Editor's Notebook: 2003

Decades may pass, but friendships, memories last

    Scrounging through old newspapers the other day, I came upon a 1970s photo of my friend Bette Snyder with her husband Sid, her hair dressed in one of those polished plastic styles popular back then.

    I teased her about it a little, but it’s safe to say virtually all we who were around in the ‘70s have cause for regret over that decade, and haircuts are the least of it — I more so than most.

    Graduating from high school in the mid-70s, I remember all too well the big-hair bands, the polyester clothes and the spur-of-the-moment road trips to L.A., getting turned down trying buy cigars at Disneyland but having no trouble whatsoever convincing convenience store assistant managers to sell us beer at Huntington Beach.

    Maybe everyone’s embarrassed by the decade in which they were teenagers — goodness knows the ‘80s weren’t wrapped in glory — but I’d challenge any Gen-X’er or Gen-Y’er to top the ridiculous glory of pimply white boys with Afros wearing powder-blue suits to discos, each searching for our own personal Linda Ronstadt.

    My old pal Kip Wheeler and I used to get together after school to watch Star Trek during its very first series of syndicated reruns. Kip took it so seriously he used to transcribe and study some of its pseudo-philosophical pronouncements.

    He moved on to Ayn Rand at about the same time I took up Carlos Castaneda, sort of the ‘70s equivalent of the Jesuits versus the Pagans.

    Graduating a couple years before I did, Kip moved off to Western Washington University, and we’ve seen one another only rarely in the following 30 years.

    But we’re e-mail buddies and he’s still on my best-friends list. Kip’s a testament to living and succeeding your own way. Dropping out of Western at some point, he when on to be a bookstore clerk for years. In the ‘90s he caught the technology wave before it burst on the shore, and near as I can tell manages his real estate empire in the Colorado Rockies in between avidly pursuing amateur archaeology projects.

    A half thought of him sometimes stays my hand when I go to grab my office door handle to chase off skateboarders. Victory does not always go to the clean-cut high school A-list kids.

    It was Kip, to my everlasting thanks, who introduced me to The Lord of the Rings. I devoured the trilogy again and again, entranced by an English-born mythology, after my childhood lost in the foreign labyrinth of Mediterranean and Norse legends.

    Humble Frodo’s victory over evil, his accomplishments greater than any lord or wizard, taught us all something about the power of tenacity and imagination.

    eter Jackson’s three-part film of the Rings has been a thrilling three-year enchantment for we true fans, even as we wish it could have been even a few hours longer to include other favorite scenes and characters like Tom Bombadil, Kip’s patron saint.

    Donna and I saw Return of the King Sunday. In addition to making me laugh and cry, it helped ease my disdain for the years of my teens. Even in that time of painful silliness, there were genuine things, real emotions and potent lessons to be remembered. Even the dumbest party can contain memorable conversations, faces to cherish, ideas to circle back around to in a decade or two or three.

Turkey amidst daunting scarcity

    A solid year of constant worry and work was stuffed into my family’s Thanksgiving. Not the trivial stuff of today — paying off last season’s holiday splurge — but the unending suspense of waiting to see how many turkeys were going to kill themselves in endlessly creative ways before they could be sold.

    My city-dwelling Washington grandparents had their own cruel struggle with the Great Depression, but my Wyoming grandparents’ depression was even harder, and certainly more colorful.

    On a ranch on the sublime east side of the dry Wind River Mountains, my mom and her brothers and parents not only somehow survived deprivation, but gained by it.

    The early 1930s were a time of daunting scarcity on a scale we today can only barely imagine. The nation’s economy collapsed, and it wasn’t just a few thousand Enron employees who lost all their savings. There was no money. It wasn’t uncommon for people to work 12 hours for little more than room and board, or for heartbroken parents to exile hungry children to better-off relatives.

    Farmers and ranchers, in a pattern that repeats itself over and over again right up to these unhappy days of globalization, saw commodity prices implode to where it cost more to ship cattle and crops to market than it did to raise them. One of the few exceptions was turkeys. American people can pare our lives down to the bone if we have to — or at least we could then — but the Thanksgiving turkey is vital to our sense of ourselves. It’s a mighty desperate family or an awfully strict vegetarian who will forego “maybe just one more helping” of roast bird this feast day.

    So my Bell family and most of our neighbors up and went into the turkey business in that sort of spontaneous chain reaction that’s both the beauty and part of the horror of agricultural free enterprise.

    Mom and Uncle Tom have vivid memories of the turkey business. Until butchering week, it mostly was all Grandma’s job. She’d feed, protect and defend six or eight hens and a gobbler through the Siberian winter while every predator in a 10-mile radius circled the ranch waiting for the sentry to let down her guard. “Your grandma would fret over her turkey hens,” Uncle Tom recalled for me this week.

    Come spring, or what passes for it in the mountains, these hens with wild strains still in their genes, would try slipping away to make their nests in the willows or roughs, Easter treats for every passing coyote and bull snake. Mom remembers seeing one giant old snake in the pasture with four or five turkey eggs bloating his ribcage, looking like a weird multi-knobbed barbell.

    After they hatched, those that didn’t vacantly wander off into waiting jaws or irrigation ditches would be pampered along, until at last in late November, 30 to 50 mature 10-15 pound birds were ready for butchering. All the small-time ranchers would help each other out with this daunting project, first hanging the turkeys by their feet out of reach of the cats and then piercing their brains and a main artery so they would die and bleed. (Sorry, but if the gory details bother you, you shouldn’t be eating them.)

    It was a festive occasion for the ranch families, in a very ancient way — a sort of harvest celebration that permitted visiting, coffee-drinking and baking pies.

    But the work went on in the freezing cold, with carcasses being plucked and finally being taken down so the pin feathers could be removed. Uncle Tom remembers a turkey once jumping up at this stage, alive despite all, running naked through the barnyard until a visiting neighbor popped her through the head with his 30-30.

    Grandpa loaded the wagon shortly before the holiday, and he and Tom set off for the scales in our little town. The train waiting to take them east gathered steam at the depot and there were wagon loads of turkeys all up and down the street, and excited men and boys waiting to get a check for real silver money. “Mom squirreled away what she could for what few presents we got,” Uncle Tom said, with the bulk of money going toward taxes, which were due about then.

    There was still a turkey left for the Bell family’s own Thanksgiving — the best bird in the world — according to two skinny kids, now in their late 70s, who still honor their parents’ sacrifices and love across the gulf of all these long years.

Shop — and eat — locally

    Our cells are constantly being replenished or replaced as they age and die.

    We regenerate ourselves every day, with food and water as building materials. So when someone says they aren’t the same person they were 20 or 30 years ago, they’re telling the truth: much of the old has washed down the drain.

    Because the composition of our flesh and bones is continually updated, delicate scientific analysis can now begin to read a human body almost the same way tree rings record ancient weather patterns.

    There was news this week about the 5,200-year-old Alpine mummy called the Iceman. By studying his teeth, bones and mineral traces in his intestines, researchers are able to say with some certainty that this man lived his entire life in one or more small valleys within 35 miles south of where his body was found.

    He literally was made of wholesome Tyrolean food and mountain spring water, a product of the place he lived. Imprinted with the unique chemical signature of his home, the Iceman somehow came to leave his valley and be murdered up on a high mountain pass, perhaps dreaming as he died of his family and warm stone home.

    Despite his violent end, he brings to mind an old Chinese prose poem about the ideal life:

    “The people take death seriously and do not travel far/ Though they have boats and carriages, no one uses them/ ...Their food is plain and good, their clothes fine but simple, their homes secure/ They are happy in their ways/ Though they live within sight of their neighbors, and crowing roosters and barking dogs are heard across the way/ Yet they leave each other in peace while they grow old and die.”

***

    Try to imagine what a researcher 50 centuries from now might make of one of us if we have the misfortune of being slain on a glacier. Careful chemical analysis peels back the molecules of our tooth enamel and reveals:

    • Water consumed from plastic bottles purchased at Costco;

    • Hormones from the ground-up California dairy cattle used in our cheeseburgers;

    • Mineral isotopes from the Andes, downstream from which our winter grapes are grown;

    • Manmade dyes from the cheap farmed salmon we found for sale at the local corporate grocery store;

    • Locked in our cholesterol-clogged arteries, minute traces of radioactive island soil from the palm-oil plantations downwind from American and French nuclear test sites;

    • DDT, which still rained from the sky in detectable amounts decades after it was banned.

