Editor's Notebook: 2008

‘Semi-Tough’

     Let’s face it: the only thing duller than the Super Bowl is the State of the Union speech, and the Super Bowl only wins this yawn-off because of its clever ads. Never have so few been paid so much for standing around spitting on the grass. The average grade school Christmas program is marginally shorter and offers infinitely more drama and real emotion.
     So how was it that I found myself — sober as the pope before his driving test — watching and even occasionally enjoying this year’s game, which was stuck at a score of 7-3 for so long I toyed with calling 911 to have a defibrillator delivered?
     For one thing (and yes, I’m embarrassed to admit this), I broke down and bought a flat-screen TV for Christmas and wondered what the ridiculous rectangular circus would look like in high definition. (Turns out the thrill of being able to read the manufacturer labels on players’ uniforms soon lost its novelty.)
     For another, I harbor a nostalgic affection for the New York Giants dating back to my 20s when I regarded Dan Jenkins’ raunchy ode to professional football, “Semi-Tough,” as a font of wisdom on par with the Tao Te Ching. The story of the Giants’ star quarterback and running back who both lust after the same college sweetheart, my paperback copy still falls open to their juvenile rating system for women that frankly set me up for a long bachelorhood — not that I didn’t have a certain amount of fun along the way in pursuit of a “One.”
     Examples: “A One was well-read and smart and witty but not as well-read and smart and witty as some guys she hung around with.” “A One never got mad at anything a man might accidentally do, no matter how thoughtless or careless it might be.” “A One had to be extremely gorgeous in all ways from the minute she woke up in the morning until she fixed a man his cold meatloaf sandwich after love practice at four A.M.”
     Gee, hard to figure why I stayed single so long, ain’t it?
     If, as somebody observed, war is months of soul-crushing boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror, the Super Bowl is only made watchable by the fleeting possibility of a play like that which put the Giants in the lead with a last-minute touchdown pass from Eli Manning to Plaxico Burress. I won’t bore you with the details — if you really care you were watching it live anyway — but it was a magically improbable Rube-Goldberg sort of play, the football equivalent of a bluebird accidentally singing the theme to “Star Trek.”
     My dad would have loved it, if for no other reason than it made his boys laugh. It’s safe to say my parents and grandparents were not fans of the game. Even when Grandma and Grandpa got lucky and atmospheric conditions were just so, they could only get two TV stations at their little farm. So they now and then were forced to watch football for a few minutes before shaking their heads and going off to irrigate the hay pasture, chop kindling or any of their other approximately 8,000 daily chores.
     Attempts to explain the subtleties of downs, extra points, pass interference and punts might as well have been delivered in ancient Hebrew for all the good our polite tutorials did. (Though, come to think of it, maybe Grandpa and Grandma were just playing dumb to make we grandsons think we knew more than they did about something — even if it was something as artificial as the Astro-turf on which it was played.)
     Even silly activities can end up having meaning. In a convoluted way, I owe my life to football. It was as a college sports photographer that I first became a quasi-paid journalist. Those were great days down on the field in the autumn sun. The excitement and fun were real.
     The Giants’ win, unscripted and messy, was a reminder of what I once loved about the game. Was it enough to get me back into the habit of watching pro football? Not a chance. But it was one of those rare occasions when I came away from a Super Bowl with the feeling I had been entertained, if only for a few seconds.

World without end?

     Like Medieval villagers setting their dogs on a traveling flim-flam man peddling fraudulent cure-alls and other gyps, many today remain understandably suspicious of assertions that a climatic catastrophe is roaring down upon us.
     Older doomsday threats, from nuclear war to bird flu, have so far happily failed to materialize. In the same vein, supposed experts warn us one year to avoid eating steaks and butter, only to be contradicted by a different mob of supposed experts a year or two later. Vitamin C cures colds! No, it doesn’t! Confusion turns to apathy or outright anger — leave us alone until you can tell us the actual truth.
     In all likelihood, humanity now faces its biggest menace since the ice age ended more than 100 centuries ago. But our response is colored by our native conservatism. From its origin in now-obscure Christian infighting over whether Jesus was brought into being by God or always existed as an equal part of the Holy Trinity, the Gloria Patri prayer has become the de facto motto of global-warming doubters everywhere: “As it was in the beginning is now and ever shall be, world without end.”
     Comforting as this is, it flies in the face of objective reality. True, the world itself isn’t going to end for another few billion years, but that will be no comfort if our children are stampeded into a mass migration, following viable farmland north into Canada as our own dries up and blows away. It wouldn’t even be a first: Ask the Okies. About one in every six Oklahomans fled their state in the 1930s because of a decade-long drought.
     Nor is a destructive rise in sea level some convoluted exaggeration dreamed up by eggheads. One of the frontiers of undersea archaeology is the study of the vast submerged plains that linked Europe and Britain recently enough to reverberate as a faint folk memory. A similar inundation of land now occupied by the Black Sea may be the source of the Bible’s great flood story.
     A year or two, or even 10 or 20, may not signal a permanent disruption of temperatures, precipitation and ocean currents. December’s Big Blow or Vancouver’s January tornado may be freak occurrences — let’s hope so.
     But stuff is beginning to pile up — literally, in the case of splintered local forests. Though it was nearing the end of its natural lifespan anyway, the destruction of the Klootchy Creek Giant spruce is symbolic of the decline and fall of our complacent lives.
     In Willapa Bay, oysters are approaching their third year of trouble, with the natural seed set failing and maturing oysters struggling in below-normal summer water temperatures. To top it off, recent daytime low tide cycles have revealed storm damage out in the bay. (These problems growing oysters are ironic, considering that market prices are strong for once, in part because of how oysterbeds in the Gulf of Mexico were wrecked by hurricanes.)
     There also are interesting shifts in the nation’s political climate. Perhaps this, too, will blow over. I don’t think so. American regions are pushing for more latitude to take on challenges themselves. The three mainland West Coast states have, for example, banded together to seek stronger control of tailpipe greenhouse gas emissions. Leaders in all three also are exploring ways out of the health-care muddle.
     In the topsy-turvy upheaval of modern politics, these changes are avidly opposed by some formerly states-rights Republican camps, allied with Rust Belt Democrats. Our well-being is close to the last thing on their agenda.
     This year’s presidential selection process is an intense demonstration of why investing ever more power in Washington, D.C. is a stupid and self-destructive idea. It suits both of our outdated political parties, along with all the bureaucrats and lobbyists, to keep a system that is so easily manipulated. With a climate crisis that is no longer looming but already here, how much longer can the sane majority support this quagmire?
     There are ample signs that the U.S. may just be too big and unwieldy to support real democracy any longer. A recent national newspaper article explored the interesting concept of retaining a national government for functions like defense and monetary policy, while devolving most powers to regional governments. (Simply in terms of physical size, did you know that Montana is bigger than Germany, Texas is bigger than France, and that the U.S. is larger than all the other industrial nations combined, except for land-rich Russia, Canada and Australia?)
     Radical? No. Governments exist to serve citizens, not the other way around. The time is rapidly coming when regions like ours should begin charting our own strategies for survival in a dangerous and fast-changing world. Nobody is coming to the rescue but ourselves.

The Four Musketeers

     Critter superhighways cross the path from home to my hill-bottom parking place, revealing a complex web of natural commerce that remains almost invisible in the absence of snow.
     Trying to find something to eat while avoiding being eaten is the murderous reality of small forest animals, so it would be a mistake to interpret their well-beaten footpaths as evidence of any kind of pleasurable game of tag in the woods. Still, it’s hard not be charmed by all the tangible evidence of other lives making their way through a frozen world. We’re all in this together.
     Our area’s teeming populations of raccoons, coyotes, mink, rats, otters and dozens of other species are literally at home in the winter, while most of we humans do our level best to avoid being out in it. But you’d have to be running completely empty of childhood not to take a certain pleasure in a vast, brawling rascal of a storm.
     Real honest-to-Pete snow days are moments removed from the dull tick of time. Like the weatherman in “Groundhog Day,” our souls don’t age on such occasions, but instead find shelter within the perfect symmetrical lattices of snowflakes, roosting there like pure white owls.
     We’re usually so cocooned within our cars and houses that our molecular connections have been severed to the mud and ice and naked branches of this season. All of us have a hundred generations of farmers in our family trees, for whom day-in, day-out activity outdoors in every kind of weather was the essence of survival. But for modern middle-age newspaper editors like me, being forced for a few days to walk part way to work has been an almost pleasurable adventure.
     This week’s crunchy snow and other inconveniences put me in mind of my New England ancestors, who had to put up with this stuff every year of their lives. It was not all the puffed up nostalgia of Currier and Ives engravings. People used to die in their homes during storms not much worse than the one we’ve just endured.
     But pioneer life wasn’t just grim toil and marching off to church. My mom and I laughed together a couple weeks ago that “the acorn doesn’t fall far from the oak” after reading about the high jinx of my pilgrim forefather John Winter in Cambridge, Mass., in 1662. A recently published history of the town recounts the trouble he got into for being one of four musketeers who discharged their weapons in the middle of night after unwinding in the tavern after a day of militia training.
     “All four night shooters committed other bouts of wildness. Stearns and Winter had been ringleaders of the drinking and petting party at Harvard after a training day in September 1660,” English historian Roger Thompson writes. Although he was eventually elected constable of Lexington, my ancestor’s college days bear a distinct resemblance to my own.
     What Christmas gifts do you remember receiving as a child? Do you still have any of them? What do you recall giving?
     A .22 rifle survives from under my tree of 1968. About a quarter million rounds later, it still stands at attention in the closet, ready in case I’m struck by a sudden urge to disturb the peace in the middle of a still winter night.
     That may about do it for long-ago presents I still possess, though I remember a few others, such as the plant grow-light my gardener mother got me at about age 14, either in hopes I would acquire her passion for horticulture or “re-gift” her with it. (It got re-gifted.)
     My little brother and I were hot on Hot Wheel cars, shooting bright little Mustangs down tracks and streaking across the linoleum all over the house, sending our dogs into frenzies of ecstatic mousing and barking.
     As for gifts I gave, little occurs to me except for the card I sent my parents saying “I love you” in the depths of my sullen teen years. It was a surprisingly hard thing to write at the time, but they apparently knew better than I did that I loved them and didn’t notice the card as anything exceptional. I’m glad they were so secure.
     Ultimately, it is Christmas conversations, dinners and sledding parties I most remember. It’ll be the same for my own daughter. So if your children’s packages are still sitting on a freight dock in icy Portland, don’t sweat it. They are the least of the things you give your kids.

