Editor's Notebooks 1991-2002: Family stories

Here is another set of my Editor’s Notebook columns published in the Chinook Observer between about 1994 and 2002. These are about my family.     



Asparagus
     Asparagus is one of my favorite things about spring; one of the slugs’ favorite things, too, unfortunately. You can sort of tell where my two-year-old asparagus patch is, if you look carefully, by searching for circular green disks just at soil level. Those disks would become stalks if slugs didn’t neatly gnaw them off as fast as they come up.
     A special speeded-up video of slugs cruising my yard on the prowl for innocent vegetables and petunias might look a lot like the fabled schools of paraná in the Amazon River, ravenous little fish that gobble entire cows in seconds in cheap science fiction movies.
     Trying to poison the slugs would be a losing battle, besides endangering my fat old starving Labrador who thinks, because she doesn’t get many table scraps anymore, that she’s accidentally wandered into a Third World refugee camp. She’d slurp up a box of slug bait and be fertilizer herself before the day was out. It seems to me that a better plan is to help the asparagus grow so fast there’s enough for the slugs and the dinner table.
     One of the few books my great-great-grandparents brought with them when they moved to Washington Territory from the silver fields of Esmeralda County in Nevada was an 1873 edition of “Dr. Chase’s Family Physician, Farrier, Bee-Keeper and Second Receipt Book” to which I still occasionally turn for practical advise on matters of country life. (Their daughter, my great-grandmother Kittie Millsap Giles, was a rare single woman in the mountains of Nevada in the 1870s. Family legend has it that my great-grandfather William Giles was a poor miner who asked for her hand in marriage. Her father told him to come back when he had enough money to support her, leading him to quit prospecting, become a blackjack dealer in Carson City, and make a fortune sufficient to win over his future father-in-law. In the process, great-grandpa Giles became one of few men in the “Wild West” who could truthfully boast that he won his wife playing cards.)
     Anyway, asparagus needs lots of good rotting compost, about which Dr. Chase has this to say: “Persons living in cities, or villages, who keep but few, or even no domestic animals about their stables, may still make quite a quantity of Manure for the Garden, with but little labor. The plan is to carry back all the grass mown from the lawn and begin 2 or 3 Compost heaps, upon which throw slops from the house; then grass and weeds that are hoed or pulled from the Garden must be added to them, at each hoeing, and all the offal and slops ... together with the accumulations of the hen-house, and piggery, to be intimately mixed with the Compost heaps, and at the proper time, spread upon the Garden, it will be found valuable, and also very considerable, yearly, in amount.”
     Despite Dr. Chase’s rather mysterious punctuation and capitalization, you probably get the gist of his idea, and if there’s one thing I have plenty of, it’s grass clippings. I’m probably courting disaster to brag about it, but I think I’ve won the war against my hoop-high blackberries. But they’re already getting revenge — all that good dirt they helped create produces such a healthy lawn that I’ll probably die from an allergy attack someday while mowing it. The only problem now are alder stumps left behind by the former tenant of the property — I’m now on my third mower blade, grateful no ministers or little kids live within earshot.
     I’m not too sure I want to know what Dr. Chase meant by “offal and slops.” But my Mom recently told a story from her side of the family that gives a clue. As a young boy, her brother spent days on his hands and knees tending a garden of irises that happened to be on the path to the outhouse. My Grandma Bell caught her elderly father-in-law dumping his pee-pot on the lush flowers one day and “raised unholy hell about it.” And it isn’t very appetizing to think about, but it might have been partly responsible for how well the flowers grew.
     In my book, asparagus is right up there with homemade ice cream as one of the things that makes life worth celebrating, and I know that someday, if I persevere, enough tender green stalks will survive to make at least one decent meal — steamed for a single minute and coated in fresh sweet butter. That first bite will make it all worthwhile — slugs, offal, slops and all.
     Dr. Chase’s receipt for ice cream
     Morning’s milk, 3 quarts; nice sweet cream, 1 quart; nice, fresh-laid eggs, 1 doz; No. 1 coffee sugar, 1 lb.; fl. ex. of lemon, vanilla, or peach to suit your taste.
     Bring the milk and cream to a scalding heat and remove from the fire; and having beaten the eggs to a perfect froth, stir them in quickly; adding the sugar and flavoring it, it is ready to freeze. Then pour into the freezer and keep it in continual motion till wanted, as slow freezing separates the watery parts of the milk into icy particles, while the quickly frozen Cream has a smooth Creaminess not otherwise obtained.



Memorial Day
     For me, Memorial Day will always be lilac scented.
     When I was little, it was our custom to spend the day at our old family cemetery on the edge of Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation. Far from being elegant or elite, it was a triangle of threadbare grass wedged between a pot-holed county road and the neighbors’ pasture, from which farm animals would stray through the barbwire fence onto hallowed ground.
     But it was surrounded by towering unkempt lilacs, shading the lichen-sprinkled headstones. Even on a hot day, it was cool inside the fragrant fort planted around Ed and Saria Alton and their children, who grew old and in death rejoined their ma and pa in the rocky glacial dirt.
     In the way of kids, it always made me uncomfortable to step anywhere beyond the invisible line marking the boundaries of what might be a casket of an ancestor. My superstition or good manners didn’t keep me from leaping over great-great grandpa’s grave, but I wouldn’t step on him. Still wouldn’t, as a matter of fact.
     His granddaughter, my sweet old grandma Hilda Bell, would bring bright plastic flowers for what she called Decoration Day. Later, not being able to abide plastic flowers, my mom would go back and make off with them.
     I can’t help but think that Ed and Saria would be happily tickled at their descendants’ fussing over their graves, like any old couple receiving a surprise visit from well-loved grandkids. Sure, it’s a lot of bother, but fun to have the attention.
     Like Japanese Shinto traditions, our Memorial Day gives us a chance to reforge our links in the chain that brought us life. It’s too bad, in a way, that all our traditional holidays have been institutionalized into three-day holiday weekends. For too many of us, including me, what should be a time to pause and remember departed loved ones by investing some sweat-equity in their cemetery plots has turned into mere time off.
     But for some at least, Memorial Day still is a time to honor the dead, especially America’s veterans. Great-great grandpa Ed Alton was one of many veterans in my family, a sergeant in the Connecticut Volunteers.
     He, A.P. Watson, H. Waltons and J.S. Johnston composed and sang the song abridged below in the notorious Confederate Belle Island Prison in the James River near Richmond, Virginia, in 1863 during what was then known in the North as the “Slave Holders Rebellion.”

