Editor's Notebooks 1991-2002: Miscellaneous

Here is another set of my Editor’s Notebook columns published in the Chinook Observer between about 1994 and 2002. These didn't fit into any easy classification.


SPICE ISLANDS
     Some believe certain spots radiate a kind of potent magic — just spending time there transforms your soul. It’s easy to smile and shrug this off as wishful thinking, childish New Age prattle.
     But now and then you come across a place that makes you wonder if, just maybe, there might be a little something to it. The Banda Islands are such a place, though for many who lived there, the transformation seems to have been from human to beast.
     This tiny but splendid island chain north of Australia at one time arguably was the most important real estate on earth. So how could you have never heard of them? Heard of the Spice Islands? Same place.
     “Discovered” by Portuguese explorers in 1512, the Spice Islands had been the object of myths and legends for centuries earlier, thanks to Malay, Chinese and Arab traders.
     We can’t begin to imagine the importance of spices to Europeans of that time. Not only did they improve the taste of bland food, they acted as preservatives in the age before refrigeration. Great medicinal benefits also were attributed to them, but maybe most importantly, they became symbols of status and wealth.
     Hunger for spices was the passion that drove European exploration and conquest of much of the planet beginning in the 15th century. Columbus and a flock of lesser-known adventurers came sailing out Europe like so many crows looking for roadkill, and transformed the world.
     Spices came from many places and, in a sense, there were several different sets of spice islands. But the Bandas were the source — for centuries, the one and only source — of nutmeg and mace. “With them they cure, or correct stinking Breath, clear the Eyes, comfort the Stomach, Liver, and Spleen, and digest Meat. They are a Remedy against many Distempers, and serve to add outward Lustre to the Face,” according to a 1609 Spanish account.
     As with nearly every other native culture possessed of valuable resources, the history of the Bandanese people is not happy. Tough traders despite their remoteness, they stood in the way of the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie — the United East India Company of the Dutch.
     In 1621, the entire native population was exterminated or shipped into slavery in Java. Replacement slave labor was brought in and thus commenced centuries of what can fairly be described as evil. Brutal executions were exceeded only by the brutality of living. In his book “Indonesian Banda,” Willard Hanna describes “A female slave, who had sought to defraud her master by committing suicide, was branded and had her cheek cut open from mouth to ear.”
***
     Now part of Indonesia’s state of Maluku, the Spice Islands fell into seediness but relative tranquillity with the abrupt end of Dutch rule at the conclusion of World War II. But peace has ended.
     The world’s fourth most populous country and its largest Muslim nation, Indonesia nevertheless is almost invisible to most Americans. Last year its economy crashed, a long dictatorship ended and its 13,000-plus islands and hundreds of ethnic groups are rumbling like a volcano.
     Having resettled many people from its over-crowded heartland to more remote islands, the former Indonesian government set the stage for violent conflict in Maluku, where in recent months hundreds have died in riots between Muslims and Christians. Some 4,000 Muslim refugees clawed their way from the state capital in Ambon to Banda-Neira, which is sort of a county seat, population about 7,500.
     In April, fighting broke out in Neira, several were killed, and a number of classic old colonial houses were destroyed by fire, according to Peter Lape, an internet acquaintance and archaeology doctoral candidate from Brown University.     I spent two weeks in the Bandas in early 1991 recovering from the ignominious defeat of the gubernatorial candidate I worked for the prior year.
     Rooming in an enormous old Dutch villa/museum and boarding with a kindly gap-toothed Christian lady named Epa, I discovered the wonders of snorkeling in water so clear it felt like being suspended in space with thousands of fish swimming in different strata below.
     A day slowly circumnavigating Palau Ay Island in a primitive homemade motorboat was among the finest in my life, drinking sweet tea and dancing with the villagers under a tarp as a monsoon shower passed.
     Despite the idyllic setting and their friendly dispositions, most islanders are crushingly poor and it makes me sad to think of more burdens being added to their lot. Refugees are the last thing they need.
     Peter tells me the United Nations is considering the Bandas for designation next year as a World Heritage Site, an abundantly appropriate step considering their importance to world history and the many surviving traces of Western Civilization’s shameful colonial past.
     The Bandas are one of the world’s magical places, good or evil or both. I hope UN recognition improves living conditions but I also hope it doesn’t cheapen the pain that soaked into those hot sands. The Bandas deserve to be known, and remembered, but they also deserve to be left alone with their ghosts.



BEAUTY
     Beauty all around us. This basic tenet of Navajo religion as popularized by Tony Hillerman’s wonderful Leaphorn-Chee books has been recurring in my thoughts these last few weeks as we voyage on through a winter that, so far defying all predictions, has been delicious in its variety.
     Thursday’s sunrise, reflecting saturated oranges and radiant blues on the slowly rippling Columbia, with Mount Hood’s inverted shadow extending down from the clouds, was a scene I want to relive on my deathbed, an image of a world of harmony.
     It will, inevitably, rain and blow and be perversely nasty on Friday when this is published. But this time of the year, a little sun goes a long way toward reminding me why we choose to live here. I can get along fine — thank you very much — without endless weeks of drizzle, but a sledge-hammering storm that comes galloping around Cape Disappointment in three directions at once feels sublimely like riding on a strong and healthy beast as she crashes through the underbrush.
     Hillerman’s books are successful because they are about much more than tribal policemen solving crimes on the vast Navajo Nation stretching across the arroyos, painted buttes and mountains of the Four Corners area. The books resonate with the same conflict many of us feel: How to build deep meaning into day-to-day life in an age when traditional values are etched thin by the acid of superficial thinking and bad news.
     The strains of Navajo mythology that seep through these books, though alien to most modern Americans, address a need — one most of us can’t even quite acknowledge — for ways to bind our lives to the world and the mysterious forces we sense beyond it. Navajo myths, though not our water, nevertheless quench our thirst.
     The late Joseph Campbell’s work teaches that building a mythological framework to support our lives is key to living happily in a confusing time. His books, lectures and popular television series of a few years ago taught that certain themes recur time and time again in legends and stories.
     We have been evolving for millions of years but have existed as a remembering, speaking people for perhaps 100,000 years. Of this, we have real possession of only the past 8,000 or so years since the advent of writing. And for most of us, even a century ago seems impossibly far away.
     Stories told around campfires in Northern Europe by ancestors 500 generations removed still reverberate in near-forgotten corners of our minds, shaping our inherent understanding of how the world’s pieces fit together. Trying to ignore these voices is like trying to write a sentence without referring to the rules of grammar.
     In this shining new year of 2000, we like to think of ourselves as a mature civilization, but I think we’re really still very young and naive, still huddling by the fire but without enough of the comforting murmur of elders telling how our grandfathers and grandmothers overcame the darkness.
     I ordered a sleek and speedy new home computer last Wednesday from the East Coast; it was sitting on my office floor when I returned from lunch the next day. Some traditionalists fear and loath computers for how they permit people to isolate themselves; a legitimate concern, but one which is overshadowed by their power to bring our minds together.
     Thanks to computers, we can share our stories, dreams, recipes and kid pictures with a community of friends that stretches not down a village lane, but around the world. Computers are becoming, I believe, the most powerful tool there has been to restore myths, heroes and vigor to our lives — if enough of us choose to use them this way.
     We all need more connections, more community, more memories of our own and long-ago lives here in the magical realm of earth. Our young people, especially, need to be brought back within the firelight and taught about the paths and destinations of life. They need fewer video games and more conversations, even if those conversations take place on a computer screen. In this technological age, we must renew our bonds to each other.
     Entering this strange new time, I’m optimistic these things are as possible as they are necessary.



