Editor's Notebooks: The Rest of 2002

Airport incident raises ire

    Maybe it was a case of several people rubbing each other the wrong way in a hectic airport screening line, but a recent incident at Portland International Airport raises some serious red flags about discretionary power handed over to the new Transportation Security Administration (TSA) and associated law enforcement personnel.

    Californians Nick Monahan and his very pregnant wife Mary Jasionowski were in Portland — which they continue to love — working on a TV special with director Gus Van Zant (of Good Will Hunting fame). They needed to fly to Nevada on Oct. 26 to attend a wedding.

    Monahan was singled out for special screening of the kind that has become somewhat routine. He figured it was no big deal and regarded it as no more than potential fodder for dinnertime conversation until the search began to resemble some odd roadside sobriety test.

    “My anger increased when I realized that the newly knighted federal employees weren’t just examining me, but my 71/2-months pregnant wife as well. I’d originally thought that I’d simply been randomly selected for the more excessive than normal search. You know, Number 50 or whatever. Apparently not though — it was both of us. These are your new threats, America: Pregnant accountants and their sleepy husbands flying to weddings. “

    The couple eventually was cleared to go, but Jasionowski was crying and Monahan demanded screeners tell him what they had done to upset her. Eventually, Jasionowski told her husband about her experience. In the midst of the crowded terminal, she’d been patted down and made to raise her shirt — presumably to make certain her big belly and swollen breasts weren’t bombs. Having had some difficulties getting and staying pregnant, these rough attentions all felt like a humiliating personal assault.

    But “eventually” was quite a while later, as Monahan was immediately arrested by Portland police as he voiced his frustration and anger to security personnel. His experience of Portland police, in the person of Officer S. L. Strait, was not positive. He was facetiously asked if he shouldn’t be taking anti-psychotic medication and, he feels, maliciously taunted with the fact that he would be made to miss his old friend’s wedding.

    After reading his account, I spoke with Monahan and the folks at PDX. I contacted the Portland Police Bureau, but they didn’t see fit to acknowledge my request for comment.

    After processing, Monahan was cited for disorderly conduct, barred from the airport for 90 days, and sent packing. The details of all this are in an article Monahan wrote, posted on the Internet at http://www.lewrockwell. com/orig3/monahan1.html

    Out of a sense of justice or a premonition of bad publicity in the film industry, at his request PDX eventually rescinded the order “86-ing” Monahan. But the airport stands by security personnel and the officer’s underlying decision to arrest him, citing the importance of maintaining travel safety. Simply explaining his story to police would have avoided an arrest, according to PDX.

    Monahan himself, in a phone conversation Tuesday, seems anything but a hothead, and much more a first-time dad rejoicing in his newborn son while still coming to grips with “being thrown into the maw of this system where you have no recourse at all.” He said he had no chance whatsoever to explain his situation before being handcuffed and led away.

    He pleaded no contest to the charges, largely to avoid having to spend any needless time in PDX attending court dates. But he makes a good case for the proposition that anybody can find themselves behind bars if they have the temerity to speak sharply to public employees in the form of airport screeners.

    “You just don’t wake up in the morning thinking that something like this is going to happen. You’re not wary, not expecting anything ... it makes you scared about things you shouldn’t have to be scared about,” Monahan told me. Since posting his powerful story online, Monahan said he’s heard many horror stories across the country, something that should scare us all.

    We’re the nation’s citizens and we’re supposed to be the ones in charge, not low-level functionaries in some airport. Certainly we should be cooperative, for the public good. But this doesn’t mean we ought to have to act like proverbial good little Germans, always toeing the line — especially when reacting to rude behavior toward a loved one.

    Protecting airports must not become a license for unchecked power.

‘Tis the season for magical moments

    “Gloria: In excess this day! Oh!” were the lyrics I innocently warbled as a boy in the comfortably worn choir bay of an Episcopal church up in the Wyoming mountains, dark warm pews polished to a pure smoothness by generations of faithful hands and bottoms.

    I figured Gloria must be some famous celebrity friend of God’s, the same girl who starred in Van Morrison’s 1965 hit: “You know she comes around here; At just about midnight; She make ya feel so good, Lord; She make ya feel all right; And her name is G-L-O-R-I; G-L-O-R-I-A (GLORIA); G- L-O-R-I-A (GLORIA)

    My misconception lasted pretty much intact from then until Thursday, when a bit of Internet research revealed the real words to Angels We Have Heard On High: “Gloria in excelsis Deo,” translates into “Glory to God in the highest,” the song of the angels at the birth of Jesus.

    This carol’s wonderful undulating tune felt like perfection in my tenor throat. Maybe it is indeed the song of angels, though I confess performing it only momentarily shook my agnosticism, which historically led to some precocious conversations with the priest when I was nine or so. How does one reconcile the story of Christ with modern rationality, I asked. Isn’t it essentially only a kind-hearted fable, its positive lessons encumbered by humor-deficient sermonizing?

    I could be an awfully sanctimonious little rascal, in my secular way.

    Mystery still holds more appeal for me than certainty. Confident belief in a deity somehow minimizes what properly ought to be beyond human understanding, the artwork presuming to know the thoughts of the artist.

