Editor's Notebook: 2010
Antipode dreamin’
When our weeping winter skies and saturated soil seem set to send you stark-staring mad, comfort yourself with the thought that we could instead be straining against the perpetual gale in what deserves to be our spiritual sister city: Port-aux-Français in the French Southern and Antarctic Lands.Ask most people to identify where they would be if unexpectedly transported to far side of the earth and they will likely say China or maybe Australia. But in fact, if you poke a really long pencil straight down through the center of the planet from our home on Washington’s outer coast, it comes out in “no man’s water” between the Indian and Great Southern oceans. (An easy-to-use program at antipodr.com allows you to find the polar opposite of any point on earth.)
The nearest landfall is a 250-mile-long paddle to the west, Ile de l’Est in the Crozet Islands, while 500 miles to the southeast is the transcendent Kerguelen archipelago, described in one article as “desolate and quite useless” and discovered by a Breton-French navigator of the same name in 1772. It’s a substantial place — 2,800 square miles — larger than Clatsop and Pacific counties put together. Its sole settlement, Port-aux-Français, hosts a summer population of about 120 scientists and technicians, who study local wildlife and track satellites.
It sounds like home: “The climate is raw and chilly with frequent high winds, but not severely cold throughout the year …”
Although Port Alfred, population 60 in the Crozets, will be a little closer when our giant earth-boring machine pops up through the seafloor, the Kerguelens look like a place where armies of faeries may still be skirmishing in secret among the blue glaciers, forsaken 6,000-foot peaks and whaler-planted cabbage patches. Thirty years ago I would have felt hope-bound to set foot there in person; now my mind’s footprints will have to do.
There’s even a tavern where we can order a glass of Bordeaux, though doing so will mean having to speak French. A lot of we Americans seem to imagine our teeth will explode in protest if we utter a word in a foreign language, so this may quash any local re-settlement plans for the Kerguelens.
We’re not entirely alone in this crotchety prejudice. Dr. Stuart Lee, whose engaging Oxford University lectures on Old English are available online, says partly in jest that we should “get back to plain talking, to ditch all these stupid words the French gave us.”
It will come as a surprise to many to learn that we already speak a lot of French. The Norman overlords who took over England starting in 1066 were descended from Viking thugs who had earlier settled in northern France and gradually adopted the local language. (Norman is short for North-men or Norsemen.) In the following two or three centuries, many French words wiggled into our language. It had been entirely dominated by Anglo-Saxon dialects, now known as Old English, brought over by Britain’s previous set of invaders.
Studying Old English is helped by its distant cousin still being a living language in parts of the Netherlands and Germany bordering the North Sea — the area called Friesland. Frisian and English can look surprisingly alike: Ik tink dat it hijr better foar him is = I think that it is better for him here. To this day, Dutch and English are considered similar enough to make them relatively easy for speakers of one to learn the other.
A playful thought-exercise written last year by David Cowley imagines “How We’d Talk If the English had Won in 1066.” Cowley imagines our speech would be sharper and fresher without the fluffiness and frills of French and Latin loan words. I really like how modern headlines, signs and phrases might sound in “new” Old English:
• I underget what’s going on
• Leaders said to be sorrowless over cuts
• Welcome to a laughterful evening of glee
• Wild weather brought seaupward onto the shore
• An unstill mind in a mood of wishedness
• Lustfulness for gold fed by these old-overseaish tales
• He’s into idlebliss
For we who work with words, all this is like unearthing a lost goldhoard, or sighting a savage new horizon after clawing our way clear through the fiery heart of the world.
The solace of nuclear decay
The solace of nuclear decay soothes me in the night. A near-endless swarm of photons buzzes up through the darkness and gently sweeps across the light-famished rods of my retinas. Like luminous blindfish surging through black waters in an infinite secret cavern, they leave me dizzy and amazed, reassured that blessed dawn will come again.Neither dreaming nor drunk, my nightlights are the aftermath of exploding thorium atoms cannon-balling Alpha particles into a zinc-sulfide target. These particles knock loose individual scintillations of light inside my spinthariscope. Looking like a chopped-off soda can with an eyepiece on one end, it will still be emitting an innocent ghostly glow from across the darkened room 60 years from now — a peephole into mystery. I whimsically imagine that if I looked long enough, my reward would be a fleeting glimpse of one of my father’s always-amused brown eyes winking back at me.
Developed in 1903 by English scientist and spiritualist Sir William Crookes and pronounced “spin-thair-i-scope,” this $35 novelty instrument was a Christmas present from my wife. It came from United Nuclear — a toy chest for physics geeks where you can also find personal isotopes and meteorites.
Crookes may have spent a bit too much time submerged in the forsaken depths between atoms. He was nearly drummed out of the Royal Society for claiming to witness levitation, appearance of luminous objects, manifestation of phantom figures, inexplicable writing without human involvement, and circumstances which “point to the agency of an outside intelligence.”
Some still find it terrifying to consider that natural processes constantly hum and rumble behind the surface of reality, operating on scales both too small and great for human comprehension. These were, I suspect, the kind of kids who didn’t enjoy spinning round and round till falling down in a giggle. It seems me, though, that we are precisely situated to enjoy the spectacle of exploding nuclei at the small end of the size scale and colliding galaxies at the other extreme. Bearing honest witness to the splendors and terrors of the raging universe is a commandment for the modern age.
The undeniability of constant, remorseless change is actively offensive to some who are affronted by the very notion that our small expectations mean nothing to the world or the cosmos. I sympathize. A human lifetime is long enough to inspire illusions of being able to see the vague outlines of providence. Actual deeper truths are far less obliging. Our comfortable little planet is being transformed every moment, like it or not. Complacency is not protection.
This is neatly illustrated by “Europe’s Lost World: The Rediscovery of Doggerland,” a 2009 report published by the Council for British Archaeology. Inhabited by the ancestors of Northwest Europeans, this fertile homeland stretched between the continent and what are now the islands of Britain. Never heard of it? No wonder — its 100,000 square miles were drowned beneath the waves as sea levels rose during a previous time of rapid global warming more than 80 centuries ago.
“The heartland of [ancient] north-west Europe would have been constantly shrinking and this would have been obvious to the inhabitants,” report authors surmise. “Sometimes slow then terrifyingly fast, the sea inevitably reclaimed ancestral hunting grounds, campsites and landmarks…[residents] would have regarded water in a unique manner, as a place where the ancestors dwelt and thus an area of special importance. At periods of low tide, these ancestral homelands could have been revisited and venerated.” These vanished sacred sites many have inspired the ages-long tradition of sacrificing precious objects and even living people within marshy waters from Denmark to Ireland.
Toward the end of this great flood, a Scotland-sized underwater landslide produced the measureless Storrega tsunami, scouring away the last traces of the vanquished land. This ultimate wave even swallowed many of those along neighboring shores whose folklore might have otherwise preserved some faint recollection of the submerged Eden where once we roamed. Perhaps more enduring legends will spring from our own time’s struggles with a hungry and growing ocean.
Like the sparkling atomic fireflies that keep me company in the night, we people will dance and shine longer than anyone can imagine, effervescent as individuals but surprisingly strong together.
Aunt Lillian
Among the nation’s foremost art collectors, my Grandaunt Lillian was one smart Montana girl. I knew she’d enjoy “A River Runs Through It,” Norman Maclean’s perfect novella about fly-fishing and family. Back when I sent it to Lillian, I wondered if it would resonate because of our family’s legacy of loss and endurance under the Big Sky.“Now nearly all those I loved and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them,” is one of Maclean’s closing sentences. It summarizes his motives and mine.
In important ways, we know least those we knew as children. I’m still finding myself surprised by my sweet Grandpa Bell’s little sister Lillian. She adored him and visited most summers. He went to work in the coal mines in 1907 at age 14 to help support our family when she was only 2, and then helped her through the University of Montana, from where she graduated in 1929.
Immigrants from a northern English county where the residents are called Geordies, many generations of coal dust are entwined in the Bell DNA. If she had been born a century earlier, Aunt Lillian would have been an illiterate peasant wed to a short-lived ‘pitman.” As it was, she and Uncle Jim Clark made a fortune on interests as diverse as El Paso Natural Gas and Keebler cookies.
An abstract passion
News a couple weeks ago about a 1960 Alberto Giacometti sculpture selling at Sotheby’s for a flabbergasting £65 million ($104.3 million) piqued my curiosity about Lillian’s passion for modern art. I knew from her 1998 obituary in the Dallas Morning News that she and Jim gave 96 artworks to the Dallas Museum of Art. Art Knowledge News reports “the museum remains almost entirely indebted to them for its strong holdings in early 20th-century abstract art.”
Jim and Lillian’s sense of wonder about modern art was a source of considerable puzzlement to her two coal-mining brothers. Grandpa and Uncle George were men of manifold and wondrous parts, but art sophisticates wasn’t something I ever heard them called.
Lillian first lured Jim into an art gallery in 1958. They collected predominantly Western art for several years thereafter. My mother, for one, was appalled when they later sold off their Remingtons and Russells, and made the switch first to impressionists and then to abstracts.
Who knows why anyone collects what they do? I must admit to having wondered if Jim and Lillian’s interest in abstracts was an affectation of the very rich — one of those things likable because only you can afford it. I’ve changed my mind. I think they were attracted to the most complex art because they themselves were complex.
Jim and Lillian’s taste ran to Piet Mondrian. They assembled a world-famous collection, the largest in private hands. Eventually, they gave three to the Dallas museum, including “Place de la Concord,” pictured here, and “The Winkel Mill, Pointillist Version.”
An interviewer asked Aunt Lillian about this obsession, noting “it was quite a jump from impressionism, with all of its lush beauty and brushwork and accessibility, to Mondrian, which is a very refined taste and, for many people, an artist who is quite severe and difficult to understand.”
Lillian admitted her own preferences ran more toward landscapes, but said that Jim “read constantly, educating himself. He spent every holiday, every day in museums or galleries … Jim’s theory was that you never understood an artist unless you looked at him in depth, and that’s why he concentrated on so many Mondrians and as many [Fernand] Légers as he did.”
Ultimately, Jim bought what he did because it satisfied his active mind … and because he could. Far be it from me to second-guess his quest for meaning.
Saving the day
In the most vulgar monetary terms, their taste was brilliant. Consider this lead paragraph from a recent story in the New York Times: “The art market is suddenly soaring to dizzying heights unmatched in the giddiest moments of the pre-recession days.”
According to a report from 2008, “a good Mondrian in top condition commands an awesome price. There are whispers of two selling for between $20 million and $25 million in recent years.”
In addition to also collecting Léger, they favored Mark Tobey (of Seattle) and Josef Albers.
However, Jim and Lillian probably will be best remembered for their gift of Constantin Brâncusi’s “Beginning of the World,” a head-sized marble egg that once sat in their dining room. A year ago, another of Brâncusi’s sculptures from the Yves Saint Laurent collection set the previous auction record, a paltry $37.7 million.
