Editor's Notebook: 2005

Surprise? Two arrowheads!

    Walking the dog is as close as I come to having a sport. With the hand-eye coordination of a toddler after a Hershey-bar binge, ball games are for me like asking a monkey to paint your house. On one particularly memorable occasion, I somehow managed to send a golf ball at a 90-degree angle into the cart, from which it ricocheted unerringly onto the patio of the clubhouse restaurant, narrowly missing a woman on whom I had a crush. Got her attention.

    In ways that make my heart sing like a corny Italian tenor — when she isn’t questioning what makes me think the sky is really blue or why we tie our shoes the way we do — my eight-year-old daughter Elizabeth still believes, in innocent splendor, that I can do anything I set my mind to. Last night, she asked if I’ll be her basketball coach. Well, I reasoned to myself, I did somehow bluff my way onto the first team in seventh grade. And I’ve bet on the NCAAs. So yeah, sure Sweetie, I’ll coach. Or mortgage the house to pay for your wedding. Or donate a kidney if you’d ever like a spare.

    Our little Welsh corgi Bina is the latest in a 30-year line of dogs who have bounded along with me through the hills. In my mind, some identical jumping spark of joy unites them into a friendly pack. Only when Clancy and Rio were still alive, long ago, did I actually have more than one dog along at a time. But in my imagination all my dogs range far and wide on each walk, sniffing every blade of grass with a gourmet’s delight and curiously investigating each passing stranger.

    In a canine fantasy, humanity would still pursue the nomadism that sent us and our dogs together following herds from pasture to pasture in a world empty of cities. Such may be my ideal life, too, a place where dogs never die, and on swift paws spend endless sunny days ordering fat cattle around.

    Apart from worn-out and muddy shoes, until recently I had nothing tangible to show for all the thousands of miles I’ve walked in the past three decades. You’d think I would have found some gangster’s suitcase full of cash or the wreckage of Amelia Earhart’s last airplane — but no, my take as a latter-day hunter-gatherer has consisted of dead weasels and broken telephone-line insulators.

    Just a few months ago, though, within a quarter-mile of my house, I glanced down at the dirt path and saw a perfect little triangle of chipped stone poking up from the dirt.

    Back where I grew up, people say you can confuse a hundred different things for the sound of rattlesnake until the moment you actually hear one, when you instantly have no doubt whatsoever about the desirability of backing up — now! So it is, in a visual sense, with arrowheads. There are billions of pointy rocks that look a little like them, but the genuine article bites your attention like a rattler does your ankle.

    A near-perfect projectile point of variegated red and pink agate, it felt as if it had just been unloosed on a wary deer — a tangible link to the ancient people who inhabited these forested hills for millennia. I nearly looked around to see if its owner might be nearby searching for it. Smug is probably the only fair description of my attitude as I brought it home to show Elizabeth and Donna, knowing plenty of people who have lived around here all their lives without ever finding a Chinook Indian artifact. And then, testing my luck to the limit, I thought after a couple days that where there was one, there might be another. I found a pristine, leaf-like arrowhead 50 feet from the first one. To say I whooped in joy is no exaggeration.

    As a general rule, the law and respect for the science of archaeology say you should leave artifacts where you find them. But after mentioning them to a friend at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum, I received only a mild scolding in light of the fact these had weathered out onto an eroding hillside. Called “Multnomah I sub-phase points,” they are from 750 to 1,800 years old.

    Elizabeth is sure they must be priceless, and so they are since I found them. She has made sure I intend to will them to her. Better yet, I hope she’ll find her own in the years ahead, as she takes up the dog-walking tradition. If I can teach her nothing else, at least I hope she learns to look for treasures where others see only dirt, pleasures where they see only silent strolls in the hills.

Genealogy can be new frontier

    Warning that what he was about to explain would cause eyes to cloud over with boredom, I recently heard someone say his subject was as interesting as listening to someone else’s genealogy. How true, and yet tracing family history has turned into a national obsession.

    In some cultures, Japan for instance, it has long been the practice to record and celebrate past generations with a religious fervency. It’s hard to say exactly why this is. It may be as simple as a child’s need to understand who she is by asking again and again about the circumstances of her birth. It may have something to do with the deep desire in each of us to reassure ourselves that life advances in an endless progression, that we are links in a strong chain that clanks along into the future just as surely as it slides into the past.

    It also seems to me that, for better or worse, an interest in genealogy is a sign our culture has reached a certain stage of maturity. All the American generations before ours had new physical horizons to explore, putting a premium on individual courage and initiative. In a nation where children grew up and promptly moved ever westward, often never again seeing parents and birthplaces, forgetting family may have helped minimize the pain of separation.

    Somehow bound up in our migratory instinct, we Americans believe in self creation, interestingly regarding great men as having sprung out of nowhere. With the exception of professional biographers, few ever stop to think about the parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins who surrounded Albert Einstein, Abe Lincoln or Mark Twain. We almost don’t want to know, for fear the facts will interfere with our unadulterated admiration. We’re a little bit the same about our own families, afraid of what uncomfortable or inconvenient facts we will find.

    But as we settle into a crowded world where no blank spaces remain on maps, many of us are feeling an irresistible urge to map our families, to place ourselves within the context of ancestors whose countless interlocking decisions resulted in the lives we inhabit today. We literally are the sum of the stories of our people. To live without knowing where we came from would be like walking around half asleep in a dark room, feeling the shapes of things but never seeing them for what they are.

    I’m sure another part of the reason genealogy is now so popular is it has become infinitely easier with the advent of the Internet and e-mail. My dad was genuinely interested in family history and I’m very grateful to him for the file he left me containing what we knew or suspected about our origins. Boy, I wish he was still alive to share in all I’ve recently learned. But his efforts were severely hampered by living in an isolated community where it was difficult to find addresses to write away for vital records. In comparison, today we live in the golden age of genealogy, when anyone with access to a computer is almost certain to discover long-lost relations in thousands of free and subscription databases. Furthermore, there exists on-line a virtual college curriculum of helpful genealogical advice for those just getting started. I realize not everyone has a computer or the money to subscribe to Web sites like Ancestry.com, but access can be obtained at most public libraries. Family History Centers sponsored by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints — nearby ones are located in Astoria and Long Beach, for example — are very helpful to everyone and draw upon the world’s richest trove of genealogical information.

    If you feel the urge to start the endless but also endlessly fascinating task of playing detective for your family’s past, the one key thing to do is begin writing down what you know. Interview family members, especially older generations, to capture their knowledge of ancestors and recollections of life. Don’t wait until they’re dead and then spend your life regretting you didn’t record their colorful stories. Copy down or tape every detail, and have them identify everyone they recognize in family photos, writing the information on the backs. Get to it now; future generations will bless your heart.

    For me, the real pleasure of genealogy is in restoring common people to living memory, not at all in searching out royalty or revolutionaries to brag about. For nearly all of human history, life was a hard struggle. Knowing my family’s miners, farmers and carpenters makes me prouder than I can say. I thank them in the only way I know how, by remembering.

Movies stick in my boyhood memories

    I’ve reached the age when I have to bite back a tendency to talk to my daughter like Yosemite Sam: “What in tarnation do you mean there’s nothing on TV? Why back in my day we were thrilled to get two channels and Dad had to wade through a snowdrift to move the antenna when we wanted to change from one to the other.” That’s the honest truth. Our aluminum aerial at the back of the house was wired to the top of a tall, spindly lodgepole pine, the kind used for teepee sticks.

    We were satisfied when we could make out a vaguely human shape emerging from the “snow” on the black-and-white 15-inch screen mounted in a washing machine-sized plywood cabinet — like Samara the ghost girl clawing her way through the hissing static in the Ring movies.

