted to rebury the 9,300-year-old Kennewick Man’s bones without first thoroughly studying them.
     But in the past year I’ve come to believe local Chinook Indians have an absolute right to demand that their preferred level of respect be paid to ancestral remains discovered on the banks of the Lower Columbia. In addition to legitimate matters of religious belief, they are a people with few other tangible links to a glorious past. We all should honor their wishes.
     Come to find out, in the pages of British Archaeology magazine, that latter-day Druids are aggressively seeking to have ancient British remains removed from museums and put back where they were found.
     Though they are easy to poke fun at, with their Harry Potter robes and newly hatched ceremonies modeled on imaginary rites from a long-forgotten past, I guess even Druids ought to be able to create whatever meaning they like for themselves, so long as it doesn’t involve human sacrifice.
     Truth be told, I suspect we’re all just making it up as we go along. Let’s be kind to one another along the way.

Thoughts on a monarchy

     “Americans have a dangerous fondness for monarchy,” writes the columnist known as “Lexington” in London-based Economist magazine. Judging by our fawning reception of Queen Elizabeth II last week, he has a point.
     Kept by the British people as the world’s most expensive pets, in America the royals are rich relations whose rare visits we are flattered as puppy dogs to receive, like when the most popular girl in school accidentally exchanges polite pleasantries with a pimply boy from physics class.
     We have always been small “r” republicans in my family, with a healthy North-England Labour Party disdain for all things queenly and kingly. Yet even in the union halls of Newcastle, there is a certain niggling affection for the queen herself, possibly akin to the respect paid to a lucky lottery winner. You gotta hand it to her — rarely in life do you come upon someone so assiduously devoted to not screwing up. Ramrod careful as she is, you’d think the English were still in the practice of beheading their leaders, as they did in 1649.
     On my list of favorite presidents, George W. Bush ranks somewhere down below Warren G. Harding and James Buchanan, but I’m sure he’ll be relieved to know that I think his winking at the queen was somewhat cool. The whole situation is worthy of a wink, perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that they are both mediocre people somehow thrust to the top of their respective heaps by the whims of genealogy and fate.
     The prospect of a Bush followed by a Clinton followed by a Bush followed by a Clinton thrills me not at all. As Lexington observed last week, “There is nothing inherently wrong with the children or wives of politicians seeking high office, but there is definitely something wrong when people start treating them as heirs to the throne rather than candidates.”
     Perpetuation of political dynasties threatens to turn our country into one where only people of a certain breeding can hope to be president, where having a former president in your family serves as a de facto litmus test for ability to do the job.
     At the same time, The Washington Post reported Thursday that the current field of presidential candidates has a collective fortune of at least a quarter-billion dollars. Like the current president’s father, who had no idea what a gallon of milk cost, none of these millionaires has more than a distant memory of what it is like to make ends meet as an ordinary American.
     “The dynastification of its political life also points to a deeper problem: the fact that America is producing a quasi-hereditary political elite, cocooned in a world of wealth and privilege and utterly divorced from most people’s lives,” Lexington cautions.
     It made for messy and frequently bloody succession fights, but the Anglo-Saxons who founded modern England after the fall of Rome firmly rejected automatically elevating a ruler’s children to the throne. Our own Constitution was grounded in this tradition of merit-based promotion based on the consent of average citizens.
     Abraham Lincoln is near the top of every list of our greatest leaders and even those who shun the study of history readily recall it was his common origins that made him great. No amount of Texas brush-clearing will ever turn George W. Bush from a rich slacker into a hard-working man of the people.
     In America and Britain alike, we need to remember heroes like King Alfred the Great. All English schoolchildren know him well for accidentally allowing a cowherd wife’s rye cakes to burn while he was hiding out in disguise and rallying his people during a Viking invasion. He humbly absorbed her harsh scolding and then richly rewarded her and her husband after regaining the kingdom. Among many worthy accomplishments, he dedicated half the kingdom’s revenue to free public education, while greatly strengthening the navy to forestall future Viking attacks.
     Contrast this with the current queen, who rewarded a presidential wink with steely and humorless contempt. Even a bad president is preferable to a monarch. I just hope the next president we select has much more in common with cowherds than with queens.