Learning from wise dogs and grandmas

     News last week that dogs have an innate sense of justice comes as no surprise to anyone who has ever endured their hurt feelings or basked in their cheerful pride.
     Behavioral researchers now observe that trained dogs will go on strike and stop cooperating with commands if they see a fellow canine consistently receiving preferential treatment.
     Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once wrote that even a dog knows the difference between being stumbled over and being kicked. By the same token, my dogs are finely attuned to whether the other has received a treat. If I have a morsel that is only big enough for one, I either have to sneak it to whichever is present, or else get out the cheddar and cut a small slice for each.
     Ridiculous, I know, to spend time worrying about the feelings of beasts that would probably be plotting a revolution if only they had opposable thumbs. No, wait, that would be cats. No one can tell me that dogs aren’t smart and well-connected to their humans: Our corgi repeatedly howls “Foo-ooo-ood!” only at dinnertime.
     While I was confirming the source of the Holmes quote, by the way, these other enjoyable observations turned up on dogquotations.com:
     “The greatest love is a mother’s; then a dog’s; then a sweetheart’s.” —Polish Proverb
     “If skill could be gained by watching, every dog would become a butcher.” —Turkish Proverb
     “Three things it is best to avoid: a strange dog, a flood, and a man who thinks he is wise.” —Welsh Proverb
     Also on the science-news front, it was most gratifying last week to learn that my grandma’s favorite cure-all — spit — has now been proven to be one of nature’s great natural salves for cuts and scrapes.
     According to a story in Discover magazine, Dutch researchers found that histatins in saliva ward off infections and prompt cells from the skin’s surface to close over a wound. These natural proteins help scratches in our mouths close up twice as quickly as normal.
     Scientists are working on a refined, and possibly less gross, form of concentrated histatins. But I’ll probably continue to use the natural kind and remember my sweet, pragmatic Grandma Bell.
     Grandma and Grandpa were a young couple of 28 and 36 at the outset of the Great Depression. Living to be 88 and 93, the lessons learned then never left them, including the curative powers of plain spit.
     They weren’t horrendously poor in the 1930s but circumstances required them to make and save money however they could. Not only did Grandpa drive many miles in his old Ford to put in long hours in the coal mine, but they raised turkeys and other products to sell in area grocery stores.
     Their survival strategies didn’t differ much from those of local families today, who manage to cobble together a living from four or five different sources. Still, the way they and their contemporaries lived continues to offer valuable hints as we go into a deep economic downturn.
     To her dying day, you could hardly get Grandma into a new blouse: believe me, her daughter and niece tried. She and Grandpa used everything until it was utterly used up, and then often found some new way to wring more value out of rags, rusty old pipes and salvaged lumber.
     There is a sort of subtle joy and pleasure in getting the maximum use out of everything, not the least of which is being able to save money for higher purposes. When one of we 11 grandsons went to Grandpa asking to borrow $10,000 as a down payment on his first house, the answer was “No.” Long pause. “But I’ll give it to you.”
     Bless you, Grandpa. How much poorer it would be to own a bunch of expensive stuff purchased with borrowed money, maxed out, like driving around with no spare.
     Let me leave you today with a delicious, low-cost oatcake recipe from our Aunt Janie Scarff: Soak two cups of oatmeal for at least 30 minutes in 2 cups of buttermilk (overnight is best). Add three beaten eggs and a quarter cup of melted butter. Stir in 1/2 cup of flour, 2 tablespoons of sugar and 1 teaspoon each salt, baking powder and baking soda. Fry in a medium-hot skillet in butter as you do pancakes until brown. Serve with butter, along with sugar, huckleberry or maple syrup, jam or — for real Swedish authenticity — lingon berries.

Of vampires, football and Finns

     The Forks school board should simply fast-forward now to the inevitable ending and change the high school’s moniker from the Spartans to the Vampires.
     You would have to be undead to not notice the excited pre-teen and teenage buzz surrounding the Forks-based “Twilight” movie and books. Being the proud father of a 10-year-old girl who reads at the graduating-senior level, I knew half a year ago where I would be sitting on at least one of the opening nights of this vampire epic. Elizabeth flew through the four thick volumes in about as many weeks.
     “Twilight” and its sequels were written by Stephanie Meyer, a wholesome Mormon mom from Phoenix who picked Forks out of a database as the gloomiest place in America to become the hometown of her family of supernatural but basically good-hearted bloodsuckers.
     Forks, a stereotypical struggling Northwest logging town that is now a backdoor gateway to Olympic National Park, will never be the same. Even before the movie earned $120 million in its first 10 days, teenage girls were making pilgrimages to local unholy sites associated with the immortal Cullen clan. The chamber of commerce there suddenly finds itself in the same enviable situation as Newport did when Keiko the killer whale splashed down in the aquarium.
     On a clear day I can almost make out the chimney fires of Forks from the seaside hilltop where I walk the dogs. Looks pretty sunny for vampires, rain or no rain.
     As for the movie, it was pretty good — almost gore-free, a traditional teen love story, all smoldering glances and chaste kisses. Being something of an advocate of the health benefits of paleness, I hope it starts a new fashion trend in that direction.
     While on the subject of small logging town entertainment, Elizabeth and her sixth-grade chums at Naselle Middle School painted themselves blue and gold last Wednesday in happy solidarity with the Naselle Comets football team. Naselle advanced to the State 2B Semifinals for the first time ever and all the Finns and fans on the Lower Columbia were celebrating.
     Getting so far was a proud achievement but it would have been even cooler if the Comets had beat Napavine Friday in Tacoma. Naselle had more losses this season than the other three semifinalists put together, but really pulled it together after the season’s opening weeks.
     As it was, an over-warm stadium and perhaps a change in pre-game rituals threw the Comets just a little off course. The game was close but not close enough.
     The genuine achievements of all these small-town Northwest boys make Hollywood vampires, ahem, pale in comparison.
     Speaking of Finns, for my part I continue to find cerebral enjoyment in studying articles like the recently published “Genome-Wide Analysis of Single Nucleotide Polymorphisms Uncovers Population Structure in Northern Europe.”
     This sounds more nerdish and intimidating than it really is. Basically, it comes down to looking inside our bodies’ cells for clues about ancestors.
     Despite all our snobbery, wars and prejudice, all humans are more than 99 percent genetically similar to each other. Among Europeans, our DNA sometimes reveals vanishingly little difference between the most observant Orthodox Jew and the most virulently racist Arian Neo-Nazi. (It would be amusing to know how my slightly racist father would react to the surprising recent finding that I depart a little from this white-bread uniformity by being about one percent African, most likely on his side of the family. Me and Barack!)
     But the genome study referenced above does find some significant variations within the Finnish population, beyond the obvious one between the Sami people of the far north and their more European neighbors to the south. Perhaps this is old news to Finns themselves, but there is as much genetic distance between East Finns and West Finns as there is, for example, between the British and Germans.
     There also is a possible origin for some Finn genes from far to the east. This might dovetail with a long-held theory that links the Finnish language and some of its DNA with sources around the Ural Mountains that divide Europe and Asia — an incredible adventure still stamped into words and flesh.
     It was on ancient journeys like this that we created vampires to scare one another around the campfire.

Winter drama

     Outsiders who come to the mouth of the Columbia poke fun at us for inevitably turning every conversation to the weather, like we’re a bunch of ignorant bumpkins who haven’t read the New Yorker lately and really don’t know our way around avant-garde art.
     Well, yeah, got us there — but our weather actually is compelling. Besides that, we are drawn together as a people by our shared awe and discomfort at the atmosphere’s mighty smack-down wrestling matches. Every winter is a hair-tangling initiation rite into the fraternity/sorority of gale-whipped coast dwellers.
     My uncle, whose stoical heroism includes having taught junior high science, used to say his job entailed separating the sheep from the goats. (I was never sure, to tell the truth, which he considered more admirable. Personally, I like goats better for their toughness and cantankerousness, but well-behaved and useful sheep perhaps fit more comfortably into a public-school setting.) Anyway, coastal winters — along with springs and quite a few summers — also divide the sheep from the goats. To survive here very long, you’ve got to be strong and not overly obsessed with personal grooming. In other words, a goat.
     One of my smartest investments — actually, maybe my only smart investment — was a set of heavy yellow rubber rain gear, still serving me well nearly 20 years later.
     About my second winter here, I put it to good if stupid use by walking out to the tip of North Head during a ferocious storm. Probably the only person crazy enough to visit that 50-million-year-old basalt cliff the whole riotous day, I was witness to the wind taking the rock by the throat and shaking it like a terrier killing a black rat. A thousand railroad locomotives crashing at full speed into a building-sized block of solid steel could not have expended more naked energy than the waves torpedoing the bottom of North Head, smashing towering shards of sea foam straight up into my streaming eyes. Only the rusting chain-link fence circling the lighthouse kept me from being hurled from the precipice. Ever since, I’ve been hooked on storms like our kitty is hooked on albacore.
     A new book has just joined my short list of essential references for anybody wanting to live a well-informed life on the coast, “The Weather of the Pacific Northwest” by UW Professor Cliff Mass. The wise man of climate science here, Mass has done more than anybody alive to bring sense to our region’s wacked-out weather.
     Right up to date, Mass discusses last December’s typhoon — a “quite rare” combination of sustained hurricane-force winds and heavy rain. Some sites in Pacific County’s Willapa Hills collected an astonishing 14-18 inches of rain over the course of two days, which also saw gusts topping 140 mph.
     From a purely pragmatic sense, this volume is the one perfect place to turn for explanations of the infamous Pineapple Express, the Puget Sound Convergence Zone or Columbia River fogs. More fun, from a “weather nerd” standpoint, are his post-game analyses of the notorious storms of history. Locally, this includes a rare first-person report on the 1921 blow during which winds exceeded 150 mph at North Head, the strongest ever recorded in Washington state.
     A U.S. Weather Bureau observer driving the plank road to the lighthouse from Ilwaco escaped his car with another staff member just as the wind reached its crescendo.
     “In three or four minutes we had climbed over two immense tree trunks and reached the place in which I thought was our only chance to escape serious injury or possibly death. The southeast wind roared through the forest, the falling trees crashed to the ground in every direction from where we stood. Many were broken off where their diameter was as much as four feet. …”
     We’ve gotten into the bad habit of watching “Gray’s Anatomy,” an absurd prime-time soap opera. In addition to the fun of seeing attractive young actors play out the lives of Seattle surgeons — misery and humiliation leavened by hyper-sexuality — I always snicker at the aerial pictures of the city. It is inevitably a crystalline sunny day on Elliott Bay … and there’s never a traffic jam on I-5.
     The sorry truth is that Seattle’s weather is worse than ours. It’s true they get less rain and hardly any cataclysmic windstorms. But in the more than century my family’s lived there, we’ve acquired a soul-wrecking familiarity with the city’s endless months of oppressively monotonous gray skies.
     I infinitely prefer the life-threatening, life-affirming drama of the outer coast.

My sister

     One hundred years ago my grandmother’s parrot froze to death. We still mourn him.
     It’s nigh-on impossible to write of a deceased parrot without recalling Monty Python’s hilarious skit about an irate pet-shop customer trying to return an “ex-parrot” to a determinedly chipper storeowner.
     But our more somber story still resonates a century later for reasons that speak to the mortality of all sentient beings, whether fowl or sweet humanity.
     Precisely where Grandma’s Uncle Lew came up with a splendid Amazonian parrot is a mystery. Won him in a saloon bet, perhaps. What is certain is that Jack was adopted into our family, even though great-grandma despaired of his incessant child-like chaos and racket.
     On a clear afternoon in the high country, the kind of day when the coiling smoke of blazing cottonwood leaves lances upward into austere autumn air like an irresistible spinning wraith, Jack made good his escape.
     Parrots are mischievous and boldly inquisitive creatures. You can sneak a peek into their shining eyes and glimpse thoughts sashaying around, alien to be sure, but recognizable. So it’s easy to imagine Jack high in the scraggly willows, avidly investigating every wooly-bear caterpillar, peeping through the leaves now and then at the children frantically calling his name down below as the sky fell black and cold began to ooze from the stars.
     At dawn’s earliest light, when even the mountain wind freezes and falls, so did Jack. They brought him in by the fire to die, all the while murmuring to himself “Poor Jack ... poor Jack ... poor Jack …” until his bright little light went out.
     Clearing out my appallingly messy garage a couple weekends ago, I was shocked again to comprehend how thoroughly I failed my sister Kathie. Her death on Aug. 27 continues to come in jolts, in small heart-stopping drops as if trapped in an elevator as the strands of its supporting cable snap one by one. My mother bought Kathie a cute billed-cap of aqua blue to protect her chemo-ravaged scalp; I had set it aside, forgotten until it slid out of the shipping box that I was supposed mail.
     It was exactly a year ago when we last said goodbye in person. We hugged beneath the muscular pines that stand sentry around the cozy sanctuary her gentle husband kept for her on a mountain high above the soft-pastel alkaline plains of central Wyoming. Looking at the photos now, we seem like the old comedians Laurel and Hardy — she thin as a fawn and I with all my youthful flesh plus most of her share as well.
     She was a cheerful American beauty, who didn’t allow a neglectful brother, father or others affect how she defined herself. She knew what she was doing when she married Michael, who cherished her every smoky breath. She fretted about what would become of him, and of the several dogs that she took in like wayward waifs. She absolutely knew she was loved, however imperfectly.
     We laughed together on the phone about frivolous things two days before she died. The same cancer that killed our father had sneaked into her bones, cellular monsters on a wild-ass killing spree. We knew the strands that bound her to this world were fraying. I didn’t realize they would break so soon.
     Michael went in to hold her in those cold predawn hours when the boundaries between the worlds is at its thinnest. Resting in his arms, she flew silently, playfully away. Fifty-eight.
     Our ancient ancestors savored the vitality and magical strength of places “at the edge.” These boundary zones have always protected humanity’s core against the enemies arrayed against us. As the eminent archaeologist Francis Pryor wrote concerning the Bronze Age, “Mythology and the supernatural formed more than just a background; they interleaved and intertwined everything, binding the landscape together and forming a reality which had an existence in its own right.” Our stories still surround and defend us.
     It struck me when I last saw her how Kathie had selected just such a hilltop fort for herself, a place of power. It was a fine and fitting place to die. I love her all the more for it.
     If somehow I stood watchful guard out within the circling forest that night, I wonder if I might have seen her slip between the frozen atoms of window glass. Lighter than desert snow, she soars up into the boughs. She ignores heavy, imploring reality and is borne away on a moonbeam.
     When my daughter asked me last week to retell our family legend of Jack, I think we were both really speaking of my brave and mischievous sister.
     May her story also live on.

