Editor's Notebook: 2004

What’s a place without a name?

    Driving somewhere in the truck Wednesday and talking to our dog, as I often do, I told her in the nicest possible way what a thoroughly evil Welsh corgi she is.

    Though they may look something like morbidly obese foxes, corgis like to believe they’re very tough, big dogs. At least in one sense, they are big — each weighs approximately as much as an active five-year-old child. And our little girl corgi, Bina, wants to be only one place when we’re in the truck, bouncing around and digging her dainty sharp-clawed paws into what let’s just euphemistically call my lap.

    But that’s not really why I praised her profound evilness. Mostly to amuse myself, I’ve told all my dogs — in an enthusiastic, light- throated way — what devilish, no-account rascals they are. (I used to tell my beloved old Labrador, as she waved her tail in adoration, “Oh, you’re about as smart as a geranium, oh yes you are!”)

    “Don’t call her evil, Daddy,” my big-hearted seven-year-old daughter told me this week.

    “Sweetie,” I replied, “so long as you say it in a nice tone of voice, a dog figures anything you tell them is a compliment; it doesn’t hurt their feelings.”

    “But it hurts my feelings to hear you tell her that, Dad, so please don’t do it,” she implored, to which I could only say OK. Drat, one more avenue to minor self-amusement slams shut forever.

    I readily agree with my daughter that words and names have tremendous power for good and ill. Speak with anyone, child or adult, with experience of a verbally abusive household and you’ll swiftly gain some understanding of how horribly destructive language can be. Contradicting the old school-yard jingle, words can hurt every bit as much as sticks and stones, maybe more so.

    The ancient Chinese, toward whom I feel an eccentric affinity, believed the act of naming was, in a way, the thing that defines everyday human existence. According to this philosophy, assigning a name to one thing led inevitably to naming a second and a third. In rapid succession, the catalyst of words cascaded through the void. Soon, the noise of ten thousand names drowned out the perfect pitch of the indefinable world.

    In something of the same way that geneticists are investigating the early migrations of humanity by studying DNA, linguists have made some apparent progress in recent years in tracing the origins and evolution of language.

    Most modern people are descended from a small band that emigrated out of Africa a few hundred centuries ago. Some believe these few people shared a common prototypical language from which all modern tongues derive. Spoken words leave no fossils, so we’ll never know for sure, but the commonality of certain sounds across many cultures — “ma” for mother, for example — lends credence to the belief in a fundamental architecture underpinning of the words we speak.

    It’s superstitious, but I attach real importance to early words and the original names of things and places. Naming somehow pulls things across the boundary from chaos into existence. And, come to think of it, it’s not just the Chinese who believe in words as the driving force of creation: “God said ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light...”

***

    The Chinook people lived here at the mouth of the Columbia for thousands of years, and the names they gave things still reverberate on some level, like ghostly chisel marks in a rocky headland. And yet we have scant knowledge of those names, the tribe having been driven to the very brink of extinction almost before anyone could record their dying words.

    But I was recently given a sort of Rosetta Stone, a slender thread of recollection that records some of Chinook places around us, and I’d like nothing more than to hear these names come alive again. Writing in 1863, linguist George Gibbs was the only person to make a systematic effort to capture these shards of language. Even then, the complexities of Chinook pronunciation were very nearly lost secrets.

    Here, as a sort of Christmas present, are a few of the original names of places we love — words of power, of creation:

    A-wak´atl ... Astoria

    Su-kum-its´i-ak ... Tongue Point

    Ka-is´ ... Cape Disappointment

    Ti´chuts ... The Peninsula

    No-wétl-kai-ils ... Point Ellice

    Nos-to-ils ... Chinook Point

    Nak-i-kláu-a-nak ... Youngs River

What we appreciate when it’s gone

    If my daughter Elizabeth could have her heart’s desire and follow Harry Potter’s footsteps into Hogwart’s School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, it’s certain she would someday learn to transform herself into a bluebird.

    The most beloved of birds, bluebirds are the flying sapphire sparks of springtime at our old family gold mine high in the barren black-rock wastes where the southern Wind River Mountains dive like humpback whales beneath the great Red Desert. In the weird alchemy of memory, the extended family of bluebirds there — cheerful and impossibly fast — are a premonition, a schematic drawing of Elizabeth’s quick little brain. If I had really paid attention, the bluebirds might have shown me the whole messy path that led through to today. Makes me wonder what obvious portents I’m missing in my life today...

    Like her artist mom, Elizabeth was born imbued with the language of color, and this season finds her ever more intrigued by the rich feminine universe of fashion and clothing. Having grown up in a house of dirty boots and clean shotguns, for me all this is like visiting a foreign country, an anthropologist smitten with a wild native girl. Don’t mention it to any of my hardass high school classmates, but I find myself flipping through catalogs thinking “Gee, that’s a pretty outfit.”

    But at her core, Elizabeth’s strength will keep her from ever becoming one of those people who hang their existence on how many clothes they have hanging in the closet. Probably her favorite toy of the past few months is the 70-pound pumpkin we won by guessing right in the annual Halloween contest at Astoria Community Store. She rolls it around the house, climbing aboard and balancing — teetering, arms extended — a surfer girl riding a great orange orb. I can’t foresee my tough pumpkin surfer ever becoming a stuck-up fancy girl.

    Yesterday we cooked our organic, free-range turkey — I like to think the extra 20 bucks it cost guarantee it had a pleasant, if too-short, life — and in our small way celebrated the memory of all those loved ones who didn’t sit with us. My Mom joined Donna, Elizabeth and me, and it was a warm and happy evening, though sadly diminished from the feasts I recall when my grandparents still bound our family together with buttery gravy and dusty stories. How little we truly appreciate anything until it’s gone; who could have known that seconds of dressing and mashed potatoes would become such treasure when tasted again through the veil of years?

***

    Like most writers of my generation, I was brought up considering sentimentality one of the deadlier sins. Yet I have no more success avoiding it than I have some of the other better known ones — sloth and gluttony coming especially quickly to mind today. Just as the holidays grant us a certain license to indulge in rich food, there’s every reason to indulge ourselves in sentiment and genuine emotion. It’s more phony, I think, to deny the importance of tears of remembrance than it is to give them room to run. We owe it to ourselves and all those we’ve ever loved to take those memories in our hands from time, turning them around and around and feeling their smooth and rough edges, like an heirloom we recognize even by feel in the dark.

    We’re so very lucky in America, and bound together by the ever-twining tendrils of blood and memory, each of us a survivor of a long series of wars and hard times, and good times and plenty. We should each be able to hold true to our own core beliefs and political positions, and yet mourn that so many of us are so mad at one another. There’s too much cynical manipulation masquerading as piety, too many sanctimonious busybodies claiming to be progressive. All this has become a jarring racket that confuses and divides. It’s as if the garbage lying in the weeds to the left and right of the highway has come to dominate the wide, straight and level middle way of our nation.

    I’m thankful for the underlying wisdom and courtesy of America, and I dream of a time when our leaders share those values. I trust our nation will someday return to a time of calm neighborliness, starting here at home with respectful attention to differing views. It’s time to quit relishing conflict and start relishing leftover turkey. I wish all of you, of every political persuasion, joy at this precious time.