    Living on the boondocks of the reservation, gravel for the driveway was often more than we could afford. Half the year, frozen tire ruts fish-tailed up the hill to the county road. My older brother Greg and I tromped along the edge of a stubbly cheatgrass pasture to the school bus stop, climbing crude wooden steps over the barbed-wire fence in our path, dirty old black rubber overshoes lined with plastic bread sacks. Thanks to poor TV reception, we had no idea how appallingly uncool we were. I don’t know what my excuse is today...

    I can now see how the Indian grade school we attended made a pretty decent effort to give us some fun and interesting experiences, though it didn’t seem so at the time. Being near Yellowstone, thermal springs were something of an under-appreciated hometown resource, and we made an obligatory weekly trip to the Chief Washakie Plunge to splash around in its 98-degree pool. Shy as a coyote, I mostly was mortified at having to strip naked around strangers in the changing room.

    In third grade, the age my sweetie-pie Elizabeth is now, I had never been to see a movie. As a special year-end treat in May 1966, just as reckless wildflowers were beginning to hazard their first blossoms on the sagebrush-studded hills, our whole school was herded into the auditorium, we younger kids excited as spring lambs and just as ignorant.

    Whoever was in charge of selecting what we would watch earned a place in heaven that day, in my book anyway, though I have a hunch our parents might have demurred. With all the earnest and thoroughly forgettable options available — anything starring Pat Boone springs to mind — we were instead bombarded by the deliciously scary and loud Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, the 1953 schlock-classic in which a fearsome dinosaur freed from an Arctic grave by an atom bomb test rampages through New York City. I don’t know what was more shocking: The beast or Manhattan skyscrapers!

    Days tumble through a life like grains of sugar poured from a bag. Looking back, we retain a general sense for whether they were sweet or sour, but as they recede ever deeper into the past it becomes hard to say exactly what happened on any particular one. I sure can’t recall much about third grade, but my memories of the “Beast” are still sharp. It feels as if I could go out to Mill Creek and still catch a glimpse of myself, all ears and scabbed knees.

    Within a couple years, we moved into town where the Grand Theater beckoned with cavernous dark space, new movies every week and opportunities for childish high jinx. The Plains Indians have a concept called counting coup, symbolic acts of derring-do that become trophies in the tale of a person’s life. It was in the Grand where I counted a mighty one. My relatively sophisticated best friend was always pulling pranks into which I naively stumbled like a sacrificial fatted calf, but during one matinee I carefully peeled the bottom out of a paper Coke cup, held it over his lap and asked for some of his. The rest is history.

    A dozen years ago, my wife and I watched Maverick at the Grand. I was shocked to find myself in such a small place, when it is so large in my mind and affections.

My, my, it’s an American pie

    “Easy as apple pie” strikes a lot of modern people as an ironic statement, something like saying “sweet-smelling as a skunk” or “hard-working as President Bush.” But pie is, in fact, really quite easy and early-fall harvest season is a fantastic time to roll several out.

    Being wonderfully fortunate in having a marvelous baker for a mother and having her live nearby, I’ve been the recipient of many secrets I find far more personally relevant than anything I read in The DaVinci Code. (Which, truth be told, I haven’t finished and likely never will...)

    There are two main keys to great pie. Crust, of course, is one and the other, as with all cooking, is selecting high-quality ingredients. Why would anyone want to spend an hour making pies and then blow it by filling them with cheap-tasting goop?

    Great crust requires a quick and carefree attitude. As with most other important things in life, worrying and overworking it will result in something bland, hard and emotionally flat. My Mom’s pie (not to be confused with the great former Long Beach restaurant of that name) relies on crust that is simplicity itself.

    Mix roughly two cups of Stone-Buhr unbleached bread flour with about half a teaspoon of salt. Don’t fuss about exact measurements. Mix in three-quarters of a cup of canola oil, working it as little as possible. In the cup you used to measure the flour, mash together a quarter cup of ice water and a heaping tablespoon of the crust dough. After it gets slushy, mix it back into the crust, again expending the minimum possible amount of effort.

    Lightly coat your breadboard with water and smooth a piece of clear plastic wrap over it. Place about two-thirds of the crust mixture in the center of this, and cover it with another sheet of plastic wrap. Roll until you can hold the pie plate over it and see the crust is large enough, then peel off the top plastic sheet, pick up the bottom piece and gently flop the crust into the pie plate. After filling the pie, roll out the remaining crust mixture, flop it on top, crimp the edges and cut three or four air slits to release steam. (Some like to top the filling with a little butter before putting on the upper crust; I’m still undecided on this issue.) You’ll know your pie’s done when you can see the filling bubbling, spied through the steam slits.

    Filling’s the main event, and we can count our lucky stars in living where we do, one of the world’s greatest fruit and berry-growing regions. Any decent recipe book will give you good guidance on how much sweetener and spices to use, but in general I like to pick good ripe fruit and add as little to it as I can, perhaps half a cup of sugar for every three cups of fruit or berries. Honey or maple syrup are good alternate sweeteners, or can be dribbled over the finished pie slices immediately before serving. A teaspoon of cinnamon or a little candied ginger can change a pie’s whole disposition. And don’t even get me started on homemade ice-cream as topping.

    One of the pleasing alchemies of pie making is concocting unfamiliar mixtures. Some reasonably time-tested ones are pineapple and apricot, apples and raisins, strawberries and rhubarb, butterscotch pudding and chocolate chips. But your imagination’s the only limit. Apples and walnuts? A blend of different apple varieties? Apples and strawberries? Blueberries and peaches? Pear slices atop lemon custard? After you get comfortable with this quick crust recipe, take some chances, knowing you can afford the time to try something else in a couple days.

    As a closing point in my pie evangelism, let me say that every boy — and girl — deserves to know how to bake and cook. My Dad taught me to shoot a rifle almost before I could walk, using the Winchester he bought me when I was half an hour old, but I regard pie-making as no less manly and no less important.

    So come on, men! Let’s bake us some pie!

Dragons in the souls of men

    Sharpening his shovel to a butcher knife’s edge, the better to slice through hard-knotted tangles of hay roots, Grandpa Bell started his day down in the fields while the young sun still cast long westward shadows through the dewy golden grass.

    He seemed able to coax rivulets of water uphill onto the hummock of hard-baked soil where his haystack stood. It was the small-time wizardry of a tough little guy simpatico with his 40 acres. He believed in work with the same unquestioning intensity that a runner believes in deep breathing.

    Though nowhere near as dedicated to blisters and toil, I was lucky to share Grandpa’s fascination for guiding water, making it want to go sheepdog-like where it’s needed. Many’s the time during my complicated 20s when a day of tending ditch cured whatever over-dramatized malaise ailed me. Water knows its way home and can show us, too. If we let it.

    As I was coming off the field one day, who should be pulling into the yard but my Uncle Bud and cousin Danny in a $300 station wagon, complaining of stomachaches from the two-day-old tuna and mayonnaise sandwiches they ate on their way over Teton Pass. If they hadn’t been hardened alcoholics, they would’ve been goners. But then if they hadn’t been drunk, I suppose they wouldn’t have eaten putrefying tuna.

    No matter how far away he lived, Uncle Bud orbited my grandparents like a damaged satellite, calling for money and a little sympathy across empty space, waiting like the Apollo 13 astronauts for some Gyro Gearloose way to avert impending disaster.

    In the 1950s, working as a plumber at the Idaho National Laboratory nuclear facility, Uncle Bud was making considerably more than his attorney brother-in-law, my dad. But by the early ‘70s, his own personal obsession with liquids other than ditch water left Uncle Bud in the position of having to implore me, his 11-year-old nephew, to intercede on his behalf with my parents for funds to apply to his bar tab. Something about his voice stays with me after all these years. “Be my Dutch uncle with your folks,” he asked at the other end of a collect call.

    

    Fewer than 10 years later, Uncle Bud died an ancient man at age 53, coming home for good in a cheap coffin, first into the family plot, his 88-year-old dad joining him six months later, his mother outliving them both by nearly a dozen years.

