Selected Notebooks from 2014, 2013 and 2012

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Be careful what Cheney wishes for: We may get it

Who cares about World War I? For most of us it’s not even grandpa’s war — more like great-grandpa’s — and lacking the Spitfire righteousness of World War II or Yankees vs. slavers drama of the Civil War. WWI is no one’s “favorite” war.

Among the 1 percent or so of Americans who pay close attention to such things, WWI is the “daily blue-plate special” just now. Not only are we in the midst of the centenary of the Great Slaughter, but aspects of current deadly kerfuffles in Ukraine, Iraq, Syria and elsewhere echo the run-up to the “Great Illusion,” as historian Jacques Barzun called WWI.

The term “great illusion” originated with English journalist Norman Angell, who in 1909 suggested whatever an aggressor might hope to gain from a European war would be illusory — that economic interconnections between nations would result in the kind of “mutually assured destruction” often discussed decades later in reference to the nuclear arms race. “The cost of an up-to-date war would be ruinous. All the resources of all the participants would be drained dry. No nation and no individual would benefit from victory.” All true — and then they went and did it anyway.

While the uninformed compare Russian leader Vladimir Putin with Hitler (see a smart rebuttal at tinyurl.com/nzymhg9), the more valid historical parallel is with German Kaiser Wilhelm II, whose impetuous and bombastic personality was a key trigger for WWI. Like Putin, Wilhelm wasn’t evil in a “Hitlarian” sense — but fanatically nationalistic, hungry for respect, and reckless with the lives of other men’s sons.

Barzun, whose magnum opus From Dawn to Decadence can serve as an essential textbook for self-guided study of western culture and history, issues this insightful verdict on the costs of WWI: “Varying estimates have been made of the losses that must be credited to the great illusion. Some say 10 million lives were snuffed out in the 52 months and double that number wounded. Others propose higher or lower figures. The exercise is pointless, because loss is a far wider category than death alone. The maimed, the tubercular, the incurables, the shell-shocked, the sorrowing, the driven mad, the suicides, the broken spirits, the destroyed careers, the budding geniuses plowed under, the missing births were losses, and they are incommensurable.”

It was broken

The Wall Street Journal and my former congressman — Dick Cheney — were busily pontificating last week that President Obama is a sort of latter-day disciple of hapless World War II UK Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain. In Cheney’s view, getting the U.S. out of Iraq and Afghanistan and keeping it out of the Ukrainian conflict are politically expedient and naively optimistic — acts of soft and craven laziness.

Cheney is precisely the manipulative jingoist who “broke” Iraq, in Colin Powell’s famous gift-shop analogy. But Powell is also right that we now at least partly “own it.” Cheney’s “war on a whim” upset the equilibrium between Shias, Summis, Kurds and other factions. The current Iraqi civil war is an avalanche that we unleashed.

In fact, deeper culpability goes farther back, to when the U.S. and all the victors of WWI cobbled together Iraq and other Middle Eastern nations for our own convenience. Then and now, they are not really “nations,” but collections of warring tribes with artificial political borders drawn around them.

Time to stay home

Although few Americans would quibble with the idea that former Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein was a horrible man, is there really any doubt that Iraq and its neighbors would have been far better off if we had left him alone? Cheney’s meddling delivered them — and many American warriors — from the frying pan into the fire.

Back in 2000, Barzun wrote “In many regions, fundamentalisms animate without unifying. To maintain some order in strategic areas, the older nations have taken on the task of policing — piecemeal — because in many corners some ‘liberation army’ is raiding and massacring in order to cut up still further the nationette recently carved out of a larger unit.” This starts to sound a lot like Iraq and Syria, Russia and eastern Ukraine.

Looking forward in time, Barzun leaves us with a premonition in which North America and Europe are “prosperous, law-abiding, overwhelming in offensive weaponry, and they have decided to let outside peoples and their factions eliminate one another until exhaustion introduced peaceableness into their plans.” Clobber outlaw nations, as we did Afghanistan, that pose actual threats to our homelands, but otherwise stay out of internal strife in places where we don’t have vital interests.

There will always be disagreements about which outside conflicts warrant our attention and which are best left alone. Most of us might agree to strongly oppose Russian armed aggression against an actual NATO member — Lithuania might spring to Putin’s mind, considering its access to the Baltic Sea.