    To me, God is found less in the words of the physical Bible — noble and inspired though they may at times be — than in the crackling atomic void between its molecules. I perceive the universal spirit residing in open spaces, hidden in plain sight, tiny as the gulf between the pages of a closed book and as infinite as sky that sweeps up into the darkness beyond a campfire. Sitting with my face to the warmth of a blaze after a Spam-and-beans dinner in some high mountain bowl, it’s always seemed as though somewhere out beyond I could hear a faint murmur of the “Angels we have heard on high; Sweetly singing o’er the plains; And the mountains in reply; Echoing their joyous strains.” Skeptic though I am, I do think the rocks remember the truth of their creation, just as the dark sky remembers the dawn.

***

    Since Halloween, my girl Elizabeth (“I’m not little!”) and I have been listening to Christmas carols on the pickup’s cassette player on our drive to the Kindergarten bus stop. After Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, she stretches her toe to reach the rewind button from her safety seat, and uncannily stops the tape at my favorite.

    I’m not sure, but she may love Jesus even more than Santa, which eventually could become a little awkward for her heathenish old man. “Who’s taller, Santa or Jesus?” she asked me the other day. After a long pause, I told her I figured they were about the same size, but she wouldn’t have any of that. “Jesus is definitely bigger.”

    All last week, she sang me Gloria, her sweet version capturing the essence of the song’s spirit, if not its every musical nuance, a few extra swoops thrown into the melody’s lovely downward spiral. She said she’d sing it at the Star of the Sea School Christmas program, but I believed she was just imagining some extemporaneous show for daddy, a plan that would dissolve in the reality of the event.

    Her mom and I found second-row seats Monday, and were thrilled as teenagers at our first rock concert when Elizabeth and her classmates made their appearance. A few minutes later, I smiled in surprise as all the school students began Angels We Have Heard On High.

    Then, alone among the Kindergarteners, Elizabeth rose to her feet. Even amongst a hundred childish voices, I’m sure I could make out hers, singing just for me.

    And I joined her, and the angels, in rejoicing in the generosity and mercy of the Christmas spirit.

    Whatever you believe, I wish you a merry Christmas. Always watch for wonderful gifts of the most unexpected kind.

Indelible memories from a colorful notebook

    The air temperature goes screaming down like a kamikaze when the sun sets at 13,000 feet in the mountains, and we wore fingerless woolen mittens in our tent drinking brandy, the two sinewy old Argentines, the Polish-American photographer and I.

    It was one of those hard glittering nights in the Andes — maybe there aren’t any other kind? — when the Southern Cross dangles nearby like tiny diamonds against a black woman’s skin.

    We sat drinking and talking for hours, my friend Zbigniew Bzdak translating into English the lives of these guides on Aconcagua, at 22,834 feet the highest mountain in the Americas. Senor Fernando Grajelos with his famous theatrical shock of white hair, and his fellow climbing master whose name I can’t recall, described decades of adventures amongst the foolish tourists and ragged crags.

    We spoke more, though, of simple human aspirations, of the struggles of hard-working men and their families left down below in the vineyards and farms of Mendoza Province. We came around to a pretty serious proposition of marriage to one of four or five daughters, and I was awfully tempted. Strong, honest fathers make good children. Ah well — another path not taken. Maybe in some alternate universe I’m growing grapes, bouncing babies on my knee, and going to an analyst twice a week like all the other notoriously self-absorbed Argentines.

    At 3:30 a.m. or so later that night, we tromped along the ice-clean line between a glacier and the steep, rubble-strewn valley walls. Soon after sunrise, we reached the magnificent 10,000-foot vertical cliffs of the south face — absolutely frightening. A Frenchman in our party, who hadn’t even stayed up all night, was sure his head was going to explode from altitude sickness and scenery overload.

    Ancient sedimentary taffy curled up into the fast-transforming clouds, which swiftly merged and parted around giant ice sheets and slabs of rock the size of towns. We really are just gnats on the skin of this planet.

    For Thanksgiving a few days later, Bzdak and I foraged up some turkey in one of the city of Mendoza’s awe-inspiring restaurants. Settled as much by Italians as Spaniards, Mendoza is the wine-making center of the nation, and every neighborhood cafe offers a riot of conversation and food worthy of an 8,000-mile trip. As afternoon dissolved into siesta and shops folded shut, I sat on a bench near the Italian Consulate, dozing in the southern hemisphere’s hot November sun, petrified glacier dust still tickling my sinuses.

***

    The sudden numbness brandy brings to the lips brought all these memories stampeding back to mind the other night. In the temporary absence of my tea-totaling wife, a little of the Napoleon otherwise destined to flavor my Mom’s fruitcake recipe somehow found its way into a glass, and then into me.

    Fruitcake has a bad reputation, and most men probably would confess to an array of other sins before admitting they like it, far less make it. But with eight eggs and a pound of butter — not to mention all that good French brandy, candied fruit and sugar — Mom’s fruitcake is nothing to be ashamed of. Drop me a note at the address below if you’d like a copy.

    At 76, Mom’s still got a lively mind but finds it harder to get around, and makes all her trips through the pages of books. Nor does she make fruitcake anymore, and I can understand why: mixing her recipe works up a sweat.

    Mom’s fruitcake has been many places, as she often gave it to me to take along on my journeys, which I always used to plan in the weeks around Christmas — I had some on that hung-over walk to Aconcagua, some on the endless switchbacks down into Copper Canyon, some during an endless wait for a lost passport in the Hotel Touristas in Abancay, Peru.

    The years dwindle down and down toward a day when creating her recipes will be one of the best ways to recall Mom, the special flavors of the holidays providing keys back into a distant time and her simple gestures of love.

