Editor's Notebook: 2011
Steampunks bring a bright age back to life
There are guys — you know who you are — who know infinitely more than anybody probably needs to about steam donkeys. (I’m not one of you, though God knows I have my own obscure boyish obsessions … I recently noticed a mildly panicky look in a guest’s eye as I veered a little too deeply into 19th century gold-mining technology.)A brief explanation is owing to readers whose families didn’t work in Pacific Northwest woods and sawmills. Steam donkeys ought to have been called steam oxen, since that is the draft animal they largely replaced. Firewood and coal-fueled, steam donkeys in essence were giant self-contained winches used to wrestle around the fallen carcasses of the King Kong-sized trees in our region’s ancient old-growth forest.
Steam donkeys were built to last and a fair number survive despite the avid scrap-metal drives of World War II. Maddie Dickerson, my 2010 summer intern, photographed the remains of one in the secluded brush of Long Island in Willapa Bay. There is a particularly nice restored example along U.S. 101 between South Bend and Raymond, and of course at Camp 18 on Oregon Highway 26. Historical photos provide a more meaningful look at these beasts in their native habitat. Most every 1900-era logging crew felt obliged to pose with their donkey, like East Indian villagers standing around a deceased man-eating tiger.
One of the minor amusements of growing older is observing the return to stylishness of the discarded fashions, feel and music of past decades. Personally, I continue to feel repelled by virtually every aspect of the 1970s and ’80s, but the steam-powered era of a century earlier does appeal to me. Oddly, that period has even become chic among much-younger people, sparking a movement called Steampunk.
Though its origins stretch back into the 1950s, Steampunk first came to my attention with the 2004 movie “Steamboy.” Katsuhiro Otomo’s anime masterpiece vividly portrays a neo-Victorian world in which conspirators maneuver James Bond-style to control an advanced steam-based power source. Hayao Miyazaki’s “Laputa: Castle in the Sky” is another outstanding example of the genre.
Industrial craftsmanship that married polished wood, cast iron, shining brass, porcelain-faced gauges, lovingly tooled machine threads and the like — these all speak to a kind of hands-on involvement in life that feels almost shockingly absent in our age of cheap imports and thousand-dollar computers designed to become obsolete within a couple years. Throw in the obvious retro attraction of women in lavish black-lace dresses and whalebone corsets and it’s a wonder I don’t editorialize on behalf of Steampunk on a weekly basis. What’s not to like?
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This all came to mind last week as I began assembling photographic materials for our forthcoming special series on transformative change in the Northwest forestry industry.
One of the best spyholes back into early logging days here is provided by the work of pioneering Astoria photographer Elmer Coe, whose images capture steam donkeys and tenders at the height of their glory. Helped by former Astoria Public Works Director Mitch Mitchum, late Astoria resident Lloyd “Bud” Howell heroically rescued a small surviving fragment of Coe’s glass-plate negatives. (Howell, who died in 2003, also was an enthusiastic fan of local steam locomotives and railroad trains in general.)
Coe was taking pictures back before Kodak exponentially increased the availability of snapshots. In his time, taking a photo was still a serious skilled endeavor. Coe’s care is evident and the chemical process he utilized managed to save extraordinary details about ordinary life at the mouth of the Columbia just after 1900.
Looking at such photographs, it becomes easier to understand the fear some native peoples had concerning their soul-grabbing qualities. Magnifying them on screen as I do, it seems possible to see the living spirits of long-departed people still dancing in the backs of their eyes.
You wish you knew what became of these people, especially the children. Did they die of diphtheria two weeks later, or as beloved grandpas at the age of 93? Imagining the full mystery of a human life is one of photography’s great, if often unintended, gifts to us.
Coal miner’s notebook opens a window on a deadly time, plus hopes for a better future
Thanks to my cousin Colin in England, this week I met my great-great-great-grandfather Joseph Walker, a coal miner who died 122 years ago. I like him very much, though his preoccupation with executions is just a tiny bit odd.It would be front-page news if I literally made a dead man’s acquaintance, or maybe a peculiar item in the daily police report. In reality, Colin generously e-mailed photocopies of Grandpa Walker’s notebook after noticing our cousinhood on an online genealogy site. For my part, our family’s photo archive has ended up in my stewardship and I e-mailed back to England images that originated there.
Reflecting his eccentric mix of topics throughout, on the facing page is Grandpa Walker’s creatively spelled “Receate for making beer: 1 [pound?] of Irish Hops, Dandy Lion Roots, 1/2 Pound of Tracle, 1/2 Pound of sugar, Ground Ginger, Worme wood, Browers Yest.” (Being a root-beer fan myself, I’ve already determined that all the ingredients are obtainable; I’ll let you know how it tastes.)
Nowadays in the U.S., we have the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration to agonize and analyze disasters like the Upper Big Branch coal mine explosion that snuffed out 29 lives last April in West Virginia. But there has always been a keen human imperative to try to grasp the mysterious inner workings of fate.
Anyone can die anytime, but underground coal miners are on extra-familiar terms with capricious and violent death. Working in coffin-like spaces far underground, surrounded by explosive coal dust and methane, operating machinery that gives off sparks — a rational person would think long and hard about such a choice. Miners for centuries, my ancestors were entirely rational but needed to feed their kids.
I think Joseph Walker’s notebook is a smart and sensitive man’s effort to make some sense of mortality as he entered the last third of his life — a life born during the Napoleonic Wars. It spanned most of a hectic century to the year the Eiffel Tower opened and Washington state was admitted to the Union.
A life-defining event sparked his efforts to gain perspective about death. A couple pages after documenting the Pelton conflagration, Walker skips 22 years backward in time and methodically records the names of those lost at the Haswell Colliery explosion on Sept. 28, 1844, including several 10-year-olds. He later scrawled in pencil, “I was down at the time 95 lost — Joseph Walker.” Historians say there were four survivors.