As remembered by a curator, my aunt and uncle’s Brâncusi, “the pearl of their collection,” saved the day and inspired the city to pass a bond for a new museum building downtown.
When the first bond effort failed in 1977, “Everybody was so dispirited that Jim Clark took his most valuable object, which is this head, put it in a Pan-Am flight bag wrapped up in a blanket, took it down to the museum, unwrapped it and put it on the desk of the museum director as a gift to the city and the demoralized staff at the museum.” Soon after, the tide turned and a grateful Dallas approved the bond for its new civic centerpiece.
Confined to a wheelchair much later, “Looking up at me with a sad yet impish expression, Lillian asked, ‘Can I hold it [the egg] in my lap,’” another curator recalled.
Lasting gifts
As a younger woman, Aunt Lillian could be slightly exhausting to be around — she had a showman’s knack for talking her audiences into a mesmerized bewilderment — but I owe her a profound personal debt.
Drats, no, she didn’t give me any art or money whatsoever. But she inspired me to travel. Among other amazing trips, she slogged her way around Machu Picchu back when it was still a genuine adventure. I toasted her memory there on my own expeditions in Peru decades later. (She also gave me early family photos that I cherish and an ancient leather-bound whisky flask that sits empty by my desk, inspirationally.)
Together, Lillian and Jim enliven the imaginations of countless other young people, who drink up their artistic vision in Dallas. In her bedroom, she kept a photo of a child on a school field trip gazing up at one of the Mondrians. “He is so intensely looking at that painting that you just know he’s got it,” Lillian’s son Jimmy observed. That sudden spark is the magic of art. It is a gift beyond any price.
In some ways, Aunt Lillian always remained the girl who grew up in her mother Elizabeth’s boarding house in Roundup, Mont. She famously advised my mom to rinse out, dry and re-use paper towels and noted that the cheapest hamburger makes the tastiest tacos. We still follow these smart suggestions.
It takes a prairie of inner strength to overcome your mom committing suicide with rat poison when you were 19. Aunt Lillian managed, though she might be unhappy at me for stirring up this sorrow, which still has the power to sting. She believed in looking forward. Sad yet impish, her generous and active spirit enriched our lives.
Saving America
The end of the world must be nigh. Sarah Palin and I finally agree on something: “Family Guy” is vile.Truth be told, it’s my suspicion that if we sat down for a quiet talk, perhaps over moose steaks and glacier-cold Miller beer, we’d find all kinds of far more important things in common. Palin reminds me very much of several beloved women friends from the Mountain West, including a member or two of Congress. Their reflexive wacked-out Republicanism is hard-wired into their personas in ways that I find endearing. I probably wouldn’t vote for them, but would gladly give them one of my kidneys, and vice-versa.
Americans should be able to belong to different political parties (or none, like me), and still find multiple ways to work together on common goals. If we’re able to laugh over plates of fried chicken, we ought to be capable of negotiating policies that make sure there are bountiful drumsticks and jobs for everybody. At the end of the day, whether someone is Democrat or Republican shouldn’t make much more difference than whether you prefer white meat or dark.
Palin is not stupid — not qualified to be president, but not stupid. I don’t question the sincerity of her core beliefs, but it’s also quite clear that Palin’s vacuous attacks on President Obama and congressional Democrats are strategic gambits designed to drive a wedge between citizens for her own personal advantage. The same statement is true of congressional Republicans. Is every iota of Democratic legislation so utterly detestable as to warrant unanimous opposition every single time? This isn’t about serving the country. It’s about picking up seats in the next election.
Republicans don’t have a monopoly on using cynical ploys to discourage the other side. But right now during a time of profound national crisis, applying “Just say no” to every conceivable proposal is freakishly irresponsible. Democratic House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hasn’t covered herself in glory when it comes to bipartisanship, but that’s no excuse for opposition lawmakers acting like a mindless phalanx of outraged cattle. No matter our political affiliation, we are all stampeding off this economic cliff together.
At their core, most politicians have always regarded getting elected or re-elected as their primary job, followed by ceaseless accumulation of personal power. Serving the people’s interest is somewhere down the list. You’d just as well object to skunks having an unpleasant stink. If citizens are going to demand reform, we must start with ourselves.
Americans’ political fickleness and fecklessness have been notorious since our nation’s founding. Aside from being a day off for school kids and a few lucky adults, our recent Presidents Day was a good reality check for all those who consider Barack Obama to be such a bitter disappointment. The fact is that our secularly sainted presidents were often reviled during their own terms in office. Short-term popularity, or lack of it, means nothing.
It’s relatively well known that Lincoln was laughed at and held in open contempt by plenty of northern citizens during the Civil War. It was only the string of Union victories at Gettysburg, Vicksburg and Chattanooga in 1863 and Sherman’s capture of Atlanta in September 1864 that allowed him to win re-election.
Less known is how disliked George Washington often was, both in office and even during the Revolutionary War.
Writing home in 1796 near the end of Washington’s second term, an Englishman observed “During the war there were many, and not loyalists either, who were doing all in their power to remove him from that command whereby he so eminently distinguished himself. It is that spirit of dissatisfaction which forms a leading trait in the character of the Americans as a people, which produces this malevolence at present, just as it did formerly; and if their public affairs were regulated by a person sent from heaven, I firmly believe his acts, instead of meeting with universal approbation, would by many be considered as deceitful and flagitious.” (Even I had to look up “flagitious.” It means extremely wicked.)
Obama should take heart from this. He’s been far from perfect, but today’s Tea Partiers aren’t any different from those who hated Washington and Lincoln, heaping scorn on a president when we really need to begin steering a better course as a people. If he drags Osama bin Laden out of his cave, or better yet takes his photo as proof before sealing him up inside of it forever, Barack Obama’s birthday will be celebrated by the grandchildren of those who now despise him. (The same might have been true of George W. Bush, if he had flushed bin Laden out.)
We need to get this country back on a sound financial footing. Hard choices are needed. Ultimately, presidents and congressmen can’t do it for us.
The willow
Ugliness isn’t usually thought of as a survival mechanism, but it doesn’t take long in coastal clearcuts to notice that “leave trees” are some of the gnarliest, wartiest, hunchbacked, cankered and convoluted hemlocks, cedars and spruce in the forest. You can almost imagine saplings passing along a whispered suggestion to grow up crooked, or else face the fateful chainsaw. Those arrogant straight-grained Douglas firs rarely take the hint, and look where it gets them.My lithe 12-year-old just discovered a leftover hemlock with a sea serpent-like 4-foot diameter coil in its trunk. Elizabeth is colonizing this lofty natural platform and I’m anticipating a plea to pack a load of scrap lumber to the site. She already shinnies up some nailed toeholds in a quarter of a minute and surveys the Pacific and distant Olympics like an intrepid member of the Swiss Family Robinson keeping an eye out for buccaneers.
It would take a pack of rabid coyotes passing out religious pamphlets to get me to shinny up anything, so I loiter around daydreaming and ineffectually hollering at our dogs to quit rolling in eau de long-dead feral cat.
My thoughts drift to my brother Greg’s and our Bell cousins’ abandoned treehouse constructed at a dizzying height of maybe nine feet above the rocky creek that wandered through the bottom of our grandfather’s pasture. A willow whose thick, low branches provided shade and back-scratches for the Herefords, my cousins’ leafy fort in it probably never amounted to much but seemed as marvelous as a forbidden ancient ruin to me, the second-youngest of 10 grandsons. I imagined no end of fun that ended just before I was old enough to participate.
There was an alternate universe — or at least an alternate climate — within the branches of that old willow, which Grandpa planted decades earlier to keep the creek bank from eroding. On August afternoons so scalding that even the horseflies were panting, scrambling up to the battered treehouse meant instant transportation back to the cool moistness of June. Borrowing one of Grandma’s old fishing poles from the bunkhouse and digging up some worms in her garden was all I needed to spend an hour angling for the brook trout that occasionally poked their freckled noses out from under the willow’s tangled roots. Inevitably catching more roots than brookies, I’d soon give up and resort to dropping twigs into the languorous water, imagining them bobbing up the Yellowstone River, then down the Missouri and Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico and exotic ports beyond.
Still hanging around waiting for my daughter (living with two females provides endless opportunities to practice calm dawdling), my thoughts soon turned to one of my favorite boyish fantasies. This involves suddenly finding myself transported back in time and amazing medieval English ancestors with modern knowledge of medicine and technology. One way I would do this is by treating King Henry VIII’s hangovers with aspirin. Fat gold coins and endless popularity would surely flow my way.
The curative properties of willow have been known since at least the 5th century BC, but it took until 1828 for an Italian chemist to separate its pure active ingredient, salicin, from willow bark. Going a step further, in 1897 a German chemist combined salicin from a different plant with a type of alcohol to make acetylsalicylic acid, or aspirin. His employer? Bayer. I’ve heard it said that if aspirin were invented today, it would surely be an expensive prescription drug. But thanks to 19th century chemistry, a couple dollars will buy you month’s supply — yet another way in which our luck far outruns our awareness.
Like most everything else in the natural world, willows are woven into layer upon layer of ancient traditions. In England, they’re mostly regarded as unlucky and symbolic of unrequited or forsaken love. In olden days, their wood was rarely burned or brought indoors. Although it was seen as perfectly OK to cane children, a willow stick was not to be used because a kid beaten with willow would stop growing.
My favorite explanation for why willows are accursed appears in the Oxford Dictionary of English Folklore. It seems that as a little boy, Jesus was trying to play with the neighbor kids but they were turning their noses up because his dad was only a humble carpenter. To get even, Jesus built a rainbow and ran across it, but when the snobby mortal children tried to follow, they fell through and were injured or killed. Mary whipped the tar out of him for this trick with a willow cane, and Jesus damned the willow forever. I guess that alleviating pain and averting heart attacks must be the willow’s way of atoning.
The moral of the story for modern children, including my infinitely kind but sometimes feisty girl: Be nice to everyone, as you never know what superpowers they may possess.
Al Simpson
One of the odd parallels between being a politician and being a journalist is that our mistakes are glaring to large numbers of people, while our successes are usually almost unnoticed.You don’t have to comb through very many back issues to see that neither spelling nor typing are my natural strong suits, a fact that ever-helpful volunteer proof-readers are quite delighted to bring to my attention now and then. But I can’t remember the last time I was screamed at, which is more than most national political leaders can say these days. Having worked in both fields, I’ll take small-town newspapering any day.
Political mistakes are usually in the eye of the beholder, of course, and sometimes something that initially seems like a dumb (or smart) decision can turn out to be the opposite a few months or years down the road. On a grand scale, though, I think it is fairly possible to figure out that some national policies are sensible — others, not so much. There are politicians in both parties I might be tempted to scream at myself if I thought it would make any difference, because they seem willfully oblivious to the clear-cut hazards in our path.
Though I certainly don’t agree with any of them even half of the time, one of the real pleasures of being in my business is getting to know politicians. They are mostly smart, funny and somewhat public-spirited people: Everyone from Bob Dole, Dick Cheney and Dan Quayle to Dick Gephardt, Jessie Jackson and Al Gore, plus dozens more. The Al I have on my mind today, however, is Al Simpson.
