Editor's Notebook: 2006

My church in the howling wind

     My grandparents were typical English-style Episcopalians, never going to their own church even to get married. In England’s poor northern counties where Grandpa Bell’s parents were born, only about seven out of every 100 residents can be found in church on a typical Sunday.

     England’s allergy to formal worship recently prompted a witty story in The Times of London. The House of Commons spends five minutes a month barely listening as Church Commissioner Sir Stuart Bell gives a parchment-dry report — known as “God Questions” — about the nation’s official religion.

     “I wish, if only for dramatic reasons, that he was a bit louder. He almost whispers his answers. It makes him sound as if he is comforting someone in distress which, I suppose, he is,” wrote Ann Treneman in her Times column, Parliamentary Sketch.

     This year is the centennial of the English Hymnal. Member of Parliament Tony Baldry aroused the House from its torpor by asking what is being planned to mark the occasion, inasmuch as “singing of carols and hymns are one of the more exhilarating ways of celebrating the soul’s progress. “

     “MPs looked confused,” according to Treneman. “I think at first that quite a few MPs thought he was referring to the sole of the foot (which is, of course, always topical during the party season). Or they may have thought that Mr. Baldry was referring to sole as in fish and chips. North Sea fish stocks are a big topic here and the sole’s progress would be very good news indeed.”

     We in America are far more serious than the English when it comes to souls and religion. My own efforts last week to convince my nine-year-old daughter Elizabeth that anybody worthy of sainthood must surely have had a playful sense of humor about bodily functions did not meet with success.

     The little Episcopal Church where I sang in the choir from the age of seven was, I recall, a place where lightness was equally at home with spiritual contemplation. Until it was sold and torn down to make room for, of all things, a bank parking lot, the sun streamed through its small but exquisite stained-glass windows. The brightly colored light fell on a comforting place furnished in wood polished smooth and dark by age.

     Our church was a sanctuary from the shyness that afflicted me as a boy, and I truly did love the hymns and carols. In fact, British MP Baldry doesn’t deserve much teasing for his assertion that hymns acknowledge “the rhythm of the Christian year is not just a matter of ecclesiastic convenience but a map of the soul seasons through darkness and light, hope and fulfillment.”

     Appropriately, considering its climate, one of the most popular carols in England is “In the Bleak Mid-Winter,” with lyrics that have a certain resonance here as well.

In the bleak mid-winter/Frosty wind made moan
Earth stood hard as iron/Water like a stone
If I were a wise man/I would do my part
Yet what I can I give him?/Give my heart

     This could serve as an epitaph for the climbers who died on Mount Hood this month, caught between earth hard as iron and water like a stone. We all mourn with their families even while joining them in a fast-dimming hope for a miracle.

     Most people are puzzled about why anyone would set out to climb mountains in the winter — or in any season. And it is, quite possibly, a dubious choice for someone with children who would be left fatherless by an accident.

     But there is a special power in these cathedrals of rocks and ice, where the wind has sharp teeth and life teeters on a narrow ridge high above the abyss. There is something sacred about these places and experiences, with God seeming to swirl around in the blinding snow. Moses wasn’t the last person to go to the mountain to quench a spiritual thirst.

     Like my grandparents, Sunday services hold little attraction to me now. My church is out in the howling storm, the world powerfully cleansing itself, perhaps protected by a god who safeguards our fundamental well-being in ways that go beyond mere life and death.

     Wherever you worship, may the joy of Christmas illuminate your heart.    

For true Celts, science is no blarney

     Brand new genetic findings are changing what it means to be Irish, English, Scot or Welsh. Turns out none of us are what we thought, me included.

     It’s at least amusing and sometimes upsetting when facts get in the way of pet beliefs, but at least I didn’t have a lot invested in my ideas about my father’s ancestral line. Up until a year or two ago, my family didn’t know whether we were English, German, Dutch, French, Welsh or something else entirely. It wasn’t even out of the question we might be Finns, the nationality of some of the Winters in southwestern Washington.

     Eventually, traditional genealogical investigations made it certain that my particular bunch came over from England in the 1630s in the Great Migration to Massachusetts Bay Colony. The fact “winter” is a very old Anglo-Saxon word seemed to seal the deal: We must be from the great Germanic tribes that swept aside the old Celtic peoples of Britain in the early Dark Ages, forcing the island’s original inhabitants into the western and northern reaches.

     Taking my own advice, I decided to test our Saxon roots by sending a cheek swab away to a laboratory in Oxford, England. Weeks ticked by as I waited like a sugar addict does for Halloween. At last, slicing open the envelope from England, my eyes sailed down the page to read with surprise “we have identified your Y-chromosome as being of probable Celtic origin. “

     Celtic! Did this mean I needed to begin wearing cable-knit sweaters, try one last time to make it through “Finnegans Wake,” or learn to toss the caber?

     Well, not so fast. As the Oxford Ancestors report went on to suggest, still-developing DNA censuses of populations in Britain and continental Europe are showing that far from being the targets of successful “ethnic cleansing” by the Saxons, Vikings, Normans and other invaders, the original Celtic people of England are still very much alive and well. Studies are finding that this aboriginal DNA constitutes most of the underlying English gene stock. In other words, the English are nearly as Celtic as the Irish are.

     Again, not so fast. What does it mean to be called Celtic? Who exactly were these Celts and where did they come from? Delving more deeply into the matter, I quickly found that the Oxford analysis was faintly ridiculous in labeling the aboriginal English tribes as Celtic. And how Celtic are the Irish? Hardly at all.

     Genetic scientist Stephen Oppenheimer’s rather densely written “The Origins of the British, A Genetic Detective Story: The Surprising Roots of the English, Irish, Scottish, and Welsh,” makes a strong case for the argument that the Celts and Anglo-Saxons were, at most, small migrant minorities — Johnny-come-latelies that introduced new words, arts and technologies, but very few genes.

     Hunter-gatherers followed the game herds over now submerged land bridges into what would become Ireland and Britain between 15,000 and 7,500 years ago as the last glaciers retreated. To the extent they were anything we would comprehend today, they were Basques, from what is now the western border of Spain and France. This safe haven from the Ice Age was the genetic reservoir that produced us.

     Ireland, furthest west and maybe sooner cut off by rising sea levels when the ice melted, retains about 88 percent of its original hunter-gatherer genes, compared to 80 percent in Wales and Cornwall, 70 percent in Scotland, and 75 percent in England as a whole — 67 percent in south England.

     According to Oppenheimer, tens of thousands of years ago the Celts started out in the area now occupied by Turkey, from where they migrated along the north coast of the Mediterranean to Italy, France, Spain and up the Atlantic coast to the British Isles. Putting considerable stock in ancient Irish legends, he believes the Celts completed their major incursions in Ireland about 3,700 years ago from a homeland south of the Seine. So the Irish are French!

     When Rome took over Britain in AD 43, they found a conglomeration of tribes. Some of these may, like the Irish, have adopted a version of the Celtic dialect helpful for trading up and down the coast. But the dominant southern groups apparently already spoke an ancient Germanic language which shared the same roots as those brought over by the Anglo-Saxons, helping explain the lack of Celtic names in England. Maybe the Saxons inherited the word “winter” from an even older language.

     Genetics makes this an exciting time to be alive, able to explore our deepest roots.

     For an article detailing Oppenheimer’s DNA findings and theories, see the October issue of Prospect Magazine at www.prospect-magazine.co.uk

War is not glorious to those in it

     The calendar that hangs above my computer at work features American military images and quotations. One particularly caught my attention.

     “It doesn’t take a hero to order men into battle. It takes a hero to be one of those men who goes into battle,” said Norman Schwarzkopt, retired general and commander of Desert Storm operations. Schwarzkopt’s comment cuts right to the heart of the matter.

     A supporter of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld remarked a couple weeks ago that she didn’t expect him ever to resign, because he was still having a thoroughly enjoyable time running the war effort. Contrast this with Dwight Eisenhower, who said “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.”

