Editor's Notebook: 2009

KKK in Kascadia

     Seeing the name Ku Klux Klan, most of us form an instant mental image of Southern lynch mobs and dumb white men mixing costumes with bigotry: angry skinheads in silly outfits.
     True enough, except that we enlightened and left-leaning Pacific Northwesterners also are part of the happy little KKK Klub, at least from a genealogical standpoint. The KKK’s robust role in Astoria’s 20th century history can be explored at the Clatsop County Heritage Museum. Broader themes surrounding organized racism in the Northwest states are the subject of a fascinating Web-based project at the University of Washington. (A summary and link can be found at uwnews.org/article.asp?articleid=45135.
     “We tend to associate images of Klansmen burning crosses, wearing white robes and holding public rallies with the South,” says study author Trevor Griffey. “But seeing some of the images we found and learning the stories of a secret society of white supremacists in Washington state shows that the Pacific Northwest also has a history of racism that we shouldn’t overlook.”
     Griffey explains that the KKK’s success in Washington and Oregon was part of a second wave of activity for this group, which began by opposing black participation in Southern politics and economics following the Civil War. The Klan came to dominate the Oregon Legislature in the early 1920s by demonizing southern European immigrants. It led a successful 1922 initiative drive to ban private Catholic schools in the state. On the national level, the Klan helped push restrictive immigration laws through Congress in 1924.
     After gaining such a claw-hold in Oregon, the Klan sought to bring its campaign to Washington, largely in the form of anti-Catholic Initiative 49, which was soundly defeated in 1924. But Washington can’t be too self-congratulatory, as the KKK lingered on here through much of the 1930s. The Klan didn’t die in the state until war was declared against its Fascist cohorts in 1941.
***
     I don’t know if Grandpa was in the Ku Klux Klan. Race hatred was deep as the sawdust in the Puget Sound mill where he drove log trucks for 30 years. The KKK’s venom flowed through Whatcom County’s veins long after the rest of Washington state bled it out. In a chapter titled “The Strongest Chapter in WA: Bellingham’s KKK,” Griffey tracks the outrageous and sickening achievements of the Klan in my family’s hometown and county.
     Old photos show parades with hundreds of hooded participants marching down Holly Street in the 1920s, a few blocks away from our family home in a working-class neighborhood on Iron Street.
     But proximity doesn’t imply support and everyone says Grandpa was a sweet old man. I like to think he was never bit by the KKK bug and belonged among the people represented by the Bellingham Reveille. Its editor wrote in 1924, “Drop the Klan, boys: It is looked down upon by tens of thousands of the best citizens of this state ... The Klan is the most inexcusable organization ever affected in this country.”
     The editor of the Astorian-Budget, Merle Chessman, also fought the Klan. “Eminent Astorians,” to be published in 2010, will contain a chapter on Chessman and Astoria’s Klan, by the late Prof. Sandra Haarsager of the University of Idaho.
***
     They didn’t wear robes and masks and ridiculous pointy hats in the Pentagon where Dad worked in the 1940s. However, despite their heroism in World War II and earlier conflicts, blacks were still seen by Dad and his fellow officers as mostly useful for scrubbing toilets and peeling potatoes.
     Dad’s reaction when my little brother started dating a gorgeous biracial musician? The stuff of sitcoms, unless you had to live through it. It speaks well of him that despite his own bigotry, he never tried to infect us kids with it. Like his father, Dad was a fine man, no Archie Bunker, but idiotic when it came to race. The same can be said of our nation.
***
     Barack Obama has his flaws. There’s no knowing at this point whether he’ll be a great president.
     But I’m tremendously proud to be alive to see his election. There is mercy and righteousness and opportunities for redemption in a nation that can so decisively turn its back on our legacy of prejudice.
     Our basic humanity resides in bearing witness and remembering. Seeing with our own eyes, telling stories — these are yeast to the bread of our souls. So my 11-year-old daughter and I will be in front of the nation’s Capitol in a few days. She will tell her grandchildren what she saw at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Obama in Baltimore

     “He grinned at me!” was my daughter’s exclamation that made all the logistical nightmares of our inauguration trip worthwhile.
     Arriving in Baltimore late last Saturday morning, we threw on all our warmest clothes and headed the five blocks uptown to City Hall, where Barack Obama, Joe Biden and their families were expected in four or five hours. It was about 15 degrees, part of the most bone-rattling cold snap on the East Coast in most of a decade.
     The excitement was palpable. Baltimore is one of our nation’s most African-American cities. Obama’s election is an occasion for joy on the scale of Mardi Gras, your first child’s marriage and winning the Lotto — all wrapped up like a big lumpy Christmas package. In fact, I feel much the same, and I’m only one percent African. All of us, of every color, want this guy to succeed.
     Thanks to our all-time favorite congressman, Brian Baird, Elizabeth and I are among those who will have a view of his inauguration. (I’m writing this the night before.) But I figured that if we were to have any chance of really seeing Obama closer than a couple thousand feet away, we’d better join our friends and brothers in Baltimore for his last whistle-stop en route to the capital. There were at least 100,000 spectators expected, but that seemed like an intimate party compared to the 2 million or so forecast for Inauguration Day in D.C.
     As it happened, it was just so darn cold that the Baltimore turnout was more like 30,000 to 50,000. Even after standing in a very, very long 16-block line, we managed to wiggle our way fairly close to the podium.
     Painfully Arctic as it was, the wait was sort of a fun rite of passage. We all laughed together as Aretha Franklin’s “Respect” began to blast through the loudspeakers. We were bursting into calisthenics and dances, partly out of jubilation and partly just to get some frozen blood moving through our veins.
     The chemical hand-warmers we bought at a hefty price from one of hundreds of entrepreneurs who circulated through the crowd came in extremely handy, at least in a psychological sense.
     Elizabeth joined the crowd in chanting “O-Bam-A” as the time for his appearance drew near. We happy mob would have been pleased to pelt Maryland’s governor with rotten Chesapeake Bay crabs as his introduction droned on.
     Finally, everybody’s enthusiasm ratcheted up and up and up. After several false alarms as other tall guys walked out through the doors, at last it really was Obama.
     His speech was widely reported and I won’t say much about it here. He joked that an over-heated global climate is a serious problem, “but not today.” He sounded a serious call for each of us to plan on making America fully as great as we all know it can be.
     One of the best parts about being in Baltimore is how open and friendly every single person is. And one of our many new acquaintances commented that seeing Obama is much less important than hearing him. Just being in the crowd and listening to the cadences and contents of his language are enough to make you feel that maybe, just maybe, he will be able to help us get the USA back on a better track.
     As soon as he appeared, the whole audience literally swelled with pride and enthusiasm, and our sightlines narrowed down. So I hoisted my thankfully petite girl onto my shoulders where she waved and swayed and shouted, a bright pink-jacketed kid rising above the rest.
     Across a rippling pond of humanity, blue eyes and brown ones connected. Obama gave her a warm smile. Or maybe he was just a politician grinning about a cheering throng. Naw … had to be looking at my gal.
     He’s got an awfully hard job ahead. We’ll see whether he’s really up to the task. I’m don’t think there’s anyone better qualified to bring us together. If it can be fixed, he’s the guy to do it.