HARDY BOYS
     A popular book a few years back claimed the author learned all he needed for successful life in kindergarten — good work habits, sharing, the importance of an afternoon nap and so forth. He had a point, but if one obscure childhood influence helped shape me, it’s the Hardy Boy mysteries.
     When I was about 8, teen-age detectives Frank and Joe Hardy were my idols, along with TV cartoon character Johnny Quest. Their adventures, played out with childish chivalry in what seemed exotic locales to a hick kid, fired my imagination and helped cultivate a love of reading.
     Though crime-solving never made my lengthy list of pondered careers, Franklin Dixon’s series dating from 1927 inspired my love of travel, gave me a sense of how analytical thinking can be fun and helped me learn what little I know about maintaining equilibrium under pressure.
     My parents had a paperback reference book that purported to give capsule biographies of all the world’s great writers and I recall being incensed Dixon was not included. How could they overlook such a mighty talent, I demanded to know. I came within a pimple’s width of firing off a letter of complaint to the publisher questioning why he wasn’t listed beside Voltaire and Thomas Mann.
     Despite this egregious slight to his talent, the Dixon empire happily continues and is up to something like number 127 in the Hardy series, whereas I recall anxiously awaiting publication of number 50 or so.
     It’s rare in adulthood to be drawn into books with anything like the enthusiasm and anticipation I once felt for the Hardys. But in 1991, in a pretty bleak and lonesome time, I had the great fortune to discover an author who helped reshape my understanding of the privileges, obligations and promise of maturity.
     Patrick O’Brian’s series about a pair of British naval officers during the Napoleonic wars of the early 1800s began to be acknowledged in the U.S. in 1989 and has since achieved enormous popularity, acclaimed as the greatest historical novels ever published.
     I accidentally started with “HMS Surprise,” the third of the series — a lucky thing, since in that book O’Brian hit his stride writing about Capt. Jack Aubrey and ship’s surgeon Stephen Maturin. It took most of a year to read the next eight books and circle back to pick off the first two, “Master and Commander” and “Post Captain.” Then it was like being 10 again, waiting for a fresh volume to appear about once a year, carrying the story and characters forward.
     Jack and Stephen — all who read of them eventually become friends on a first-name basis — are an unlikely team. Jack’s utter courage and cunning at sea dissolve into near-infantile naïveté on land, while Stephen doesn’t know a mizzen topgallant from the head but is a ruthless secret agent and brilliant naturalist, a member of the Royal Society.
     Through 20 intertwined volumes, their battles, affairs, marriages, philosophical discussions, squabbles, losses and victories are a tribute to honor and intelligence. They are complex, flawed characters who nevertheless usually try and succeed in doing the right thing.
     O’Brian died last week in Ireland at age 85. I always suspected Stephen Maturin was his stand-in and O’Brian’s obituary in the New York Times strengthens that impression, noting that like Stephen, he kept big secrets. Maintaining an iron grasp on his privacy, O’Brian claimed to be an Irish Catholic, but it turns out his mother was English, his father German and none of them Catholic. His real name was Richard Patrick Russ.
     But like his characters, he lived the right kind of life at his secluded home in France, one of rigorous thought and deeply human values.
     I wish I had room here to quote from the Aubrey-Maturin books. For instance, though he told his fan Walter Cronkite in a recent interview on C-Span that he never visited South America, a passage in “The Wine-Dark Sea” about Stephen’s flight from enemies through a high Andean pass made me feel as though I was back there, among mountains I love, having real adventures for which I can thank my childhood role models Frank and Joe Hardy.
     Blessings upon you, as well, Mr. O’Brian. I’ll miss looking forward to your next installment. Knowing your books makes my life better.