America’s treasures are worth preserving

    I owe my life to President Ulysses S. Grant. If Grant and Congress hadn’t created America’s first national park in March 1872, my Grandpa Bell wouldn’t have pulled up to Brooks Lake Lodge at the wheel of his Yellowstone Park bus in 1922. His courtship of a playful 21-year-old maid named Hilda Alton would have remained in the infinite realm of potential things that never happened. Their children and grandchildren would have remained unborn. The soul that is me wouldn’t be.

    Even 50 years after its creation, getting to Yellowstone still was more of an expedition than a vacation. Brooks Lake, near the park’s southern entrance, was and is a pleasant way station — rates now starting at $300 per person a night, double occupancy. I suppose it was more like $10 back in the ‘20s when Grandpa used to chauffeur Franklin Roosevelt’s children and many others on dirt tracks up from the railhead into the wilderness.

    Growing up in the town that once billed itself as the place “Where the rails end and the trails begin,” we were used to the annual influx of tourists from the East making their way to Yellowstone and the Tetons. Not counting the nearby iron ore mine, tourists and cows were the big industries and there was a running debate about which were more ignorant. Pretty much a toss-up.

    Living so close to Yellowstone, you’d think we’d spend a lot of time there. You’d be wrong. Probably had something to do with having a workaholic father, but we visited Yellowstone precisely once during my childhood. Our family treated the park like a fancy sitting room in an old-fashioned house, reserved for special occasions and guests that seldom came.

    I’ve been critical of national park management, particularly with regard to Yellowstone, and this led last month to an hour-long conversation with visiting National Park Service Director Fran Mainella.

    My general concerns about national parks have much to do with the fact that it is easier to create a park than it is to provide adequate long-term funding for infrastructure construction, maintenance and staffing. This is an issue for local city parks on up. After the ribbons are cut and dedication speeches are done, the politicians go home and the park becomes just one more thing begging for a thin slice of a limited tax pie.

    Addressing the huge maintenance backlog in our nation’s parks was a campaign promise by President Bush four years ago, and some progress has been made. In the last year, the more controversial issue has been staffing, with complaints circulating that management decisions are hurting customer service. Paying for post-9/11 security chews up a surprising chunk of her budget, the director explained.

    Mainella comes from a background of managing the Florida state park system, and so is more familiar than most with being on the receiving end of a long and skinny money pipeline. I was impressed with her. But the fact that she works for an administration fundamentally hostile to government constrains what she and future park directors can do. A government bankrupted by tax cuts, wars and runaway entitlement spending will not be taking very good care of parks.

    Getting tourists into Yellowstone remains a big issue, especially in winter. Notwithstanding my well-founded concerns about this administration’s broader environmental policies, Mainella lays out a convincing case that she is serious about curtailing damage from snowmobile use in the park — limiting their numbers, requiring guides, keeping them on established routes, requiring better noise control and moving toward cleaner four-cycle engines.

    Why should we on the coast concern ourselves with what happens in Yellowstone? For one thing, decisions there illustrate what we can expect at the new national and state historical park system being dedicated today at Cape Disappointment.

    Beyond this, Yellowstone is a place of great intrinsic value, even for those who rarely if ever visit it. “Now, at a time when the face of the earth has become so ravaged that few truly natural areas remain, the Yellowstone country assumes a value far greater than the original proponents of the national park ever could have anticipated,” writes Rick Reese, former director of the Yellowstone Institute. “Here we find the largest essentially intact ecosystem remaining in the lower 48 states — millions of acres of diverse mountain wilderness relatively untouched by the imprint of man, much the same as it was hundreds, or even thousands, of years ago.”

    That’s a heritage worth cherishing. Heck, maybe I’ll even visit it again someday, maybe buy a postcard at Brooks Lake Lodge on the way. We editors don’t make enough to stay there.

My brief career as a lawyer

    Having made $3,252 and some odd cents, I retired from practicing law at age 29. I had overcome my own ineptness to win one hopeless case and I had helped a famous law firm sue one of the world’s largest companies.

    I don’t actively conceal that I’m a lawyer. My framed old license to practice, the glass long since broken out, is propped up in a corner of my newspaper office. But I don’t often bring it up in polite company. I have never before written about this part of my life in any detail.

    My wife suggested I tell some funny stories about law school. Possibly if I reminisced long enough with one of my classmates — Seaside romance novelist Cheryl Holt, for example — we could come up with something humorous to say about legal education. It makes me smile a little to think of how terrified I was — and I’m not exaggerating — of our intellectually sadistic contracts law professor. I made myself sit in the front row in a show of bravado, not unlike poking a hand into a jar of snakes. Then I literally shook in fear of being called on.

    I was yakking with the governor the day I found out I had been accepted into law school. He took a long drag on his cigarette, tapped the ash onto the floor, shook his head sadly, and said “I’m not sure I’d do it again.” I know exactly how he felt. Funny stories about it don’t just roll off my tongue. Our criminal law prof joked on the first day of classes that they had never lost anybody to suicide. He should have knocked on wood. That lucky streak ended while I was there.

    One of my favorite movies is Peter Weir’s “The Year of Living Dangerously,” and law school reminds me of it: One long excess — booze, hormonally charged late nights and a wild mix of callousness and idealism.

    There’s an old saying about law school that “The first year they scare you to death, the second year they work you to death, and the third year they bore you to death.” I found it to be true. After grinding through second year, I was set for the home stretch and a comfortable job in my dad’s law practice when cancer changed my mind. Disbelief cast aside for the occasion, a long conversation with God in the summer of 1985 convinced me that if I lived I’d spend my life doing something other than shuffling legal documents, which somehow seem dry and dusty even when brand new.

    But I figured I’d better take the bar exam just to be on the safe side. While waiting for it, I worked for Spence, Moriarity & Schuster. The advantage of even doing grunt work for an internationally known crusading law firm is that they only take interesting cases. Bob Schuster put me to work figuring out how to force Volkswagen to respond to questions about an allegedly faulty design. For reasons so complicated they still make my head hurt, Volkswagen was legally able to put its engineers out of reach. But we figured if we could drag them into court, the company might prefer to settle. I supplied the intellectual ammunition.

    Gerry Spence is, of course, the big gun in the firm. I’ve known him a little since he and my dad ran against each other for county attorney back in the 1960s. Our family opinion of him is, well ... mixed. My little blue- collar grandfather kept the courthouse boiler working and always said Spence was the most gentlemanly of all the lawyers, and I think Mom, who sat on one of his juries, still has a little crush on him. Dad, on the other hand, always remembered the time Spence flipped him the finger in the courtroom during a trial and believed him capable of any degree of underhanded dealing to win, a belief shared by Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis, one of the rare attorneys to have beaten Spence on a case.

    For my part, Spence stormed into my office once after I reviewed one of his books, yelling “You got it all wrong!” But then he kept us all laughing at his stories for the better part of two hours. Loves an audience, that man, and hates big corporations. Hard not to like. I’ve been unable to resist yanking the chain on his teepee-tall ego a few more times over the years, but am happy to see he’s representing Oregon lawyer Brandon Mayfield, who was improperly persecuted by the FBI.

    My other big case? Well, I busted a career burglar out of prison after the judge told me how, but that story will have to wait. For now, suffice it to say that he didn’t stay out for long.