Mention “Big Al” to anybody in his hometown of Cody, Wyo., and they’ll know whom you’re talking about. The second-ranking Republican in the U.S. Senate for a decade, he now is co-chairman of President Obama’s bipartisan commission for reducing the stampeding federal debt.
Although Simpson can take the cantankerous mountain man act a bit too far — as he did while defending Clarence Thomas against sexual harassment allegations during U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings — he is a genuinely kind-hearted, gracious and intelligent man. My dad fondly remembered Al and Ann falling in love when they were all in school together.
Now, the people attacking him are more likely to belong to his own party, where there is an absolutely rigid line against cooperating any way with the president, even on a subject so clearly crucial to our future as reining in the deficit.
Simpson practiced politics in a time when Republicans and Democrats maintained friendly fraternal bonds — dining and playing cards together, cosponsoring laws and generally finding mutually agreeable ways to get to the end goal of a healthy nation. Nowadays, he told U.S. News and World Report, the changes on Capitol Hill are “dramatic.” There’s an attitude of “If Obama’s for it, then we’re agin’ it.”
In the interest of passing on a viable country to our grandchildren, Simpson refuses to take anything off the bargaining table, including finding new sources of revenue. Because of this, the New York Times reports that Simpson was denounced as a stalking horse for new taxes by conservative bloggers, Rush Limbaugh (“Rush Babe” to Simpson, and not affectionately) and anti-tax activist Grover Norquist, a longtime nemesis.
Between war costs and rapidly expanding entitlement expenses — Social Security, Medicare and now national health-care reform — we’re on a path that just isn’t feasible. And as Simpson notes, we’re out of easy answers. Reforming earmarks, cutting foreign aid, and going after waste, fraud, and abuse total less than 2 percent of the federal budget, he says, amounting to no more than a “sparrow fart.”
Simpson has always been wonderfully quotable, and U.S. News shows him at his best:
• “Hatred corrodes the container it’s carried in,” commiserating about Capitol Hill’s poisonous atmosphere.
• “It’s the extremists on both sides that are causing America’s great pain, because most Americans are centrists. That’s why most people are going independent. They can’t stand either party because it’s just babble.”
• He recalls his mother’s advice: “If you’re damned if you do, and damned if you don’t, then do. … I live by those words.”
So should we all. Go for it, Big Al.
Learning to live with risk
The past few weeks have offered both solace and discomfort about the two main flavors of natural apocalypse that are most certain to someday afflict our area.Since I always prefer good news, I’ll start with the comforting stuff.
On global warming, UW Prof. Cliff Mass is absolutely the best when it comes to understanding Washington state weather. His essential blog offers some fairly encouraging observations about local impacts from climate change over the next several decades.
In his April 20 posting titled “It’s 2040,” Cliff says “Congratulations! For those of you living in western Washington, you have experienced a typical winter of roughly 2040.”
He bases this on weather conditions at SeaTac and in the Cascades, but with some nuances, it probably applies to southwest coastal Washington as well. At SeaTac, winter temperatures were 1.8 degrees above normal and snowpack was roughly 70 percent of average in the central Cascades.
“Examining the temperature predictions using high-resolution models embedded in global climate models, driven by an aggressive increase of greenhouse gases, one finds that this corresponds to the expected changes around 2040,” Cliff says.
“Now I am not saying this to downplay global warming, but to just add some perspective. Thirty years from now it will be warmer and the snowpack will be less, but here in the Northwest no panic is required. Even our current infrastructure can handle water supplies for such a situation.”
This is darned encouraging, though of course it only projects the situation out another 30 years — basically the expected average remaining lifetime of many baby boomers.
On the other hand…
None of this means that Mass is a climate change naysayer — quite the opposite. We just happen to be fortunate in living on a part of the planet where the affects of global warming will tend to be relatively positive for the time being.
Several of those who left written comments in response to his “It’s 2040” blog said that Cliff’s non-alarmist message is misplaced:
• “It’s not 2040 I worry about, it’s 2100. If we melt the permafrost and release tons of methane gas, the models I’ve seen show that this gas overwhelms any contributions from C02. That is to say, no amount of carbon reduction on our part will affect the climate trend. And instead of being masters of our fate, we’ll just go along for the ride. And that ride will NOT be nice.”
• “Sure global warming may cause problems elsewhere in 30 to 40 years but things will be peachy here. Thank god the hole is in the other end of the boat.”
• “So this past winter was a warm winter for 2010. It would be an average winter for 2040. What will the warm winters be like in 2040? No snowfall at all?”
And more disaster news
The other “kinda” good news pertains to the mammoth subduction zone earthquakes that pulverize our coastline every few hundred years.
Scientists feel like they’re getting a better handle on the basic rhythm at which our offshore crustal plate breaks. We’re still a long way from any real predictive power when it comes to these quakes that resemble the one in Chile a few weeks ago. But scientists attending the Seismological Society of America meeting in Portland reported some progress last week.
It’s been previously estimated that there is between a one-in-10 and a one-in-seven chance that a magnitude-9 mega-quake will strike the Northwest within 50 years, but the Oregonian reports that some seismic experts now think the picture is more complicated.
By examining layers of undersea landslides triggered by past mega-quakes, scientists including Oregon State University geologist Chris Goldfinger have been able to count 19 ruptures of the entire subduction zone from British Columbia to Northern California in the past 10,000 years.
These researchers say that for our northern part of the zone, the 10 to 15 percent disaster estimate in the next 50 years still applies. When this northern segment goes, it tends to take the whole coast-wide fault system with it. The ground will violently shake for several minutes throughout much of Washington and Oregon, followed a few minutes later by a tsunami, a wall of water perhaps 30 feet high.
Unfortunately, Goldfinger thinks these deadly quake-tsunami combos occur in clusters and that we could be well within the time window for the next one. This theory would put us about 50 years overdue, in fact.
(The subduction zone off southern Oregon and Northern California breaks more often, and usually with smaller quakes in magnitude 8 range. These, too, are a concern for us, in the sense that they will cause tsunamis. We’ll have a little more warning before they reach us, though.)
Our Ring of Fire neighbors in Chile, to their own horror and ours, experienced this on Feb. 27. Of all the coverage of this event, I found a March 21 article in the Los Angeles Times to be the most powerful, an account of terrible and relentless loss: See http://tiny.cc/5gva9
Perspective
Should we all move two miles inland, rebuilding our houses with internal bracing, foundation bolts, lightweight roofs and other quake-management measures?
Maybe, in the long run, this would be a good strategy to consider. As far as we know from archaeology, Chinook Indians, who have lived on this coast for many centuries and earthquake cycles, did not build permanent villages on the seashore.
But in drawing comparisons between our region and quake-prone areas of Italy, writer Tim Egan made this wise observation earlier this month in the New York Times:
“At some point, people there learned to make peace with ground that can kill you. Such is the contract for living in a lovely place, still taking shape, still forming.”
We’re awfully lucky to live here, risks notwithstanding.
We picked violets
What makes a color our favorite? Was it the complicated, emotion-tinted hazel of mama’s eyes? The rocketing enamel red of your best friend’s wagon that seemed perfectly capable of zooming to the moon? The saturated living green of the insanely bitter crabapples that grew by grandma’s door, which you only tasted once on a cousin’s dare?There are some rational, scientific and perfectly stupid theories that color preferences somehow echo our personalities. Maybe I shouldn’t dismiss these ideas out of hand — how else to explain my Aunt Bertha’s profoundly bizarre afghan-design choices but as outward expressions of her blend of sweetness, passivity and mule-headed chaos? Innocent bystanders could be forgiven for exclaiming in horror, “Who in God’s name knitted these colors together?” Some of auntie’s afghans continue to pulsate radioactively in a cardboard box in my garage.
If we picked our favorites solely based on what we see most when we’re small, mine would be the dusty gray-green of sagebrush or else the color of the poor tortured brown soil that ineffectually nourishes it.
The reservation where I attended primary grades is a difficult place to love, and never more so than in early spring. As the cold and wind drone on under endless sunny skies, the lengthening daylight only serves to provide additional time to gaze around and wonder why in hell the grownups plopped you down in such a place, an American Siberia. Though its despicable climate has supposedly gentled a trifle in the decades since I left, I prefer to nurse my grudge.
And yet, would I be capable of savoring a color and all it represents if it had not been so rare, so angelic, so tenacious? If sapphires and emeralds were so common we mixed them with tar to construct asphalt highways, would we still treasure their beauty?
The early blue violet, Viola adunca, is a noble plant. Smarter than we are, in some ways, it has worked out through thousands of years of trial and error when it is safe to take a run at it, go for the gusto and start a new family. There’s still snow in the shadows of the sagebrush when the violets are ablooming, gem-like in the ice-seared wastes. Like many native plants, it is pragmatically useful and nourishing, as suffused with vitamins as with beauty. (Here in our area, it is the sole source of food for endangered Oregon silverspot butterfly larvae.)
Are school children permitted to dance around maypoles anymore? In first grade on the rez, we did, and gathered tiny bouquets of fresh violets of variegated blue to spirit home and present to our moms. This color forms a substratum of my life, an essence that will persist after all else evaporates away. It even infused my dreams last Friday on May Eve, or Walpurgisnacht in the old tongue, when my Germanic ancestors celebrated the end of the reign of the winter witches.
For a place where the sun shines clear about 340 days a year, the Wind River Indian Reservation can feel awfully shrouded in shadows. Ancient disputes between the Shoshoni and Northern Arapaho tribes still slowly unravel like kabuki plays and clan names are crystallized destiny. Across a gulf of time and a thousand miles, it would haunt me even if girls my own daughter’s age weren’t dying there.
Ohetica Win “Elyxis” Gardner, age 13. Winter Rose Jenkins, age 14. Alexandrea WhitePlume, age 15. All dead of methadone overdose in June 2008. Ruled a homicide, cloaked in mystery. The FBI won’t even confirm or deny that arrests were made, a thin plea bargain struck. Marisa Spoonhunter, age 13. Body dumped early this month near the mission where I was baptized. Her brother is charged with brutally assaulting her after finding her having sex with a step-cousin.
It makes me angry, even at myself, when assumptions are made about families I grew up with and when these toxic tragedies are tossed into the wind to be dispersed, swept away and forgotten, as unchangeable as the plot of a Faulkner novel. These are good families, good girls lost under the infinite sky. Nobody’s story should end at age 13. It insults everything about life to consider such deaths in any sense inevitable.
“I love and I miss my daughter so much, but the world don’t stop spinning,” one of these girls’ moms told an interviewer, with the fatalism that many on the reservation wear like an overcoat. “The sun’s going to rise and the sun’s going to set. And we’re still here.”
We picked violets together, these fine brown people and me. This soul-pure blue is the color I cherish, binding us together in affection and respect. And the love of our daughters — we share that, too.