Inauguration Day

     Instantly halting the kangaroo courts at Guantanamo: For me, perhaps a little more than for most, this symbolizes a faith-restoring return to normal in America. Our ‘”normal” is extraordinary. Here we are again, where we belong.
     Sitting in my hotel room this morning after Tuesday’s inauguration of Barack Obama, gazing out across toward Fort McHenry where Abraham Lincoln once unlawfully imprisoned one of my ancestors, it comes forcefully home just how resilient and yet fragile our system of laws really is.
     Legitimately great a president as Lincoln was, when faced with the enormous national crisis of the Civil War, he suspended the ancient Writ of Habeas Corpus. Like most Latin phrases that lawyers still throw around, this is just a convenient abbreviation for a straightforward procedure that allows judges to test the underlying legality of imprisonments.
     Lincoln didn’t want courts that were in some instances controlled by his political enemies to have any say about whom he locked up. My Great-great-great-granduncle John Merryman was among Lincoln’s detainees. Lincoln and Gen. George Cadwallader disobeyed a direct order from Supreme Court Chief Roger Taney to release him. While this constitutional crisis played out, Taney had furniture and home-cooked meals delivered to Merryman in his cell. Then as now, reason eventually triumphed.
     Standing among the multitudes below the U.S. Capitol, I was heartened to hear Obama say: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake.”
     Obama trusts our system of laws to arrive at a just result for the men who have until now faced detention without end in our Cuban concentration camp. So should we. There is no peril so great that we should compromise our basic principles; if we do so, the enemy has won.
     We’re not going to turn any really bad guys loose. We’re also not going to poison our democracy by behaving like tyrants.
     My reflections on Inauguration Day center on this history lesson for a simple reason: the leaders we watch on TV news are real, with all the flaws and qualities of people everywhere. They aren’t some electronic construct assembled for our viewing pleasure. They are working for us as a direct consequence of our simple act of voting. We deserve to demand the best of them.
     It perhaps says as much as anything can that there were no reported arrests of any of the 1.8 million of us who attended the inauguration, the parade and related celebrations. Mutual respect and joyful pleasure in one another’s company were the dominant emotions of the day.
     Just as I enjoy being out in a really energetic and muscular coastal storm, there was something elemental and powerful about being enfolded within such a great happy mass of humanity. We were a clean and frothy tide lapping the shore of the Capitol.
     President Bush, who has so isolated himself from the people and anything that might contradict his opinion of himself, couldn’t hide from the stormy chorus of boos that rumbled up the National Mall as he swaggered onto the national stage one last time. It was probably as close to justice as he will face.
     Just 24 hours after the event, Obama’s inauguration already has a growing feeling of legend. He’s no savior, though, just a human being like each one of us. What comforts me is that he plainly knows this. He understands he’s not above the law. He understands that you need to show up at work in order to get the job done. He sees America for what it is: A land of good people who choose to be here, who define our own future with firm guidance from the mistakes and wisdom of the past.
     On Tuesday, Obama shivered in the same frosty sunlight as all of us, a man with a Herculean task ahead.

Village comes alive

     Tragedy is too small and trite a word to describe what happened to the Chinook Indian people beginning in the late 18th century. And yet the rediscovery of one of their ghost towns on the banks of the Columbia is uplifting, a joyous echo of a distant time.
     The past is replete with peoples remembered, if at all, only by name. Reading the works of Herodotus, the Greek historian who died circa 425 BC, is to be tantalized by whispers of European tribes of whom we know literally nothing. Even their bones have been ground back down into individual atoms.
     It was the Chinooks’ misfortune to be the most fortunate of the Pacific Northwest’s mighty tribes when the tsunami of Europeans rolled ashore with our alien technologies and microbes. It was a “War of the Worlds” without H.G. Wells to provide an ironic rescue. As the native leaders on the frontlines of invasion, the Chinook were first to profit from new trading opportunities and first to fall victim to our unfamiliar bugs, booze and land-ownership laws. Like the ancient civilizations of Herodotus, drowned beneath the Black Sea, the Chinooks’ cedar-plank houses and nearly every other trace of their culture vanished before anyone paid attention.
***
     Worldwide, massive development in recent years has destroyed countless archaeological sites. At the same time, however, before building is allowed to commence, many states and nations mandate archaeological surveys of potentially interesting sites. This was the happy accident that allowed scientists to sample the area just east of the Chinook tunnel in the winter of 2004-05 prior to planned realignment of Highway U.S. 101 to accommodate a new park for the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial.
     “Happy” isn’t a term most would have used at the time to describe the discoveries of Chinook ruins, artifacts and bones. For surviving Chinook descendents, it was another painful reminder of loss and a century of disrespect. For historical and highway officials, it was an entirely unwelcome surprise that interrupted plans long in germination for a suitable tribute to Lewis and Clark’s ultimate victory.
     But from an archaeological-dig standpoint, it was golden. Scientists including Douglas Wilson of Portland State and Astoria-based Brian F. Harrison found something that could eventually deserve World Heritage Site designation as a prime meeting place of cultures, one of the original Pacific Rim free-trade zones.
     “The Chinook Middle Village (qíqayaqilxam) site and its other components — Lewis & Clark’s Station Camp and the salmon cannery town of McGowan — are iconic of the change affected by the fur trade and the inevitable march of the Pacific Northwest into modernity,” according to a just-released report on the dig. “The site is on the cusp of history in the Pacific Northwest. It reflects a time when the Chinook at the mouth of the Columbia River were at the zenith of their power.”
***
     The biggest headline news from the report is that the remarkable one-eyed Chinook leader Concomly might have made his home there, at least during some times of the year. This is certainly plausible but can never be proven.
     More potent are revelations about the end of a culture whose complexities we can scarcely imagine. Having left no books, we must rely on traces in the soil in which to read about these people who were truly masters of their universe. There still is much to learn from these remarkable folks who lived so well here for so astonishingly long. Future non-invasive technologies will permit us to keep learning from Middle Village for generations to come.
     “The site is the earliest known archaeological site at the mouth of the Columbia River containing extensive information on the fur-trade era networks of interaction between Chinooks, other American Indians, and British and American traders,” the report reveals. Harkening to another of H.G. Wells’ books, this site is a time machine.
     The National Park Service and its partners now plan a riverside parkway south of the site, strictly minimizing any further disturbance of a sacred precinct that represents both crushing sorrow and transformative change.
     Pause here and reflect on the rise and fall of civilizations.

Who are we

     What tribe do you belong to?
     Identity, pride, prejudice, screams and spilt blood all hang in the balance.
     Many of us are generically European. Maybe this accounts for our envy of American Indians. Ironically, considering all we’ve put them through, we now think it would be pretty cool to be able to say with certainty “I’m Cherokee,” or any other tribe somebody’s heard of.
     Being able to identify our ethnic heritage as Russian or Italian or Croatian is about the outer limit of modern self-knowledge. Going beyond this has seemed like trying to distinguish individuality in the tiny dark brown specks mixed throughout French vanilla ice cream.
     And yet we’re starving for any genuine context in which to place our lives. Nobody wants to be plain white bread, or even plain rye bread for that matter — Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s amazing “African American Lives” investigations on PBS provoke tears by giving back to American blacks a precious sliver of their pre-slavery past.
     This Tuesday, some 80 percent of Americans of all colors claimed to be Irish, at least for the day. This speaks to a need for connections, not merely a lame excuse to drink too much Guinness. Ireland has to be the all-time favorite place to be from, but in fact there are folk festivals and revivals hither and yon devoted to every ethnicity in creation. We all want to know what great-great-grandpa used instead of pants and sample whatever disgusting peasant dish great-great-grandma fixed for Whit Sunday.
     It’s easy to forget that designations like “English” and “German” are recent innovations. Until a century ago, ethnic loyalties still belonged much more firmly to areas than to nations. Inhabitants once identified themselves as Cornish, Bavarian, Prussian, Cockney, Geordie, Umbrian and hundreds of other increasingly diluted regional bloodlines.
     Go more centuries back and the concept of nationality disappears altogether. Britain, for instance, was split between at least 20 squabbling tribes — the Regnenses, Catuvellauni, Trinovantes, Belgae, Iceni, Parisi and many others great and small. Divergent peoples were even more tightly packed elsewhere in Europe. It will come as no surprise that the incessantly warring region east of the Adriatic Sea was home to something like 40 tribes before the Roman conquest, everyone from the Abri to the Iapydes and the Pirustae.
***
     You might think it would be impossible to unravel exactly where your ancestors fit into this ethnographical mess. And you’d be right. But almost month by month, we’re gaining steady ground on the genetic past, to the extent that at least a little bit of your ancestry may be trackable back into the far corners of time.
     Geneticists, many of them dedicated unpaid amateurs, pore over compilations of individual test results from companies like Google-offshoot 23andme looking for patterns. The amount of data has exploded in the past year, breaking monolithic population structures into smaller chunks that are starting to look a lot like traces of the ancient tribes.
     For some of we in America, who may not even have a well-founded idea what direction our immigrant ancestors sailed from, these tests can show where most of your family started out. Now, if you’re half Chinese and half Swede, this mapping will split the difference somewhere in Siberia and you’ll be even more confused. But if you’re basically European and have always wondered whether your family is primarily Irish or mostly French, your answer is within easy reach.
     When it comes to learning which of the ancient tribes you have some affiliation with, we still have a long way to go. For one thing, we just don’t have enough test data from every little inbred valley. The time is coming when we may.
     Before you get tested, a tremendous amount can be learned at dna-forums.org, where a free sign-up provides access to the best available free-form online course on this subject. As on any occasion when discussing people’s basic sense of self, things get extremely heated at times. (Were the membership not scattered across the globe, duels would be fought over the heady issue of Neolithic versus Paleolithic repeopling of Northwest Europe by the now-dominant “R” haplogroup.) But members are always nice to beginners.
     Precisely who we are is a confusing muddle, so don’t get into this expecting any lightning-like strokes of illumination. Even so, you are guaranteed a richer life and a far better understanding of your family’s long slog around the wide world.