Death’s fascination

    Black-shadowed woods alive in the night, the voracious bottomless ocean and smiling monsters with savage teeth are only a vague hint of the dark things that dance around the edges of even the happiest child’s dreamlife.

    Only short-memoried adults consider childhood perfect, carefree and light. Children themselves not only are aware of death, but almost hunger for knowledge about the whole cavalcade of scary facts and legends that dance beside the hearse. It isn’t just candy that kids relish about Halloween, but the license it gives them to revel in curiosity and celebration of subjects otherwise taboo in our society.

    It’s as if being closer to the beginning of life makes a person more connected with its end. Children instinctively understand how tenuous is our grasp on existence, how easily it comes, how easily it goes.

    No child should be exposed to the raw violence that comprises so much of what corporations sell us as “entertainment.” Watching people being torn apart by Hollywood exploitation bombs or smashed into wrestling mats by steroid-enhanced madmen is inherently corrosive to civilized values. (It is a horribly distorted culture in which accidentally exposing a breast on TV warrants punishing fines and public condemnation, while foul murders are played out countless times every week in popular prime time programs.)

    But even as we protect them, we adults do children a real disservice when we deny their ingrained understanding of death’s importance and fundamental role in sculpting the contours of a fully inhabited life. By segregating the elderly from the young, by whisking the dead away to sanitized commercial funeral parlors, by censoring most routine references to real death from our daily lives, we have turned the end of life into something to be ashamed of, and feared for all the wrong reasons.

    The end of life truly is a frightening mys-tery, but we trivialize death and we trivialize life when our culture hides the genuine facts of dying while profiting from lurid depictions of fake death.

    It’s impossible to tell whether the entertainment media brought this about or merely came along for the ride, but I for one blame Disney Corp. and others like it sugar-coating the American concept of life and death until all we have is layer upon layer of sugar with no substance underneath. Disney hasn’t really confronted death and darkness since Bambi’s mother died.

    Contrast this with Japan, for example, where director Hayao Miyazaki’s films like Spirited Away and the forthcoming Howl’s Moving Castle tell of ordinary girls swept up by powerfully life-threatening and magical events, but who toil and prevail in some subtle manner in the end thanks to commonplace brains and courage. (I do give Disney credit for distributing these movies in the U.S., though I have no doubt that a desire to piggyback on Miyazaki’s towering box-office profits in Japan had far more to do with Disney’s decision than good taste.)

    Or consider Isao Takahata’s Grave of the Fireflies, which film critic Roger Ebert contrasts with the strongest Disney movies like Bambi and The Lion King by saying “these films inspire tears, but not grief.” Few American parents would be comfortable exposing their children to the great sadness and anti-war themes of Grave of the Fireflies, and yet I think it represents exactly what Americans need — genuine feelings about the price of war and the art of living gracefully in the face of certain death.

    Children aren’t little adults and they deserve all the love and shelter from violence we can provide. But they are wonderfully complex beings who crave the honest truth about life and death. A Chinese woman had it right when she said “Permit your children taste a little hunger and a little cold.” To really appreciate and value life, you need to be on speaking terms with death, discomfort and despair.

1888 magazine is a lens on the past

    Back in the 1880s, The West Shore magazine provided flattering portraits of the growing towns and industries of the Pacific Northwest. I’ve been enjoying the October 1888 issue, which includes articles about salmon fishing on the Columbia River, hunting the fur seal and a history of the saw mill, among other topics.

    The fascination of early publications is that they lack most of the layers of misconceptions that build up around any subject with passing time. They have their own prejudices — The West Shore was virulently anti-Chinese, for example — but read with significant skepticism, early periodicals are a valuable course in how things really were, as opposed to how we think they were.

    About salmon, I was interested to read that “Beside the Chinook salmon, there are nine distinct varieties in the Columbia, only three of which, the Blue Back (average weight five pounds), the Steel Head (five pounds), and the Weak Toothed (12 pounds), have any commercial value, none of which approach the Chinook in quality, value or quantity.”

    It interests me that even at the early date of 1888 there was a perception of so many different varieties of salmon on the river, though the author doesn’t specify exactly what they were. Considering one had to be dog or chum salmon, that still leaves five unaccounted for.

    I’ve long been under the impression that blue backs, or Columbia River sockeye, were considered something of a gourmet salmon. This is partly based on the fact that the Columbia River Packers Association reserved its Bumble Bee brand exclusively for blue backs for years, before changing the company’s name to Bumble Bee in the early 1960s. Other companies also had fancy labels for blue backs, and only packed them in half-pound cans, the practice a century ago for expensive fish — the usual goal was to keep the cost of a can at a dime.

    And yet maybe all the fancy packaging was nothing but marketing hype designed to fob second-rate fish off on unsuspecting Easterners. It appears that only early-run Chinook were considered to be the real article: “The spring and summer shipment to the east consist of genuine Chinook salmon, but the later shipments are generally Steel Heads and Blue Backs, smaller and much inferior varieties.”

    As we all know, this is the world capital of salmon fishing. “Astoria is the headquarters of the canning business, three-quarters of the canneries being located at that point.... Fully a million salmon were canned the present season, which is but little more than half the pack of some former seasons.”

    In 1888, as in 2004, “A most important question now before the fishermen is the maintenance of an adequate supply of fish. With the mouth of the river literally blockaded by traps and more than four hundred miles of gill nets, it is a wonder that any considerable number of fish succeed in entering the stream at all.”

    Largely unenforced Sunday closures of the fishing season were combined with the first feeble experiments with artificial propagation in hatcheries in the initial efforts to keep salmon runs healthy. (By the way, this year’s spring Chinook run brought about 700,000 fish past Bonneville; the fall run stands at 432,000.)

    Fishing is still a dangerous activity here at the mouth of the Columbia, but nothing like it was in 1888. “Skill and bravery are both required by the bar fishermen, and annually half a hundred of them lose their lives among the breakers. In their rivalry to get the first chance at the fish as they enter the river, they crowd down upon the very verge of the bar, and every few days a boat is swamped in the breakers. Occasionally the luckless men are rescued by the crew of the life boat at Cape Hancock (now called Cape Disappointment), but the majority pay for their temerity with their lives.”

    The pay scale was a little different back then as well. “Some fishermen own their own boats and nets, worth about $400, and others operate boats belonging to the canneries; the former receiving about one dollar each for their fish, and the latter sixty cents.”

    I think I paid $6 or $7 a pound for this week’s “inferior” fall Chinook, and I thought it tasted just fine. But imagine the horror and awe the old fishermen would have felt at that price for a piece of fish. The world moves on, but thank goodness the salmon still run strong in the Columbia.

Labor through life savoring the flavors

    September peaches bruise easily as a deb-utante’s feelings, but my they’re delicious — the white-fleshed ones at the Astoria Sunday Market are sweet as sin in the afternoon, and only slightly less costly.

    But, like a fat black bear on a gluttonous pre-winter binge, I can’t help myself –nectar white peaches, heavy seedless yellow Hermiston melons pregnant with gently flavored sugar, corn by the half-bushel begging for butter, vine-ripened tomatoes red as the throbbing heart of the sun, green beans so fresh they curl around your finger — all these and more leap into my arms. Staring down the long, cold barrel of winter, how can a body resist the temptations of the earth?