42ND BIRTHDAY
     Forty-two: How weird an age is that? But it’s how old I am today, and I can live with it — happily.
     Birthdays don’t mean much, but maybe this one merits reflection since it’s been on my mind so long. Everyone’s birthday this year will be a little special: After all, it’s the year 2000.
     When I was about nine and new to calendars, I started calculating how old I’d be in this mystical, magical, faraway time. It’s probably easier for a sturgeon to guess what it’s like to be an exotic dancer than it is for a nine-year-old to imagine being 40-something. But that didn’t stop me from trying.
     I’m pretty sure paying bills wasn’t part of my vision of maturity. Changing diapers? Not on my radar screen. Thinning hair on top and big black ones sprouting from my nostrils? Arthritis? Two hundred and ten pounds? Snoring? Not on your life!
     In truth, my size-nine dreams are long lost; every cell in my body probably has been replaced about four times since then. I’m pretty sure I once was nine, but beyond that I don’t recall.
     My first really conscious recollection of planning for the future dates from about age 13, when I decided to become a doctor. Was I interested in helping others? Maybe, but not much. Was I interested in making lots of money? Thought never crossed my mind. No, I aspired to be a doctor in this glorious new millennium because I figured what I really wanted was to be a reclusive, best-selling writer living on a tropical island. But even at 13 I knew there’s no money in creative writing, so I figured being a doctor would keep me and my girlfriend supplied with coconuts.
     I was astonishingly naive as a teen-ager, and though I conceptually recognized that having a girlfriend was a good thing, I had no idea what a person actually did with one. A pretty neighbor was the object of my unrequited passion and if sheer intensity of thinking about someone could make anything happen, I’m sure we would have simultaneously exploded like nuclear-powered hormone bombs.
     Idealistic people wish they could travel back in time and make certain Hilter’s mother never met his father. Greedy people wish they could travel back in time and lend Bill Gates a hundred bucks when he was a pimply kid just getting started. I wish I could travel back in time so I could kick myself in the behind and say “Just ask her, you dope!”
     But life has a way of working out, even for jackasses like me. I love my brave and strong wife. My little girl Elizabeth is the apple of my eye, my sweet pie. I have a job I relish in one of the planet’s best places. I’m honored to have interesting and, I hope, meaningful volunteer roles.
     Donna and I were talking over lunch about how people’s lives would change if we knew when we would die, especially if soon. Who knows for sure, but I don’t think I’d alter much; perhaps spend even more time with family, eat more of Chef Eric Jenkins’ fried calamari, revisit the Wind River Mountains.
     But, for the most part, I’m happy to be here and not sweating buckets on some flea-infested island with a 42-year-old cheerleader I’m afraid to kiss.
     My least favorite part of growing older is losing dear people to death.
     As we grow into our lives, we’re wrapped in comfortable layers of warm humanity: Grandparents, parents, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts, friends of every type and degree, mentors, colleagues, cousins ... the list goes on and on. We gain spouses, children, new friends, but the original people who bind our lives together drop away like petals falling from a complex flower. We live in fear of waking one day to find ourselves alone and cold.
     Bud Forrester, our publisher emeritus who died this week at 85, was one of the people who warmed my life. But in his case I find my fear was misplaced: Though I’m sad, I don’t feel colder. His was the kind of life that mere death can’t peal away.
     I’ve always found it the most difficult to eulogize the people I like best, so I’m not going to say much more about Bud. I admired everything about him and hope to live up to his example.



COTTON PAPER
     I have a peculiar fascination with creamy white 100% cotton rag paper. For one thing, the damnable stuff is so expensive my breath catches each time a pen nears a fresh sheet. For another, its color and texture have something about them of a baby blanket, warm and wholesome.
     This was the paper on which, uncountable years ago, I composed insightful (self-absorbed), original (fossilized clichés) and undying (really yicky) undergraduate poetry. In my 20s, I couldn’t write a love letter unless it was on cotton rag. I had visions of our grandchildren reading my timeless prose on this paper that seemed meant for constitutions and sonnets. (Somehow, considering how it all worked out, I gather Teresa Cook was rather less impressed by my supposed eloquence and fancy paper than I was.)
     It’s no mystery why our earliest experiences make the deepest impression: They are written on just such clean and precious paper. Intensely concentrated little minds spinning around in a world where every sight, sound and smell is new, each 2- and 3-year-old is like a tablet being inscribed by a burning bush.
     If we’re modestly lucky, our parents imprint our minds with hugs, bedtime stories, kitties, foreign languages and curiosity. (But even while we celebrate childhood, let us never for a moment forget that a gut-wrenching proportion of little kids are imprinted with fear, shame and pain — and that sometimes it’s up to we unrelated adults to pull them to safety.)I was more than modestly lucky as a child. I didn’t get foreign languages, but enjoyed an unending plenty of hugs, bedtime stories, riverside forts, firecrackers, rascally older cousins, warm woodstoves and picnics.
     Helping my mother plant spring flowers (now I have a toddler myself, I use the word “helping” advisedly) is one of my first memories, and gardening still is something I treasure today. I’d treasure it more if I had time to do it. I still read. I still take joy in the outdoors. I still value hard work. All these started for me, as for nearly all people, as a kid.
     One of my earliest memories, so early it melds into a certain dream-like substance, is of going to the circus with my dad. I can’t even say for sure it happened. Dad’s long gone, self-sacrificed to the tobacco demons, and Mom doesn’t recall any such trip. But I’m quite sure it’s a fact, something that lasted a handful of hours counting driving time, but which holds a tenacious grip on my recollection.
     We probably can never really know our parents (or perhaps anyone), but my dad was especially mysterious. He was older than I am now when I was born and already had, in effect, lived an entire earlier life of which he rarely spoke, exploring the Canadian Arctic with the U.S. Army and fathering a daughter I never met till my teens, among other things.
     I tell this by way of introduction to my amazement that Dad knew someone with a traveling circus. After marveling at the clowns and exotic animals, my clearest memory of the whole event is being carried into a trailer where circus performers and managers were playing cards. I napped in a chair while Dad joined in. For a mega-respectable small town lawyer, this was spot-changing no leopard could ever match. What was it all about? I’ll never know, but the memory is delicious to me.
     My own little daughter Elizabeth is entranced, at the moment, with tigers. I recently bought her the new Disney “Tarzan” DVD and we’ve watched it approximately 300 times on the computer at home. We’ve watched the leopard segments (she thinks they’re tigers), at least 900 times. (As an aside, it’s odd that a movie set in Africa includes precisely zero Africans.)
     Anyway, when I saw a circus was coming to the Clatsop County Fairgrounds, it was a sure thing we’d be in the grandstand eating cotton candy.
     No clowns, tigers lazy and sedate as spayed housecats, and Chinese acrobats who shouldn’t give up their day jobs didn’t detract from an experience I hope Lizzie will remember forever. For one thing, her Mama bought the two of them a ride on an elephant, which I videotaped from across the arena. How many almost-3-year-olds can say they’ve ridden an elephant?
     And so what if I never fought Nazis with the ringmaster, as my childhood imagination would have had my father doing? I’m certain, boring though I am, I’ll be every bit as mysterious to Elizabeth as my own sweet Daddy is to me.