    We all imagined Grandma in her later years alone on the farm entertaining herself by destroying treasured family documents out in the burn barrel. But my mom only recently delved into the old cedar chest she inherited and found dozens of letters from a lonesome 18-year-old boy in the Navy.

    Describing how his well-practiced “iron gut” protected him from bad water and seasickness, Uncle Bud told Grandma to “mention it to dad that all those days of grief for him and the rest of the family turned out to be more of a profit than a loss.” In another letter, he denies that he is brig-bait, having earned a 3.9 service record out of a possible high score of 4.0.

    

    Sitting here looking at a colorized black-and-white portrait of a handsome imp of a sailorboy fresh off the U.S.S. Antietam, I don’t know whether to interpret these and other clues as evidence of an ordinary person brought down by low expectations, or of the youngest ne’er-do-well son never willing to live up to a family that expected sobriety and success.

    Or maybe it was just bad luck that set a susceptible young man down in the Navy in an era when boozing, brawling and otherwise raising hell in port was expected. “I guess you have just about lost your baby,” Uncle Bud wrote his Ma in January 1947, in words that were sad and true.

    I’ll gather up his letters and send them along to his sons in hopes they’ll find a key in them to the mysterious man who wreaked such havoc in their lives. They can feel proud, as I do, of his service to his country and the bravery it took to leave the farm behind for the wide open sea and perils of life. As old sea charts warned, “There be dragons” out beyond the horizon, and in the souls of men.

Captain’s namesake sins

    Capt. Austin Keegan was one of the best known sailing masters on the Pacific before retiring to a quiet life of building ship models and collecting old sea stories in San Francisco. He left behind a fascinating trove of old photos and papers, his life stretching from his birth on Prince Edward Island in 1879 at least into the 1960s.

    Every life has its mysteries, and when it comes to Keegan, one of them is why the papers of such a strong and interesting man should have ended up in an online auction, where I acquired them for not all that much a few years ago. The seller told me he bought them from a Catholic priest in the Southwest who was a descendant of the captain.

    Googling Capt. Austin Keegan just now to see if I could learn his death date for what was to be a light-hearted look at some of his colorful adventures not covered in an earlier Editor’s Notebook, what should turn up but numerous stories about disgraced priest Austin Peter Keegan. “The San Francisco poster boy of pedophiles,” in the words of an assistant district attorney, he was dragged back to California to face justice for up to 80 individual cases after fleeing in 2002 to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.

    I hope for the old captain’s sake this is all a big coincidence and that this isn’t his grandson. But a life in the news business tells me that the obvious conclusion is often the correct one.

    The sad arc of some families is a common thread in the works of two of my favorite writers, Anton Chekov and Thomas Mann, although I’m not sure either ever created a scenario as tawdry and extreme as the plunge from great ship’s captain to child molester in the course of two or three generations. On the other hand, a few monsters have always been mixed among us, occasionally lurching out of even the most gracious families just as deadly tumors sometimes develop in people with no obvious bad habits. I’m not sure whether we’re better off for living in an age when the vicious predations of such fiends are detailed in sickening detail on live television.

    In 2003, on a 5-4 vote, the U.S. Supreme Court threw out a California law that in effect extended the period during which child molesters could be prosecuted. According to a news story, the California Legislature passed the law because they found victims of child sexual abuse are often too afraid, immature or intimidated to bring charges in a timely fashion. But the court majority ruled lengthening this statute of limitations after it already had expired violated a constitutional prohibition against what are called ex post facto laws, which make a crime more serious than when it was committed. Justice Stephen Breyer said that allowing the California law to stand would be to invite legislatures “to pick and choose when to act retroactively, risking both ‘arbitrary and potentially vindictive legislation.’”

    I seldom find myself on the same side of controversial issues as Justice Anthony Kennedy, but I do this time. Writing for the court’s minority, he said the majority stretched the historical understanding of ex post facto laws, disregarding the interests of child abuse victims who have found the courage to confront their abusers and bring them to justice.

    One of Keegan’s victims said, “The pedophiles are laughing. They just got a ‘Get Out of Jail Free Card’ and it disgusts me.”

    In the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision, criminal indictments were dropped against Keegan, who had also managed to absent himself to Mexico in 1995 when California dioceses settled for $2.5 million a molestation lawsuit filed by 15 men against Keegan and other priests. According to the Santa Rosa, Calif., Press-Democrat newspaper, “After the suit was filed, several people stepped forward, including the son of a former state senator and another priest, to say that church officials had ignored complaints about Keegan’s predatory behavior for years, transferring him to new assignments instead of taking action against him.” Having filed for bankruptcy, Keegan even escaped most financial consequences for his crimes.

    I’ll get around to writing more about Capt. Keegan some other time, after this digression about his namesake. But allow me to close by saying I occasionally envy Mexican-style justice. A known child rapist does not last long down there.

Indian author’s journey rich and worthwhile

    As a teenager I greatly admired The Foxfire Book and a string of sequels, sort of an amalgamation of oral history and how-to guide about rural life in the Appalachian Mountains. My family has no particular connection to that corner of the nation, but the books have a unique “voice” that I still like — plain-spoken, pragmatic and evocative of American traditions of hard work in the company of good neighbors.

    I was recently reminded of Foxfire while reading George W. Aguilar Sr.’s When the River Ran Wild! Indian Traditions on the Mid-Columbia and the Warm Springs Reservation, Oregon Historical Society Press in association with University of Washington Press.

    Aguilar is a 75-year-old Kiksht Chinookan who has been a soldier, a fisherman, transient field worker, timber faller, carpenter, service station retailer, auto mechanic and blackjack dealer. In When the River Ran Wild! Aguilar demonstrates a richly nuanced memory, a wry sense of humor and a genuine gift for writing. All Northwest people can feel a sense of pride at his accomplishment, but Indians especially owe Aguilar their thanks for recording a now mostly vanished lifestyle centered on the formerly great free-flowing fishing grounds of the Columbia River’s Five Mile Rapids.

    If I was a movie producer — and if three-quarters of movies weren’t vapid and hollow examples of corporate decision-making — I’d buy the film rights to When the River Ran Wild! Not only is it loaded with interesting facts about Indian history and practices, it is studded with many little gem-like stories about growing up around the Warms Springs Reservation in the mid-20th century.

    One of things I like best about Aguilar’s book is that it doesn’t try to paint a deceptively pretty picture. At one point in the 1950s, Aguilar and his wife Ella unsuccessfully applied for a federal relocation program that would have moved them to a big city.

    “I impatiently looked forward to the time we would be leaving this God-forsaken wasteland of a reservation that had no running water, no electricity, no indoor plumbing, decrepit housing — you name it, the Warm Springs Reservation didn’t have it.” With a tribal job, Aguilar eventually obtained financing to buy a brand-new Ford Fairlane 500 in 1958 — but then hid it behind the shack they lived in, ashamed of having such a thing when 80 to 90 percent of tribal members barely had enough to eat.

    Writing of an early-childhood shopping trip to town with his grandmother, Aguilar recalls “I watch a couple of children each drinking a bottle of soda pop. Grandma must have noticed me, for she nudged me and asked me in Indian if I wanted some of what they were drinking. I was overwhelmed with curiosity about what the taste would be like, because it looked so good. With my response of ‘Ee,’ which means yes in Indian, she dug around in her waist-carrying purse, retrieved an Indian-head nickel, and bought me a bottle of strawberry soda pop. I was awestruck by its bright, yummy-looking color.” But he wasn’t expecting the bubbles, which went straight up through his nose, and it was three or four years before he tried this treat again.