Geography of personality

     Around here, most of our ancestors came from Northwest Europe. We’re comfortable parsing the tribal personalities of self-contained Finns versus snooty English, and superior Germans versus, well, most everybody. Even so, in our aggressively multi-cultural society we mostly smile and figure these national personality traits are little more than amusing myths.
     I grew up in a remote mountain valley where the few who weren’t white as a hospital wall were Shoshoni, so dignified as to be nearly invisible except perhaps when in the company of brother whiskey. Northern Arapahoes and Scottish MacDougals were about as exotic as we ever got. I recall in junior high taking a serious run at convincing the neighborhood kids that I was French Canadian, just in hopes of being a little different.
     My first real taste of the reality of personality differences on a national scale came in my 20s, after accepting a college friend’s invitation to visit his family in the Andes. Even with perfect affection — I nearly married into a climbing guide’s family there — Argentines are as annoyingly arrogant as they are deliciously sensual. Cross the long border into Chile and the sexual climate cools to the ambient temperature of the nearby Pacific, while personal warmth soars. Go a little north to Bolivia and it’s as if you’ve slipped through to an entirely different universe, one where human strength and tragedy are hard as the surrounding rocky peaks with their circling halos of giant condors.
     Now, research is revealing some interesting contrasts in typical personalities among the 50 states. As recently reported by the Wall Street Journal, a study of more than 600,000 people published in the journal Perspectives on Psychological Science found a real basis for some of our perceptions that New Yorkers are neurotic and Oregonians prefer to keep their own company.
     Maybe because we’re so darn lucky to live amidst such natural splendor, folks in Oregon and Washington rate near the bottom of the list in terms of anxious, high-stress behavior — 48th and 46th respectively among the 50 states and District of Columbia. On the other hand, we’re so busy communing with nature and spending family time that we rank 44th and 48th on extroversion.
     We’re near the top of the list in our openness to new experiences — 3rd and 5th — perhaps because we’re all the literal or figurative offspring of pioneers who felt perfectly comfortable packing their wagons and striking out for the fresh far West.
     Oregon and Washington are in the middle of the pack when it comes to agreeableness and conscientiousness — neither too naughty nor too nice nor on time. In terms of cooperation and friendliness. Oregon is 18th and Washington 22nd. In terms of getting jobs done with self-discipline, Oregon comes in 31st and Washington 25th — we’re sometimes kayaking when we should be writing that quarterly report.
     Putting this into a larger context, states like New York really are as neurotic as Woody Allen has shown us. So too are some relatively poor states like West Virginia and Mississippi, where living on opossums is presumably a struggle.
     The biggest cluster of gregarious glad-handers is in the Upper Midwest, where people in empty prairie states like North Dakota need all the human contact they can get. On the bottom of the extraversion list are the Chesapeake Bay states and New England, in addition to us. The Northeastern states and Wyoming are the least conscientious.
     As the Wall Street Journal notes, the causes for these distinctions is an open question. “There’s no way to unravel the chicken-and-egg question: Do states tend to nurture specific personalities because of their histories, cultures, even climates? Or do Americans, seeking kindred spirits, migrate to the states where they feel at home?”
     I think personality is genetically hardwired into each of us. Over the course of decades and centuries, a great sorting process occurs. A thousand years from now, the U.S. will be 20 little countries, all specializing in their own peculiarities. Until then, we all get to vote for the same president. What fun!
     See the Wall Street Journal article at http://tinyurl.com/3etnbl.

Friends and fiends

     Mr. Croup and Mr. Vandemar are my new favorite villains, remorseless supernatural cutthroats with a sense of humor as dry as the priceless dynastic Chinese figurines Mr. Croup devours in ecstasies of destruction.
     While most people aspire to be good guys, the world of film, theater and dramatic fiction would be dreadfully dreary without wicked scoundrels. Where would Agent Starling be without Hannibal Lecter, Buffy without Spike, or Bullwinkle without Boris Badenov? Without evil, drama is simply an empty suit.
     In real life, there is nothing amusing or entertaining about fiends who harm others. I wish the world was larger and still had unexplored continents where all evildoers could be sent into perpetual exile. But on the stage, screen or printed page, a little creepy grotesquery is the milk in the chowder, keeping the other characters in motion and greatly enhancing their flavor.
     Without deliberately planning to, our recent annual family trip to Ashland for Shakespeare encompassed not one of the Bard’s fantastic villains like Iago or Richard III, but rather Croup and Vandemar from the deliciously twisted mind of Neil Gaiman. We listened to his book “Neverwhere” in the car. In an interesting accidental symmetry, last year in Ashland we loved the movie version of Gaiman’s novel “Stardust.”
     Gaiman doubtless is old news to many readers, since he has apparently long been famous for his Sandman comic series, but I’m always running behind the time. (Just the other day, I was still nostalgically recalling my crush on Veronica, the snobby black-haired socialite who toys with Archie’s affections at Riverdale High School.)
     “Neverwhere” creates an alternate city beneath London, a place to which the upper city’s “invisible” homeless population retreats, many serving an intelligent rat nobility in the sewers and abandoned subway tunnels. It is in these black and haunted vaults that Croup and Vandemar hunt the novel’s hero and heroine, crunching and crucifying anyone in their way. It goes without saying that the squeamish need not rush to the library to reserve a copy.
     Where trash like the “Saw” movies are completely repellent, “Neverwhere” is modeled on the ancient and honorable tradition of fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm variety. Now sanitized beyond all recognition, these stories were born in the dark forests of northern Europe and meant to terrify grownups, not just children.
     Modern life would be richer and deeper if we brought our culture’s timeless malefactors back within the tent. It’s as if we gave Satan an exclusive contract to provide all bad-guy services when our ancestors abandoned Woden (after whom Wednesday is named) and took up the Jesus trail. The old monsters had a certain juicy vitality, a je ne sais quoi connection to the genuine DNA of our subterranean tribal brains.
     Anyone interested in exploring the mythical bestiary of Britain would do well to spend some time with the art and descriptions of Andrew Paciorek online at www.batcow.co.uk/strangelands/tricksters.htm. Although he earns only a passing mention by Paciorek — perhaps because he’s just a blob — my pick for most disgusting old monster is Boneless. A vast, revolting bag of flesh, Boneless could nevertheless transport its voracious hunger and teeth down country lanes quick enough to engulf unwary travelers. Still believing in him would make evening strolls ever so more exciting.
     I’ll be checking out the Sandman comics — still have a hard time thinking of them as “graphic novels” — delighted to encounter a fellow traveler in the quest to put some chills back into modern life’s slack and lazy imagination.

Rage

     Nothing on earth or elsewhere emits purer rage than the agitated wasps that rocket out of “land mines” they obstinately construct underfoot along forest trails. Nothing, that is, except for Buoy 10 fishermen deprived a decent share of astounding tens of thousands of fat chinook observed surging past Bonneville since last Thursday’s vote to close the season.
     When it comes to Columbia River fishing, the difference between chinook and coho salmon has always been like Marilyn Monroe versus Bette Davis. One inspires lust, the other only admiration. (Roughly translating this comparison for younger readers, perhaps think Rihanna versus Amy Winehouse.) It’s no accident that chinooks are also known as kings. Would you rather capture the royal and gilded ruler, or the skinny peasants?
     One of the curses of being a journalist is being hard-wired to see things from multiple perspectives — not for us the simple pleasures of absolute certainty — so it’s possible to sympathize with decision-makers who strangled Buoy 10 just before it reached its, er, climax. After all, the daily Bonneville count had withered down into the hundreds just before they scuttled the chinook season. Still, fisheries managers must be relieved that functioning voodoo dolls are not commonly available in Warrenton or Ilwaco tackle stores.
     Personally, my attitude toward salmon fishing and duck hunting are identical — both serve more as plausible excuses to spend time outdoors than as ways to put food on the table. Another publisher and I recently confessed to one another that we don’t even care for the taste of ducks, though we cling to our affection for tromping through swamps and farm stubble — he far more actively than I. My dogs, with their joyous enthusiasm for investigating coyote droppings in the hills, are ample incentive to drag me out of the house. We don’t need to hook or shoot anything to have fun.
     A trifle bored with our usual paths near home, the dogs and I have been rediscovering the highlands on the south end of Willapa Bay. Once my daughter Elizabeth’s favorite place to scoop up dozens of red-legged frogs as temporary pets, I was thoroughly disgusted when several hundred acres bordering the National Wildlife Refuge were clear-cut. I’m mindful that logging fed the Winters family for a century, but that doesn’t translate into automatic forgiveness for the despoilers of “frog hollow.”
     But, lo and behold, the endless wet spring that has now stretched to the end of August has really greened up the hills. In fact, it’s breathtaking to have unobstructed views out to the recovering wilderness of Long Island and the bright Pacific horizon. This Monday, a herd of contented elk dozed in a meadow far below us. There even were a few surviving red-legs remaining to throw themselves off the logging road as my roving canine mini-pack and I approached.
     Other days, Elizabeth and I race along a steep forest trail above one of Cape Disappointment’s minor headlands to reach a secluded shore above the old anchorage, where ships once rested after successfully threading their way through the perilous north channel of the Columbia. Nineteenth century sailing instructions are almost comical in their complexity, for instance requiring the captain to make a dash in the direction of a certain yellow-colored bluff at precisely the right moment. The anchorage’s tranquility must have been cause for cheers and profound prayers of thanksgiving.
     It still is. Sitting on a black basalt knob a few feet above the placid river on what qualifies as a comfortable afternoon this year is like worshipping in a watery blue cathedral. If, as some experts believe, “Water is the oil of the 21st century,” we bathe in untold wealth — even if the estuary itself is probably a little too salty for most purposes. There will soon come a time when we all fully appreciate inhabiting a place where so much cold, fresh water oozes from the sky in every season and gushes down any wrinkle in the land.
     As much as the salmon themselves, we people of the Columbia are creatures of water and have cause to be grateful to the river, sea and sky that conspire to deliver such bounty to our well-webbed toes.