    Without a doubt, despite or because of all these clues to modern multinational merchandising and agribusiness, we live on average far longer than the Iceman would have even if an arrow hadn’t cut short his life. We’re lucky, in a way.

    We’re also poorer for having a weaker connection to where we live. We’re a little bit from everywhere, but our basic heritage and the stuff of our bones is constructed from materials that are, in profound ways, meaningless to us.

    A movement known by the annoying acronym of ELF, short for Eat Local Food, aims to restore our marriage to the lands and waters where we live.

    An English advocate of the practice has this to say: “By eating food produced locally, we are not only supporting local farmers, we are supporting management of the countryside. The food we eat is the landscape we create.”

    That may at first glance strike you, as it did me, as slightly goofy. But it really comes down to supporting local fishermen, farmers, oystermen, ranchers and orchardists, while at the same time nourishing our bodies with the good stuff surrounding us. What could be healthier or tastier than food produced where we live, in an environment we know, by hands we trust?

    I like to think, if I thaw out of a ice flow centuries from now, that scientists will find in me the chemical traces of Willapa oysters, of wild chinook salmon, of locally grown tomatoes and berries, of wild mushrooms mixed in omelettes made from the eggs of slug-fattened Columbia chickens.

    I am what I choose to eat.

Old railways give sentimental journeys

    An old fantasy of mine, shared by many others, was rekindled this week by this e-mail update about Buenos Aires from The Economist magazine.

    “The most welcome of (the newly re-elected mayor’s) plans will undoubtedly be the extension of the subte, the capital’s subway system.” The line’s vintage carriages, built between 1913 and 1919 and incompatible with the subte’s new electrical transformers, will finally be decommissioned. The subway is Latin America’s oldest, and Line A’s carriages are among the oldest rolling stock in the world.”

    Hmmm, I thought, just what would it take to get that rolling stock up to the Peninsula, to reawaken the Ilwaco Railway & Navigation Company?

    I can almost picture raising sufficient donations through car washes and rummage sales in two or three weeks. We’d go down, box ‘er up, and be in business by spring. (That’s the way with daydreams: You can just skip over all the messy details.)

    There’s no real danger of my becoming a foamer, but I’d dearly love to see the return of the train that Union Pacific pulled down in 1930.

    What is a foamer? Local writer Glenn Gillespie explains: “I first encountered the term ‘foamer’ as applied to railroads, trains and railroad fans in the summer of 2002, when a New York Times staffer named John Tierney wrote an article about Amtrak for his paper’s Sunday magazine. Amtrak is the troubled national railroad financed, somewhat reluctantly, by the federal government.

    “Tierney confessed a long-standing love affair with trains and railroads and spoke of others deeply afflicted with what for some is an incurable malady. With tongue partly in cheek, Tierney wrote:

    “‘In the hierarchy of train lovers, I was at least a train buff and maybe even a “rail fan,” which is the formal term for the ultimate obsessive. The informal term, coined by railroad workers and now used by the obsessives themselves, is “foamer” — as in foaming at the mouth.’”

    It’s no exaggeration to say there are many thousands of foamers in the Northwest, and a great many more people like myself with a strong, but not obsessive, affection for trains, particularly old ones. Why else would I have a copy by my desk of The Standard Guide for Locomotive Engineers and Firemen?

***

    A few weeks ago, amidst the reams of press releases I receive, was a packet from the Mount Hood Railroad, detailing its fall schedule of murder mystery trains, circus trains and Western train robbery trains. It told me the 97-year-old railway has operated since 1906, and has carried passengers on excursions up into the orchards below Mount Hood since 1988 from its depot in Hood River.

    My 6-year-old daughter and I left Ilwaco on a Thursday after work and drove up the Gorge, spending the next night in The Dalles, where I bought incredible water-pack peaches and cherries from Muirhead Canning Company.

    Early Saturday morning, we put together picnic supplies and headed for the train station. Unbeknownst to Elizabeth, we were on the robber train. As we pulled out of Hood River, without explanation I gave her the $1.2 million in play money the ticket agent had handed me.

    She put her wonderful imagination to use immediately, thumbing through the bills and telling me about the house with a peanut-shaped swimming pool she planned to buy for her momma. It was a fun diversion for us as the 1940s vintage cars swayed up the tracks through the soggy October morning, hugging the river, from which fly-fishermen paused to wave.

    Elizabeth stood ramrod straight as the shooting began, robbers on horseback firing their six-shooters in the air and stopping the train. Soon, we started up again. Sitting in a middle car it took almost half an hour before the robbers reached us.

    As one of the bandits playfully rousted the man sitting in front of me, my tigress-like 43-pounder stood up with her money, thrust it at him, and said “Don’t hurt my Daddy!”

    “Ah, little darlin’,” he said, and we knew it would all come out all right.

Espy and Plimpton’s tales

    “Far be it from me to heed any of those dastardly stories about hanky-panky on the peninsula during Prohibition days. A still in the woods maybe for home use — perhaps a little blackberry or cranberry wine down in the basement — who needed anything more?”

    It’s always a pleasure to read Willard Espy. The man’s grocery lists probably were entertaining. A native son of Oysterville, Wash., Espy was sort of a celebrity in south Pacific County, our tenuous connection to the literati of Manhattan, where he spent most of his time as an author of books that playfully caress the English language.

    Until he died awhile back, Willard’s annual arrival back in Oysterville with his wife Louise was a signal true summer had arrived. You’d see him holding court at a corner table in the Heron and Beaver Pub and imagine yourself part of some great international network of the witty and the genteel.

    He was a gracious man.

    I recently came across a letter from Willard in a file of Prohibition-related research material in our office. Assembled by Marie Oesting, a fine lady from Ocean Park, the file was intended to lead to a book on the subject. Marie passed it all on to us years ago.

    “I do recall Saturday night dances at Long Beach,” Willard continued, “When I was still in my early teens, at which the custom was for the young bucks to hide their bottles of lightning in the sand and go out to take a swig between swings around the floor.

    “Roy Kemmer and I once spied on them, dug up their bottles, and managed to dispose of enough whiskey so that we were able to drive unscathed through a forest fire and then bump into a buried log on the ocean beach on the way home. Nobody hurt.

    “Of course the mainland was less law-abiding. You doubtless know the story ... about the esteemed South Bend editor who became a high Prohibition official but didn’t have much luck apprehending rum runners because he talked too much in bed to his mistress about what he was up to and she always told her husband, who was the chief rum runner. I don’t believe a word of it.”

    George Plimpton, who died about three weeks ago, was a great friend (and former son-in-law) of Willard’s and was a big help with the Willard R. Espy Literary Foundation, the Oysterville outfit that funds a residency program for aspiring authors while maintaining a large library devoted to the study of English.

    In one of those “everyone knows someone who’s connected to someone else” stories, my old college friend Andrew Melnykovych and I once had a visit with Plimpton, who was making the rounds on the university talk circuit.

    A new sports arena had just been finished on campus, and as the administration was anxious to show the Legislature it could be multi-purpose, they stationed Plimpton out on the basketball court with his audience of maybe 100 scattered amidst the 15,000 seats. Maybe they mistook Plimpton for George Harrison or Eric Clapton.

    But Plimpton dispensed with his platform and microphone and gathered us all courtside, regaling us with stories about his days as a young American in Paris. Thanks to the social license granted even college-age reporters, he indulged the two of us with a long conversation after his lecture. Maybe he inspired Andrew, who went on to win one of journalism’s top prizes. Whatever he said must not have rubbed off on me.

    There are plenty of other nuggets amidst Marie’s Prohibition file. This is one of my favorites, from the North Beach Tribune of July 3, 1925:

    The former editor “came down to be on hand for the smashing of the bottles (of seized Canadian liquor) but evidently did not stay long enough on the job for reports have it that the bottle breakers gave each sack a lick or two with a sledge and dumped the stuff overboard but partly broken. ... As many as 30 cases are said to have been rescued by a single man and 50 boats were on the job so thick as to seriously interfere with one another.