Surviving the flu

     The sudden scare over swine flu may turn out to be only a scare for most Americans but deserves our serious attention anyway.
     About 36,000 Americans die each year from flu and its complications. So the fact that several dozen flu victims have succumbed in Mexico City in recent days is personally tragic but might not even make the local news were it not for this being a new strain. As such, those it kills tend to be healthy young adults rather than the already sick and vulnerable.
     It is not especially shocking that this new flu first developed in pigs. As it happens, similar influenza viruses infect pigs, poultry and people. Flu fairly routinely incubates in pigs and/or chickens and ducks before getting passed onto humans. Sometimes, it develops the ability to efficiently pass from one person to another, and sometimes not.
     Scientists have noted that roughly three times per century, a fresh new kind of flu comes swinging out of the animal kingdom and causes what is called a pandemic. Whereas an epidemic might sicken a noticeable number of citizens in a town or a state, a pandemic can encompass a continent or even the entire world. The last flu pandemic, a mild one, killed more than 30,000 Americans in 1968. By some calculations, we’re overdue for another.
     There is quite a bit of good news. Since the last really bad pandemic hit in 1918 — the so-called Spanish flu — incredible advances have been made in antibiotics, antiviral medications, respirators and public-health monitoring and management. In 1918 and 1919, many flu victims died of secondary infections — opportunistic illnesses like pneumonia that take advantage of patients’ weakened conditions. Now, when caught in time, there are good treatments for such infections.
     It’s also good news that we have been preparing for a flu pandemic for at least half a dozen years, since the H5N1 bird flu began killing a few people mostly in Southeast Asia. H5N1 has so far failed to achieve the genetic changes that would make it easily transmissible from one human to another. But in the meantime, governments around the world have been laying in stocks of antivirals and practicing their response to the flu threat.
     Although no immunization will be commonly available for the new swine flu strain for several months, there are other things we can do to protect ourselves. Follow your mom’s advice — wash your hands thoroughly after being out in public. Avoid rubbing your eyes, nose and mouth — these are where germs frequently enter. Stay home if you’re sick. Cough and sneeze into the crook of your arm.
     A big flu outbreak can take years to work its way through the population, during which time, maybe four out of five people won’t get sick at all and 98 percent of those who do will recover. It wouldn’t be surprising if this flu faded during the warm summer months and then returned with greater strength the following winter. That was the national pattern with the Spanish flu, which reaped 40 million lives worldwide in distinct waves.
     Here on the Peninsula, flu showed up in October 1918. Fort Canby army base at Cape Disappointment was placed under strict quarantine. Soon afterward, all churches, schools, dance halls, pool halls, theaters and other public gathering places were shuttered. The use of six-ply gauze masks was mandatory in the entire state of Washington that month.
     But by November 1918, residents here were congratulating themselves for getting off so lightly, chalking it up to the health benefits of cranberries. In July 1919, the flu returned with a fury and lasted through the year, before burning out by January 1920. There’s no easy way to tally-up total Spanish flu deaths in Pacific County, but if nationwide patterns held true here, mortality may have been as high as 60 out of a total population of something less than 15,000.
     A couple of letters I have from 1919 hint at the flu’s macabre ripples in this general vicinity. In one, the mayor of Seaside writes Clatsop County Judge T. Cornelius of “a woman Mrs. Wholer living close to the old rock crusher that is in poor condition. She has no money at all. ... She said her sister living in Idaho has been sending money until the last six weeks and at that time was very sick with the flu. Says she can’t hear from her sister at all... .”
     In another, the city of Warrenton asks Cornelius to intervene in stopping school children from “interfering with the body” in a washed-out grave. “I have not personally seen the gruesome sight but believe there is no doubt of the existence of the condition.” Clearly, awareness of the fragility of life was close to the surface in those frightening times.
     We’ll get through this, just as we always have in the past.

Hunt versus McCarthy

     A good flow of out-of-region tourists has begun to rise like sap in a gnarly old broad-leaf maple and flood out onto local streets.
     The Pacific Northwest’s riotous greenery is enough to send residents of my sere home state of Wyoming into the visual equivalent of a diabetic coma. I gave one such disoriented driver a wide berth the other day, as he struggled to parallel park amidst downtown Long Beach’s obstacle course of concrete planters and jaywalking looky-loos.
     Like all expatriated Wyomingites, I’m always quick to notice vehicle plates from there. We think of Wyoming as being a single small town linked by extremely long streets, and always half hope to recognize some long-lost college pal behind the wheel.
     As usual, my hopes were dashed and I didn’t know the Wyoming driver. But his bucking bronco license plates reminded me of my Grandpa Lafe Bell’s good friend and dentist Lester Hunt. It was Hunt who came up with Wyoming’s bronco logo back in 1935. It’s instantly recognizable worldwide, though I have to confess that until about age 12 I mistook it for a sort of Rorschach Test claw hand reaching up out of a bush.
     There is a Bell Road in my hometown of Lander (very short, just like Grandpa), but I bet very few people there know their airstrip, Hunt Field, is about the only thing honoring one of the community’s most famous residents. After all, just how many local dentists are there, anywhere, celebrated in an Otto Preminger/Henry Fonda movie and a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel? Should be enough to justify a statue, at least.
     Lander has loosened-up its bolo tie quite a bit in recent years, but only the traumatic Great Depression can explain how in 1933 such a bespattered cow town elected Hunt, a progressive Democrat, to the Legislature.
     Steadily advancing to become U.S. senator in 1949, Hunt immediately became bitter enemies with Wisconsin Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy, fighting a running battle against the Republican’s anticommunist tactics.
     “He is an opportunist, and liar, and drunk,” Hunt opined about McCarthy. Hunt said in 1951, “there have been many suicides due to the smearing received either in Committee hearings or from remarks made in the United States Congress.” He pushed federal legislation to strip members of Congress of their immunity against slander lawsuits, but of course it went nowhere.
     All this made the Wyoming freshman into a one-winged sitting duck.
     Though Hunt’s only known vice was having Grandpa take him trout fishing in the mountains near Jackson Hole, his 20-year-old son blundered into the trap McCarthy’s blackmailers were praying for, being arrested in Lafayette Square in D.C. for soliciting prostitution from a male undercover police officer. A pair of McCarthy’s loathsome Senate henchmen delivered an ultimatum, requiring Hunt to drop out of the Senate or else see his son destroyed.
     Hunt announced on June 8, 1954, that he wouldn’t seek reelection and killed himself 11 days later. Ironically, on June 9 the McCarthy era effectively ended when Army special counsel Joseph Welch confronted the bastard with his famous question, “Have you, at long last, no decency?”
     In 1959, author Allen Drury fictionalized Hunt’s death in “Advise and Consent,” which Hollywood turned into a major movie in 1962.
     We like to think we’ve progressed beyond McCarthy’s viciousness, though my fellow Wyomingite Dick Cheney’s campaign to discredit a Bush critic by wrecking his wife’s CIA career had something of the same flavor. It is amusing to see our old congressman on TV, trying to salvage the Republican brand. As a BBC commentator noted this week, “with him as its figurehead, the GOP will have as much success vying for lost moderate voters as a garlic seller at a vampire’s convention.”
     Even Cheney, however, isn’t vile or stupid enough to play the “gay” card anymore. I’m reminded of this whenever I see my old acquaintance NBC correspondent Pete Williams, outed in 1991 while serving as Cheney’s Pentagon press secretary. Cheney didn’t care about Pete’s love life and neither do I, nor about the Republican Miss California’s nudie pictures or opinions.
     The memory of Sen. Hunt lives on. I store some of my overflow keepsakes in his old footlocker at home. And Dick Baker, the U.S. Senate historian, plans to use the Hunt story for his weekly “historical minute” in early June before the Senate Democratic Caucus luncheon.