Ozette: Potential and perils of NW archaeology

     In its cozy, muddy way, Ozette is the Pacific Northwest’s Pompeii, a frozen moment in the lives of native villagers just before European contact erupted in the midst of their complex and ancient civilization.
     Chances are you’re at least vaguely aware of the miraculously preserved Makah buildings and artifacts discovered under an eroding hillside at Ozette, between Cape Flattery and La Push. They are displayed in a first-rate museum. But it isn’t a place many people stumble into by accident. There is a good reason the reclusive vampires of the popular “Twilight” books “live” nearby: Ozette and its neighbors aren’t on the way to anywhere.
     But back in the day, the fertile coastal zone beneath the Olympics must have been a wonderful place to live — except for those darned mudslides. With the ocean full of whales and sea otters and the rivers leaping with a dozen salmon species, people had leisure to develop a premier aesthetic tradition that was reflected in everything from ceremonial cedar carvings to children’s toys.
     After high tides began exposing artifacts to looters in the winter of 1970, Washington State University commenced an 11-year dig that eventually excavated more than 55,000 objects.
     The fact that so much was found at Ozette isn’t good news for the people who lived there. In many places, warfare toppled walls that entomb the evidence of long-ago lives, but it was an unstable hillside that tumbled over the Makah habitations, a natural process repeated at least a couple times over humanity’s 2,000 years in residence there.
     Portland State University archaeologist Ken Ames, who attended WSU, says “at the simplest most fundamental level, Ozette is important because it is many stories, many really good human stories.” Their calamity preserved a unique cross-section of interesting lives for rediscovery in our time.
     The current edition of WSU’s alumni magazine contains a tremendous article by Tim Steury that explains “for the Makah people ... the place was not just a memory. It was home. And thus Ozette presented an extraordinary opportunity, confirming much of Makah tradition and oral history.” For non-Makahs as well, this lost village teaches much about living well here by the capricious sea.
     As incredibly successful and fortuitous as the Ozette dig was, the real headline news in Steury’s piece is the hard times that have befallen Pacific Northwest archaeology, particularly of the “wet-site” variety often required west of the Cascades. Big as the pay-off is from such research in terms of scientific and cultural understanding, really rich sites like Ozette are both expensive and difficult.
     “Coordinating and paying for a massive 11-year dig requires a leader with equal parts ego, salesmanship, political and diplomatic skill, and persistence — as minimum requirements.”
     Fully 90 percent of Ozette remains unexcavated, including a tantalizing 800-year-old house buried by an earlier slide. And it’s expected to stay that way: “large-scale Northwest archaeology, along with public and academic interest, has nearly disappeared.”
     Steury explains this is partly to blame on academic snobbery that equates studying local archaeological sites with being merely a “regional” university. (For example, my acquaintance Peter Lape at the University of Washington’s Burke Museum has been digging on the Indonesian island of Timor lately. Ironically, Japanese archaeologists are relatively heavily invested here in the Northwest, where certain native food-processing practices closely resemble those in Japan.)
     Cable TV is loaded with documentaries about how to survive wilderness misadventures, exploring dripping catacombs and investigating deaths; archaeology combines all of these and more. Scientists need to be better evangelists for their own fields. With public excitement would come the funds to continue the work at Ozette and dozens of other worthy locations in Washington and Oregon, including several around the Lower Columbia.
     “Archaeological resources come closer to being magical than anything else in my existence,” archaeologist Gary Wessen said. These sites transcend the bounds of time: They “are better than books. If we’re smart, we can have a dialogue with the past.”
     In a time of advancing sea levels, erosion and rapid development, many archaeological sites can’t afford to wait. We owe it to the past and future to dig now.

Our new isolation

     Going to Portland by water was an exotic voyage for a Lower Columbia boy and his daddy decades ago, when the isolation of Clatsop and Pacific counties wasn’t a lifestyle choice but an absolute, cramping reality.
     Wayne O’Neil, the Chinook Observer’s wise and kindly old publisher from 1963-84, once described the boat trip he made upriver with his dad in the waning days of steamship travel on the river. Jimmie O’Neil, who bought the Observer in 1937, wanted Wayne to have the experience before this mode of transportation died out.
     Unlike today’s fancy gingerbread-adorned excursion boats that disgorge their passengers for a few hours shopping in Astoria’s prettified downtown, Wayne’s working-class steamer rumbled along like a decrepit factory floating uphill on a river of gravy. The forests, stump farms and bright villages crept by. His bottom grew weary of sitting on hard-slatted seats, but the monotonous growl of the engine lulled him off to sleep.
     Even today, places like Skamokawa are clearly more oriented to the river than to the modern pavement that sweeps past on flat causeways blasted out of facing hillsides. Astoria, Chinook, Ilwaco, Clifton, Westport ... all were directed to the river as their main transportation corridor. Wharves were front yards. The steamers General Washington, Cygnet, Lurline, Melville and a dozen others conveyed people from port to port for daily business, calling on relations, or an arduous day’s expedition to Astoria to see the doctor.
     It’s hard now imagine the excitement and incredulity that must have greeted the Observer’s June 24, 1910, headline “Auto Trip is Possible.” For the first time in history, “The run from Portland to Astoria by automobile can be made now.” Just think — fewer than 100 years ago, it was extremely big news that you could aspire to drive yourself to the big city. By Wayne’s childhood in the 1920s, the old riverboat network was in full retreat, as federal-funded highway construction put men back to work and cars fueled with pennies-per-gallon gasoline cut the trip from Astoria to Portland to a mere five hours or so.
     The 20th century will long be remembered for foundation-shaking events and trends, but when it comes to transforming ordinary lives it will be impossible to ever forget the enormous impact of cars and trucks. Distance simply ceased being a big deal when it came to selecting homesites, moving food from farms to the table, deciding where to vacation and countless other basic considerations that underpin modern life.
     Was this all a teetering tower of glass fishing floats, ready to skitter and crash? Will $4.50 gasoline make us turn back to riverboats and the days when going to Portland entailed a strenuous multi-day commitment?
     All in all, I think not. When you consider gasoline cost 13.3 cents per gallon in 1910 but that half of all adult male workers made less than $12 a week, it took about a full day’s labor to fill up your tank. Even though Ford Model Ts could sometimes achieve a surprising 25 miles to the gallon, this means an hour of work would buy at most 47 miles on the road.
     Contrast this with today. According to Washington state, the average hourly wage in Pacific County is $12.25 before taxes, or about $10 net. With gasoline now costing roughly $4.50 a gallon, this means an hour’s labor will buy about 2.25 gallons. Now, we have a lot more automotive choices than Model Ts in black, black or black, but even if your rig only gets the same mileage as a Model T, you’re driving 56 miles for an hour’s labor — a considerable improvement since the birth of the modern car.
     Still, much of how we live is premised on dirt-cheap gasoline. Anybody who chose to live in Long Beach and work in, say, Longview is seriously regretting it. As a commuter told the New York Times last week, “Before it was ‘we spend too much time driving.’ Now, it’s ‘we spend too much time and money driving.’ ”
     At the same time, the cost of transporting everything from Idaho potatoes to Irish whiskey to our truly remote coast is going up and up.
     The age of personal transportation isn’t over, not by a long shot. But it’s certainly time to plant a vegetable garden and start clearing the train tracks between Astoria and Interstate 5. Maybe there will even be a renaissance for riverboats as ordinary means of conveyance. Nostalgia junkie that I am, I kind of like the idea. Just remember to bring a pillow.

Doing The Puyallup

     Shyly standing with her petite brown 4-H heifer, she was certain she’d take a prize at the county fair. Judging criteria are completely inexplicable to anybody not initiated into the sacred mysteries of livestock showing. But to an unpracticed eye, girl and cow both look like winners, hooves and boots glinting in the sun, every curly auburn hair in place.
Mom’s still pretty disappointed 70 years later, mystified that any judge could be so blind to all that was perfect about her adored young cow. Things like that stick with you. I wish she had won and yet I’m glad county fairs remain a strict if obscure meritocracy. Most of the time, our culture’s sin is making winning too automatic for kids.
The yellowed photo of Mom at that long-ago fair hovered in mind last week as we sampled raspberry scones at the grand Western Washington Fair. With a late uncle who was president of the fair board, my wife brims with nostalgia for “The Puyallup,” named for its Pierce County hometown and its snappy and inescapable jingle. To me, it’s more like Disneyland with manicured critters instead of sweating men dressed as Donald, Goofy and Mickey, with their creepy plastic corporate grins. A few weeks ago someone dismissively described it to Capital Press Managing Editor Carl Sampson as “just an old scone feed,” which Carl quotes in an amusing assumed accent.
We mostly went this year to give our 11-year-old her first live rock concert — Fergie, lead singer for the mainstream hip-hop group Black Eyed Peas. Though she puts on a convincing bad-girl pose, Fergie was a straight-A student, spelling bee champ and Girl Scout — definitely not the worst possible role model. My bad ear is still merrily ringing from the Apocalypse-loud and bad opening act. Note to self: in the future take earplugs and don’t sit down until the warm-up band leaves the stage.
Elizabeth loved the experience, though, standing on her seat and swaying throughout Fergie’s show, rushing the stage with others of her age to wave a slender hand for “the Dutchess” to touch. As always, it was refreshing being in the confidence of someone with such innocent enthusiasm. Reminded me of my big 1970s crush on Karen Carpenter back before the demon of thinness stole her away.
Thank goodness, though, Elizabeth isn’t a screamer. Even on the aptly named Extreme Scream, which I wouldn’t ride for $300, she was stoical about being sucked straight up into the sky about 15 stories and plunged downward fast as a falcon. It made her mom and I gasp just to witness it.
     Although doing the Puyallup was something I resisted, it was a good deal more than just an old scone feed. It wasn’t cheap entertainment by any means, but it has the real appeal of getting people outdoors and exposing them at least a bit to the farm animals and agricultural producers upon whom we all rely for our very lives. And those hot scones are yummy.
     Talk of economic depression in the past couple weeks has me wondering just how well we’d do if confronted by anything like the same scary conditions that Mom and her folks endured at the time of that long-ago fair in the Wyoming mountains. In the 1920s and ‘30s, productive farms bordered nearly every town and city. Nowadays, if things broke down I’m not real sure how a lot of people would feed themselves. Most consumers have only the vaguest idea of where food comes from. As my Grandpa Bell observed, people think hamburger is somehow pulled out of thin air in the back of the store, plastic wrapping and all.
     Some will barely notice a downswing. Others are already suffering. As in the Great Depression, I suspect we’re going to see a big upswing in hunting and gathering, vegetable gardening, home canning and all the other make-do mechanisms people have at their disposal to stretch their dollars till they whimper and tear. In our blessed nation, there’s no good reason for anybody to go hungry. We’ll need to make sure nutrition gets where it needs to. Out here on the coast, we may have to learn to swap fish for Willamette Valley produce.
     In other ways, an economic slap may be good for us. We’ve gotten awfully complacent and too big for our britches. It’s time to focus once again on the fundamentals of this country, on security and peace in our own homes and neighborhoods. It’s time to live within our means and our borders.

125 years

     We’re all familiar with the provincial attitude that proclaims you have to be a native resident of a place in order to have valid opinions about it. Anybody with sense rejects this arrogant silliness.
     So while acknowledging that length of residence is in many ways meaningless, I’d still like to take a moment to celebrate my family’s 125 years here in Washington, a milestone we formally achieve this Sunday.
     After grieving and burying a 5-year-old son along the way in Walla Walla, my family’s small wagon train from Nevada arrived in far northwestern Washington Territory. On June 29, 1883, my Great-grandfather William Giles “cut a trail, done some slashing and commenced a home ... worth about $20” on 40 acres near the Canadian boundary in Whatcom County. His father-in-law, brother and their families soon settled nearby.
     Complying with the letter of the Homestead Act, over the next five years my great-grandparents built a 10x20’ log house with two rooms, two doors and two windows, along with a variety of outbuildings and other improvements. My slightly better off great-great-grandparents, Robert and Susan Millsaps, built a 16x16’ frame house valued at $200. Altogether, by 1889 my ancestors had eight cattle, two horses, 22 hogs, 72 chickens, 58 fruit trees and a dog.
     Unlike dry-side homesteaders east of the Cascades where they wielded picks and shovels to scratch out endless irrigation canals, at least in Whatcom County there’s rarely any problem keeping things watered. Proving up his land claim, Great-grandpa Giles noted “The first year I had in about 1 acre and raised about 175 bushels. Since then I have added to that every year as fast as I got it cleared.” He managed to clear about 1 acre of cedar forest each year.
     It was the definition of a hard life, and every year he and great-great-grandpa left their own farms to be itinerant laborers. “I worked in the harvest field at La Conner from one to two months each summer for different persons, and boarded where I was at work ... to make money to live on, but my family staid on the ranch all the time,” he said.
     (I’ve always felt an affinity with Great-grandpa Giles, partly because Dad said I closely resemble him. We certainly share the same faulty spelling gene.)
     Family photos in the archives of the Center for Pacific Northwest Studies at Western Washington University show my grandmother and her two little sisters among the kids in the original hand-hewn school in the village of Custer — all looking like they’ve been scrubbed to within a hen’s feather of their lives.
     As it worked out, the 1880s were actually a tremendous economic boom time in western Washington. Buoyed by out-of-territory investments in our seemingly limitless and unquestionably cheap natural resources, the Pacific Northwest was a place where ordinary working people could get ahead. This was despite the fact most employment was utterly under the thumb of companies, which dictated everything from the length of the work week to the price of soap in the company store.
     “There was a sense of security investing here and moving here,” I was told last week by Dr. Lorraine McConaghy, historian at the Museum of History & Industry in Seattle.
     In 1889, boom turned to utter bust and a “very grim time” began, McConaghy said. Prices for all the raw materials we exported outside the region were always set by market forces far beyond our control. We manufactured little, and the logs, grain and other bulk materials we shipped out brought little back to local people. We were a classic economic colony. And then suddenly the bottom dropped out of the commodity market.
     Historian Bernard DeVoto may have had our bright newborn state in mind when he wrote of the West as the “plundered province.”
     Washington actually lost population, as people despaired that things would ever turn around. My family stayed, but great-great-grandpa and grandma died, broken, in the 1890s at ages 66 and 53 respectively. Great-grandpa Giles sold the homestead, moved to Blaine, and began his career as a purveyor of oysters and waffles. He prospered with everyone else when the Klondike gold rush finally turned the money spigot back on. Eventually, he opened a small gold mine of his own in Geneva on the lower foothills of Mount Baker. More of the Northwest’s money started staying here.
     And so it went, with Grandpa Elmer Winters arriving from Michigan in 1904 and marrying Lillie, eldest of the Giles girls. Thirty years of labor in the Bloedel Donovan sawmill helped make one son a dentist, another a lawyer. One daughter ran Coast Guard personnel operations in Seattle and the other owned restaurants in Blaine.
     To make a long story shorter, here we still are today — more dentists, restaurateurs, newspaper publishers and a raft of other semi-useful things — making our lives where our ancestors made theirs. We’re tremendously grateful for all they built and all they suffered. Each and every one of us believe Washington’s citizens must always strive for control over our own destiny, always putting families first.