    “No doubt this will be a joyous Fourth in Raymond and vicinity and Roy Herrold reports even the oysters of Willapa Bay are right up on their hind legs and the clams have developed a stretch in their necks of length and capacity beyond anything ever thought of heretofore.”

Bequeathing reading

    A most exciting thing happened last night. My daughter read to me.

    She was in the Pediatric Intensive Care Unit, a tiny five-pounder swaddled in donated blankets, when we first read together — “Goodnight Moon,” I suspect.

    Having seen in a magazine somewhere that babies who hear complex language develop stronger verbal skills, I bought a fresh new translation of Homer’s “The Odyssey” the day before we finally got to bring her home, six long weeks after her birth.

    “Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns/ driven time and again off course once he had plundered/ the hallowed heights of Troy”: That’s about how far Elizabeth permitted me to get in one of my favorite books. “Oops,” I realized as she knocked it from my hands, “this is one baby who’s going to set her own agenda, and Homer ain’t on it yet.”

    Three books or stories a night, more age-appropriate, have been our regular routine since then. We’ve re-read some so often that she sometimes suggests saying the words in reverse just to reinvent a bit of novelty — “Madeline was one smallest the/ lines straight two in girls little 12.” The moment we pick a book, she knows everything I’m going to say. I routinely substitute a few weird new words here and there just to make sure she’s paying attention. She is.

***

    I was starting to wonder, though, when she might get fired up about doing it herself. It’s warm and comfortable being read to, cuddling in an intellectual nest, but I always figured my tough little gal would want to assert her independence by eliminating the middleman in her reading pleasure.

    Last night marked the first real sign in that joyous and slightly sad process: I like being the middleman. Instead of reciting the words from memory as she’s been doing before, a kind of pretend reading, Elizabeth started whipping through one of her first-grade Accelerated Reader books. She suddenly broke the code. I was so tickled.

    Chapter books will be my next gambit for enhancing this precious time together. Ancient Greek poems probably are still out, but I kind of figure “Call of the Wild” may be a good introduction to “real” literature. In one of our many role-playing games, she likes to be a powerful girl raised by wild dogs, so Jack London’s heroic thinking dog, Buck of the Arctic, may just strike a chord.

***

    It’s great hanging out with such a richly imaginative person, and I like to lead her along sometimes just to see what she’ll come up with. Last week, it was “How do you touch the sky, Daddy?”

    “Go up into it in an airplane or a rocket ship.”

    “No, how do you touch the sky with your hand?”

    “Well, I guess you could climb a mountain. The sky’s up there.”

    “How do mountains grow? A seed?”

    “Sure...”

    “How big is it? As big as me?”

    I’m truly grateful for these little exchanges. Just like the green bean we grew in the windowsill this summer, which yielded a crop of seven plump pods, it sort of makes sense that a mountain might grow from an Elizabeth-sized seed. I like the idea.

    All kinds of traits get passed down through families, genetic and behavioral. There’s still not much we can do about the genetic stuff, but how we spend time with our kids is so vital, and reading is near the top of the list.

    My own daddy used to buy and read me what we called funny books: Donald Duck, Archie and my favorite, Classics Illustrated. We read Huckleberry Finn for real, night after night and side-by-side, but my first exposure to many authors like Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Kipling came in abridged form in comics. It was a pretty great way to go, and I mourned a little when Classics Illustrated was allowed to go under.

    Those evenings with my dad and mom set me on my life-long path of reading. Watching my little old high school drop-out grandpa poring over newspapers got me started toward publishing. Words and hugs and sitting close started me toward being (I hope) a good parent. It’s an inheritance I’m trying hard to pass down.

Here’s to the newlyweds

    Getting married is akin to setting out on an endless ocean voyage with only one other passenger onboard. At least that’s a good standard for picking a mate. Make sure you’re compatible best friends, and start figuring how to navigate through all conflicts and challenges, the inevitable storms and doldrums.

    Many seem to put less effort into selecting a spouse than they would in picking a new pet, and see both as disposable whenever they become inconvenient.

    In our culture and others in which divorce has become commonplace, we’ve been instilled with an entirely false idea that marriage should always be fun, a first date without end. And it should be fun sometimes, but it isn’t always. You can hate each other’s guts once in awhile, or even be bogged down in mutual despair from time to time, but still love one another and drive on through to another brighter day.

    I’ll get teased, but I confess to sometimes voluntarily watching Dr. Phil, the TV family counselor. Without getting all doped-up on sentimentality and sensitivity, he listens calmly, and then cuts through all the cover stories people concoct to shield themselves from taking responsibility for their own actions and lives.

    He doesn’t pretend everything can be worked out every time — we’re all humans, not saints or angels. But I think Dr. Phil agrees with this bit of ancient Hebrew wisdom: “Live joyfully with the wife whom thou lovest all the days of the life of thy vanity, which he hath given thee under the sun, all the days of thy vanity: for that is thy portion in this life ... Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might; for there is no work, nor device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest.”

    Work at it, rejoice in it, and really listen to each other — you ain’t going to live forever.

    I Once was the kind of horrible best man that brides write advice columnists about (sorry again, Jenny). Another Bible quote assures us “There is not a just man upon earth, that doeth good, and sinneth not, “ and I’ve surely tested that proposition. (I hasten to add not to the extent of, say, Jules in Pulp Fiction.)

    In the context of marriages, the sins I’m inclined to admit to at present include bringing my Labrador retriever and making up my toast at the spur of moment after too many beers. So it was a pleasure attending a wedding last weekend where everyone had practiced their lines, though I do recall seeing a dog at one point.

    My friends Kathryn Brown and Andrew Picken had one of the best weddings I can recollect or conceive, bringing together scores of friends and relations from across the country to the lawn and home of Steve and Brenda Forrester in Astoria Saturday afternoon. Dozens of kids and babies mingled with people up into their 90s. Even if marriage is a voyage for two, Kathryn and Andrew are accompanied by an energetic and loving crew.

    Ocean fishing last Thursday with Andrew and his medical school friends was a good reminder, too, of some complementary wisdom about marriage. It’s necessary to maintain some space for yourself, for your own interests and enthusiasms. Being married doesn’t mean ceasing to be an individual. Kathryn and Andrew somehow make each other more complete in charming and refreshing ways, two interesting people whose marriage will be more than the sum of its impressive parts.

    September’s a popular month for weddings on the coast (Donna’s and my sixth anniversary is coming right up), and my friend and advertising manager Sondra Nash will be marrying her beloved, Jim Eaton, at Oysterville Church Saturday.

    Speaking from personal experience, Oysterville’s a wonderful place to be married, steeped in history, tradition and inspiring scenery. The old church, schoolhouse and elegantly simple (but awfully expensive) residences up and down Territorial Road are as close as Washington comes to England’s Cotswolds.

    Sondra and Jim, too, make a great couple. I hope Oysterville’s enduring strength will rub off on them, as it did Donna and me.

    A marriage is one of those great, ultimate reminders of the turning gears of time, of the power that flows from generation to generation among the hopeful and brave.

    Here’s to the newlyweds.

Land sakes, pard’ner, herd them doggies

    “You’re a cowboy, right, Papa?”

    “Well, no, not really a cowboy.”

    “Yes, you are!”

    “Well, yeah, OK, I’m a cowboy.”

    Compared with some things my 6-year-old insists I pretend to be — pirate and kidnapper come to mind — cowboy is way up the evolutionary ladder. I really even am a cowboy in the honorary sense of having a couple degrees from the University of Wyoming.

    Elizabeth’s satisfaction with papa being a cowboy probably stems from her adoration of horses. She’s going to be a cowgirl someday, by gad, and she senses that my tenuous connections to cowboyhood lend her quest a legitimacy otherwise tough to come by for a seaside resort kid.

    She starts riding lessons in a couple weeks and is saving tooth-fairy money and my pocket change to buy a young paint mare to be named Whisper — I tell her she should have just about enough quarters by the time she’s 12 and old enough to take care of it.

    In the meantime, we’ve been hitting whatever county fair is closest this summer, so she can feed the horses cotton candy and try to spot real working cowboys.

    Didn’t notice a bunch at the Clatsop County Fair. Last week at the Klick itat County Fair in Goldendale, Wash., just east of the Columbia Gorge, we sighted quite a few. But they were the pickup-driving variety. Like most people, when Elizabeth imagines cowboys, she thinks of big rugged men who live in the saddle. And the “Old West” is still a real place, as in ,”When can we go to the Old West, Daddy?”