In other cases, considering Cheney’s track record, as long he is alive we would do well to do the opposite of whatever he suggests. From Vietnam to Iraq, the wars Cheney has urged — but never personally risked anything in — have cost hundreds of thousands of lives, trillions of dollars and generated unimaginable amounts of bad will without much to show for it. Minding our own business isn’t isolationism. It’s good sense and good manners.

The U.S. spent at least 117,000 lives on WWI. Who knows why.

The sky is falling, but that’s nothing new

If we don’t try to learn from history, we’re little better than monkeys in the forest.

Knowledge of the past can be a warning, a comfort or often a mix of the two. On the broadest scale, it’s helpful to bear in mind that despite desperate challenges, we endure.

We have survived both as a nation and a species, and are likely to continue doing so. But this isn’t to suggest the future will be consistently enjoyable.

Thinking of a few of today’s big news stories — immigration, infectious disease, climate change — all are profoundly embedded in the human experience. The Book of Ecclesiastes may not literally be true in saying, “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.” After all, we live in a time of dazzling inventiveness. But when it comes to broad human themes, Ecclesiastes is right.

Here they come, again

History reveals that efforts to block human migration are destined to fail, but that there are excellent short- and medium-range reasons to control it.

There are innumerable examples, but the one that comes to mind at the moment are the Vikings. Really an occupation — piracy — rather than a race, Vikings continue to fascinate. And there constantly is “new” news about them, in addition to cultural reminders like a popular cable TV series.

An 800-page tome that compiles archaeological finds from the past three centuries, the forthcoming publication “Viking Graves and Grave-Goods in Ireland” illuminates the fact that Scandinavian invaders and colonists were integral in making Ireland what it is, for good and ill. One expert quoted by the Irish Times in July said, “It was a win-win: Vikings came with new technology and introduced long-distance trade.” However, another authority said, “We used to think the annals were prone to exaggeration, and maybe the Vikings weren’t so bad. But now there is a swing towards, ‘Jeepers, they were fairly catastrophic’.”

By operating an enthusiastic slave trade in cooperation with local warlords, founding Dublin on the harbor of the black pool, or dubh linn, and starting clan dynasties like the O’Loughlins — the Irish word for Norwegian — the Vikings left a profound imprint. But it is safe to assume most native people understandably considered them murderous thugs to be repelled and expelled at any cost.

We should count our blessings that our current would-be immigrants are aspirational Latin American kids. But protecting borders ultimately has to be near the top of any nation’s to-do list if it wishes to influence its own destiny.

The first horseman

In his persona as a War College-educated Army colonel, my dad was prone to analyzing international crises with reference to the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, particularly the first horseman named Pestilence. Although Dad never met my friend Dr. John Campiche of Seaview, the two shared the view that human affairs are highly subject to extreme intervention by viruses. Plagues are potent drivers of change, both in populations and individual families. In part, it was a series of devastating outbreaks of bubonic plague in London in 1603, 1625 and 1636 that spurred my Winter family’s emigration to Massachusetts Bay Colony.

There are some reasons why the Ebola virus is unlikely to become a major factor outside West Africa. But as Dr. Campiche wrote in a series of articles for the Chinook Observer, something or other certainly will blow up and become a pandemic killer of global extent. It is inevitable as sunrise.

When it comes to Ebola, Redmond O’Hanlon’s 1997 Congo memoir “No Mercy” provides this dialog/description that is better than anything I’ve seen in recent reporting:

“What’s in the Ebola River? The 60-foot python? The one that swallows dugouts whole?

“It’s not funny. It’s called the Ebola virus. Another of God’s little jokes. A filovirus — a thread virus. Another one He really worked on. ... It’s just for Homo sapiens. It’s adapted to take advantage of our caring for the dead. It’s there at the funeral service.

“Never heard of it.”

“It erupted simultaneously in 55 villages along the Ebola River. September 1976. You get a headache. You get a fever. Your immune system gives up. Your cells fill with the replicating virus and sprout threads like hairs. You hemorrhage and clot at the same time. [Lots of gruesome details omitted.] When someone picks you up to bury you they get it, too. No vaccine. No cure.”

Let’s just hope it doesn’t become airborne — the plague did.