1000 YEARS
     We’ve just celebrated 1,000 years, a millennium. Considering even the most long-lived of us survive only about a tenth that, at first glance a thousand years almost seems forever. But consider if there existed somewhere a family with “really good genes,” a family in which everyone lived to be about 100. Conceivably, just 10 or so overlapping lives would stretch back to the distant year 1066 and the Battle of Hastings, when the Normans conquered England.
     Now, consider this: Geneticists working in the strange but exciting field of human DNA analysis have determined the human family began its dauntless migration out of southern Africa only 140,000 years ago. We reached Asia about 55,000 years ago and pushed into Europe just 40,000 to 50,000 years ago.
     Note the words I use: “The human family.” Examining the genetic makeup of living people reveals we all are closely related, from Pygmies to Scotsmen. Working backward through time, it’s now believed each of us alive in the world today can trace our lineage to 18 women and 10 men who successfully reared children during a brief span of time at the dawn of exploration 140 millennia ago.
     Almost all people of European descent can be traced to seven individual women. (For complicated reasons, scientists trace male and female genetics with very different mechanisms, and are farther along exploring female lines.)
     For $180, a person of European descent can send a tiny tissue sample and trace his or her genealogy back to one of these seven “daughters of Eve,” complete with a hypothetical mythology describing where and how they lived. (See www.oxfordancestors.com.)“We need to create a new epic based on the origins of humanity,” biologist Edward Wilson recently told the Wall Street Journal. “Homo sapiens have had one hell of a history! And I am speaking both of deep history — evolutionary, genetic history — and then, added on to that and interacting with it, the cultural history recorded for the past 10,000 years or so.”
     This sounds a rich chord with the many of us interested in family genealogies. More Americans than ever are intrigued with creating personal epics, trying to understand ourselves and our heritage. But on another level, it’s just plain fun: Family histories are adventure yarns about real people with our own flesh and blood.
     There’s something very potent about all this. Maybe it goes back to the 130,000 years when we possessed no written language and relied instead on stories spoken around the campfire. Just as I’ll tell my daughter someday about my dad’s run-ins with ham-stealing bears as an Army captain during construction of the Alaska Highway, some ancestor 50 generations ago told his daughters and sons about the day his grandfather fought off wolves on some forgotten path over the Alps. Gathered over millennia, the weight of all these stories is what makes us human.
     Present-day fascination with stories of small-scale individual heroics has, I believe, a lot to do with running out of obvious frontiers on earth. We are a traveling people, a speaking people. Our great migrations have imbued us with a need for new stories, new adventures to live and recount. I can’t leave the subject of migrations without sharing a story I just learned about my family, my great-great-great grandparents who came west to the Great Salt Lake Valley in Utah in 1850. I’ve had a condescending attitude toward my Mormon ancestors, but reading a little of their story makes me ashamed of myself.
     Fleeing persecution in Nauvoo, Ill., on Feb. 25, 1846, my Neeley ancestors “endured the hardships and sufferings of the most destitute pioneers,” according to a history compiled by my sweet old Aunt Bertha. With some long stops along the way, it took them until Sept. 17, 1850, to reach their destination, “which at first sight had the appearance of a dreary waste or vast desert, the dry and parched soil seeming to bid defiance to the husbandmen to bring forth from its bosom the comforts of life.”
     Imagine coming so far to build new lives in such a surprisingly harsh place. This is the story of all our ancestors, yours and mine. I’m very proud of them all.



TEETH
     The English are more or less famous for bad teeth, and as a proud member of that old race, I am no exception. Certainly there are many Englishmen and women with Chiclet smiles, but they stick out like watermelons at a jack-o’-lantern convention.
     Don’t get me wrong: Neither I nor any other descendants of the fair northern city of Durham would send a lass screaming from the room by opening our mouths, unless it was by saying something sarcastic, as we are wont to do. We just have normal human teeth, with all the gaps, chasms, pits and coffee stains that come with life lived in places lacking supplemental fluoride.
     In fact, perhaps for want of a better strategy, I kind of like my teeth. They fall into much the same category as my scars, each a little souvenir.
     I pause while typing to examine the tip of my left middle finger, nearly bit off 24 years ago by the new Remington Model 1100 automatic shotgun I got for my 18th birthday. I look down at the fleshy part between my right thumb and fingers, where a gopher sunk his incisors when I imprudently tried to grab him at age seven — I can still picture the exact spot it happened back by my grandma’s garden gate. I feel my scarred left earlobe and think of the Romanian-Canadian woman who pierced it with one of her golden hoop earrings as we reveled in the bright lights and worn stone fountains of Buenos Aires after a week trekking in the high Andes.
     I wouldn’t trade my scars for anything.
     And I guess the same goes for my teeth, though they’re theoretically fixable, if I was willing to spend as much on them as on my pickup truck. I figure it’s a short life and a person needs to choose what to be egotistical about. I’ve staked off plenty of other territory without needing to obsess much about what I crew my food with, so long as they’re healthy and stay put.
     My Grandpa Bell was about 5’5” and never weighed over 130 pounds, and he flashed a merry smile with a set of chompers that looked big and bright enough to have come from a magician’s supply store — as I got older, they reminded me of his favorite president, Harry Truman. Grandpa must have gotten dentures when he was about as old I am now, and though I loved his smile, I’m very pleased to avoid his dental fate.
     Teeth are a strange topic for a column, but I was put in mind of the subject by a recent article in the New York Times on trends in tooth whitening. I was struck again by what a deep divide exists between the lives and values of most people I know, in contrast to the values we see on TV and other urban media.
     Though the Times prints stories about $3,000 dresses and $300,000 starter homes without so much as a blink, even it couldn’t resist winking at the very idea of someone paying $1,000 a tooth to have half a millimeter of natural enamel shaved away and replaced by an artificial veneer. One of the most popular shades is Hollywood White.
     While such an expenditure would strike most anyone as extreme, there is a much broader move toward whiter and whiter teeth. A few years ago, according to the article, those interested in remodeling their mouths wanted bleached teeth to look as natural as possible — merely a clean kind of ivory.
     But now even ordinary dental patients insist on shades such as Bleach White and Opaque Snow. “What was once perceived as so bright it was fake-looking is now considered fabulous.”
     I’ll probably sound like a hick (which is delightful since I am one), but what’s our nation coming to? Things here go from silly to wildly improbable. It’s hard to imagine any excess that won’t end up becoming enshrined as a new lifestyle choice. People hunger for legitimacy in their lives but squander themselves on triviality.
     And here I am writing a column about teeth when there are plenty of nice ordinary people dying in the world at this moment of things you and I could help them overcome. Maybe I’m no better than the tooth-bleachers, just a little more self-aware.
     But I’ll smile at you if you will at me.