This would make anybody introspective. Our family’s whole future existence teetered upon the abyss. For the rest of his life, he recorded virtually every significant mine disaster in Northeast England.
A curious taste for homicide
For some reason, Grandpa Walker also reported on the murders, suicides and executions of his time. Maybe they simply were all interesting major news stories. Or maybe he saw some relationship between mine owners’ haughty disregard for life and the social decay that spawned homicides.
Here’s one typical passage: “Saturday February the 8th 1873 the price of Coal in London went up to 48 shillings per Tun some of the best samples to 50s. Mary Ann Cotton hung at Durham March the 24th the year 1873 for poisoning her family about twenty in all. The Demonstration meeting of the Miners in the County of Durham June 14th the year 1873 70 Thousand present.”
And this one: “Explosion at the Swaithe Main Colliery December the 5th 150 lives lost 1875. James Clancey Transportation for Life for Robery with Violence near to Durham 18 years of age 1875. … Kenerey Wainright hung at Newgate Dec the 21st 1875 for the murder of Harriett Land he Chopped the body into ten peaces.”
Grandchildren depart for ‘Amarica’
He kept track of the sizes of hailstones, the marriages of his grandchildren, the ships they emigrated in, and their addresses in “Astrila” and “Amarica,” including that of my adventurous young great-grandparents in Colorado. I wonder whether, in a long life of recording death, these partings might have been the hardest of all for the old miner.
Grandpa Walker’s heroes ranged from Scottish mine union founder Alexander Macdonald to the great Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone. (Gladstone had a contentious political relationship with Queen Victoria, who once complained, “He always addresses me as if I were a public meeting.”)
Grandpa was not, by all indications, much of a religious man. But a few weeks before his death, he wrote, “Nothing in my hand I bring simple to the Cross I Cling.” On May 2, 1889, he recorded his last coalmine death, and died himself 20 days later. He was 79, having emerged from the mines alive on Dec. 22, 1883, “Adged 73 years.” His wife Elizabeth died in December 1890.
Back in 1887, he left this advice for Colin and me and hundreds of other descendents: “Remember, if the thing you desire be good do it without a bribe because it is good, if it be not honest do it not for all the goods in the world.”
A dreary farm commodity report
The farm commodity report is the soundtrack playing in memories of my grandparents’ resplendently early breakfasts.Frying bacon and gently over-boiled percolator coffee are this recollection’s aromas, joined by whiffs of coal smoke that escaped when Grandma stoked their cooking-range fire. Before winter came full-on, they’d make a day-trip to the nearest mine and bring back a pickup-load of good, solid chunks. One of these would burn through the night and keep the kitchen toasty until dawn, when they switched over to well-dried, hand-split lodgepole pine.
Their plastic AM-frequency radio perched like a dull beige pigeon atop the refrigerator. Grandpa in his holey socks would stretch up to tinker with it from time to time. There wasn’t a confusing array of stations — maybe three in the daytime, depending on atmospheric conditions. Alfalfa, hay and sugar beets were about the totality of commercial crops in our immediate vicinity, but as a matter of academic interest grandpa followed news about livestock prices in the big regional Omaha market.
Though my Uncle Tom Bell still pampered a herd of shorthorns — there was some question about who owned whom — our family really wasn’t in the agriculture business by the 1960s. But my stoical grandparents felt a strong sense of fellowship with food producers anyway — even if quite few of them pulled on a victimized attitude with their boots each day, always bellyaching. Siding with ranchers, Grandpa observed with disgust that most people would be shocked to learn that hamburger wasn’t magically extruded from a machine in the backroom of Mr. D’s grocery store, complete with clear cellophane wrapping.
A sense that man and nature are conspiring against them is nigh-on universal among farmers worldwide. And just as it’s true that clinically paranoid people actually do have some real enemies, farmers and ranchers face an ever-evolving encyclopedic cast of adversaries and blights. Bringing crops and livestock to market is a crapshoot. Often by the time you manage to, prices have gone to rot.
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Right now, global food prices are at or near all-time highs, though it’s important to note this doesn’t mean farmers are getting rich. What consumers pay at the store scarcely bears on how much farmers are paid.
Following in his dad’s footsteps, my 86-year-old uncle forwarded me this story on ag prices a few days ago. “Populations are still on the rise, and from Brazil to India, Turkey to China, new powers are rising as well,” Michael Klare writes in CommonDreams.org. “With them goes an urge for a more American-style life. Not surprisingly, the demand for basic commodities is significantly on the rise, even as supplies in many instances are shrinking.”
“Global weirding,” the clever new term for a climate that is crazy if not universally warmer, has decimated grain crops in Australia to Pakistan and Russia. After dipping briefly during the recession, food commodity prices are soaring. In December, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said its index of global food prices hit 215, one point higher than the previous record in the spring of 2008.
“As 2011 begins, food experts fear that, within months, prices for key staples will climb above the 2008 threshold and stay there, causing extreme hardship for poor people around the world,” Klare reports. “We are at a very high level,” says a worried Abdolreza Abbassian, an economist at the FAO. “These levels in the previous episode led to problems and riots across the world.”
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This will come as no surprise to many people here at the mouth of the Columbia. Even in a relatively well-off region in what is still supposedly the wealthiest country in the world, there is old-fashioned Appalachian-style poverty and malnutrition in some neighborhoods.
A report last month from Northwest Harvest, the main supplier for Washington state food banks, was an eye-opener.
Northwest Harvest summarized a panel discussion: “Alongside waves and storms battering their beaches, Ocean Park participants seemed caught in a constant cycle of survival. Behind the tourist destinations, residents experience real struggles, especially in winter. ‘We’re different here, we’re not like the cities, we’re a community that relies on tourists. We’re poor, really this community is poor.’”