Up-front week

     Heat and sweet sunshine poured onto our soggy coastline late this week. As the rain-saturated soil puffs out its humid breath, it’s as if heaven has tipped a vast dammed-up cascade of gently steaming maple syrup over our doughy, winter-white bodies. I’m not complaining.
     We’re all rummaging for shorts in our Pacific Northwest hope chests. Flats of annuals are flying out of local greenhouses like clouds of plump, black bats wearing merry hats. But like the demonic, quick-as-wolves zombies in Will Smith’s recent remake of “The Omega Man,” I can picture our skin frying fast as bacon under an acetylene torch at the first touch of UV light.
     By the time late fall trundles down the calendar’s tracks five months from now, today’s juicy green young leaves will be as tired and brittle as a mummy’s bones, and as anxious to melt back into the earth. Our lawns will have dried, browned, turned to powder and blown away. We’ll thirst for cold rain, warm jackets and no tourists.
     For now, though, I’m turning up João Gilberto’s murmured samba and imagining myself live in Montreux. An icy Brahma beer beckons from the deck.
     This is “upfront week,” when television networks float their fall program line-ups with all the naive optimism of teenagers buying their first lottery tickets.
     By all rights, our newspapers ought to run the TV listings on the front page. There is, after all, nothing except work and sleep upon which we lavish more time. Especially here, our sodden and windy northern climate dictates that TV is the key leisure activity for two-thirds of the year. We dwell on it the other third as well, out of sheer habit.
     Having a wife and an 11-year-old daughter, but just one TV, my viewing preferences rank about fourth in our house, just after our wheaten terrier Duncan’s but sometimes marginally higher than our Welsh corgi Bina’s. Luckily, we have surprising overlap in our tastes, so I only have to absent myself while my girls watch DVDs of “The Gilmore Girls” and when Elizabeth settles in for marathon sessions with “iCarly” and the Disney Channel’s other endless, indistinguishable shows aimed at the lucrative “tween” demographic.
     The TV script-writers strike broke us out of our comfortable rut of “Lost,” “Heroes,” “Supernatural” and “Gray’s Anatomy” — all of which I recommend with some reservations.
     Although they test the limits of my tolerance for sexual innuendo, two new additions to our schedule — “Two and a Half Men” and “How I Met Your Mother” — are both frequently hilarious, the former particularly in its older reruns. We all love “Aliens in America,” an innocent and funny exploration of high school life and ethnic stereotyping. I usually hate shows about lawyers — I know all too many — but “Eli Stone” is interesting and touching. It has just been renewed for another season. “Damages,” with Glenn Close, is another exception and is also returning.
     Of all the countless police procedurals, “The Closer” is the only one I can tolerate.
     Ordering DVDs of TV series from Netflix has been a source of great entertainment. “Slings and Arrows,” a Canadian Broadcasting program about a fictional Shakespearean festival closely patterned on Canada’s real Stratford festival, is a ribald look at the creative process. “Ballykissangel,” a light-hearted BBC comedy about an English Catholic priest stationed in a small Irish town, is also worth a look. Darker by far, the Japanese manga “Death Note” is nearly as complex as “Lost” and similarly addictive. (You can sample it during Cartoon Network’s “Adult Swim” after midnight on Saturdays.)
     Uniquely among the new shows announced this week, I can’t wait to see “Dollhouse,” by Joss Whedon of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” fame. If you subscribe to Netflix and haven’t tried “Buffy,” please do so, along with my other favorite canceled show, “Veronica Mars.”
     Silly, I know, to devote so much space to TV on a gorgeous day. But if there’s one other thing I also know for sure, it’s that coast weather will soon drive us back indoors. Be prepared.

Winters the Smith

     Beating life into dull iron is how I wish to spend retirement, leaving something tangible to outlive these decades of arranging words on newsprint. Dad’s massive anvil and hammers won’t have been dragged across the country in vain.
     “The blacksmith and the shaman are of one nest,” a Siberian proverb observes. I first sensed this kinship between metalworking and magic at Dad’s forge. It was my job to crank the blower’s handle so fast it disappeared into a mad blur and the coals reached a terrifying, pulsing intensity like opening a wormhole between our rattlesnake-infested yard and the center of the sun.
     It is only at this extreme — glowing with mesmerizing fury — when stubborn iron can be tamed to our purposes. A useless, breakable lump is transformed against its will by the implacable fires of change and focused strength of man.
     Grandpa’s cherished friend Buck Tryon, an ageless little Irishman who could turn cartwheels and walk on his hands, was a maestro of the forge. His smithy in Grass Valley, Calif., was an alchemist’s gallery where inert iron rods stood everywhere, like Mickey Mouse’s multiplying brooms in the “Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” They loitered, waiting to be heated over and over again, split and twisted into flowing liquid shapes, all performed with as much skill as Dale Chihuly brought to glassblowing back when he still had two eyes.
     In Buck’s elfish hands, a garden gate became a kindly spider’s web, its patient occupant waiting for us to pass out of sight before lazily stretching a delicate leg.
     No wonder “Smith” developed into our culture’s ultimate name of prestige and honor. (If we were creating surnames for ourselves afresh today, there would just as doubtless be long columns of phone book listings like Jessica Moviestar and Andrew Venturecapitalist.)
     For centuries the arcane knowledge of ironmongery was jealously guarded, one of the original “trade secrets.” Our hairy tribes in the wilderness of Northwest Europe were among the last to obtain this technology. Swords became the “in” house-warming gift among the petty warlords of the day. Contrived from low-grade iron harvested from peatbogs, they were pattern welded to distribute enough carbon throughout to turn them into steel.
     We’ve negligently permitted much of our cultural heritage to slip away, and the tale of one of Northwest Europe’s greatest heroes is barely remembered today. Thanks to samurai movies, more Westerners probably know about the legendary Japanese swordsmith Musumane than our own Weyland the Smith.
     Of course there is no doubt about Musumane’s reality. If Weyland lived at all, it was perhaps 1,500 years ago, most likely in Jutland in southern Scandinavia (though the English assert he lived in the Vale of the White Horse in Berkshire and Germans say he was from Westphalia.) The old tales ascribe minor god-like powers to Weyland, but also the burden of being bound to complete any smithing commission for which he was paid.
     Weyland was captured by evil King Nithhad and hamstrung so he couldn’t escape. (Hamstringing entails cutting the two large tendons that attach to the knees. Leg control is thus limited to the thigh muscles, permanently destroying the ability to properly stand, walk or run.) Before exacting a horrific vengeance on Nithhad, though, Weyland had to make him the mighty sword Mimming, a process recounted in the Norse “Thidrik’s Saga.”
     He made a sword so sharp that it cut a sheet of velvet floating on water. This perfectly satisfied the king, but Weyland filed it down to dust and fed it to the chickens. Yes, that’s right. Fed it to the chickens. Then he collected the chicken droppings, refined them back into iron, and made another sword. Only after he repeated this whole process yet again was Weyland content.
     In an experiment originally reported in the Journal of the Historical Metallurgy Society in 1979, a French researcher tested Weyland’s process using a duck. It yielded completely slag-free iron suffused with nitrogen, which would indeed produce a sword of incredible strength. This nitriding process would overcome the natural brittleness of bog iron caused by residual phosphorus.
     I aspire more to be another Buck Tyron than another Weyland, but the idea of closing out my life by creating heirlooms — no matter whether swords or garden gates — is enormously appealing. Let the sparks fly!

Pony coal on the Bounty

     My older brother Greg earned my lasting worship when at age 10 he persisted in mounting an evil-tempered monster that radiated ill-will toward all living things: Our Shetland pony Frosty. Greg was, and is, easy-going and dauntless. He never stayed bucked off for long.
     It wasn’t until a couple years ago that I learned of my family’s older connections with ponies. Mom’s dad’s family, the Bells, were coal miners for hundreds of years in County Durham, England, where mines are called pits. Robert Bell, my ancestor born in 1758, was among the first generation of horse-keepers in the coal pits, in charge of the well-being of about 15 ponies that spent their lives hauling enormous loads from the coal face and up the main underground road.
     These ponies, only about 12 hands (four feet) tall at their withers, eventually came to replace children and women in the pits. By World War I, 73,000 worked eight-hour shifts for 20 years or more, seldom seeing the light of day.
     It sounds like a cruel life, but then humans didn’t have it so good in the mines either. Many died awfully young as they pried fossil fuel from seams so narrow that the pitmen were forced to curl up like fetuses working down in the sweaty, black womb of the earth.
     And yet there was much fellow-feeling between pitmen and the ponies, which some called “the best miners in the world.” According to a 1969 article in Britain’s Daily Telegraph, they used to “play ‘snap’ with their owners by sneaking pieces of sugar from pockets, trotting forward to sample the sandwiches and fruit that should have been the miners’ lunch.”
     The sentimental Scottish singer Sir Harry Lauder told of being saved from death when, as a young miner, his pony Catherine refused to budge and minutes later the tunnel collapsed just where they would otherwise have been. On the other side of the balance sheet, a 19-year-old pitman died a few years before the Telegraph’s article while trying to save his pony after it galloped into thick methane gas.
     It wasn’t until 1970, as the ailing English coal industry was caving in, that the last of the pit ponies were all finally brought up to the surface for good. The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals launched a major campaign to find homes for as many of the remaining 1,500 as could be salvaged.
     In Witton-Gilbert, Durham, one of my family’s hereditary hometowns, the Telegraph reported “When Mrs. Margaret Bell tries to get on with the housework it’s Fred who gets in the way. He just marches into the house and generally monopolises the kitchen — which is surely his right as the retired member of the family.”
     Thousands of English homes applied to adopt ponies, who required kind and patient care. Fred, for example, had spent 22 of his 26 years underground. Crotchety, habit-bound retirees, these ponies desperately needed love and understanding, and a nation opened its heart to them. I suspect their reward was lots of bucking and bites, but bless their hearts anyway.
     All this came to mind last week while browsing through a recent copy of the International Journal of Nautical Archaeology. It contained an article on the origin of coal found at the site of the HMS Bounty, destroyed by mutineers at Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific in January 1790.
     A small 215-ton sailing ship, the Bounty was burned to the waterline to foil the British Navy’s feverish search for Fletcher Christian and the other men who turned on Capt. William Bligh. It carried coal down in the hold for use in its forge, which was in turn used to mend the Bounty’s many iron parts.
     Through the miracles of human ingenuity and modern technology, archaeologists have now determined that this coal was from the Durham coalfield, quite possibly the Hutton or Low Main Seams in the ancient district of Chester le Street. And where exactly were my great-great-great-great-grandfather’s ponies employed in 1787 when the Bounty set sail for Tahiti? You guessed it.
     For my money, that’s Bell coal on the bottom of Bounty Bay.