The Belle Island Prison Song
Sung to the air of “Robert Ridley”
     
Come list to me old soldiers true,
While I’ll a story sing to you.
It’s all about this Island Belle,
Where cruel starvings made to tell.
     
Chorus:
Ho! Belle Island, Ho!
O Ho! Belle Island, Ho!
O Ho! Belle Island, Ho-o-o!
We long from you to go.
     
Belle Island is a splendid camp,
You sleep so nice you get the cramp.
Tents are open behind and before,
The gray backs stand guard around the floor.
     
Comforts here are very great,
You get some grub though oftimes late.
Just take the Sergeant by the hair,
And hold him until we get our share.
     
They feed us here but twice a day,
So little a bird could carry it away,
With stinkin’ meat and buggie soup,
That gives all the measles and the croup.
     
Jeff Davis, he does all things well,
Though he and his army will go to H — -,
Where they say it’s all agreed,
That from the devil they can’t secede.
     
You have nothing to do but roam the street,
With ragged clothes and nothing to eat,
Now comrades you must not despair,
Columbia never seemed so fair.
     
You must not fret but happy be,
Until Uncle Abe doth set us free,
When down the river we will go,
To see that fortress call Monroe.
     Alton and Watson escaped on Sept. 22, 1863, and rejoined the Union Army to fight out the remainder of the war; Waltons and Johnston died of starvation two weeks later.
     A poor port-city varnisher until 1861, his wartime exploits won great-great grandpa the Republican connections it took to become a small-town politician in the West, where he met and married a Mormon girl from nearby Salt Lake City and settled down to raise horses, and a family.
     Their last surviving granddaughter, my grandaunt Bertha Bailey, died in Salt Lake earlier this month at age 94.
     She had been much on my mind in the weeks before her death. A widow lady who somehow managed to amass a modest savings despite receiving something like only $291 a month Social Security, Aunt Bertha crocheted some truly appalling afghans. Her color sense had something in common with those poisonous florescent Amazon tree frogs.
     She was kindest and gentlest of old ladies and she’d periodically ship off an explosively colorful package of lap warmers and pillows. A few weeks ago, unpacking a long-forgotten box at our new house in Ilwaco, I came across one of Aunt Bertha’s afghans that my mom had used to cushion a flower pot. And my two-year-old daughter latched onto it as her one-and-only favorite blankie.
     I kept intending to take a photo of Elizabeth with it to send to Aunt Bertha, knowing how it would warm her heart to know how much she had pleased her little niece, but I waited too long, and in the meantime my aunt’s fragile life finally evaporated into mountain air.
     So I say this to you: This Memorial Day, reach out to your loved ones, those who have passed and those still with you. We’re all here such a little while, and then gone forever.



Elizabeth is ours
     Bringing home a new baby is like opening the door of a familiar house and belly-flopping into a strange alien vortex. Especially the first time, it is one of life’s most magical, and scary, experiences.
     I tell childless friends that a baby is an atom bomb explosion in the middle of your schedule and budget. I now sympathize with people I’ve been mad at for years because they stopped communicating with me the minute they had a kid. In those rare moments you have to yourself, napping or gazing vacantly into space are higher priorities than phone calls or letter writing.
     But there’s nothing to compare with the innocent love of a child. Like the Grinch, my heart grew three sizes the day my daughter popped into my life.
     All this is old hat to any parent, but how it all came to happen to me is one of life’s little mini-dramas, a lesson in the fact that families form in countless unique ways.
     Adoption and parenthood were things I thought about in the abstract, if at all. In May 1997, my longtime girlfriend Donna and I were looking forward to a typical summer together, spending most of our time at my house on the Columbia, with trips north to see Donna’s 14-year-old, Brian, who then lived half-time with his dad.
     Donna and I are content, complete people, and though we discussed adopting a child in 1996, we decided not to pursue the idea. But on May 8, 1997, we learned that Donna had a newborn niece who needed a home.
     Although our culture and entertainment media still mostly portray families in a predictable manner, with a mommy and daddy who conceive and raise 2.3 cute kids, the facts have always been a lot more complicated.
     On my side of the family, my mother’s parents ended up being parents — for all intents and purposes — to a variety of kids. Their family included everyone from a quarter-Inuit niece to a grandson from an alcohol-ruined family. She arrived from Alaska wearing mukluks and ate the paraffin on top of home-canned jam, confusing it for whale blubber. He was lovable but so pathologically squeamish that he trimmed all the fat off his bacon.
     One of my great-great grandmothers raised the girl who would grow up to become one of the legends of the Wild West, Calamity Jane.
     Most every family has stories with one thing in common, the triumph of love and responsibility over the disasters that keep some parents from being able to raise their own kids. There are reams of fascinating anthropological details concealed in every genealogy, but the real living children are far more interesting and important.     This isn’t the Jerry Springer Show, so I won’t go into all the details of how a wonderful little girl came to be floating through the world without parents to love and protect her. But we knew this baby was meant to be ours.
     An array of social workers and Washington state bureaucrats did not altogether share our belief. It obviously is best for a child to be with a stable married couple. We quickly set a date to set that to rights. But that didn’t particularly smooth relations with our initial state case worker, a Pentecostal Christian who spent her time talking about her family and beliefs, not ours.
     From her and others, we encountered an array of suspicion and hostility that shook our faith in the functioning of government. We thought we were good people trying to do the right thing. But we were treated like parolees.
     We came to discover it wasn’t just us. On complaining to the State Senate, we learned three state senators were in a similar situation, virtually powerless in dealing with an agency with a crucial mission but unchecked power. We lived for months in dread of losing our daughter, until at last our case worked its way into much friendlier and competent hands.
     The government claims to want to get more kids quickly out of foster care into loving homes, but if our experience is any indication, the culture of some state agencies like Child Protective Services first much be transformed. These are seriously overworked people with a wounded view of humankind. Something’s got to change.But we have a delightful little girl now, as of last week ours alone and not the state’s. Her name is Elizabeth Saria Winters, named after strong women who understood and prevailed over life’s many puzzlements.
     We will work to instill in her an appreciation of learning, a knowledge of other cultures, pride in jobs well done, concern for the feelings of others, and a true sense of her own great worth. She’ll know how to fix her own car, how to climb mountains, how to prune trees, how to bake pies, how to pick good books. She’ll be an interesting person with good values.
     I feel a lot of pity and compassion for Elizabeth’s birth parents. It makes me sad to think that they’re missing out on so much, both in general and specifically with regard to this child. I hope they gain some satisfaction from knowing that, somewhere, their girl is enjoying a full and rewarding life.