Headlines for the ages

     My grandfather read every paper from The Times of London to the Billings Gazette. They were his college, his library and passion. Having gone to work in the mines at age 14, I suppose they were even his high school.
     As an old man, he built himself a snug cushioned nook over the wood box in a corner of the kitchen, a sumptuously warm spot where he’d prop his feet up on the white-enamel stove, a newspaper inevitably in hand. Although one of my uncles was a publisher, I’m sure it was more Grandpa’s high regard of journalism that lured me into it as a profession.
     An ardent Democrat, his acidic contempt for our local congressman was boundless — reading news stories aloud to my grandmother, he always made Cheney rhyme with meanie, close enough to the truth.
     FDR was Grandpa’s god, darned near, and the little collection of historical papers he eventually passed on to me starts with Roosevelt’s third inauguration in 1941, followed by his death and Harry Truman’s ascension to the presidency in 1945.
     I took up the practice of saving newspapers that feature notable historical events, starting with Nixon’s resignation in 1974. (I nearly danced in the street with joy at the time, little knowing how moderate and competent he would seem in comparison with what we have now.)
     Some other big headlines:
     • “41 STATES GO FOR IKE”: The Denver Post, Nov. 8, 1956
     • “Russia Orbits Spaceman: Astronaut Uninjured in Landing”: The Denver Post, April 13, 1961
     • In November 1963, the Riverton Ranger from the small town adjoining ours pronounced “Kennedy Dead” in what we in the business call “wood”: type so large that in the old days it had to be carved from blocks of wood instead of cast from molten lead.
     • “MOVE OVER WORLD: ‘Intelligent Beings’ Send Space Signals”: The Oregonian, April 13, 1965
     • “AMERICANS WALK ON MOON! ‘GIANT LEAP FOR MANKIND’“: The Oregonian, July 21, 1969
     • “Powder keg with a lighted fuse: Ash, gas still are flowing”: Tacoma News Tribune, March 13, 1980
     I hope that one of my own grandkids someday shows an interest in them so I can keep our family news archive alive. Considering how rapidly the Internet is winning the information war, it’s hard to predict just how long newspapers will continue using paper and ink, so new additions to the collection may piddle out. But I sure hope not: There’s no good substitute for sitting with a newspaper, absorbing history as a work always in progress.
     One relatively recent acquisition is the Astorian’s Vacation 1976 Bicentennial special edition. As is so often the case with newspapers, I came across quite an interesting item while looking for something else entirely.
     A story by Steve Bagwell recounts the history of Bradwood, today much in the news once again, the proposed terminal for liquefied natural gas shipments.
     A Bradley and Woodard Lumber Company town, Bradwood’s mill was constructed in the 1930s, employing 150. The firm chose the site because the Columbia, only 12 feet deep at nearby Clifton, was 50 feet at Bradwood — perfect for ships even back then.
     The town and mill eventually died due to a miscalculation about natural resources and a failure to adapt.
     “In the 1930s ... the supply of old growth timber seemed inexhaustible. No one bothered to cut smaller second growth timber. Consequently, the mill wasn’t equipped to turn second-growth timber into lumber. Its saws could handle only large old growth Douglas fir logs ... [which] became scarcer and scarcer as the years went by.”
     Other companies modernized, but for whatever reason, Bradley and Woodard simply waited for the end to come. By 1976, only a decrepit company store remained on the shore, along with the superintendent’s house on long pilings out over the water.
     I don’t know what the moral of this story may be: Is LNG the new way of doing things that we’d be hidebound not to embrace? Or is putting an LNG terminal on a lonely stretch of river thousands of miles from natural gas supplies like building an old growth sawmill beside a vanishing forest?
     Read all about it, a generation or two from now.