Treasure hunters
Oh, I’ll just admit it — about 90 percent of archaeology’s appeal to typical people can be sifted down to one word: Treasure. For anybody interested in this subject, the past year inspired avarice … but also worry.Especially to those of us with English ancestors, 2009 and 1939 will always be bejeweled bookends in the history of spectacular Anglo-Saxon finds.
Excavation of the Sutton Hoo burial ground in 1939 was the high-water mark in advancing modern knowledge of the barbarian people who descended on Britain in the decades following withdrawal of Roman troops in about AD 410. A final resting place of tribesmen who were, in a sense, illegal immigrants perhaps with origins in Sweden, Sutton Hoo somehow escaped being robbed for more than a thousand years.
Belying the “Indiana Jones” image of early archaeologists as little but glorified looters, the Sutton Hoo team led by landowner Edith May Pretty performed a masterful and sensitive job of carefully unpeeling the site. A key example of this is the excavation of a ship burial believed to contain the long-vanished bodily remains and rich funerary goods of Redwald, king of East Anglians in the early 7th century. Noting ghostly images in the soil of long-decayed wood and the location of metallic parts such as rivets, the ship was so well documented that you or I could build a replica of it today. (Or you could … judging by my struggles accurately cutting bathroom floor tiles last weekend, I think I’d better steer clear of shipwrighting.)
What really made news in 1939 and continues to attract museum crowds today are the spectacular kingly gold objects — heavy bullion belt buckles, shoulder clasps and other rich accoutrements of royal life. Considered together with other Sutton Hoo artifacts superbly made from humbler materials, such sophisticated riches transformed impressions of wealth and creativity in a rough and violent time. All of a sudden, the hardened English warrior-princes of ancient lore were brought to reality, just in time for their descendents to take on the Nazis.
Edith Pretty is a genuine heroine in this story. A judicial process found she was sole owner of these riches, to do with whatever she liked. She promptly gave everything to the British Museum, declining even to accept the female equivalent of a knighthood offered in thanks.
Fast-forward 70 years. British and European archaeology have been revolutionized forever by the proliferation of private metal-detector hobbyists, men who spend their weekends tromping over every square meter of countryside listening for metal. Take the enthusiasm that is devoted to finding Japanese glass floats on local beaches after a west wind, then imagine these floats also contain gold coins, and you’ll have some idea of the energy that goes into metal detecting.
This is a nightmare for science in most nations. You have only to troll eBay to encounter hundreds of real (and thousands of fake) artifacts plundered from the fields, hillsides and beaches of the Old World. These are nearly all things raped of their original context, degraded into pretty baubles instead of perhaps being vital clues to lost or poorly understood civilizations.
In Britain, however, the awkwardly named Portable Antiquities Scheme provides sizable cash payments to detectorists who report interesting finds. Last July, Terry Herbert found and reported the first bits of what is now being called the Staffordshire Hoard. Consisting of more than 1,500 items including 11 pounds of gold booty, perhaps the spoils of a forgotten battle. Herbert will split about $5 million with the landowner. The hoard will go on public display in the area where it was buried 1,300 years ago, adding enormously to scholarly understanding of the Dark Ages.
Every archaeologist would always prefer that artifacts be left in place for expert analysis, but the British plan also has a beneficial side in this regard. Even if the government decides a reported artifact isn’t interesting enough to buy, it is added to databases. Celtic, Roman and Anglo-Saxon coin finds, for example, have been enormously helpful in interpreting unrecorded economic and political patterns.
In the U.S., state and federal laws impose outright bans on artifact hunting — bans that are widely violated and ignored. Wouldn’t we be better off with a system based on Britain’s?
A final note on the Staffordshire Hoard: One of the damaged objects, perhaps given by a mother to her soldier son, quotes Numbers 10:35 — “Rise up, O Lord, and may thy enemies be dispersed and those who hate thee be driven from thy face.” Sad to think this prayer went unanswered. This kind of glimpse into past lives is the real treasure of archaeology.
OSF reboots Hamlet
When your grandfathers were a sawmill laborer and a coalmine boilerman, as I’m proud to say mine were, your first and possibly last exposure to Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” came on Saturday mornings. The Bard’s classic play was among several lampooned in Bugs Bunny’s 1959 cartoon, “A Witch’s Tangled Hare.”With its famous lines “To be, or not to be” and “Alas, poor Yorick,” “Hamlet” is the kind of moldy “Culture with a capital C” that most Americans ignore. Me, too. My daughter’s heart-felt desire that we spend an expensive three hours watching it last month during our annual Ashland trip struck me as a noble mistake that only a youth could make. I imagined us abandoning the matinee at intermission, sharing a wry chuckle about how people fool themselves into pretending to be entertained by self-important crap.
In fact, finishing a play where everyone of any consequence has just been conclusively poisoned, stabbed, drowned and executed, imagine my astonished surprise in finding that this “Hamlet” is among the most sparkling, moving and deeply funny experiences I can recall. More details below …
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Angus Bowmer, who started the Oregon Shakespeare Festival 75 years ago, was an irrepressible and pragmatic evangelist for live theater. After he floated his festival idea to Ashland town fathers in 1935, he promptly accepted their counter-plan — that he share the program with boxing matches in order to appeal to a rougher demographic in the 4,500-population Rogue Valley settlement. Shakespeare outdrew the pugilists and OSF is now among the largest theatrical enterprises in the world, attracting a yearly audience of up to 400,000.
Bowmer understood the necessity of making theater relevant and useful to his hometown patrons. At the start of his career, he produced one of his first plays to raise funds for the Pacific County championship basketball team, which he coached at Chinook Grade School. The Chinook Observer printed this report in 1930:
“Angus Bowmer and his ardent group of would-be actors and actresses of Chinook’s noted talent, are practicing three nights each week for the 3-act farce comedy entitled ‘Never Touched Me!’ The play is scheduled for April 15th in the Chinook hall and is being sponsored by the Chinook P.T.A. The comedy is a scream with a touch of drama thrown in occasionally for a bit of spicing.”
If Bowmer hadn’t lost his money in an Astoria bank failure, perhaps today I would be writing about the Washington Shakespeare Festival in Chinook.
Nowadays, OSF holds auditions for its dozen or so acting openings each year in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago. Twelve hundred aspirants try out for these precious opportunities to perform before packed houses night after night for two-thirds of the year.
Jeff King, the versatile and friendly actor who plays Claudius, rightful king of Denmark in “Hamlet,” led our backstage tour. He told us that OSF jobs are among the most coveted in American theater. This is evident in the skill and joy the company brings to each season’s diverse classical and modern offerings. (In response to a question from my daughter, Jeff related a hilarious story about an actor trying to escape backstage for a quick costume change while trying to free an actress’ wig from one of his buttons.)
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Before sailing to Massachusetts in 1635 at age 63, my immigrant ancestor John Winter may have practiced his trade of tanning at Leadenhall Market, about half a mile from where Shakespeare was writing and performing. Though he was a puritan, John Winter seems to have been pretty lackadaisical about it, so it’s entirely possible he attended plays at the Globe Theater. But it’s impossible to know much for sure about anybody’s life 400 years ago, including Shakespeare’s.
It is certain that theater was not an elite or snooty activity back then — nor is it today in Ashland. There’s a theory that the many-sided semi-round playhouses of Shakespeare’s time were patterned on London’s circular bear-baiting rings and cockpits, where citizens reveled in the spectacle of animals fighting to the death. A penny would buy standing-room admittance at the Globe, putting plays within reach of ordinary Londoners. And boy, were they ever ordinary — a German traveler of the time reported “The most striking thing to a foreigner in English theaters is the unheard-of coarseness and brutality of the audiences.”
Archaeological digs have found old English theater floors carpeted with discarded shells and hulls of oysters and hazelnuts — the cheap snack foods of the time. Author and historian Peter Ackroyd writes that “fights would break out among the gentlemen ‘of quality,’ while there were often riots which effectively concluded all theatrical proceedings.”
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There were no such rough thrills in Ashland, where I paid many thousand pennies for our seats at “Hamlet” at stage level. I have seldom felt my money was so well spent. We didn’t so much watch as participate, two 13-year-olds and I leaning forward to catch every nuance of Dan Donohue’s living portrayal of a prince splintered by grief into a tightly wound hurricane of humorous fury.
This is “Hamlet” rebooted for the 21st century, re-imagined as fresh as the day it was written. The language is still all Shakespeare’s, but this production somehow brings keen meanings and emotions upwelling through a kind of creative wormhole from 1601. Although it may sound obnoxiously trendy, part of the play is performed hip-hop style. Damned if it doesn’t work just dandy.
Playing Hamlet’s beloved Ophelia, Susannah Flood also deserves special mention. She is deliciously amusing both as Ophelia and as Lydia Bennet in OSF’s fine “Pride and Prejudice.” She brings searing despair to the former role. She and Hamlet each lose their fathers — she at Hamlet’s sword hand — and I cried with them.
Our family loved nearly everything we saw in Ashland this year — though “Merchant of Venice” in the evening after “Hamlet” proved to be “a Bard too far.” Maybe six hours of Shakespeare in any one day is just a tad too much, or maybe the humorous potential of Jew-baiting has long outlived its time — if it ever can be said to have had a time.
It’s about an eight-hour expedition to Ashland from Ilwaco. But that’s nothing compared to getting east to Broadway, and the shows you see will be as good and quite possibly better. Even the Wall Street Journal says so — their reviewer loves OSF’s “Hamlet” as much as I do.
Explore ancient Egypt from your armchair
I don’t know about your family, but in 1323 B.C. mine were scratching fleabites in hovels in Scandinavia, Britain and northwest coastal Europe. They would have nodded in sympathetic recognition at philosopher Thomas Hobbes’ description of pre-government existence: “no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.”Meanwhile, only about 2,200 miles away, Egyptian society was already ancient and supremely sophisticated. By King Tutankhamun’s time, almost as many years had passed since the founding of the first dynasty as have passed between our time and birth of Christ.
In an age when even bronze was still a novel new technological innovation to Nordic people, Egypt was producing products and artworks of astounding refinement. All this is, of course, literally old news.
What is new is online publication by the Griffith Institute at Oxford University of English archaeologist Howard Carter’s records of the excavation of King Tut’s tomb. It’s impossible to read Carter’s contemporaneous first-hand notes from 1922 or look at the photos of the thousands of objects removed from the tomb and not be swept up in the joy of experiencing dynastic Egypt.
When Carter died in 1939 at age 64, it was chalked up to a curse on those who disturbed the tomb. But what these papers really make clear is that Carter might have worked himself into a somewhat early grave through sheer rapture and delight. Far from being a curse, the Tut materials are an ecstatic challenge to mediocrity and complacency. Carter must have burned himself up in his attempt to absorb and comprehend all he found. What a way to go …
The last pages of Howard’s record are being placed online now with instant access for everyone at www.griffith.ox.ac.uk/gri/4tut.html. Allow yourself plenty of time, and don’t stop with merely browsing through Harry Burton’s luminous photos of the interior and exterior of the tomb — Carter is not a poet by any means, but his written account of one of the great discoveries in all history is potent stuff.