    Along with items like preparation instructions for ground squirrel — “burn off the animal’s hair in an open fire, dress it out, and skew and roast it over the fire” — Aguilar passes along intriguing stories remembered from childhood. An example: Tom Nye, teased as being “Palai,” or “not quite there,” kept toppling into the river while fishing at Celilo Falls. Only much later did Aguilar learn Nye’s guardian spirit was a river otter. “Nye knew when and who was going to drown in those turbulent waters, and he had the gift of taking that individual’s place.” True? Who knows, but it makes a great yarn.

    Recently revisiting his childhood home, Aguilar finds “only silence. The memories remain, but the echoes of the canyon are calm. No children play in the springwater pools. No sweathouse fires heat the rocks. No deer hides are soaking. No buckskin tanning. No wheat or hay growing. The fields are now teeming with juniper trees where the golden heads of wheat once swayed to the whispers of the wind.”

    Aguilar’s journey through life has been worthwhile and quietly remarkable. I appreciate him sharing it with us.

GOP is not quite so grand anymore

    The bulk of my political contributions over the years have been to candidates best described as Republican mavericks and I suppose it’s thanks to them my name found its way onto U.S. House Majority Leader Tom DeLay’s “Dear Friend” mass mailing list “as one of the Republican Party’s key supporters in your area and voting district.”

    In an entirely unintended sense, I suppose this is true. Although I abhor the coarse, cynical, radical and divisive politics that DeLay epitomizes, I have a real sense of fondness and nostalgia for the Republican Party that held its first national convention in 1854 in one of my family’s ancestral strongholds, Jackson, Mich.

    Recently celebrated by a commemorative 150th anniversary calendar issued by the Republican Policy Committee of the U.S. House, this is the party founded by anti-slavery activists. “Despite fierce Democrat opposition, Republicans passed constitutional amendments banning slavery, extending the Bill of Rights to the states, guaranteeing equal protection of the laws and due process to all citizens, and extending the right to vote to persons of all races and backgrounds.

    “Republicans led the fight for women’s rights, and most suffragists were Republicans. In fact, Susan B. Anthony bragged about how, after voting (illegally) in 1872, she had voted a straight Republican ticket.”

    This is the Republican Party that included the first woman elected to Congress, the first female mayor of a major city — Seattle, and every single African American elected to Congress until 1935. This is the Republican Party of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, who authored the landmark 1954 decision Brown v. Board of Education ending school segregation.

    In its always fascinating Survey of America, the July 16 edition of The Economist magazine brings its British objectivity to the question of whether America has become a centrifuge — a place where people are sorted into an increasingly rigid class structure based on wealth and education.

    “Americans are separating themselves out into winners and losers, according to how much they earn, where they live and how they behave,” The Economist concludes. “With this heightened sense of separation goes a more rigid and stratified politics, both reflecting and reinforcing a more hierarchical society: the antithesis of the American Dream.”

    Our national mythology says anybody has the potential of going from sharecropper to president. The Economist reports “America has never been as socially mobile as Americans like to believe” and that it’s becoming more difficult, not less so, to pull oneself up by the bootstraps. If you are among the poorest 5 percent of the population, your chances of achieving even an average income are only one in six.

    I don’t think Republican leaders like DeLay deserve all the blame for these trends, though recent GOP-driven tax cuts are worsening the split between the haves and have-nots, while paupering the national treasury. Both major parties deserve condemnation for policies that have made congressional elections largely irrelevant by virtually epoxying 98 percent of incumbents to their seats, despite the fact only 17 percent of us believe Congress shares our priorities. Because they know they’ll be re-elected, those in Congress pander to the extremes on the right and left, the people who vote in primary elections and who pose the only risk to incumbents.

    The Economist, with some silliness, bemoans the fact “the key to upward mobility is finishing your education, having a job and getting and staying married,” when this has always been true. What has changed, however, is that our nation used to be committed to helping lift people onto this scaffolding through a variety of mechanisms like federal aid for poor college students. But the cost of a good college education is spiraling out of reach — in part because of Republican policies that have shifted costs onto the states, which are forced to raise tuitions. Meanwhile, the income gap between college graduates and those without degrees doubled between 1979 and 1997.

    Most Americans are centrists. The whole Red versus Blue state conflict is exaggerated. I wonder what it will take before all we moderates — no matter which party label — take Congress back from DeLay and his ilk.

Story spells pain

    Sentimental as I am about childhood, it still makes me wince to think about how mean children can be, like chickens that peck to death the weakest in the flock.

    In our grade school class, the unlucky victim was a fat and homely girl whom I got to know pretty well. Then as now, I was in some ways kind of a snob, but even so I found it socially preferable to stand by her in line than engage in the asinine jockeying around the other boys performed to avoid being placed by her at lunch.

    By necessity, she was a tough little being and not particularly easy to like. In the psycho-speak of our modern age, we’d say she had built up a strong defense mechanism. She had just as big a soul as anyone and found ways to shield herself from the acidic idiocy of kids who squealed about catching her cooties.

    To this day, she wouldn’t appreciate being thought of as a victim. She found something at which to succeed, easily becoming the best artist in sixth grade. In a just universe, she’d today be living in Manhattan selling her drawings of beautiful horses for six-figure prices, but the universe isn’t particularly just, and I have no false optimism about how her life worked out.

    Oddly enough in a nation with so many super-size physiques, prejudice against fat people remains the last unconquered frontier of overt bigotry, as if the Old Testament injunction against gluttony gives us a license to be cruel. For all our society’s supposed sensitivity — some say over- sensitivity — to the rights and feelings of disadvantaged people, we still have more of that old schoolyard “law of the blackboard jungle” mentality than we’d like to admit.

    There’s been quite a bit of squeamish positive press about the recently published book Fat Girl: A True Story, in which author Judith Moore takes a full-frontal look at what it’s like to be a fat child and woman in America. So often beaten by her mother that she didn’t realize until much later that all children aren’t abused, Moore literally turned to comfort food.

    One has to admire the courage it takes to write passages like “I am a short, squat toad of a woman. My curly auburn hair is fading. Curls form a clown’s ruff about my round face. My shoulders are wide. My upper arms are as big as those maroon-skinned bolognas that hang from butchers’ ceilings. My belly juts out. The skin on my thighs is pocked, not unlike worn foam rubber. When I walk, my buttocks grind like the turbines I once saw move water over the top of the Grand Coulee Dam.”

    In the words of a reviewer on National Public Radio, “when you see grossly overweight people, you may well keep in mind Moore’s admonition to consider that their fat is far more than the desire run amok for blueberry pie and fried chicken ... What you’re seeing is past pain made visible. Consider that before rendering judgment.”

    For me, one of the deep pleasures of traveling abroad is getting to see lots of people in different shapes, sizes and colors than those common among we northern European tribes who settled here at the mouth of the Columbia. Although television’s portrayal of beauty as skinny, tall, white, with perfect teeth is making inroads wherever there is cable or satellite reception, there still are a diminishing number of places where being big is “in.”

    There’s something incredibly appealing about people who are happy inside their own bodies, and watching a big, bouncy woman laughing as she measures out a liter of olive oil or a kilo of tortillas in her market stall is one of life’s genuine pleasures.

    Each of us has enough to think about without devoting a single critical thought toward someone else about how they look or what food they put in their bodies. It’s time we all grew up and got over obsessing about fat — our own or anybody else’s.

Numbers tell the story

    With luck, I’ve got 366 months to live — a leap year’s worth of months. Putting life expectancy in terms of months makes it more real. I can understand a month and hold it steady in my head. They scoot by like weeks used to when I was 9, when the school-free days between May and September seemed long enough to sail around the world, with time left over to savor whatever strawberries the robins overlooked in my grandmother’s garden. (I wasn’t at all above eating the partial berries they left behind.)

    In the overall scheme of things, a human life is no more durable than the bubbles that briefly bob along the surface of a clear, quick stream. But for all its impermanence, life continues to astound me with its limitless capacity for joy and sorrow, which are often mixed together like complex seasonings in an unfamiliar recipe.