    In what’s usually still our Sahara season of sun-baked lawns on the Lower Columbia, these surprising freshets in the past two weeks have sent tens of thousands of chinook hogs surging upriver, spurning most hooks in their rush to procreate. Two Hammond-based scientists monitoring the biologically rich plume of the river as it mingles with the Pacific told me they see chinooks exuberantly leaping into the air out at sea, lustily feeding on schools of bait fish — sardines and herring in heroic abundance. I watched pure wonder light up a pragmatic, bewhiskered face as he described the scene.

    Tomato pesto supersaturated with crushed garlic and fresh parmesan cheese bakes into a fragrant crust over a piece of sturgeon my fishmonger correctly described as beautiful, and it’s an approach that’d work fine for a nice slab of salmon. Don’t trouble yourself over exact measurements — just throw together a mess of fresh Willamette Valley basil, sun-dried tomatoes, parmesan, pine nuts, garlic, douse with olive oil, and blend the beezeezus out of it. Slather it on, cook till done but check so’s the fish doesn’t dry out. Serve with ice-cold cider out on the deck. Watch the fishing boats go by.

***

    Saturday at the Pacific County Fair started out sort of slow and drizzly, and my daughter Elizabeth and I spent an hour indoors with the livestock, petting sleepy dairy calves, peering at a prize Guinea pig sporting curly blond hair that would have looked good on a 1950s’ beach boy, and watching teenie-weenie baby quail peck their way out of speckled eggs under a warm lamp.

    Held in Menlo, Wash., an old Northern Pacific Railroad whistlestop six miles east of Raymond, the Pacific County Fair is a compact world unto itself, which is a pretty good description of all the Willapa River Valley, from which it draws the lion’s share of its participation. You can see why the area appealed to the Swiss immigrants and others who settled there — the grass looks good enough to spoon into a waffle cone for dessert.

    I finally wised up and bought Elizabeth an all-day pass for the carnival rides — there were even more than at the Clatsop County Fair, where I think I dropped about 60 bucks on the Gravitron and assorted other attractions. She rode the kiddie roller-coaster about eight times straight while I chatted and mingled with old friends, carefully steering clear of politics — the Valley is a fertile bed of red-hot Republicanism in an otherwise moderate Democrat county. Very hospitable people, though, so long as you don’t speak up for some radical notion like Social Security or, heaven forbid, land-use planning.

***

    To my Grandpa, the Holy Trinity consisted of the Democratic Party, the Masonic Lodge and the United Mine Workers of America, and this week’s GOP convention would have had him in a quiet fury. I can almost hear his dentures clicking in disgust at the vision of a Yale-educated oilman laying on the awe-shucks working-guy image.

    But we’d have put that all aside and headed for the mountains for Labor Day to cut firewood in the achingly sad forest of beetle-killed trees, skeletons standing near the old miners’ houses we used as weekend cabins.

    On Sunday we’d gather in the old cookhouse, its 1920 linoleum pitted from the nails in miners’ boots, and Grandma and her friend Pluma would fry home-raised chicken on the cast-iron range — and there’s nothing like chicken you’ve known since it was an egg.

    We really did labor on Labor Day — keeping the damned chainsaws running — and we celebrated the achievements of working Americans, Grandpa sipping perhaps half a bottle of Miller High Life with lunch. Oh, the wild life we led!

    Have a wonderful Labor Day. Remember the simple good things. Honor the blood and sweat and tears that got us here.

Little one’s frog march is riveting

    “Today’s a pesticator day, daddy,” my rascally 7-year-old, Elizabeth, told me Sunday, messing up my hair as we set out for the moist old forest path leading to what we call Frog Hollow.

    You won’t find “pesticator” in the dictionary, being one of many proto-words my dad transported through time. Born in 1912 when northwestern Washington state still was ferns and farmhouses instead of Starbucks and strip malls, his vocabulary came from an innocent age when people actually said things like “jumping Jehosephat!”

    When I was about Elizabeth’s age, dad read me Huckleberry Finn, forever instilling Mark Twain’s vision of adventure as my ideal model for growing up — endless summer days floating on a lazy river.

    Every American generation needs to revisit and re-imagine Twain’s America, a place of individual liberty where everyone has the option of lighting out for the wilderness — even if, in our day and age, that wilderness likely is more metaphorical than real.

    I probably have a thousand photos of my kind, strong daddy, but in one I particularly like, he is indistinct — a small figure reclining on a flat homemade raft drifting out on Lake Samish. Printed at the family home in a little amateur darkroom set-up, it’s a tiny snapshot that fades every year, as though he is pulling farther from shore, dissolving back into a far-away long-ago.

***

    My friend Warren and I were incredibly lucky living where we did, with parents who gave us freedom to be boys. Growing up on one of the West’s great Indian reservations, the empty terrain we ambled had almost no physical resemblance to Twain’s humid Mississippi, but it was much the same at heart — a sublime unused land with the pale blue Wind River Mountains sweeping up to the horizon.

    Aside from some tortured hay and alfalfa fields that existed only through the grace of federal irrigation projects, there mostly was sagebrush and powdery dirt. It got about 10 inches of precipitation a year, most in the form of snow that the wind blew back and forth until it not so much melted as simply wore out.

    Warren’s parents had a small ranch carved out of deeded property on the reservation, and we were blessedly unsupervised. We used to melt the lead from old car batteries on his mother’s kitchen stove, pouring the molten metal into water-filled pots and observing the weird shapes it made, steam spitting up to the ceiling.

    We went inner-tubing down the irrigation canals and meandering creeks, hoping maybe to see a sunning rattler, or an old discarded bottle sticking out of the bank. (A lifelong collector of antique bottles, Warren’s literally gone on to “write the book” on the subject.) Come August, it was so dry even the mud smelled dusty, and the ditch water was cool as lemonade.

    We never got in much trouble, though I still have a guilty conscience about the swallow’s nest we knocked from the underside of a single-lane iron bridge out in the middle of nothing. Deserved a hide-tanning over that.

***

    Red-legged frogs come in several colors, from dark brown to a burnished copper that looks newly minted, like something from a Mexican gift shop. Lively fellows that are almost supernaturally attuned to flee at the first vibration of an approaching predator, this native species is still abundant here in our home woods.

    Like their close cousins, the California red-legged frogs that Twain immortalized in his tale from Calaveras County, ours deserve to be celebrated for their jumping. Not that it helps them escape Elizabeth, whose personal record currently stands at five caught on one walk.

    She names each one, and lets it ride along in her hair for a while like a tiny jockey atop an elephant. They seem quite content there, looking from side to side in apparent equanimity, until I insist she set them free again. Last night, for want of pockets, she carried four along folded up in the hem of her dress, pausing to reassure them of her good intentions.

    In Frog Hollow, there’s a congress of amphibians, enough red-legs to tow a trailer if only you could harness them and get them to all hop in the same direction. Elizabeth and I tread cautiously as deer, keeping our pesticating to ourselves, acting like the guests we are in someone else’s home.

    We love our little wilderness, still more than a metaphor, still frog heaven.

Books that entertain and make life better

    Many books cross my desk purporting to be helpful guides to one thing or another. The amazing thing is how useless most are. I’ll protect the guilty by not mentioning titles, but rarely does a month go by without a glossy-covered bubble of a book drifting into my office from a publisher, with fancy packaging and no real content beyond what you could find for yourself with an afternoon’s research on the Internet.