     As we struggle to find an honorable and lasting end to a war we didn’t need to initiate, our debt to the ordinary men and women who actually place themselves at risk should be seared into our national soul. The lives that have been savagely shattered, the horrifying injuries inflected, the fears and discomforts endured — all constitute a breathtaking heroism that is in no way sullied by the arrogant stupidity of the politicians who found it so easy to shortchange diplomacy in their rush to depose a tinhorn dictator.

     There are no good wars, but there are wars we must fight. The American people have always stood ready to leave the safe embrace of their families to keep war out of our homes and quiet neighborhoods. In this sense, even the ill-conceived adventure in Iraq has a valid intention buried deep within its thick coating of corporate profiteering. But the goal of keeping terrorism far from our shores will ultimately be far better served by minding our own business. We will never fix the religious hatreds of the Middle East. The bravery and energy of our young heroes can be put to better use right here within our own borders.

     It’s never been easier to learn about the military service of our ancestors. Free and pay Web sites contain a staggering amount of information, while the National Archives and Records Administration (www. nara.gov) now offers straightforward ways to order copies of the vast records generated by and for veterans.

     The Civil War is not only among America’s most powerful stories, but the war and its aftermath generated a veritable bombardment of paperwork that still resides in federal storehouses. Pension files provide a detailed look into the lives of our great-great-grandparents, and can be obtained from NARA for $39 — three times the maximum monthly pension of a disabled Union soldier or sailor. Records from more recent wars are also available through the National Archives, as are a variety of other documents, including applications for land under the Homestead Acts.

     Unsure whether your ancestor fought in the Civil War, or unclear about the details? A National Park Service Web site (www.itd.nps.gov/cwss) allows you to search by surname and then pair him up with his regiment to learn exactly where they fought.

     Ancestry.com is the big dog in private on-line genealogy in more ways than one: A subscription unlocks a wealth of data, but costs hundreds of dollars a year. You can opt for an incrementally more expensive month-by-month Ancestry subscription, use the heck out it, and then cancel.

     Our national and family histories are an inspiring lesson in the costs of war. To our peril, schools spend a decreasing part of class time on educating children about why we must sometimes fight and why we should always try hard not to.

     Thomas Jefferson wrote “We did not raise armies for glory or for conquest.” Eisenhower said “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired, signifies in the final sense a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.”

     It is time to recall and live by those words.

Oysters can’t handle many more insults

     it’s hard to imagine any of today’s up-and-coming oystermen founding an innovative local environmental group, as Lee Wiegardt did with the Willapa Alliance in the early 1990s. It’s inconceivable any would risk great financial expense and unpopularity by litigiously brawling against bay-area development as Dick Sheldon has done.

     That’s too bad.

     Oysters need clean water and firm, open tideflats. At least since the last ice age, that’s what they’ve had in Willapa Bay and parts of Puget Sound.

     But as with so many other of the Pacific Northwest’s natural bounties, the century and a half since white settlement have been a time of unremitting insults to oyster habitat. Precious tideland was diked and turned to cow pasture. Suffocating blankets of sediment were unleashed from clear-cut hillsides. Invading species churned up and covered up oysterbeds. Polluted run-off oozes harmful bacteria and industrial chemicals into the water.

     And yet oystering survives, with a remarkable three pricey new oyster boats christened on Willapa this year. To call the industry’s continuing viability a miracle would miss the point, ascribing to the supernatural what really is a costly and tenacious commitment by ordinary people to the proposition that perfect water must not be sacrificed on the altar of progress.

     It wasn’t just Wiegardt’s patrician leadership or Sheldon’s guerrilla battle tactics that brought the bay into the 21st century still relatively functional and indisputably sublime. But they and a few others like them projected an energy into preservation efforts that are sadly anemic today.

     Something I wrote many years ago still holds true, for now: On a late autumn afternoon Willapa Bay glows with a pearly blue light from a surface so pure and still that it merges seamlessly with the sky like a mirage. Gaze across it to the dark encircling hills, breathe slowly until you are as calm and watchful as a heron, and a revelation may come — this place is alive.

     Even so, more and more of the bay shore is being carved up into residential lots, most on septic systems. A leak from any one of them could close nearby oyster harvesting for months. Even without a catastrophic sewage leak, the other trappings of modern residential development — from pet droppings to lawn fertilizer — may slowly wound Willapa’s strong beating heart. Puget Sound, with its dying orcas and bacterial outbreaks, is all too near in every sense.

     A fresh generation of Willapa defenders is urgently needed.

     Recently perusing the on-line collection of the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies, I was pleased to find several old family photos detailing our family’s minor historical connection to oystering.

     It’s hard to imagine a more unlikely food combination than the one my Great-Grandfather William Giles struck upon for his inexplicably popular restaurants in and around Bellingham, Wash., in the 1890s and early 1900s — oysters and waffles.

     One photo is an exterior view showing his Oyster and Waffle House next to the Palace Fish Market on Dock Street, while another shows Grandpa Giles and a helper in their aprons waiting on diners in a genteel Victorian room.

     An 1893 notice in the Blaine (Wash.) Journal touts a slightly earlier incarnation of the restaurant: “When in Whatcom call at Giles & Meyer’s Oyster Parlor, on the Holly Street viaduct, if you happen to want lunch at any time, day or night.”

     I can’t quite picture oysters and waffles together at the same time, day or night, but I still have our recipe for fried oysters from my great- great-grandmother’s 1873 “receipt” book: “Take the largest ones, and rinse them in cold water to free them from bits of shell; then dip them into beaten egg, and then into finely rolled cracker crumbs, both sides, and fry in butter, not too hot — turning them over when the first side is nicely browned.”

     The page corner still bears traces of being folded down for reference. It closes with this valuable advice: “Serve while hot ... a cold Oyster, unless RAW is not a ‘treat.’“ Words to live by.

For backpacking bliss, bring on the llamas

     It would be an exaggeration to say we crawled back to the edge of town on our hands and knees, gasping for water through cracked lips. But just barely.

     Snared into it because a couple excruciatingly cute girls from our high school were going too, I hastily signed up for a 10-day Explorer Scout backpacking trip across Wyoming’s tallest mountain range. Turns out that lugging 70-pound packs up and down granite-festooned trails through 70 miles of mosquito-clouded forests and crevasse-laced, near-vertical glaciers is less fun than it sounds.

     It wasn’t “Deliverance.” It also wasn’t the von Trapp family’s sun-dappled waltz through the Alps after they escape Liesl’s loathsome Nazi boyfriend. More like a cross between boot camp and one of National Lampoon’s “Vacation” movies.

     For one thing, the two 20-something expedition leaders assigned to the mission by the National Outdoor Leadership School were boisterously enthusiastic in ways that have always sent me into a steely, thin-lipped rage, and never more so than at age 15. After coming down off a glacier one day, they held a rope-coiling contest. Only after 40 years’ practice have I gotten to where I can even coil a garden hose, and my climbing-rope wasn’t tidy enough for them. They’re lucky I wasn’t holding my ice ax.

     Aside from a lifetime aversion to guided tours, what did I learn? Uncooked Bisquick batter mixed with honey makes a pretty good breakfast drink on rainy mornings when you can’t light a campfire. Completely break in your boots before leaving town. Don’t tailgate the next person on the trail, even if you have a crush on her. Never take mattresses and dry socks for granted.

     Somewhat surprisingly, maybe the main thing I came away with was a love for trekking. We are a walking species, or were until our oversized brains sent us down the sedentary evolutionary path toward driving our cars on any errand more than a city block away. All griping aside, my sophomore- year adventure in the Wind River Mountains was a memorable introduction to decades of happy tromping, though now mostly on short forays through the woods of home. With a 22.5 percent drop in nationwide participation since 1998, for too many of us including me, backpacking is more a memory than an annual summer ritual. Even day trips are too long for current tastes.

     There is something about an extended wilderness expedition that resets your internal odometer, a valuable distancing from the routine march of days that blur indistinguishably together. I remember my parents’ amusement when I was awestruck by all the changes I noticed in my hometown after being away for all of a week and a half. When you see the same things every day, you stop seeing them at all.