Oaxaca
     Elizabeth’s a brave girl who plans to tame ferocious rainbow-colored tigers when she’s a grown-up, and I try to face life with at least a trace of her intrepid spirit. But our courage was put to the test by the mean witch and galloping steel rides of a scroungy little traveling carnival we visited on New Year’s Eve.
     We spent the last few days of the second millennium in one of North America’s best places — remote and poor, but awesome and friendly Oaxaca in Mexico’s deep south. (If you’re like most Americans, including me, the name Oaxaca probably stops you dead in your tracks: “How the heck do you say that!?” It’s actually pretty easy: wa-ha-ka.)
     Oaxaca is simultaneously one of the nation’s cruelest and most magical states — deforested mountain crags and coastline occupied by an amazing diversity of Indian peoples. Between tourism, art and making mescal, its capital city of the same name manages a pose of wealth despite the surrounding countryside’s soul-crushing poverty. The state is among the top sources of Mexican emigration to the U.S., as many are forced to flee north for work. Money orders mailed to Oaxaca from here are a blessed factor in whether many families eat.
     The Zocolo is centerpiece of the city, a breath-catching shady plaza surrounded by outdoor cafes. Paths through the trees are lined by ancient wrought iron benches painted so often they seem at first to be made of melted plastic. Appallingly bad musicians hustle around extorting change, but apart from that, it’s usually a place where you can sit surrounded by birdsong.
     Not during the holidays. In addition to foreign vacationers, the city was packed to the armpits with Oaxacans home visiting their families. Cotton candy, corn-on-the-cob and vast protoplasms of mylar helium balloons — ”Buzz Lightyear: To Infinity and Beyond!” — enticed the passing packs of kids. The Alameda, an adjoining area fronting the ancient cathedral, was awash with a sea of vendor stalls thrown up from sticks and turquoise-colored tarps.
     Elizabeth and I flew in from the coast two days after Christmas, leaving the beach to her Mamma and Brother Brian. (Elizabeth always calls her 17-year-old sibling “Brother Brian,” as if he were a Franciscan friar. They adore each other.)
     My old-hat pansy adventures — like unexpectedly snorkeling with sharks in Southeast Asia and solo-skiing in blizzards in the Rockies — pale in comparison to the terrors and excitement of traveling alone with an active three-year-old. Don’t get me wrong: She’s great company and a better traveler than most adults, but like every parent, I’ve discovered worrying about the safety of your child is a whole new brand of extra-strength fear. We had more than a few heart-to-heart discussions, Lizzie and I, over issues like staying within sight of Daddy and watching out for cars. She’s been so well loved, it’s just not in her sweet heart to comprehend anything might harm her.
     But seeing the Wicked Witch of the West get melted on the “Wizard of Oz” on TV got her interested in the fact that people, or at least witches, can die. We spent our whole vacation playacting that I was Mean Witch and she was Dorothy, so she could reconcile the two characters by politely trading the ruby slippers for Toto, permitting everyone to coexist in harmony.
     So when she spotted a terrifying blood-shot-eyed witch painted on the shell of the Funhouse trailer in a carnival on the outskirts of Oaxaca, we knew we’d have to come back and help that poor witch discover her inner niceness. But on New Year’s Eve night, we got about three feet inside the door before discovering it was way too scary — and I bet we set a new record time through the maze for a fat gringo with a skinny little girl tightly wrapped around his neck.
     We stayed for the rides, which make it immediately obvious Mexico doesn’t have product liability laws or many plaintiff’s lawyers. Holy smoke, those things move like a pea in a pot of boiling water. After the Funhouse, Elizabeth was more than content to just take the wheel of a girl-sized bus pulled along an oval track — something she usually spurns for babies.
     Later, back at the Zocolo, we juggled chicken’s eggs packed with confetti, got our pictures taken with a swarthy Santa and generally made more memories.
     Even if we didn’t fix the carnival witch’s bad attitude, Oaxaca did wonders for our own.