    Happily there are a few exceptions, books that not only entertain but also make life noticeably better.

    One of the best guidebooks I’ve read in a long time was just published by the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife. Living With Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest joins my short list of must-have books for living well in this corner of the country.

    Written by Russell Link, an urban wildlife biologist with WDFW, Living With Wildlife is nearly 400 pages of interesting information about common species that people bump into in Washington and Oregon. Its emphasis is on helping overcome and avoid conflicts with wildlife, which occur with ever-greater frequency as people and housing subdivisions expand into wildlife habitat.

    Living on the outskirts of Ilwaco, in the past week alone I’ve either seen or observed signs of bats, beavers, black bears, coyotes, deer mice, moles, opossums, porcupines, rabbits, raccoons and tree squirrels, plus Canada geese, ducks, crows, ravens, pigeons, eagles, herons, gulls, terns, hawks, sparrows, jays, owls, robins, finches, starlings, swallows, swifts, flickers, frogs, salamanders and snakes — all described and explained in Living With Wildlife, along with many other species as well.

    In the past few years, new homes have been springing up just about everywhere here in exceptionally beautiful Clatsop and Pacific counties. Although it’s gratifying to live in a popular place, every new yard and flower garden takes the place of wilder vegetation that was once home to these birds and animals. To the extent it’s possible for people and these creatures to co-exist, Living With Wildlife explains how.

    Along with its diagrams of Coyote Rollers — an Acme-like trademarked device installed on fence tops to foil Wile E. Coyote’s yard invasions — and other helpful wildlife-related inventions and techniques, Living With Wildlife is loaded with interesting facts, such as:

    • Raccoon droppings may carry a parasite that can be fatal to humans. Do not handle or smell raccoon droppings and wash your hands if you touch any.

    • Opossums lived during the time of the dinosaurs and one reason for their continued survival is their ability to eat nearly anything.

    • Kingfishers teach their young to fish by dropping dead prey into the water.

    • For their size, bats are the world’s longest-lived mammals. The record for a little brown bat — a common species here — is 33 years.

    Bear in mind also Landscaping for Wildlife by the same author.

    Also topping my list of recent highly useful books is Cooking Salmon & Steelhead.

    In my house I’m the fish chef, and this recipe book is far and away the best I’ve ever come across for the Northwest’s signature menu item. Scott and Tiffany Haugen have compiled dozens of the most tempting creations any fishermen ever dreamed of, recipes that are easy to prepare and don’t overwhelm the simple goodness of fresh salmon.

    Also included are a variety of helpful tips for selecting quality salmon at the store, filleting your catch, preserving salmon’s freezer life, canning and other subjects.

    My magazine-publisher friend Frank Amato, of Portland and Naselle, Wash., has with this latest offering added to his very fine list of Northwest books, all of which pass my test for pragmatic usefulness and beauty. Another example is his daughter Ann’s book Ancient Forests & Western Man, a perfect gift for anyone interested in the Northwest’s pioneer timber industry.

Beautiful objects are the joys of life

    What would you bring back if you could travel through time? Pristine baseball cards from 1954? A thousand shares of Microsoft, circa 1986? A photo of your grandfather stepping off the immigrant ship from Sweden at Ellis Island? A dozen Bergman decoys?

    Antiques Roadshow feeds many versions of this fantasy game. If only you had known to buy each school lunch box available in 1965 and lock them away in your parents’ attic. Or if only you knew which struggling young artist is destined to be the Michelangelo of the next age.

    For my part, these daydreams often don’t have as much to do with financial gain as with possessing special objects that might otherwise perish with passing time, or with holding some tangible piece of history — imagine grasping in your own hands the hot and powder-stained rifle your ancestor used at Gettysburg.

    I even go so far as to imagine how I’d pay for things in the past, and have settled on aluminum. Worth pennies a pound now we’ve figured out how to refine bauxite, aluminum used to be awfully expensive stuff. I’m sure Paul Revere, the Boston silversmith, will be happy to trade me a handsome teapot for a bag of empty pop cans.

    My time travel desires were kicked up again last week while reading First American Art: The Charles and Valarie Diker Collection of American Indian Art, from the University of Washington Press. UW Press has an amazing record of publishing books on Indian art. It deserves credit for inspiring a deep modern interest in the subject, and this volume keeps up that proud tradition.

    I envy the Dikers, whose obvious love of this art and awesome taste is reflected in every color plate of this book, which accompanies an exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian Institution. They have assembled a collection that exudes the power and incredible nuances of Indian artworks and ceremonial objects, not to mention some of their extraordinarily lovely household items.

    Living where we do, I always search every new UW Press book for objects from the Chinook Tribe. Whereas some tribes of the Pacific Coast — the Haida are a notable example — left an inspirational heritage of masks, bentwood boxes and other items, the material remains of Chinook civilization are far less abundant. (Perhaps because of too many tsunamis, and a climate that eats wood.) But I was delighted to see the Dikers’ collection includes a wonderful leaf-shaped Chinook cup that may have started life within 10 miles of here.

    There’s little I love more than really old wooden things well-used by those who created them. Nothing else has the warmth and genuine beauty of a wooden tool or other object worn smooth by human touch, polished and stained by our sweat and dirt and oily hands.

    Near at hand as I write this is the iron and wood master-switch handle from my family’s old mine in the mountains, the Duncan. I’m ashamed, in a sense, to have removed it from its context, though it doubtless would have been stolen by someone 30 years ago if I hadn’t brought it home. But I hate to think that someday, when I’m gone, no one will remember what it was or where it belongs. I shudder to think it will be discarded by someone who doesn’t love wood.

    So it is with that Chinook cup. It probably only survives because some trader plucked it out of its context and tucked it away beyond harm’s reach. I’m so happy it still exists. And I wish I could step back 200 years and barter for one of my own, perhaps for a handful of 10-penny nails.

    Even more than this, I wish people with eloquent hands were still producing such cups here on the Lower Columbia, and that we all were using them, rubbing them smooth with our fingers and lips, imparting to them the rich character that would someday make them truly beautiful.

    Creating and using beautiful objects is one of the joys of life, and it’s something we’re losing — or have already lost — in this mass-produced plastic age. Let’s fight back. Create an heirloom today, or at least use one. It may be the treasured artifact of a century from now.

Life wasn’t meant to be haunted

    Elizabeth would have hugged her if she could, the tiny lost girl, but had to settle for sitting still above her and whispering secrets amidst the close-cropped dandelions.

    We went from grave to grave and Elizabeth gave flowers to some of the babies who flickered in and out of life so long ago, fresh-plucked rhodie blossoms and a daisy or two borrowed from recently dead grownups. I trust they don’t mind.

    It’s easy to imagine these little ones living on, having babies in their turn, becoming grandmas and grandpas, before taking up their rightful places in the Ilwaco, Wash., Cemetery, eventually to be surrounded by generations of family.

    Movies show spooks and zombies, angry things, bubbling up from graves, punishing the living for being alive. What vile silliness!

    Regret is as close as you will feel to a negative emotion wafting about the tombstones — regret over joys not experienced, regret over words of love not spoken, regret over wasted time, wasted chances, wasted worry over all the empty things that clutter our brief time above the soil.