The family link to uranium

     Even the word “uranium” is radioactive. Watch television and sooner or later some ex-GI or innocent white-coated lab assistant will sprout pulsating, putrefying sores and then flop over dead after scarfing a cheeseburger villainously poisoned with purloined nuclear fuel — or some variation on this theme.
     Of course Americans are far, far more likely to die from eating cheeseburgers than from ingesting uranium of any kind. My dad kept a small blob of the heavy gray metal on his desk as a paperweight. Depleted of its dangerous isotopes, the only way it could have killed anybody would have been if they swallowed and choked on it.
     And yet uranium is one of those buzzwords you’ll see underlined in bold type in fundraising solicitations of the more avaricious environmental groups. Millions of dollars are raised by the scare industry by linking all nuclear power to nightmare visions of birds falling dead from the skies over Chernobyl or Three Mile Island.
     A partial meltdown at the latter power plant in Pennsylvania in 1979 killed no one but produced a scorching explosion of bad publicity. The U.S. nuclear business curled up like a caterpillar at the feet of a ravenous April robin. It didn’t die, but quivered on the ground for decades, with not a single new electricity-generating plant licensed since.
     This is a matter of more than passing interest to my family, which was left holding thousands of suddenly worthless corporate shares in one of the West’s most promising uranium deposits. Instead of Stanford, I went to community college part-time.
     Our involvement in the civilian atomic industry goes back to its inception in the 1950s, when Dad met Mom while working as attorney for the small start-up uranium company on whose board of directors she served. We weren’t particularly unusual in our small Wyoming town in owning Geiger counters and ultraviolet test lights; ordinary families spent their summer weekends out in the desert poking around for radioactive hotspots on which to stake mining claims.
     Ugly trailer villages sprang out of the purple sagebrush, archetypic boomtowns with four men for every woman. Guys blew off testosterone by screaming down dirt roads in prematurely bashed-up pickups, chasing jackrabbits, washing down the dust with Wild Turkey — among a great many other regrettable exploits best left for posthumous memoirs.
     Lured by easy money, after high school I went to work for Tulsa, Okla.-based Unit Rig & Equipment. Our gargantuan dump trucks were used in open-pit mines for hauling up to 200 tons of coal or rock in a single load. In the American West, uranium deposits usually are found in the bottoms and bends of long-vanished primordial rivers hidden beneath hundreds of feet of worthless overburden that must be peeled away to reach paydirt. I wasted many a youthful day delivering coffee-table sized brake discs and hydraulic cylinders large as Civil War cannons to mining pits scattered over hundreds of miles of sublime empty land where dinosaurs once roamed a surface far below.
     After I left the business to begin college in earnest, rich mines were opened in Canada and Australia, and the end of the Cold War flooded the world market with nuclear fuel once earmarked for weapons. Coupled with Three Mile Island, this doomed what remained of uranium mining in this country. The pits were filled in, the sagebrush tenderly replanted.
     Until now. Driven by catastrophic flooding in foreign mines and depletion of Cold War weapon supplies, the West’s relatively low-grade deposits have suddenly become more attractive. A March 28 headline in The New York Times proclaimed “Uranium Ignites ‘Gold Rush’ in the West.” Old mines are reopening. Once again, amateur prospectors are staking claims and trying to interest investors in yellowcake, the name by which semi-refined uranium ore is known.
     It will seem strange to some that my family’s roots in the environmental movement are as strong as those in mining, so it is not without misgivings that we see a new uranium boom begin. Some powerful thinkers believe a headlong drive to revive the nuclear power industry may be the only way to avert the worst of the coming climate crisis. But uranium and its byproducts can indeed be very deadly, very persistent poisons. We need to think this through, rationally but quickly.
     As for us, we will only obtain melancholy amusement from revitalized uranium mines, as our company’s claims lapsed long ago.