    All of a sudden, my daughter Elizabeth has reached that age when she no longer wants a good-bye hug when I drop her off at daycare. Wasn’t too long ago I had to coast the pickup down the driveway on early mornings when she was staying home with Mom — if she awoke and heard me, I’d see her pretty tear-stained face pop up in her bedroom window like a sad blond jack-in-the-box and have to return for a long parting ritual of kiss- hugs. As she now bustles across the room to greet friends, my joy about her swell little life is flavored by just a pinch each of jealousy and regret that daddy will never again be the very center of her world.

    Happiness consists of knowing this moment right now is the high point of life, especially when you have children and the opportunities they provide to indulge in rock-skipping contests, gaudy fireworks and spinning around and around until we all fall down. June is almost gone in one of the 30 or so summers I have left, and we’re going to pack it as full as we can with charcoal-colored marshmallows, tracking beach sand into the house, and grossing out Mom, which is pretty hard to do. These are the good times.

    During what was definitely a far more in-nocent era, my friend Warren and I used to bicycle five miles back and forth between each other’s houses on an empty stretch of reservation highway in second and third grade.

    Warren’s parents’ little ranch was as near as I ever got to the Magic Kingdom — my parents would no more have taken us to Disneyland than they would have sold us into white slavery, which is probably about the only way they could have afforded a California vacation.

    Warren’s mom and dad let him read those ghoulish pulp comic books in which tortured fiends wait beneath the stairs to devour 9-year-old boys, and it made me nervous to even have them in the same bedroom with us when I’d spend the night — a good kind of scared, demons held at bay by a flashlight with strong batteries.

    During the day, we’d run around like monkeys up in the rafters of the barn, where there was an incongruous stash of exotic bamboo poles or sneak into the cold, dirty darkness of their half-collapsed root cellar, where cataract-colored Ball jars held ancient preserves, probably with more botulism than green beans.

    Those were the best of times, too.

    In a TV show that started in 1967 when Warren and I were having our adventures, Sally Field played “The Flying Nun,” and I’ve been thinking how I resemble her. No, I haven’t transformed into a perky 20- year-old actress so petite that the wind can lift me by my hat, but I recall her wobbling along on one of those fat-tired bicycles that used to weigh nearly as much as she did. Recalling all the fun and independence such a bicycle brought me as a boy, I recently bought a bright blue Electra Townie — a lighter, 21-speed version of my boyhood bike.

    Among its selling points is that you can stand flat-footed on the ground while sitting in its seat and you can ride completely upright, a great thing when your back has to support a belly big as mine. So I’ve been tooling along Long Beach’s beautiful Discovery Trail through the ocean dunes, sitting high enough to keep an eye out for the tsunami (or the “salami,” as a friend’s grandson calls it). If the big one hits this summer, I have it all planned out — I’ll pedal like a madman to Peninsula Church Center Daycare, grab Elizabeth, and we’ll head for high ground.

    Nobody lives forever, but damned if I’m going to let some stupid natural catastrophe rob me of any of my precious months.

    (You can find your own life expectancy online at www.cdc.gov/nchs/ fastats/lifexpec.htm.)

Selective memory saves the vacation

    Our past two months weren’t unremitt-ingly awful. My wife, daughter and I thoroughly enjoyed the people and places we visited in Mexico. But that’s like saying we appreciated everything about hell except for the wailing of the damned and all those steamy heaps of stinky brimstone.

    It’s possible to put a positive gloss on just about anything. This is particularly true of vacation travel. Arriving home, people invariably ask “You had a good time?” in a tone that suggests they really don’t want any mamby-pamby equivocations about their implicit assumption.

    The best definition of a bore is a person who, when asked how he is, actually tells you. Similarly, most of us are self-taught to answer the vacation question with “Great, the weather was nice,” and swiftly move on to another subject.

    When you stop and think, most trips include broad swaths of time spent sitting in hard, yellow fiberglass chairs next to colicky babies, or slogging over-weight luggage stuffed with dirty laundry through cinder-block bus stations where you really don’t want to know the source of the aromas.

    It’s only after the digestive juices of time work their magic that we manage to forget the filthy public rest rooms from which the toilet seats have been stolen. With the skill of a Las Vegas cardsharp, selective memory — that most blessed human trait — shuffles to the top of our deck the recollections of laughing children, awesome pink sunrises, delicious fried plantains and rare slow tangos with pretty women.

    There’s a school of thought that legitimate travel, as opposed to tourism, requires a fair measure of suffering. This whole distinction between travel and tourism is little but silly snobbery, like the one-upsmanship of self-punishing religious fanatics — “I whip myself harder than you do.” Thus my experience is more genuine and profound.

    But if fear, tedium, discomfort, inconvenience and extraordinary expense are good criteria for measuring what a friend of mine recently joked was “a cultural holiday, one where you really got to experience the Mexican way of life, not just how the tourists live ... blah, blah, blah,” then you can call our latest annual trip down south a resounding success.

    My wife Donna is a Swede and not inclined to permit her chronic illness, or much of anything else, get in her way once she’s made up her mind. So despite some undefined misgivings, we never seriously questioned our ambitious plans for a 50-day tour of a wide arch of mountainous country around Mexico City.

    The first major clue this may not have been our best-ever plan came in March, a week into our trip. I was leading a scramble across a busy intersection in Xalapa in the state of Veracruz when I heard a burst of cursing and turned to see Donna flat on her face as the cars slammed on their brakes and a traffic cop whistled frantically trying to get them to stop.

    Over the next month, a mysterious weakness in her leg muscles eventually sharpened into a serious onset of lupus, probably triggered by nearly every Northwesterner’s favorite thing about Mexico, its bright sunshine. With her immune system busily destroying vital components of her blood, we rushed by taxi to a private hospital in the city of Queretaro.

    We did indeed escape from the humdrum tourist experience, with Donna spending the next 10 days attached to an IV, getting thousands of milligrams of powerful steroids to knock down her out-of-control immune response, along with many units of blood products. We lost count after a couple dozen.

    In contrast to the U.S., where physicians squeeze as many patients into a day as possible, our excellent young Mexican doctor, Gelacio Gonzalez Gutierrez, cleared his schedule and spent over 100 hours with us, ably aided by translator Holly Hursh. We’ll feel a lifetime of gratitude to both of them, with Donna now safely home and feeling much better.

    Despite Mexico’s rising cost of living, 10 days of tender, humanistic treatment in what almost amounted to all-inclusive, intensive care ended up costing something like a third what it would in the States. So if you plan a sudden, life-threatening illness, you could do yourself quite a favor by going down there.

    At the moment, I can’t imagine this will go into the record books as one of our best vacations. But who knows what tricks memory will play?

A toast to Grandma, and to the glaciers

    The water at my grandparents’ little stucco farmhouse was a mossy, mousy broth pumped up from a cistern concealed under a trapdoor on the back porch.

    Every few weeks, my tiny retired-machinist grandpa — his muscles skinny and hard as wire rope — would wrestle a galvanized steel tank into the back of his Jeep pickup, drive into town to the fire hall, and haul loads of water back to the house.

    Like the frost-flavored elk pot roasts from the bottom of their chest freezer, cistern water needed special handling to be palatable, and Grandma improved it by chilling it in big recycled glass jars in the refrigerator and serving it in her popsicle-colored tin cups. Drinking water was precious enough that we’d put even a swallow or two back in the fridge to save for later in the day. The cold metal would start sweating the moment it hit the hot summer air, and the sip of water inside tasted like a glacier.

    I didn’t know it tasted like a glacier until I was 15 and took a National Outdoor Leadership School trek into the high mountains, where torrents freshly thawed from the Grasshopper and Dinwoody Glaciers tumbled big boulders down steep, narrow valleys. The water was the unlikely milk-blue color of cheap Mexican ice-cream, and it left a film of pulverized quartz in the bottoms of our canteens, but tasted sweet as a cool melon on an August afternoon.