    We walked around visiting people I’ve known and heard of, pausing to tell Elizabeth “Oh, he was nice man. I talked to him once before he died. He helped your school.” And “This man was a fisherman who died out in the river. I sure wish he had stayed home that day.”

    One I spent a minute with used to work for my newspaper back when it was a youngster, and I know him mostly from two or three photos, a wiry dark- mopped young guy with a jittery energy. In one, he sits in a darkened doorway with other men on July 4, 1903, and I’m willing to bet there was a cold beer out of sight on the planks behind him.

    Will Barrows drew news illustrations and political cartoons, firmly opinionated jabs at venial local officials and the pressing controversies of a small fishing town, things like competition from immigrant labor and controlling salmon predators. They most often accurately reflect the concerns of his time, though I bet he sometimes got his editor in trouble, just as my cartoonist does me. But then that is the chief pleasure of cartoonists, that and canceled subscriptions.

    Forty years after he was gone, his daughter remembered “Papa tried everything and did it all well, but next to his great love for his family, came drawing and steam engines.”

    He converted anything gasoline-powered to steam, if he could, and ran a small steam donkey with which he and a crew logged the strong old forest above Bear River.

    I honor him as he lies among his neighbors above Baker Bay, no ghost but a kind memory on the sunny hillside.

***

    Elizabeth told us the other day if she dies as a child how she’d like her “heart and brain and anything else they can use” to help sick kids and adults stay alive, cheerful at the thought of being able to make such a generous gift.

    But I sure hope my 7-year-old gets to realize her dream of being “an ‘ FBI’ and a rock star” for many years before she makes her ultimate gift.

    Helping and rescuing are written into her genes, something made obvious by our recent first visit to her birth-father’s sister and father, who just turned 89. Believing more family is always better, we reached out to them for our small adopted wise woman this spring.

    Her aunt, a sweet veterinarian’s assistant, has a home overflowing with hundreds of rescued homing pigeons, doves, goldfish and a shy kitty, as well a gentle horse kept on pasture a few miles down one of King County’s surviving country lanes.

    Life never was meant to be haunted, in any sense. The rich grass, the picnic lunch, the slow horse carrying my daughter told me so.

Revelations on every page

    “The Handbook of American Indians” probably would spontaneously burst into flames if touched by a liberal college professor or school textbook buyer. Some authors of the 2,193-page study dare to make judgments and occasionally slip in a now-forbidden word or phrase.

    Published by the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1905, the handbook is, however, an astounding tribute to America’s original civilizations and societies. Founded in 1879 by John Wesley Powell — famous today for his adventures in the Grand Canyon — the bureau collected all that outsiders could know and possess of the breath-taking galaxy of peoples then being swallowed up by territorial conquest and foreign diseases.

    A generous recent gift to the Chinook Observer by Ilwaco’s Robin Taylor — a brilliant though sometimes self-sabotaging authority on local tribal history and politics — the handbook contains revelations on every page. It is, as Taylor cautioned when handing it over, something of a grab-bag of often-contradictory information. But there are near-countless passages of splendid clarity, a lost world tumbling off pages into the mind’s eye.

    Comcomly, the Columbia estuary’s greatest Indian celebrity, is described in part: “Writing in August 1844, Father De Smet states that in the days of his glory Comcomly on his visits to Vancouver would be preceded by 300 slaves, ‘and he used to carpet the ground that he had to traverse, from the main entrance of the fort to the governor’s door, several hundred feet, with beaver and otter skins.’”

    Perhaps, instead of revisiting the hallowed heights of Troy, Hollywood ought to expend its millions recreating scenes such as this?

***

    Now, subjects like slavery and profligate over-harvesting of fur animals are, to some, an unwelcome intrusion in their conception of Indian life being an unending happy camping trip by buff brown Boy and Girl Scouts. But that’s almost more of an insult than thinking of them as blood-thirsty savages.

    Convoluted is too simple a word to describe American Indians and white relationships with them. In 1758, for example, at the height of the French and Indian War, one of my direct ancestors was murdered by Indians in western Virginia and his widow and children held captive until 1764. Not a nice thing to do, but dwarfed by the vicious British-American tactic employed in 1763 of handing out smallpox-infected blankets to Indians under the guise of goodwill.

    In a long passage on the subject of captives, the handbook notes “It is learned from the numerous accounts of white people who had been taken by Indians that the principal immediate hardships they endured were due to the rapid movements of their captors in order to escape pursuers ... the honor of a white woman was almost always respected by her captors among the tribes east of the Mississippi....” I’m glad for great-g-g-g-g-g- grandma’s sake that her captors practiced more humanity than their opponents.

***

    Attending reservation school during primary grades — first grade in a segregated classroom and then integrated classes starting in 1967 — I was embraced by the gentleness and warm humor of the Shoshoni people, at least on the days I wasn’t being taunted for having ears sticking out at right angles from my blindingly white head. On balance, Indian friendships still beat in my heart and bind my soul to a certain high mountain valley.

    If you’re at all like me, Lewis and Clark burn-out is near. Boon to the economy though it will be, the Bicentennial can’t be over any too soon. It’ s only a matter of time before we start seeing parties of transvestite re-enactors, or blue-painted people retracing the trail walking backwards.

    That said, and as the Handbook of American Indians often alludes to, the L -C expedition was as much concerned with discovering Indians as it was new horizons.

    Above and beyond all the hoopla, the celebrations of the next three years deserve to relaunch what should have been — and what still can be — a relationship of trust and honor among all America’s people.

Treading the path of old

    This strangely bright May sunlight illuminates an emerald shard clutched in the dense brown clay. It bears a patent date of 1893, and I spot a couple small broken insulators high overhead, mounted on the smooth trunk of a hemlock.

    They must have held thin copper telephone wires above North Head Lighthouse Road, a log and plank affair hewn from impenetrable woods that once blanketed the hills between Ilwaco and the newest of the Peninsula’s two lighthouses, dedicated in 1898.

    After decades of benign neglect, Washington state is throwing vast sums of money at newly renamed Cape Disappointment State Park. In the process of installing new water and sewer connections to Ilwaco last year, the overgrown lighthouse road was cleared of man-high ferns and fallen branches.

    My little red corgi streaking along beside me investigating earth-colored frogs and plump chipmunks, we’ve pounded out a footpath down the old road and out to the light, a perfect hour round trip from home. First crossing the remarkable new Discovery Heights residential subdivision, we pick up the road and descend onto the edge of a rare remnant of old-growth forest owned by the federal Bureau of Land Management.

    We’re blessed to live in a place with plenty of woods, but there’s a monotony to them, as might be expected of forests planted in expectation of harvest. Corporate tree farms have all the scenic and spiritual value of really tall cornfields.

    But the forest along North Head road was justly famous in its time, often pictured on postcards of a century ago — families riding on horse-drawn wagons or walking in their bonnets like tiny pixies in a land of giants. Little is left, but there are enough wild old ones on the road’s south side to at least fuel an illusion of primordial wonder.

    Perhaps six stories up in the twisted crown of one 8-foot-diameter skyscraper is what must be an eagle tenement, judging by all the racket and commotion. Four were performing aerial somersaults in a neighboring hollow last week, and a local innkeeper told me of seeing eight fighting over a dead duck on the shore of nearby Baker Bay a month ago.