A local woman told Northwest Harvest the end of the month is always hard. “The last two weeks, we’re having bean soup or water gravy with biscuits.” A man said, “My problem is running out of food that is good for me. There is so much in the media now about good nutrition and how important it is for your health and preventing disease. But down here on the lower level of the food chain, where one feels guilty for being down here anyhow, wouldn’t it be nice if we could get multivitamins if we can’t have fruit every day?”
Jobs are few and far between, and nearly 4,000 of Pacific County’s approximately 22,000 residents needed food stamps last year. One person spoke of hoarding his or her $28 in monthly food benefits to the end of the month before finally splurging on milk, eggs and bread. A man said, “The only thing that bothers me is when my kids suffer, that kills me. I’ll go without anything to provide for my kids.” Two-thirds of students in Ocean Beach School District receive free and reduced-price meals.
These are hard daily battles, in the tradition of “The Grapes of Wrath.” If ordinary folks are having trouble feeding themselves here amidst the natural bounty on the Pacific coast, how much worse is it in the parched/frozen/flooded foreign places we hear about on the news?
It could be time for us to all get back into growing our own vegetables, keeping a few chickens, bagging an elk in the fall. Doing for themselves, Grandpa and Grandma kept our family fed, come hell or high water.
I don’t, however, foresee listening to the crop report…
Fond accounts of Prohibition as its Northwest centennial nears
There probably isn’t anyone with an alcoholic in his or her immediate family who hasn’t wished all ethanol could be magically zapped into oblivion forever. A century ago, this thinking brought forth a notorious social experiment that remains a frothy topic of interest to this day.“Boardwalk Empire” is HBO’s violent but fascinating new saga chronicling an only-marginally fictionalized Prohibition-era criminal enterprise in Atlantic City, N.J., a key port of entry for smuggled Canadian hooch. Anchored by Steve Buscemi, who is sure to win a best-actor Emmy, and created by Terence Winter of “Sopranos” fame, it is a bloody and sexy thrill ride. Family viewing it is not. But in exploring a time when fairly ordinary people wandered into outlawry, it reveals juicy moral intersections.
Most of us think of Oregon and Washington as being “live and let live” places, but Prohibition was one of those episodes when our do-gooder gene kicked in. Oregon voters banned the manufacture, sale or advertisement of intoxicating liquor on Nov. 3, 1914, five full years before the rest of the nation. Seattle went dry on Jan. 1, 1916, one of the first large American cities to do so.
This definitely does not mean that everyone quit drinking. Although no one has made much of an effort to mythologize Prohibition in the Pacific Northwest, newspapers and court dockets from the era overflow with colorful references to moonshine and stills. It also stands to reason that the mouth of the Columbia and Willapa Bay would have been prime territory for smuggling, and so they were.
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One of her best interviews was with “Slub” Tenho Harju, a tremendously nice man on the Peninsula, now dead, with a neck like a keg of bolts. He told her a variety of hearsay stories that wouldn’t stand up in court, but make for good reading. One was from his cousin, who used to be invited to ride along with a deputy who lived nearby.
“On of those trips they were looking for a still that was reported in the area, and they was just going out in the woods and they’d find where there was a little stream, and they’d head up the stream you know and see if they could find anything,” Slub reported, noting that stills require a lot of fresh water. After wasting quite a few hours bushwhacking their way up creeks and not finding anything, his cousin suggested to the sheriff that they check out a little bigger creek. “And he drove by the place. He [the cousin] says, ‘Right here; here, stop here.’ He [the sheriff] says, ‘Can’t go up there, kid, there’s b’ars up there.’ In other words, he knew where the still was, but he wasn’t going to find it. ‘We can’t go up there, kid, there’s b’ars up there.’”
Slub remembered a friend whose father was a reputed bootlegger. “And this kid was around their home place, you know, it was on the road between here [Ilwaco] and South Bend, and he, the sheriff and some other fellows came along. ‘Your dad at home?’ ‘Nope.’ He says, ‘Is he out in the woods?’ He says ‘Yup.’ ‘You know where he is?’ ‘Yup.’ They say, ‘Will you take us up there?’ He says ‘Nope.’ ‘Give you 50 cents to take us up there.’ ‘Nope.’ When their offer got up to $10, he says ‘OK,’ $10 being a lot of money in them days. So he [the sheriff] says, ‘Let’s go.’ He [the kid] says, ‘Pay me.’ Sheriff said, ‘We’ll pay you when we get back.’ Kid shook his head. He said ‘Well, we’ll pay you when we get back.’ Kid says, ‘You ain’t coming back.’”
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In September 1916, nine months into Washington state’s prohibition and nearly two years after Oregon went dry, with suspiciously complete knowledge the Chinook Observer reported one of many, many smugglers:
“A whiskey vendor is doing business outside the Columbia River bar, on a ship named Tramp. He is selling ‘barbed wire whiskey’ in solution at $1 a quart, bonded goods at $2 a quart, and beer at 33-1/2 cents per bottle. The federal authorities are waiting to swoop down on Skipper Bob Jones and his whiskey ship, and if they lay hold of him they will probably prosecute him on a charge of ‘maintaining a general nuisance.’ Fishermen, gillnetters, and Astoria businessmen are said to be patronizing the booze skipper. He hails from Eureka, Cal.”
The Pacific County historical magazine Sou’wester reported, “There was once a merchant of Bruceport [on the east shore of Willapa Bay] who amassed a fortune said to be upwards of a quarter million dollars, mainly from selling penny pencils for a dime! There as a gimmick, for with the sale went the privilege of a trip to the back room where a barrel was kept containing a concoction referred to as ‘tangle-foot’ … for a beginner could take but a sip at a standing.”