    

    Grasshopper Glacier gets its name from the frozen locusts entombed in its ice, evidence of the vast swarms of voracious, high-flying insects that used to cloud the skies of the West. Only a few years after the first white settlers arrived, the locusts disappeared forever, unmourned.

    Now, glaciers themselves are going. From the Rocky Mountains and the Cascades to the frozen wastes of Greenland, water is trickling through ancient seams, loosening and weakening the old ice that fuels rivers and feeds nations. In Antarctica, Spain-sized ice shelves are collapsing; glacier elevations in some places have dropped by as much as 124 feet in six months.

    A couple years ago, an unnamed lake 12,000 feet above sea level eroded through Grasshopper Glacier, an estimated 650 million gallons of ice water gouging out a new 30-foot deep ravine over the course of four days.

    

    Ice cores taken from another nearby glacier can be deciphered to reveal hundreds of years of weather. Flipping back through the glacier’s pages, climatologists find confirmation that global temperatures can flip like a figure skater.

    A 10-year period of rapid warming began in 1840, ending an epoch of cold in the northern hemisphere known as the Little Ice Age. This warm spell coincides pretty neatly with the onset of the Industrial Revolution, which began to pour previously trapped carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Those pesky grasshoppers died off about the same time.

    Aside from reminding me of my strong old grandma — who, to her daughter’s horror, favored threadbare shirts mended with safety pins — those bright metal cups appeal to me as a tangible symbol of a durable style of life. I bet my cousin Tom, who bought the old family farmhouse, still uses them.

    Saving the glaciers means printing fewer catalogs, buying less stuff and using well-made things until they wear out. And then repairing them and using them some more.

    Here’s a toast to you, Grandma.

Mexico is not what it once was

    The jacaranda trees and bougainvillaea are bright as Christmas wrapping paper this April in the mountains of central Mexico.

    Jacaranda blossoms parachute down in the dry siesta wind, such a luscious lilac-purple to make you wonder how they’d taste sprinkled on ice cream. Glowing red bougainvillaea climb 300-year-old stone walls like uncountable millions of Chinese rice-paper lanterns strung on leafy vines.

    These daily scenes and a hundred others fit neatly into the timeless conception that Mexico never really changes:

    • Shopkeepers vigorously scrubbing the chiseled volcanic cobblestones to greet the morning’s first customers;

    • Sidewalk juice vendors using elaborate chrome-plated presses to squeeze local oranges that are far less pretty and infinitely more delicious than those we buy in Warrenton;

    • Ancient grandmothers in awful black stockings going from café table to table asking for a peso or two.

    There is, it’s true, an almost geological conservatism that grips fundamental aspects of society in Mexico and most other Latin American cultures. Lichen may grow on your skin before you can convince a government official to do something he doesn’t want to do. Blessed saints preserve you if you need a phone installed before the end of the year.

    But, rather suddenly, traveling in Mexico is not what it once was. Nor, I guess, is living here.

    My experience of the country goes back only about 20 years, but even that recently, visiting the bottom of Copper Canyon in the northern state of Chihuahua was to step back a century.

    No electricity within 30 miles, dinner meant finding a woman to make corn tortillas on her woodstove. To accompany them, my brother Andy and I ate pickled peppers and carrots washed down with warmish beer smuggled down into the tea-total depths of the Tarahumara Indian homeland.

    The canyon’s cold, dark chocolate night was a delicious dessert delivered during our slowly eaten dinner. The moonless blackness was like that in the Wyoming caves I used to explore as a boy with my mischievous friend Cale, who’d pretend to strand us inside a mountain without a light. You could almost make yourself believe you saw patterns in the fathomless night, as they say amputees can still feel a missing limb. Down in the canyon, we forgot to bring flashlights altogether and had to feel our way along adobe walls back to our simple beds.

    In the pure bright morning, we followed a guide through an abandoned mine tunnel a mile or more into the canyon wall, dodging bats and imagining the hellish, teetering weight above us. Later we washed off with a splash among shy brown trout in the cold river.

    Now, there are two luxury resorts in the pit of Copper Canyon. One, my guidebook tells me, charges $200 a day. But all that dinero won’t buy you one pure black night. And there probably isn’t one Mexican resident within a two-day mule ride of the canyon who can afford to stay there.

    In this glorious age of NAFTA, an endless stream of working Mexicans must risk death and humiliation to flee a country so rich in dignity, comfort and tradition, and still so poor in economic opportunity for ordinary people. Everywhere there are cell phones, new hotels, smooth toll highways, Wal-Marts and other trappings of affluent modern life. But prices are up, too, for citizens and tourists alike. Talk with them, and it soon becomes apparent that plenty of middle-class Mexicans are being priced out of their own country. Meanwhile, the rich keep getting richer. This is one completely dependable constant about Mexico — and 21st century America.

    The life of a Mexican peasant was no fiesta before the global trade revolution, but it was a life — a life at home in the fields of Oaxaca, Guerrero and Veracruz, not a life running the gauntlet of coyotes and Minutemen at the U.S. border.

    All the same, it’s easy to find Mexicans who have lived in the U.S. with all its apparent advantages and opportunities, but instead choose to live here. This partly is everyone’s preference for the old familiar. More importantly, despite stagnant wages and inflating prices, life in Mexico still can be sweet as the calorie-rich candy for sale on every street corner.

    Spend a few hours under a shady tree in a clean jardán, a public garden created and maintained by Mexicans for Mexicans, and you’ll taste a life with a warmth and basic humanity that can be harder to find north of the border. Oddly enough, I think cool and stormy Astoria — another place where good jobs have been thin on the ground in recent years — is on its way to creating similarly welcoming public spaces and the hospitable spirit that goes with them. I hope, very much, that the old Safeway block can become Astoria’s own great living plaza, with fluttering pedals of rhododendrons and magnolias, a northern counterpart to the Jardán Corregidora in Querétaro, where I write these words.

Bankruptcy law change is simply sinful

    “The Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul & Pacific Railroad (lovingly called the ‘Milwaukee’ by local residents) reached Central Montana in 1907 when ‘Old Roundup’ was nothing more than a little cow town. The railroad spurred both homestead filings and development of the rich local coal deposits. Roundup coal mines soon became the principal source of fuel for railroad steam locomotives throughout the Northwest.”

    These seminal events in the history of Roundup, Mont., also are an essential part of my family’s story. Searching for a slice of the American dream and fleeing the memory of their oldest daughter’s death — crushed by a workhorse at their original farm near Boulder, Colo. — my great-grandparents and their surviving children arrived in Roundup about the same time as the railroad.

    Great-grandpa brought coal-mining savvy with him from the collieries of northeast England. This and a boarding house run by Great-grandma generated in steady income while the family struggled for 15 years to build up a dry-land winter wheat operation that lifted them into something resembling wealth. Photos show them vacationing in Salt Lake City and I have a little souvenir box they bought in Los Angeles.

    Those who doubt the reality of global warming are right about one thing — the West already has a long history of droughts — and one of them wiped out my family’s little fortune. Great-grandma committed suicide in 1923 and the 1930 census shows Great-grandpa living as a boarder with another Roundup family, still working in the coal mine at age 67.

    Far as I know, this is about as close as we’ve come to bankruptcy, and here’s hoping it stays that way. Were I ever to do it, I have visions of my ancestors clawing their way out of their graves and hunting me down like a rabid dog. But the fact is that lots of ordinary Americans who feel the same way are forced into bankruptcy every day. In truth, most of us are only one drought — or serious illness, or divorce, or job loss — away from financial cataclysm.

    

    Much as I believe in paying one’s debts, what Congress is doing to bankruptcy laws is nothing short of sinful. Acting as the agents of credit card companies that are the modern equivalent of the money-lenders Jesus evicted from the temple, a majority of U.S. senators marched in lockstep this week to gut debt-relief laws.