Ultimate climate change

If you need any more proof that we can “Take a lickin’ and keep on tickin’,” consider the Toba catastrophe. This vast volcanic eruption on the island of Sumatra about 73,000 years ago is believed by some scientists to have pressed humankind to the brink of extinction. Bringing on a decade-long winter, some geneticists think we declined to 1,000 to 10,000 breeding pairs who barely clung to existence in scattered refuges.

British environmental prophet Jim Lovelock believes modern climate change will pound us back to similar straits. He told The Guardian newspaper in 2008 that humanity is in a period like 1938-39, when “we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn’t know what to do about it. ... Enjoy life while you can. Because if you’re lucky it’s going to be 20 years before it hits the fan.”

According to Lovelock, “There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human [race] on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”

As my current favorite singer, Ane Brun, says to our generation of obsessional worrywarts in her “Lullaby for Grown-ups”: “Go to sleep with closed eyes, your prophecies won’t be fulfilled tonight ... you can’t keep the sky from falling anyway.”

Lessons in how not to behave as a nation

This isn’t going to be a column about American ignorance of geography and history, although there are many irresistibly amusing and/or ghastly examples:

• A tired President Obama said in 2008 that he had campaigned in 57 states. He also asserted Hawaii is in Asia.

• After the Chicago Tribune called him “ignorant” and an “anarchist,” industrialist Henry Ford successfully sued for libel in the 1920s but revealed during legal depositions that he thought the American Revolution was fought in 1812 and that Benedict Arnold was famous for being an author. The jury awarded Ford six cents in damages instead of the $1 million he demanded.

• After Chechen-American radicals bombed the Boston Marathon in 2013, there was an outpouring of U.S. vitriol against the Czech Republic and Czechoslovakia. The latter ceased to exist in 1993. Part of southern Russia, Chechnya is 2,000 miles from the Czech Republic. The Czech ambassador had to issue an official statement highlighting this fact.

• During ongoing furor over Russian interference in the Ukraine, a nationwide survey of 2,066 Americans asked them to locate the nearly Texas-size Eastern European nation on a world map. Only 16 percent got it right, but the real horror comes from seeing just how appallingly wrong people were. A bunch think the Ukraine is in Alaska, Canada, Greenland or Africa. Eight survey respondents confused it with Brazil. Five think it is within the borders of the lower 48 states. Unsurprisingly, our fellow citizens who think the Ukraine is somewhere other than on Russia’s western border are much more likely to favor U.S. intervention. Heck, I’d be for intervention, too, if I thought the Russians were invading Argentina or Australia — as believed by three of our fellow citizens who participated in the survey.

I started out to write a column about Argentina’s loss to Germany in the World Cup, but then got to wondering whether it would be necessary to explain where Argentina is and why anyone should care about it. A passion of mine, I could write a 20-page essay off the top of my head about this lovable mess of a nation at the bottom of South America — but few readers would sit still for such a demonstration of my obsessive-compulsive fascination with Argentine wine, women and song. (Check out Silvana Deluigi on YouTube for a clue to my interest, for example tinyurl.com/mks8moe)

Very briefly, Argentina is a huge contributor to its own problems. Being the offspring of Spain and Italy, it exemplifies many of its parents’ worst political and economic attributes. And yet it also clearly is the victim of predatory international lending practices, while the U.S. and other western democracies largely sat on the sidelines and allowed a repressive dictatorship to conduct an internal “Dirty War” against political opponents in the 1980s.

Argentina is also worth studying as an example of how powerful countries can submerge into hard times. From being the 7th wealthiest nation a century ago, it now is about 26th and barely solvent. On top of disappointment about its now-dashed hopes for the World Cup, Argentina’s currency is quivering on the edge of collapse and its young, educated people are emigrating quick as crickets.

Writing in the Buenos Aires Herald, BA’s venerable English-language newspaper to which I long subscribed, an economist last month blamed his country’s decline on a sort of vampirish populism. Successive governments from every point on the political spectrum have placated voters with short-term, feel-good fixes instead of working on fundamental issues like fostering a high-quality education system or investing in national assets that lay the groundwork for future wealth creation.

“Missing from the market are cars, new construction, meat, motorcycles, medicine, flour, sugar, spare parts, etc.,” the Argentine observes. “The only remaining thing to buy is a television set on which to watch the World Cup, on the official channel, of course. Circuses we have, too bad the bread disappeared!”