    I trust you’re relishing your own family traditions and tastes this weekend, recording it all in your minds and hearts, putting it all in memory’s pantry to re-heat on some distant day.

Campaign trail dusty but rewarding

    I’m a big, fat loser. Well, maybe “fat” is a minor exaggeration. But the candidates I worked for lost their races, and I certainly took it personally.

    For most people, election night is a terrible bore, or at least it was until 30 years ago when cable TV began offering some evening options — Gunga Din instead of Walter Cronkite. Now, unless it’s a presidential year, even the dull old networks usually stick with what they consider to be entertainment.

    U.S. citizens isolate themselves from politics, then wonder why leaders so poorly understand our needs and dreams. We form opinions about candidates based on little more than their advertising. It should come as no surprise we end up with politicians who are all colorful plastic packaging and no actual contents, the human equivalents of those puffed rice cakes favored by dieters.

    And, anymore, dissatisfaction seems only to breed greater disengagement, not anger and more involvement.

    There was a time when personally meeting a politician wasn’t just a citizen’s obligation, but a rich source of fun. Free hot-dogs and a chance to rub shoulders with the great man. Maybe drink a little of his beer. Poke fun at him, perhaps, or pick a fight.

    He’s pretty far down my list of favorite presidents, but I got quite a charge out of going to see Reagan once on a press pass. Man alive, that guy was the best ever at saying nothing while making it sound profound.

    I guess lots of folks have the same sort of aimless affection for our current president. I sure haven’t managed to figure out the attraction, unless it’s the fact he doesn’t seem to have a lot of pretension. Maybe I’ll study up on him and see if I can find a way to like him, since it looks like I’m stuck with him as my president for the next two and probably six years.

***

    But with the exception of presidents and maybe a few top senators and congressmen, you could promise to pass out $20 dollar bills at the door and still not lure many voters to an average campaign stop. During the two gubernatorial campaigns I’ve worked on so far — both Republicans, by the way — there were plenty of times we’d set up in some library community room and end up with three or four people.

    Even if they’re big yawners for average citizens, inside a campaign, election nights are the grand finale, the few hours during which months or years of effort finally pay off or fail.

    The candidate and his or her staff haven’t strung together four hours of sleep in the past week, and everyone is almost hallucinating from sleep deprivation and excitement. You’re all charged up, somehow running on electric ions drawn from the atmosphere. Even if the polls say your cause is doomed, you always hope for divine intervention. Maybe all those disaffected voters will shake off their apathy and turn out at the polls. You’d just as well wish there really was a Santa.

    This probably sounds kind of unpleasant. Especially if you end up on the losing end, it is. Seeing the handwriting on the wall in the waning hours of my last job as press secretary, I said on statewide TV that I was going to leave the country. And I did, for months, before moving here to the coast in self-imposed exile. That’s putting it kind of grandiose, but then I wasn’t drawn to politics by a shy and modest manner.

***

    Once you’ve worked on a campaign or actively volunteered with one, it’s much easier to comprehend their appeal, why politicians are willing to subject themselves to this incredibly life-disrupting process that contains such potential for embarrassment. The rewards go well beyond the possibility you might win. I wouldn’t know what that feels like, anyway.

    Even on the losing end, campaigning is a rich and memorable experience. It’s a chance to perform, to see areas of the state or nation you’d never otherwise visit, drinking icy cold pops by dusty highways, plotting your next move. On a campaign staff, you’re paid to have a rich imagination. You’re darned near paid to flirt and attend parties. In short, I commend it to anyone.

    And I do wish, just as I wish there really was an Easter bunny, that regular people would show a little more interest. Even from the standpoint of pure spectator, American politics is one of the greatest shows on earth. Shame to ignore it.

Remembering Bali in wake of bombing

    Back in the 1970s when I first heard of Kuta Beach, it was one of the famous three Ks of Asian travelers — Kabul in Afghanistan, Katmandu in Nepal and Kuta on the Indonesian Island of Bali. Burrowing for weeks into each was like a hat trick in hockey, a kind of counter-culture trophy, although of course nobody cool enough to bag the three Ks would be so gauche as to brag about it. (Like hell they wouldn’t ...)

    By the time I got there, Kuta had become a loud and noisy beach resort, a sort of Tijuana for Australians. I came to know many Aussies there, as well as young Kiwis, Germans and Brits, with a couple whining poms mixed in, but I won’t speak of them. Like we Gringos in one of the Mexican border towns, the Aussies often were not on their best behavior. They do love their beer. Honest, fun-loving people, maybe a little too uncomplicated for their own good. Same is said of us.

    Aussie party-makers inject an incalculable amount of energy into Kuta. They aren’t especially enjoyable to have as neighbors in an adjoining hut at 3 a.m., but it’s hard not to smile at their shenanigans. A pack of untrained puppies in rugby shirts and string bikinis — really offensive to no one except perhaps one of the aforesaid poms — pretentious Englishmen. And, it occurred to me a year or so ago, doubly offensive to the radical Muslim clerics on the neighboring island of Java.