    It’s amazing the number of people who feel such palpable affection for the legends of round-ups, brandings, rustlers, outlaws and brave gunslingers. For example, I can’t ever think about cowboys without recalling what heroes they are to a generation of German city-slickers, who play out Old West fantasies with all the enthusiasm of Civil War re-enactors.

    From my few first-hand experiences working cattle, it’s hard to figure what all the fuss is about. Toward the end of my time in Wyoming, I spent a day helping our nice old former Gov. Cliff Hansen and his crew brand calves in Jackson Hole. It may have looked like a beer commercial, but it was darned hard work. No wonder most cowboys are skinny as fence rails and hard as railroad ties. Top it off, Cliff lost a big patch of hide in the loading shoot.

***

    Over in Hood River last week, I bought Elizabeth a little book, Cowboys and Cowgirls: YippeeYah!

    It’s mostly about the “glamorous” multi-state cattle drives back in the 1870s, but includes a few hints about the true life of the cowboys, who were often virtually serfs working for the second sons of English lords, wealthy dilettantes who bought up vast tracts of land.

    I was a little touched to see a couple small biographies in the back, inaccurate as usual, about my family’s acquaintances Calamity Jane — whose real name was Martha Canary — and her alleged sweetheart Wild Bill Hickok.

    My great-great-grandfather Ed Alton was the first Wyoming territorial justice of the peace and county commissioner for the region from Yellowstone in the north down to the Utah state line. He ran a boarding house and saloon and sold horses. He and his first wife Emma hired young Martha as a live-in baby-sitter in 1869.

    In an interview many years ago, my uncle Charlie Andrews, one of the kids she baby-sat, recalled: “She spent most evenings dancing with the soldiers and finally a neighbor told of seeing her dressed in a soldier’s uniform at some party. Mother blew up and fired her.”

    As for her reputed romance with Wild Bill, Uncle Charlie said my g-g-grandfather “knew Wild Bill well and talked of him a lot. Told me that Wild Bill was a fine man, quiet spoken and easy to get along with. Never started trouble.

    “He never had anything to do with Martha. Why the idea of it would make my stepfather laugh until he was sick.”

    The thought of me as a cowboy would make him laugh, too, I bet.

Mythtown otters remain elusive

    Looking ahead 300 years or so to a time when the communities of the Columbia estuary have their own professional baseball team, I’d like to propose a name: The Mythtown Otters.

    As long-time readers may recall, Mythtown is the lost city of the Chinook Nation on the south shore of Willapa Bay. Perhaps a real place in ancient times — several giant tsunamis ago — Mythtown was the focus of one or more stories related by Charles Cultee of Bay Center, Wash., to legendary anthropologist Franz Boas in 1890.

    Cultee was one of only two surviving speakers of the Chinookan languages who Boas could find when he made two trips to the estuary country. To people of this area, Cultee deserves to be a far more honored and recognized hero than Sacagawea. Perhaps he should be a bigger hero than Lewis and Clark. Cultee’s vivid memories of the tales and taboos of a vanished civilization are the perfect embodiment of the true spirit of our land and waters.

    erhaps someone knows where Mythtown really is. If so, please show me — I promise not to tell. But it’s both more likely and more romantic to think it is a place that exists only in the imagination, a Shoalwater Brigadoon.

    I’m a little torn in writing about it because of fear it will become one more roadside attraction on the tourist circuit, a place of McDonald’s wrappers. But in one of the happiest occasions of luck and leadership, Mythtown happens to be hidden somewhere on the thousands of acres of the Willapa National Wildlife Refuge.

    Although poorly funded in relation to other extensive land holdings in the West and elsewhere, the refuge system places land securely off-limits to hot dog stands and cheap souvenirs. (This bears constant attention, however: we have a presidency that seriously considers “privatizing” aspects of the national park system.)

    Mythtown also is protected by its profound dullness. Among the most exciting places to me, it is the very antithesis of what most folks consider interesting. There’s really not much to look at, apart from the aforementioned otters, plus a lot of birds. There are no artifacts, no crumbling ruins, and in places not really much open water.

    An incredible restoration effort is restoring the shallow marshes and tidelands to some of the south bay, bringing back a dizzying crowd of birds. But some of the old dikes, made by white people decades ago to turn Willapa mudflats into pasture land, now snake their way through a grassy expanse, with even their “water” side being thousands of feet from the bay.

    I often walk along the grassy dike. Much about it reminds me of the August fields of my childhood, the wind constantly changing the warp and weave of the land. Far off in the distance, the cliffs of Long Island rise from water I can’t see, as close as it comes to abandoned battlements in this place of the lost city.

    Apart from this, I treasure the place because of how it lets me occasionally get out of my own head, forgetting who and what I am for moments as the sweet air blows in and out of my lungs, feet steadily pacing through the stubble of wild hay. It is in those times that Mythtown swells out of the bottomless muck somewhere far beneath the hungry roots. Ghosts pass, busy and content.

    But sure there are other times, most of the time, when it is only a sublime real place, the sloughs alternately draining the marshes or refilling them with salt water.

    Then, I imagine myself as someone may see me from a distance, striding across the green-golden expanse like the solitary sowers in Van Gogh’s 1888 series, or “Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun” that he painted in Saint Remy in late June 1889 — about when Cultee and Boas were sitting in deep conversation half a world away.

    Once in a great while, when I time the tides right and luck is in the wind, I come upon the otters. They station themselves below enormous culverts as the tide ebbs, waiting for fish.

    Watching them playing with graceful charm — plump, whiskered mermaids and mermen — they are a tangible link to the past, to the ages when many of the Northwest’s original people considered otters to be people, too, as Hindus do the cow.

    There’s still an intelligent sparkle in their eyes. They tolerate being appreciated for a minute or two, then slip beneath the surface.

Next time, I mean to stop the car

    It’s a trait inherited from my dad or perhaps it’s just common to all men. I share the mindless compulsion to drive long distances as fast as possible with a minimal number of stops.

    Often some scenic wonder or pretty town has sped by in my peripheral vision. Only after it’s in the rearview mirror have I thought: “Should have pulled over, stretched a little, dropped a fly line in the vicinity of the local brook trout. Learned the language, fallen in love with a tall woman of noble demeanor, raised some kids.”

    On other occasions — trapped on plains, trains and buses — I positively longed to step down and look around. Even from the air, the Magdalena River is as magical as described by Gabriel Garcia Marquez in Love in the Time of Cholera, the tropical sun pouring down on an endless succession of little villages frozen in time like insects caught in bright green shards of amber, thunderheads billowing all about, mushrooms in fertile soil.

    The times I’ve stopped — often by accident — are keepsakes. A break from a long trip resembles getting out of solitary confinement: All the colors are brighter, the odors more florid, the sounds more haunting.

    Coming up through the Atacama once, driving after dark to beat the heat, we stopped at a bus-stop eatery out by itself somewhere near Chala, Peru. There was really nothing around but the Pacific on one side and on the other the slowly rolling sands of the planet’s driest desert, where archaeologists find 2,000-year-old funerary cloths beautifully preserved, where centuries pass without a drop of rain.

    It’s weird hearing the pounding surf, when just across the highway there’s nothing but vast dunes stretching up to where the Andes block the starlight on the eastern horizon. A place awesome in its austerity, it is the absolute opposite of most national parks in America, where we celebrate gorgeous freaks of nature like Mount Rainier, the sequoias and the Grand Tetons.

***

    Living here at the junction of the Columbia and Pacific, where every turn in the road brings a fresh scene of spendor, it’s somehow occasionally refreshing to think about — if not visit — places where there’s nothing to look at; a bland meal as a break from the rich sauces of the Northwest Coast.

    It ain’t the Atacama, but sagebrush expanses of southeastern Oregon are as close as it comes around here in terms of aching emptiness. (The more obvious, sandier comparison, 10,000-acre Oregon Dunes National Recreation Area down at Reedsport, is but a teeny joke compared to 40-million-acre Atacama.)