The U.S. remains, thankfully, far from this level of dysfunction. But we’re not immune. All the imaginary money created in the past half dozen years to stave off a depression eventually will give us quite a case of indigestion. There’s no substitute for actual hard work when it comes to sustaining personal and national wealth.

Finally, back on the topic of national ignorance and self-deception, I commend to your attention the writings of international traveler extraordinaire Francis Tapon, including “Defending American Ignorance” at tinyurl.com/d6xhwtx.

“People who live in big countries can spend their whole lives there and not get bored. It’s not that we’re more stupid or have a bad education system (although both of these may be true), but it’s primarily because learning about a big country is complex enough,” Tapon writes.

“[I]t’s true: Americans are ignorant about many things. However, Europeans are hardly much better and sometimes their provincialism makes them worse.”

Isn’t there a way to end this shameful sacrifice?

I was 11 when I drowned.

Having fun one moment, and the next my lungs filling with water cold as a winter grave. Like 11-year-old Lindsey Mustread who died last Thursday in the Long Beach surf, I was just being a kid, playing in Birch Bay in Blaine with my cousins while our parents chatted on the beach a hundred yards away.

I was chest deep, wondering how summer water could possibly be so frigid. And then I stepped in a crab hole. Over my head in an instant, thrashing and panicky, my drowning might have been fatal if my cousin Gordon Kley hadn’t swam over and plucked me out.

“We didn’t even know you were in trouble,” my dad and Aunt Alice said later. From a distance, the splashing of drowning doesn’t look all that much different from the splashing of horsing around.

As a grownup now on another Washington shoreline, it makes me angry that we haven’t come up with better ways to keep kids and adults from dying in local waters they innocently come to enjoy. If Lindsey had fallen down a well, society would spend a million dollars tearing up the earth to get her out. But though we know with near certainty that one or more people will die in our surf each year, we seem powerless to stop it. I’m absolutely and profoundly grateful that we have professional and volunteer lifesavers — some of whom saved Lindsey’s 9-year-old brother Kenneth. But can’t we do more?

There must be few long-time residents who have not had close calls from sneaker waves, crab holes and rip tides on this deceptively beautiful stretch of coastline. Even on dry sand on a perfect summer day, you can never afford to turn your back on the Pacific.

Reviewing century-old death records a few years ago, I came across a report of two local boys drowning in a Peninsula slough, an event I feel may have inspired Verna Oller to make her generous bequest of $5 million for a community pool where children could learn to swim and where tourists might also play in safety. As a member of the committee that determined the City of Long Beach couldn’t afford to maintain and operate such a facility on its own, I have a sinking feeling that maybe we should have worked even harder to find some way to make it work. Her devoted lawyer Guy Glenn Sr. is still working on fulfilling her wish.

But would tourists really use a pool when the beautiful, dangerous ocean beach is close at hand? Probably not.

We must do a better job conveying the message that you can’t be truly safe in anything more than knee-deep water. Surging waves turn our beach’s “kiddie pool” into the “deep end” in a matter of moments. Combine suddenly deeper water with a strong rip current and amateur swimming skills, and it is a recipe for drowning.

If last week’s drowning was unusual, it was in the young person dying rather than a would-be rescuer. With sorrowful regularity, it is a parent rushing to the aid of his or her child who ends up in the morgue, while the child somehow manages to thrash his way to shore. There is more than one lesson in this.

First, children and teens should never be permitted to go in deeper than their knees. Younger kids should be kept within reach of an adult at all times. Those of us who know these precautions must not be shy about warning others when we see potential danger — even a rude brush-off from the recipient is a small price to pay. Parents visiting the beach with small children should buy life jackets for them and insist they are worn.

Second, don’t go into or near the ocean alone at any age. The powerful rip tide kills even strong swimmers, but if two or more people are holding onto one another, they are less likely to have their feet carried away from underneath them. If you can swim and are carried offshore by the current, don’t struggle but marshal your energy to angle back toward shore when the rip tide relents.

Third, if you observe a drowning in progress, you can nearly always do more good by staying on the beach. Call 911 immediately if you have access to a cell phone. Bystanders undoubtedly saved Kenneth’s life last week by calling for help without delay. Emergency responders would far rather be called and find the situation has happily resolved itself than be called too late and have to go into body-recovery mode. In the meantime, look for anything that can be thrown or pushed into the surf as a flotation device, such as a surfboard or beverage cooler. Assign bystanders to try to maintain sight of the person in the water.