***

    Indonesia, the world’s most-populous Muslim nation, is a fairly tolerant and absurdly diverse archipelago of some 13,000 islands. Even so, Bali stands out. As Islam swept across the islands to its west, the Hindu intelligentsia took refuge in Bali in 1478, establishing one of the world’s most spiritual and artistically complex cultures. It is an inherently welcoming society, one that easily coexists with the unceasing tsunami of hormones brought to its shores by generations of young adventurers and middle-aged dropouts. People say Kuta isn’t Bali, that it’s sort of the gangrenous toe on an otherwise beautiful dancer. It’s rather the case that Kuta represents the amazing extent to which the Balinese are willing to be hospitable. It also is one more working example of the adage “You can’t eat pretty scenery.” Bali needs the jobs Kuta provides.

    A strait about three miles wide separates Bali and Java, and it was only a matter of time before some violent religious fringe group struck out at the infidels cavorting topless and often bottomless an easy ferry and bus ride away. No matter the infidels are harmless innocents, or that hundreds of thousands of tourism-dependent Balinese will plunge from functional poverty into destitution. I’m sure the hate-filled zealots who bombed two nightclubs in Kuta last weekend are filled with righteous pride. What an unspeakable insult they are to Bali, to Indonesia and to humanity.

    My favorite haunt in Kuta is/was The Bounty, a gloriously tacky bar made up to look like Capt. Bligh’s 18th century British man of war, where we Aussies and Yanks watched the Giants win the Super Bowl 20-19 on satellite TV at 6:30 a.m. local time. No sound, so we made up the color commentary ourselves, explaining the fine points of American football to the Australians, who watch Monday Night Football on Tuesdays, being on the other side of the International Date Line. The Bounty’s maybe a couple hundred feet from where the bombs went off. Makes me damned mad to think of those blokes’ little brothers and sisters being murdered.

    After Sept. 11, many Americans asked “Why do they hate us?” Like many of you, I’ve come in the past 13 months to understand that “they” are not all Muslims or even a very significant minority of Muslims. They are a few miserable, woe-begotten bigots, of whom we also have our share. And “us” are not just Americans, but virtually anyone who doesn’t share our enemies’ medieval notions about a vengeful, closed-fisted, angry, patriarchal God.

    I’m going back to Bali, soon as I can talk the wife into it. I won’t allow a few ignorant hate-mongers to intimidate me or keep me from roaming the earth, a free human being. Sitting home in fear, locking all our doors, turning strangers away from our shores, starting “pre-emptive” wars to protect oil fields and distract voters: I reject these things, too. But most of all, I reject the hatred that breeds hatred, the ignorance that spawns fear. I’m proud of America for reopening the first K, Kabul, to the world. We can’t allow terror to win in Kuta, either. Exercising our freedom is the way to insure it doesn’t.

My little girl goes off to kindergarten

    Elizabeth wakes “super-extra early,” and carting her mismatched pair of stuffed-toy dogs, gets me up, too. We’ve got an hour and a half to get ready for kindergarten.

    Getting up early is no problem (staying up past 10’s the bigger challenge for me), and I’m tremendously proud of my interesting little person and how excited she is about getting started. Having myself grown up surrounded by a gang of brothers and boy cousins, every weekday morning now offers fresh anthropological insights into the 5-year-old female fashion sense.

    At least until junior high I wouldn’t have minded if Mom sent me to school dressed in untanned hides or unpatched Levi’s. I despised the stupid fuzzy caps with ear flaps she made me wear in the cold . Funny how often they got lost. But otherwise I didn’t give a damn.

    Increasingly, Elizabeth does care, and I can almost begin to imagine in my dim way how from a young age some girls and women regard clothing as an art form, a statement of individuality. The great marketing monster has absorbed the fact we have such a girl and amongst the bales of mail order catalogs pouring into our post office box are many devoted to children’s clothes. It wasn’t long ago — merely 30 years — my mother reacted in shocked anger upon learning I had paid $12 for a shirt at the Bon Marche, shaming me that my dad had never paid so much for a shirt in his life. (Recalling Dad’s taste in shirts, I don’t doubt it.) Looking through a catalog this morning I see a little T- shirt for $16. It’s for a doll. The matching girl-sized shirt is $24.95.

    Lamentable as American consumerism is, it’s fun having a decent-paying job and being able to buy my only daughter things she likes, though heaven forbid ever outfits with matching dolls. In any event, she leans more to bright, bold Scandinavian patterns and designs. She’s hated lace and frilly girlie things from age two.

    All this might only be cute if it also didn’t highlight one of the dirty secrets of starting school, the extent to which kids categorize one another based on what they wear, how well they can throw a ball, what their parents do, how bashful they are, how outgoing, how smart, how strong.

    It may fairly be said this is the human condition, that we all consciously or unconsciously make these assessments a hundred times a day.

    But when children start being pigeonholed by one another and adults at the age of five, it amounts to a sad pruning of possibilities. I’m all for recognizing and rewarding merit, but too often kids and grownups alike are poor judges of what makes a person valuable. Despite idealistic teachers, by its very nature school too often becomes a place where kids become convinced of their limitations instead of being awakened to their possibilities. They get pressured into blending in, instead of being encouraged to stand out. It irritates me to no end.

    So I’m probably more nervous about kindergarten than Elizabeth is.

    On her first day, she pulls on a backpack almost large enough to fit herself into, and waits with Donna and me for the school bus she has longed to ride for years. I remember shedding a tear my first day of school when Mama left me with Mrs. Moore. Not Elizabeth. She climbs aboard with gusto. It isn’t that she’s fearless; a child’s life is never as simple and innocent as it appears or as a daddy would like it to be. From kidnappers and house fires to illness and death, she’s sadly aware of the perils of existence. She almost seems to like the idea of darkness and danger at a safe distance, turning with endless fascination to some of Grimm’s scariest fairy tales at bedtime. Maybe they help place her own struggles and fears into perspective.