    Too soon, the reopened path ends at the state highway, and our walk must continue down a paved spur to the lighthouse, at least until a planned trail extension through the woods is completed west of the highway to the ocean. Mosquitoes hang in the air like nets waiting for passing mammals, and just maybe they’ll keep too many people from trampling what I already selfishly consider to be my own private way.

    My friend Susan Holway was ushering her dog, pet coyote and two English cousins into her van in the parking lot, and we spoke a little about walking, England and other topics. Sadly, in a way, I probably don’t need to worry about much company. Nine hundred ninety-nine people out of 1,000 prefer Wheel of Fortune to an evening stroll, and the great English walking tradition seems about as likely to catch on as afternoon tea.

    The gravel path out to the lighthouse is a riot of big root vines, glorying in this spring’s early warmth. Also called wild cucumber, the aptly named big root sends its runners dozens of feet away from a soccer-ball sized root whose bitter juice the Indians once used to treat venereal disease and kidney trouble.

    Gale-blasted dwarf Douglas firs hang onto the cliffs, where I pause to examine the ocean’s marching swells and the light’s elegant curves. Returning, the lighthouse keeper’s path leads to brightly painted mansion-like dwellings where a keeper’s wife is said to have been driven insane by wind, loneliness and who-knows-what-else before casting herself to the waves. I’m superstitious enough to wonder whether I’ll keep walking this way when the days again grow short.

    Crossing the highway, hungry for dinner and stepping up our pace, I swell up my chest a little at the sight of a brazen nonpet coyote pausing to calculate whether he can grab my little dog for his own meal. Finally deciding against it, he melts back into the woods to the west. We melt away into the east, treading the ancient road home.

A life lived with gusto, a genuine patriot

    It’s a contradictory message we deliver to the Iraqi people when we invade to set them free and then shut down a newspaper that prints things we don’t like.

    But even in our relatively unrestricted nation, Freedom of Speech always has been a nuanced and oft-attacked concept. It’s easy to understand the military’s unease over newspaper content that stirs up violence against Americans, especially in light of this week’s horrendous display of hatred by Iraqi civilians toward civilian American contract workers, not to mention yet another awful bomb targeting U.S. soldiers.

    Here at home, our constitutional freedoms ensure we’ll get to openly discuss and debate the wisdom of a war to liberate a people of whom a significant portion obviously despise us. And it’s our civilian-controlled military that has defended our freedoms, and the freedom of other nations, at the cost of lakes of blood and mountains of treasure.

    Speaking as a staunch political independent who has worked for and contributed to more Republicans than Democrats, it was the current president’s position that war opponents are unpatriotic and should shut up that sealed my opinion of this administration as fundamentally flawed.

    Criticizing the government isn’t a privilege any American should be discouraged from using; it’s our absolute paid-in-blood right to say anything that crosses our minds about George W. Bush or George Washington. For Bush and his cronies to suggest otherwise offends me deeply and is offensive to memory of every ancestor and relation of mine, and of yours, who fought and suffered for this nation over the course of centuries.

    My friend Charles Levendosky was a patriot in the most potent American sense of the word. In the kind of heaven we all hope exists, on March 14 he was greeted with a tankard of ale at a table with Ben Franklin and James Madison.

    He was a Franklin-esque man, with a robust capacity for fun and understanding of justice, a sense of humor and an unerring sense of right. Starting adult life with degrees in physics, mathematics and education, he went on to become Wyoming’s first poet laureate and a beloved mentor to aspiring poets everywhere.

    Mary Martin of Des Moines, Iowa, who got to know Charles in the summer of 1972 during a poetry program at Georgia Southern College, wrote his network of friends after his death last month from cancer at age 67:

    “I remember being in professors’ homes on hot summer nights where all the front rooms of the house were packed with students and teachers completely quiet and straining to hear the poems being presented in poetry reading parties. This was the real deal — words, ideas and learning — live and searing.

    “After that summer, at least once a decade we caught up with each other. His beautifully penned, thoughtful letters, were written as if he were not pressed for time with the serious political questions of the day and later, serious health matters.”

    It was as a leader in the defense of First Amendment freedoms that Charles became best known. He wrote a nationally syndicated column for the New York Times wire service, which we often published in The Daily Astorian.

    Working from home the past couple years, tenaciously living far longer than doctors thought, Charles fought the Bush administration’s many assaults on our Constitution with all the fierce courage of a Minuteman.

    Beside passion, what made Charles especially effective in constitutional arguments was his incisive reasoning. He not only believed in the First Amendment, he was intimately knowledgeable about Supreme Court cases that preserve freedoms of speech, religion and assembly as living cornerstones of our culture.

    Walter Echo Hawk and Steve Moore of the Native American Rights Fund, said of Charles that “His courage in fighting cancer these last years was emblematic of his courage to stand up for the first amendment rights of all people, including Indians,” with whom he joined in protecting access to and use of sacred lands.

    Charles knew and loved the poetry of the U.S. Constitution. Freedom was his partner in a dance he knew by heart and practiced with gusto.

It’s a zoo out there (thanks to the humans)

    Insanity ripples around caged zoo animals, a faint hum angry and hopeless as a wasp spinning on its back alone in an overturned jar.

    The solitary parrot methodically plucking itself, the flabby tiger twisting in nervous loathing as his lunch of dismembered chickens sweats in the sun, the half-bald brown bear frolicking in his soil-brown moat — you won’t see these on postcards.

    The wolves weren’t pathetic, got to give them that. And you wouldn’t confuse them with anything else, certainly not with the “wolves” occasionally offered for sale on hand-lettered signs on back streets here at home. A pale gringo two years into semi-professional meth addiction wouldn’t be so stupid as to try to pet these “don’t need no stinking badges” wolves. Superficially calm, but deeply pissed off.

    Next door, two hyenas really warm into their daily beating of a little sister whom I sincerely hope is the sentient reincarnation of Joseph Stalin. Otherwise, it’s mighty cruel treatment. Meantime, the crisp black wolf gazes around at passing human families, watchful as a prisoner of war monitoring the guards as co-conspirators tunnel under the fence.

    Forty years ago, my dad reported coming across what appeared to be a tiny carved stone archway surrounding an opening in a rock face in the mad confusion of mountains just southeast of Yellowstone. What looked like a narrow tunnel snaked away into the darkness.

    He always speculated it might be connected to the Sheep-Eaters, a mysterious lost civilization of sorts in the empty void of time before even the Shoshoni showed an interest in Wyoming’s austere charms.

    Dad never tried to find it again despite many curious questions. Perhaps he dismissed it as an exaggeration of his own imagination. Maybe it’s my own imagining, but I detected a suggestion of fear in his reaction. He was a hardy man who spent years in the Arctic, but could be skittish as a horse. There was something in those bushes he didn’t care for.

    Camping in a snowy valley one June, my cousin, brother and I realized with dismay we were on a grizzly path, fresh prints big as bowling balls nearby and nowhere to go. Might be how Dad felt, caught in the mountains next to a big hairy mystery.

    Without going, it is impossible to know exactly how it would be to be up in that same high country with wolves howling again, not penned but roaming free as back in the Sheep-Eaters’ age. Nerve-racking, probably. But I’d like to try.