     How rapdily thangs change has been an American obsession at least since Washington Irving wrote about Rip Van Winkle’s ill-fated stroll in the Catskills, and with good reason — like it or not, “progress” is our middle name. With our national odometer having clicked over 300,000,000 this week, it’s dizzying to think of where we’ve been and where we’re going. When my active 9-year-old daughter Elizabeth is 46 in 2043, there will be 400 million people in the U.S., a third more than today and twice as many as in 1967, when I was 9.

     Considering more than half of Americans choose to live within 50 miles of the coastline or Great Lakes, by 2043 Clatsop County will go from about 37,000 people to around 50,000 and Washington’s Pacific County will add 8,000 to its present population of around 22,000. But these guesses don’t take into account that we may get more than our share of growth, or that people who move here tend to jam into a mile-wide strip along the ocean and river. Things may start to get a little snug, especially if the sea level rises.

     It would be fascinating to fast-forward, or lie asleep in some enchanted dale, and come back to observe all the changes at once rather than have them slowly pile up around us.

     My cousin Bob and I are talking about taking up backpacking again, though for my part I think hired llamas may get stuck with the packs. Nowadays, I’ve got enough weight to lug around, without strapping any to my back.

Cider captures the taste of summer sunshine

     In late September sugar occasionally coalesced out of the kiln-baked soil in my grandparents’ plum thicket, suffusing the fruit with just enough sweetness to stave off puckers and spitting.

     The plums were the size of cheap green olives, plenty hard for sling-shot ammo until fall, when the first adventurous winds tobogganed down the mountains and playfully knocked them down. A presidential administration might come and go before any survived till edibility. But when the marauding frosts lurked above 6, 000 feet for a precious extra couple of weeks, a slippery fermenting mass of ripe purple bon-bons enticed mule deer down from the hills to get plum drunk, silly as kindergartners at an all-you-can-eat cotton-candy buffet.

     Grandma Bell kept canned foods in the dark recesses lining her dirt-floored cellar, where a pump always in need of Grandpa’s tinkering stayed half a step ahead of the ditchwater that seeped through the walls. Although grandma had a Tibetan monk’s sense of frugality, I don’t remember that she ever made preserves from her plums — they may have been just too fickle — but Mom remembers a year when their pig gorged on so many it nearly re-enacted the exploding-glutton scene in Monty Python’s “The Meaning of Life.” This pig sparks another memory of Mom’s, of a year when she and her two bothers rescued a pair of orphaned mallard ducklings on the ranch and fed them so many earthworms they couldn’t close their greedy little bills. They survived the experience, still lean and coursing with enough wildness to quack up into the southbound migration that fall.

     Walking home during the first comfortable weeks of autumn, Mom meandered through the apple grove, where beckoning mottled-red fruit bent the branches so low they almost touched the tall grass, more dusty yellow than gold in the brief interlude before the snows pounced. Maybe they were a hardier variety of pioneer cowboy apples, or maybe her memories are filtered through the perfecting lens of time, but Mom doesn’t recall them having worms, only sweet juice as dessert to a one-room-schoolhouse day in the austere 1930s. They may well have been planted in the 1880s by some veteran of Antietam, thirsty for the magical elixir that a perfect hard cider can be.

     Johnny Appleseed was a real man, John Chapman, who traveled the young nation from the 1790s creating fenced apple nurseries. These were in effect operated as some of America’s first agricultural cooperatives, selling trees to neighbors on shares. In an era when contaminated water was a relentless killer, hard cider was a pure, mildly inebriating beverage that also provided a way to package and preserve many of the nutritional benefits of apples. Cider mills were scattered across the country, and provided Chapman with free seeds to encourage the planting of orchards. Increasing immigration from Germany, with its adoration of beer, combined with the disruption of Prohibition to blight the cider business. Today, most people think of cider as a less refined form of apple juice, an autumn novelty of no consequence.

     There is a sensation like biting into a crisp, tart apple when you sip a great hard cider, a rapturous transportation into an idyllic fall morning — like my grandparents’ orchard where I can still imagine the frost evaporating off into white vapor, a bright crescent moon looking close enough to touch still floating high above the sage- and pine-clad mountains. Like a good wine, a well-made cider encapsulates the best of its birthplace — I think I first could imagine England after my first taste of Woodpecker, a medium-sweet cider available from importers such as internetwines.com

     Most mass-market ciders available in grocery stores have far more in common with wine coolers than legitimate cider, being a carbonated concoction of apple juice and other ingredients. Thank heavens, we’re lucky here in the Pacific Northwest to be near the world’s most celebrated apple-growing region and several new artisan cider makers. We even have one well-regarded maker, Ford Farms Cyderworks, operating on nearby Sauvie Island, qualifying as local for those of us who aim to buy our food from suppliers within 100 miles of home. Another, Wandering Aengus Ciderworks, produces three ciders ranging from dry to medium sweet near Salem. Links to both can be found on the Web site of the Northwest Cider Society, www.nwcider.org

     Mom is making applesauce this week, another way to preserve and enjoy the essential goodness of fall. Months from now, as the rain pounds down, we’ll open a jar and relive these perfect weeks of starry nights, dewy dawns and shirtsleeve afternoons. I know my daughter, spending this afternoon learning at Grandma’s side, will always keep a perfect apple in her heart.

Why wait? Join the DNA game

     Used to be that if an ordinary person had any reason to think about genetics, it was in connection with being told “You’ve got your grandmother’s eyes” or uncle’s over-fondness for strong drink. Now, it’s somewhat plausible for neighbors to get into a genetics discussion that includes mutation rates and comparison of haplotypes.

     Most of us have seen TV programs or read news stories about DNA studies like the Human Genographic Project, a partnership of the National Geographic Society and IBM aimed at unearthing the history of human migration. By charting the genetic footprints etched into the cells of diverse populations around the world, this project will restore a great history that was lost to us, epics unrecorded by written language.

     Less publicized but perhaps with even greater significance is a monumental study organized by a Utah-based nonprofit, the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation. By analyzing the DNA of thousands of volunteers from around the world, people who at a minimum know the identities of all eight great-grandparents, SMGF plans a publicly available data base that eventually will permit anyone anywhere to determine how they are related to any other person. The mission of SMGF “is to promote a sense of connection, belonging and identity among all people by showing how closely we all are related as members of one human family.”

     As explained on the SMGF Web site (www.smgf.org), “molecular genealogy links individuals to their ancestors using genetic profiles, eliminating guesswork and dead-ends caused by surname changes and missing historical records.”

     Like all DNA studies directed at history and genealogy, the Sorenson project has nothing in common with other types of genetic research designed to understand disease or solve crimes. So far as anybody knows, the tiny pieces of DNA examined by the SMGF have no function or significance other than providing clues to ancestry.

     Nor is the SMGF’s role to give even ancestral information to those who volunteer. While DNA results and the portion of their family trees older than 1900 will be added to the data base, volunteers aren’t given their own DNA test results. For that, it’s necessary to turn to one of several private companies offering increasingly sophisticated and affordable testing, the total results of which are your haplotype.

     My distant cousin Ann Turner has co-authored “Trace Your Roots with DNA,” an enthusiastic and convincing introduction to personal genetic studies. She and Megan Smolenyak do a great job explaining how it works, identifying what companies perform tests, and detailing the promise and limitations of current technology. An interesting limitation of the two most commonly available DNA tests is that they reveal only a small percentage of our overall genetic make-up. The Y-DNA and mtDNA tests each trace a single thread of ancestry, in the first case the specifically male DNA that is handed down father to son, and in the case of mtDNA, only a snippet of DNA that mothers give to their children of either gender. Because of our cultural tradition of passing surnames along on the male side, Y-DNA tracks the origin of the long line of men — your father, his father, his father’s father and so on — who give us our last names. This is of considerable interest, but in terms of our total genes, Y-DNA and mtDNA together make up less than 1 percent of who we are.

     More advanced tests are becoming available that may bring the lofty goals of the Human Genographic Project down to a personal level. Autosomal tests, which already are included in the Sorenson project’s broad analysis, examine a wider range of a person’s total DNA. By identifying genes that have undergone persistent (but usually harmless) mutations, it’s possible to estimate how much of any person’s ancestry originated in particular areas of the world. In one well-known case, a man who thought he was African-American found he was an estimated 57 percent Indo-European, 39 percent Native American, 4 percent East Asian and zero percent African.