    So I do what every parent must, turning her loose into a world that won’t love her as well as I do, where there are some wicked people, if not wicked witches. I expect her to do fine, but I don’t want anyone judging my girl, least of all herself. And I hope maybe together we can learn to be less judgmental of others.

    Have fun, sweetie. Be who you are and all you want to be.

Joys of discovery

    Looking for the intellectual equivalent of comfort food, I recently began rereading early volumes of Patrick O’Brian’s great seagoing saga, the Aubrey-Maturin novels. Besides being rousing fact-based descriptions of some of the heroic naval cannon duels of the Napoleonic wars, appealing to me are fictional glimpses of the dawn of modern natural science, especially ornithology.

    We live in an age when people can be surprisingly contemptuous of learning, a time when some will consider me hopelessly geeky for admitting I find this subject interesting. But maybe not — after all, Ernest Shackleton’s Antarctic scientific expeditions lately have become an amazingly popular topic, and channels including the Discovery Channel have a solid following (though probably only a tenth that of professional wrestling).

    Many early European forays into previously unstudied regions are adventure travel of the highest order, seeing and recording plants and creatures for the first time. It’s as if the world was a vast library filled with a strange and beautiful language that we only began to understand a couple centuries ago, each species a beautifully illuminated page. And most of us still have only a vague inkling of what’s out there: We’re functionally illiterate when it comes to nature. As we’ve become ever more remote from the land, experiencing life by watching TV and no longer growing our own food, ours senses have atrophied. How much richer our lives would be if we possessed a better understanding of what we see around us.

    I’m privileged to be on friendly terms with a couple of the West’s best writers on nature, Barry Lopez and Bob Pyle, and I always feel somewhat like a snot-nosed kid asking Babe Ruth and Cy Young for their autographs whenever I have anything to do with either of them. Each has trained his mind to understand what his eyes see, and convey some part of his wisdom to us whose vision is less keen. They demonstrate it’s still possible to make new discoveries, to interpret our surroundings in fresh ways that speak to our spirit and imagination.

    Pyle, who’s sort of a neighbor out at our country place in Wahkiakum County, is particularly adept with the names and habits of living things, most notably butterflies. For him, a butterfly isn’t just a pretty scrap of animated color, but an individual with fascinating quirks, a history and a future. His recent book, Chasing Monarchs, was an in-depth look at one man’s love affair with the monarch butterfly, one of the flashier members of the million-member insect order lepidoptera. Its pace is a little too stately for it to be described as an adventure story, but Chasing Monarchs stands as evidence that getting to know butterflies can be a lot of fun.

    That impression is strengthened with Pyle’s new book The Butterflies of Cascadia, which is easily the most entertaining nature guidebook I’ve ever read. Published by the Seattle Audubon Society, it functions as a pictorially stunning record of the butterflies of Washington, Oregon and nearby areas, also briefly touching on the moths, which apparently have fewer admirers. If you’ve ever wondered about the butterfly feeding at your window box, this book is the tool for you, a product of deep and sustained study of an amazingly rich niche of life.

    But in a sense, the most rewarding parts of The Butterflies of Cascadia are Pyle’s personal observations on each butterfly and the enthusiasts called lepidopterists who pursue them. Both the bugs and their fans obviously are real characters. Nearly every page has a gem, like this about pale tiger wallowtails: “Like Western Tigers, these frequent roadsides — who has not tried to dodge swallowtails while crossing Cascade passes in June! The resulting road kills, though sad, offer a fine opportunity for obtaining study specimens, since close encounters with windshields often leave the wings unblemished.”

    I recently was interested to read of a study linking the emergence of modern humanity with a profound genetic shift no more than 100,000 years ago permitting the development of language. In essence, the ability to describe our world and convey what we learn is the trait that makes us most human. Reading Pyle’s butterfly guide makes me proud of our language, our curiosity, our legacy of scientific inquiry. We’ve evolved pretty well if a mind like Pyle’s is the result.

    Now if we can just get a few people to read the book, in a mountain meadow, before chasing butterflies.

Uncle Bud

    Sometimes in August we’d drive over to Blackfoot and visit my alcoholic uncle, Buddy Bell.

    He was a bantam-weight World War II Navy boy, a handsome little jack-tar with a twisted grin who somehow blew right past the slow curve into adulthood, possibly distracted by memories of the Pacific. He died ancient at 50-something, well before both parents, tortured liver a testimonial to what a body will put up with, and what it can’t.

    But for pharaoh-scale federal irrigation projects, most of central Idaho would’ve stayed a desert relieved only by occasional lava flows, and even so, Blackfoot was a hard, nettle-edged town. Like Uncle Bud, it was simultaneously buoyant and dangerous, unreliable but full of content — an interesting police blotter.

    Some junkyard dogs have better home lives than my cousins did; they had to be dang tough to survive. My cousin Danny was practicing some minor cruelty on me once when I was about 6 and he was 8, and I remember Uncle Bud handing me a baseball bat and telling me in all seriousness to just whack him hard if he kept it up. In retrospect, I appreciated being told to stand up for myself, but suspect I’d have prematurely lost some baby teeth if I’d taken his advice.