A July 18 story in London’s Guardian newspaper describing the “Tutankhamun: Anatomy of an Excavation” project makes it clear that we are still a very long way from fully digesting all Carter gave us.
“The only intact pharaoh’s tomb ever discovered, it contained such an array of treasures that it took Carter 10 years to catalogue them all,” the Guardian reports. “Yet despite the immense significance of the discovery, the majority of Carter’s findings have never been published, and many questions surrounding the tomb remain unanswered.” Many of 5,398 objects found in the tomb are not well known, even to experts.
“I often say that the real curse of Tutankhamun is that Egyptologists have tended to shy away from working on the material,” expert Marianne Eaton-Krauss told the London newspaper. “These pieces are beautifully made. To study them takes a lot of work, and requires expertise not only on the symbolism, but also the technology.”
Everyone can be amazed at not only iconic objects like Tut’s burial mask, but many fragile items preserved in the near-perfect conditions of the tomb. To see things like a 3,250-year-old ostrich-feather fan is to be transported back in time. Ancient ceremonial shawls are still draped around the shoulders of the protective gods guarding the king.
National Geographic captivated my imagination with a Tut article back in about 1963, which my dad read to me when I was 5. A caption accompanying a photo of a carved duckling emerging from a nest of large eggs — an Egyptian religious motif — said something or other about “decades” and for quite a while I thought that adults referred to 10-year units of time as “duck eggs.” Thanks to deteriorating hearing, I now make similar mistakes all the time...
Looking somewhat like the world’s ultimate abandoned self-storage unit, Burton’s photos capture what it was like to see this tomb in its first days of discovery: a revelation in every way.
•••
As a personal aside, this Friday, July 30, National Public Radio’s eTown will pay tribute to my uncle, Tom Bell, at a concert at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheatre. Lyle Lovett and Taj Mahal, both of whom Tom’s probably never heard of, will perform. The concert is not yet scheduled for local rebroadcast here, where eTown airs on KMUN Fridays at 2 p.m.
Discovering the lonesome North Shore
Names on maps exist on two levels — as actual locations and as placeholders in our imagination. In this, they resemble theater or concert tickets purchased long before the show and safeguarded in a desk drawer. The potential they represent has a discrete and separate value, a promise of future experience — anticipation in material form.Calling a place a ghost town implies rotting storefronts and crumbling foundations. Around here, maybe “phantom town” or “myth town” would be better terms for places that once were. Manmade structures melt away in our formidable winter rains. Anything that lies still too long is smothered beneath layers of detritus by rampaging plant growth and decay.
Villages flower-up along the banks of the Columbia estuary like perishable bolete mushrooms, only to be swallowed up by slugs and rot after a handful of years or decades. Some survive only on obsolete maps, or as a few disintegrating pilings in the river. Occasionally, a few cedar- and lichen-shingled houses still hold on, from which retirees emerge to tend gnarled apple trees on behalf of hungry autumn bears.
The world has become big again in this furious age of war and hardship. Exploring the lost and neglected corners of our own home counties is increasingly appealing. Why regret unaffordable expeditions up the Amazon when the Columbia is littered with legendary lost would-be cities?
A personal favorite among these is Frankfort, which was partly an investment scam but could have taken off as an actual metropolis if a couple really lucky breaks had materialized. Stewart H. Holbrook in his book, “Far Corners,” writes that in 1901 “Frankfort illusionists declared their city was to be the ‘Terminus of three transcontinental railroads.’ The usual billboards were erected to mark the future site of this or that great industry. Many lots were sold. Then the mists again enfolded Grays Bay, and when the sun had cleared them, Frankfort had evaporated into the salt-washed air.”
If Northern Pacific Railroad promoter James Jerome Hill had succeeded, today’s Astorians would gaze across the river to the northeast and observe a Seattle-scale city rising from what is actually a still-wooded hillside. Dozens lived and loved in Frankfort, which even had its own newspaper, the Chronicle. A plat map hints at dreams: College Street, Wellington, Warren, Gray, Wharf, Granite, Pike, Park, Cannon …
In his book “Frankfort on the Columbia,” historian Carlton Appelo poignantly reports “The sidewalks were all sound as were the docks. But the families were growing old and discouraged. In all the lovely homes but one child remained. Here was a town after World War I with no school, no road, no electric lights, no post office, not a horse but two cows — and Ulrika Brandt, the town spinster, owned a goat.” People drifted away, leaving their big furniture behind.
Frankfort surprised everybody with one more incarnation, though, as a hippy enclave in the 1960s, after a counter-culture magazine mentioned it as a potential commune site because of its many abandoned homes. An amazing novel might be written about these flower children’s misadventures in a myth town. But their attention took its toll — my friend Edith Olson wrote in the early 1990s of a visit there: “Fences and sidewalks have been torn up for firewood, windows broken, attractive furnishing of the homes stolen, and the piano, which Gust Brandt bought from Eilers in Portland in 1905 at the Lewis and Clark Exposition, lies in pieces no larger than a matchbox — a victim of a senseless vandalism.”
Forgotten things and memories are often revealed in the kinetic interface between land and water. I’m drawn time and again to the riverbank to look for cryptic objects and the even more baffling afterimages of recollection. Parking at the old Knappton Mill site on Washington State Route 401, I walk to Frankfort along an uninhabited arc of sublime Northwest shoreline. I don’t encourage it — twisted ankles and a rising tide could make for an uncomfortable and embarrassing rescue for the unprepared. My gorgeous future big-city wife, Donna, proved she was tough enough for me by wading back against shoulder-depth incoming waters on one of our first dates.
Anyway, you’ll see no sign of Frankfort on anything but century-old maps — it’s all bulldozed and vanished. But mammoth sword ferns give way to a rocky beach that occasionally still surrenders vaporous hints of long-forgotten dramas. One hike resulted in finding what I take to be a grapeshot, an 18th or 19th century cannon projectile. Was it merely lost, or fired in fear or anger? Curiosity is all that remains on this lonesome shore.
Writing summer’s elegy
In full-grown late summer it’s hard to decipher all the rioting smells of rot and ripeness. They swirl together like complex shades of sand woven by an outgoing tide. So I wasn’t sure exactly what was teasing the tip of my nose at the far west end of last evening’s walk. The cinnamon-colored bear of the night before? The sad, crushed and tattered leaves of cow parsnip? The camphor stench of flowering tansy, so pungent it was once marketed by apothecaries to repel vermin from the winding sheets of the dead?No, it was something fresh — goldenrod, suddenly mature and avid for attention as a 16-year-old girl unpracticed in the subtle art of applying perfume. The blossom sprays were like lithesome Washington coast girls hanging out with a gang of weedy friends on the side of the trail. My eyes snapped to them as quickly as they would to a bewitching flute soloist standing in front of an orchestra.
A talisman during the Crusades, a powdered medicine for bleeding, a homegrown substitute for high-priced English tea during the tumult leading up to the American Revolution, useful for clearing the upper respiratory tract of mucus — my botanical references say goldenrod is anything but a mere trash plant. The Latin name for the goldenrod genus is Solidago, from solidus (whole) and ago (to make): in other words, to make whole, or cure.
In addition to other beneficial properties, all goldenrods are a significant source of natural rubber latex. In December 1929, Time magazine reported on the elderly Thomas Edison’s retreat from his New Jersey laboratory to his winter home in Fort Myers, Fla.:
“Packed in his five carloads of laboratory material were tons of stalks of a common, ubiquitous weed: goldenrod. Goldenrod, announced Inventor Edison, seemed a likely U.S. weed from which to produce the object of his major research in the past two years: Rubber.” He was able to produce a hybrid that yielded 12 percent rubber, but the project quietly died with him in 1931. Apparently, we prefer to make synthetic rubber from oil we purchase at an exorbitant cost from multi-national corporations.
This is the calendar page when I must guard most against anticipatory mourning, the sadness of imagining bereavements to come. As if it weren’t enough to grieve losses in their true time, some of us are cursed with pre-living them, writing summer’s elegy while many warm weeks yet remain. This year it’s harder than most to remember blessings, with a gray ether-soaked gauze of sky stretched tight overhead and forebodings of a La Niña winter to come.
If April is all about birth and creation, the boundless friskiness of life embodied in every horsetail stem and canary-yellow skunk cabbage spathe, then August is the month of incipient destruction.
But context is everything. We are biological organisms. Our peeves, mopes and moods are functions of everything from light cycles to the foods we eat. Writing in his 1679 guide to “this year’s revolution, as also things past, present, and to come,” Richard Saunders observed “In August Choler [a peevish or irascible temperament] and Melancholy much increase, from whence proceeds long lasting Fevers and Agues not easily cured.” Among other remedies, he suggested eating sage and drinking “moderately a glass of good and pleasant Wine.”
Even without wine and sage, it usually doesn’t take long to bend my mind away these dark and grasping tendrils. Feeling blue about the ebb of the growing season isn’t bad or unnatural. The Youth of Eternal Summers — Mother Nature’s rambunctious but helpful son — will make certain the atoms from this year’s despairing leaves find their way safe into next year’s baby sparrows. Goldenrod is his gift.
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It helps that this is peak time for berries, peaches and fairs. I am on a full-out pie binge and insensitively told my wife that if a bear gets me, authorities can finger the culprit by looking for traces of huckleberries in his stomach contents.
My daughter and I treasured this year’s Clatsop fair, as always. This week brought the far smaller but equally charming Wahkiakum County Fair, concluding Saturday. Pacific County’s is Wednesday through Saturday. All these little country revels are deeply satisfying reminders that we are lucky to be alive in times that are plentiful by almost any historical standard.
I wish, though, that the veil of centuries would peel back a little and show me the Bartleme Fair, held on Aug. 24 in olden days in England. It was commemorated by poet George Alexander Stevens (1710-84):
Here are drolls, hornpipe dancing, and showing of postures;
Plum-porridge, black-puddings, and op’ning of oysters;
The taphouse guests swearing, and gall’ry folks squalling,
With salt-boxes, solos, and mouth-pieces bawling;
Pimps, pick-pockets, strollers, fat landladies, sailors,
Bawds, baileys, jilts, jockeys, thieves, tumblers and tailors.
This is life, in all its pitiful and perishable splendor...
Seeing achievement in aging’s changes
If you haven’t yet witnessed time travel, it’s safe to say you will. It most likely won’t be in the form of Lycra-clad tourists from the 27th century slumming amidst the wasteful bliss of our still ice-capped times, but instead in the persons of your own parents, spouses or selves. It’ll probably be upsetting. Maybe it shouldn’t be.On the disquieting end of the scale, my dad experienced a sort of hiccup in his memory. He fully recovered within a day or two, but in the meantime I stumbled into retelling him about the death of his beloved father-in-law two years earlier. I’ll always be haunted by his reaction. Though I’m in the news business, it taught me that mercy sometimes requires a more selective and diplomatic approach to information.