    Especially contemptible is the majority’s refusal to include protections for the elderly, families with children, young people below age 21 and other vulnerable groups. One recent study found that most bankruptcies are rooted in medical emergencies and other personal crises. Desperate people turn to high-interest credit cards to meet expenses and then swiftly find themselves in a morass of debt and ever-mounting penalties for the smallest slip-up.

    With every American over the age of 18 receiving about that many credit card solicitations each month, it’s no wonder there’s too much plastic debt. They lure people in with low interest rates for a short introductory period, and then set the hook with a hard yank. The vast marketing apparatus of the credit industry, coupled with rules that encourage people to make the minimum payment each month, result in virtual serfdom for tens of millions of debtors. They will go to their graves owing money to Visa and Mastercard.

    Under existing law, millionaire deadbeats can easily shield fortunes by buying houses in Texas and Florida, states that permit debtors to keep the full value of their homes, no matter how expensive. Is the Senate going to close this gaping loophole? Not on your life — the fat cats will continue to sit pretty, thanks to their pals in Congress.

    The biggest irony in all this is that congressional Republicans are themselves the biggest spendthrifts our nation has ever seen, bankrupting the U.S. Treasury with tax cuts for the ultra-wealthy while we pursue open-ended foreign wars.

    From where the U.S. Senate has taken us this week, it’s a short step back to the county poorhouses of a century ago. But if anybody is going to be sentenced to debtor’s prison, it ought to be the shameless vermin in Congress who brought us to this sorry pass.

Art objects shine light on Chinookan history

    There are utilitarian objects so perfectly suited to their purpose that they rise to the level of art. The new book, People of the River: Native Arts of the Oregon Territory, is a sublime showcase of such things from the early inhabitants of the Columbia River region.

    People of the River for the first time makes a systematic effort to display the sorrowfully small number of artifacts that survive from the Chinookan-related tribes that populated the area from the Pacific inland to the mouth of the Snake River. It is a proud publication of the Portland Art Museum and University of Washington Press, sponsored by the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde and the Spirit Mountain Community Fund.

    As Bill Mercer’s insightful text notes, objects are rare from the intertwined civilizations of these historically rich 300 miles of Columbia riverbank. Things dating from before contact with whites are excruciatingly so, but it’s difficult even to find artifacts from the 19th century.

    “Many of the villages along the river were already abandoned by the time Lewis and Clark arrived, and it is estimated that the Native population fell by more than half” due to early smallpox epidemics, Mercer writes. By the time anthropologists and private enthusiasts began intensively collecting American Indian artifacts from the upper Northwest Coast, the Southwest and the Plains, little was left here and few even bothered to look.

    

    The orphaned objects that still exist from along the Columbia tend to originate from the drier regions east of our tidally-influenced estuary, which most consider the homeland of the Chinook people. But, Mercer writes, “There is a great deal of archaeological evidence, supported by oral history, confirming that Native people have lived along the Columbia River for countless generations, during which time a general pattern of cultural practices and artistic traditions emerged.” Even things recovered from distant Umatilla, for example, thus may reveal lost secrets from the mouth of the Columbia.

    But “People of the River” manages to include some amazing things that originated right here in what became Clatsop and Pacific counties.

    Two knife handles made of bone were recovered from a village site near Seaside. They are compelling evidence of a powerful esthetic sense that must have pervaded the daily lives of the Clatsops. One, representing a man, shows a horizontal band of lines and dots below the eyes that suggest tattoos or face paint, while the other is an abstract figure of a bird of prey.

    A small carved cedar cradle lined with the tree’s soft, papery red inner bark, from the collection of the Field Museum in Chicago, probably was a very old and cherished family heirloom when collected at the end of the 19th century. It features an incorporated handle in the shape of a trickster coyote that a mother must have grasped to rock her infant to sleep perhaps two centuries ago.

    A ceremonial club carved from whale bone is imbued with a splendid and incongruously cheerful personality by use on its grip of a highly stylized smiling human face very similar to the famous pictograph on the Washington side of the river near The Dalles of Tsagaglalal, also known as “She Who Watches.”

    My possibly eccentric favorite among these treasures is a simple mat woven from cattails, a specialty of the Clatsop, used to weather-proof the roofs and walls of plank houses. Obviously highly perishable in our harsh weather, this mat is nevertheless executed with outstanding verve, interweaving vertical strips of maidenhair fern to create an undulating pattern.

    Mercer, curator at the Portland Art Museum’s Center for Native American Art, deserves high praise for this celebration of the gifted and too-long-forgotten masters of Columbia River style, form and function.

    Aside from visiting some of these objects in person in Portland, it’s worth visiting one of the stars in the collection of the fantastic Ilwaco Heritage Museum. It is the time-torn prow of a Chinook canoe. Pause for a moment to study this pragmatic sculpture, allowing your mind to wander back to a time when it was dashed with salt spray while helping speed ancient people toward a home where virtually every board and bowl were works of art.

    Take time, too, to ponder how we can translate a little of the Chinook esthetic into our own existence. How wonderful it would be to invest every day of our lives with the intrinsic importance of small things, beautifully made.Happiness comes with forgetfulness

    Ingrid Bergman, on whom I still have a total crush, is supposed to have said “Happiness is good health and a bad memory.” No mere pretty face was she.

    Just as we can never really know what’s happening inside someone else’s mind or home — sad or unpleasant surprises are all too common whenever we do get a glimpse — it’s similarly impossible for a normally healthy person to comprehend the experience of being sick.

    As opposed to the occasional routine colds, aches and scrapes we all experience in life, real illness is like an inescapable sand pit with sides that collapse all the faster as the trapped person tries to claw her way up to the surface. The memory of health lingers, alternately taunting and inspiring, like diminishing sunlight filtering down into the narrowing pit.

    In a quiet, haunting moment recently as I sat eating a sandwich for lunch at home, my long-ailing wife Donna wondered aloud if our 7-year-old daughter will remember her if she dies soon. With little more surface reaction than I might show if asked to speculate about tomorrow’s weather, I reassured her that Elizabeth’s memory has been strongly etched by her mama’s love — after all, I said, we all remember our kindergarten teachers from when we were 5 or 6.

    This gnawing sensation or dawning awareness of the fundamental fact that the world moves ever onward even when we cease to exist comes to everyone of any intelligence at some point in our very mortal lives. The desire to be remembered is, in a sense, the same as our desperate wish to live on. Though our bodies perish, we hope to survive in the hearts of those we leave behind.

    It doesn’t do to dwell on any of this. By “a bad memory,” Bergman perhaps had in mind forgetting or putting aside the sorrows, slights and injuries in our pasts, but her observation applies equally to forgetting about the final sickness and death toward which we all inexorably march. Best, by far, to follow King David’s advice “to eat, and to drink, and to be merry” and “Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might ...”

    As a species, we also improve our prospects for happiness by being forgetful about the calamities of the past. Heck, we even have a short attention span for the disasters of the moment.

    We’re particularly good at blocking out recollections of the horrifying outbreaks of disease that have often doomed entire civilizations to wretchedness and toxic chaos. This phenomenon of apparently deliberate forgetfulness is one that fascinates, especially in regard to past influenza pandemics and the one that may even now be tapping at our door.

    Our nation almost erased from its collective awareness and memory the appalling flu outbreak at the end of World War I, as if it was something of which we should be ashamed. Yet it carved itself into every family and community.

    A couple of letters I have from 1919 hint at the flu’s macabre ripples through Clatsop County. In one, the mayor of Seaside writes County Judge T. Cornelius of “a woman Mrs. Wholer living close to the old rock crusher that is in poor condition. She has no money at all. ... She said her sister living in Idaho has been sending money until the last six weeks and at that time was very sick with the flu. Says she can’t hear from her sister at all. ... “

    In another, the City of Warrenton asks Cornelius to intervene in stopping school children from “interfering with the body” in a washed-out grave. “I have not personally seen the gruesome sight but believe there is no doubt of the existence of the condition.” Clearly, awareness of the fragility of life was close to the surface in those frightening times.