    Wherever they all lived, and they briefly lit down in many places, there always was a baseball diamond somewhere nearby. Ducks have better eye-to-hand coordination than I do, so it’s never been my game, but partly because I so liked my feisty uncle, I have a strong nostalgia for those summertime shrines.

    August sun and zero humidity pounded the park dirt into dry brown powder that looked like cheap chocolate cake mix fresh from the box. Spill a little pop and it’d just bead up and sit there a while on dirt that forgot how to be wet. Out in the weeds, though, there’d be some little muddy ditch or meandering creek, with beers tucked up underneath in the dark, cool, root-tangled hollow where grass overhangs the water. Uncle Bud loved his beer, but wasn’t in it for the taste, and needed always to have some in easy reach, along with something stronger.

    This week’s true, good heat reminded me of those summer evenings watching baseball as cottonwood down hovered in the air and crickets set up a racket. The wild excitement of some sinewy 10-year-old slugging a long one in front of family and friends beats the heck out of watching a pro who’s thinking the whole while about calling his agent and demanding more money. Little ballpark dramas somehow persist in the summer air, effervescent bubbles, some kid’s best shining memory.

    People like Uncle Bud never really solidify into functioning human beings. It’s difficult to look at his photograph as a youngster without a sense of foreknowledge of how it was all going to fall out for him. As I’ve reached middle age, the more interesting cases are those whose lives go sideways after promising starts. Maybe it involves the classic conceit of Greek tragedy, that for a failure to be worth noting, it has to involve a spectacular pieces-flying-everywhere explosion from great height.

    Of course you just don’t get all that many Methodist ministers skipping town with the Baptist preacher’s wife kinds of scandals (something that really happened in Dad’s hometown of Bellingham back in 1909 or so). Mostly you see the sadder and far more pedestrian cases of old friends slowing, shrinking into alcohol, bad marriages and simmering bitterness. Not much, if any, entertainment value. Short as even a long life is, it seems some people just run out of fuel. They reside forever in a hell of squandered opportunities.

    Philosophical ruminations such as these on a luminous August afternoon are a waste in their own right, and I’ll have no more of them. Like so many here at the mouth of the Columbia, my mind’s been more occupied by salmon fishing than by either baseball or tragedy. Once again last week, fishing with folks from Shorebank to celebrate their fifth anniversary here, I was reminded that this place’s strongest essence is down at water level. Motor out into the river’s main stem and out over its bar, and all of a sudden the world just opens up around you, the ocean and sky expanding infinitely outward into the west. I only caught shakers, two sea bass in a row and a mess of jellyfish, but considered it a morning splendidly well-lived.

Ode to a passionate collector of stuff

    Most of us are good at a few things, whether it’s helping customers, working on cars or baking bread. We manage to pose and bluff our way through a few more, perhaps casting a fly without totally embarrassing ourselves or somehow behaving well enough in the airport to avoid a strip search. We’ve achieved basic competency. But mastery? For me, “I’m no expert” would make a good family motto.

    The people I admire most are blessed with tremendous curiosity, along with the attention span, time and imagination to become masters of weird topics, experts at stuff. And I use that slightly goofy word, “stuff,” on purpose. I idolize the best scientists, writers and artists who seem to know all there is to know about fancier topics. But idolizing somebody doesn’t necessarily mean liking them.

    Curious people who become experts at stuff are nearly always smart and well-engaged in life. The best of them also overflow with humor. They know they’re a little eccentric.

    And within limits, the weirder the stuff, the better I like them. Everybody’s an authority about what was on TV last night. But it’s a rare man who can knowledgeably discuss the differences between the 1907 models of marine engines from Fairbanks-Morris, Acme, Standard and the St. Clair Motor Company.

***

    My friend Jack Edwards is just such a man. With a spirit at least 20 years younger than the 62 on his Washington State Driver’s License — maybe 40 years on his playful days — sporting high-top Keds sneakers and jaunty attitude, Jack is richly enthusiastic without being a pain in the ass about it.

    For as long as I can, I’m going to avoid using the past tense when thinking about Jack, who died in a terrible accident a couple weeks ago at his home up Abernathy Creek outside Longview. He is, is I tell you, a passionate nut about all sorts of obscure Northwest boy stuff, from the first generation of fishing boat engines on the Columbia to old salmon canning labels.

    For Jack and other friends like Clarence “Snooky” Barendse in Knappa and Jim Mitby in Aberdeen, collecting artifacts and obsolete knowledge about this region’s old days is something more than a hobby, more like a way to bridge the past and present. Possessing, studying and understanding these things is to touch a bygone time, occasionally catching a glimpse of a precious distant simplicity.

    Anybody with luck and money can collect labels, duck decoys or Ilwaco train artifacts, but it takes a brave and determined man (with a patient wife) to find and restore century-old boat engines. Jack’s the man, scouting out forgotten engines half buried behind fallen barns, toting around incredible restoration jobs on the back of a flatbed trailer, firing them up to play a rhythm that is music to the ears of only a few.

***

    These engines are a neat symbol of Jack’s life — tough and functional, but with a sense of style. Leafing through old brochures I’ve set aside to show Jack the next time I see him, I see a sales pitch that will make him chuckle.

    “Being satisfied from results that we couldn’t improve the design, we improved the finish. The 1910 ‘Perfection’ is finished with three coats of enamel in a handsome shade of blue with a gold stripe, making it the most striking and attractive engine on the market, one that will add to the appearance of any boat.”