     DNA testing is a fascinating and affordable way to learn more about exactly who we are. Incredible advances have been made in less than a decade. Even more amazing things are sure to come, but why wait? For less than $200, you can join the game.

Cherish what you have, don’t corrupt it

     Looking down from airlines window at a wounded paradise I expect to never visit again, it was simultaneously sad and yet oddly comforting to observe brightly lit puddles — interconnected neighborhoods shimmering far below in the night. Like bacterial colonies growing across a petri dish, their shapes were crisply defined, bulging inward from the seashore up into the darkened rice paddies and forests of Bali.

     It’s a tiresome truism that no place is ever how you remember it. Similarly, no matter how incredible somewhere may seem now, there is always someone pleased to tell you how infinitely better it was 10 or 20 years ago, in the mythical past before it was “discovered” and overrun by chattering troops of sun-burned tourists.

     In the decade and a half since I last made the interminable trip around to the far side of the world, development has romped through south Bali with awesome abandon. You can buy $100 Italian neckties on a little island where it used to be a chore finding a Diet Pepsi. A multi-lane highway speeds you through what was oxen-tilled farmland — though it speaks to Bali’s persistent charms that on the day we flew home, all but one of its southbound lanes were closed to accommodate rollicking local teenagers competing in a homemade-kite festival.

     The sheer entrepreneurial energy on exhibit is a stirring testimonial to the human aspiration to create better lives. The wonderfully hospitable people of Bali are doing the best they can for themselves and their kids. But there’s a tremendous downside to the Bali boom.

     Unquestionably among the world’s best craftsmen, the Balinese have built 50 sumptuously tasteful palace-hotels where 10 would have served quite nicely. And when tourists vote with their credit cards in favor of a particular item of heavenly fabric, fearsome stone temple demon, meticulous basket or any other imaginable product of ingenious minds, the Balinese respond with not six small shops, or 60, but more like 600.

     Going to and from work every day I pass a roadside place dedicated to the manufacture and sale of chainsaw carvings. If we were in Bali, these would have been honed into a nearly Zen-like state of perfection, and then every other homeowner in Seaview, Wash., would have taken up the same activity with multi-generational zeal. Finally, there would be so many houses all making essentially the same thing that none would sell more than one a week.

     Thousands of individual decisions to build pretty little hotels and gift galleries along once-rural lanes have combined to sabotage the very qualities that make Bali so appealing. I’m not such a snob as to declare that it has been ruined — far from it. Readers of Travel and Leisure magazine recently voted Bali the best island in the world for something like the fifth time. But having seen it in strobe-flash visits separated by 15 years, I cringe to think what it will be like 15 years from now, another vapid French Riveria buried alive in its own fancy coffin.

     Bustling as is seemed during our August there, Bali actually is in an awful slump, the nearby Australians having deserted it for a variety of reasons. Combined with the deleterious effects of over-building, this fickleness in the tourist trade strikes me as a strong warning for our cool, ferny version of paradise here at the mouth of the Columbia River. We’re certainly nowhere close to having the same single-minded dependency on tourism as is true in Bali, but there are troubling similarities that bear careful consideration.

     No one — well, almost no one — wakes up in the morning and decides “Today I’m going screw up my town!” But too many people all busily building their dream houses, or trying to make money by catering to those people, are a sure ticket from paradise to purgatory. There’s a lot of resistance to land-use planning, but in absence of thoughtful and well-enforced rules, only the wealthy can afford to insulate themselves from the Bali syndrome.

     When it comes to tourism, the single most important thing we can do is work to preserve all that makes us special and unique — more eagles and fewer condos.

     Like cancer, degradations sneak up on a community, and like cancer, early detection and treatment are key. We’re not too sick yet, but we don’t have all the time in the world.

We can still learn from ancient shamans

     In a past worn parchment-thin with age, when the tribes of my people still kept a watchful eye on the gloomy forests and nasty marshes of northwestern Europe for marauding wolves and Romans, we regarded all Finns as wizards.

     Wrapped in raven’s clothes, bearing rune-scratched bones, they were the most powerful shamans in all our close, precious, capricious world. Heralded by a barking village dog, the wizard strode down from the north, pausing open-handed at the village’s ill-defined threshold before being excitedly pulled near the blazing fire — an iron-age celebrity — a spiritual doctor making a house call.

     The far north was the birthplace of the furious wind, the realm of timeless ice, of tusks and teeth and awesomely thick furs of white. The Finns, men and women who somehow confronted and overcame the screeching storms of winter in their land of silent lakes and mystery, obviously maintained strong bonds with the ancient vengeful gods.

     We speak now of times so long past that even the legends have been worn out, like snow blown back and forth across rocky ground until it finally dissolves into the welcoming air. One of the only tales recalled about the Finnish wizards concerns the magical ropes they sold, with spell-encased knots each holding little pieces of the wind, which could be unloosed when out upon the sea to propel our boats when the natural breeze fell still.

     I have a vision of my family parting with a few of the hard-fought silver coins we hoarded, handing them over to a scary northern shaman, insurance of a fair wind on the voyage of our Germanic tribes across the North Sea to a new home in Britain. I’m not too sophisticated to harbor a slender suspicion the knots may have worked — we obviously reached our destination, didn’t we?

     So far as I know, something like 1,500 years passed before any of my clan had additional commerce with the Finns, but when we did it was again to purchase a variety of magic — a Nokia cellphone — and it has to be admitted that northern technology has advanced quite a way since the knotted-rope business.

     It’s still somewhat questionable to me whether cell phones are truly as essential as they’re made out to be. Perhaps, 15 centuries from now, our descendants will look back upon them as more of a marketing triumph than a communication breakthrough, a distant echo of the salesmanship techniques the Finns employed in foisting spell-enwrapped knots upon us as vital transportation infrastructure. Still, it’s nice for my wife to be able find me, no matter where I may hide ...

     Saunas, though, are an aspect of Finn culture deserving of the greatest affection and respect. At their most elemental, the sauna acts as a direct conduit back to olden times when the Finns and Saxons shared a European wilderness that the Roman chronicler Tacitus considered hideously distasteful.

     Writing in about 110 A.D., Tacitus scathingly observed “Besides the dangers from a sea tempestuous, horrid and unknown, who would relinquish Asia, or Africa, or Italy, to repair to Germany, a region hideous and rude, under a rigorous climate, dismal to behold.” Considering the German climate so unforgiving, how much worse would Tacitus have considered Finland, with its dark and combative winters?

     The true, simple dry sauna still is a delightful cure for bone-deep cold, the pure wood radiating a healing heat that calls forth memories safeguarded deep in the cells of Finns and other northern peoples — memories of the hot Mediterranean and African climates we left behind so many millennia ago on our epic migrations ever west and north.

     So please join me in welcoming the world’s Finns to Astoria and Naselle, Wash., next week. They gather here to celebrate their intensely rich and subtly nuanced culture.

     Finns are about much more than cell phones, saunas and magic ropes. Even in these latter days, they possess strong connections to the governing spirits of the northern world, plus an indomitable sense of fun.

     Tacitus gives us guidance, telling of how the Finnish wizards of old would have been greeted by my old folks: “Every man receives every comer, and treats him with repasts as large as his ability can possibly furnish. When the whole stock is consumed, he who had treated so hospitably guides and accompanies his guest to a new scene of hospitality; and both proceed to the next house, though neither of them invited. Nor avails it, that they were not: they are there received, with the same frankness and humanity.”

     Welcome to our villages, all you Finns.

Patriotism does not announce itself

     The First World War might have been fought by the ancient Greeks for all it is remembered by most Americans. And yet only nine decades have passed since this paroxysm of military malpractice was burned into the souls of a generation like a magnesium flare eating through tender flesh. The lives of young men were spent with feckless contempt — the mind-numbing waste excused with the huckster’s lie that this would be the war to end all wars.

     Fourth of July smells like Blackcat firecrackers and tastes like fried chicken raised on earthworms and kitchen scraps. Or so at least it seems in that cherry bomb-sized kernel of sharp boyhood memory that bounces around inside my untidy brain.