PATAGONIA
     For many years I’ve looked forward to seeing something appear in my mailbox that I’ve gradually come to regard as a kind of pornography. I’m referring to the Patagonia clothing catalog.
     If you don’t get it or haven’t seen it, allow me to swiftly say the Patagonia catalog doesn’t feature augmented-breasted South American shepherdesses cavorting amongst the glaciers. But almost.
     Patagonia’s stock-in-trade is splendidly made but swooningly expensive jackets, shorts, luggage and sportswear geared toward mountain climbers, skiers, hikers, surfers and anyone else who participates in photogenic outdoor activities; or those who fantasize about such things; or those who want office-mates to think they spent the weekend bone fishing in Belize.
     The catalog, formerly a semi-annual event but which now comes about as often as the Fred Meyer flier, is quasi-famous for its many contributed photos of attractive skinny people doing exciting things while wearing Patagonia products. Through the dumb luck (if “luck” is the right word) of growing up in a small town where mountaineering is a cottage industry, I know quite an assortment of climbers and get a vicarious thrill from leafing through to see if anyone I know is pictured. The current number has a goofy photo of the Canadian climber Barry Blanchard, who used to be married to one of my best friends.
     Thanks to its success in peddling made-in-China $40 sport bras, $72 hemp shirts and $375 parkas, Patagonia splurges by contributing 1 percent of sales to conservation and habitat programs. It gave some money to Sea Resources in Chinook a few years back.
     Legendary climber Paul Petzolt lived near us when I was growing up. He also was a legendary womanizer and scamp, but ultimately a humane and worthwhile guy for all of that, and I don’t know if he ever paid $375 for a car, far less a jacket. His clothes were the tough but expendable items all hard-working people favor, the kind you buy at a feed store, not in a boutique. (Oddly, he didn’t like wilderness areas, something he and my environmentalist uncle often argued over.)
     In contrast, if you tear a “Pata-Gucci” shirt while scrambling through a barbwire fence on your way to the Torres del Paine, the shriek you let out likely is motivated less by pain than by horror over what clumsiness just cost you.
     Patagonia is part of a whole array of similarly framed organizations including Outside magazine that pander to a kind of weird, voyeuristic, armchair adventure trend, similar to the phenomenon of urban commuters driving sport utility vehicles. In their defense, it can be said of most of these people that they have, at minimum, a dilettantish sympathy for the environment.
     But undeniably stunning as Patagonia catalog photos are, there’s something unsavory about the concept of people wearing $80 pants pictured next to Himalayan and Andean villagers who don’t make that much annually. I’m not quite such a bleeding-heart as to suggest people make a big sacrifice and buy $60 pants instead and give $20 to international aid, but it does seem we diminish ourselves by acting as if expensive gear is vital for an authentic experience.
     Legitimacy is earned, not purchased. My Mom says buying a pair of cowboy boots doesn’t make you a cowboy. The same rule applies to the whole matter of living in general. Let’s spend less on fancy things that only pretend to be tools, and spend more time learning how to do small things well for as little as possible.
     Finally, let me confess that yes, I do buy some Patagonia stuff, though usually used off the Internet nowadays. I’ll probably even go to their new store in Ecotrust’s oh-so-ecologically-correct Portland headquarters when it opens. But I’ll be a smidgen ashamed of myself. I sure wish they’d start sending the catalog in a plain brown wrapper.



HAPPINESS
     A couple weeks ago, an essayist in a national publication raised the question “If richer isn’t happier, what is?”
     The average American family received a 16 percent raise between 1970 and 1999. It isn’t uncommon for fairly ordinary families to take trips to Hawaii, own two or three cars, and live in homes with a thousand square feet per person. In contrast, 30 years ago long-distance phone calls were considered a luxury and vacation, if you got one, consisted of piling into daddy’s 8-year-old station wagon for a white-knuckle road trip to Yellowstone.
     But during this same period the number of people who described themselves as “very happy” fell by about 20 million.
     This is causing more than a little consternation among economists (including me, though since I only have a bachelor’s degree in the subject, maybe I’m less confused than the Ph.D.s). After all, one of the ten commandments of economics is that more money equals greater personal well-being. So why aren’t more of us cartwheeling in joy over all our stuff and lifestyle options?
     One psychologist suggests maybe we actually are a little happier but are unaware of it because we’ve come to expect so much more of life. We hope each thing we buy will be the magic ticket to status and success, only to have our spirits dashed every time as the novelty wears thin or our neighbor buys something better — think of the constant pursuit of a faster computer, a bigger screen TV.
     Other experts wonder if women are disenchanted with some aspects of working outside the home, or if we all are simply stretched too thin by the pace of living — a poll found nearly nine out of ten of us long to spend more time with our families. Although we could accomplish this by working fewer hours and still have enough money, few choose to.
     Are we merely spoiled whiners? Maybe.
     When I think of what makes me really happy, it’s clear wealth seldom plays a direct role. My pleasures involve motion and mystery in the company of people with whom I share intellectual and emotional intimacy. That sounds fancy, but it translates into doing fun and interesting things with friends and loved ones, and I know I sure don’t get enough.
     I think the key is “doing.” We all do an incredible amount of living by proxy in the form of watching TV or surfing the Internet. I spend too much time living inside my head, when what my body needs is to work up a sweat struggling up to a mountain ridge to look over into the next valley. Far too many of us are like those sad little monkeys you see in the zoo who don’t even have any real nits to pick for amusement.
     Being in the news business myself, it’s kind of sacrilegious to say this, but I also think people are overwhelmed by what we see and read. I’ve almost quit watching TV news; why do I need to know about some horrific car wreck in Indiana or gruesome murder in New York? Happiness is harder when you permit other people’s tragedies to pull you down.
     Mystery is something sorely lacking in most of our lives, and again popular culture and news media bear a lot of blame. I remember being distressed as a teen-ager at how naive I was, how sheltered. I’ll never quit blushing at the thought of playing strip poker at age 17. Although I’ve led my wife to think I enjoyed an adolescence of manly sophistication, I was as scared of two beautiful semi-nude girls as an escaped felon at a bounty hunters’ convention. In retrospect, my terror was fun. And I was darned lucky, even if I didn’t get “lucky.”
     I really regret modern teens seem to know the facts of life before they get their learner’s permits. Knowing too much about too many things too soon is strangely debilitating. I suspect there are some things we should never know. There needs to be more of a place in our world for mystery about sex, and whatever God may be, and life itself. We need to back off and let the world show us what it wants at its own pace.
     In the end, I think happiness takes a certain amount of work and deliberate choice. I’m not there yet, but aim to keep trying. After all, isn’t the pursuit of happiness is one of our inalienable rights?