One of my favorite stories, as it was for other area newspapers at the time, involves “Hazy,” the owner of the South Bend Journal and simultaneously the crusading divisional chief of the coast’s federal booze-interdiction efforts. Editors are justly infamous for enjoying a little “nip” from time to time, and fairly or not, Frederick Archibald Hazeltine was regarded as something of a traitor to the cause.
His biggest seizure was a Canadian barge carrying in excess of 1,600 cases of liquor — precisely 18,836 bottles. Hazy posed for photos on deck. In their hurry to smash this cargo and dump it in overboard, his men reputedly “accidentally on purpose” left many bottles intact. According to the Sou’wester, “The bottles were packed twelve to a sack, each protected by a strong covering of a bamboo-like material. It was usual in such operations to pack in a generous weight of rock salt and cork to float the sack when the salt melted away.”
Even now, there are those who recall their dads and uncles acquiring a sudden and intense interest in fishing that part of the bay.
Let’s get America back to making great stuff
News that Australians are thinking of exporting up to 60 million tons of Wyoming and Montana coal to China each year through the Port of Longview stirs complicated feelings.I love coal. I imagine most people have never seen any. If you’re among them, don’t worry, because I’ve seen your share and then some.
Just out of high school, I joined the mining-machinery parts business, working for an eccentric but wonderful Tulsa company called Unit Rig and Equipment. Unit Rig got its start in the oil patch in 1935, making top-quality rigging for oil wells. The firm then somehow spurted out in odd directions, including squat little aircraft tow tractors. But they mostly made unbelievably gargantuan dump trucks that were used worldwide in open-pit mines.
Unit Rig’s Lectra Haul trucks were miracles of American knowhow, with vast diesel engines powering independent electrical motors that made the wheels go around.
Just about any component bigger than a lug-nut was so monstrously over-sized as to represent a crush risk to workers. Inch-thick brake discs were large enough to use for card tables. Accessed via steep steel ladders, driver’s compartments sat a good 10 feet off the ground and were almost bigger than some New York apartments.
It was all pre-computer, so our international team of service advisers was comprised of old-fashioned mechanics, grease flowing in their veins. They were masters of cannon-sized hydraulic cylinders and mile-long electrical systems. They included some of my earliest and best friends, hardheaded guys like Don Trowbridge and Mike Suba, the latter a refugee from the Russian invasion of Hungary.
The smallest of our trucks — still capable of carrying many times the tonnage of any scrawny highway dump truck — were made for hauling heavy ore or the rocky overburden that lies atop coal seams. Our biggest trucks were capable of carrying more than 200 tons of coal in a single load.
An open-pit mine, or any mine for that matter, is a world unto itself. Traffic drives on the left, in part so the haul truck drivers can stay clear of the edges of the earthen ramps that provide access to the pit. Mines tend toward strict organization and zealous compliance with safety rules. The good ones are rather surprisingly clean, considering what they’re about.
Periodically, the warning sirens sound. With an impressively powerful, low thump that you can feel in the pit of your belly, explosives fracture a newly exposed 30-foot-thick shelf of coal. And a shovel that makes even the haul trucks look teensy begins gobbling away at black rock that was living forest and swamp long ago. (Being a mine shovel operator is pretty much the best “boy” job on the planet.)
Coal is not made out of dinosaurs and has fairly little animal component of any kind. One common type of it started out as lignin, a kind of tree-bark fiber that was once plentiful.
The rolling plains of Wyoming and eastern Montana, dull to the point of murder, are underlain by coal seams that are hundreds of feet thick in places and extend over hundreds of miles. Power River Basin coal targeted for export to China is the result of swamps soaking up carbon from the atmosphere for 25 million years.
At current prices, about 10.1 billion tons of basin coal are buried under shallow-enough rock to be economically recoverable at present. Ultimately, if coal prices reach an astronomical $60 a ton, about another 70 billion tons might be mineable. The amount of energy contained in the basin’s recoverable coal is almost unimaginable, equaling about 30 years-worth of current U.S. crude oil consumption. If the Australians take their plans to the max, the energy-equivalent of about eight and a half days of American crude oil consumption will be shipped to China annually in the form of coal.
Much as I love coal, I love it best when it is left in the ground. The simple fact is that by digging it up and burning it, we are undoing the natural removal of carbon from the air that took the planet 25 million years to accomplish — or much longer, when you count all the coal beds that are older than those in the Powder River Basin. What we are doing is awesomely self-destructive. Little things we do to make up for this act of planetary suicide are ludicrously insufficient. Steps like switching to compact florescent bulbs while burning coal to make the electricity to power and manufacture them is like trying to compensate for melting our icecaps by making more ice cubes in our refrigerators.
And yet, too many years are going by with too few new opportunities being created in America. It breaks my heart to see good young people without decent jobs. Realistic hopes for a bright future are the essence of our nation. An increase in jobs of almost any kind is welcome. A coal-export terminal would create quite a few.
The real issue is this. Good old Unit Rig, maker of those marvelous giant trucks, was picked off by a corporate raider back in the 1980s. The hollowed-out name still exists, and is stuck onto trucks now made in Mexico. There’s little left of what Unit Rig once was, a key to middle-class success for thousands of people. Manipulated politicians, tax loopholes and shameless greed betrayed the America that once gave birth to companies like Unit Rig. Genuinely good jobs and bright futures disappeared with these honest employers.
Instead of exporting coal to power Chinese factories, let’s rediscover our own backbones and put Americans back to work making real things right here.
Read more about Unit Rig at http://tinyurl.com/4vmxpek.
Tsunami in Japan has ripples here
Watching the horror of wreckage-choked black water relentlessly and effortlessly over-topping Japanese tsunami barriers, we all are reassessing our emergency strategies.Living in an even more robustly active seismic region than we do, the Japanese are conscientious and methodical planners. For instance, unlike us, they actually make a diligent effort to place tall earthen dikes between towns and the ocean. It turned out they weren't tall enough to avert disaster everywhere, but they probably still managed to provide some people with a little more time to escape, and thus saved lives.