There are other things we all can do to help avoid senseless tragedies in the ocean. Make certain your children take swimming lessons. Learn CPR. And learn to spot the signs of drowning, which are less obvious than you might think. (Drowning people usually don’t have enough air to yell for help. Their motion has been described as “trying to climb a ladder in the water,” with heads bobbing up and down, accompanied by some splashing. It all can happen very quickly.)

Once a person is out of the water, it’s important that they not be given up for dead. The rule is “no patient should be pronounced dead until warm and dead.” Drain water from their mouths and throats and continue CPR until emergency personnel take over. Children have been revived after as long as 70 minutes submerged in cold water, and Wikipedia reports even an 18-year-old surviving after 38 minutes under water.

It would be worth our while on this coastline to invest in low-wattage radio broadcasting devices along the beach to repeat all these warnings and advice.

The summer is young and promises to be warm and busy. Let’s resolve to make this first drowning of the year the last.

It is profoundly sad that a girl died in the surf at Long Beach last week. We offer our deepest condolences to her family and friends. Our thoughts and prayers are with you in this time of grief. It pains me to say that I have offered these exact same words of minimal comfort before, and will no doubt have to repeat them in the future.

Surging waves turn our beach’s “kiddie pool” into the “deep end” in a matter of moments.

The boondoggle that got away: The Columbia River-Puget Sound canal system

In a region famed for public-works boondoggles, one of the biggest fish that ever got away is the Columbia River-Puget Sound canal system.

If westerners think of canals at all, the image that springs to mind is an oversized, concrete-lined irrigation ditch. These are relatively common on the dry side of the mountains, channeling arteries of water around U.S. Bureau of Reclamation projects designed to turn deserts into cropland. Dad and I used to hunt mallards along such canals, harvesting daily limits of companionship memories but little else.

A full-size ship canal is a different matter. That’s what some of our forefathers envisaged as early as the 1850s, with variations on the same theme cropping up again and again for more than a century.

In a way, the concept has ancient origins in Indian trade routes and portages. The Washington State Historical Society’s Jim Sayce and others actively work to understand and map how Chinookan people moved around coastal watersheds. Sketchy documentation of these waterways and trails is available from a number of early sources, including the journal of Scottish botanist David Douglas, of fir tree fame.

Guided by Chinook Chief Comcomly’s brother Tah-a-muxi, Douglas traveled along a kind of U.S. version of British Columbia’s island-studded Inside Passage. From Douglas’ destination of Grays Harbor, Indians used to continue up the Chehalis River, portaging their canoes a mile and a half to Black River and then to Puget Sound at what is now Olympia.

On Oct. 25, 1825 Douglas wrote, “I found it very laborious dragging my canoe through the wood, over rocks, stumps, and gullies. On reaching (Willapa) Bay I proceeded along the coast a few miles; two hours before dusk a thick fog with a drizzly rain obliged me to encamp for the night ...”

Long before this, Chinook legends recorded on Willapa Bay in 1890 by Columbia University anthropologist Franz Boas tell of the tribe’s migrations within and between the Columbia estuary and Southwest Washington’s other great marine water bodies. One of the best of these stories is about a poor, lousy-headed boy trying to make his way back to the spring village of Mythtown after being robbed of an otter pelt and abandoned by three older cousins. Forced to walk along the bay shore, lack of water transportation was obviously tantamount to a death sentence.

But reaching the broad mouth of the Naselle River at ebb tide and waiting for slack water, he sees five monstrous black bears emerge from the river and stand upon it. The boy thinks “I must surely die,” but he boldly discards his elk-skin blanket on the shore and begins to swim across. He passes one bear after another, but as he reaches the fourth, it looks him right in the face. As the boy faints, he realizes the bear is really the powerful spirit Itc!xia´n.

Waking on the homeward riverbank and endowed with supernatural luck by this spirit, the boy makes his way back to his people, wins everyone’s money in gambling games and becomes so wealthy that he can buy wives from every tribe in the region. Soon, he is surrounded by women speaking many different tongues, just as Itc!xia´n foretold.

The prospect of great wealth, if not many wives, also was what drove whites to cross waters and dream of linking the river and the sound.