    No, you come closest to experiencing the near-death of a real desert in Christmas Valley, a place through which my family rapidly passed with my dad behind the wheel during one of our Great-American Driving Vacations in the 1970s. I had a less poetic appreciation for open spaces back in my teens, and even at 65 miles an hour, the boredom nearly killed me.

    I might kind of like it today, and Christmas Valley made a rare appearance in the news recently when two men drove a century-old Winton Touring Car through the area, re-enacting 1903’s first cross-country trip by automobile from San Francisco to New York City, where they arrived Saturday.

    According to a great series of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle that traced the day-to-day progress of the re-enactment, the original trip was a miracle to Oregonians of the day: “Almost nobody in Oregon at the time had ever seen a horseless carriage, and many had not even seen the railroad. When the vehicle arrived in Lakeview, for instance, the whole town lined the streets to see the ‘wonder’ machine, as one local newspaper described it.”

    “The people’s curiosity had been aroused,” crowed the Lake County Examiner, “from a report that an automobile was coming this way, and that if they wished to see it pass it was necessary to have a seat in the front row, otherwise it might go through at a rate of 90 miles an hour, and would be out of sight before they could run a block.”

    And sure enough: Today some cruise through Wagontire and Alkali Lake going just that fast on Oregon Highway 395.

    Next time I’m there, I mean to stop.

Of sunny days, a wedding and war

    Like a bunch of belligerent grade-schoolers hopped up on Hostess cupcakes, dozens of Anna’s hummingbirds are locked in a West Side Story rumble above my deck, hammering out rights to our feeder. Each time I open the screen door, they scatter as if I were a flat-footed beat cop rounding the corner, twirling my baton.

    According to a 1980 Audubon bird encyclopedia, the Anna’s then nested almost exclusively in California. A 1961 survey of Washington’s Long Beach Peninsula birds doesn’t mention them at all. So their big invasion seems one more indication among many that warmer temperatures are marching steadily northward.

    Climate change or not, you still can live here at the seashore and barely break a sweat from one year to the next, the cool gray blanket of treetop- level clouds moving in each day at dawn to tease the moss with tastes of dew. Maybe we’ll end up with weather more like San Francisco’s, but probably never San Diego’s.

    There must be some secluded patch of genes hidden somewhere back in my DNA that demands real heat from time to time, and it felt delicious last week to camp with my six-year-old daughter down on the Umpqua River in south-central Oregon while attending an old friend’s wedding.

    Forgetting one afternoon that my personal curly brown “cloud cover” is quickly thinning, I managed to sunburn my scalp and can look forward to a scolding from my dermatologist when I see her later this month. It’s a small price to pay for sharing an authentic, old-fashioned home wedding, and seeing my intrepid kid herding uncooperative minnows through the algae-cloaked backwaters of a meandering summer stream.

    The 85-degree days took a kingfisher dive into the 40s just past dark, and it was too dry anyway to shoot off illegal bottle rockets, so we quickly retired to our old tent to read fairy tales and tell scary stories — Elizabeth’s were better told and scarier than mine. Adjusting to the baked pasture mattress, we slept off and on, working to keep cold toes tucked under covers. As the sun’s first rays found the valley floor, we set off on successful 7 a.m. raids on the Elkton bakery, pirates in search of pastry.

    Cattle grazing on the pastoral hills of Douglas County remind me of my old Wyoming home. My friend Donelle, a former Wyoming cowgirl, had her home blessed with sage and sweet prairie grass before marching down brightly painted verandah steps to marry on Independence Day. We later talked of my visceral longing for the smell of sagebrush, the defining incense of the mountain states. Someday, I promise myself, I’ll build that summer cabin in the transition zone between the Wind River Mountains and the Red Desert.

    Something about the setting along the Umpqua reminds me of America of 85 years ago, trim houses set amidst lawns patrolled by turkeys and lazy tomcats. And as in 1918, these warm days of watermelon and ripe cherries are counterbalanced by a faraway war.

    Granted, ours brings news of only one or two dead American boys a day in contrast to the thousands that died in each of the great battles in that long-ago War to End All Wars. But there’s something dreadfully similar in the creeping sense of having bitten into bitter fruit. The happy pleasures of being welcomed as liberators are fast dissolving, the sweet water is turning to salt.

    It was an easy victory only to the president’s speech writers, the same ones who have advised him to portray the growing number of doubters as trying to “rewrite history” when it actually is the White House that’s slopping on the whitewash, now telling us this war never was about weapons of mass destruction.

    It’s not that deposing Saddam Hussein was an intrinsically bad idea — the world’s better off without him, if indeed he’s dead. But this isn’t a war for Iraqi freedom, or to destroy unconventional weapons, or revenge 9/11. It’s about empire building by the radical fringe element that’s taken over leadership of the once calm and conservative Republican Party.

    We ordinary Americans of 2003 aren’t any more interested in empire than were our grandparents. Porches, shady lawns, cold rivers on hot days, learning to drive on daddy’s lap. This is what we’re about; these are the things worth fighting for. But they aren’t what Bush’s war is about. We shouldn’t let our boys die for lies.

Grandpa’s tractor

    My grandfather’s Ford tractor was old when he bought it, but virtually immortal — it’s been 20 years since we sold it and I’ll bet it’s running.

    At least seven of we 11 grandsons had our first driving experiences on it, just an old pillow made of flour ticking between us and its thick steel seat. It was too small to be any good for haying, but perfect for dragging fence supplies or spreading cow manure.

    On hot days like these, Grandpa would ride it around as he irrigated, practicing the ancient art of maneuvering ditch water into thinner and thinner channels, a sort of vascular system spread out flat on dry ground.

    He was often at it by 7 a.m., first filing his shovel blade to a knife-like sharpness, the better to cut through the dense roots of hardy dryland turf. After all the years on his place, he knew every difficult-to-reach hump and swampy swale as well as he knew Grandma’s blue eyes, so he tended the spots that needed babying and left alone those that could fend for themselves.

    He sometimes wished aloud he had hired a contractor 30 years before to level out and gently slope the whole lower pasture, but I didn’t believe it then and still don’t. The fine nuances of irrigating were Grandpa’s game. While other old men played golf, or studied pool shots, or sat watching TV while whining at their wives, Grandpa worked in his field, shepherding his hay through the changing seasons. His thoughts flowed out into that field and came back to him carrying the sounds of moving water and blue birds and growing grass. He was a happy man.

    Even though he was 88, it still was a spine-breaking shock when I went out and found him face down in a ditch where he toppled after his heart stopped. I howled but realized within a day that his death was perfect in every way, a final embrace with the land and water. I still often use the shovel he held as he died.

    His old tractor ran out of gas waiting for him, but started just as reliably as ever after one of us hauled a couple gallons down from the big tank at the house. I still miss it and hope it’s doing OK at its new home.

    My friends here on this little semi-island on the remote western edge of America get themselves worked up into some strange and entertaining fights, with the great tractor controversy being the latest.

    Randy Jones, a mischievous twinkle in his hard-working eye, added a used tractor to his menagerie of toys recently. I checked it out the other day on Pacific Avenue as he hauled it toward Chinook. It isn’t Grandpa’s old Ford, but a fine tractor it appeared and I’m envious.

    Being a new toy, it begged to be put to use, which Randy did by mowing the grass on a neighbor’s property up toward Klipsan Beach.

***

    Now around here, one man’s fire-hazard vacant lot is another’s valuable wildlife habitat. This circumstance was swiftly picked up by my earnest but generally good-humored nature writer Craig Sparks. His thoughtful recent defense of mosquitoes probably won’t ruin the market for bug spray anytime soon, but was an interesting angle nevertheless. Can’t accuse him of pandering to the masses.

    Of course now the pro-mowing and anti-mowing letters are rolling in, probably with pro- and anti-mosquito letters not far behind. You could write 100 novels about this place. Randy obviously mowed just to get a rise, and now he’ll play the situation like a fisherman dangling a mosquito-like fly over a trout. Amusing, but I caution everyone to please play nice.

    I declare my neutrality on the tractor issue, just in case someone feels like getting all worked up at me over my remarks here. I have enough real issues to deal with.

    But just as Grandpa had his well-watered fields, he also nursed along a meandering creek on his property, planting trees and treasuring the great- horned owls that roosted there amidst the cool, leafy shadows. He believed in balance. He believed his land could accommodate many different uses.