Not only do Pacific Northwest communities lack this basic frontline defense, for years we've been actively punching roads through our primary oceanfront dunes for beach access, storm-water outfalls and to preserve views. The general assumption is that our own mega-thrust earthquake and tsunamis will happen long after we're gone - that we'll enjoy our living-room vistas of the surf for a few years and that a future onrushing wall of seawater will be someone else's problem.
Now, in the space of a decade, we've witnessed similar quake-tsunami scenarios unfold in Sumatra, Chile and now Japan — all places associated with the same giant crustal plate circling the Pacific Ocean. The consensus of scientific opinion is that the Japanese quake doesn't make it any more likely our offshore subduction zone will break soon. But we know it's been 311 years since the last great disaster on our shores and that we're well within the window for another. It could happen this afternoon, or it could be another 311 years.
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As I see it, rational people will take two broad lessons away from what we're seeing in Japan. One has to do with personal and family obligations, and the other with societal and government duties. And by “obligations” and “duties,” I mean they are mandatory.
One category of response has to do with how we personally get ready for this awful eventuality. This includes not only the fairly well known disaster-preparedness checklist items, but also a more active kind of mental and community planning for what we do in the moments, hours and days after our quake and tsunami.
Preparation checklists are widely available on the Internet and in the form of paper brochures from many agencies. Good ones can be found at http://tinyurl.com/65pfzh. These actions include having a well-practiced evacuation route if you live or work within the tsunami-inundation zone. As a general rule, any area less than 50 feet in elevation above sea level is at risk. Detailed maps can be found here for Oregon, http://tinyurl.com/5uxsjk6, and here for Washington, http://tinyurl.com/chlaan.
Using these maps can make a big difference. During last Friday's scare on the Long Beach Peninsula, there were people who rushed to safety in the hills surrounding Ilwaco who could have found sanctuary much closer to home in the high ground surrounding Ocean Park. In a real tsunami, minutes will make the difference between life and death. Know where to go.
The scale of devastation in Japan makes it clear that stockpiling emergency supplies should be undertaken with differing scenarios in mind. It makes good sense to have days of wood, water, firewood and similar supplies on hand at home in the case of winter cyclones. But for a tsunami, if you live in the flood zone, it makes sense to have a small bag packed with the bare essentials that can be grabbed on your way out the door. A camping-style water filter, rain slicker, matches, blood-pressure pills and some granola bars will do you much more good than a ton of supplies sitting inside a collapsed garage as the waves roll in.
Also on a personal scale, the most likely first-responders are going to be neighbors, not the National Guard. We need to talk to one another and have chainsaws and pry bars at the ready to get our own families and neighbors out of their collapsed homes. We should decide in advance on who exactly is going to check on whom to see whether they need help.
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The second category of preparation involves our society and government. In the first place, what ought to come first — preserving views from encroaching sand dunes or leaving natural barriers in place between neighborhoods and the ocean? We may decide tsunami risk is still so remote, private property rights so paramount, or dikes so ineffective that we keep doing things as we have. Or we may decide we should do the Japanese one better and build a 30-foot dike between our homes and the ocean. At least, we should have the discussion.
Many low-lying areas between Leadbetter Point, Wash., and Tillamook Head are simply too far from high ground for evacuation to be a feasible option. This is especially true because our sandy soils are expected to liquefy and turn streets into crumpled rip-rap following a big quake.
As Simon Winchester wrote with atmospheric drama in Newsweek, “it is an axiom known to all those who dwell by high-tsunami-risk coastlines that when the sea sucks back, you run: you run inland and, if at all possible, you run uphill.” But on a flat coastal plain, “if a monstrous wave is chasing you inland at the speed of a jetliner, and if the flat topography all around denies you any chance of sprinting to a hilltop to try to escape its wrath, then you can make no mistake — it will catch you, it will drown you, and its forces will pulverize you out of all recognition as a thing of utter insignificance, which of course, to a tsunami, all men and women and their creations necessarily must be.”
There has been much talk in recent months about building artificial high ground in the form of armored earthen berms for people to escape to. The University of Washington's Cliff Mass observed this week, “What will it take to make the investment to build enough vertical evacuation facilities to have a hope of saving most of our coastal population in case of NW tsunami? This is also homeland security — for a fraction of the funding used to building that fence along the Mexican border we could protect all our coastal folks.”
Depending on how much time we want to allow, building these platforms need not turn into a vastly expensive government-contractor money-pit. Archaeologists have determined that the largest Neolithic site in Britain, Silbury Hill, was probably built one basket-load of dirt at a time over a period of decades or centuries. In our times, in a place where ports and the Corps of Engineers are disposing of millions of cubic yards of sediment, it seems we might be capable of building ourselves some hills where we need them.
We live in one of the world's most beautiful places. Let's keep living here, but do a much better job of factoring geological danger into our lives.
Visiting my family’s religious foundations
In her 80s, Annie Weston exuded the kind of acidic expression that might make merry little bluebirds suicidally throw themselves in front of marauding goshawks. Ill-fitting dentures? Maybe she despised having her picture taken, a family trait.I hope she'd eke out a thin smile if she knew a great-grandson was thinking of her last Friday in the graveyard of our parish church, the 12th century St. Mary the Virgin in Bishops Cannings.
Emerging into the crisp spring English sun like an immovable lichen-encrusted boulder, St. Mary's is an ancestor-hunter's dream destination. Spying it from a distance, I didn't know what to expect to find — tombstones with our name on it, I suppose. Two and a half centuries after the Weston branch of our family left for America, I was looking for a spark, a jolt, the frisson that comes from completing a circuit in time.
The caretaker appeared to the village's only living soul. His gasoline weed-whacker wasn't the background theme music I had in mind. But the very first grave marker was for a Weston. “Hello, cousin.”