    The bird flu now circulating in Southeast Asia has the grim potential of forcefully wrenching our wandering attention around to the subject of mortality. Some scientists say it is not a question if, but rather of when, this hammer will drop, when this virulent flu strain evolves into being able to spread from person to person.

    Hurried preparations are going on, but considering the truly nightmarish proportions of this disaster in the making, this is a time to put aside squeamishness about bad things. Sometimes we must openly confront the hungry emptiness of death in order to safeguard ourselves and all we love.

You are as old as you think you are

    As old photos do, it’s dwindling down into a faded spectrum of pale gray and sepia, but in the only fancy portrait their very poor parents could ever afford the personalities of the two little girls still gleam like polished silver dimes.

    The older sister, about five, is one solid freckle with bright eyes and a warm grin, dressed in 1906 high fashion with pure white lace circling her dainty neck and cascading down to her toes, two broad white ribbons holding up curly dark ponytails. A strong hand grips the hem of her sister’s clean cotton dress as the laughing blonde 1-year-old squirms to return to her mama’s nearby arms.

    In all its commonplace profundity, their entire future now loops and coils in the perishable cells of my brain. At their most basic level, I know their stories concluded in 1993 and 2000, when the protective older girl’s life wound out to its end at age 92 and her happy little sister died at 95.

    Along the way, the jagged-edged grindstone of time spun tragedies their way that should have inexorably ripped the smiles out of their souls.

    For one sister, it was a pretty 2-year-old daughter stricken with polio, a brilliant boy hardly out of his teens half blinded in a bombing mission over Nazi Austria, another son pounded into an early grave by the most abject alcoholism.

    The little sister, with a light grace and no trace of complaint, endured a ne’er-do-well husband and a boy who remained always absent as she confronted old age alone.

    The girls’ brave parents, stripped in the end of nearly every crumb of hope and good fortune, died destitute within two years of each other in their older daughter and son-in-law’s home in the swampy, oxygen-starved depths of the Great Depression.

    And yet, and yet — the sisters’ smiles remained.

    Her freckles evolved into age spots, and she was again nearly as slender as when her father could cheerfully lift her one-handed onto the back of a Wyoming workhorse. But my infinitely strong, sweet Grandma still had the same kind eyes at 90, riding in quiet amusement down Main Street at the head of the Fourth of July parade, as she did 85 years earlier tending to her baby sister Bertha.

    And Grandaunt Bertha was such a notoriously upbeat little fuss-budget that my decidedly calm and even-tempered Grandma would openly rejoice when Bertha ended an annual two-week visit and returned home to Salt Lake City.

    I’m fascinated by the way people age, at how we each contain within ourselves all we ever were, at how a wrinkled and spotted old woman is still a straight, lithe little girl somewhere inside. I imagine, as I lift my smooth 50-pound sea otter of a child from the bathtub to the bathroom counter to towel her dry, that I am in some sense tending to the aged and bent person she someday will be. I think of that old lady thinking of me, her long-gone daddy.

    It is the terror of everyone, in every age, that this natural order of living with honor, giving with an open heart, dying in dignity might not hold true. There are plenty of examples in my family of all that can go wrong. All the love in the world can’t keep wicked fate from wiping the plate with us like scraps of bread used to sop up gravy. But we control what we can and, if we’re lucky, keep smiles in our eyes and on our lips.

    Many in America see poverty as something shameful, almost sinful, but I can look back at my own family and see no blame in my people who died poor. It’s just the way life is.

    It worries me deeply, though, to see national leaders fiddling with the future of Social Security, which allowed Grandma and Aunt Bertha to live out their lives, if not in luxury, at least in warmth and with modest independence. This is no small thing.

    There’s nothing abstract or imaginary about family survival. It took generations for working people to fight our way into the daylight, where children live long and can face old age without dread. It’s a hard thing to acknowledge and face, but the struggle to secure the basic essentials of humanity for ourselves and our children is a war that doesn’t stay won.

    My little girl will still be my little girl when she’s 90, and by God, I won’t have her thrown into the cruel mercies of charity, far less the capricious whims of bought-and-paid-for politicians. Pay attention people! This is your fight, too.

Don’t be alarmed; prepare to survive

    Swiss Family Robinson was a favorite book of mine as a child and I’m still attracted to the idea of castaways successfully adapting after disaster strikes. That concept has become stigmatized under the name “survivalism.”

    Google the word, and the first result is “Survivalism. Survivalists tend to be the strongest mix of Politics, Self-Reliance, and Radicalism. .. . dedicated to preparing for a coming collapse of society, assuming the worst and preparing for it. They’re not waiting for the calvary [sic]; they’re looking to eat the horses if they come this way.”

    Read further at www.textfiles.com/survival and you’ll come across dozens of articles ranging from genuinely useful to distastefully paranoid, containing such kernels of advice as:

    • “Following a nuclear war or total socio-economic collapse, surviving city populaces will panic ... Regardless of your town’s officials’ attitudes toward such probabilities, now, roadblocks will be set up after the first influx of refugees hits. ... The roadblocks at every entrance around the town will be to screen the refugees to determine which should be absorbed into the population. Those with practical educations and those willing to do physical labor should be welcomed.”

    • “Develop an emergency communication plan. In case family members are separated from one another during an earthquake (a real possibility during the day when adults are at work and children are at school), develop a plan for reuniting after the disaster. Ask an out-of-state relative or friend to serve as the ‘family contact.’ After a disaster, it’s often easier to call long distance. Make sure everyone in the family knows the name, address, and phone number of the contact person.”

    • “There are myriad ways the water supply can be disrupted. The most common way is due to lack of electricity. With no electricity, there will be no water from water purification plants or your well — unless it is a non-electric well. The second most common way is a water main rupture.

    “In storing water for emergency uses, most authorities recommend a minimum of two gallons per person per day. This should include one half gallon for drinking and the balance for other uses.

    “Trapped water in house plumbing lines offers several gallons of clean water. As soon as the water pressure goes off, be careful to shut off your house lines from the street. This action will insure you do not draw in contaminated water or allow your trapped water to flow back into the connecting municipal system. Next, turn off the heat sources to your water heater. To gain access to trapped water in the house line, crack the faucet at the lowest level and drain the lines.”

    Other topics include “Making Pine Soup,” “Who Controls the Media,” (the Rockefeller family, in case you’re curious) and “Urine as a Survival Resource.”

    It’s easy to make light of some of the more outlandish people and ideas associated with survivalism, but the Asian tsunami demonstrates the worst can and does sometimes happen. When our own subduction zone breaks again as it did in 1700, much of the Pacific Northwest coastline will be cut off from help. And as in Asia, many who survive the earthquake and waves will face a miserable struggle for basic existence for days and perhaps weeks. It behooves each of us to spend some time planning for our family’s survival.

    Although it may look funny to the neighbors, one of these days soon I intend to take a stopwatch and see just how far away from the seashore I can get in 20 minutes, the usual estimate of how long we’ll have between a major nearby quake and the first tsunami. Seaside is to be commended for its leadership on this issue, by the way, with a community-wide evacuation exercise planned this spring.

    It’s worth noting that although towns along the ocean face the most immediate threat from tsunamis, river towns from Warrenton and Astoria to Ilwaco and Chinook, Wash., also are very much at risk. Some have convenient nearby hills, but residents still need to carefully plan evacuation and survival strategies — once the ground stops shaking, you need to be ready to move, not milling around waiting for instructions or wondering whether you need to rescue your spouse. All family members should know the plan and act upon it.

    It isn’t enough to be alarmed about quake and tsunami risk. Prepare to survive.