LOST INNOCENCE
     “In April 1917 the illusion of isolation was destroyed, America came to the end of innocence, and of the exuberant freedom of bachelor independence. That the responsibilities of world power have not made us happier is no surprise. To help ourselves manage them, we have replaced the illusion of isolation with a new illusion of omnipotence.”
      — Barbara Tuchman (1912–1989), U.S. historian. “How We Entered World War I,” New York Times Magazine (May 5, 1967).
     And here we are again, at the end of innocence. We didn’t think we had any, that decades of being reviled as the Great Satan had callused our souls, that nightmare visions of rabble desecrating the body of a dead American flier had hardened our hearts.
     But no. We had innocence left to take.
     Our wealthy isolation left us blind to a gathering storm of hate and envy beyond our blessed shore. We were complacent about our privileges, and naive, like a pampered child without warning abducted and raped.
     The well of our mourning is black and deep. The terror and death of those innocent thousands vibrate in our bones like wasps. A sunny September morning, airplanes disappearing into gleaming buildings as if by a sly magician’s trick — these frozen moments will be forever welded in our minds, a poison capsule of deeply personal grief.
     We all know those who permit grief to root out every trace of who they were, people who dine each day on the broken glass of hate, people who walk under the sun but can never feel its warmth.
     America will not be such a victim. Our pain will not destroy us. Our righteous anger will burn bright, not turn into a cancerous hatred.
     War is upon us, and we are mighty. But this will be a war requiring wisdom, honor and restraint — in short, all the qualities our opponents lack. Our doughboys won’t be marching off to stand across a bloody field from an enemy commanded by misguided but understandable generals. Unlike the wars of our grandfathers and fathers, ours will be against a nearly anonymous evil that despises all we are, loathing our openness, our humor, our love of motion and change. They hate us because we feel no hate.
     We don’t like complexity, and this is a weakness we’ll have to overcome. Smashing one man and his minions will not fix this problem. Rarely in the world, there is a time when pure vengeance and punishment are called for. This is such a time. But unlike these evil fanatics, we must not give in to wanton destruction based simply on race or creed.
     This war is a war against the preachers and leaders of hatred, and their camp followers. It must not turn into an endless great crusade in the timeless mountains and valleys of the Middle East. We cannot win such a crusade, because the price of victory would be destruction of all we treasure about our culture.
     With all our strength, we must pursue and crush those guilty of these crimes and those who harbor plans for similar atrocities in the future. With all our strength, we must free all people bound in religious servitude to ignorant zealots. With all our strength, we should lift these nations as we did our foes after World War II so that their citizens can share the simple blessings of democracy and freedom.
     In the end, this is a war to preserve innocence, an informed innocence in which we and our children can work and play without fear. This is a war, an unending quest, to secure this for all the world’s children in every nation, regardless of color or faith.
     May God grant us strength, wisdom and, above all, mercy.



PISCO SOURS
     I stayed up till 1 a.m. drinking Pisco sours in the starched-tablecloth bar of the Hotel Bolivar and proceeded in the morning to board the wrong flight, a fact that arrived in my brain like an ice pick as the airplane slalomed through jagged Andean peaks en route to the unofficial headquarters of the Shining Path revolution in the highlands of Peru.
     It was 1985 and I was playing hooky from law school, which I had come to see as a mummifying waste of three years. After Lima, I meant to fly down to the large and relatively safe Peruvian city of Arequipa, on from there to Chilean beaches, and then back up into the mountains to see friends in Bolivia.
     But I was so utterly incompetent at Spanish, so jet-lagged and — to tell the truth — so “under the weather” from the previous night, I bought a ticket for the wrong city starting with “A.” Flying to Ayacucho instead of Arequipa was a stupid though ultimately enjoyable mistake — a rare chance to explore a beautiful region — yet I had a hard time staying philosophical that morning as my broken seat back kept slapping into the lap of the passenger behind me.
     On either side of the path between the plane and the terminal in Ayacucho there were heaps of sandbags and government soldiers armed with a machine guns, aimed out at the apparently empty but dangerous hills. As if this wasn’t unnerving enough, a cold-eyed commando stood guard at my hotel, so intimidating I couldn’t bring myself to take his photo as a memento, though now I bet it would have made his day.
     In some ways, on the surface Ayacucho was remarkably ordinary, with a few people browsing the traditional outdoor market, celebrating New Year’s eve in the plaza, happy to see a gringo with a little money to spend.
     But somebody assassinated its mayor the week before I arrived. There were severe restrictions on movement, constant document checks by authorities. Silent, angry civilians stood on rooftops. I never knew if they were angry at me, the government, the rebels, or their wives, but they symbolized a strangely warped place. Whether it was under siege by murderous zealots or occupied by brutal invaders was a matter of local controversy. The answer was unimportant to most folks, busy trying to get by in hard times.
     Thousands died in terror attacks and military reprisals in Peru as that nation virtually sacrificed its democracy for a decade, eventually suppressing the revolution but possibly sowing the seeds for even worse trouble in years to come. Despair and the longing for vengeance are an explosive combination, and they’re still in rich supply in the endless shantytowns of Lima.
     I don’t want to go there. As our nation faces a demonstrably real and deadly threat from terror, it’s imperative we not allow ourselves to be stampeded into accepting anything that smells even faintly of South American-style law and order. We already have laws, the ability and the resources to combat terrorism on our own terms. If we permit authorities to curtail liberty in order to preserve America, in the end it won’t be America.
     I hope we can cast fear aside and travel when and where we wish, say what we think, and stand up for the same rights for all. At the same time, I don’t think we ought to go on as if nothing happened Sept. 11. Just because these attacks were evil doesn’t mean we shouldn’t learn from them. We ought to take the world more seriously, pay better attention, and take responsibility for what our corporations and agencies do.
     We’ve lived through a kind of golden age of international travel, when even inept travelers like me could fumble our way in and out of some sticky situations without a scratch. A few years ago, intrigued by ancient central Asian cultures, I even toyed with going to Afghanistan. The thought wouldn’t cross my mind today. In fact, it and many other nations could be extraordinarily risky for generations to come.
     Maybe safety is always an illusion, or maybe I’ve just gotten a little smarter with age. But recent events feel like a clear signal of a slide into chaos, an end or at least a pause in the forward progress of humanity. But maybe universal progress was always an illusion, too.