Living the G-rated life

     My daughter Elizabeth and I just watched the G-rated “Kit Kittredge: An American Girl” on TV and thoroughly enjoyed it. This surprised me. A movie based on “a long-running series of historically themed dolls” would seem unpromising, at best.
     It must have been conceived and filmed back when the economy still was all go-go-go, but resonates with themes that are salient today.
     “Kit Kittredge” is an innocent adventure placed at the outset of the Great Depression. It certainly doesn’t try in any documentary-like manner to capture the horrors of the early 1930s, but at least hints at how that awful implosion tore families apart and brought neighborhoods together. Making the Depression look infinitely more fun than it actually was, the movie also makes a sincere and effective point of showing that Americans were able to draw genuine comfort from one another by reaching out rather than withdrawing.
     Aspiring newspaper reporter Kit and her friends are appalled at the idea of their families having to sell home-laid eggs in order to dredge up a little mortgage money or, far worse, having their dads leave to seek work in other cities. They gradually come to accept and take pride in their self-sufficiency — though still horribly missing their daddies. (This reminded me of the underappreciated 1985 Disney gem “The Journey of Natty Gann,” in which a young girl played by Meredith Salenger makes her tortuous way across the country to Washington state in 1935 to reunite with her father. The quality of the video transfer is deplorable, but check it out anyway.)
     We aren’t exactly to the stage of making dresses out of flour sacks yet, and hopefully this lousy mini-depression won’t come to anything like that. For all the legitimate concerns over our obese budget deficit, if we manage to whistle past this wreck without everybody getting too bloody, it will be thanks to the prompt action of President Obama and his allies in Congress. But there’s no denying that there definitely are more “Eggz 4 Sale” signs popping up and families being uprooted by foreclosures and joblessness. People are hurting.
     Here in our county, the numbers of exhausted unemployment claims are climbing to levels unseen in decades. These are working people really at the end of their ropes, for whom options have scoured down to throwing themselves upon the mercy of relations and hitting the road for hypothetically greener pastures. But you’ll still find odd contrarians who argue the whole situation is being overplayed — I’m not sure what planet they sleep on, but it sure isn’t earth. They are certainly the same kind of people who would have bitterly opposed Social Security in the 1930s but complacently cash their checks today while bellyaching about socialism.
     Anyway, without going off on a rant on that subject, this is a time for simpler pleasures of family and home, a time to renew our appreciation for old tastes and ways of doing things. We can argue about politics and yet all enjoy my grandmother’s perfect comfort food, Southern Spicy Gingerbread:
     2 eggs — ¾ cup brown sugar — ¾ cup of molasses — ¾ cup of melted shortening — 2 ½ cups flour — 2 teaspoons ginger — 1 ½ teaspoons cinnamon — ½ teaspoon cloves — ½ teaspoon nutmeg — ½ teaspoon baking powder — 1 cup boiling water. Add beaten eggs to the sugar, molasses and melted shortening, then add the dry ingredients which have been mixed and sifted, and lastly the hot water. Bake 8 x 8 x 2 pan in 350-degree oven 30 to 40 minutes.
     My Dad, another child of the Depression, treasured this and all his mother-in-law’s other recipes. Dad brought with him from that era an entire playful vocabulary of once-fashionable expressions that are now rapidly fading from comprehensibility but which deserve a new lease on life. He was always popping up with a “jumping Jehoshaphat” or “whole kit and kaboodle.” (See www.worldwidewords.org for complete translations of these and other terms.) I don’t think I ever heard anything more profane than “darn it” pass his lips. Let’s get back to such good-hearted naiveté.
     At the other extreme, we in the word business also find the Web site www.sex-lexis.com helpful for translations of unfamiliar terms. Who knew humans were so dirty-minded? But speaking of old-fashioned pleasures, we mustn’t neglect “sheltering under the pink umbrella,” “dancing the reels o’ Bogie” and “a bit of how’s yer father.” All forms of cheap entertainment — so long as they don’t involve “a nymph of the pavement.”

Close encounter

     “What the hell are you doing?” I asked, quizzically. “Yes, you! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
     He oozed over behind a small mound of dirt and resumed his obnoxious, loud-mouthed complaining.
     “I can still see you,” I said, and he froze again, a perfect picture of schizy antagonism and curiosity.
     Coyotes aren’t used to being spoken to. Manners aren’t their strong suit. But maybe they think the same of us.
     I’m accustomed to glimpsing coyotes in quick sideways or rear-end profiles, dashing across the highway and vanishing into blackberry thickets, focused and intent as if they are delivering a crucial message to the queen from a general on a distant battlefield.
     You can roughly gauge a species’ intelligence by counting corpses in the road in the morning. Around here, this suggests opossums are the dumbest, followed by porcupines, deer, feral cats, raccoons and the odd beaver. Ever seen a run-over coyote? Neither have I. Judging by city TV news items, even humans must have a lower roadkill-IQ than coyotes — we’re constantly finding innovative techniques to get ourselves backed over in the driveway.
     While taking their sharp wits into account, it was surprising to find one standing up on its hind feet haranguing me on Tuesday as I walked the dogs down our favorite forest path between home and the ocean. Although we’re habituated to discreetly steering clear of the sleuth of bears that inhabits our hills and garbage containers, packs of coyotes are a new and unnerving phenomenon.
     A few days earlier, I observed four coyotes dashing along behind one of our neighbor’s goofy boxer dogs like greyhounds in hot pursuit of a mechanical bunny. They broke off the chase when they caught wind of me, but I suspect the boxer still has its tail between its legs. Keeping it at home instead of wandering around unsupervised in the woods would be a good option.
     My talkative coyote, which probably has plenty of bite to accompany its bark, might be protecting newborn spring pups, or it might simply be bored and emboldened by the savage Battle of the Boxers. It really was standing up, at least for a few moments at a time, and barking at us — all big ears and bluster. Out in the open, it stayed a good 50 feet away, but in the deep woods I could tell it was much closer and began to fear for my dogs’ safety.
     Back in the Rocky Mountains, where I grew up, we all smiled with pained forbearance when sheepmen launched into another arm-waving tantrum about the varmints killing innocent livestock. By some strange cicumstance, ranchers received government compensation if predators were involved, but nothing if their lambs just up and died, as they are wont to do. (By the way, every true Westerner pronounces it Ky-oat, not ky-oatie.) This led to the mocking bumper sticker, “Eat lamb: 10,000 coyotes can’t be wrong!” which eventually proved so popular that the industry adopted it as an advertising slogan. Maybe, though, they weren’t completely crazy after all.
     Here on the Peninsula, recent complaints about aggressive coyotes led to an information session in April by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. The gist of it was that “Yep, we sure have a mess of them,” and “Nope, there’s not much anybody can do about it.” In an interesting side note, the officers said a lot of local cat and small dog disappearances actually can be pinned on eagles, not coyotes.
     My mother suggested I start carrying a shotgun on my walks, and back in the old days, I would have. Besides intimidating any overly frisky coyotes, every so often a grouse takes flight in the underbrush, always making me jump and think of how best to fix her for dinner. But somehow I suspect any tourists encountering a shotgun-toting local accompanied by his mangy curs on the Discovery Trail would speed-dial 911 on their cell phones — and I don’t want to end up in my own police dispatch report.
     In his online “Living With Wildlife” series, the always sensible expert Russell Link advises carrying a starter pistol to scare them off — coyotes, I mean, not tourists, though I suppose it would work for them, too. See all his wisdom on the subject at wdfw.wa.gov/wlm/living/coyotes.htm.
      Finally, it always bears remembering that coyotes have been here a lot longer than most of us have. Chinook Indian legends tell of learning all the do’s and don’ts of salmon fishing from Coyote — who learned them by questioning his own articulate excrement.
     This is a species that can use some lessons in couth, but outsmarts us in every other way.