     World War I doughboys sat around the rough plank table where our Independence Day meal was served, nursing nasty Roi-Tan cigars and icy tall-boy bottles of Miller High Life. They were quartz-hard and serious men, not philosophically opposed to laughing, but with a living tendril of raw nerve still snaking back into the bloody trenches of France and the Great Depression that soon followed. The posing, posturing patriotism of politicians was of no more consequence to them than the latest fashions in Vogue magazine.

     These men, Pete Facinelli for one and my almost equally curmudgeonly right-wing Granduncle George Bell for another, would no more talk of wartime exploits than prance down Main Street wearing one of the aforementioned frilly frocks. This reticence was particularly noticeable since they weren’t otherwise shy about storytelling. Pete, especially, was always quick with a tale of his life in the mines.

     In an episode worthy of the demythologizing HBO Western series Deadwood, he once told of how a foreman with a grudge against a prominent Chinese offered him a dollar to cut off the man’s queue, the lifelong pigtail that assured traditional Chinese a place in heaven. Pete had never possessed a whole dollar, and agreed to the mission only once it was explained to him that a dollar consisted of 20 nickels. Although cultural sensitivity was, in all fairness, never one of the strongest of Pete’s many good qualities, he had no idea what serious business this was: Writing in 1876, a western missionary noted “the man who deliberately cuts off another’s queue, loses his own and his head with it in consequence.” Pete barely escaped with his throat intact, but got his dollar.

     When it came to war, Pete and his peers seemed to have no use at all for stories, implicitly believing in the ancient Chinese adage that “Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know.” But although their uncomplaining heroism was deeply admirable, it’s likely the stoicism and agreed-upon amnesia that followed World War I contributed to the subsequent horrors of World War II. The Great War’s estimated 16.3 million deaths became just a down payment toward the 62 million killed from 1939 to 1945. Arguably, the World War II generation has done a better job preserving our collective memory of the crushing personal cost of war.

     Patriotism isn’t — or at least shouldn’t be — a simple-minded matter of waving the flag and calling down God’s wrath upon whomever the sitting president has decided is our enemy. Real American patriotism consists of getting up and going to work, caring for family and leaving everyone else the hell alone. Far too many voters are easily fooled by politicians quick to prostitute the memory of the honorable and sacred dead in the service of corporate greed. Being mighty isn’t what makes America great. America is great only because its people are. We need a lot fewer smart weapons and a lot more smart leaders, a lot more firecrackers and a lot less swagger.

     Pete and his marvelous wife, Pluma, a giantess in spirit even more than in body, virtually lived in their vast vegetable garden in the summer. Pluma’s famous cucumbers, source of at least 10,000 Mason jars of pickles, spread out across the hot black soil. Biting into a charcoal-broiled cheeseburger crisscrossed by crisp dills, this July 4, I’ll think of Pete and Pluma, and their quiet lives of integrity, strength and courage. Patriots.

Meet the bears in my neighborhood

     Black bears top out at only three feet tall at the shoulder and 225 pounds, according to the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. But someone forgot to restrict the diet of our neighborhood’s dominant male bruin, who is easily four and half to five feet tall and 350 pounds.

     His intimidating size didn’t stop our dauntless one-foot-tall, 40-pound girl-dog from chasing this brute into the woods last week, down the hill into the hollow below our house where a shredded carpet of slobbery litter bespeaks his powerful garbage addiction. The people of a downtrodden African village could thrive on the good food thrown away by residents of a typical small American neighborhood, so it’s no wonder our bear is becoming a sideshow freak. I have visions of him someday having his stomach stapled, toning up, and appearing on Oprah, extolling the healthy macrobiotic grub-and-berry diet.

     Bears and sharks are alike in growing about 50 percent in the telling, especially when spotted in the wild and not behind zoo barriers or aquarium glass. As with the fish-that-got-away, our tall-tale gene takes hold of the facts and inflates them into something worth repeating around a campfire. When it comes to ego glorification and goosebump production, what good is a nerdish shark or a bear no bigger than a stuffed one you could win playing pull-tabs at the corner tavern?

     But I can honestly defend my size estimate for our local papa bear, since we also have a number of little guys that genuinely are the meager specimens proposed by WDFW. There are so many muddy bear tracks of various sizes crossing the street next to our house that I first mistook them to be the footprints of a large party of surveyors traipsing through the woods. (With the Long Beach Peninsula still in the grips of an unprecedented building boom, rampaging surveyors are common as bears, if usually not quite so hairy.)

     A visitor was in our office saying he caught a glimpse of one distant bear while driving through Yellowstone, but saw four at close quarters in the space of a few minutes at the peninsula’s Leadbetter State Park, including a mama who defiantly stopped traffic while her shy second cub worked up courage to scamper across the road.

     In crass economic terms, our region is a true-life Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom that would draw packs of nature tourists if it were better publicized. With a little patience, knowledge and luck, in one day a person here can experience bears, sea lions, elk, otters, seals, eagles and a host of other interesting critters that we all take for granted but which are amazing novelties to most modern Americans. A friend in Oysterville told me of how fascinated customers at his store are at a semi-wild raccoon, which is kind of entertaining the first few hundred times you see him. But how much more so is a bear or an otter?

     At one secret spot I stake out for otters, I recently was rewarded by the sight of a lanky juvenile fishing in the slough, having obvious fun in the way of his species. He was successful and took his catch up to a muddy bank — just below where I stood — and set to eating before noticing me out of the corner of his eye. He sat erect with a surprised “Where did you come from, you sneaky bastard?” expression, before swiftly slipping into the water to examine me more closely from its safety. He’d take a look and dip beneath the surface, slyly trying to elude my gaze, not realizing his position was given away by a distinct trail of bubbles. I wouldn’t trade this experience for a thousand dollars.

     Speaking of witnessing wild things, I’d swear I saw a funnel cloud between Ilwaco and Astoria last Friday evening. A crisply formed tube snaked out of the bottom of a dark rain cloud, extending downward a good way but stopping some 500 feet above the Columbia. It’s the first I’ve seen, and a curious beast it was, a peculiar thing of mindless energy and destructive potential. I vote for trapping and releasing them somewhere they can’t harm my family and the bears.

     As the world discovers our choice, long-overlooked wonderland at the mouth of the Columbia, only careful and deliberate planning will ensure there always is space for our wild neighbors. I hope we have the wisdom and strong hearts necessary to preserve this essential aspect of life on North America’s fine western edge.

We’re immortals today, gone the next

     Ilwaco’s fire siren started to wail a couple of Sundays ago just as we passed above one of my alternate dog-walking paths, an abandoned logging road in the new high-end Discovery Heights subdivision. My news-gathering instincts barely wiggled. Electronic alarms appear to be about 98 percent false. But my ears and my dog’s both pricked up at the sound of a weird undulating siren much closer at hand. A moment’s puzzlement dissolved into amused entertainment as I realized that down in the blackberry thicket off to one side of the road, six or eight coyote pups were singing in unison with the siren, the mama of all coyotes.

     I’m a connoisseur of forgotten and overgrown old roads, which in our lush region are sort of leafy green hallways leading to surprising little clearings above the ocean, haunted coastal artillery bunkers and the moldering stumps of giant cedars left over from pell-mell land-clearing a century ago. My limited knowledge of botany and the other natural sciences tells me that much of what I appreciate near home has little relationship with the original, wild nature of this place. The grass, dandelions, blackberries and perhaps even some of the spiders are all invaders that tagged along with us Euro-Americans. Even so, I love each of the paths I walk. Thriving life, even a carpet of weeds, has value and charm.

     So I was saddened to see progress come to the coyotes’ road, as a grader last week cleared the way for another row of residential lots. This isn’t to suggest I would have intervened to stop it if I had known. People need places to live, too, and these developers are good folks who love the place as much or more than I do. Some part of me still mourns all those spiders, bustling through their lives one second, and the next churned into the soil. I suppose it’s not much different for us, blithely acting like immortals one day and gone the next.

     In his Ecclesiastical History, the great eighth century English cleric the Venerable Bede beautifully expressed this thought.