Just then, a sweet tendril of children's voices pierced my self-absorption. Curious, I followed the sound through the church's arched-stone doorway. Its impenetrable rock walls were tightly packed with tidy uniformed elementary school kids, teachers and parents, all belting out “Go Tell It on the Mountain.”
Standing in the entry, drawing curious glances, I had to turn and blink away tears. It felt like the benediction I had been seeking, an acknowledgment of an unbroken thread running through the centuries. Wishing for better lives, the Westons left all this heavenliness and kinship behind, staking everything on a risky journey to a new world across the Atlantic. One, the brother of my immigrant ancestor, would soon die fighting on the losing side in the American Revolution.
As I later told the priest, we endured. We remember.
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A 17th century travel writer noted that Bishops Cannings and its church “Would have challenged all England for musique, foot-ball and ringing.” Boasting virtually a cathedral in miniature, the parish was once rich and encompassed a good chunk of the fertile belly of Wiltshire County, itself the core of the old Saxon kingdom of Wessex.
Colonizing the area starting around the year 500, the Saxons were Johnny-come-latelies. It is one of Europe's most aged and famed landscapes, home to multiple World Heritage Sites. My family and many others have lived there for thousands of years. It is a terrain of enormous spiritual gravity, coupled with an inexplicable sense of lightness.
Six miles northeast is the giant stone circle at Avebury. Fifteen miles south is Stonehenge, where my 13-year-old daughter Elizabeth and I started the morning before dawn, after a breakneck drive on England's serpentine highways to make our 6:45 appointment. We made it with two minutes to spare and a fluorescent-vested guard escorted us into the site.
Blanketed by a thick ground fog, Stonehenge would have sent my heart thumping wildly if I hadn't seen it pictured so often. Like the mysterious black slab in “2001: A Space Odyssey,” it is a bold marker that was clearly always intended to be an enduring beacon or signal to all future generations of man. It shouts, “This place is ours.” I wish a little more of what we build today were nearly as worthy of surviving for eons.
As the sun at last lazily drifted upward, an orb of muted apricot through the lingering mist, the backs of the stones sprang to lively color and a family of crows recommenced nest-building high inside the interior cracks between the uprights and lintels. If the circle were really comprised of hunched-over giants around a campfire, they would have begun standing and stretching, stiff joints cracking in the new light.
Preparing to leave and find coffee in the nearby market town of Devizes, Elizabeth and I circled to the eastern exterior of the stone ring. We encountered an entirely unexpected gift.
Arching above and perfectly framing Stonehenge was a white rainbow, a subtly shifting band of pearly light. More prosaically known as a fog bow, one Internet source describes their scientific origin: “White rainbows result from sunlight striking fog droplets which are so tiny that they can not act as prisms, like larger raindrops do for typical rainbows. They just bounce back white light for the sun, right to your eyes.”
But to a wandering priest or chieftain 5,000 years ago, I can well imagine such a sight triggering an epiphany, a belief that a doorway to another universe was being revealed. Standing in the cold morning dew, my arm wrapped protectively around my daughter's shivering shoulders, so it seemed to me.
Exploring the cave of tenuous connections
For an entirely goofy and bogus reason, I feel a personal connection with German movie director Werner Herzog dating back to “Fitzcarraldo” in 1982. I still follow his career with great interest.This is despite the fact that my link with Herzog doesn't even rise to the level of my Aunt Lucille's and Uncle Frank's with William Shatner: At least he bought them breakfast one day at Harrison Hot Springs for no particular reason other than being a really swell guy.
Herzog thinks deeply about his own craft, seeing films as modern mythmaking with a duty to explore fundamental truths. His movies, from the vampire classic “Nosferatu” to the haunting documentary “Grizzly Man” about bear-obsessed dreamer Timothy Treadwell, are memorable because they plumb the outer limits of passion and darkness.
Comedy is not his forte. But although by no means comedic, Herzog borders on it in “My Best Fiend” about his love-hate professional relationship with German-Polish actor Klaus Kinski. At one point, Herzog discusses the semi-serious rumor that he contemplated having Kinski assassinated in the aftermath of a titanic quarrel while filming “Aguirre, the Wrath of God” on the Amazon in 1972.
Kinski's fabulously ravishing daughter Nastassja is one of the extremely few nostalgia-inducing things about the 1980s, after which her acting career went into the ditch. Her 1982 poster with a boa constrictor was a visual leitmotif of the decade. Her father was freakishly intense and a dismal parent, but it is through him and Herzog that I can claim maybe three or four degrees of separation from her.
For anybody who doesn't know, it is asserted that humans are so socially interconnected that every person on the planet is an average of only six or seven acquaintanceships away from anybody else. “Acquaintance” is loosely defined. It means, for example, that I have two degrees of separation from the queen of England on account of knowing people who know or met her. It literally is a small world when it comes to human interactions.
In the case of Herzog and the Kinskis, my most obvious connection is through my good friend Zbigniew Bzdak, a Polish-born photographer with the Chicago Tribune.
Zbigniew is a captivating artist and envy-worthy adventurer, a member of the first expedition to explore the Amazon from its source in the Andes to its gargantuan mouth in the Atlantic Ocean. He reminded me of his Herzog/Kinski connection this week:
“As for the Fitzcarraldo, Herzog build three identical boats for his film, two of them were used as local transportation after filming and one destroyed during the filming. I went from Pucallpa to Iquitos on “Jhuliana” during expedition down the Amazon and stay in a cabin # 1 used by Klaus Kinski and Claudia Cardinale ... old times.”
So my tie with them is, in other words, about as tenuous as it gets. Maybe one of the “Jhuliana's” crewmen shook both Herzog's hand and Zbigniew's…
But this doesn't stop me from feeling an ever-so-slightly proprietary interest in Herzog's movies, including his new “Cave of Forgotten Dreams.”