    He would share my mirth over a time when manufacturers proudly touted the paint scheme on their six horsepower, two-cylinder engines. But he also would have set about figuring how to paint one of engines to match, just to be totally accurate.

    Oops, slipped into past-tense verbs, Jack. Sorry. You’ll always be alive in my heart. It’s one of those misty summer days as I write this small remembrance while sitting at home up above Baker Bay. I can’t quite see him, but I can hear the pop of Jack’s engine from all the way up this Columbia Barbary Coast. I’m pretty sure he’s holding a bottle up to all us on the shore. His merry laughter rolls across the waters.

    But Jack, why’d you have to go so soon?

‘Please, Dad, get me a puppy’

    A baby girl dog and the mommy dog and all her babies. I’m serious. Please, Daddy, please, please.

    This is what I hear morning and night from my strong, gentle-souled daughter Elizabeth, her first great life quest.

    Whereas most kids merely beg for a puppy, Elizabeth loathes the idea of breaking up a family, even a dog family. So she wants to find and adopt the whole shebang, a compact constellation of lives around which she can wrap her heart.

    The average person listening to her sweet little sales pitch might only understand about every other word, since she’s started losing her lower front baby teeth, first amongst her crowd of 5-year-olds.

    I don’t know about other kids, but Elizabeth’s got a thin skin when it comes to any clue of condescension. I have to keep a smile off my face as she struggles to communicate her arguments, enormous intensity of feeling mixed with copious spit.

    Until I had a child, dogs were my kids. Their uncomplicated love and loyalty saw me through times of uncertainty and dark depression on 10,000 miles of walks. Four years after she died, my fingertips still vividly relive the texture of my old Labrador’s velveteen ears.

    Work hard as she might, her chances are nil of getting an entire litter, but I’m sure Liz’s mom and I will succumb one of these days to her steady onslaught of charm and persuasion by buying a pup. I have a sneaking hunch about who will get to walk it in mid-January’s driving rain, but what the hell ...

    I’d probably get another yellow Lab, though I recall the drifts of shed hair wafting across the floor, not to mention the time my last one chewed nearly all the bark from the base of a beautiful mature crabapple tree, leaving it three-quarters dead.

***

    My mother suggested a small poodle, an idea that sent my wife recoiling with a horror that made me momentarily wonder if she had misheard and thought we were discussing buying a rabid skunk. Anyway, I guess a poodle’s out of the question in this family.

    But a poodle was one of our dozen dogs, growing up. We were not, it’s safe to say, conscientious pet owners, or else we had unusually stupid dogs. It seemed every ugly mutt in a 10-mile radius could roam the highways with complete impunity, whereas each of our pampered purebreds got flattened into hairy pancakes the first time they escaped the yard.

    The awful enormity of a pet’s death is one of the things that gives me pause about fulfilling my daughter’s wish. It’s tempting to try to shield her from one of life’s bluntest lessons, the unbearable lightness of being a dog. But I know that after reaching adulthood I was able to lead my pack of two through their entire natural lives without them getting run over, something I wouldn’t have believed possible when I was a boy.

    More important, all kids need to know death isn’t like the black sheep of the family, something we can ignore until it moves away to another city and changes its name. The years of joy a good dog will bring Elizabeth are worth the price of admission, the certainty it someday will die.

    She already plans her puppy sleeping in her bedroom, snuggling under the covers, plotting awesome adventures together out in the big world.

    Oh, the whispered secrets that little girl dog will hear, the peals of laughter, the contented sighs and snores after days of play.

    I’m envious, but can hardly wait to let it happen.

The rule of law

    Policing cutbacks, an unceasing tide of crime and absurdly misdirected efforts to enhance national security definitely have me in a “the world’s going to hell in a handcart” kind of mood.

    These concerns over crime and punishment are nothing new. A couple weeks ago on an antiquing road trip with my mom and daughter, I picked up a 1903 Seattle magazine, The Beach, in which a writer laments the swelling ranks of “dope fiends” in every walk of life in the Emerald City.

    And I was transfixed, horrified and occasionally even amused earlier this spring by a most interesting book about early days in the West, “Hell’s Belles” by Clark Secrest (University Press of Colorado). Relying on elaborate scrapbooks kept by pioneer Denver lawman Sam Howe, this definitive history of Wild West prostitution makes clear our ancestors had more on their minds than branding heifers and sewing crazy quilts.

    “Little House on the Prairie” takes on repugnant new meaning after reading about the practices in other sorts of little “houses,” such as “A depraved creature called ‘Adobe Ann’ decoyed a little white girl, only 10 years of age, and the little colored girl who lost both arms and a leg by being run over by the (railroad) cars three years ago, into her place, kept them more or less under the influence of liquor, and permitted a half dozen or more men to sate their passions with them during the day.”

    For all our problems, even the often troubled subcultures here at the mouth of the Columbia River would have a hard time quite matching such depravity.

    I’m in the process of reading Mark Twain’s account of his years in the Nevada mining camps, where some of my family lived and where rotten behavior sank its lowest. It’s a very funny book, but in some respects “Roughing It” isn’t much of an exaggeration.

    On going to work as city editor for the Territorial Enterprise in Virginia City in the summer of 1862, Twain briefly despaired of filling his news columns until “a desperado killed a man in a saloon and joy returned once more. I never was so glad over any mere trifle before in my life. I said the murderer:

    ‘Sir, you are a stranger to me, but you have done me a kindness this day which I will never forget. ... Count me your friend from this time forth, for I am not a man to forget a favor.’