Good-omened bird

     My 1960s summer experiences of slipping sleepily along wee creeks splayed out on patched rubber inner tubes still sparkle on the skin of my brain. These are glistening sunbeams of memory, illuminated little keyholes that allow me to peek through a decrepit door at a shy and innocent time.
     A daring leap and a loud holler would carry you over some of these lazy capillaries in an arid watershed, skinny brooks for skinny boys. You’d be more likely to drown running through the sprinkler. Excitement wasn’t part of the experience, unless you bumped into a burrowing wasp’s nest up in the warm mud where thirsty pasture sod curled out into the void as if reaching for a drink. Then you paddled madly like a startled mallard, or more likely stood up and sprinted for safety in the shin-deep puddles.
     The only serpents in the garden were water snakes that traced geometrically graceful arcs from bank to bank, hell-bent on grasshoppers and capable of delivering a strong enough pinch to discourage incautious handling. But Eden still had its devils, in the form of we pesticating rascals, floating through July with chores done and eyes peeled for any chances to explore the more-forgiving outer edges of trouble.
     There’s nothing much we did that was sinful or hurtful, but one weedy patch of guilt and regret is still rooted in those times. We broke some swallows’ nests.
     Drifting under a thick concrete slab that passed for a bridge out on the reservation, our curiosity fastened onto the clouds of cliff swallows and their improbable adobe houses, pasted to the under-girders like an organic cross between Anasazi ruins and hippies’ geodetic domes.
     Oh, the shame of thrown rocks. I’d like to go back and wring my scrawny neck. It was far from a full-out holocaust — more like three or four nests and their precious cargoes of eggs, but that’s three or four too many.
     Just possibly slightly less stupid a man than boy, barn swallows now are welcome up in my eaves in Ilwaco, where they scouted out and colonized a hole beneath the gutter this spring. Slicing through the humid fresh Pacific air, lightning flashes of the purest, deepest sapphire, the swallows now seem to me to be personified spirits of luck and protection. I’ve yet to see a single mosquito within a thousand feet of home this year, though the no-see-um gnats appear to slip under the swallows’ radar.
     (A contrary view was held by my sweetly superstitious Great-Grandmother Jessie Alton, who couldn’t abide swallows in the house because she believed they brought in bedbugs. Odd to say, I’ve recently learned that dense colonies of swallows do indeed sometimes cause infestations of swallow bugs, which rather resemble bedbugs and will bite humans if no birds are available.)
     It is a minor consolation of the ongoing great recession to observe other swallows feeding their nestlings up in the virgin eaves of otherwise lifeless spec houses, elegant young squatters making the best of another species’ profligate ways. It is an ill foreclosure notice that brings nobody any good.
     By mid-September, they’ll be away to the river valleys of Central and South America — wise birds.
     My affection for swallows has ancient roots. A book from 1650 on the folk customs of the English noted “Though uselesse unto us and rather of molestation, we commonly refrain from killing Swallows, and esteem it unlucky to destroy them.” Similar beliefs survive even from the old Romans, who held them sacred. In the century-old “The Swallow Book,” Prof. Guiseppe Pitre of the University of Palmero recounts many priceless legends about this “good-omened little bird of gladness and of joy.” (See http://tinyurl.com/nu2ffk)
     Pleased to think the best of them, perhaps my favorite of the professor’s stories is this:
     Accidentally tangled in a frayed line above a Paris street, an exhausted swallow cried out to her surrounding flock.
     “After a while they seemed to hold a noisy consultation and one of them evidently hit upon a plan to free their companion and to make it known to the others. For all at once they set to work. One after another they flew swiftly to the knot and gave it a blow with her bill in the same spot. In about half an hour the string was broken and the prisoner set at liberty. The swallows remained about the place until evening, flying about and chattering as if congratulating themselves upon the success of their maneuver.”
     Along with intelligence and compassion, for my sake, I’m thankful forgiveness also evidently is part of the personality of the swallow.

Classes collide

     Put a semi-reasonable police sergeant up against any Harvard academic in any context whatsoever, from cage fighting to a hotdog-eating contest, and Americans of every color are likely to side with the sarge.
      Now I happen to have tremendous respect and even affection for Prof. Henry Louis Gates Jr., whose PBS specials about genetics and “African American Lives” were profoundly moving.
     But golly, Cambridge, Mass., police Sgt. James Crowley wasn’t being wildly out of line asking Gates for his identification after a neighbor responsibly reported a potential break-in at Gates’ home. I would be grateful to have police promptly come and check on such a suspicion, and far more annoyed if they just blew it off.
     Where Crowley went overboard was by charging Gates with disorderly conduct. This law essentially gives police the ability to arrest someone for exercising free-speech rights in public in a manner the officer finds offensive.
     As reported in the Los Angeles Times, “Crowley said the professor was ‘yelling very loud’ and ‘accusing me of being a racist.’ Complaining that the ‘acoustics of the kitchen’ made it difficult to communicate, the officer said he ‘told Gates that I would speak with him outside.’ Once on the front porch, the officer arrested Gates for being loud and abusive in the presence of several neighbors who had gathered on the sidewalk.”
     Even considering the prevailing national prejudice against intellectuals, everybody should be irritated about this. The jet-lagged Gates was rude, but rudeness isn’t a crime. It seems kind of sneaky to have gotten him outside where he could be handcuffed and hauled away for it.
     Of course, you get back what you put out. Sensible and polite people don’t pick big, loud fights with police. Black or white doesn’t really enter into it.
     Racial profiling by authorities is a legitimate issue of concern, but in a way I wonder if a more interesting sub-text of the Gates-Crowley-Obama “beer summit” meeting last Thursday isn’t the class system in America. We continue to pretend everyone is equal here, but this is drivel, as I was reminded while browsing the interesting www.eupedia.com discussion forum.
     In this context, the Gates-Crowley conflict is about the collision of two worlds, of two men both powerful within their own spheres who were unable to play well together. Their friction had less to do with race than with the fact that Harvard professors basically have absolutely no familiarity with police and that each man felt disrespected by the other.
     With its lords and knights, we Americans still think of England as the rotten trough of the class system, but as an Economist article noted in 2006, “Recent international studies indicate that British social strata are a bit more flexible than America’s but more rigid than in many European countries.” In other words, a vast majority of Americans don’t fall far from the tree in terms of family status.
     As one Eupedia poster noted, “Social mobility depends more on the will of individuals to educate themselves beyond the family/school education, or start behaving differently from one’s family. This is mostly against human nature…”
     Born into what sounds at best like unexceptional circumstances in West Virginia, Gates bucked human nature to rise to the top of his field, wielding tremendous influence on contemporary society. After a humble start, he now is in the upper class, despite the traditional disadvantage of being black. President Obama’s trajectory can be described in exactly the same terms, and it’s no wonder he initially sided with Gates instead of the well-regarded middle-class cop.
     For all his dopiness and hypocrisy, President George W. Bush successfully played this game to the hilt, with his aw-shucks regular-guy manner — never mind his background of extreme privilege and favoritism for the ultra-wealthy.
     The same Eupedia poster observed that although it’s obvious that classes exist in every society, American people don’t really understand how the class system works and do not exactly know where we are compared to others. One consequence of this is that we keep electing Bushes even though doing so is patently contrary to our own best interests, somehow seeing “W” as “one of us.”
     Aside from being a triumph over old race-based attitudes, Obama’s election marked a rational return to placing our trust in someone who isn’t afraid of appearing intelligent. I, for one, still like and trust him. But if he hopes to get re-elected, he better learn not to impulsively throw his lot with the elite guy, black or not.

Mining a rich vein

     Although my Great-grandfather William Giles was the last of our family to make a real living by mining gold, on some level we still regard ourselves as miners. Written in our veins is knowledge about how to tickle mountains until they split a seam and let us crawl inside.
     Just as hereditary fishermen’s descendants probably can’t grasp how anyone could be discomforted by floating atop the fathomless ocean aboard a mere chip of a boat, most of my family has no particular problem being underground. On an intellectual sort of level, I can vaguely imagine how some might feel oppressed by having a great weight of rock overhead, but it just doesn’t pertain to us. I almost find it comforting, in some weird way.
     This doesn’t mean being reckless. Just as any sensible fisherman won’t go to sea in a rotten boat, hard-rock miners are maestros at setting support timbers and other structures designed to provide a modicum of safety from cave-ins. I recall elaborate Sunday dinner discussions of the arcane fine points of this craft.
     Hard-rock miners are like fly-fishermen, regarding all other forms of mining as being practiced only by unrefined amateurs. In particular, open-pit mines, in which the earth is methodically stripped away until you reach the ore or coal, is dismissed as totally undignified grunt work.
     My great-grandfather further described himself as a quartz miner, as this especially hard substance is frequently where you find gold. Veins of gold-bearing quartz will capriciously narrow to a finger's width and plunge at a steep angle beneath countless tons of dross. Long before there was anything formally called “cost-benefit analysis,” miners agonized about whether to pursue these leads, never knowing if the vein would open back up or peter out, or become richer or poorer in gold content. As men weighed these prospects, weeks of hard labor, crushed fingers and gallons of sweat hung in the balance.
     There are quite a few ways to get gold out of quartz or whatever it’s contained in, about the easiest of which is panning. On a small scale, this requires grinding the ore to powder with a mortar and pestle — basically a big steep-sided iron bowl and a heavy iron club. The resulting fresh rock powder, which has a distinctive, not-unpleasant burnt odor, is then swirled around in a shallow steel pan. The gold, being far heavier than most other materials, sinks to the bottom, as more and more of the lighter waste is panned off. Panning doesn’t work for industrial-scale gold extraction unless you have a heap of cheap labor, but it’s still used for prospecting and by hobbyists.
     My Dad, who used to work in his Grandfather Giles’ mine, was a great panner. But to his eternal annoyance, Shorty Haddenham was better. Shorty was just about what the Looney Tunes cartoon character Yosemite Sam would be if translated into real flesh and blood, a smelly misanthrope who lived in deplorable conditions in a trailer down a gulch near Atlantic City, Wyo., near where my family owned the grand old Duncan Mine. Shorty could separate gold quicker than anybody I ever saw, though I guess his bad habits kept him poor.
     Staying poor is the perpetual complaint of most gold miners. Having tried my hand at it as a teenager, I know full well that there’s “a lot of hill on them, thar gold.” But with it still hovering in the $950-an-ounce range, even a quarter ounce a day would make for a pretty decent wage. Nice to have as a fall-back position in case the economy ever goes totally kaflooey.
     This doubtless accounts for the reaction last Wednesday when I stopped at the Josephine County (Ore.) Historical Society to ask about records of my family’s mine on Oscar Creek near Grant’s Pass. The lady at the desk smiled and said, “There’s sure been a lot more interest in the old mines, recently.”
     Though the property title is over burdened with complexities by now, great-grandpa was on a very promising vein when he closed up the tunnel back in 1936. He figured Dad would soon be out of the Civilian Conservation Corps and back to restore the riches our family lost in the financial panic of 1873. Great-grandpa died in 1938, and World War II, law school and family life intervened. Dad never reopened the mine.
     And so it still sits, forgotten by all but me and you, guarded over by the rattlesnakes of southwest Oregon. Your fortune awaits.