    When I lived there, folks used to steal a page from Mark Twain and say “First God created idiots. This was for practice. Then he created the Wyoming Legislature.”

    I see in the news they’re up to their old cow-pie flavored hi-jinx, pushing the federal government hard and threatening to sue to get a hunting season for wolves, which have done modestly well since reintroduction a decade ago. Put anything up against a cow in Wyoming — up to and including the Almighty — and most Republican legislators will throw the contest to the cow. But maybe they’re just scared of all wild things. They’d probably get a kick out of that Mexican zoo.

    I had the pleasure of meeting a volunteer Yellowstone wolf watcher last month, retired G.E. engineer Don St. John, who reassured me humans are most definitely not on the wolves’ menu. Spending days perched on mountain tops with his eyes glued to a spotting scope, Don’s witnessed warm affection and treachery worthy of a Shakespeare play within wolf packs, but never the hint of threat toward himself or others.

    Seems to me an occasional cow is a tiny price to pay for hosting wild wolves. Someday, the people of the West will make sure the wolves are free and put ignorant rural politicians behind bars. Now that’s a zoo I’d enjoy.

Drowning prompts a visceral fear

    Every second was etched in acid as I plowed through the wave-churned surf, submerging my face into the sandy water every few seconds hoping to catch a glimpse of my drowned daughter as my wife shrieked out every mother’s horror on shore, collapsing into the arms of kind Mexican strangers.

    Experimenting with a slight relaxation in her eternal vigilance against every danger, real and imagined, Donna left Elizabeth playing 50 feet away from our table on a tiny, calm bay nobody’s ever heard of. Plenty of other kids were splashing unattended; what could be safer? We turned away for a moment to move our chairs, and our precious 6-year-old was gone as if snatched off the planet.

    I scanned the surf line, and asked “Where’s Elizabeth?” and our world fell apart. Of all the stupid things to dawdle over at such a time, I wasted five seconds worrying about whether to leave Donna’s purse unattended. Coming to my senses, I ran down to the water, looking this way and that to see if she had wandered away on the beach. No sign. Nothing but the blank surface of the ocean, blank faces of happy vacationers unaware anything was wrong.

    That unawareness changed quickly as Donna screamed “Elizabeth!” over and over, investing the name with furious, passionate fear. Soon, dozens were running, wading and swimming, hoping for a forgetful girl, but imagining a skinny little body, eyes open and unblinking, silky brown hair fanning out under salt water.

***

    I know that back at home the Pacific still forges an artful sickle of fine sand from the jetty down past the recently taller and brighter lights of Seaside and on to black Tillamook Head surfacing over its surroundings, a hulking but placid humpback whale rising from endless gray swells.

    In every culture, eons of mothers’ helpless screams form scabs over the spirit of a place. Back in the long age of the Clatsops and Chinook, every mountain, headland and creek was wrapped in tragedy and humor, demons and gods. Stories grew like moss on every geographical feature within sight of my house, from Cape Disappointment down that long arc of sand to the south.

    Even in this time of hardened resistance to mystery, I think I can now hear those ancient stories. At least I understand better now the necessity of creating some fragile framework on which to hang a soul-shattering loss.

    Maybe our fishermen, working so close to the ocean’s faceless doom, still have a little of that rich and subtle stew of stories stashed in their holds. Can’t work these mean waters long, I suspect, without acquiring a little heathenish propensity for seeing capricious spirits in the swells and currents and impenetrable fogs. Maybe poets are drawn to the life. Maybe the life creates poets. I lean to the latter explanation.

    There’s no planting pretty daffodil-lined paths over the horrifying impersonal depths of the cold-bone ocean. It’ll grab you, chew you, and your family will feel lucky if it deigns to spit back your remains.

***

    There’s a small window of time in which a drowning victim’s life can still be pumped back into her, and we were nearing the end of that time when I heard shouts from shore.

    Elizabeth, covered head to foot in the warm sand in which she had been rolling, far from the water, was telling Donna over and over again that she was OK. A stout Mexican lady was telling Donna “Just hold her.”

    And that’s what we did. It was a couple days before she got us back in the water. The taste of losing her will linger forever.

Grandparents make the difference

    A tragedy of modern American life is our loss of connection to stories and achievements of the past. It’s often said children don’t have heroes any more, at least not beyond the latest video heartthrob or pro athlete. I think this is because they lack access to grandparents.

    Grandparents are the living threads linking us to learning, adventures and awe of remote times. Without the context they bring to life, children grow into a world that simply exists as it is. It’s like eating nothing but restaurant meals and never seeing or understanding what goes on in the kitchen, far less participating yourself.

    My grandfather used to smile with gentle disgust at all the people who have no idea where their food comes from, for example suggesting that most folks assume hamburger simply appears as if by magic in plastic-wrapped packages in the back rooms of grocery stores. He considered it important that kids understand roast beef starts as a cute calf. He made sure his grandsons knew how to thread a pipe, sharpen a chainsaw, dig a ditch.

    He also sat and told us of how Franklin Roosevelt saved American democracy from anarchy in the ‘30s, how it was to see automobiles and airplanes for the first time, how he felt when a family horse crushed his sister to death.

    It’s harder to pretend you’re the center of the universe when a grandparent shows your very life and freedom are built from decades of struggle and luck.

***

    We won’t know for sure until more time has passed, but the Internet seems likely to be the stellar invention of our age, and it’s peculiar so few of us can name the man primarily responsible for starting it. Not Al Gore, by the way, but Tim Berners-Lee, who was knighted by the queen last week. If you were a child looking for a hero, Berners-Lee would be a good choice — a decent, modest man who nearly went out of his way to avoid profiting from his creation.

    Sadly, such selflessness is more likely to earn derision than praise. We place lotto winners ahead of saints these days.

    I was happy, though, to see some enthusiasm for the Wright Brothers last month as we marked the 100th anniversary of powered flight. Though they ended up far more embroiled in lawsuits than one might wish of heroes, the Wrights are genuinely admirable for achieving a great feat without aid from Pentagon contracts or shady stock deals.

***

    Reading science journals from a century ago, it’s fascinating to trace the arc of interest in “aeroplanes,” the Wrights, and a host of competing inventors.

    At least among professional scientists, the Wrights didn’t have to wait long for acclaim. Only two weeks following their flight, a speaker at the Dec. 30, 1903 meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science said: “Too much praise cannot be awarded to these gentlemen. Being accomplished mechanics, they designed and built the apparatus, applying thereto a new and effective mode of control of their own. They learned its use at considerable personal risk of accident. They planned and built the motor, having found none in the market deemed suitable. They evolved a novel and superior form of propeller; and all this was done with their own hands, without having financial help from anyone.”

    There isn’t a single index listing for airplanes, or areoplanes, in the bound volume of January-June 1904 Scientific American, but by 1911 things had moved along to the point a writer was exploring the potential uses of airplanes in war, concluding they would be impractical for much besides reconnaissance.

    Thanks to my grandfather, I knew airplanes were the product of good American imagination, of young men engaged in life. It’s been one of privileges of my daughter’s young life that she’s had her grandmother to tell her of horseback rides to school in the snow, of making jam and chasing chickens. Grandma has decided recently to move back to Wyoming, so we’ll be using a lot free nighttime minutes to keep these treasured memories alive in a fresh little mind.