We rigidly expect time’s arrow to always move in a hard, straight line. We live under a dictatorial decree that everything happens only in a one-way progression with no backtracking or overlapping. Anyone under the age of 80 reporting a deviation from this is likely to be greeted with pained forbearance or a quick trip to the psychiatrist’s office. In the elderly, slow-sprouting dementia gets the blame for loopdaloops in time. They get the pity treatment.
What if getting to experience time in a looser way isn’t always a pathology or flaw of a deteriorating brain? What if getting to converse with departed loved ones, or forgetting old hurts, or romping in your noggin with long-dead dogs are delectable rewards for reaching old age? My aged grandmother had a habit of literally twiddling her thumbs while sitting at her window observing the chickadees or staring away into a middle distance, a faint smile on her lips. Time traveling, there was nothing pitiable about her.
Swedish sociologist Lars Tornstam has coined a two-dollar word for this: gerotranscendence. A little more artfully, it’s climbing above the physical limitations of old age — appreciating what it is instead of chasing after what it isn’t. Some really do suffer dementia to one extent or another. No one suggests pretending otherwise. But about six out of every seven Americans will never suffer dementia. We’ll just get old and that’s not a bad thing.
Speaking to interviewer Paula Span, Tornstam said that successful aging doesn’t mean keeping up the same busy schedule or roster of friendships near the end of lives as we do in our action-packed middle years.
“We develop and change; we mature. It’s a process that goes on all our lives, and it doesn’t ever end. The mistake we make in middle age is thinking that good aging means continuing to be the way we were at 50. Maybe it’s not. … People tell us they are different people at 80. They have new interests, and they have left some things behind.”
An evolution in our experience of time is among the natural developmental processes many of us undergo. In a synopsis of his thoughts that you can download at http://tinyurl.com/39w7wap, Tornstam outlines some of the telltale signposts of gerotranscendence, including:
“New perception of time. A feeling of being a child, a young person, an adult, middle age and old — all at once! You can look back on past events in your life with new and more experienced eyes. Sometimes even old wrongs can be accepted and reinterpreted.”
There are many more clues that you’re in the winner’s circle, such as a declining interest in material possessions and finding “greater value and pleasure in the small, everyday aspects of life. Music, art and nature may inspire you in a new way.”
Unlike grade school when we were given fancy certificates in honor of smart accomplishments, no one is handing out gold medals for all this. If anything, wisdom is its own reward.
But we’ll be more content within our families and society if we quietly honor the real achievements of elderly people who attain satisfaction inside their own skins, playful minds leafing through all the pages of their lives.
My pack will run again in heaven
If my dogs aren’t all in heaven, I don’t want to go. Anyplace without them wouldn’t be paradise.The clouds over the mouth of the Columbia at lunchtime Friday were as whipped up as Einstein’s hair, a huge swirling Old Testament bouffant pile of sky that somehow encouraged frivolous ruminations on the afterlife.
Leading a strange surging pack of capering dogs all free of the arthritis that chewed away at their fleetness in old age, we would course untiring through warm mountain valleys pursuing platoons of swift and impudent bunnies. Tired and content, the dogs would curl around me by the fire each night. And then we’d rise up each morning soon after dawn, I’d have black coffee and fried eggs, and then we’d do it all again. Doggy Valhalla.
It would make for an absurd canine menagerie. Including all that ever shared my footsteps would take in dignified Irish wolfhounds and dimwitted but ever-so-sweet Labradors, feisty cairn terriers and so forth, right up to my current pathologically glutinous Welsh corgi and a softhearted wheaten terrier.
As I considered him with affection, Duncan, the terrier, was completely absorbed in watching a crow that was scrounging a drink up in the rain gutter. His wolfish intensity was at odds with the innocent, goofy crush he has on me. Several times a day, I must provide a hand or cheek for him to kiss, especially after returning from the woeful betrayal of leaving him at home.
What, I wondered, if instead of being a custom-made reward for humanity, heaven is defined by dogs? If so, Duncan will have me all to himself, along with my wife and daughter. To him, only we are the pack — everything else, mere distraction. In his heaven, the door will never close in his face, the words “sorry, can’t come” will never be uttered.
Milan Kundera observed, “Dogs are our link to paradise. They don’t know evil or jealousy or discontent. To sit with a dog on a hillside on a glorious afternoon is to be back in Eden, where doing nothing was not boring — it was peace.”
Oh what a fine world it would be if we defined success in terms of what it took to keep our dogs happy.
It may even be that it was our connection with dogs — and other domesticated animals — that helped humans turn the corner into becoming the problematically successful species we are today. So far as we know, dogs were humanity’s first friends, being brought into partnership with us about 32,000 years ago. Considering truly modern humans arose about 170,000 earlier, this means dogs have been suspiciously close at our heels throughout our age of greatest achievement. Coincidence? I don’t believe it.
Long before we formed our alliance with dogs, paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman of Penn State University believes that our ancestors’ transition into the role of predators with the invention of stone tools 2.6 million years ago created a necessity to study our prey and communicate hunting and herding information. In essence, our minds were expanded by the need to understand and talk about other creatures.
“Establishing an intimate connection to other animals is unique and universal to our species,” Shipman said. “No other mammal routinely adopts other species in the wild — no gazelles take in baby cheetahs, no mountain lions raise baby deer. Every mouthful you feed to another species is one that your own children do not eat.”
Forming this “animal connection is an ancient and fundamentally human characteristic that has brought our lineage huge benefits over time,” she said. In the case of dogs, Shipman has in mind services such as tracking game, destroying rodents, protecting kin and goods.
But for me, being adored by dogs and gazing into their pure, uncomplicated little souls is all I want or deserve. They make me a better man.
An unforgettable scream in the night
“I heard the owl scream and the crickets cry.”— Lady Macbeth
***
Even while sitting in my comfortable office on a transcendent sunny autumn afternoon, the scream of a cougar makes me feel like backing against a sturdy wall with a rifle in hand. I can hardly imagine what it would feel like to be a child hearing such a hair-raising sound, not fully knowing what it was as it clawed its way through the frozen, inky night shrouding a mountain ranch house. Curious? You can share a hint of what it’s like at http://tinyurl.com/25d5guq.
In the 1930s my grandfather often stayed with a friend when weather got bad between our family’s isolated ranch and the coalmine where he worked a shift. He drove his old Model A Ford back and forth most days to bring in a little cash money during the darkest days of the Depression. So my grandma and the three little kids — my mother and her brothers Tom and Bud — were all alone as screaming began to rend the night.
Sometimes described as the sound of a woman being gruesomely murdered, it made an impression on mom that has endured 70 years thus far. It would be an otherworldly shriek on any occasion, but it’s especially chilling to think of it intermittently circling a kerosene-lit house like a scalping being performed on the move.
Even most long-time mountaineers have never heard a cougar’s scream, so grandma and the kids didn’t know what to make of the hate-filled screech. Even worse, rugged outdoorswoman though she was, grandma was strangely averse to firearms. I have little doubt that my mom, a crack shot, would have grabbed up a weapon in short order at the sound of shattering window glass.
But the screams dwindled and morning light brought the answer, in the form of mountain lion tracks beat into the snow all around the house.
The incident was never repeated and who knows what, if anything, brought it on. There is much in the minds of other species that we can make no pretense of understanding.
In writing it is often regarded as an amateurish stunt to anthropomorphize — to attach human characteristics to animals. To say that a cougar is expressing hatred or that a raven is amused by is own reflection is to risk a figurative pat on the head, as if you are too simple-minded to know the vast difference between we suave humans and those buffoonish beasts.
More and more, I suspect that they are more like us and we are more like them than anyone wants to acknowledge. Maybe our snobbish attitude grew up to salve our consciences about treating so many creatures with such wanton cruelty. Don’t get me wrong — I’m a carnivore. But death should be swift, efficient, economical. Anything else makes me wish animals were more capable of vengeance.
I’ve been collecting stories recently about our smart co-passengers on planet earth. There are plenty enough, especially among mammals and birds, to make me believe some other team will arise from the wreckage if we utterly fail.
There is John Vaillant’s enthralling new book, “The Tiger,” in which a wronged great cat stalks, kills, eats and goes a fair way toward obliterating every trace of a poacher in the Russian Far East in 1997.
And I treasure this report from January in The Sunday Times of London:
“Dolphins have been declared the world’s second most intelligent creatures after humans, with scientists suggesting they are so bright that they should be treated as ‘non-human persons.’”
Or consider this from last Wednesday’s New York Times:
“Not only do coyotes hunt singly and in packs, they have even been observed hunting cooperatively with other species. In Wyoming, scientists have seen coyotes hunting with badgers, large burrowing creatures that enjoy a nice bit of ground squirrel. As badgers dig toward squirrels in their tunnels, coyotes wait above for the squirrels to pop up for a quick escape, or perhaps to be chased back down to be eaten by a badger. Teams may work together often for an hour or more, the coyote mock-chasing or otherwise playfully inviting the lethargic badger to activity when it pauses, and to good purpose. Coyotes hunting with badgers had to work less and ate more than solitary coyotes in the same area. These teams were so effective that researchers reported often seeing the same pairs working together again and again.”
I dearly cherish the idea of coyotes and badgers inheriting the earth. That’d show us.
Comfort in diverse music from the heart
Mavis Staples describes thinking of her dad while performing Randy Newman’s “Losing You” on her new gospel album “You Are Not Alone.”Coaching Mavis when he heard her copying the style of other singers, Roebuck “Pops” Staples said, “Listen, let me tell you something. You’re singing God’s music. You be sincere and sing from your heart. Because what comes from the heart reaches the heart.”
She’s still honoring his advice. As a reviewer said on Amazon.com, her song for him “is infused with so much genuine authenticity and passion that it will barely leave a dry eye in the house particularly when she sings ‘Do you know how much you mean to me?/Should’ve told you ‘cause it’s true/I’d get over losing anything/But I’ll never get over losing you.’ It is a spine-tingling cover and please download it and let it wash over all over you.”
Music like this is a scalpel-like wind effortlessly slicing through the leaden fog trapping us on a granite mountainside. It pierces the dull, gauzy layers of sludge that imperceptibly smother our senses and emotions. That’s probably why we hear so little of it: People don’t appreciate being awakened. How much easier it is to nibble the opiate-flavored cotton candy of Lady Gaga and Katy Perry.
Veins of true emotion run through every sort of music. If you listen for this, for sounds and phrases that resonate within your secret core, it won’t make any difference whether it is called gospel, country, rock, opera, classical, jazz or even pop. Too many people latch on to a single genre of music like a self-limiting political or religious affiliation. Souls grow when fed flavorful, nourishing songs. Ignore the label. Just minimize the sugar, starch and filler.
The sun dance is a fundamental sacrament of the Indian people I grew up with. “The Sun dance was not only the greatest ceremony of the Plains tribes, but was a condition of their existence,” the federal Bureau of American Ethnology observed in 1912, while predicting the dance would soon become extinct.