    He also got into some wry old fights with his neighbors. In the end, he and they all died, and who remembers or cares about those fights? It’s the being neighbors that counts.

Like ice cream, this journey offers several flavors

    Qualities of light have something in common with varieties of ice cream: Light can be thick or runny or velvety; light can taste sweet to our eyes, or gummy; light can be soft and smooth, or hard and cheap.

    The long, leisurely train trip from Portland to Astoria is a Tillamook Cheese Factory sampler of different lights. The expensive gourmet flavors are concentrated on Astoria’s half of the route.

    Railroads usually begin and end in industrial zones, and last Saturday’s inaugural trip showed the Lewis and Clark Explorer Train is no exception. Departing Union Station, a glowing artifact of the glory days of rail travel, the Explorer spends a certain amount of time swaying through seldom-seen parts of Portland and its western suburbs. Scenic is not a word that springs to mind.

    The flavor of light: Licorice, maybe, or possibly artificial vanilla.

    To St. Helens, it’s a rocky road, flavorwise, with scoops of bright green pistachio scattered around here and there. This isn’t to imply the ride itself is bumpy, but rather that the train rolls through some alder groves and rural backyards where people have experienced economic bumps. There is a surprisingly Appalachian feel to some of it.

    But then who among us would be truly comfortable having hundreds of strangers rumble through our backyards? I know my own mossy old pickup canopy isn’t photogenic, nor my one-handled wheelbarrow I’ve never quite gotten around to repairing. With the return of passenger service, those who live along the tracks may have some tidying up to do.

    Starting about Westport, the light begins to change from convenience-store quality to something much, much more interesting. The tracks mostly trace the very southern edge of the river bank, occasionally swinging inland, as in Brownsmead, a slice of Northwest heaven by any definition.

    Though remote, places like Clifton clearly have lives of their own, and there are a surprising number of people and points of access to the river along this lightly populated shore. For we who live in the vicinity, the Explorer really lives up to its name in the sense of revealing places worthy of exploration — a Sunday picnic or a long walk. It’s an experience of “Wow, I didn’t know this was out here!”

    Any train trip necessarily is an unfolding series of snapshots, of people and places glimpsed for a moment, which then sail away forever. Sometimes there is a distinct sensation of being stationary as a movie unwinds on rollers around the train car, each scene existing only for the moment you observe it.

    Having said this, there is a vast immortal timelessness about the waters of the Columbia estuary, a feeling the next bend in the tracks might reveal a Chinook trading party racing across Cathlamet Bay in cedar canoes.

***

    At the river’s broadest point, stretch-ing some nine miles from bank to bank, the flavor of light is almost beyond words, a homemade honey-butter, but not too heavy, not too sweet. Is there such a thing as ambrosia ice cream? The boundless sweep of river through Lewis and Clark National Wildlife Refuge tells me there ought to be.

    We VIPs — very inflated personalities — were served champagne as the little train pulled out of Portland as part of a genuinely gracious and fun trip that I will always recall with gratitude. A better time, however, for effervescence might have been in the miles just east of Tongue Point, where the air itself sparkles with life.

    Capt. William Clark has received a certain amount of good-natured teasing for writing on Nov. 7, 1805 that he was “in View of the Ocian,” when the explorers were in fact still 25 miles away from the sea.

    On this train trip it occurred to me, however, that Clark was in essence correct. In many meaningful ways, our fantastic estuary is the ocean — none more so than in its luminosity. After spending close to two years crossing North America, these tired men were ready for soft and delicious ocean light. And here it is.

    It’ll be an awful shame if railroad turf battles or lack of funding spell the demise of the Explorer train, this rolling buffet of light. Support it by climbing aboard. Ride it while it still runs.

Photos tell the story better than words

    Ten years ago I started reading “The Living,” by Annie Dillard, about the trials and tribulations of settlers in Bellingham, Wash., where part of my family has lived since 1883. I got tired of key characters being killed off in creepy ways on every other page and didn’t finish it.

    Dillard must have been very unhappy in her years teaching at Western Washington University. By the time I bailed out on page 124, I felt like writing Dillard and saying “Jeez, Annie, lighten up. Come down to Long Beach and I’ll feed you some nice oysters.”

    In 1660 in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes wrote of the “continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Maybe this was a sufficiently accurate description of ordinary life in the mid-17th century, but by the late-19th things really weren’t quite so bad.

    Despite its squalid gloom, I’ve kept The Living in my library as much as anything because of the photograph on its dust jacket — a razor- sharp monochromatic image of a tiny cedar slab shack nestled in tall timber, the Stars and Stripes hanging above the door with family members standing frozen like lawn ornaments amidst their stump farm. It is a far more interesting portrayal of early Northwest life than the 400 pages of text it’s wrapped around.

    I’m buried in historical photos now as I select images and design pages for volume one of the Chinook Observer’s forthcoming history of southern Pacific County. Written by Nancy Lloyd based on thousands of items culled mostly from the Observer, the text is certain to become a definitive reference for decades to come.

    Being in the word business, I love what Lloyd has done, pulling together thematic threads from across the generations. It’s fascinating, exciting and funny. We plan to have it back from the printer in July, and I hope you ‘ll pick up a copy.

    Notwithstanding the excellence of its written content, photos and other illustrations are going to be what draws many people into this book that ends in about 1925. Volume two will run through about 1980.

    We’ve been very lucky. Kjeld Enevoldsen, a longtime peninsula summer resident and an avid photo collector, is donating use of his amazing assemblage of old postcards.

    Many were commercially produced from 1900 to 1930 or so, while others are unique images with postcard markings on the back, used to record and boast about family vacations and other special events. A Danish immigrant who loves the Northwest coast, Enevoldsen has a great eye.

    One seldom sees the grim underside of a place in its postcards, and these are no exception. But even after allowing for the idealization and boosterism that goes into postcards, it’s obvious people led pretty contented lives in the first third of the last century. I’m not suggesting there wasn’t heartbreak and tragedy, but I don’t think it ground them down or dominated them.

***

    Luck also is on our side thanks to Lloyd “Bud” Howell, 85, of Astoria, who recently donated to the city his collection of glass plate negatives taken a century ago by Elmer Coe. In the person of Astoria Public Works Director Mitch Mitchum, the city is generously permitting us to use a number of photos taken on the north shore of the Columbia from Megler around to North Head.

    Although a biography of Oregon photographers places Coe in this area from 1906 to 1911, several photos in the collection were commissioned by Observer founder George Hibbert in 1903, featuring homes and families around Chinook on Independence Day. They were published in the paper’s special Christmas edition that year under the heading “The Beautiful Homes of the Salmon Trappers of Chinook, Washington.”

    Commenting on the photos, Hibbert wrote, “Neatness and newness about the buildings are striking features, as Chinookers never allow their residences to appear shabby or neglected.”

    Coe’s photos provide a near-miraculous look at these immaculate and elegantly simple designs, and the wonderful people who lived in them.

    I can’t wait till our book comes out. I know you’ll love them, too.

Service outshines tarnished image of man

    Growing up in a rather peculiar family equally devoted to the outdoors and Democratic politics, William O. Douglas was one of my childhood heroes, right up there with Sir Edmund Hillary and King Tut.

    The iconoclastic and energetic Supreme Court justice stood foursquare in favor of much that is key to us, including careful stewardship of natural resources and protection of workers’ rights. My grandfather, racked by black lung from his years in the coal mines, didn’t put much faith in the good intentions of corporations and was reliably allied with those like Douglas who shared his jaundiced views.

    There was a general sense in my family that Douglas was unfairly targeted for his beliefs by enemies in Congress, a campaign that led to him being brought up on impeachment charges in the U.S. Senate when he granted a stay of execution to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who had been convicted of passing atomic secrets to the Soviet Union. He again got into hot water with Congress in the 1960s and ‘70s for bucking the war in Southeast Asia and marrying, for the fourth time, a woman 45 years his junior.

    All this and his rigid objection to any form of censorship made him public enemy No. 1 to the Rush Limbaughs of his generation, including Richard Nixon and others whom my grandpa considered somewhat lower than rabid skunks. Douglas, I was taught, was over-revved but under-appreciated, a wise man uninterested in playing games of compromise in the capital. Besides — he was a good fisherman.