Territorial Gov. Isaac Stevens wrote in 1860, “the country between the Columbia River and Puget Sound ... was so favorable that it had been an idea, presented years ago, to connect their waters by a canal, so easy were the grades, and so low was the dividing ridge.” Imagining “vast possibilities,” the Washington Legislature pressed Congress time and time again to consider the scheme. In 1907 this resulted in a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers’ study that suggested there wasn’t enough groundwater available to keep such a canal full. Twenty navigation locks would be needed to lift vessels up and down the intervening hills, at an exorbitant cost, the corps said.

It is shocking to hear the Army Corps ever discouraged anyone from monkeying around with a complex hydrological system. Odds are good that the corps and its congressional partners merely preferred to spend the money elsewhere – for example, the Lake Washington ship canal near Seattle, which was constructed not long after the more grandiose Columbia-Sound canals were rejected.

The Great Depression brought a renewed push for the canal system. As recently as 1961, a new law created the Washington State Canal Commission, which contained a member touting easy travel on protected waters from Skagway, Alaska, to Lewiston, Idaho. Ballooning cost estimates – coupled with strenuous objections from the oyster, cranberry and fishing industries – finally killed it off. See tinyurl.com/lrdht3k for a blow-by-blow account of all this.

Of course one man’s salmon-slaying boondoggle is another’s precious John Day Dam or deeper Columbia River shipping channel. What will it be next?

In a drying world, every creek is sweet water

The Sweetwater River was a reliable lifesaver for pioneers on the Oregon Trail, its crystalline water wriggling down from glacier-clad Rockies into a sterile expanse of perpetual wind and peevish rattlers. Dad used to thrill us with his derring-do by fording it in our Jeep, water having about three seconds to seep under the door seals before we climbed to the other side of a grassy floodplain studded with wild columbines. If it drained directly into the Columbia estuary, the Sweetwater would be considered a creek, at most.

After leaving Sweetwater, wagon trains had a long and dusty slog ahead across the high desert of the continental divide, with only trickling Pacific Springs offering any respite for livestock. The springs — revealed by some scraggly willow bushes rising from monotonous low sagebrush — were almost in the shade of the Oregon Buttes, an iconic landmark that voyagers checked off a list of way-markers en route here to the promised land of rich soil and ample water.

Crossing this country on foot with a bedroll, a canteen and some beef jerky is to flip the calendar back thousands of pages to mankind’s wandering time. If you’re lucky, as I was during a “Survivorman” phase years ago, the only person you may encounter is a hospitable ranch hand out tending fences. But the Sweetwater is the biggest treat of this cross-desert sojourn — a skinny oasis at the bottom of a steep-sided valley that is nearly invisible from only a thousand feet away. Like watering holes in Africa, it attracts predators and prey from many miles around, while also supporting its own vibrant ecosystem of everything from aspen to wild strawberries, beavers to bluebirds.

Creeks are the downtrodden orphans of waterways, treated as disposable by people throughout the developed world. A whole small sub-genre of literature has grown up, for example, about the lost rivers of London — nearly forgotten little tributary streams that have been covered over and incorporated into the city’s labyrinthine sewer system. The Fleet River — where in 1710 Jonathan Swift observed “Dead Cats and Turnips-Tops come tumbling down the Flood” — was long ago paved over and became the district where the British newspaper industry was until recently based.

In London and much closer to home in cities including Seattle, an expensive but appealing process is under way to free some concrete-entombed rivers and restore them to the light. Here in the vicinity of the estuary, creeks weren’t so much deliberately buried as cut off from tidal influence and migrating salmon by inappropriate culverts, or wrecked by antiquated logging practices such as splash dams.

On Gray’s Bay in Western Wahkiakum County where I lived for five years in the 1990s, a skinny little creek was buried beneath blackberry vines a good 15 feet high. It was a scratchy pleasure hacking down the blackberries to reveal the creek, making it watchable from my living room window. Making its way under the county road, this unnamed creek did what it always had, mingling with the bay’s brackish waters in a rich tidal swamp.

Some of my most pragmatic local friends view creek restorations as something of a liberal affectation, with efforts to rejoin them — and their associated wetlands — to the Columbia having some poorly defined negative impact on nearby river currents and water quality. I’m unaware of any evidence to support these concerns.