Something’s got to change

     My Great-Granduncle Nelson Cowden came to mind as I read about the declining standard of life for working-class people in Seattle.
     It’s always interesting seeing America from the perspective of another nation’s press. The Tyee, the alternative newspaper for Vancouver, British Columbia, is a particularly insightful source of news and commentary about the Greater Northwest region, that area of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia sometimes (and rather annoyingly) called Cascadia.
     In a provocative article titled “Life’s harder in Seattle,” reporter Crawford Kilian wrote on Feb. 13 that “life for the working poor in Seattle is strikingly harder and more stressful than for their neighbors here in Vancouver. It’s not because folks in Seattle are lazier or dumber than folks in Vancouver. It’s because laws have created wildly different environments in the two cities and the two nations.”
     Citing a study of hotel workers by a University of British Columbia professor, Kilian notes several factors detrimental to working people in Seattle and, by extension, in America as a whole:
     • Few Seattle hotel workers are represented by a union, in contrast to Vancouver, where most benefit from a single collective bargaining agreement. American unions have never recovered from the labor-hostile policies of the Reagan administration.
     • In Canada, workers routinely see their doctors without worrying about the bills, even if they are laid off. In Seattle, hotels offer limited health insurance only after completion of a probationary period, and there is so much turn-over among nonunion employees that many are never insured. In Vancouver, 100 percent of workers’ children have regular doctors; in Seattle, only 56 percent do.
     • Affordable housing, public transportation and other basic essentials of urban life are meager or borderline in Seattle. “Public transit isn’t as good, so they have to cluster in high-crime neighborhoods that at least have some kind of bus service to their downtown workplaces. In the slow winter season they scramble for alternative jobs, or borrow from relatives.”
     Many of my relations have lived in Seattle, beginning soon after we homesteaded in Washington Territory in 1883. But Nelson Cowden particularly illustrates how things have changed for the worse there. He and Aunt Emma owned their own $3,500 home at 1614 24th Avenue a few blocks above Lake Washington. In 1930, the last U.S. Census year in which they were living, Nelson worked as a janitor in a stationary store, his job for 30 years.
     Today, the house Nelson bought new in 1900 is valued at up to $519,666, according to an online real estate estimation service. It last sold just 10 years ago for $110,000.
     Now how in hell can any ordinary working man, far less a janitor, afford to live in Seattle? It’s a sorry situation when the men and women who keep a city alive can’t begin to aspire to buy a simple little home. Similar situations exist up and down the West Coast and aren’t far from happening in Astoria. Something’s gotta change.
     Sewn into the old family Bible is this 1891 Seattle newspaper clipping that provides poignant insight into the life of a quiet man:
     “Was not afraid to die: Mrs. Verbena Cowden Calmly Awaited the Grim Reaper.
     “At 10 o-clock on Friday night Mrs. Verbena Cowden, aged 23 years, died at her residence, No. 1906 Eighth Street. A remarkable thing about this death was Mrs. Cowden’s coolness in the face of death. Half an hour previous to her death she called her friends and relatives about her bedside, and after telling them that her moments were numbered she calmly arranged her worldly affairs. There was no fear in her manner and she seemed more like one who was bidding adieu to friends in order to take a short, pleasant journey than one who was delivering an everlasting farewell to this world.
     “Last of all, she called her husband, Nelson F. Cowden, to her bedside and said: “Goodbye, dear; oh, how I do love you and how I do hate to leave you.” Then she fervently kissed him for the last time. The stricken woman then turned her face away from her weeping friends and in two or three moments breathed her last.”
     It’s good to know Nelson found contentment with Emma later in his life. He died in 1934 at age 73. Wouldn’t he be shocked to learn how much his house is worth today?

We are the predators in charge

     It would be only a modest exaggeration to say my family perpetrated what surely must be one of the worst environmental crimes. They eliminated a marine mammal from American waters.
     This happened so long ago it’s tempting to say we didn’t know what we were doing. But how can you slaughter hundreds of ponderous beasts without having some inkling they wouldn’t last forever?
     “Plain Dealing: or, Newes from New England,” published in 1642 by Thomas Lechford, includes this reference to my ancestor John Evered-Webb: “About 150 leagues from Boston eastward is the Isle of Sables whither one John Webb, alias Evered, an active man, with his company, are gone with commission from the Bay to get seahorse teeth and oyle.”
     After the cruise above, this news: “The merchants of Boston sent a vessel to the Isle of Sable with twelve men, and brought home 400 pair of sea-horse teeth which were estimated worth £300, and left 12 ton of oil and many skins which they could not bring away, being put from the island in a storm.”
     In light of our modern usage of “seahorse” to denote peculiar little horse-shaped fish, this all will be rather mysterious until I reveal that in colonial times this was the colloquial term for walrus. It also should be noted that “alias” in this context is equivalent to a hyphenated surname; my ancestor often signed his name “John Evered alias Webbe.”
     Anyway, closely following my family’s predations, Atlantic walruses were extirpated from their former southern range. Although about 15,000 of them still exist, they are now mostly limited to the Canadian Arctic and Greenland.
     This tragedy has parallels throughout human history. Our expansion into Australia between 50,000 and 60,000 years ago coincides with the disappearance of creatures including the giant short-faced kangaroo, which stood as much as nine feet tall. Hunting pressure probably combined with climatic changes to doom a veritable Noah’s ark of animals in North America, from mammoths to sabre-tooth cats.
     Locally, the relentless destruction of the sea otter is a relatively recent chapter of this sorry story. In June 1913, the Chinook Observer enthusiastically and ignorantly witnessed the very tail end of an era when it reported: “The first otter seen on the North Beach for five years was sighted off Willapa Harbor Sunday by ... a crab fisherman. Seven of the otters appeared in one family and were quite tame. Three of them were killed, and one was a ‘silver-tip,’ eight feet in length, with a pelt valued at $1,200. The value of the pelts range from $100 to $1,500. Formerly otters were numerous along the beach, but disappeared completely a few years ago. Their return means the reopening of the business of otter hunting, which made fortunes for many a fisherman years ago.”
     And that was that, the last time sea otters were reported here.
     Taken together, all this history goes toward explaining my positions regarding local sea lions. In the first place, it is a remarkable achievement and a comment on our growing sophistication as a species that we’ve hauled sea lions and other marine mammals back from the precipice of extinction.
     But it would be a mistake to treat them all as pampered pets. At this point, we humans have so dramatically altered the natural balance that it is foolish not to kill or otherwise effectively manage particular sea lions that in a week of feasting can undo millions of dollars in salmon-recovery efforts. Like it or not, we are the predators in charge.
     My ancestor eventually was forced to shift his efforts from walruses to whales, a distinctly more problematic prey animal, as shown by this Oct. 17, 1668 item from Roxbury (Mass.) Church records: “John Web, alias, Everit, pursuing a Whale, was caught in ye rope, twisted about his middle, & being drawn into ye sea, was drowned.”
     An appropriate end for a man who long pursued the denizens of the Atlantic.