***

    A new book, “Wild Bill: The Legend and Life of William O. Douglas,” fondly but effectively demolishes a good deal of Douglas’s carefully hand-crafted image as a individualist who always took the high road. He was, in the words of a recent New York Times article, a “dirty rotten hero.”

    “Douglas’ unabashed dishonesty is one of two revelations that give life to Wild Bill,” writes reviewer James Ryerson. “The other surprise is what a rotten and unscrupulous person Douglas could be. A habitual womanizer, heavy drinker and uncaring parent, Douglas was married four times, cheating on each of his first three wives with her eventual successor.

    “He so alienated his two children that they chose not to notify him when their mother, his first wife, died of cancer.”

    My rigorously moral grandpa, whose idea of a wild time was having four ounces of Miller High Life with dinner, would have been appalled at these revelations. Leaders of the vast right-wing conspiracy apparently aren’t always full of it. Horrors!

    But despite his Sears-Roebuck catalog of personal flaws, Douglas still emerges as an impressive intellect who made many contributions to preserving individual liberties during difficult times in U.S. history. Ryerson notes “It’s refreshing to see a biographer who can keep separate his judgments about his subject’s personal and intellectual lives.” A jerk, but a remarkably colorful and productive jerk ...

    Douglas, born and raised in Yakima, Wash., enjoyed a strong lifelong connection with the Northwest. The dust jacket of his autobiography Go East, Young Man, features a photo of Douglas and his as-yet unestranged young children Millie and Bill posing with a big chinook salmon on an Astoria wharf in August 1940.

    On Aug. 22, 1941, the Chinook Observer reported “William Orville Douglas, youngest justice of the United States supreme court, is on Long Beach Peninsula this week. He, with Mrs. Douglas and their children ... have taken the Jamison cottage, “Bide-a-Wee” at Seaview for their summer vacation. ... Justice Douglas, a six-foot sandy-haired westerner of athletic build, 41 years of age, plans clamming and crabbing expeditions, with a day spent on the Columbia river fishing and thinks the Peninsula an ideal place to spend a vacation. ... This summer is their first visit here. “

    Douglas loved the Lower Columbia and treasured happy memories of his family vacations here long after his misbehavior wantonly destroyed that family.

    I wouldn’t describe him as a hero anymore, and sure wouldn’t have wanted him as a dad, but remain convinced the nation is better off for having had him. Good men can be bad, bad men do good things: We Americans hate moral ambiguity, but such is life, like it or not.

New virus strikes fear deep in our soul

    Dead sometimes outnumbered the living on the Great Plains in the terrible winter of 1846-47 as white settlers began to spill across the West, for the first time exposing many Native Americans to dreadful diseases germinated in the cramped dwellings of the East.

    I wouldn’t exist if my Mormon great-great-great grandfather hadn’t lost his wife to cholera that winter and married the woman who became my ancestor. In all, 325 Latter-day Saints died at Winter Quarters, Neb., of illnesses that could cut down a healthy person in a matter of 24 hours.

    In terms of sheer magnitude, Indian deaths far outweighed whites. My family recorded passing villages where corpses were stacked like cordwood outside tattered lodges, drifting snow only partially concealing agonizing scenes of tragedy.

    Some people got sick and recovered; others somehow avoided it altogether through some lucky happenstance, genes or partial immunity. Enough settlers survived so we can look back on western settlement with some complacency, our forgetfulness leading to a greater sense of inevitable triumph than is deserved. Imagine an alternative American history in which contact with Indians exposed us to new microbes instead of the other way around. As it was, many tribes including those here at the mouth of the Columbia River were pounded into near extinction. They were blameless victims punished by biology for their long isolation from the larger human population in the Old World, who harbored deadly germs in their veins as well as in their animals and parasites.

***

    The development of antibiotics and imm-unizations, coupled with better hygiene and public health care, radically altered our perception of disease. It’s no longer at all normal for children in developed countries to die of whooping cough, diarrhea or polio. No longer do people in the prime of life look over their shoulders in fear every time a family member comes down with an infection.

    But for at least a decade, experts have warned our complacency is misplaced. For example, retired Seaview, Wash., physician John Campiche has often written of the danger of an impending second wave of infectious illness due to a combination of factors ranging from misuse of antibiotics to over-population.

    Setting aside AIDS, which is nearly 100 percent avoidable if proper precautions are observed, many scientists have long believed the next great killers will sweep out of east Asia where vast numbers live in close proximity with pigs and poultry, prime reservoirs and incubators of microbes which can jump to humans.

    Most new types of influenza first spring up in Asia, and scientists’ greatest fear has been emergence of a new quick-spreading flu germ like that which killed 20 million people worldwide in 1918-19, including 675, 000 Americans. (Even without a new super-flu, the plain vanilla varieties kill about 20,000 a year here today.)

***

    While few of us have direct experience of epidemic illness, we still dread it. That’s why the mysterious outbreak of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) is getting so much attention.

    In all likelihood, SARS won’t become a big problem in the U.S., where health authorities are taking it very seriously and where our relatively low population density will impede its ability to spread from person to person. It’s important to remember no one has died here.

    It could, however, be a whole different matter in China and Southeast Asia, where conditions for transmission are ideal and where many officials are in denial about the danger they face. Killing approximately four out of every 100 people who catch it, SARS has the potential to wreak horrible damage.

    SARS also is already an appalling economic disaster, with travel to Hong Kong and southern China grinding to a standstill, a grim reminder of the massive social disruptions that accompanied European plagues centuries ago.

    While our health officials are acting with reassuring competence, it’s hard to feel secure that national leaders, preoccupied with war, are similarly engaged. The fact is that infectious diseases, old and new, will surely kill many times more Americans than terrorism ever will.

    We must give this fight the resources and attention it deserves.

One little girl’s vision delves deep into a magical past

    “Daddy, Jackie Paper should write Puff a letter and say why he doesn’t come to see him anymore,” Elizabeth told me Monday.

    We’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about Puff the Magic Dragon and his friend Jackie, and how anyone could ever become so grown up as to forget best friends, magic and the autumn mist in a land called Honah Lee.

    “Maybe,” I tell her, “Jackie Paper’s kids, and their kids, will discover Puff’s cave and play with him again.” This is scant comfort for a girl who still cherishes Olivia, the Mexican mutt impervious to house training, and Grover, our gentle black kitty too fat to climb a tree when the coyote came — long-lost pets she barely knew as the thinnest little slip of an infant.

    Dragons live forever, and so does love, according to Elizabeth. Once felt and forgotten, it’s still alive out in the universe, flapping around waiting to be recaptured, like a butterfly in a net. Better to never let it get away in the first place, but it’s never so lost as not to be found. How did dragons, something we’re told never existed, come to inhabit our dreams across thousands of years and miles?

    Explore humanity’s first cities along the Tigris and Euphrates in the nation we’ll soon be bombing, and you’ll find fine bas-reliefs of dragons 40 centuries old. Look carefully under the peat bogs of Britain and you may yet discover golden Celtic broaches cast in the shape of flying serpents, while the richest Chinese textiles from the earliest times feature the fearsome four-clawed yellow dragon reserved for the emperor. For nearly all we people of the dragons, they represented the ancient, uncontrollable power of the universe, horribly alive and capricious. On some level, we needed them, we needed something to fear other than the miserable facts of living in the 14th century and before.

    Some of the old English fairy tales we read at bedtime deal with dragons, and even old as they are, they speak of dragons as something far beyond the confines of ordinary time.

    “We know there were fiery dragons in those days, like George and his dragon in the legend. But there! It’s not the same world nowadays. The world is turned topsy-turvey since then, like as if you’d turn it over with a spade!”

***

    Fossilized dinosaur bones are the most rational (and least emotionally satisfying) explanation for the nearly worldwide belief in dragons or something like them.

    Although it was only in the 19th century that fossils were reassembled into complete skeletons, commissioned for public display by Pittsburgh tycoon Andrew Carnegie, even our most distant ancestors must have come across mysterious stone bones and teeth sticking out from eroding hillsides.

    It’s easy to imagine the dread such bones would have elicited in people still as often the prey of leopards and wolves as hunters of them. Migrating through the endless steppes and forests, think of seeing for the first time a single leg bone taller than a man. Think of fearing whether this creature’s brothers might live in the cavern just visible in a distant cliff. Hurry past and build a big fire against the night.