It didn’t. As a small child, I was a guest at the public portion of one, and they continue today. For some reason, memories of the drumming, movement and chanting accompanying that occasion have become a live current within me in the past few months. This doesn’t mean I’m sitting here listening to Arapahoe or Shoshoni songs on my laptop — don’t like them that much. But their rhythms are a leitmotif on the border between waking and dreaming, perhaps a subconscious echo of my own ancestors’ dances in northwest Europe so long, long ago.
A full eight days in length in olden times, the sun dance offers an interesting model for our own times. Imagine if each year Americans simultaneously took a full week, including both weekends, and offered it to renewal of our bonds with one another, with our world, with our ancestors and children, with whatever gods we each worship.
As ethnographers observed about the sun dance, “It gave opportunity for the making and renewing of common interests, the inauguration of tribal policies, and the renewing of the rank of chiefs; for the exhibition, by means of mourning feasts, of grief over the loss of members of families; for the fulfillment of social obligations by means of feasts; and, finally, for the exercise and gratification of the emotions of love on the part of the young in the various social dances which always formed an interesting feature of the ceremony.”
Envision a week when all television, internet and other electronic connections are severed and we are obliged to meet in person for a long, serious, silly series of community dances, talks, songs, flirtations, mourning, politicking and picnicking. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? Short of switching to a benevolent-dictator form of government, this won’t ever happen, but maybe we can at least strive for it in our families and neighborhoods.
The sun dance is another type of song from the heart. We all can learn from it.
“Pops” Staples died in 2000 and Mavis was so devastated that she quit singing for most of a decade.
“Devastated” is far too short and uncomplicated a word to describe the sensation of having your life ripped up by your dad’s death. I saw a photo yesterday of a Washington man who survived a bear attack — missing an eye and with more scars and stitches than undamaged skin. That’s how I felt when my father died. I was raw and beyond help.
But heal you do, or scab over anyway. I still sure do miss my daddy, though. To quote Mavis and Randy, “When you’re young/And there’s time/To forget the past/You don’t think you will/But you do/But I know that I don’t have time enough/And I’ll never get over losing you.”
Waiting for our defining leader
With this month’s spleeny election fresh in our minds, it bears remembering that as combative as our politics are, tempers aren’t yet nearly as explosive as they were a century and a half ago. We recently marked the 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln’s election on Nov. 6, 1860, followed five months later by the Civil War.Now as then, however, there are striking divisions between regions of the USA, and even between the counties within states. It’s interesting to consider whether today’s rifts might someday metastasize into a nation-breaker.
Cursory comparison of the 1860 and 2008 county-by-county presidential election maps reveals how political polarities have flipped. Just before the Civil War, the Northeast and Midwest voted heavily Republican, while the South went for the conservative Southern Democratic Party and the Constitutional Union Party.
The latter party is unfamiliar to most of us. A force in 1860 in the border states between North and South, in one respect it sounds eerily similar to today’s Tea Party, being based on a simple resolution “to recognize no political principle other than the Constitution … the Union … and the Enforcement of the Laws.” It waffled on slavery and soon faded away.
Nowadays, the Northeast is the region most clearly aligned with the Democratic Party, along with the upper Midwest, West Coast counties on or near the ocean, and strongly Hispanic counties in the Southwest. Almost everything else is a sea of Republicanism, with Democrat islands mostly centered on cities, universities and high-income recreation areas.
Looking at the 2008 map and considering Republican gains this month, it’s hard to see how the country would split on geographical lines. Possibly the Northeast could become its own country — Yankeetopia, maybe? The West Coast counties from Silicon Valley to Bellingham might peel off to form another — the Tsunami Republic?
But most likely, we’re so intermixed as to be stuck with each other, like it or not. In that sense, maybe the modern Tea Party ideal of hammering the federal government into irrelevance might not be completely wrong-headed, so long as regions like ours are freed to prosper in our own self-selected ways — maybe with our own supreme courts.
Washington was still a territory in 1860 and not eligible to vote in presidential elections. But our neighbor to the south, Clatsop, was part of a solid Republican block in Northwest Oregon, along with Multnomah, Columbia, Clackamas, Washington and Yamhill counties.
Other West Coast hotbeds of Lincoln’s Republican Party centered on the Bay Area — except for San Francisco itself, which went for Stephen Douglas. There was another nugget of Republicanism among the gold miners of Nevada County, Calif. (These included one of my three Gold Rush great-great-grandfathers, Gilbert Giles, who was from Jackson, Mich., birthplace of the GOP.)
The vast geographic bulk of Oregon went for ardently pro-slavery Democratic candidate John Breckinridge, at least in part out of loyalty to his running mate, Oregon U.S. Sen. Joseph Lane, who was also Oregon Territory’s first governor. In an infamously premature obituary, the New York Times said of Breckinridge, “It might have been in weakness that he was first made a dupe, but his subsequent career marked him one of the basest and wickedest of traitors.”
It’s hard to say how Pacific County might have voted in 1860 if we had been allowed to, though it is perhaps a useful clue to note that some Confederates are known to have made their homes here following the war.
Lincoln is justly enshrined in our national pantheon, largely thanks to his capacity for making and enforcing hard decisions on pivotal occasions. But if you seek out any of his views that might have relevance to our own fractious age, it is glaring both how equivocal Lincoln was about the slavery issue in the years before the war and how specific his speeches were to the narrow legal questions of his own time.
Reading, for example, Lincoln’s remarks in his famous second debate with Douglas in 1858, he states “I do not stand pledged to the prohibition of the slave trade between the different states.” His answer almost turns on the definition of “pledged.” He goes on to explain, “that question has never been prominently enough before me to induce me to investigate whether we really have the constitutional power to do it.”
This is hardly the ringing denunciation of an evil practice we might expect from one of our most ballyhooed orators.
Ultimately, Lincoln shines not for his predominantly cautious and lawyerly language, but for his personal choices. In the harshest emergency our country ever faced, he grabbed hold of the dominant idea of his time. He re-imagined our laws to do something that the Constitution then did not: Outlaw slavery.
William Vincent Byars, editor of my 1899 collection of orations by Lincoln and others, makes this observation about him. “As walking is merely a process of falling and checking the fall before it is complete, so all the progress of the first century of American life was the result of everlasting disorganization and reorganization. The secret of leadership under such circumstances is, first of all, willingness to lead.”
Disorganization and reorganization are still overriding themes in this, our third century. We’re still waiting for the defining leader of these times.
Beth and Barack
Whether it's America's obsession with celebrities, a replacement for the royalty we foreswore in 1776, or a superstitious throwback to old beliefs in the healing power of the king's touch, it's hard not to be a little awed by a president.For one thing, there are all his knights of the dark sunglasses — the Secret Service, with their little curly-cue-wired earpieces and "don't even think of speaking to me" attitudes. Though one tall, bald one Thursday was chewing gum like a cow on crystal meth, for the most part they appear as calm and restful as snakes lying in the sun — and just as capable of instantaneous violence.
And then there are all the layers of other people either trying to control or gain access to him. In Seattle this week, the 20,000 people at Hec Edmundson Pavilion at the University of Washington included everyone from Miss Washington to Sen. Patty Murray. But a good 500 were cops, staff and volunteers — what might have been called "retainers" back in old feudal days. Good folks all, I'm sure, but maybe just a smidge happier than necessary about getting to tell others where to stand.
Having been through all this a time or two, I drove up with my daughter the night before and stayed in a motel just off campus. We walked to the arena rather than hazarding the snarled morning traffic on streets semi-closed for the motorcade. Personally, if I were president I'd be so mortified about inconveniencing everyone that I might never leave home. But I suppose that sort of concern doesn't much arise among the people attracted to the job.
Realistically, getting out and actually seeing the citizens is essential to being president. Not only should you hear their complaints, catcalls and concerns, but a leader without the noise and adrenaline of the crowd is like a nuclear reactor without uranium fuel rods.
President Obama began by theatrically rolling up his sleeves like a railroad engineer before launching into a genuinely entertaining and inspiring speech with all the gusto of a man tossing logs into the firebox of a racing locomotive.
It was exhilarating seeing Obama on his game again after feeling for some time like he was nursing wounded feelings about congressional Republicans not playing nice. Everyone sort of likes the idea of D.C. opponents putting away their rhetorical daggers and being friends. And maybe you can occasionally invite the minority leader of the U.S. House over to the White House for poker or lawn darts. But voters expect well-justified, massively pissed-off anger about the mess this country's in. We need our president to knock heads together, not play kissy-face.
Thursday also was a reminder that Murray is a scrappy, smart and worthwhile little grandma. It would be deranged to not re-elect her. And I just want to affectionately tussle Congressman Norm Dicks' hair, though he'd probably punch me. He's like Jimmy Cagney's and Mae West's secret love child, raised by a race of politically progressive Olympic Peninsula werewolves and weaned on moonshine.
At an age when many 13-year-olds are all-boys/all-the-time, my daughter Elizabeth's good instincts put her in the way of not one but two Obama handshakes, as he circled back to her. He laughed as she told him how her teacher Debbie Denny would be disappointed not to get an autograph — we forgot our pen back on the press table, sorry.
And Elizabeth's reaction? Tickled, of course. But more importantly, she observed, "He's just a man!" She and all of us know intellectually that presidents are only human, but it doesn't completely sink in until you've met them in person. Even George W. Bush was just trying to do his best. When they fail, or don't succeed as quickly as we wish they would, it's not because they're stupid or capriciously failing to wave their magic wand fast enough.
For my part, I'm still waiting for a Pacific Northwest president, someone whose parents honeymooned at Lake Quinault — kind of a Kurt Cobain of national politics. I want someone who grew up in the land of big storms, someone who wouldn't be caught dead using an umbrella.
In fact, Westerners of any kind rarely land in the White House. Ronald Reagan, whom I felt sort of put-upon to cover when he visited Cheyenne back in my junior cub-reporter days, was about as close as we come to a Westerner in modern days. (In retrospect, the old codger was often wrong but seldom mean, calculating or a poser. That counts for quite a bit.)
Obama is kinda-sorta from Hawaii, but it's hard for me to see it as "The West." More like a theme park. It would still be a territory if we hadn't needed one more to get up to the nice, even number of 50 states.
The only president to ever live on the Columbia River was Ulysses S. Grant, who was stationed at Fort Vancouver in the 1850s and considered moving his family to Washington Territory. Aside from illustrating the fact that great men can become pretty disappointing presidents, Grant is an example of how vital it is for presidents to gain more than whistle-stop familiarity with America.
According to the Oregon Encyclopedia, "Grant's work brought him into occasional contact with Native peoples, and his experience in Oregon and Washington territories helped foster an understanding that stood in contrast to much thinking of the era. 'It is really my opinin [sic],' he wrote from the fort, 'that the whole [Indian] race would be harmless and peaceable if they were not put upon by the whites.'"
Like my daughter's realization about the humanity of the president, there is no substitute for first-hand knowledge about the nation they serve. I appreciated Obama's attention to us. Just wish he would come out and live here for a while ... then he'd really know about our storms and trials and tribulations.