Crutches
     Polio has played a villainous role in my family for generations, and if breaking my foot a couple weeks ago accomplishes nothing else, it at least gives me a very watered-down taste of what it’s like to be in a cast and on crutches, mobility seriously affected.
     It’s a pain. From aching underarms, to a sore behind from sitting so much, to the indignities of having to ask for help doing such simple things as getting a dinner plate to the table — limping around is a lousy experience.
     Imagine being on crutches for a year at age 11, as my mother had to after a polio operation, or for most of your adult life as my Uncle Chuck did while running his famous hamburger restaurant up in Blaine. As a kid, I always thought Chuck was sort of grouchy. Now I can guess why. And Mom recently told me my Great-grandmother Jessie Alton and her sister each had polio in a place and time when doctors were an unaffordable luxury.
     All that polio, all that misery. They did what they had to. From across time, I admire their tenacity.
     My fiercely proud and independent mother won’t appreciate having her polio mentioned in print, but what a heroine she was and is. Struck at the age of 2, she spent too much of her childhood in hospitals and otherwise unable to relish lots of the simple joys of youth. Running, dancing, walking: All were difficult or impossible. Her brother got her to school on horseback. She remembers her Uncle Ed carting her around in his arms, maybe 10,000 miles’ worth.
     Mom has an intense distaste for pity and habitually goes to great lengths to avoid situations in which it might arise. Even in her mid-70s, she gets around surprisingly well in her tight circle, a strong woman still engaged in the battle of her life. I regret but respect her need to be tough.     For someone who hates going to the doctor, I seem to be spending a lot of time with them. Between my daughter’s earaches and my broken bone, I’m getting to know Ilwaco ER doc Stephen Bell well enough to tell you he’s from Oklahoma and isn’t wild about humidity. Excellent orthopedist Dr. Russell Keizer in Astoria will, I’m sure, have me dancing the tango in no time — quite a trick, since I have two left feet even when one of them isn’t bruised from top to bottom.
     But these last couple months have been most notable, from a medical perspective, for my latest occurrence of melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer. Taking advantage of East Oregonian Publishing Co.’s enlightened preventative health plan perhaps saved my life, as a little black spot was caught before it could poison my blood and lungs and brain. I’ll be getting to know OHSU’s charming dermatologist Dr. Han Lee quite a bit better in years to come, as I go back for checks.
     As polio has for my mom, in a sense melanoma helps shape my life. Strangely, it’s been a positive force. In 1985 when I last contracted it, I had a heart-to-heart talk with God and decided I didn’t really want to spend my life being a lawyer like Dad and instead would better enjoy my brief stay on earth as an editor, like Uncle Tom.
     Melanoma gave me good advice. This latest episode is a great reminder that life is short, that we need to budget our time wisely, and that we are the best guardians of our own health. Also: Wear sunscreen.
     Considering my history so far, I expect to meet melanoma a few more times in my life, and I’ll probably be cut so often I’ll look like a clumsy samurai by the time a Mexican bus runs me down in Oaxaca at age 97.
     In closing, Terry O’Donnell who died this week is someone I wish you all could have known. A wonderful man and author, I wish my wife Donna and I had followed through on plans to have him to dinner.
     We had the privilege of chauffeuring Terry to his Columbia Forum speaking engagement last year and he regaled us with a true tale of innocently and unknowingly spending a weekend at the home of Nazi Germany’s spy chief in Mexico shortly before World War II.
     Such blunders were few. He did a good job of living his life. It wasn’t luck.
     It’s making the right choices.



Investments
     I’m a hick. I kept expecting the raging bull stock market to crash starting back in about 1993 and never bought a share. Now that it’s finally lived down to my expectations, I should be feeling smug. But no — I’m still a hick.
     My impression of stocks was largely formed by my Dad’s wheelings and dealings when I was a kid. He was a thoughtful and loving man, a fine father, but his investment skills were on par with your typical African bushman. It’s a sad flaw in his otherwise remarkable life that he placed a lot of importance on the subject and died feeling he had failed.
     With the exception of real estate, at which he did quite well, Dad seemed to take his investment cues from his forebears, hopeful gold miners who never found the Mother Lode despite a gawdawful lot of digging.
     Getting out of the Army in the ‘50s, he went into the mink business, which was supposed to be the ultimate quick road to riches. But killing old nags so vicious little buggers could have fresh meat was more than he could take. If I recall correctly, a batch of them ended up escaping, enriching the local mink gene pool with devilish little dandies.
     Then came the Cold War uranium boom, when ancient riverbeds buried beneath Wyoming’s sagebrush suddenly became strategically valuable for the infinitesimally tiny deposits of potential reactor fuel they contain. In an early example of the pitfalls of stock options, Dad devoted thousands of hours of work to uranium mining schemes in return for stock that now sits worthless in tattered file folders in my cluttered garage.
     Then there was “Operation Amigo,” his Mexican resort concept also represented by a stock share in my garage. Throw in a few other nifty ideas like trying to fly live sheep to sell in Japan, and Dad was at his office more than at home on more nights than I can count during my childhood.
     We drove across the country together in the week before he died of lung cancer at age 74, and I know all this weighed on him, weighed on him too much. It’s not that he entirely rejected his fanciful boondoggles or felt ashamed of them — well, he might have been a little embarrassed about that mink deal. But he felt at fault that the big-payoff somehow eluded him despite all his effort, never quite realizing the role of pure chance in who hits it big.
     It’ll probably make my wife snicker to read this, considering my own sometimes playful approach to personal finances, but Dad’s life experiences made me quite conservative when it comes to investing. Aside from some pension money in 401k mutual funds, I’ve bought only one stock in my life — a mining company, imagine that — on which I think I ended up making about 500 bucks back in 1979. The experience reminded me of horse racing without the beer and pretty grass.
     This whole game of money is darn weird. For some reason, a galloping stock market made us all feel like our pockets were full, and a droopy stock market makes us skittish. But while the elite are playing roulette with our money on Wall Street, the fact is that for you and me the size of our electric bills next December is a whole bunch more important.
     Deep inside each of us, there’s a fussy old man or woman who secretly enjoys going to a good funeral, and there’s quite a bit of that going on now with regards our economy. But I say it was all mass delusion anyway, and wonder why the sour faces. The stock market’s down: So what? Maybe there’ll be a depression, people won’t have enough money to get their TVs repaired, and we’ll all be forced to play with our kids more. What a tragedy.
     My Dad gave my Mom and us a very comfortable life despite his quirky get-rich-quick ideas. He’d have died a happier man if he had savored his success at that instead of focusing on the games that didn’t pan out. The same applies to our nation. Let’s pay more attention to living, and less to making money without working for it.