Along the estuary’s north shore, where the mostly now-abandoned deep north channel used to sweep along close to cliffs, 20th century highway engineers were forced to construct several miles of Washington State Route 401 and U.S. Highway 101 atop artificially created shelves, levees and dikes. The same is true around Willapa Bay. I suspect the real worry by objectors has less to do with restoring creek-river connections than with the related possibility that pastures behind these levees will be eyed for restoration, or subject to more flooding. (But since many of the same individuals reject the reality of human-caused sea-level increases, they have nothing to worry about, right?)

The National Park Service and CREST will be working on a new creek-river reunion at the Dismal Nitch Rest Area just east of the Washington end of the Astoria Bridge. A number of other, similar projects are possible in the next few years, as salmon-restoration efforts look for ways to make the estuary more like it was. Even in this year of excellent salmon forecasts, runs are a small fraction of what they were. Much remains to be done.

It is close to the opposite of pragmatism to admit this, but to me, free-flowing creeks are a “good” in and of themselves. Bringing them back, tending to them, turning them loose to be as wild or tame as they want to be — this all feels inherently virtuous.

Even in this luxuriantly well-watered place, there’s something profoundly satisfying about a little stream. They speak a language of gurgles and murmurs. Our ancestors looked for answers there. So do I. Every creek is sweet water.

The untamed shrew — tough little warriors deserve respect

To be so nauseating that nothing else wants to eat you is the ultimate indignity in the natural world. On the spectrum of deliciousness, commonly encountered coastal corpses range from cottontail bunnies — nothing left but random tufts of hair by the next post-mortem morning — to shrews, which everything else leaves untouched to drearily evaporate back into the soil and air.

Watching for Chinook arrowheads is only one reason to carefully look where you step in these storm-lashed hills; another is avoiding treading on beetles and red-legged frogs and other living wonders. Late one afternoon last week above the Pacific, the horizontal light of the sinking sun illuminated an otherwise invisible canopy of translucent spider highways, molecule-slender tightropes laced no more than four inches above the mud by mite-sized hatchlings. A gossamer village of glimmer and life, it’s vanished from everything but memory after this week’s deluge.

Another cause to be alert is not stepping on the dead. There was the possum this fall, which I still observe in the form of her one remaining white scapula or shoulder blade sinking into the trail, a last memorial of a bloody fight with a coyote. I happened upon the scene the next day with an audible “Whoa!” and swift change of course to steer shaggy Duncan around the body. It was easy to picture veritable liferafts full of fleas surrounding the cooling carcass like drowning survivors around the Titanic, frantically hoping for something to pick them up.

Shrews are the most un-dearly departed of forest dead, with at least four currently lying bloated on my dog-walking paths. Though I suppose every night is an Omaha Beach bloodbath for a host of cute woodland creatures, only shrews are murdered but left untouched — unclean lepers in an otherwise hungry habitat. If you really, really want to know why, first find a recently deceased shrew, insert your hand into a plastic bag, pick it up and place near your nose. They reek like their reputation.

Shrews have gotten nothing but bad press since long before there were printing presses. Their very name has entered culture. You will quite rightly be labeled a misogynist if you call a woman a shrew — though on the other hand, few mind being called shrewd, a synonym for brilliant that also derives from this unloved creature.

Beyond their goat-like aroma, at one time I wondered if our local shrews weren’t eaten because they are a rare venom-filled mammal, like the platypus. But our western long-tailed shrews are of the genus Sorex, while poisonous short-tailed shrews belong to a different genus, Blarina, and live in the eastern U.S. and Europe. There’s an upside to this venom: An active ingredient in shrew spit has been shown to inhibit some cancers.

The delightfully esoteric The Shrew(ist’s) website, at members.vienna.at/shrew, has vivid accounts of shrew bites, such as this from 1889: “I walked to the house, only a few hundred yards away, but by this time, the pain which had been rapidly increasing, had become quite severe, and by the time I had placed the shrew in an improvised cage, I was suffering acutely. … The pain and the swelling reached its maximum development in about an hour, but I could not use my left hand without suffering great pain for three days, nor did the swelling abate much before that time.”