Lessons from 1902

     Gone are the days when the editor of a Seattle newspaper would opine in print that a colleague in Bellingham was a “contemptible whelp.” We’re much the poorer for it.
     Looking for a better idea of what my family’s hometown was like when Grandpa Winters moved to northwest Washington in 1902, I’ve been taking keen pleasure in reading the Weekly Reveille from that era.
     Back then, multiple newspapers served Seattle, Astoria and most other significant Western cities. Far as I can discern, the Reveille was a relatively even-handed paper for the then-separate towns of Whatcom and Fairhaven, while the Bellingham Herald catered more to the area’s Democrats.
     Maybe they were all secret lodge brothers who played up their vitriol for the amusement of subscribers, but Col. A.J. Blethen of the Seattle Times and the editors of both Bellingham papers seem delightfully intent on thrashing one another into bloody ribbons. It makes for voyeuristic enjoyment, like watching muscular tykes duke it out on the schoolyard.
     In the papers I’m perusing at the moment, Blethen is all lathered up by Bellingham Bay’s claim to have more than the population of 9,135 reported by the Times. Blethen’s letter dismissing the protests of local boosters is “a perfect hemorrhage of invective and defiance,” according to the Reveille, noting “an intimation that he is not the most wonderful journalist the world has ever produced will drive him into a towering rage.”
     In these latter times when hardly anyplace has more than one surviving newspaper, most of us are too polite and cautious to lambast one another. This is too bad. Blethen’s descendents still produce spirited publications, but a majority of modern papers have all the character of reconstituted mashed potatoes and would only leach-out all flavor if used for fish wrappers. Any paper that lacks the guts to get into a cataclysmic pissing contest doesn’t deserve to survive.
     My grandfather would soon meet his future wife, whose own father sold oysters (and waffles!) at his place on Dock Street just down from the Reveille’s offices along Whatcom’s bustling waterfront. Their edition for July 31, 1903 reports on a Sunday outing by the Puget Sound & Eastern Oyster Co.
     “Oyster lands are valuable properties, being veritable gold mines from which a very large annual profit is always assured.” Yeah, right…
     Usually successful in keeping our names out of the papers unless we ourselves publish them, I haven’t yet come across references to any of my bunch.
     In an editorial praising President Theodore Roosevelt while at the same time teasing others who were being obsequious about it, the Reveille’s editor comments “Any ordinary man prefers a good licking to public flattery.” He goes on to note “the American people can honestly lay claim to the possession of good, strong common sense” that is quite capable of seeing through the chicanery and silliness of politics.
     Such everyday wisdom was much in evidence a couple weeks ago at U.S. Rep. Brian Baird’s Ilwaco town hall meeting. After all the nonsense perpetrated around the country in recent weeks by obnoxious twits intent on disrupting discussions of health-care reform, it was such a relief to be among serious-minded, good-mannered local people.
     This starts with Baird. It’s unfashionable to say anything nice about elected officials, but he’s not bad — a smart and moderate guy. (Striving to avoid flattery…) And the 250 or so citizens in attendance were, if anything, even more impressive. Admittedly, there were some misinformed opinions here and there, but people made up in sincerity anything lacking in their facts. (An actual fox is more knowledgeable about the health plan than Fox-TV, for example.) Overall, though, it was inspirational to see fellow citizens working together on a big issue.
     The only detraction was the town hall moderator, a tall, goofy-looking guy who obviously buys his clothes at the Salvation Army store at 9045 NE 177th Ave. in Vancouver. Let’s hope that next time Baird finds somebody who knows how to read. And has more hair…

Giving the dead her due

     It is the delicate art of the obituary writer to forever capture the essential outlines of a person’s life — the relationships, choices and fateful events that made him or her into what they were. Your obituary is the end of the story, probably the last significant time you will come to the attention of the living.
     The Peninsula is lucky in a variety of ways to have the undertakers we do, for one thing because Ron Hylton and Dan Hickey give obituaries the serious attention they deserve. Preserving their memory is an appropriate and just part of caring for the dead. If I had my way, these permanent records would be indelibly engraved on metal plaques and buried with people, so that bones unearthed centuries from now would come complete with stories.
     I am emphatically reminded of the finality and formality of obituaries each week when laying out that page. This person was alive last week and expected to still be so. And yet he or she is here with me now, taking a final bow. Occasionally, I spend half an hour fiddling with an old driver’s license photo or some image of similar poor quality trying to come up with a picture the departed would be unashamed of. (Do yourself a favor and have a decent portrait taken once in a while.)
     Many deaths are as certain as the arrival of winter and no more regrettable. We are fragile biological organisms. We die.
     And then there are the other kinds, the out-of-time deaths of violence, cruelty and arbitrary fate. It was a death of this corrosive and spirit-burning nature that bore down last Tuesday as I put Lisa Bonney’s obituary on a page. This intelligent-eyed, beautiful face framed by an obituary was someone I knew in a small-town “nodding in the grocery aisle” kind of way. My daughter attended the pre-school she once ran out of her former home and our kids sometimes rode the Star of the Sea bus together.
     Clues passed through my pages in recent months that all was not going perfectly well in her life. But these things happen and we mostly all move along past them. I couldn’t begin to guess that she would be gunned down just west of my office on a brilliant September afternoon — by a man we photographed her dancing with in July. She smiled confidently up at him.
     If ordinary death calls for my minor technical services and the funeral home’s indispensible and subtle concern, murder demands an entirely different order of care. You have only to visit Lisa’s condolences posted at penttilaschapel.com or engage any local in brief conversation to see how a crime of such magnitude is an assault on all. It can no more be “fixed” than any other death, but it absolutely requires redress.
     There is a lot that is ancient and tribal when it comes to our expectations of how crime should be dealt with, the all-too-slippery concept of justice. In America, we bind ourselves to an even-handed and fair process, making sure police follow strict constitutional rules designed to avoid abuses and shortcuts that once victimized some innocent suspects. In the end, we expect our near-priestly class of prosecutors and judges to guide juries toward the right decision.
     Hope springs eternal, but the outcome of homicide cases in Pacific County in recent years does not fill the public or law enforcement with enormous confidence. This literally may be a place where you can get away with murder, or at least not pay much of a penalty for it. I won’t take the time right now to provide an itemized account of local crime and punishment — that’s why I employ reporters — but suffice it to say that there have been some truly stupefying miscarriages of justice. It would go too far to lay all these problems upon the prosecutor’s office currently run by David Burke, but something too often goes wrong in the courthouse in South Bend.
     Although he invites tolerant smiles by never encountering a microphone he is unwilling to throw himself in front of, Clatsop County District Attorney Josh Marquis is a model aggressive prosecutor. His competence and gusto may not please everyone, but there’s little doubt that he’ll get a conviction and stiff sentence whenever he possibly can.
     For the sake of Lisa’s family, and for justice, I find myself making the inappropriate wish she had been killed in Astoria. Lisa’s is one of those unfortunate life stories that did not end with her obituary. Whenever I do get to write her last headline, I hope to do so with confidence that the dead has received her due.