Family history
     Our families all are equally ancient; no one just springs up like a weed from virgin potting soil. And yet in this country and particularly here in the West, it’s not uncommon to find people who can’t name their great-grandparents. Some don’t even have a good idea who their grandparents were.
     I’m in no position to be judgmental. I never met my father’s dad, who died while I was still a baby, and I barely knew Dad’s mother. Partly that’s a natural part of our American habit of moving around — Dad’s parents lived in Washington state, while I was raised in Wyoming. In my Dad’s case there also were hard feelings at having been sent away at age 17 to live with his mother’s parents in Grants Pass at the start of the Great Depression. Dad never talked about his parents a lot. Nor, apparently, did his dad ever say much about the family he left behind in Michigan when he came west to Bellingham, Wash., back in 1905 or so.
     It’s easy to picture a long series of such leapfrog migrations across the face of the planet, younger sons being pushed from the nest and setting off for adventure. On the edge of what was once the last wide, wild continent, nearly all of us have similar stories — there’s nobody, Indian or white, who is from here. We’re all immigrants, all discoverers. We can take incredible pride in the courage, work and suffering that brought our ancestors here by foot, by canoe, by prairie schooner, or by Ford Fiesta. There wasn’t anything easy about it, and these migrations deserve to be remembered and celebrated.
     It’s impossible to celebrate something if you’re ignorant of it. That’s why many of us are getting involved in genealogy. It’s really not about bragging rights — what wars your forefathers fought in, or how long you’ve been Americans. Instead, family history is a matter of context, of gathering strength from the lessons and hardships of the past. Your ancestors are your people — they belong to you and you belong to them.
     Despite my Dad’s awkwardness toward his dad, I’m lucky. I knew Mom’s parents well, and they were great storytellers. As a kid, I didn’t exactly memorize our family legends, but I managed to absorb and save quite a bit. And Dad also had much to say, at least when it came to his mom’s parents with whom he lived as a teen-ager.
     But there were — and still are — many dead ends in my knowledge of our family tree. A desire to begin filling the gaps led me to the Internet a few months ago. Let me tell you: There is an amazing amount of information pretty easily available.
     Probably the most user-friendly website is that of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, the Mormons, for whom identifying ancestors has special religious significance. They happily share their knowledge and resources with all, and a few hours on their site www.familysearch.org helped me, while still leaving many tantalizing questions unanswered for now.
     I had a vague knowledge from childhood that Grandma Winters’ family were miners in Aurora and Virginia City, Nevada in the great gold rush of the 1860s before coming to Washington Territory by wagon in 1883. But the Mormon website fleshed out some details, aiding me in remembering some half-forgotten stories, such as my grandmother’s grandfather, Robert Millsap, having to step around the dead victims of five separate gunfights on the way to his mine one morning.
     Dad told me of how Robert and Susan Millsap initially disapproved of their daughter Kittie marrying my Great-grandfather William Giles, a common miner who made a modest fortune dealing cards. (By “modest fortune” I mean something like 500 bucks.) The Mormon site helps explain the Millsaps’ attitude: In the more class-conscious society of that time, they traced their lineage back to royal land-grant pioneers in Virginia, and well back beyond that, to other English land grants in County Tyrone, Ireland.
     It’s difficult to relate this kind of stuff without sounding like a snob, but I’m learning about my family not in order to tell others about it, but to understand who I am. I own the scales on which William Giles weighed his gold, along with a nugget from his last mine in Josephine County, Ore. And now, I’m genuinely beginning to understand who he was. His humor, his straight posture, his taste for strong coffee all are part of who I am. I’m darned happy about that.
     All the same, I deeply regret that my Dad didn’t write down more of what he knew about his family and about his own life. For every piece I still recall, I bet there are a dozen things I’ve forgotten or was never told. In a few decades, Dad’s experiences — like battling brown bears while helping build the Alaska Highway — will seem as exotic as anything Great-grandfather Giles did in the dangerous Sierra Nevada mining camps of Mark Twain’s day.
     The same is true of you and your family. If they’re still around, visit with your mom and dad and record their stories. Have them identify everyone they know in family photos. Pretend you’re a detective interviewing witnesses in an important case. Get the facts. And talk with your kids about your own life — the story of your struggles, triumphs and defeats is the most valuable inheritance you can leave them.
     On 60 Minutes last Sunday there was a story about Icelanders being able to trace their family lines back 1,100 years. That incredible heritage started with a few people recording what they knew, and their descendents keeping up the tradition. We can do likewise. Even if the only family history you possess is your own lifetime, it’s still important. Your story is the story of the human race. Please don’t allow it to be lost.