A turning point for father and daughter

     When will she stop letting me hold her hand when we cross the grocery store parking lot? When will she be too big to carry out to the living room in the morning, grumpy and wrapped up in her warm purple blanket? Will there be a last time she says “I love you, Daddy”?
     Merely writing these words is enough, sentimental simpleton that I am, to send me reaching for a Kleenex. (I had to beat a semi-dignified retreat from the living room just yesterday to avoid overhearing the details of Marley the Labrador’s death as her mom read Elizabeth the penultimate chapter of the best-selling dog biography. My gentle old Lab’s death as I gave her a last scratch behind the ears is still a jagged wound eight years on. I don’t need to relive it.)
     Fourth grade is a difficult demarcation in lives of daughters and daddies. It is that final tipping point on top of the sledding hill, the place where children begin to speed from our grasp, hollering in joy, life’s mysteries flashing toward them at a zillion miles an hour. Trying to clutch onto them is a futile and crippling fight, but neither can we just cast them loose, novices navigating through the rocks we can see so well, but which are mysteriously invisible to each new generation. Better, I figure, to ride nearby as long as she’ll let me, laughing with her, hoping with all I’m worth that she lands softly.
     A guide to nine-year-olds, perhaps outdated, advises parents to write a journal of this year for their daughters, who may not enjoy the same sense of adventure and possibility again for years, if ever. Like a note in a bottle, these observations are supposed to help her find herself again as she emerges on some distant shore, the doubts and mute agonies of adolescence behind.
     Remember, my dear, that you could never stay in a bad mood for much more than an hour before coming up with some cheerful scheme involving food coloring, or wooden swords, or your vast collection of stuffed animals. Keep remembering what you’ve named each one. Remember how smart you are in all the ways that matter, most especially at reading the strange hieroglyphics on human hearts. Remember that thunder was the only thing you feared. Remember your daddy loves you, for always and always and always.
     I suspect my Elizabeth will grow up to be a great mom, or at least a decent psychologist, because there’s nothing she loves more than trying to figure out what separates people (and dogs) from their truest selves. She certainly knows how to ask questions that penetrate to the deliberately darkened core of old hurts and subtle pleasures. Or maybe she just likes to explore what makes me cry.
     Elizabeth’s subject of inquiry this week was my late father — his last words to me, how and where he died, how he got there, how I heard.
     Concerning Dad’s and my cross-country car trip in the week before his death, the high point was hearing his recollections of New Orleans in the year before the war, croaked out through the cancerous cough that was pulling him down. A young Army officer, he had been delivered a much-coveted invitation to a fancy dress ball, only to have Pearl Harbor blow everything up. He was a tough guy, certainly no crier, though with an infinitely kind heart. I’m sure he didn’t mean to hurt me when he told me in fourth grade I could no longer kiss him, but it cut me deep. I went years not knowing even what to call him — it seemed he had stopped being my daddy.
     “I love you” were my Dad’s last words, as I left him dying at home in the dreadful last gasps of his illness. I didn’t say it back. Oh, how I wish I had. I thought I’d see him one more time. But in every life, there is a day that is the last. What fools we are if we arise in the morning without a little niggling awareness that the words we speak could be the last our loved ones ever hear from us, or choose to hear.
     So be kind, Sweetheart, and save a kiss for me. In your darkest moment, remember your dad will always hold your hand. I know my dad holds mine.