Whispers from the past

     I have a recurrent fantasy when out walking our dogs on the glorious shores and hills surrounding the mouth of the Columbia and Willapa Bay. It is being able to command a sort of genie to retrieve every human-made artifact within 1,000 feet, no matter how deeply buried.
     I’m as covetous as the next guy — maybe more so — but this particular obsession has little to do with wanting to physically possess the lost or ritually deposited property of the ancient ones who haunt these fogs and ferns.
     Instead, wanting to examine everything the original people created has two more complex motivations: deciphering exactly how they so ingeniously fit a legendary civilization into the Columbia’s matrix of rich but fragile habitats, and simply reveling in their unsurpassed ability to imbue even the simplest objects with life-affirming artistic power.
     As we twiddle about in our decidedly vapid lives of selling things to each other and hurrying home to watch TV, there still is the faint imprint upon this reality of a bold time when mighty cedar canoes sliced local waters. For 100 generations or more, the Chinooks were bred in the bone and flesh of this land, just as much as the Heroic-Age Greeks were a fundamental element and product of the Aegean Sea. Lacking a Homer of their own, we are left to read what we can concerning old Chinook ways in the rough Braille of lost arrowheads, long-forgotten floor planks and other ephemeral material clues.
     We who quest after details of our own deepest Northwest European heritage are sadly familiar with the vexations of descending from preliterate peoples who mostly worked with wood. We know, for example, that the Anglo-Saxon tribes were great seafarers, managing to transport themselves in relentless numbers from the continent to Britain. They must have built countless boats, but a sorry few barely cling to the archaeological record. All their timber houses and a vast proportion of their wooden artifacts have long since perished.
     So it is with the Chinook and many other peoples of the maritime Pacific Northwest. Preeminent archaeologists Ken Ames of Portland State University and Doug Wilson of Fort Vancouver National Historic Reserve recently told Steve Forrester and me about lingering stories of Chinook vessels that would have struck terror into the heart of a Viking — floating works of supreme confidence with articulated figureheads that danced across the waves. All gone.
     Ames and Wilson tenderly unwrapped many historically precious (but almost monetarily valueless) things recovered from Lower Columbia digs like the Meier site near Scappoose, Cathlapotle near Ridgefield and the Station Camp-Middle Village dig at McGowan. Perhaps most marvelous was a small face carved in soft stone, its eyes fixed on a scene very long ago when Cathlapotle sat astride the river like a German castle dominating the Rhine, collecting tribute from all passing travelers.
     Northwest tribes share a sense of proprietary privacy when it comes to such tangible pieces of the past. This is most recently and controversially an issue with regard to the 2,700-year-old Tse-whit-zen village discovered in the course of now-canceled excavations at the Hood Canal Bridge near Port Angeles. Based on objections by the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, 900 boxes of artifacts are locked away in a storage facility in Seattle.
     As memorably reported Thursday by the Seattle Times, “frustrated local historians evoke the final scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark, when, after all the adventure and fuss, the Ark of the Covenant is crated and carted into obscurity inside a cavernous government archive.”
     If I were Chinook or Elwha Klallam — instead of maybe 1/128th Cherokee — perhaps I too wouldn’t care to have these talismans of a bygone age studied or ogled by whites. But these objects whisper essential messages about treasuring this place, about weaving our lives into the far western edge of the continent in an age of epic threats.
     I hope their descendants will find it in their hearts to allow us to partake of their Old Ones’ wisdom. Just maybe, some small part of their respect for the land will rub off on us.
     For more information, see http:⁄⁄seattletimes.nwsource.com⁄ html⁄localnews⁄2004384678_artifacts01m.html

Going a’mayin

     On May Day we boys used to gather straggly bouquets of delicate spring violets of heart-breaking butterfly blue for our one-and-only best gals — our moms. Giggling slender Shoshone girls at our tumbleweed-terraced reservation school danced around the Maypole trailing bright crape-paper streamers, a 5,000-year-old Celtic tradition sitting quite nicely in the land of the mystical Sun Dance.
     In this crabby age of “tyranny with manners,” as the late Charlton Heston called political correctness, I don’t suppose many schools indulge in the day-long festivals of foot races, somersaults and iridescent Kool-aid that marked the true start of spring in the mountains. But if ever a tradition deserved revival, ancient May Day with its bubbling sense of fun and earthy reverence for nature ought to be put back into our calendar lineup.
     Twentieth century communism had countless flaws, not the least of which was its stultifying lack of humor. Totalitarian military parades on May 1 probably did as much as anything to make suspect May Day celebrations of any kind. Lightness of spirit wasn’t ever a strong suit of our own Cold War warriors either, and they ill-understood that shunning May Day fun only made matters worse. Laughter has ever been the pure storm that spoils the self-importance of pig-headed ninnies. (In any event, May Day as a holiday for the workers of the world was an American invention, not a Soviet one. It started in Chicago in 1867 to mark passage of hard-won eight-hour work day legislation.)
     Like many Celtic traditions, May Day survived longest in the modern world in Britain and Ireland, the last strongholds of the Celts in face of successive waves of invaders that transformed the culture and ethnicity of Europe starting in about 500 BC.
     Looking, therefor, across the Atlantic for reminders of what we might try to revive here on our own wave-washed shore, Brian Day’s “A Chronicle of Folk Customs” provides a good sense of the overall flavor of the event.
     “The advent of the merry month of May was a time of great celebration, when summer was welcomed by men blowing on cow-horns. Girls rose early to bathe their faces in the May morning dew, which was held to have curative and beauty properties. Blankets soaked in May dew were thought to be able to cure sick children wrapped in them. Wells were able to grant wishes on May Day. ... [But] Fairies are abroad today so don’t leave your baby unattended lest it be kidnapped and replaced by a changeling.”
     T.C. Croker’s “Fairy Legends of South Ireland” recounts that “May-eve is considered a time of peculiar danger. The ‘good people’ are supposed then to possess the power and inclination to do all sorts of mischief ... The ‘evil eye’ is then also deemed to have more than its usual vigilance and malignity.”
     This dark side to May’s joyfulness is an echo of the Celtic spring festival of Beltane, when the old pagans made sacrifices and lit foul-smelling bone fires (bonfires) to purify the earth and drive evil spirits away. People would jump through the flames and farmers would even drive their cattle through them, according to Day.
     Bringing in the May, or “going a’maying,” was an all-night party for young and old alike. On the innocent end of the scale, children gathered garlands in the forests and fields with which they decorated family houses and garden gates. In the 19th century, this evolved into sort of a Halloween double-dipping scheme, in which kids paraded their garlands around the neighborhood, singing songs and collecting money.
     The earlier R-rated version was a bit less wholesome. There’s no doubt that the prevailing theme of the holiday was one of rollicking life and sexual license. It was this latter trait that so fired up English Puritans in 1644 that they ordered the destruction of all Maypoles. In 1583, a moral reformer observed that of “a hundred maides going to the wood over night, there have scarecely the thirde parte of them returned home againe undefiled.” Belying Colonial America’s staid image, Massachusetts Gov. William Bradford railed in 1628: “They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing and frisking togither, (like so many fairies, or furies rather,) and worse practices.”
     Well! Being a boring old person now myself, I can’t quite bring myself to advocate a return to multi-day revelries in the woods that result in young women wearing fashionable “green gowns.” The Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore explains these are “a well-known metaphor for what girls received from lying in the grass with their lovers.”
     But neither can I resist the thought of what fun it would be for entire communities to go a’maying, basking in the first fine warmth as earth is reborn. A well-made May garland will result in a silver dollar for the first child who brings one to my door.

Duncan and the bear

     “Zombie plague sweeps the internet.” “Boozy bear plunders campers’ beer.” “‘Cremated’ father turns up on TV.” With these headlines and many others, BBC’s Web site proves every day that it no longer is the stodgy old “auntie” of British news. Though it certainly won’t win any contests for luridness when stacked up against London’s carnivorous and reactionary tabloids, BBC has a fine sense of humor and of the absurd.
     And yet it’s still BBC’s brilliant content makes it one of my favorite and most-trusted sources of information. Its objectivity and thoroughness are a bracing drink of cold, pure water compared to the inane pablum that is passed off as news by most U.S. media.
     I’m no paragon of intellectual virtue when it comes to dipping into the “most read stories” on BBC and elsewhere. It turned out the zombie article concerned the rather prosaic hijacking of home computers for use by criminal gangs. But once in a while, the news turns out to be every bit as bizarre as promised.
     The bear story is particular favorite, having taken place four years ago in a campground just east of my family’s long-time hometown of Bellingham, Wash.
     Campground workers encountered a bear, passed out after guzzling 36 cans of beer raided from coolers and opened with his claws and teeth. The real pleasure of the story, though, is in the details. The bear tried out and rejected Busch beer before settling on and sucking down a case and a half of Rainier — doubtless unaware that the iconic Pacific Northwest brand is no longer owned or brewed in Seattle. Later needing to remove the suds-loving bruin from the Baker Lake area, game officers found success by placing two cans of Rainier in the live trap.
     A less appealing but still interesting bear-related item turned up a couple weeks ago, when BBC ran a series of unsettling photos of two Chinese men who have benefitted from innovative new facial transplant surgery. Neither will win beauty contests, but the one whose old face was devoured by a bear must be particularly grateful to now have far fewer places to insert a drinking straw.
     This story flashed through my subconscious Monday when our ridiculous terrier flushed a modest-sized black bear out of the stumps along the old logging road where we walk. Two seconds later, the bear flashed across the spot I had just passed, Duncan in hot pursuit until breaking off the chase at my command. Talk about a cardiovascular workout: my heart was really pounding. Two days later, walking somewhere else, we encountered another, as an innocuous blackberry bush suddenly erupted into violent motion as we strolled by.
     As every South Pacific County resident can well testify, bear-human interactions are up considerably. At least here, this is probably a function of so much residential development in recent years leaving inadequate wild space for the bears to do their thing. Dad’s solution probably would have been to pack around his .45 service automatic, with which he once stopped a charging brown bear while serving as a young captain on loan to the Canadians in the Arctic. For my part, I may invest in some pepper spray. Live and let live.
     Though I’ve heard of no serious local confrontations, even little black bears are nothing to be complacent about. In another sign that our species are rubbing each other the wrong way, it’s been reported that 15 North Americans have been killed by blackies since 2000. This stands to reason, as the U.S. human population continues to balloon at the same time bears are recovering from the unsustainable hunting levels of the past. The U.S. Geological Survey estimates there are now more than 800,000 black bears on the continent, four times more than at their low point.
     Unlike grizzlies, which mostly attack defensively, a minute number of black bears have been recorded actively stalking and killing humans as prey animals — a quality that means “playing dead” after being attacked definitely is not a good idea. If ever a black bear acts aggressively in your presence, better to be as big and loud and obnoxious as only a human can be.
     All in all, considering all the bears we kill, maybe a little payback is deserved. At least the prospect of it enlivens my evening walks with the dogs.