Muddy bottoms
     “Daddy, did you ever put your bottom in mud puddles when you were a boy?”
     “Yes, I’m sure I did, sweetie! But daddy can’t remember that far back.”
     Lowering your bottom into cold rainwater just to see how it feels doesn’t often occur to a typical adult, at least not me. After age nine or so, even the startling shock of puddle water running over the top of a shoe, especially an expensive one, is something most of us abhor like touching slug slime.
     My famously unprissy 4-year-old daughter Elizabeth and I waded out into the storm in our Helly Hansen’s Tuesday evening, explicitly on a puddle-stomping mission. A wonderful one gathers in our well-rutted Ilwaco street, and Elizabeth cranes her neck as we pull into the driveway after any storm to see if it’s sprung back to life. It’s almost big and deep and mucky enough to house a family of salamanders.
     She got in some overdue stomping, splashing and bottom-lowering before being persuaded to run back inside, where she scrambled into a steaming tub.
     I could kick myself, but I didn’t do any stomping or bottom-lowering myself — what was I thinking? My old sneakers are easily washed and dried, or even replaced. But a chance to be wide-awake with frozen toes beside a spontaneous, laughing girl?
     Putting comfort ahead of fun may be the single greatest sin of adulthood. Next time she gives me a chance, I’m going to let Elizabeth re-teach me all the secrets of puddle jumping. What’s the harm in a little mud, splattered head to toe?     Winter in August. But though I feel bad for the kite fliers and tourist-based businesses, this storm feels sacramental. Drizzle is despicable, but a strong rain is worth nearly any inconvenience in return for making us walk faster, breathe deeper and peer farther into the mist in search of the horizon.
     When the horizon is always there, crisp as a cracker as it is in the Southwest, you can forget there’s a world beyond your yard. But a raging Northwest storm that stuffs the climate straight into your lungs, that turns the air above your front deck into a churning cascade — such a thing is like waking from a dull dream and finding a dragon with Technicolor scales perched on your bedpost.
     While most of the nation swelters, and bits of it burn, here are we, bathed in pure water and breaking a sweat only in the gym. (I assume some of us go to the gym ... at least I noticed a pretty woman running on the treadmill at the Aquatic Center last week.)
     Not that I’d mind a few weeks of real sun and warmth before it turns into November on the coast, and all hell breaks loose.     The lines between physics, poetry and religion have never been so pleasingly fuzzy. Since I basically don’t get to watch any television that doesn’t somehow involve “The Rug Rats,” I don’t know if this has been widely reported, but on Aug. 14 the science section of the New York Times said our universe is the result of a whisper.
     An unimaginably tiny sound accompanied the apparently mis-named “Big Bang.” This faint tremor was frozen in place, imprinted on the very fabric of space, creating lumps that caused the primordial matter to eventually coalesce into the vast web of galaxies in which we live.
     About 900 million years after the Big Bang, a pea-soup fog of neutral hydrogen lifted throughout the universe, stars formed, and there was light where before there was only a nearly formless void. It might have remained formless and timeless, but for the sweet tone of creation and chaos, this merest whisper of a whisper, the birth cry of everything.
     My little girl, the puddles we stomp in, the molecules that fuel and regulate our brains, the windows that shield us from the storm — all bear the imprint of this whisper.
     Some people believe prayer eases illness and helps defeat opposing football teams. More power to them; in this sometimes scary world only a mean-spirited drudge would begrudge anyone the comfort of belief.
     But everything I look for from God is contained in that whisper echoing down through time. “He” spoke the prayer. We are the answer.



A new depression?
     Mom tells a story about her Grandma and Grandpa Alton’s struggle with hunger in the 1920s and ‘30s, their teen-aged son Parley engaging in a long-running cat-and-mouse game with the local game warden.
     Parley was adept at teasing little brookies and rainbows out of the creeks and hayfield ditches around the old family home. His nearly blind father somehow managed to operate a freight wagon, a team of horses pulling him along familiar ruts between the nearest town and the far-flung ranch houses of the Wind River Indian Reservation.
     They were poor in ways entirely alien to 99.9 percent of modern Americans, depending on an adolescent’s out-of-season trout for an oversize share of their weekly protein. Ducking through the willow saplings dodging the warden had its comical aspects, but the fact was that if Parley had a bad day, the whole family had skimpy pickings for dinner.
     Parley’s mom died in 1932 at the ripe old age of 50, his dad two years later at 64. Parley himself became a wonderful man of smooth humor. By the time I came along, he was a semi-grownup and moderately prosperous Huckleberry Finn with a distinct physical resemblance to Mark Twain. I always loved seeing him, and it broke all our hearts when Uncle Parley killed himself, a victim in the end of a different sort of depression.     The stories of most American families differ from mine only in the fine details. The generation now celebrated as the greatest by Tom Brokaw, their grim wartime exploits brought to life by the horrific but moving HBO series “Band of Brothers,” was pounded by the grinding poverty of the Great Depression.
     Sure, there were a million different degrees in the Depression’s impact on ordinary people. But nearly everyone was deeply affected in one way or another — options narrowed, lives shortened, families broken.
     By the time the Second World War erupted — itself fueled in large measure by economic friction among desperately competing Depression-era nations — it was a perversely welcome shock. New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps, which allowed young men like my dad to feed his grandparents while working at Camp Bly near Klamath Falls, forestalled civil unrest but didn’t really reach or cure our own economy’s deep illness. Unlike Parley’s well-loved old motorcycle, which he rode roaring into his dad’s irrigation ditch one day, no amount of tinkering could kick-start the 1930s.
     Despite their bruised and broken hopes, my mom and millions like her have an affection for the ‘30s that goes beyond the mere nostalgia everyone feels for lost childhood. That interminable crisis brought families and communities together like hot fire forges a strong alloy. Banding together, actively participating in your family’s survival, getting by on little, growing ( or poaching) your own food, making toys and fun out of life’s leftovers — all made that time as rich in human experience as it was lacking in hard cash.
     And hardship tempered America for the savage cruelties of war. The men who went off to Europe and the Pacific already knew how to fight. The women who stayed at home already knew about holding families together on next to nothing.     We may be coming to a time of needing to remember these skills. I wonder if we can.
     If the optimists are wrong and our economy doesn’t dust itself off next year, or the next, or the year after that, how will we cope?
     Part of reason much of the world in angry at us is that they’ve already been struggling for years. From Japan to Argentina, and from South Africa to Jamaica, the 1990s weren’t a lot better than our 1930s. Our luck really is the exception. Misery does indeed love company, and they’re delighted to see storm clouds over our happy island or prosperity, even if a depression here means even deeper poverty for millions beyond our borders.
     If we have to, like people everywhere, we’ll survive how we must. We’ll fight the battles circumstances place in our path.
     Along the way, I hope we won’t allow ourselves to be the pawns of the powerful. I hope we rediscover the difference between needs and wants, between the things that enrich us and the things that pull us down, between satisfying honest hunger and gluttony.