     “Thus, to me seems, O King, the life-span of humans at present on earth, in comparison to time as a whole, of which we know so little: it is like when you are in your hall feasting with the war-leaders and councillors in the cold season, and a fire has been kindled in the centre of the hall, warming the chamber, while outside the whirlwinds of winter rain and snow rage over everything — then at great speed a sparrow flies through the chamber, coming in one door and exiting soon after by the other. During the time it is inside the building it is unaffected by the wintry weather — but only a fraction of time is passed in comfort before it must leave, and repassing speedily from winter into winter, it is hidden from your eyes. Such the life of man on earth seems to me. What follows it or what comes before, we have no way of knowing.”

     In some ways I share my ancestors’ belief that we remain alive in the world to the extent to which others treasure our memory, repeating our names, recounting our exploits and achievements. One of the great rewards of living a long while in a community is getting to know local heroes and heroines, the people who weave our towns together. As a smalltown newspaper, one of our best purposes is celebrating these people.

     One such was Noreen Robinson, a friend of mine who died May 20 at a good old age. Noreen was a friend to hundreds and perhaps thousands, someone who understood and thoroughly appreciated Ilwaco, savoring it like I do a neglected country lane. She always saw what many others are only now discovering, that Ilwaco and the Peninsula are remarkable in terms of beauty and personality. Though rightly celebrated as the driving force behind the surprising Ilwaco Heritage Museum, Noreen will always have a special place in my heart because of her deep belief in young people.

     Life’s path brings each of us into the light shone by fine people. It’s up to us to open our eyes and see them, warming ourselves on our swift flight from what comes before to the final mystery that awaits us all.

Folklore honors the mystery of life

     “Celt envy” partly explains English attitudes toward the folklore and cultural heritage of England. The colorful “pure” Celts of Ireland have their own long-running National Public Radio show in “Thistle and Shamrock,” leprechauns and the luminous Book of Kells, to say nothing of Guinness beer and James Joyce.

     The English, in contrast, are defined by over-boiled vegetables, expressionless young palace guards in queer hairy hats, and a misbehaved and outmoded aristocracy. When I was about 14, I told the credulous neighbor kids we were French-Canadians, thinking even they were exquisitely exotic compared to the English (and was thoroughly insulted when their parents set them straight.)

     There is, it turns out, a rich and entertaining font of English customs and beliefs the Folklore Society began collecting in 1878 from the island’s eccentrically distinctive counties and hamlets. The Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore, summarizing these cultural roots, is an amusing tool in my quest to reconnect to my “inner-Englishman.” While it probably won’t become a bestseller in the Scandinavian strongholds of Ilwaco and Naselle, it is stuffed with luscious details from England’s complex tribal past, a savory genetic stew of the prehistoric Celtic Brythons, the Romans, Saxons, Angliis, Vikings, Normans and others.

     Uncountable generations of my Great-grandmother Annie Weston’s family have lived in and near Bishops Cannings, Wiltshire, the residents of which are known as moonrakers. “Once, some smugglers from Bishops Cannings had hidden barrels of brandy in a pond, and were spotted by Excise men while trying to retrieve them. Challenged, they replied that they were ‘only raking for that big cheese down there,’ pointing at the moon’s reflection. The Excise men believed them — more fools they!” (Nowadays, the moonrakers continue to get the best of the outside world by promoting crop circles in this area up the road from Stonehenge.)

     The dictionary entry for “Dogs” provides a helpful charm to calm my 9-year-old’s nerves after an evening watching the mildly scary TV shows she craves. (Hopelessly behind the times, we’ve been watching “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” on DVDs.) From 1686 — “I believe all over England, a spaied bitch is accounted wholesome in a House; that is to say, they have a strong beliefe that it keeps evill spirits from haunting of a House.” I always suspected our little corgi Bina was more powerful than she lets on, but a ghost buster? I’ll be darned.

     Our house also is amply guarded by holly, “generally protective against witches and other evils.” It’s been considered unlucky to cut down a holly bush or tree since at least the 15th century. I’ve certainly always avoided cutting them, and my luck is pretty good, knock on wood.

     The belief that knocking on wood — or touching wood, as they say in England — counteracts the tempting of fate brought on by a boast is one of those superstitions we all vaguely assume has been around forever. Without evidence, some speculate it stems from ancient worship of tree spirits, while others think it calls forth the protection of Christ, with his cross made of wood. But in their folklore dictionary, authors Jacqueline Simpson and Steve Roud say absolutely no reference can be found to ritually touching wood before 1805, and that it otherwise first shows up later in the 19th century mostly as an element in children’s games of tag.

     In fact, most current superstitions appear to be of remarkably recent vintage. For instance, nobody gave Friday the 13th an extra thought before the 20th century, although Fridays in general were considered unlucky as early 1390, possibly because of the old Catholic idea that Fridays were a day for penance. (Good Friday was an exception, being known as a perfect day for planting peas and potatoes, since “the Devil had no power to spoil crops planted on this holy day.”) Because they mark the end of the work week, most modern Americans have a benevolent view of Fridays, showing popularity comes to all things in time, if not necessarily to all high school students.

     English traditions centered on fishing have a special significance here on the Columbia and Pacific. Befitting England’s maritime heritage, there are a bunch of them. For example:

     • On his way down to his boat, fishermen thought it unlucky to see a rabbit, pig or woman. But worst of all was “to turn back after you had set off from home — even looking back was avoided.” In a similar vein, families must not wave him good-bye.

     • “Talking in plain terms about the size of a catch was to be avoided as tempting fate and many words were avoided altogether.”

     • “One of the strongest taboos was the word ‘pig,’ and fishermen and their families would go to extraordinary lengths to avoid saying the actual word,” spelling it out instead or using euphemisms like “porker.”

     • Whistling was regarded as very dangerous, conjuring up disastrous winds, “although in sailing days a little judicious whistling might be necessary if you were becalmed.” A whistling woman was a particular anathema, according to folklorists.

     • A child’s caul, a membrane that sometimes covers the heads of newborns, was believed to protect against drowning. Cauls were often advertised for sale up through World War I, with an asking price of 30 gold guineas in 1799.

     Having now read a third of the folklore dictionary, I haven’t yet found many practices or beliefs I intend to incorporate into day-to-day life. But it’s nevertheless charming to contemplate a place and a time when girls believed saying “Rabbits!” on a month’s first waking moment guaranteed good fortune for the rest of the month.

     All our ancestors, English or not, relied on whimsy and ritual to guard their passing days. We haven’t just suddenly lost our need for these essential connections to the natural world and human traditions. Even Einstein acknowledged science can’t provide all the answers we seek. Humans are defined by the need to quench this thirst by seeking out the depths behind the surfaces of life.

     Whether we search for still-relevant folklore from our past, or create brand new traditions, we owe it to ourselves and our children to honor the mystery and vitality of the world that gives us life.

Roping snakes

     “Yep, I remember Mom coming in from the hills dragging her lariat with a big rattlesnake in tow. Dad cut it open and a nearly full size cottontail rolled out. It wasn’t long after that that I was allowed to make those rides into the hills to look after the horses.

    “That was when, on hot summer afternoons, I would have to ride clear to the top of Red Butte to check them out. Mom had taken me on some checkout rides first, to show me where she usually found the small band of horses. Those were some of the most pleasant days of my boyhood. I know your mom would have liked to have been able to do that. But she became a very good rider in her own right.”

    Expanding on a thread of recollection provided by my mom, my Uncle Tom recently e-mailed me this evocative little vignette about childhood high up in the aspen and sage-clothed mountains. I’m ever thankful that writing and talking are among my family’s most cherished traditions, though I don’t have anything approaching my uncle’s relaxed grasp of language.

    Tiny old photographs show my mom and uncle as they were when Grandma was still roping snakes — warmly wrapped ranch kids, Tom, two years the elder, wrapping a protective arm around his polio-stricken little sis Lois, along with their youngest brother Bud. They eventually parented 10 boys in a row before adoptions finally brought two girls into the lineup, along with yet another boy. All 13 of us, along with dozens of grandchildren, great-grandchildren and even a great-great-grandchild or two, are joyful that Tom and Lois are still in our company after all their lively years. Tom recently turned 82 and my Mom turned 80 yesterday.