    One of the easy first steps in geology is keeping your eyes open for things that are different — a vein of hard white quartz cutting through nondescript black rock may contain gold; a patch of pale yellow contrasting with a brown hillside may be an outcropping of uranium ore. Coming home from the desert, our family would often stop at such a yellow patch in the spring, looking for freshly eroded dinosaur knuckles. We’d take them home, and wish we believed in dragons.

    Only in those years of late 20th century were people finally comfortable enough to regard dragons, our ancient fantastic enemies, as sympathetic creatures capable of being a child’s playmate.

    “If I had a dragon I’d ride him every day and take super good care of him,” says Elizabeth, the conqueror of fear. I don’t suppose she’ll have the opportunity. But I’m smart enough to know she’s really talking about something else: The power of love. And the small young filly she’s set her sights on as her next pet. That and an orange kitten.

A touch of brilliance, dose of madness

    Dick Cheney, whatever his other faults, is a brilliant man. Talking with him in any detail is a bit like channeling the ghosts of Cardinal Richelieu, Prince Metternich or other great geopolitical gamesmen of past ages.

    You hear a world vision that is at once far darker and more complex than any you’ve imagined, expressed with an informed logic that is formidable and yet still strangely suspect. His arguments rarely if ever contain any twinge of doubt and it is this certainty itself that raises red flags, giving off whiffs of a fanaticism largely closed to countervailing points of view.

    I suppose he may be open to discussing fine points of how to preserve and extend American military/economic dominance over the world, in much the same way a religious leader might be willing to banter about minor nuances of church doctrine with a devoted acolyte or disciple. But express any doubts whatsoever about anything fundamental, and you tangibly feel the drawbridge of his mind shutting against you. You’re either hopelessly naive, not very smart, or blinded by liberal twaddle.

    Conceding for a moment that one or more of these reactions may have a grain of truth, it nevertheless is sobering to realize one of the key elected officials in the world’s stellar democracy has little ability to accommodate or consider dissenting views.

    I don’t mean to imply in any of this that I’m anything more than vaguely acquainted with the vice president. I interviewed him a few times when he was in Congress and I think once after he became defense secretary. But I remember those encounters well, and they’re about all I have to go on as I try to understand the administration’s avid hunger for war with Iraq. Maybe President Bush and Cheney aren’t completely in lock step, but I don’t have any doubt Cheney’s ideas form the rigid backbone of administration philosophies.

    Particularly memorable to me were remarks Cheney made a year or so before the collapse of the Soviet Union, the end product of a long and clever campaign that reached its goal in the Reagan-Bush Sr. administration. Cheney and like-minded people wanted to bring the U.S.S.R. down at almost any cost short of nuclear war, and were ruthless about achieving that end. But Cheney knew and feared the instability that would result, speaking in the most serious tones about the need to tightly control the spread of ethnic and religious violence as Islamic republics splintered away from Russia.

    The loosening of communist ropes in the Balkans certainly unleashed awful violence that was destabilizing and tremendously costly in terms of lives, while within the actual borders of the old U.S.S.R., only in Chechnya has there been real chaos. But I can see Cheney and company wanting to establish a strong permanent beachhead in the Middle East, with a large military presence there serving to dampen revolutionary enthusiasms in the heart of oil country, which extends far into the former Soviet Union.

    In this scenario, the lives of a few hundred Americans and many thousands of Iraqis will be a small price to pay for guaranteed cheap oil to quench American corporate thirst. At the same time, it delivers the strongest possible message to Islamic regimes that they must keep their own fanatical elements in check, or else face our wrath. And a nice fringe benefit is that it allows Bush to kill the guy who tried to have his father assassinated. In grand terms of the Great Game fought for centuries over control of the Middle East, this could make us the big mega-lotto winner of all time.

***

    I’m not nearly as liberal as some people assume — I’ve been a gun enthusiast since I was about 20 minutes old, believe in the death penalty in some instances, and think war is frequently justified — my family’s fought in most of them starting with the Revolution.

    But launching a war and armed occupation of a country on the other side of the world that has made no threat against us in years is contrary to American principles. Even if you are conservative, this isn’t. We’re not the nation of small farmers and shopkeepers we used to be, but our national disposition still is one of live and let live, staying the heck out of foreign entanglements. To launch a war for strategic reasons, based on the thinnest of pretexts, simply isn’t who we are.

    Bush supposedly doesn’t care what the polls say, he’s going to war. I’m sure it’ll happen, no matter what we want. But please, please remember come election time that the men in office took us down a road we never wanted to go. Even if it makes a certain cold-hearted Cheneyish sense, it makes us into a nation we never wanted to be.

Depression is sneaky

    “We’ve lost another kid” are words I’d just as soon never use again. They’ve become an all-too-familiar part of my vocabulary in recent months as an appalling number of teenagers and young adults in Pacific and Clatsop counties have killed themselves or died under suspicious circumstances. Only one such death would have been too many; each additional one is a sledge hammer to our fragile consciences and community well-being.

    Suicide and other forms of self-destructive behavior are terrifyingly commonplace among mature adults and senior citizens as well, here and elsewhere. Aside from the overt suicides we all secretly acknowledge, what else are chronic alcohol or drug abuse but long, torturous forms of suicide?

    There’s no real beginning or end to this chain of sad death, and I’ve spoken with people who don’t even consider it all that remarkable, only a hastening of what inevitably faces us all. It certainly is this attitude, coupled with untreated depression, that accounts for the premature deaths of uncounted numbers of senior citizens who might otherwise have lived years longer.

    With the possible exception of the terminally ill, I don’t accept that suicide is ever the right choice for the person involved, the victims left behind or our communities. Only people who have never been brushed by it, or are deeply in denial, could believe otherwise. I don’t want to arouse the stigma that once saw suicides buried at midnight in unhallowed ground. They are, in a real sense, victims themselves, but I also don’t absolve them of responsibility. There is no bigger bomb that can be set off in a family.

    Suicide reverberates down through time like radioactive waste, killing or damaging what it touches. There was a talented, charismatic family I once knew. The father was state Democratic chairman. He killed himself. Shortly later, his oldest son was next. A few years later, his youngest. It’s probable all three suffered from clinical depression, a highly treatable chemical imbalance in their brains. And they were all problem drinkers. But I’ll always believe there was a distinct element of contagion involved. If daddy had held it together, his well-loved sons would be alive today.

    Less dramatically, my own family has been deeply etched by suicide. After his mom drank rat poison following the dust bowl-era failure of their dry-land wheat farm in Roundup, Mont., my grandfather was plunged into a deep well of pain from which it took years to emerge. Every life eventually is sculpted by grief, and Grandpa and his siblings went on to lead long and fairly successful lives. One sister was spectacularly successful. But there was nothing natural about the price they all paid for their Mom’s deliberate act.

    I was a teenager when Grand uncle Parley, my grandmother’s brother, killed himself. He was one of my favorite relations, probably a favorite relation of every family member who knew him. He wasn’t an extravagant gift-bringing kind of uncle, but his presence was itself a present. He was a solid, gentle man with a profound but low-key sense of humor, like Mark Twain on a slow day. Grandma was 85 when he died at age 69 and certainly had seen plenty of death, but her tears were every bit as hot as they would have been if he had died at 17 or 47.

    None of us guessed Parley’s despair about his recurrent colon cancer until he removed himself from the world, though of course in retrospect we tortured ourselves with half-glimpsed signs that something about his life wasn’t quite what it seemed. As for Grandpa’s mom, I never knew her, but see a horrible, yawning cavern of dismay in her pinched eyes in photographs taken of her, decades before the event.

    I know the seductive power of sadness and doom, rolling them around in my mind like acid-filled marbles, and I’d be lying if I said suicide has never crossed that mind. It has, though not since my mid-20s. I somehow skated over the top of those evil times, but it wasn’t until recently that I sought treatment for depression. I’m feeling better and sleeping better than I have in years. Give it a try.

    Depression’s an awfully sneaky bastard. It’s easy to confuse it for something else, to think feeling lousy is bound up with growing up. It isn’t. Deal with it and help your loved ones confront it. Who knows — they may die anyway — but don’t let it happen without a struggle.