CHARLIE BROWN
     What if we’re alone in the universe? Or, if not alone, at least an exceedingly rare gem of intelligent life with no peers to be found for a horrifying distance in every direction?
     A couple of University of Washington scientists, Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, hypothesize in their new book “Rare Earth” that we are unwittingly privileged to live on a planet nearly miraculous in its ability to produce and sustain complex animals. Maybe, instead of a million civilizations in the Milky Way galaxy as estimated by Dr. Carl Sagan, there is, well, one.
     A virtual religion has grown up around the idea that we are infants toddling around the outskirts of an endless city occupied by benign beings who will someday step from spaceships and deliver unto us universal secrets about eating rich foods without putting on weight and how to win every time at blackjack.
     Ward and Brownlee make a convincing rebuttal by pointing out numerous ways in which earth enjoys special advantages over other known or guessed-at planets. For example, they suggest most solar systems and many entire galaxies are lifeless because they lack metallic elements required for advanced biological processes.
     Though some colleagues have heaped them with praise for poking holes in popular fallacies, they’ve also been heaped with plenty of the opposite, in particular by those who have spent $100 million in a so-far fruitless search for electronic traces of extraterrestrial life in the form of distant echoes of the Klingon version of “The Honeymooners.” Despite a lot of long and hard listening, we’ve yet to detect so much as a whispered murmur of accidental or purposeful transmissions from other planets. So if there are a million civilizations in our galaxy, they evidently lack 100,000-watt talk radio stations.     It’s interesting to ponder what it means if Ward and Brownlee are right and there will never be any cosmic cavalry riding to our rescue. Without getting into the big imponderables like whether we owe a debt for our existence to some sort of God — it is, after all, easier to believe in divine intervention if we’re one of a kind rather than one amongst ten trillion — this theory puts us on notice that we should better appreciate and protect what we have.
     Until the last few hundred years, mostly for superstitious reasons we believed we enjoyed a position of remarkable privilege, that we resided on the only planet in existence. What will it be like if we have to readjust to the idea that we truly do enjoy the only Garden of Eden, that any cosmic colonization or leadership will have to come from us or no one?
     It’s a big old universe. It may be a whole lot roomier than we realized, and infinitely more lonesome.
     In a roundabout way, all this deepens my sense of loss at news of cartoonist Charles Schulz’s death last Saturday night. Maybe the apparent lifelessness of space drives home the need for human connections, or maybe it’s not that fancy: It’s just nice to think about good ol’ Charlie Brown, Snoopy and the gang slogging through the ordinary and innocent challenges of childhood.
     I remember seeing “A Charlie Brown Christmas” when it was first broadcast in 1965. Its theme music still evokes the holiday season for me: Suddenly, I’m a skinny little kid in fuzzy pajamas, terrorizing my little brother and hoping to get neat toys and not stupid clothes from Santa.
     I studied paperback collections of Peanuts for clues how to live. After we grow up, it’s easy to forget all the doubts, fears and uncertainties of childhood. Peanuts is a window on the interior of childhood, in which missed baseball pitches, broken kites, unrequited crushes (Lucy and Linus) and wild misconceptions (the Great Pumpkin) all are pretty typical. It was nice seeing how cartoon kids dealt with those kinds of situations.
     Much as I pretend to have more sophisticated role models, Snoopy’s nonchalance, good taste and courage helped me create a self I can live with. Even now, wide awake at 3 a.m. thinking of an empty universe, a little cartoon dog still is a surprising and welcome friend.