A very special guy

     We each like to imagine we’ll face the end of life with courage and poise, all the time hoping to win mortality’s equivalent of the $1 million lottery — dying painlessly at age 95 with all life’s loose ends neatly tied up behind us and our family gathered around.
     Our true natures are best revealed when everything falls apart, not when we skate along happily atop the crest of a best-case scenario. I was inspired and moved last week after witnessing a nice old couple persevering in spite of the relentless storms of age and ill health.
     A carefully manicured retirement home in a wealthy part of Tacoma isn’t necessarily the kind of place you expect to encounter heroism. Lawn tennis pointers, maybe, but nothing so profound as a lesson in how to embrace the closing years of life with unassuming nobility.
     My wife Donna’s high-strung mother, Betty, was eldest of Tacoma’s three magnificent Magnuson sisters. A model, she married a World War II flier who turned out to be a better con man than husband or father. Much messiness ensued — alcohol-induced confusion and desperation masked in the empty trappings of mid-20th century suburbia. Donna found a lifesaving island of stability in the family of her mother’s younger sister, Aunt Doreen and Uncle Sandy.
     Doreen, who weighed only slightly more than a willow twig when I knew her and possessing all that hardy tree’s famous strength and resilience, succumbed a few years ago after a tough battle with auto-immune diseases. Sandy, a tire dealer and former chairman of the Western Washington Fair in Puyallup, eventually remarried Lynne, who had attended Whitman College with Doreen.
     All too soon, Sandy began to experience a brain disease that has slowly stolen his power of speech and pushed this proud, tall, humorous man into a wheelchair. His life is being whittled down to its naked core.
     To one extent or another, this is true of everyone. I recall reading and scoffing at a news story several years ago in which a doctor spoke of men with clear eyesight quite suddenly turning a corner in their late-40s or early-50s and experiencing a loss of visual acuity, like a switch being flicked off. Perhaps it’s my imagination, but after turning 50 a few weeks ago, this phenomenon isn’t seeming so farfetched. And my hearing, long impaired by firearms noise and rock concerts, is starting to resemble my deaf grandfather’s — sometimes if it wasn’t for the ringing, I wouldn’t have anything to listen to at all.
     How little we appreciate the vivid senses we are born with — the eyes that perceive colors at a nearly molecular level, the sense of smell that detects the aroma of Doreen’s Swedish sweet rolls from six blocks away on Christmas morning. Our experience of the world curls down within itself, making it all the more important that we build up a reservoir of sensational memories to draw upon in the dry years.
     At least in the brief time we spent with him, the good old Sandy was right there with us, responding with murmured words and cognizant glances as Donna lobbed him questions and gently kidded him about their past. He was not a man robbed of his mind, but a good mind peering out at us from a small window, an opening to which his disability granted him access for our visit.
     I imagine Sandy rambling through the rich memories of his lifetime with Doreen and Lynne, playing with his three children, breathing deeply the cold, pure air of Alaska where he often traveled. Dipping back into his crippled body from time to time just to see what’s going on, Sandy wanders farther and farther along a golden shore, waiting for the sun to set.
     “Well, he’s a very special guy,” Lynne responded when I thanked her for looking after Sandy so well. Most of us are better at beginnings than at endings, which are just as important. It was good seeing these people living and loving, their lives in no way darkened by the path ahead.

Strange histories, past and present

     Bears in the garbage, deer in flower beds — natural signs of spring on this coast, but how long will it be before somebody tries suing to bring these outrages to stop?
     I’m joking, of course, but it was widely reported last week that an exasperated beekeeper in Macedonia successfully sued a bear that persisted in raiding his hives. The court awarded $3,500, which the government has to pay since the bear is protected as endangered and presumably would have bought honey at the store if it had money of its own. (No word yet on what Boo Boo and Cindy Bear think of Yogi’s antics.)
     It’s a wonder the beekeeper himself wasn’t sued by his neighbors. To scare away the bear, he played obnoxious folk songs by Ceca, the widow of late Serb war crimes suspect Arkan, over a loudspeaker for weeks.
     Although the court’s decision was labeled “bizarre” in news stories, European records are full of similar cases, many recounted in Darren Oldridge’s “Strange Histories.”
     In 1457, a 5-year-old was “killed by a sow in the presence of her six piglets. These were stained with blood at the scene of the crime, but there was no ‘positive proof that they had assisted in mangling the deceased.’ After consulting with local experts, the judge ruled that the sow should be executed.” This sentence was carried out, by hanging, but the piglets were paroled.
     Besides pigs, there are cases involving horses and bulls that attacked people, along with mice, fish, caterpillars and weevils that damaged crops or otherwise harmed entire communities.
     In a famous instance from 1545, French villagers sued a plague of flies for destroying a vineyard. A noted lawyer was appointed to defend the flies and argued his clients were merely obeying God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply.” The townsfolk then acknowledged the flies’ right to live and set aside a piece of land for this purpose outside the vineyards. Oldridge comments he would have loved to learn how this worked out for everybody, but insects destroyed the later court papers.
     Admitting to liking science fiction has got to be one of the most guaranteed ways of killing conversations with pretty women at dinner parties, but as I’m off the market anyway, I can publicly mourn Arthur C. Clarke, who died last week at age 90.
     My hometown’s shrine-like Carnegie library was piled to the rafters with thick 19th century novels written about the same time it was built. For newer books we relied on a slowly rotating assortment of cheap paperbacks in our three drugstores and two grocery stores — an assortment of Travis McGee mysteries, Alistair MacLean spy thrillers and a free-floating mishmash of other popular fiction. Dad and I favored these drugstore books.
     With clarity I recall making an eccentric selection in 1969, a strangely lit spaceman on its cover, which also touted a forthcoming movie, Clarke’s “2001: A Space Odyssey.”
     His death brings an end to a kind of childhood, a hopeful time when he foresaw mankind’s heroic and inevitable migration across the galaxy. It sometimes seems now that Clarke’s version of our destiny has been stillborn, a victim of earth-bound politics and space shuttle deaths that shocked us into rude awareness of the deadly risks of space exploration.
     Science fiction has long since fallen off my reading list, replaced by my bedside by heavy tomes on European archaeology and genetics. (Our Celtic ancestors were avid headhunters: Who knew?) But I strongly believe that Clarke and his generation of post-World War II sci-fi writers — Clifford Simak, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and Ray Bradbury, to name a few — will be honored generations for now for their hopeful vision of our species and our potential to transcend the bonds of space and time.
     Whether we actually will succeed in traveling beyond our solar system is somewhat questionable, considering the positively horrifying distances involved. Clarke wasn’t prepared to take no for an answer, envisioning vast fleets of humanity making generations-long voyages from star to star. We are a mere baby of a species and no one knows what we can achieve.
     Thanks to Arthur Clarke, we can imagine a glorious future.

Lugh of the Irish

     Every modern nation ought to maintain control over its borders and who enters. It’s ridiculous that we haven’t done so.
     But it also strikes me as odd when otherwise moderate people express virulent anger specifically toward undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Central America. I challenge anyone to identify a harder-working, more family-oriented ethnic group.
     Getting all lathered up about economic refugees who come here seeking jobs is extremely ironic. There’s hardly one of us whose ancestors didn’t come here in similar straits and who didn’t face hateful prejudice because of it.
     The Irish are the classic example of this, having been regarded as inferior cattle when they began arriving in numbers following the Potato Famine of the 1840s. Now, most every American proudly claims at least a little symbolic Irish ancestry, especially in this month of St. Patrick’s Day. In the 19th century, they were seen as illiterate, criminal brutes who lowered everyone’s wages by stealing the jobs of “real” white people.
     He claimed to be born in England, but I’m virtually certain one of my great-great-grandfathers was Irish. He managed to pass himself off as English because his family had moved to London a few years before he came to the U.S. in 1849, probably in response to the California Gold Rush. For all intents and purposes, our borders were open then and there was no such thing as an illegal immigrant. Citizenship still didn’t come easy if you weren’t rich: It wasn’t until he survived fighting in the Civil War that he was formally made a member of our happy little club in 1865.
     When it comes to Mexicans, it particularly bears recalling that we essentially stole half of their country, including California, after our trumped-up Mexican-American War and our annexation in 1845 of Texas, which Mexico regarded as a rebel territory much like we did the successionist Old South.
     What’s done is done, and I’m often happy to have California as part of our nation. (Mexico can have Texas back, however.) We should at least curb any tendency to feel high and mighty when it comes to normalizing the legal status of Mexican people who are already here in “our” land.
     A hundred years from now, if not much sooner, a little Mexican blood in Gringo veins will be as commonplace and fully as much a source of pride as having a touch of the Irish.
     Speaking of St. Patrick’s Day, I didn’t know until recently that Patrick wasn’t born Irish. Starting his life as Patricius, Patrick was born in Carlisle in a well-to-do Romano-Briton family in what is now northwestern England. He was carried off to Northern Ireland by pirates as a slave at age 15 — an illegal immigrant?
     After escaping to Gaul in what is now France, Patrick trained as a priest and returned to Ireland with a determination to continue the conversion of his captors. (Christianization of the Irish actually began years before St. Patrick’s mission. And it was more than 200 years after his death before he became the primary focus of Irish Catholic devotion.)
     Possibly foremost of the legends about him is that he drove the snakes from Ireland. Though less inspirational, this absence perhaps has more to do with the island being cut off from the European mainland by rising sea levels after the end of the ice age, before moderating air temperatures encouraged the northward migration of reptiles.
     St. Patrick also is remembered for suggesting the shamrock as the model for the Trinity, from whence it became Ireland’s emblem. In her “Superstitions of Ireland,” Jane Francesca Wilde wrote, “The fortunate possessor of the four-leafed shamrock will have luck in gambling, luck in racing, and witchcraft will have no power over him. But he must always carry it about his person, and never give it away, or even show it to another.” I like this poetic English form: “The first leaflet is for fame, the second for wealth, the third a faithful lover, and the fourth, glorious health.”
     I can’t leave the subject of the Irish without mentioning leprechauns. According to the Ireland Now Web site, “These two-foot tall, unfriendly, gruff men (there are no female leprechauns) prefer to pass their time making shoes for other fairies.” They carry two leather pouches and if you ever have a chance, be sure to select the one containing a single silver shilling, which will always magically replenish itself after being spent. The other pouch has a gold coin that turns to ashes once the leprechaun is freed.
     It’s also good to know that leprechauns are probably a Christian invention, substituting harmless fairies for the powerful Celtic god Lugh Lámhfhada, or Lugh Long Hand — nicknamed in honor of his archery prowess that killed enemies as if he reached out and downed them with his hand.
     His name is pronounced “Luck.” He is the original luck of the Irish.

This game was the one

     Let’s face it: the only thing duller than the Super Bowl is the State of the Union speech, and the Super Bowl only wins this yawn-off because of its clever ads. Never have so few been paid so much for standing around spitting on the grass. The average grade school Christmas program is marginally shorter and offers infinitely more drama and real emotion.
     So how was it that I found myself — sober as the pope before his driving test — watching and even occasionally enjoying this year’s game, which was stuck at a score of 7-3 for so long I toyed with calling 911 to have a defibrillator delivered?
     For one thing (and yes, I’m embarrassed to admit this), I broke down and bought a flat-screen TV for Christmas and wondered what the ridiculous rectangular circus would look like in high definition. (Turns out the thrill of being able to read the manufacturer labels on players’ uniforms soon lost its novelty.)
     For another, I harbor a nostalgic affection for the New York Giants dating back to my 20s when I regarded Dan Jenkins’ raunchy ode to professional football, “Semi-Tough,” as a font of wisdom on par with the Tao Te Ching. The story of the Giants’ star quarterback and running back who both lust after the same college sweetheart, my paperback copy still falls open to their juvenile rating system for women that frankly set me up for a long bachelorhood — not that I didn’t have a certain amount of fun along the way in pursuit of a “One.”
     Examples: “A One was well-read and smart and witty but not as well-read and smart and witty as some guys she hung around with.” “A One never got mad at anything a man might accidentally do, no matter how thoughtless or careless it might be.” “A One had to be extremely gorgeous in all ways from the minute she woke up in the morning until she fixed a man his cold meatloaf sandwich after love practice at four A.M.”
     Gee, hard to figure why I stayed single so long, ain’t it?
     If, as somebody observed, war is months of soul-crushing boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror, the Super Bowl is only made watchable by the fleeting possibility of a play like that which put the Giants in the lead with a last-minute touchdown pass from Eli Manning to Plaxico Burress. I won’t bore you with the details — if you really care you were watching it live anyway — but it was a magically improbable Rube-Goldberg sort of play, the football equivalent of a bluebird accidentally singing the theme to “Star Trek.”
     My dad would have loved it, if for no other reason than it made his boys laugh. It’s safe to say my parents and grandparents were not fans of the game. Even when Grandma and Grandpa got lucky and atmospheric conditions were just so, they could only get two TV stations at their little farm. So they now and then were forced to watch football for a few minutes before shaking their heads and going off to irrigate the hay pasture, chop kindling or any of their other approximately 8,000 daily chores.
     Attempts to explain the subtleties of downs, extra points, pass interference and punts might as well have been delivered in ancient Hebrew for all the good our polite tutorials did. (Though, come to think of it, maybe Grandpa and Grandma were just playing dumb to make we grandsons think we knew more than they did about something — even if it was something as artificial as the Astro-turf on which it was played.)
     Even silly activities can end up having meaning. In a convoluted way, I owe my life to football. It was as a college sports photographer that I first became a quasi-paid journalist. Those were great days down on the field in the autumn sun. The excitement and fun were real.
     The Giants’ win, unscripted and messy, was a reminder of what I once loved about the game. Was it enough to get me back into the habit of watching pro football? Not a chance. But it was one of those rare occasions when I came away from a Super Bowl with the feeling I had been entertained, if only for a few seconds.