Modern justice moves slowly ... if at all
With my nephew recently back in Wyoming prison and some notorious unrelated Pacific County cases dragging on and on, I’ve been cogitating more than usual about our national and local legal system. Since about one of every 31 American adults is in prison or jail, or on parole or probation, this is no abstract issue for any of us.Law school, at least the one I attended, spends about an hour of class time in the first year considering why we process criminals as we do. Ted Lauer, my criminal law professor, told us to notice that the sign out front did not say “College of Justice.”
As mechanics learn how to fix cars rather than understand why they exist, lawyers’ arduous three-year training mission includes hardly any navel-gazing regarding the reasons we imprison people.
The standard list includes retribution, providing an unpleasant experience to deter future crimes, segregating bad people from the rest of us, giving offenders a space to kick old addictions and learn new legitimate job skills, and avoiding the chaos that ensues when victims or their families engage in vigilantism.
In theory, there’s something to be said for all of these. But I’ve started to wonder if temporary segregation is about the only desirable thing prison actually achieves. At least they’re not jamming a sawed-off shotgun in the face of a liquor store clerk while they’re actually behind bars.
***
It makes me sad to think of my nephew, who at 35 has spent half of his adult life locked away from society for an escalating series of crimes. I still picture the laughing little red-haired boy who came to live with my parents as a baby. When he was two or three, I used to swing him through the air until we were both happily exhausted.
By the time he gets out this time, the state will have spent the best part of $1 million prosecuting, defending and incarcerating him. He absolutely deserves to be where he is, if not worse, but what a waste. During most of human history, he would have been hanged a decade ago for habitual thievery, or at least forcibly transported away to a distant wilderness.
I’d hate to see him hang — though I’d hate it far more if some innocent person eventually dies in one of his stupid misadventures. But I do dearly wish the world had more vacant continents where aimless felons could be shipped away to productively labor, far from the rest of us.
From a pure cost-efficiency standpoint, perhaps work camps that actually instilled worthwhile post-release job skills would be a better way to go than prisons. However, I’m also sympathetic with those who resent devoting much effort to training inmates when law-abiding young people have to pay for their own vocational training.
Maybe prison is sufficiently awful to punish and deter some people, but its threat has obviously been too limp to keep my own relation and many others from bouncing back time after time. Nor has addiction counseling been of any lasting help for him, though the optimist in me hopes that it keeps some others off the prison treadmill.
***
One of my best friends is a gifted criminal-defense lawyer. He started out as an idealistic liberal but now is quite conservative. A decade or so into his career, he abandoned opposition to the death penalty. He had met evil men with no possibility of parole whose predatory predilections were only just kept in check by the disagreeable prospect of death row if they killed a guard or fellow inmate.
My friend is not a fan of prosecutors but corrected me immediately after I ranted about the glacial pace of prosecuting Brian Brush for the broad-daylight slaying of Lisa Bonney in Long Beach. He told me that if a criminal defendant is acting “goofy,” the prosecutor and judge have zero option but to send him away for psychiatric assessment and treatment as often as it takes. To do otherwise invites certain successful appeal of any resulting conviction.
Likewise, Brush’s attorney’s decision to plead him “not guilty” is 100-percent standard operating procedure. Although it might seem a waste of time in a case like this with many witnesses, a “guilty” plea means the defense doesn’t get to discover precisely what the evidence is. This would inevitably lead to a successful appeal based on “ineffective assistance of counsel,” according to my friend.
Brush is in prison while he awaits trial. He appears to find living to be terrible torture. Good. So long as he stays there forever, maybe our creaky legal system actually is delivering some sort of justice.
Nevertheless, patience wears thin when it comes to the seemingly endless series of delays surrounding the Brush case. It is time to wrap it up.
Winter brings memories of a drier shore
The mid-19th century name for the Long Beach Peninsula was Weather Beach, which I’ve always figured was abbreviated from its truthful secret name of Oh My God We Have Horrible Weather Beach.Living as I do between places with the dis-enticing names Cape Disappointment and Dismal Nitch, you’re on fair warning that you’ll be buying more mink oil to waterproof your boots than suntan lotion for your skin. (We love it here anyway, though perhaps not so much in December and January.)
Microclimates are one of the defining natural phenomena of this area and exist in distinct contrast to the Rocky Mountains, where I grew up. There, roughly identical glorious or abominable weather is likely to simultaneously dominate thousands of square miles. Here, a short distance from the Pacific or Columbia can be the difference between lovely picnicking conditions and needing to call out search-and-rescue.
This first came to my attention when attending Oysterville events — August’s Jazz and Oysters and the sadly long-defunct croquet tournament at the Espy House around Labor Day. Like passing through a magical veil, heaven’s golden orb would be shining in O’ville with a gentle breeze lapping the shore of Willapa Bay, while a mile west a cold rag of foggy rain clutched the ocean beach like a miserable harpy.
For five years in the 1990s, I commuted 45 minutes each way to the blissful riverside area of Altoona in Western Wahkiakum County. (Once centered on a couple salmon operations, modern-day Altoona is too spread-out to even be called a village. And technically, I lived in the Altoona suburb of Pigeon Bluff.) Despite being on the river, it’s far enough east of the ocean to escape the brunt of our maritime climate. Sitting out on my deck on a sunny weekend, I’d sometimes observe a monstrous fortress of clouds rearing up just west of Astoria Bridge, soaring from ground level to a thousand feet. Was I smug to be on the clear side of it? Yep.
Though not much further inland than Astoria, Altoona benefits from a southern and westerly exposure, and feels markedly warmer than the north-facing Oregon shore. It is so temperate and suspended in perfect quiet seclusion that on a summer’s day you can hear the blackberry vines humming prickly little songs of joy.
Back in 1995 or so, I wrote “My grass is intoxicated by all this steamy July sun and it makes my peasant heart feel strong to push through it, watching as breezes from off the Columbia ripple across the man-high stalks, sending pollen ghosting through the heavy air.” Contrast this with our summer of 2010, when I’m unsure there were sufficient heat units at the beach to even produce much pollen or enough dry days for it to drift more than three feet.
Living in Ilwaco now, it was so sloshy outside over much of Thanksgiving weekend that we stayed in and re-watched DVDs of some of the “Lord of the Rings” saga. I enjoyed the observation by Treebeard, one of the tree-like Ent people, that “I always like going south; somehow, it feels like going downhill.” That’s sort of how south-facing Altoona feels — just naturally amiable toward living things.
But starting in 1997, what was a manageable lifestyle choice for a bachelor became unacceptable isolation for a couple with a new baby. Rosburg Store, five miles away on our serpentine dead-end road that I can still navigate at an average of 45 mph, was an absolute lifeline. Stalwarts there like Mike Swanson and Rosalee Eaton have my undying gratitude for countless friendly greetings, gallons of milk, fresh produce, gasoline and Lorna Doone shortbread cookies. But hypoallergenic baby formula was an additional half an hour away and we eventually made the move to town.
The Center for Rural Affairs recently issued reports on the disappearance of many such country stores, with dire consequences for their communities. Loss of the store becomes a self-fulfilling calamity, with people avoiding living in a place because it lacks convenient access to food, and potential storeowners avoiding locating there because of a declining pool of customers.
“Rural grocery stores are more than food retailers … they are also economic drivers, community builders, employers and meeting places. Unfortunately, many rural communities across the nation are losing local grocery stores, and residents are forced to leave their communities to purchase food, often at great expense due to great distance.”
This seemed in the cards for Rosburg for a time, but the store was recently purchased and reopened. I hope everyone out there is helping it succeed.
Just maybe, Altoona will get its own general store again when I retire. We’ll blow up the road to Wal-Mart and bring back the riverboat General Washington. My store will have a pot-bellied stove. Chicken bone candy, RC Cola and corncob pipes will always be in stock. I’ll learn to whittle.
Finding grace at the turn of winter’s tide
Instead of marking the first dire embrace of winter, solstice last week really is when things began to wake up. If the year were a day, this isn’t midnight but dawn. The sun’s first magical soul-warming sliver is now peeking over the black horizon. Sleepily but steadily, we are sauntering back toward summer.This is especially true in northern Pacific coastal latitudes like ours where the swirling ocean maelstrom spawns monstrous storms on a timetable that doesn’t heed the modern calendar. If you’ve just moved here, don’t despair — we’re actually toward the end of the worst, not at the beginning. Our howling winter runs about Halloween to Valentine’s Day.
It is, of course, spitting in fate’s face to write this. The North Pacific is brazenly capable of erupting into perfect awfulness at any point between now and at least April. But usually by Dec. 21, odds steadily dwindle for the sort of demonic events that suck all the air out of your lungs and try to punch you over the cliff edge.
If you don’t believe me, leading University of Washington meteorologist Cliff Mass wrote last Wednesday: “Real Northwest winter starts roughly the first week of November and roughly ends the last week of February, so we are now approximately midway. Congratulations! By real winter, I mean the period we typically get serious weather — the big windstorms, rainstorms, flooding, snow events, etc. Yes, I know — it can be cloudy and grungy into June, but if you look at any of the statistics, we rarely get the big stuff after March 1.”
To be more precise, Mass places the start of Northwest spring on Feb. 23. By then, around here we’ll already have happy daffodils in bloom. Spunky skunk cabbage — possessing a sort of chemical furnace to sensibly create their own internal warmth — will be greening local wetlands and creek bottoms.
So rejoice — this is not only Christmastime, but the turn of the tide.
***
In “The Winter Evening” (1785), William Cowper captured the right spirit in which to traverse the brief but occasionally bleak weeks immediately ahead.
I crown thee King of intimate delights,
Fireside enjoyments, home-born happiness,
And all the comforts of the lowly roof
Of undisturb’d retirement, and the hours
Of long uninterrupted evening, know.
If something about the cadence or feeling of this poem fragment seems familiar, maybe it’s because it literally comes from the same neighborhood as “Amazing Grace.” One of those hymns that transcend organized religion, “Amazing Grace” is attributed to Cowper’s collaborator, pastor and friend John Newton.
Written to accompany a sermon on New Year’s Day 1773, it was always meant to comfort and inspire “plain people.” Two-hundred thirty-eight years later, “Amazing Grace” is still powerful. I won’t quote it all here, but its last stanza fits well with my wintery theme:
The earth shall soon dissolve like snow,
The sun forbear to shine;
But God, who call’d me here below,
Will be forever mine.
Tragedies both loud and quiet are peppered through every month and day of every year, but two particularly sad Christmas week events have been gnawing on us in Pacific County.
A terrible Chinook tunnel accident left a nice young guy in a torturous fight for his life. A capsizing on Willapa Bay sent a young father to his grave, leaving behind a widow and a little boy too young to remember anything about his daddy but whiskers and the faintest hint of a hug.
We need to brace these families up, along with all those who lost so much in the Astoria waterfront fire. Their need for us will continue long after the headlines have moved on. Most of all, they’ll need grace to lead them home.
posted by Mythtown @ 4:28 PM
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