LEADERSHIP
     Puttering around the deck Sunday, willing my potted tulips to blossom faster, I heard the unmistakable cries of a pair of eagles flirting and whirling a ways out over Cape Disappointment. Their swift tango took them out of sight in moments, but echoes of their conversation still spilled across the bay.
     The first eagle I saw as a boy was in rather different straits. Western fence poles are set maybe 12 feet apart, and his enormous tattered wings were wired across most of that. Poisoned or shot, let’s at least hope he was completely dead before he was crucified for representing a threat to some unspeakable wretch’s spring lambs, otherwise destined for the butcher’s blade.
     It was secrecy and ignorance that permitted eagle killings to go unnoticed for a long time. The killings may not have ceased altogether after my uncle brought them to light in his newspaper, The High Country News, but the subculture that once condoned them became virtually outcast. By the same token, once Americans learned of the detrimental affects of DDT on eagles, it was a relatively swift process to see it banned, though bits of it still seep into the system to this day.
     With our national symbol back from the brink of extinction, it’s nice to think the tide has turned in many people’s unthinking animosity toward the world beyond their lawns. I have little fear for eagles, though plenty of other creatures certainly still are at risk from habitat loss and other dangers in a world where humans are spread ever more thickly. Not everything is so lucky as to be a national symbol.
     No Pollyanna on this subject, it nevertheless also seems to me that Danish statistician Bjorn Lomberg has it at least partly right in his controversial assertion that many things are indeed getting better. Maybe not so much so as he puts forth in his book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist,” but better than his vociferous critics would have us believe.
     Lomberg gets carried away with some of his arguments. As everyone knows, even seemingly straightforward statistics can somehow be made to miss the truth, and he manages to inveigle a fair amount of manipulation into his numbers. But he’s absolutely correct in saying environmental groups have much to gain from exaggerating bad news. And he’s right that we in the press deliver what our audiences ask for: doom and gloom. After all, calamity makes for good headlines; slow improvement does not.
     But truthful, objective and fairly presented facts are the most powerful tools there are for protecting the environment and making lives better. Though in the U.S. we all sometimes feel overwhelmed by the sheer suffocating weight of too much information, generally as people obtain more knowledge about their environment, conditions have a habit of improving. No one wants their kids to be at risk.
     However, filling this prescription — giving people information and ensuring they have the education to understand it — is far from certain. As much as anything, I fear the creeping ignorance of humanity, particularly the vast billions who will never experience a free press, or open access to the Internet, or most of the other news sources we take for granted. In the scramble for survival, long-term strategic planning is a luxury many folks can’t afford. But lack of such planning dooms them and their posterity to perpetuate practices that deplete soils and fisheries.
     Even in this country, ignorance presents great risks, though here it stems more from laziness than lack of opportunity. Too many Americans go out of their way to avoid learning anything that might interfere with enjoyment of the planet’s most lavish lifestyle. What we don’t know can’t give us a guilty conscience.
     Meanwhile, our president and his administration continue to do all they can to stifle information, in effect gagging government scientists who don’t toe a rigid pro-development line. And yet President Bush is idolized by millions, he a dangerous simpleton who can’t read his speeches, far less write them himself. He’s made out of the same stuff as the guys who used to blast away at eagles from helicopters “for sport.”
     As Lomberg suggests, things often tend to improve almost despite themselves, and I trust our big resilient nation will survive this dopey president and his manipulative henchmen. Whether we can survive the ignorance and laziness that put him in office in the first place is a different matter. I’m trying to remain optimistic.



GOOGLE FRIENDS
     Anyone who has ever been my friend is my friend forever. Because everyone moves around, becoming busier and more distracted, reality is I have friends I’ll never see again. But they’re each pretty close to the surface of my heart, even kids I ran with in grade school and, with a couple possible exceptions, women I briefly dated.
     So for me, one of the greatest transformations brought by the still very young Internet Age is the chance it offers to relocate old friends and re-establish connections. Usually, after a first splash of getting caught up, active contact recedes to an occasional e-mailed “Hello ... how you doin’?” But since I write these newspaper columns — and have always found it useful to think of them as personal letters to best friends — they’re a natural avenue for actively staying in touch.
     Google, the most comprehensive yet simple Internet search engine, is one of my main all-purpose research tools and a way I’ve tracked down a friend or two. If you haven’t tried it, you should — it’s so popular, it’s becoming a verb, as in “I googled so-and-so,” meaning I entered someone’s name and learned something about them.
     A few months ago, I googled my old friend Carlos Aliaga Uria, a Bolivian engineer. We met back in about 1983, when I was editor of my university’s newspaper, and Carlos was my most inflammatory writer of letters to the editor. Although he was an excellent writer, I occasionally advised him on obscure grammatical questions. I appreciated his intellectual energy, and we hit it off.
     Carlos was, and is, concerned about economic domination of the world’s poor, especially as it pertains to Bolivia’s native population. Unbelievably wealthy in mineral resources, Bolivia nevertheless is among the most impoverished nations in this hemisphere. It’s hard to even imagine how thoroughly Bolivia was despoiled. In the 17th and 18th centuries, Potosi in the Bolivian Andes literally became synonymous with great wealth, its mines providing most of the Spanish Empire’s silver, while hundreds of thousands of Indians died there in horrifying slavery. Things have improved, but not so as much as you might expect, and it’s easy to understand why Carlos is worked up about it all.
     He remained politically active after college and became involved in other newsworthy pursuits, so Google popped him right up. I e-mailed him and we’re back in active friendship even though he now lives in Cochabamba, way off on the edge of the Bolivian Antiplano, or high plains.
     Besides all the messy complications that accompany almost any interesting life, he’s been involved in a project that gets air time on the Discovery Channel on a program called “Atlantis in the Andes.” Farfetched at first glance, this documentary develops a theory that Plato’s descriptions of Atlantis easily may apply to a lost civilization now buried beneath sediments thousands of feet above sea level in a vast, formerly lake-filled plateau.
     Carlos organized British explorer Jim Allen’s “End of Millennium” expedition in September 1999, findings of which were shown to the whole world in a surprise press conference Carlos organized at the Bolivian Congress. It is appealing to think that Bolivia’s gentle but rock-hard people may have created one of the world’s first great civilizations. Read more about it at http://www.net-zone.co.uk/atlantis/.
     Google also contains a few references to me, though none so exciting as helping re-discover Atlantis. When I looked last week, the most intriguing reference to Matt Winters was about a recent romance novel, “Some Kind of Wonderful” by Barbara Freethy, with amusing parallels to my own experiences adopting a daughter.
     According to a description on Amazon.com, “A baby is the last thing hard-driving journalist Matt Winters needs. ... When he discovers a newborn baby girl on his doorstep, he panics ... then he desperately turns to his temptingly pretty neighbor Caitlyn Devereaux for help. After all, women are supposed to know everything about babies!”
     Of course, in the case of this real Matt Winters, a baby was exactly what I needed — my little sweetie pie Elizabeth. Someday soon, I’ll be taking her to explore Atlantis.