Michaelmass berries

     It isn’t often nowadays that we might avoid eating something because the devil peed or spit on it, but after last weekend a local delicacy is off limits for just this reason. Or not, but it’s still intriguing to recall the legend.
     There’s always a race in the fall between the last sugaring blackberries and the cold October rains that turn them into hard gray kernels of fuzzy mold. Sour as rat poison throughout the summer and more seed than flesh, finally in September they plump up and dangle from the brambles like glistening bunches of juicy ripe grapes. The window of opportunity is narrow. They are at their best for about three weeks and then, after the first furious deluge, they’re done.
     By one reckoning, the 20 or so luscious ones I ate during my walk a couple weeks ago should already have been the last. After all, Sept. 29 was Michaelmas, the time-honored end of the season. But until England and her colonies finally bowed to international pressure in 1752 and shifted the calendar by 11 days, Michaelmas was Oct. 10. So it last this past Saturday that old folklore set as the real cutoff for blackberry picking.
     Besides becoming inedibly watery and corrupt as winter nears, this custom dates back centuries to when country people said Archangel Michael threw Lucifer from heaven down into a blackberry bush on Michaelmas, which he cursed and defiled while extricating himself. Just imagine the Prince of Darkness sputtering and plucking thorns from his backside — an altogether more satisfying image than the oh-so-heavy claptrap and brimstone of TV evangelists.
     In fact, most blackberry bushes are themselves a curse. With a few exceptions, those we encounter here are non-natives introduced from Europe in the 1800s. And as the University of Washington guide to invasive plants notes, “If blackberries have already appeared [on bare soil] it is important not to procrastinate; a patch can widen by 3 m [10 feet] or more a year, smothering every plant in its path.” They produce as many as 10,000 seeds per square meter per year, and seeds remain viable for a long time.
     Our love of blackberry fruit, if not the plants themselves, goes back forever. Haraldskær Woman, an Iron Age bog body dating from 2,500 years ago, had blackberries in her belly. An English botanical writer notes, “The fruit of the bramble is the blackberry, but in a strict botanical sense, the blackberry is not a berry. Each tiny juicy ‘blob’ on the blackberry represents a tiny fruit or drupelet, and there are many of them so it is an aggregate fruit… Blackberries have formed part of the human diet in Western Europe for thousands of years.”
     Even considering my affection for folklore, it’ll be impossible to resist this natural candy if I happen across more in coming weeks while strolling to where I visit with the river otters on south Willapa Bay. (Watched three juvenile siblings last week, mostly while they slid under the polished clear water like furry brown torpedoes, leaving pressure wakes on the surface that perfectly predicted where they would next pop up and peer back at me.)
     Maybe it was only the knowledge that they would be among the last I’d taste this year that made these blackberries so delicious, but my thoughts have revolved to ways to preserve this pure, ripe essence of summer. They freeze pretty well, of course, but since our freezer is full of a quarter of delicious homegrown Naselle beef thanks to the Bennett family, some other preserving method may be required.
     Turning as I often do to my great-grandmother’s “receipt” book, this looks like a novel option. Touted at the time (1873) as “highly beneficial in the bowel complaints of grown persons as well as children,” blackberry cordial calls for a mashed gallon of berries allowed to age for 10 hours. This pulp is then combined with two pounds of sugar, one-half ounce each ground cinnamon and nutmeg and two ounces of allspice. Add a few ounces of crushed raisins and bring the mix to a boil for 15 minutes. Cool and add a half-pint of brandy. Strain out the solids and bottle in airtight pint or half-pint bottles. “Use freely.” Enjoy it with roast goose, the traditional Michaelmas supper.
     Highly rated as an antioxidant and rich in folic acid, blackberries are good for us. But who are we trying to fool? They really just bring out the hunter-gatherer-child in us — delicious morsels of autumn, free for the picking, but mind the thorns.

Enjoy good scares

     The scariest thing I ever saw was a preview for a coming attraction in my sagebrush-town movie theater at about age 7. When a poor logger got crushed beneath a tree in the main feature it was upsetting enough, but what really gave me bad dreams was the trailer for some circa-1965 film in which somebody was buried alive in a coffin. It had a peculiar little window through which a silently screaming face could be glimpsed.
     Here I am 45 years later and it still gives me the willies.
     Secreted away by our retired Army colonel dad in a mountain valley far from the nukes and commies, my brothers and I were well sheltered even by the middle-class standards of the time. Biblical adventure stories in Episcopalian Sunday School were about as racy as it ever got for this choirboy. If I harbored vague suspicions that Samson and Delilah were getting up to something more than haircuts, darned if I knew what it could be.
     The Grand Theater had one screen and ordinarily one movie a week, though they occasionally slipped something else in for a Saturday matinee in the form of old cowboy shoot-em-ups, or horror films in the weeks before Halloween. It was regarded as a key benefit of being a Scout that a seldom-locked door linked our upstairs meeting room and the adjoining theater balcony. But gosh, we were Boy Scouts and couldn’t bring ourselves to cheat the theater out of their 35 cents. Nice having the option, though, and not exercising it made us feel noble.
     I admire the tenacious strategies of friends like Eric and Ann Wiegardt, who raised wonderful and sophisticated kids while nevertheless successfully buffering them from today’s wilder media environment. But homeschooling wasn’t an option for our two, and television presents a very slick slope when it comes to questionable content. There’s plenty we still won’t let our 12-year-old watch, but many mainstream, primetime shows today make reference to subjects that would have made my craggy-faced, gun-obsessed father blush like a 19th century bride.
     Sadly, in a way, my choirboy days are long over after enthusiastically embracing the twin temptations of girls and Coors at age 16. But without being prudish about it, wouldn’t it be nice to not have children subjected to ads for impotency drugs and snickering jokes about masturbation? Even knowing that the young are never as innocent as parents wish them to be, society preserves something worthwhile by allowing kids to be kids for as long as possible.
     In all likelihood, it will turn out to be an accidentally seen TV news item or something similarly unavoidable that attaches itself to my daughter’s memory like that coffin scene did to mine. Our psyches seemingly can’t help themselves from latching on to macabre and even repellent snippets of reality or imagination. Maybe being safely and vicariously scared provides a pleasurable little squirt of adrenalin. Or maybe it goes deeper than that, providing enticing clues into the nature of mysteries that lie beneath the familiar, staid surface of the known universe.
     Either way, this week is the annual grand finale of our society’s giddy flirtation with the dark side, as we count down to Halloween on Saturday night. Unfortunately, instead of giving anyone a genuine entry point for frightening insights about death, magic and mystery, it is mostly just another marketing event. Second only to Christmas as an excuse to drag out the credit cards, Halloween is all about over-priced plastic costumes and candy sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup.
     In sixth grade our teacher really did it up the right way, vapor bubbling down across the floor from dry ice in the punch bowl in her darkened room as she read us Poe’s “Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” I doubt there’s one of my classmates who doesn’t still treasure a shivery memory of the experience.
     This year, put family and fright back into the old Celtic celebration of Samhain, the last day of the year in ancient Wales, Ireland and Scotland, from where immigrants brought it to the New World. Build a fire and spend the dread night together reading stories. Let’s give our children more memories that will stick to their bones, and fewer sticky treats to rot their teeth.