    The two of them used to ride miles to a one-room school, a white clapboard rectangular box fronted by a phalanx of wooden steps where photos show gatherings of generations of local families. Standing like a solitary outcropping of pale stone jutting up through a dusty prairie, the schoolhouse was a world of its own, a busy beehive of humming young minds harvesting Latin lessons and multiplication tables amid the wind-swept spring wildflowers and the swirling eddies of powdery winter snow. Mom still shivers thinking of the bitterly frozen morning when their horse spooked and dumped them into a drift, leaving them to shuffle a half mile to the woodstove-warmed classroom.

    One honest memory from any family’s past is infinitely more valuable than all the surrogates our culture creates for real experience, from television to computer games. To have my mother living nearby is an incredible privilege, a direct connection to the past for me, my wife and daughter. Listening to her stories of working as an X-ray technician serving the poor broken and burned boys of World War II at Portland Emanuel Hospital, or as a telephone operator dealing with awful old lady Schwinn of the bicycle empire, is worth more to us than any quantity of packaged corporate entertainment or diversion.

    All of us so lucky as to have jobs in journalism, especially within a company as devoted to community service as this one, count it a key benefit that we have so much license to ask people about their lives. Taking time to listen, especially to the stories of older people, is one of life’s most richly rewarding occupations. But you don’t have to be a reporter or editor to enjoy the benefits of curiosity.

    Spending time among older people, open to all they have to say, is an essential part of every childhood and mature life, one that is in sadly declining supply in today’s fractured and distracted culture. In the past century we’ve lost a lot of what turns human animals into human beings. Severing our connections to older family members and our ancestors threatens to drain the blood from our society, turning us into mere consumers.

    By 2050, an estimated 2 billion people will be age 60 and older, and yet America and most other advanced nations celebrate the supposed accomplishments and allegedly cutting-edge tastes of youth. Though they certainly are a powerful political force, the elderly ought to play a far more important role in society by becoming active in the lives of young people.

     Talking, writing, listening — these are great treasures accumulated one Sunday dinner at a time. Turn off the TV and spend the time conversing with the flesh and blood people in your life.

My boyhood of revolvers and rifles

     Wilson basketballs and sweat-darkened baseball gloves are essential artifacts of many boyhoods; Winchester rifles and frontier Colt revolvers are mine.

     Dad gave me a rifle the morning I was born. I was pumping innocent targets full of hot lead about the time I learned to walk. Afternoons at the shooting range with Daddy, learning to squeeze off careful shots in the thin Wyoming air, are among my earliest treasured memories.

     My two brothers and I shot countless tens of thousands of rounds. In an era when real men never heard of hearing protection, we discharged clips of .45 automatic ammo from Dad’s service pistol as fast as we could reload them. A retired colonel with years on the U.S. Army marksmen team, Dad had a limitless supply of bullets courtesy of his officer corps pals. We had enough .30 caliber M1 carbine match ammo to launch a coup-d’etat. I have something like 50 percent hearing loss on my right side thanks to decades of shotgun and rifle discharges inches away from that ear.

     That was Dad’s only divergence from accepted safe shooting practices. In brief summary, we learned never to point even a toy gun at another person. When handed a firearm, we check if there is a cartridge in the firing chamber, no matter whether the person handing it over thinks it’s empty. In the field, we do not discharge our weapons until we’re certain exactly what is in our sights, and what is beyond our intended target.

     Though I rarely shoot nowadays, two events recently brought all this to mind.

     The first is my fellow Wyomingite Dick Cheney “peppering” another bird hunter.

     On the occasion of Cheney speaking to the Wyoming Legislature after the accident, I heard a man purporting to be a Wyoming hunter say to a radio interviewer the shooting was no big deal, that such little boo-boos are commonplace amongst he-men of my homeland.

     What a moron. In 20-plus years of bird hunting, I never saw or heard of anybody getting hit by a shotgun blast.

     The Republican big-shot (pun intended) lawyer Cheney peppered within an inch of his life actually said he was sorry for all the bother. As The Daily Show’s Jon Stewart observed, just how powerful do you have to be to get an apology from a guy you darn-near killed? In my world, “peppering” a fellow lawyer would get you pistol-whipped. Within six months, you’d be living in a cardboard box with your hunting dog after the ruinous lawsuit, trying to figure out how to come up with your child-support payments.

     I deplore the mess Cheney has helped create for our nation, but I don’t totally share the view of those who view him as a hell-rotted Rasputin-like figure pulling Bush’s strings. He was an impressive and coolly courteous man in our several interactions, even though he quite obviously regards talking to reporters as an experience slightly less desirable than getting lice. I don’t think he got us into Iraq to enrich Halliburton. We shouldn’t be there, but much as I enjoy doing it on occasion, demonizing Cheney or Bush doesn’t really accomplish anything.

     All this comes down to saying I’m not an elitist West Coast knee-jerk Cheney hater, but it irks me when his hangers-on so avidly leap to excuse a careless blunder like shooting a friend in the face. He deserves to be ashamed.

     Curt Gowdy’s death Monday is an event that sparks pleasant recollections of shooting and hunting. He was a very nice man who was often back in his home state, with time and a kind word for anyone who approached him at the Hitching Post in Cheyenne or his other haunts.

     A generation of American kids grew up listening to his calm, distinctive voice calling seven Super Bowls, 10 World Series and a host of other athletic events, including seven sets of Olympics back when the whole nation was enraptured by the games — they were less commercialized but a bigger deal, a proxy for the old Cold War.

     It’s perhaps most for hosting The American Sportsman for ABC that I remember Gowdy. Buddying around with the likes of Ted Williams, he perfectly symbolized everything wholesome and fun about hunting and fishing — a true role model for everyone who has ever held a fly-rod or a 12 gauge.

     It’s a safe bet Gowdy never peppered anybody.

Weather puts faint hearts to the sword

     Wind, gale and storm — nice names for mischievous, artificial-breasted triplets in a WB or UPN cable TV series, but entirely inadequate to describe our winter weather. Snarl, gnashing fangs and Armageddon. Ogre, scream and misery. Wreckage, terror and Hitler. These would be better descriptors for the rampaging barbarian horde of North Pacific fronts ravaging the coast.

     “Tonight’s forecast calls for a 40-mph snarl rising to a blood-curdling scream after midnight. The Weather Service has issued an Armegeddon warning for tomorrow morning with 30-foot swells on the Columbia bar. A series of Hitlers are expected to blitzkrieg the coast for the next three weeks, but the long-range outlook is for gnashing fangs backing off to wreckage by mid-to-late April, or July at the latest.” See? Even a recent arrival from Southern California would have a pretty good idea what to expect.

     You can tell I have a desk job: I actually like coastal weather. Seattle’s climate — an anemic shadow of ours, with far less rain but endless gray skies — would be a wet diaper on my soul. In contrast, in the hours running up to a really juicy cataclysm of the sort we’ve been getting every two days since Christmas, I can feel sparks leaping between the neurons of my brain like the wildly arcing electricity in the original Frankenstein movie.

     During a brief quiet intermission in our pitchforks-and-torches weather Sunday, my daughter Elizabeth and I explored the lonesome dunes at Cape Disappointment’s uttermost tip, where repairs to the North Jetty seem to have kick-started the ailing beach-building system. As much as five feet of sand have piled up immediately north of the jetty in recent weeks. Although coastal erosion remains a serious long-range threat because of ill-considered alterations in the Columbia’s sediment-transport system, it felt great to walk on a little new land after a decade of inexorable losses.

     The growing dune at least temporarily sealed off a sandy channel that runs just leeward of the jetty, giving us a dandy wind-shielded path out to the ocean. Long before appearing with other Star of the Sea schoolchildren in their recent Missoula Children’s Theatre production of Robin Hood, Elizabeth initiated a series of epic sword fights with her daddy. We threw ourselves into another bloodthirsty stick-battle in our little canyon by the jetty. She whispers to cue me whenever it’s time to lose, sending my weapon flying. Although I plead for mercy, I’m pleased to lose my heart every time.