A special case for doctors

     Ice-blooded tempers and go-to-hell dispositions aren’t confined to any one profession, but for sheer cussedness it’s hard to beat doctors. (Yes, yes, I know — before my doctor friends or their spouses fire off offended letters to the editor, I hereby freely admit newspaper publishers are cranky, spoiled, bubble-headed egomaniacs who would have gone to medical school if only our math scores had been better.)
     My uncle, a retired publisher, recently reminded me of the case of Dr. Julius Schuelke, a high-octane German physician who took up practice in my Wyoming hometown of Lander back in the 1880s. Hailed as best doctor in all the surrounding country, Schuelke was an accomplished medical high-wire artist who famously cured a local man of facial cancer at a time when it would otherwise have been an automatic death sentence.
     Speaking of death sentences, that’s probably what Dr. Schuelke faced in 1890 after being indicted for murder in record time by a grand jury that included my great-great-grandfather.
     Echoing a complaint that has resounded through the pharmacy business for as long as there have been doctors, the town druggist — a man named Sullivan — told a few too many gossipy neighbors that Dr. Schuelke’s appallingly messy prescriptions were going to kill a patient someday. The German’s handwriting may have been a symptom of a bigger problem: Acting out another familiar theme, Dr. Schuelke was said to be addicted to narcotics.
     Word got back to Dr. Schuelke. Strapping on his six-shooter, he marched a block down the street to Choo’s barbershop, confronting Sullivan as he sat in the chair. Noticing or imagining Sullivan’s hands moving beneath the barber’s cloth and thinking he was reaching for a gun, Dr. Schuelke drilled the unarmed man right between the eyes.
     The good doctor was hauled off to county jail. After just one night behind bars, however, local authorities realized they needed him so badly they turned him loose. A few weeks later, with what can be imagined as a community sigh of “Aw, to heck with it,” he was acquitted.
     In a freakish occurrence that hasn’t happened since “M•A•S•H” ended production in 1983, I find myself relishing the nation’s top-rated TV show, “House.”
     It’s on Fox, owned by Rupert Murdoch, a media mogul whose ruthless egotism makes Citizen Kane look modest as Mother Teresa. (Although I find myself somewhat disarmed in reading that Murdoch once played himself on “The Simpsons,” in an episode where Homer runs into a guy at the Super Bowl who introduces himself: “I’m Rupert Murdoch, the billionaire tyrant!”)
     Dr. Gregory House is perhaps the most unapologetically despicable character in television history. Like Dr. Schuelke, House is so irreplaceable as a medical puzzle-solver that his colleagues and society are compelled to put up with shockingly boorish behavior, sarcasm and escalating self-destruction. Addicted to prescription pain drugs after a leg injury, House accepts no authority but his own, pushing his body past all limits and punishing anybody who dares to care about him.
     Weird to say, but “House” is almost Shakespearean — not only in its dramatic themes but in its humor. Lead actor Hugh Laurie won a Golden Globe Award for best television performance and deserves to go down in the history books for most wicked ... and most funny. In some ways, Laurie and “House” resemble Alan Alda and Hawkeye Pierce on “M•A•S•H,” except that House’s acidic wit would have swiftly resulted in his own murder by the easy-going, martini-swilling surgeons of the Korean war zone.
     And what of Dr. Schuelke? A few years after the events recounted here, he opened a successful health spa at Wyoming’s famed Thermopolis hot springs, which he named thermae, Latin for hot baths or springs, and polis, Greek for city.
     High above the modern highway that now snakes through Wind River Canyon just south of Thermopolis, a dirt track once ascended Bird’s Eye Pass. (The homesteader who first brought cattle into the Owl Creek Mountains branded them with a circle with a dot in the center, and the Indians thought it looked like a bird’s eye.)
     Traveling over the pass with a woman who might or might not have been his wife, Dr. Schuelke somehow managed to fall from the stagecoach, suffering fatal injuries. Though he deliberately took one human life, he doubtless saved hundreds. But he couldn’t save himself — to this day, people speculate he was on drugs the day he finally fell beneath the spinning wheels.
     It will be fascinating to see if the fictional Dr. House finds his own peace and redemption in the end.