Dance every dance

     “Oh, you foolish boys,” was my smiling thought as I watched my daughter’s first seventh-grade dance Wednesday, which was boycotted by several male classmates, presumably in a display of excess toughness.
     I know what I’m talking about, taking a backseat to nobody when it comes to gender-specific idiocy. Good golly, I was stupid.
     This was back in ancient times when battery-powered cassette-tape players the size and weight of adobe bricks were the most amazing technology that would never be surpassed. “I Think I Love You” by the Partridge Family was Billboard’s number 1 hit and that’s what we listened to on the afternoon school bus, along with assorted songs by Karen Carpenter, whom I still hope to meet in heaven.
     Our junior high dances were strictly daytime skirmishes, held in a brightly lit cafeteria festooned with crepe-paper streamers. The boys sat or stood on the window side, stealthily glancing at the opposing team across the room. Unarmed peasants ordered to storm a Death Star could have felt no greater anxiety than I did at the prospect of crossing that million-mile-wide minefield.
     Cross it I did, however, even managing a couple times to dance with my beloved. It subsequently turned out that she was human, though that still barely seems possible.
     Instead of hanging out and having a conversation, I hurried out as if going to a vital Student Council summit conference on U.S.-Soviet relations. I overheard two girls facing the dance floor by an open doorway, one of them asking “Did you see Matt Winters?” I rushed past, not wanting to learn whether they thought I was ridiculous or dreamy. Still don’t want to know. But wish I could whisper into my seventh-grade brain that there isn't any higher priority than staying right there and dancing every dance.
     Although some 2009 Pacific County boys are no smarter than I was in 1970, in other ways my daughter’s dance was far more evolved. In addition to being held after dark, thanks to the wise arrangements by teacher Debbie Denny there wasn’t any Israelis-versus-Palestinians separation between girls and boys.
     It also seemed to me that the kids were a lot more relaxed about the whole deal — or maybe they’re just better at faking it than we were. Everyone was dancing and having a fine time, even if there weren’t quite enough boys to go around for each song. And Taylor Swift even gives the Carpenters a run for their money when it comes to catchy love songs.
     All this sparked my mother’s memories of her own childhood experiences in a cavernous two-story Grange Hall, where people came from 20 miles in every direction for multi-generational hoedowns.
     I can hardly believe her report of it, but my grandparents were enthusiastic waltzers, whooping it up out on the vast oaken floor in the company of their fellow ranchers. Mom herself was the world’s biggest wallflower, she claims, though I bet with her fresh-faced beauty and spectacular mane of auburn hair she was the oblivious object of much unrequited lust. With Grandpa and Grandma in the room, the boys were no doubt quaking in their cowboy boots and slicked-back hair.
     Mom blames TV for killing off the great tradition of neighborhood country dances, but rumors of their demise are exaggerated. Maybe this will be the year I finally drag my own family out to the Netel Grange, where I believe the next event is calendared for Nov. 21.
     This foolish boy 40 years on from junior high probably still won’t be able to overcome self-consciousness. But dancing with my wife and daughter would certainly be a lifetime delight.

Kill Disappointment

     Watching “House” last week, I was struck by the curmudgeonly TV doctor’s observation that “Disappointment is anger for wimps. You don’t have to be so gentle about everything. It’s okay to get angry once in a while.”
     Crossing the silent but undeniable boundary into the concluding half of my life — perhaps quite a few years ago — has enhanced my appreciation for strong and unambiguous emotions. Anger still isn’t one that I find personally enjoyable, but it’s good to have it available, as an artist needs vivid vermilion paint on his palette, easily at hand when the situation calls for it.
     House’s remark also set me to thinking about a local geographical feature, Cape Disappointment. It’s such a disappointing, wimpy name. Almost any emotion is preferable. Expanding on House’s observation, Cape Anger wouldn’t be bad, at least having an honest strength to it. It certainly would be appropriate to describe this autumn’s violent ocean storms.
     Cape Fear is already taken, in North Carolina. But Cape Rage has a nice, unpleasant ring. It’s been taken, too, but just in Canada. Since they are the world capital of sublimated emotions, we could expropriate the name with no hard feelings, or at least none they would admit to.
     A few years ago, I concocted a plan to begin calling all the majestic sweep of beach from Tillamook Head to the mouth of Willapa Bay by the brand label “Discovery Coast.” I still like it, in a marketing sense, and have a feeling it’s slowly catching on. But Cape Discovery? A little too bland for the historic entryway to the epic Columbia River.
     Cape Fury? Cape Wrath? Cape Spite?
     How about Cape Passion? True, pure, enthusiastic passion about almost anybody or anything has to be one of the defining characteristics of a life well lived. It’s a name that would far better fit the hard-playing, hard-living clam diggers of the Peninsula.
     There will inevitably be an enormous fight over any such name-change. Arriving on the scene nearly 20 years ago, I began referring to my readership area in print as simply the Peninsula, with a capital “P,” to sidestep a long, snarling argument about whether it is the Long Beach Peninsula or the North Beach Peninsula — the latter a holdover from the days when Portland vacationers termed it that to distinguish it from the Clatsop beaches south of river’s mouth.
     In fact, even now, I hasten to say that people should continue calling our little sand spit whatever they wish; I just think it is time to expunge the name Disappointment from our gazetteers. It was always a stupid, mistaken name, attached to the cape by an English fur trader who was incapable of recognizing the entryway to a great river when he stumbled across it.
     I’m as superstitious as the next person, or more so, when it comes to names and many other subjects. For instance, I sincerely believe we impart a little bit of our spirit to the things we touch, symbolically or in the flesh, and that they leave a little of themselves with us.
     So I fear tagging such an important geographical feature with “Disappointment” has a slight but pervasive poisonous influence. We should aspire to greater, nobler feelings. It has been demonstrated that the names we give our children confer a kind of predestiny. People live up or down to their names. The same is true of places.
     Damn history. Damn tradition. Damn the cost of altering maps. Let’s get passionate about a fitting name for this remarkable cape, this place where land is born on the extreme edge of earth’s most monstrous ocean.

In praise of humble Christmases

     “Twas the night before Christmas, and we opened all the packages!”
     This was my brothers’ and my favorite parental expression when we were kids. Didn’t happen every year, but there were at least a couple times when our campaigns of begging, longing glances and present-rattling succeeded. Mom and Dad graciously allowed the wrappings to fly off on the evening of Dec. 24. (I use the word “graciously” with some reservation — maybe their emotions were more akin to the resigned French attitude toward invading Germans.)
     All that breathless waiting usually paid off in the form of a few of the toys we saw advertised on Saturday morning cartoon shows. We got Hot Wheels cars to send arrowing across the living room on hard plastic racetracks. And then there were literally red-hot contraptions that emitted a satisfying puff of carcinogenic smoke each time you molded your own synthetic rubber spider or day-glo monster.
     Just as today’s kids surely can’t envision a time when cartoons were only available for about four hours on Saturdays, they probably can’t imagine how important Christmas was when it came to toys and sporting goods. Mostly, if we didn’t get it at Christmastime, we just didn’t get it, period. There was, in other words, a lot of pent-up consumer demand in the 5- to 13-year-old age group. We were explosively interested in whatever was underneath that tree, like starving African villagers rioting at the tailgate of an international aid truck.
     Hardly any of it survives, but I keep a present from 1965 within easy reach on the knick-knack shelf beside my desk. An innocent rip-off of the 1964 James Bond movie “Goldfinger,” my Sixfinger is a flesh-colored toy pistol, complete with molded fingerprints. You grip it between your thumb and index finger and surreptitiously launch plastic projectiles at your brothers’ eyes while sending messages to your beautiful accomplice with the secret code clicker on the handle. (Want one? You currently can collect a Sixfinger in its original packaging for only $225 on eBay.)
     Aside from wishing my brothers Greg and Andy were on hand so that we could race around and playfully try to blind one another, I kind of wish I had done a better job of rationing my daughter’s access to today’s bottomless cornucopia of stuff. It’s hard for me to believe that she regards any of it as special or worth saving for display beside her own desk 40 years from now.
     Maybe it’s a “girl thing” or emblematic of our electronically connected age, but aside from books, Elizabeth’s most cherished “possessions” are her Neopets. These are online bits of computer code that take the form elaborated adorned and equipped creatures. They are the basis of a vast culture and economy that link kids around the world.
     At root, Neopets ultimately are about relationships, as Elizabeth and her far-flung network of friends run an international marketplace of ideas and products using Neocash. This is purchased with real allowance money at a rate of something like 100 Neopoints to $1, a racket if ever there was one. But the entertainment appears to be endless.
     That’s what all the best Christmas gifts are really about — making connections with other people, whether by torturing your brothers or designing the perfect Neopet with your computer pals. Memories are what we really hang onto, not the cheap bits of plastic and sheet metal.
     As far as waiting for Christmas Eve to open gifts, Elizabeth got her big present two weeks ago. Donna and I make my kindly parents seem like pillars of immutable strength, though in our case the early gifting derives from an inability to delay our gratification about pleasing her than from any real pressure from our beloved daughter.
     In closing, this is our second Christmas since my sister Kathie died. Listening to jazz singer Erin Bode’s “Holiday” yesterday, something in Bode’s words or voice brought Kathie back to me for a moment. “If my heart should break, I can’t blame the season, it’s the chance I’ll have take. … Everywhere I go, it seems you’re right there with me.”