On the road
     Like a big turquoise-blue convertible’s tire tracks in impressionable mountain mud, about a thousand years ago “On the Road” imprinted my soul with a strange and persistent daydream of endless drives across America and Mexico.
     Since high school I’ve never been tempted to re-read Jack Kerouac’s self-indulgent masterpiece, but bits and pieces of it stick with me, somehow capturing truths about the highway as uniquely endowed for fundamental experiences. Something about setting out and temporarily cutting ties with whatever lies behind — if only for a week-long 500-mile-a-day expedition to Disneyland — is vital to our national personality.
     I remember trivial incidents from the road with intensity that belies their surface importance, things like my black cairn terrier rolling in pale gray Mount St. Helen’s ash at an I-90 rest stop after I drove out of Gig Harbor in 1981 to start university courses. Why would anyone remember such a thing? But I do.
     At home, a person eventually forgets to really see familiar furniture and possessions. They simply become like twigs in its nest must seem to a bird, part of a necessary but nearly meaningless background. So it also is with our natural surroundings: How often have you cursed an enraptured tourist driving 20 mph under the speed limit, hypnotized by Columbia River scenes? Seeing Astoria and the estuary for the first time is a transforming experience, a symphony of beauty. But live here awhile, and these sights fade into faint static, just as someone who lives by railroad tracks learns to ignore the passing trains.
     Setting out beyond normal boundaries, suddenly we are the meandering slowpokes holding up traffic, pausing to look at spring valleys and people we’ve never seen before, imagining the mysteries contained in each. Meanwhile, the picturesque farmer on his tractor wonders what the hell we’re looking at.     My second cousin Mary Silsby wrote this week, and I recalled some of the road trips she used to take me on to Denver when I was 10 or 12. Oh boy, was that ever an adventure for a kid from a 5,000-population cowtown.
     We’d go to Elich Gardens, Denver’s old amusement park, and though I like to think of myself as physically courageous, Mary delighted in scaring the bejeezus out of me on the rides. Elich’s has an old wooden roller coaster, and I thought for certain I was going to die or, much worse, pee my pants. She loved it, and on some level I guess I must have, too, as on another trip to a more modern park, she talked me onto something called “The Wild Squirrel.” It lived up to its name.
     Mary’s generosity in showing me the big city was nothing unusual for my fun-loving part-Eskimo cousin. (Her dad Ed Alton was an Alaskan pilot in his youth, and I hope he’s written down his experiences for posterity. Must be where Mary gets her strong stomach.)     Most everyone I know is talking of taking driving vacations. (Gee ... I wonder why?) I suppose there’s a down side, in the sense that driving consumes more resources and probably still is far more dangerous than flying, terrorists or not. But the thought of more Americans getting back on the road exploring their country gives me a warm feeling in an era sadly and suddenly lacking comforting notions.
     Sitting in the backseat bores you to tears when you’re six, as your dad tries to squeeze another 50 miles into an endless asphalt day. But in hindsight, these Great American Vacations seem like a mighty fine dose of family time, looking at new horizons and drinking unfamiliar soda pop. Now I cherish those mundane bygone days spent wondering (out loud, many times) “When are we going to get there?” and “When are we going to be home?”
     And in the end, maybe getting home is the best part, seeing accustomed scenes anew, fresh batteries in the flashlights of our minds.
     Hitting the road sometimes is the only cure for the sodden forgetfulness of routine, the leaden numbness of over-familiarity. Maybe there are other ways to break life’s wet net, of living even ordinary days as though they are land-yacht voyages down unexplored country highways, but I don’t know of any.
     So in the meantime, see you out on the road, out in America, out beyond the life we know.