A documentary about the sublime Cave of Chauvet, where some of Europe's finest Paleolithic art was discovered in southeast France in 1994, “Forgotten Dreams” is as close as most people will come to experiencing what Herzog calls “one of the greatest and most sensational discoveries in human culture.”
We have a cartoonish idea about cavemen being club-wielding brutes. But as Herzog reveals, the cavemen of Chauvet were not savages. The sophisticated paintings there hint at enormous depths of spiritual and artistic feeling among our remote ancestors. Painted in two phases about 35,000 and 30,000 years ago, Chauvet was sealed off from the outside world by fallen rocks until explorers reopened it. Access now is strictly limited to safeguard unique features including a child's footprints undisturbed in the mud for something like 300 centuries.
My pal Cale Case and I were exploring caves by the time we were 12 — what were our parents thinking!? We once dug out a passage that may have been blocked for centuries. All we found was darkness, but we felt as if we possessed it — we were the first to experience that particular darkness. What must it have been like to see Chauvet for the first time in thousands of years, filled with visions of a vanished past and more than 190 cave bear skulls?
Herzog gets it. He was the perfect man for this documentary. He understands our hunger: “We do not need any other Tutankhamun's tomb with all its treasures. We need context. We need understanding. We need knowledge of historical events to tie them together. We don't know much. Of course we know a lot, but it is context that's missing, not treasures.”
How Hawaiians helped create the Pacific Northwest
Woven almost invisibly into the ethnic fabric of the Lower Columbia is a fine thread of colorful explorers: Native Hawaiians. Though frayed by time and neglect, their story is a source of inspiration and human interest.When I moved here 20 years ago, someone mentioned that Waikiki Beach at Cape Disappointment State Park was named after a Hawaiian sailor whose body washed ashore there during a colossal fiasco at the time of Astoria's founding in 1811.
This was close to the truth, but the actual facts are far richer.
During this heady year of Astoria's bicentennial, even the most fanatical off-the-grid hermit would be hard-pressed to remain ignorant of the misadventures of Capt. Jonathan Thorn of the Tonquin. Our modern caricature of him as a blundering bully may be overly simplistic or unfair, but it's difficult to give him much benefit of the doubt. He managed to lead his ship and crew to utter destruction off Vancouver Island soon after dropping off the Astorian settlers.
Before this screw-up of literally historic proportions, Thorn begrudgingly participated in recruiting some of the early Pacific Northwest's most useful and hard-working citizens. During a February 1811 stop at Waikiki on Oahu, about two dozen young Hawaiian men joined the Tonquin expedition.
The Hawaiians were “remarkable for their skill in managing light craft and able to swim and dive like waterfowl,” according to merchant leaders of the Astoria party. They agreed to three-year contracts in return for food, clothes and a payment of $100 each in merchandise payable at the end of their enlistments.
As all local schoolchildren recall even if we adults do not, the first small boat sent by Capt. Thorn to find the Columbia entrance channel on March 22, 1811 disappeared in the bar's life-chomping tumult. All five white crewmen perished. The next day, three more of the ship's crew were marginally reassured by having two competent Hawaiians accompany them on another semi-suicidal probe of the river's mouth.
Thorn again showed his rotten mettle by abandoning this jolly boat when it turned back for help amidst the breakers around Cape Disappointment — “without a Rudder & only an old broken oar to steer her,” according to the headquarters logbook of the Pacific Fur Company. A vast breaker “came rolling after them and broke right over the stern of the Boat which ingulphed them all in an instant.” Tonquin armorer Stephen Weekes and Hawaiians Harry and Peter gasped to the surface alive, while the other two men drowned.
“I saw the two Sandwich Islanders struggling through the surf to get hold of the boat, and being expert swimmers they succeeded. After long struggles they got her turned on her keel, bailed out some of the water, and recovered one of the oars,” Weekes reported. “The poor fellows tried to haul me into the boat, but their strength failed them. At last, taking hold of my clothes in their teeth, they fortunately succeeded. We then stood out to sea as night set in, and a darker one I never saw.”
Before dawn, Peter died of what we now call hypothermia, while Harry “seemed to court death.” At first light, Weekes managed to steer through the surf north of the cape, where the boat was thrown high and dry. He pulled Harry to safety and covered him with leaves, expecting him to die. After crashing through the underbrush for hours, Weekes was awestruck to see the Tonquin comfortably riding at anchor inside the lee of cape.
The next day, Harry “was found half-dead with cold and fatigue, his legs swollen and his feet bleeding. After much care he was restored to life,” expedition member Gabriel Franchere later recalled. In what strikes me as one of the most amazing set pieces in the history of West Coast exploration, six of the other Hawaiians honored Peter — perhaps at the beach that now bears their homeport's name. Franchere, who also paid his respects, wrote this account:
The Islanders carried “the necessary implements to render the last rites to their compatriot.” Upon locating the body, the men dug a deep hole in the sand and then performed “the ceremonies that they observe according to their tribal customs. Each before leaving the ship had taken an offering of biscuit, pork, or tobacco. They put the biscuit under the arm of the deceased, the pork under the chin, and the tobacco under the testicles.”
After placing Peter's body in the grave and covering it, they formed a double line facing eastwards. “One officiating as a priest went to fetch water in his hat and having sprinkled the two rows of Islanders, began a prayer to which the others responded. Then they rose and departed and made their way towards the ship without looking back.”
How remarkable it is to think about these men so far from home, all bearing Christian names, carrying out a funeral ceremony for their kinsman rooted in the rituals of their old gods.
The company logbook indicates that Harry had a long convalescence but was still alive at least several months later. Weekes recovered but was doomed to die a few weeks after the Tonquin sailed from Baker Bay. Some historians believe he was the last survivor who set the Tonquin's powder magazine alight as an Indian war party bore down on him — blowing himself, his attackers and the ship to smithereens. This came after Thorn's final fatal mistake of insulting a chief on the shore of Clayoquot Sound.