There is no glamor in crime news

     How long will it be before CBS announces a Naselle edition of its outrageously popular Crime Scene Investigation franchise or NBC schedules Law & Order: Starvation Alley?
     Inmates serving life sentences are the only people with enough free time to watch all the different versions of popular cop and prosecution programs. “Oh, cripes,” they may say to the guy in the next cell, “where do they come up with all these ridiculous ways to kill somebody? I’ve never done it that way! It’s insulting.”
     The pathetic reality is that really elaborate violent crimes are few and far between. All too often, the drunken and drug-addled blunder their way into situations that spiral out of control after lifetimes of slowly escalating personal confusion and crime. There is nothing the least bit entertaining about the pain and fear criminals cause their victims or the drumbeat of damage they inflict on their children and communities.
     Colleagues in publishing imagine that running newspapers on this wild and gloriously scenic coast is a bucolic exercise in covering fried-seagull recipe contests and peg-leg dances. But in fact we may be left with even fewer illusions about human character than our big-city cousins. Drunk-driving or meth arrests can’t be just empty statistics when you often know the back-stories of the people in the court blotter, or when the kid your kid used to play with turns nasty because unspeakable things are happening at home.
     “Tragedy” is a word robbed of most of its meaning by overuse, but the collective impact of rural crime rises to a tragic level. With sheriff’s departments, jails and county attorneys stretched to the breaking point and sometimes beyond, the same people re-offend again and again, secure in the knowledge that the temporary inconvenience of being arrested is the only punishment they will suffer. (I’m all for a vigorous program of vehicle forfeiture for repeat drunk drivers and those driving without valid licenses or insurance; at least this would be a real consequence for those who put innocent people at risk on our roads.)
     Acknowledging the sorry banality of most local crime, it still has to be admitted that our counties at the mouth of the Columbia seem to be the scene of an unusual number of really weird and notorious deeds. Who can forget the tourist who petulantly shoved her boyfriend off a cliff?
     The fact that crime and punishment are topics of endless fascination is proven by the enduring popularity, not just of cop shows, but of the actual judicial process as spectator sport. Court TV is only the latest incarnation of a lengthy tradition of vicarious and voyeuristic enjoyment of other people’s misfortunes acted out in front of a judge and jury.
     An interesting evening can be had by looking up the proceedings of the London criminal courts at the Old Bailey on-line at www.oldbaileyonline.org. Here you can read a remarkable catalog English criminal cases from 1674 to 1834. If our current system of justice invites a belief that laxity leads to scofflaws, a detailed look at the severe punishments of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries reveals that reflexive harshness also doesn’t necessarily discourage lawlessness.
     My family once lived in the vicinity of London and a search for records pertaining to the Winters revealed quite a few malefactors with my surname, whether or not they were actually relations:
     • Robert Winter “was seen hovering about the Court in the very face of Justice, and by an accident pulling out the Handkerchief, it was discovered by a Gentleman that stood by him, and searching him they found 4 in his Breeches, and 3 in his Pockets.” Found guilty of pick pocketing on July 8, 1696, he was sentenced to be whipped.
     • Reynolds Winter, found guilty in 1722 of stealing four dozen sword belt locks and other items from a shop and a “Chints Gown” valued at 42 shillings from a woman, was sentenced to death.
     • Thomas Winter, indicted for stealing six wether sheep in 1740, was found guilty and sentenced to transportation to America.
     • Convicted of stealing 48 reams of paper and a jacket in 1816, John Winter was sentenced to be transported to Australia for seven years.
     On the other hand, you really, really didn’t want to be convicted of counterfeiting in England in this early era, or of clipping some of the metal from coins. In 1674, an Ann Petty was sentenced to be “Drawn on an Hurdle or Sled to Smithfield (the usual place for such Executions) and there to be burned to Death.”
     When it comes to modern criminal justice, how about we try for a happy medium? Better that than medium rare.