James Russell
     His eyes are alive — hot and mournful like those of a man who has witnessed soul-wrenching cruelty and prevailed over it, but at unfathomable cost. He has a full Old Testament beard, and an odd lock of dark hair curling away from his left temple.
     He wears a velvet-collared jacket in grand Victorian style, over a fine woolen vest. On his lapel is a badge and ribbon, possibly of the Light Dragoons, the British cavalry drawn from the northeast counties including Durham, where he was born in 1836.
     Skin is stretched tautly on his skull, and his bone structure looks familiar, a lot like mine. He has not a trace of a smile. And he is family, my Great-great-grandfather James Russell.
     I wonder if he is recently back from fighting in the Crimea. His eyes tell me he is a man who rode “Into the jaws of Death, Into the mouth of hell.” Amongst his descendants on this side of the Atlantic, there’s no recollection of him serving in world’s great mid-19th century war, heroically or otherwise. I only know — from another photograph — that he lived on, weathering into a silver-haired gentleman of gentler demeanor, leaning on a cane.
     An electronically enhanced enlargement of his surviving photo as a grim young man faces me this morning. Whatever circumstances made him who he was, he speaks to me of the true costs of life, of the emptiness of frivolity. No image I can recall has affected me more deeply.     Photography has always seemed little less than miraculous to me, in a variety of ways but most of all in its astounding ability to bridge time. My mother recently passed along a small collection of ancient family tintype photos, and last Sunday a breath caught in my chest when my computer finished reconstructing James Russell’s portrait from a tiny and nearly black plate. It was as if a pale ghost had suddenly been splashed with a flagon of raw life.
     Looking into those burning eyes, meeting him in a sense, was something I needed. We have moved so far from his times, so quickly, that I for one sometimes feel unanchored. He pulled me up short and reminded me of the hard bones beneath my well-fed flesh. He tells me this is no time for drift, but a time to grip tight.
     A friend told me last week she finds she suddenly has less patience for incompetence, for the minor annoyances that flow from people who don’t honor the simple social contracts of honest labor and common manners. Her remark momentarily struck me as harsh, but I now believe I know what she meant. We shouldn’t discard laughter and forgiveness. But we deserve to expect from others what we give ourselves: Hard work, serious thought, deliberate action.     And this is true of us as a nation. We aren’t perfect. But at great cost, we fought in Kuwait, Somalia and Kosovo on behalf of victimized Moslems. We give sweat from our brows and money from our pockets to feed the hungry of the world, regardless of whether they hate us. If there are starving children in Iraq, it’s because their damnable dictator blocks our food aid, not because of our economic sanctions. The crimes committed against us are inexcusable. I’m proud of our response, even though I remain no fan of our president.
     Writing in the current New York Times Magazine, Andrew Sullivan puts our situation in proper perspective, saying we have embarked on a generations-long struggle with Islamic fundamentalists who regard our very existence as an affront, “whose resentment of Western success and civilization comes more easily than the arduous task of accommodation to modernity.” I agree with Sullivan that this conflict is against a more formidable enemy than Nazism or Communism. I have no sympathy for nations like Saudi Arabia that accept our help with thinly disguised contempt, all the while abetting the fanatics who would destroy us.
     It’s time to reaffirm our ideals. It’s time to look our ancestors in the eyes and live up to their terrible sacrifices, which delivered us to this blessed age. It’s time to prepare for the long fight ahead on behalf of religious tolerance against the forces of hate and fear. It’s time to conduct ourselves in ways that will make our great-great-grandchildren proud.



Don’t bug me
     Being a boy and all, eating bugs is an activity that’s popped up in my life. The first time, I was about seven and riding my Schwinn a million miles an hour toward Uncle Tom’s when a big black fly flew up my nose and — I swear to goodness — never came out.
     And then there was Hub Cramer’s clothing store, hometown headquarters for manly sophistication. Though it mostly sold polyester-blend shirts and going-to-church jackets, on a display island jammed between its two narrow aisles were fascinating adult goods like chrome martini shakers and assorted party novelties. One of these latter items was a sealed can purporting to contain candied grasshoppers.
     It’s hard now to imagine or convey just how endlessly fascinating this can of insects was to me and my boyhood pal Cale Case. We probably came in and looked at it 25 times before Cale, wealthy with paper-route money, took the plunge and shelled out the magnificent sum of three bucks so our circle of friends could experience what the heck was inside.
     It’s not like grasshoppers were some exotic life form to us — we’d been baiting hooks with them since we were six. But staring over the brim of that open can felt like the scene in the science fiction thriller “Alien” when a space explorer leans too far over a glowing egg and suddenly catches a face full of monster. Golly, we were excited.
     And boy, was I ever disappointed when it turned out the anonymous cocoon-shaped lozenges inside were just candy, through-and-through. Kind of stale, at that.
     It’s probably been 35 years, but I never stopped wondering how a real grasshopper would taste. Last month I finally got my chance, the authentic item.
     Along with my intrepid wife and 4-year-old daughter, Donna and Elizabeth, I spent a good chunk of April in southern Mexico, where we often go to escape the endless gray days of early spring on the Northwest coast.
     The chaos, close quarters, riotous smells and colors of Mexican markets are right on the edge of overwhelming. Spreading over acres, spilling far beyond the walls of enormous hanger-like buildings, the best Mexican markets are amalgamations of Wal-Mart and the Middle Ages — Japanese TVs vying for space with turkeys encased in burlap bags, only their naked red heads poking out, eyes blinking.
     We’ve been to such markets often enough to fancy ourselves old pros, and I don’t mean to turn this into a breathless account of what is, after all, basically a grocery/hardware store. But this time we happened to stumble upon the section devoted to fried grasshoppers.
     Chapulines are grasshoppers fried in garlic and lime juice, piled in big red mounds and sold in the market. Local people buy them by the kilo and serve them on tortillas, but I had just one, with the vendor’s permission.
     Salty. Crunchy. Not nauseating. But probably won’t have another, thanks just the same.
     The important thing from my standpoint, besides showing off for my womenfolk, was being able to tick another item off my childhood list of “Things I Want To Do When I Grow Up.” Deliberately eating an insect — the fly up the nose didn’t count — was pretty far down that list, but friends tell me it’s important to keep making progress on your life plan, and it feels good to achieve a long-held goal.
     It’s kind of easy to lose sight of these silly little goals that make life fun, the kiss-a-girl-on-every-continent kind of goals. It turns out to be easier, cheaper and more convenient to sit at home and watch the National Geographic Channel.
     But maybe something in the bug juice got me fired up for adventure. I got a couple girls back at the house who need kisses. Maybe we’ll see how they like ‘em in South America.