     Sword fighting is in our genes. Following up on an idle mention in a conversation, my colleague Patrick Webb at The Daily Astorian identified archival records for one of my ancestors who served as an able seaman on the 100-gun HMS Britannia in the Battle of Trafalgar — last year’s other bicentennial. Playing the smallest of bit roles in one of history’s most remarkable naval engagements, he would likely have been part of a gun crew or manned the rigging as the British fleet under the command of Adm. Horatio Nelson hammered through the French line, foiling Napoleon’s plan to invade England.

     Surviving the battle, his exultation perhaps turned to tears as word spread through the fleet of Nelson’s death aboard the HMS Victory. (Sometimes I feel my family is like Forrest Gump, popping simple-minded into key historical events. Maybe there were just so few people back then that any commoner who stood in one place long enough was bound to be thrust into the affairs of the high and mighty.)

     Being rated “able” meant he was able to take over as the main helmsman, keeping the ship on course. As I stand guard in the snarling wind while our fastidious little dog selects a perfect place to tend to her business, I amuse myself by comparing my task with my ancestor’s. We both taste the salt spray in our teeth. The ogre-like storm tears at our foul-weather gear, ripping our exhaled breath out into the dangerous night. I hurry indoors to watch Alias on dvd. He stands at the Britannia’s wheel forever, steering his ghost ship toward a rain-cleansed morning under a young and playful sun.

Harnessing hot air is one cool sensation

     One night earlier this week, I dreamt of inflating a luminous red balloon, alone in a silent landscape. Ascending in its basket from within a circling bowl of sun-burnt hills, I watched a towering range of ice-blue mountains swiftly rise above the horizon, as if an eccentric theater curtain was being lowered to reveal an unimaginably lovely stage set.

     Flying in a hot-air balloon is a powerful recurring theme in my dreams. This probably could provide a wealth of material for years of costly Jungian analysis if not for the fact that piloting hot air balloons is in reality a treasured experience of my teenage years.

     Some might argue that learning how to harness hot air is an apt preparation for my later careers as political spokesman and newspaper columnist. They’d be right.

     Balloon navigation requires nearly intuitive calculations concerning constantly changing wind speed, air temperature, elevation and terrain. Steering one is like riding a giant soap bubble in turbulent air, a sort of slow-motion chess game in which you must always know precisely where you are, while constantly revising plans several steps ahead about how to get where you want be.

     Spitting is the ballooning equivalent of political polling. Balloons can no more go against the wind than a jellyfish can go against the tide, so the secret is to know that the wind is usually blowing several directions at the same time at different heights above the ground. Before a flight, meteorological reports provide some insight into winds aloft. But during flight, you must unleash a generous loogie and observe how the winds warp its long plunge earthward. Permitting the balloon to cool slightly, you descend into the wind layer going closest to the direction you desire. If all goes perfectly well in a flight, you can ascend, zig-zag around the countryside for a couple hours, and then land nearly where you first took off. More often, your frustrated chase crew must drive up and down obscure country lanes to find the remote cow pasture to which the winds have delivered you.

     Depending on the basic principle that heated air is lighter than the ambient atmosphere, smoothly ascending or descending takes a practiced feel for the delay between starting to increase your balloon’s internal temperature and when it starts to take effect. The true trick though, at least a small-scale joyous occasion, is a combination of skill and conditions that permit perfectly level flight a foot or so above the rippling surface of a lake or hayfield. Gliding along like a gargantuan swallow that no hawk would ever fool with, you feel the kind of pure pleasure that’s intrinsically impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t done it.

     If winds are the balloonist’s greatest ally, they also are his most feared foe. In the first place, filling a vast nylon bag using what amounts to a giant blowtorch is hazardous if not impossible in anything but the lightest breeze. But it’s during landing that the wind can be most deadly, dragging your basket into rocks and fences or causing your envelope — the fabric portion of the balloon — to collide with power lines. Getting hung up in arcing electric lines while standing in a big wicker basket loaded with propane tanks isn’t something you want to do, even in these days when internal suspension cables are made from nonconductive Kevlar.

     Like many balloonists, I got my start at the old Balloon Ranch in the amazing San Luis Valley of Colorado, rising every morning in the magically still hour before dawn to fly before the hot summer sun could cause temperature differentials that cause unpredictable thermals and winds. Soloing was one of life’s grand experiences, sailing through the cold crystalline air “when young Dawn with her rose-red fingers shone once more.”

     Standing on a solid wooden floor as the world slides by a mile beneath you is to feel a touch of the divine. In the long pauses between the roar of your burners, there is a perfect silence. Traveling at one with the wind, there is a profound calmness, a sense of fundamental health in all the world. Is it any wonder I still dream of it, hardly wanting to land or awake?

Death down below

     “Imagination in vain attempts to paint the scene which went on below: the agony of suspense they must have endured, the torturing terrors of their dim and stifling gallery, are all beyond conception; and then the pale, sorrowing watchers above, who thought of neither night nor day, nor of cold nor of privations, while waiting in dread anxiety for husbands, brothers and children engulphed in that dark abyss.”

     Written in 1862 concerning the New Hartley mine disaster that killed 204 English men and boys, as old as 71 and as young as 10, it describes our squeamish horror at the thought of being buried alive or having a loved one suffer such a fate.

     Coal seems like an obsolete artifact of the early industrial age, a dirty relic from an era when every factory was powered by boilers fueled with this fossil carbon hacked from the bowels of the earth. It took many Americans by surprise to learn this month that 21st century men still descend deep underground to mine something so firmly rooted in the 19th century.

     Metropolitan TV crews that swarmed to the scene of the Sago Mine in West Virginia appeared incredulous anyone would volunteer for such work. On some fundamental level, they equated coal mining with cave exploration or bungee jumping — some eccentric recreational activity — failing to realize how vital coal remains in generating electricity for the nation. As a consequence of coal’s continuing economic importance, mining remains one of a diminishing number of decent-paying jobs available to those with perhaps limited formal education, but with courage and a capacity for the hardest labor.

     A big disaster briefly attracts everyone’s attention today, but mining eats a steady diet of lives and always has. My Grandpa Lafe Bell was glued to his radio in November 1968 when a huge explosion ripped the heart out of Consolidation Coal’s Number Nine mine, killing 78. Being 10 years old at the time, I remember those grim days more vividly than I do John Kennedy’s assassination. In my family, with five generations of gold miners on Dad’s side and countless generations of coal miners on Mom’s, the death of any working man in the mines was then and is now deeply personal. Presidents’ widows and children don’t have to worry about going cold and hungry; miners’ families do. We feel their loss down to the marrow of our bones.

     Grandpa Bell went into the mines when he was 14 and his mother wept bitter tears that day. Smart and handy, he eventually achieved privileged positions as a boilerman and storekeeper up top, but his time below left him with a legacy of black lung. His miner’s lamp, which I keep beside my desk as a tangible reminder of the depths from which we’ve climbed as a family, bears a last patent date of July 21, 1925. I doubt Grandpa spent much time underground after then. But he was still hacking up coal dust half a century later.

     He remembered the dreary or adrenaline-injected circumstances of every fellow miner who died during his long career. Once, a bucket loaded with TNT jammed in the lowering mechanism above the mine shaft. He clambered up into the rigging himself to free the teetering explosives, perhaps averting a calamity like that at the New Hartley in 1862, where a giant iron lifting-arm shattered and plunged down into the shaft, trapping the miners in the bottom, where toxic gases snuffed them like moths in a killing jar.

     The origins of coal mining are lost in the dusty twilight of time. In England there is evidence the Romans exploited local coal deposits during their long occupation from 55 B.C. to 411 A.D. Up in County Durham in England’s far northeast corner, my Bell ancestors and most families were virtual slaves as recently as World War I, legally bonded to the mines. The marvelous Durham Mining Museum now recounts known details of thousands of deaths. Little kids as young as 6 toiled and perished in the darkness, following coal seams a few inches in width out under the North Sea. With appalling frequency, the crushing weight of water would explode into the workings. Then as now, government safety inspectors rarely found anything to criticize and even more rarely forced change. Our lives were cheap. Still are.

     One of many mine disaster memorials scattered through Durham’s bright green hills pays tribute to 168 men and boys: “Farewell, farewell, no tongue can tell, how brave, how true, were those who fell. We know you did your duty well, you heroes of the mine.”