    “If I did not really say that to him I at least felt a sort of itching desire to do it. I wrote up the murder with a hungry attention to details, and when it was finished experienced but one regret — namely, that they had not hanged my benefactor on the spot, so that I could work him up too.”

***

    In February 1864, back down the road in my great-great-grandparents’ boomtown of Aurora, Nev. — where dozens were dying in gunfights — citizens obliged by lynching four members of the Daly Gang after the murder of popular stagecoach station manager William Johnson.

    My dad’s beloved Grandma Kittie being just 7 weeks old at the time, I don’t know if her father would have joined the 400-man vigilance committee that hanged ‘em high. I kind of bet he was, but in any event he would certainly have been a witness to this classic Western drama, retold by author Roger McGrath in the June 1999 issue of Chronicles magazine:

    “Hundreds of vigilantes with fixed bayonets formed a hollow square around the scaffold while a crowd of 5,000 watched. Daly pointed at a member of the vigilance committee who was brandishing a revolver and said: ‘You son of a bitch. If I had a six-shooter I would make you get.’ He then took several silver dollars out of his pocket, threw them to the crowd and declared:

    “There are two innocent men on this scaffold. You are going to hang two innocent men. Do you understand that? I am guilty. I killed Johnson. Buckley and I killed Johnson. ... He was the means of killing my friend, and I lived to die for him. Had I lived I would have wiped out Johnson’s whole generation.’”

    Every generation has its Daly Gangs. We have ours, and lynching’s no answer, if it was in the 1860s. With calm fortitude, our ancestors eventually prevailed over the evils that endangered their families. They built a civilization based on the rule of law, prevailing over the vengeful bloodlust within themselves. These struggles continue.

Tom Bell

    Flak bursting all around, the squadron’s other B-17 Flying Fortresses began dropping bombs that February day in 1944. Tom Bell did not.

    Although the other bombardiers and pilots were confident they were on target, Bell believed they were blasting the hell out of Allied troops preparing to attack the Italian town and Benedictine abbey of Monte Cassino, a Nazi stronghold. It can’t have been comfortable in any sense, but he kept steady on.

    Finally above what he believed were the correct coordinates, Bell released his bombs. Looking back, he saw explosions erupting in a neat row, marching up a street into the Nazi lair.

    (Returning to Sicily, Bell was promoted. Those who disastrously bombed Allied positions disappeared like smoke in the night, quietly busted and transferred.)

    A few months later, leading his squadron to a ball bearing plant in Austria, flak pierced the thin envelope of his B-17, shattering one of his eyes. Poisonously cold air rushed in, freezing his awful wounds, keeping him from bleeding to death. And he finished his mission.

    Lapsing into shock on the return flight to Italy, Bell was visited by an angel. Frozen and silent, he was placed among the dead upon landing. Stirring, he finally was rushed to a hospital for a long and, perhaps, miraculous recovery that partially salvaged one eye.

    As a kid, I knew about his medals, but I never heard a breath of this from Uncle Tom until five years ago, and I hope I’ve correctly set down this broad outline of a far more detailed and moving story.

    The point is that Tom Bell does what he believes is right, no matter what others think, no matter the personal cost. There’s a joke told on the Bell side of my family that the expression “Hells, Bells” is specifically about us, in tribute to our obstinacy. Tom gives credence to this theory.

    Last week, my strong and devout uncle joined the ranks of legendary naturalist Roger Tory Peterson, former President Jimmy Carter and Sen. John Chafee by being named J.N. “Ding” Darling Conservationist of the Year by the National Wildlife Federation, the nation’s largest and most powerful conservation group.

    Named for the NWF’s founder, the Darling Award caps Uncle Tom’s amazing life, recognizing him as “the Grand Old Man of Conservation,” in the words of an NWF regional director. “He had the insight to see the future of unchallenged development at the very beginning and decided he would head ‘em off at the pass, even if he had to do it alone.”

    Founding publisher of the High Country News, the Colorado-based leader in natural resources and environmental reporting, Uncle Tom waged campaigns against practices now regarded as stupid — if not outright wicked — such as private fencing of public lands in the Mountain West and rampant poisoning of eagles and other predators. Among other things, he also started the Wyoming Outdoor Council, a citizen-powered group that still somehow salvages precious things from industry-fueled politicians.

    The Sierra Club’s Bruce Hamilton eloquently summarized his contribution. “Historians may look back in puzzlement and wonder how backwater states such as Wyoming, Montana and North Dakota could pass the toughest clean air, strip-mining and industrial siting laws in the nation back in the 1970s. The single biggest factor was Tom Bell.”

    He’s led an exemplary life far beyond his overt public heroism, helping his folks in countless ways in their old age, adopting three little kids after his first three biological boys were grown, and selflessly caring for his ailing wife.

    Thanks to his lively curiosity about the living world and degrees in wildlife conservation and game management, he is a brilliant observer. It was wonderful growing up with an uncle who knew the names and particulars of just about any plant, bird and animal you could point at.

    His remaining eyesight now ebbing at last, Tom Bell triumphed over Nazi evil and continues to help lead efforts to defend for posterity our nation’s spirit-enriching natural treasures, places like Wyoming’s Red Desert. His vision of the West will never fade.

    I’m extraordinarily proud of him.