The “priest” who officiated at Peter's ceremony was most likely King Kamehameha's personal representative, Naukane, known to whites as Old Cox. Like hundreds of other Hawaiians who came after him, he ended up working for Hudson's Bay Company in Vancouver, Wash., dying there in 1850. He claimed to have been present when Capt. James Cook was killed in Hawaii in 1779. In any event, what a life he led!
Hawaiians often intermarried with local Indian people along the Columbia and Puget Sound, until eventually their descendents forgot great-great-grandpa was from Hawaii. But their names live on here and there. Kalama, Wash., is named for a Hawaiian settler, as is Friday Harbor in the San Juan Islands. In Astoria, they were largely gardeners and swineherds. In Vancouver, they formed the core workforce at our region's first large sawmill.
As for Peter, his last name appears to be lost to history. But now I'll always think of it as Peter's Beach whenever I surreptitiously play with my dogs there — off-leash, joyous and wild on a noisy winter day.
Thanks to Professor Jim Ronda for sparking my interest in this subject.
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| Showtime Networks The canceled television series “Dead Like Me” took a morbid but usually lighthearted look at the myriad ways in which humans meet their mortal ends. |
Grim reaping in Tudor times and ours
Everyone has his or her own list of favorite TV programs that were idiotically cancelled. One of mine is “Dead Like Me,” in which Mandy Patinkin headed a grouchy crew of blue-collar grim reapers in charge of safeguarding the souls of Seattle’s recently departed.In it, 18-year-old Georgia “George” Lass, played by pretty Ellen Muth, is struck and killed by a toilet seat that rockets down from space as Mir space station breaks up in the atmosphere. High jinx ensue as George learns the ropes of her new career, an unwillingly drafted handmaiden to death in all manner of wacky situations.
Some of daft ways in which real people actually die are absurd beyond belief — even if still terrifying to the people involved and sorrowful for their families.
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| National Archives of the United Kingdom An Oxford University academic is leading a project to study coroners’ reports of accidental deaths in Tudor England. The report above concerns the drowning death of Jane Shaxspere, whom researchers speculate may have been a cousin to William Shakespeare and an inspiration for Hamlet’s love, Ophelia, who dies under similar circumstances. (Shakespeare was spelled in many different ways during William’s lifetime, though curiously never by him as “Shakespeare.”) |
Dr. Steven Gunn comments, “Although the material we are studying is tragic, there are some deaths which could well be material for Laurel and Hardy or Monty Python’s upper-class twit of the year.”
In addition to the spectator killed at a sledgehammer-throwing contest, Gunn makes special note of several eye-catching items:
“One man shot himself in the head while trying to get out the arrow stuck in his longbow and another fell into a cesspit while relieving himself. At least three people were killed by performing bears — one bear’s value is listed as a princely 26 shillings and four pence [roughly $525 in today’s money]. One unlucky man was standing in a garden on the edge of Coventry when a maypole fell over. It missed him and hit the city wall — but his narrow escape turned to disaster when a stone fell off the city wall, hit him on the head and killed him.
“Some of the records ask more questions than they answer — one man crushed his testicles while playing a ‘Christmas game’ and a Scottish man is recorded as dying after offering to demonstrate a pastime popular in his country which seems to have involved lying down and being tied up.”
This got me thinking about deaths during settlement times in the Pacific Northwest. Closer to us in time and space, Pacific County’s 1891-1917 death register is lacking in amusement but rich in mysteries. These are “cold cases” that will never be solved, but we can at least remember them.
One that disturbs me is the report on Jane Millet, a 14-year-old Indian from Bay Center, who died Aug. 13, 1913, from having been “Poisoned by carbolic acid.” Was this suicide? Murder? Accident? I mourn her in any event.
Later in 1913 at the onset of winter, Rasmus Peterson, 59, committed suicide by revolver slug through the head at North Cove Lighthouse. Considering also the dramatic suicide of the keeper’s wife at North Head, who threw herself off the cliff in 1923, and it makes you think that lighthouses were not smart residential choices for depressed people.
It is astounding to see the large numbers who died in ways that have been mostly abolished by modern medicine, at least here in America. Death was depressingly frequent for newborns and their mothers. There can’t be anything sadder than the notation “Born dead.”
People quite often expired from typhoid, polio, malaria, whooping cough and other diseases. Doctors of the time had to know a lot about the varieties of gangrene. Many, many perished of various types of tuberculosis, from 3-year-old Henry Kaino of Ilwaco in 1903 to 36-year-old Albert Jacobsen at his farm six miles north of Ilwaco in 1912.
Then, even more than now, logging was extremely dangerous. A sample from 1913:
Age 48 — “Fractured skull, crushed by falling stump.”
Age 27 — “Frac. skull, neck broken, arm broken. Log rolled on him.”
Age 30 — “Back broken. Hit by log.”
Age 33 — “Acc. injury. Cut on circular saw. Hemorrhage.”
Drowning, especially by kids, was appallingly common. For example, in 1912 Victor Clark Slingerland, 11, Lester Young, 11, and Phillip Winnerood Brooks, 9, died together. The Chinook Observer reported they “were drowned in Sprague’s slough, near Ocean Park, last Thursday, being upset in a small hunting skiff. They got excused early from school, and they were not missed until suppertime, when a search revealed the accident.”
As in our time, firearms killed far more people via suicide and accident than by murder. This incident on Aug. 26, 1912 really got to me: John Willis Henry, 11, died of “Gunshot wound thru head inflicted by brother, supposed accidental.” And then, William Cleveland Henry, 27, died of “Gunshot wound thru head self inflicted.”
Spare a prayer for the Henry brothers.
posted by Mythtown @ 11:30 AM
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