Flavorful lives

     Whether it’s talking the pretty girl from chemistry class into going out on a date or describing to your cousins the best pond to hunt ducks, our sophisticated ability to communicate is key to being human. Like it or not, it’s no accident that we insensitively refer to people locked in comas as vegetables. Language defines humanity.
     Science tells us that our most distant hominid ancestors roamed East Africa 2.4 million years ago. The oldest-known anatomically modern humans lived about 1,600 centuries ago. But only in the past 100 centuries have we fully developed the complex speaking skills that gave rise to recognizable human society. History — the practice of systematically recording and learning from the past — is even more recent: 25 or 30 centuries.
     For something like 7,500 generations, we were hunter-gatherers, knowing no more than 200 or 300 people during a lifetime. (It has been estimated that fewer than 5,500 of us lived in the entire British Isles a good 40 centuries after the last gasp of the ice age.) Until very recently, neighboring villagers exchanged gossip across the hedgerow, but news from even 25 miles away might not filter out until the next annual harvest festival.
     It’s easy to forget that today’s cheap, instant worldwide news and communications would have been punished as vile witchcraft when Ben Franklin was a boy.
     In the same way that technology has radically expanded food availability and waistlines, it’s tempting to wonder if we haven’t become information gluttons, endlessly overstuffing our minds with empty or even destructive facts. It’s heresy for somebody in the news business to suggest this, but there is a lot we do not need to know.
     For example, it’s infuriating how most national news media handle mass murders like those recently committed at Northern Illinois University. By immediately clamoring to plumb the secret motivations and life stories of the monsters who commit such acts, the emitters of toxic news confer a warped immortality on those who wantonly kill the innocent.
     I don’t want to know the names of these obscene criminals. I don’t care about their motivations. I don’t care about how they were mistreated as kids. I don’t want to know anything about them except that they are dead. When confronted with such evil-doers, our ancestors buried them face down in the crossroads, a fat wooden stake driven straight through so they couldn’t claw their way back into the light of day. Their names were never spoken again. This all strikes me as not entirely unreasonable.
     Aside from polluting our lives with burdensome knowledge of distant mayhem, national news media steadily erode our “sense of place,” a phrase I borrow from architecture. Commenting on oddly inappropriate Spokane strip malls designed to look like Swiss chalets and Medieval fortresses, Washington State University Professor David Wang asks “What is ‘sense of place,’ or it’s near cousin, ‘sense of community?’ Whatever these mysterious substances are ... you’ll find that past cultures did not fret about these matters. One reason is because they HAD sense of place. It never occurred to them to go looking for it.”
     The same is true of good newspapers, some local radio stations and a few rare TV news operations — without making a big to-do about it, they capture the essence of their own communities. People hunger for such legitimate content but so seldom find it that they aren’t sure what it is they’re missing. Metropolitan newspapers throughout the nation are dying because readers instinctively know they are being sold empty, generic, formulaic garbage with no sense of place.
     It will seem immodest of me to say so, but we at the Daily Astorian and the Chinook Observer are avidly interested in our own villages and their interplay with the outside world. This is analogous to the local foods movement, the grassroots initiative to seek out and support nearby farmers, fishermen and ranchers. In the case of our newspapers, we know that a keen focus on this endlessly fascinating coast strengthens the connections between good neighbors. We all prosper together.
     In an age defined by abrasive distractions, it takes self-discipline to turn away from the poison that seeps out of the media corporations that profit from tragedy. The good news is that we all have the power to select fruitful and flavorful lives, firmly rooted here in this enthralling place.

Treasure ships

     Professional treasure-hunter is one of those dream jobs most of us bury on a deserted, palm-shaded beach at the back of imagination sometime in our early teens.
     But who doesn’t still occasionally fantasize about stumbling upon an ancient, iron-bound chest poking up through the sand, drooling gold doubloons from a broken corner? The enduring popularity of Indiana Jones and the corny “National Treasure” movies testifies to our potent interest in the adventurous discovery of ancient riches.
     Like winning the lottery, it happens often enough to dangle a thin thread of reality even to those of us whose most dangerous exploit is paying winter utility bills. Who didn’t snap to attention last year when Odyssey Marine Exploration brought up 17 tons of silver coins and gold artifacts from a mysterious 18th century shipwreck 200 miles west of Gibraltar?
     Treasure also generates a wealth of blarney (or another “b” word the boss won’t let me use in a family newspaper). One participant in an online discussion board for wanna-be tomb raiders claims “over 600 ships lost centered at mouth of Columbia River, estimated $600 million total in area, many near Sand Island.”
     Golly, where are my chest-waders? I’m going to walk over at low tide and start digging.
     The same person says, without source, that the Vazlav Vorovsky, a Russian freighter that wrecked in 15 fathoms on Peacock Spit just below Cape Disappointment in 1941, carried $1.5 million in gold and silver coins. This was a favorite ship for the Long Beach Peninsula’s “seagulls,” as its beachcombers are known, but not because shiny Stalinist rubles were washing ashore. Far more prosaically, the Vazlav ruptured and released thousands of pounds of boxed lard — used to fry countless clams in the ration years of World War II.
     Someone else chimes in with a tip that there is “a ledge of gold dust along [the] Naselle River ... [look for] black sand and you might find some fine flour gold.” Maybe this is how oystermen afford Hawaii vacations?
     In fact, counting fishing boats, there have been something like 2,000 shipwrecks in the vicinity of the Columbia’s mouth in the past three centuries. Hundreds more were lost along the rest of the Oregon and Washington coast, particularly around Cape Flattery and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Among these were a number rumored to carry significant amounts of unrecovered gold. But look case by case, and ships reputed to contain safes full of coins had manifests only listing dull cargoes of newsprint and lumber.
     And yet some of the rumors are pretty intriguing. A man who recently moved away from the Nehalem-Manzanita area writes on the treasure.net forum that “My brother and I came across an old gentleman a few years ago that had a first hand story of a Spanish ship buried in the sand in that area. The ship was uncovered during a storm in apx 1908. The only thing is, the coastline has changed a lot and the ship is now nowhere near the water, but about 1/3 mile (or more) inland. ... The guy that found the ship and his son tried to dig into the ship. As the son descended down into it the sand caved in and he was killed. The old man never went back, but did mark the spot, using the witness tree and measurements.”
     So far, the only really tangible signs of one or more nearby Spanish wrecks are hunks of beeswax with markings that may or may not be from the early 17th century. Still, perhaps I’ll put a metal detector on my Christmas gift list.
     Another type of treasure altogether — a poignant historical mystery — is represented by a different kind of North Pacific shipwreck. There are numerous riveting stories of shipwrecked Japanese, Chinese and Spanish sailors living out their days among the Indians of this region.
     The former have been called “Japan’s accidental ambassadors.” They were fishermen caught up in the same trans-Pacific current that still brings Japanese shampoo bottles and net floats to local shores. There were enough of them to warrant their own descriptive word, hyôryûsha, or sea drifters.
     A Chinook legend told to Smithsonian ethnographer Franz Boas tells of a beached ship from which emerged a man who “looked just like a bear, but his face was that of a human being.” The Chinook kept the two survivors as pets, and traded the ship’s metal parts to other tribes for slaves.
     In a “Narrative of a Voyage to the Northwest Coast of America,” Gabriele Franchere says that in 1811 he met an old man of about 80 who said that his father was one of four Spaniards wrecked on Clatsop Beach many years before.
     Unlike the tall tales of lost treasure, these stories are more easily verified. The genes of shipwrecked sailors may someday be dredged up from the DNA of the living descendants of the Chinook. Such knowledge really would be a treasure.

Uncle Vic’s ways

     My godfather and his brother, Frank and Victor Rauzi, were from the parish of Santo Stefano in the extravagantly picturesque village of Cloz in the Non Valley of the Italian Alps. Their father was Stefan, my middle name.
     Uncle Vic, who used to spin me through the air like his own and make me laugh with bold old songs from Spain, died so long ago that I have only hints of memories of him. In the mixed-up way of small children, his death mingles in my mind with Kennedy’s assassination. Both events engraved a deep and jagged emotional signature, of crying parents and a sort of wild conflagration in our daily routine.
     Struck down alone in a hotel room Back East at about the age I am now, Vic was some unidentified species of diplomat in the deliberately obscure manner of the capital in those days when Ian Fleming was creating James Bond. Dad, a former denizen of the Pentagon, flew out to bring Vic’s body home to the West.
     Aside from a special spaghetti recipe that still makes my toes wiggle in pleasure, I especially recall Vic in this season because of an obscure Cloz tradition that is regrettably impossible to envision taking root in 21st century America.
     Paring down to essentials, the people of Cloz combed through their possessions in December. They piled in the road everything they hadn’t used or cherished in the past year. Neighbors took whatever they wished. Anything unclaimed was set alight to welcome the new year.
     To be sure, circumstances here are much different than in the Tyrolean Alps. Cloz has only a few dozen dwellings, built tall to conserve land and rise above the snow. Into each were gathered multiple generations of the village’s 28 families. Nowadays, new homes in Italy tend to be tiny — under 1,000 square feet — while 2,500 is considered embarrassingly cramped in America. They simply don’t have space to accumulate excess stuff in the forlorn hope they may someday need an LP of ABBA’s greatest hits or fit back into a size 4 dress.
     As observed earlier this month by Professor Jared Diamond, the time rapidly approaches when we must measure success not by how many things we squeeze into our closets but by how much life we pack into our lives.
     “Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts,” Diamond writes in the LA Times.
     I’m bad as anyone, having been known to drive the block between my office and post office — hey, it was raining sideways! And don’t even think of looking in my garage. But I resolve to do better.
     My daughter Elizabeth and I did drive during the holiday break, as we haven’t found a way to sled on beach sand. We didn’t have to go far, with a thick and slippery carpet of crusted powder blanketing the hills surrounding David Douglas Park east of Seaside. (Less enjoyable but no less thrilling was traveling Oregon Highway 26, which some idiots were treating like a bobsled race — one unfortunately lacking sides to keep their cars on course.)
     Pulling off to the side, we trudged up into the cold clouds. Sliding along logging roads made wondrous by mantles of unblemished white, our delight enveloped us, tangible but fleeting as frozen breath in the frigid air. Tossing up a bow wave of icy particles that turned my bushy eyebrows into caterpillar-sized flocked Christmas trees, I shushed from adulthood into the idealized past.
     Elizabeth, always playfully competitive and invariably faster than her old man, for once lost the race. This was no tribute to my superior sledding skills but to my sugar addiction, which gives me a mighty weight advantage — once I work up some momentum, I’m hard to stop.
     I like to think Uncle Vic would have joined us with tremendous zest and brio, probably imparting ancient sledding techniques from the Tyrol.
     As it was, maybe his spirit was represented by our big, gangly puppy Duncan, who joyously danced in the strange substance. By the time we turned for home, chilled and thirsty for hot chocolate, we were filled with gratitude for living in these little villages by the sea, snug beside the snowy hills.