In English folklore, the merest touch of any shrew caused agony to men, cattle and horses. As an antidote, a living shrew was sealed inside a hole drilled in an ash tree, branches from which were then used by a human “shrew mother” or healer to counteract the creature’s evil after-effects. Poor shrew…

In western Washington and Oregon, shrews aren’t a danger to us, but very much to one another. Extremely territorial, depending on food availability each defends 10,000 to 60,000 square feet with tiny tooth and claw, sometimes to the death. Except when in the mood for love, individuals of opposite genders regard one another as bitter rivals. They need a lot of foraging space since some eat up to three times their body weight per day in insects, worms, small rodents, seeds and anything else they can swallow. They aren’t rodents themselves, being more closely related to moles.

Several different species are found here, including the Pacific water shrew, dusky shrew, Trowbridge’s shrew, vagrant shrew and — at least in Pacific County — possibly the Olympic shrew.

The 1968 book and 1971 movie “Red Sky at Morning” comes to mind when I think of close encounters with deceased creatures. Every ranch child has an ingrained aversion to horse corpses, which are the odor equivalent of a doom’s day bomb. Worth your time for many reasons, “Red Sky” includes a shockingly funny scene that I sense underlies my minor phobia about even the tiniest of decaying bodies.

Far from hating shrews, though, we should salute them as micro-weight warriors matching wits with endless enemies in a dangerous wilderness. Untamed and disregarded, they are still mighty in spirit.

Long-awaited O’Neil book celebrates amazing shipwreck stories

Magpies aren’t found on our coast, but there are plenty of the human variety.

Geniuses of the bird world, these crow cousins are famous for collecting shiny objects and flying them back to their tangly, treehouse-like nests for ongoing display and enjoyment. You might think magpie homes would be good places to paw through in search of gold nuggets and lost diamond rings, but regrettably their taste tends to run more to foil candy wrappers and bits of broken mirrors.

Human magpies also started out by collecting shiny things. Some still do. My wife springs to mind. I tell her that a comet hitting the earth wouldn’t be all bad — she would easily become queen of a post-apocalypse bead-based economy.

One of the attractions of archaeology, at least for laymen, is that it sometimes involves digging up the coins and baubles of our ancestors. Particularly in Britain and Europe where people have been losing rings and hiding valuables from invaders since the age of copper and bronze, the sport of metal detecting threatens to denude the soil of every glittering object.

In the Pacific Northwest where “lost” civilizations didn’t have much metal, objects were mostly made of wood and stone. Here around the mouth of the Columbia, the powerful Clatsop and Chinook tribes — plus others whose names are barely remembered such as the Kilooklaniuck — made household and ceremonial objects from perishable cedar and other woods. Judging by rare surviving examples collected by early white explorers, these tribes more than made up for in artistry what they lacked precious metals. Entire houses were sculptures of a kind, now rotted away to nothing by time and our relentless climate.

In the modern day, men like me gather all sorts of eccentric items, not because they are shiny, useful or intrinsically beautiful, but because they tell stories. We aren’t quite odd enough to actually hear things whispering to us, but they do spark our imaginations and give us things to talk about with fellow enthusiasts.

Avian magpies, according to Ask.com, “are attracted to shiny things because they use them to attract a partner. This is often seen as a way to give them an edge over the other. They intend to attract a partner by keeping the shiny objects at strategic places or locations for them to see.” Human magpies, on the other hand, quickly learn to hide our obsessions from romantic partners. There aren’t many wives or dates who want to learn of the glories of first-generation Evinrude outboards, 1890s oyster cans, Bergman decoys or Salish Sea stone net weights.

One of my favorite all-time collectors was fortunate in having a daughter who shared his passion for one special category of coastal artifact: photos and other materials pertaining to the shipwrecks and lifesavers of the late-18th through mid-20th centuries. Wayne O’Neil published the Chinook Observer from 1963 to 1984, and as a U.S. Coast Guard veteran, he took a passionate interest in all things nautical.

When I moved to Long Beach in 1991, Wayne was employing “pickers” around the country to find these materials. “I’ve got something to show you,” he’d say with a mischievous Irish smile, and reveal some astounding newly arrived one-of-a-kind photo of jetty construction or sailors struggling in the rigging of a grounded sailing ship. Photos of wrecks were uncommon in early Pacific and Clatsop county newspapers, which lacked the appropriate technology to convert them in a timely way into formats suitable for newsprint. But real photo postcards portraying shipwrecks — often in high resolution and captured at dramatic moments — were reproduced and sold to residents and tourists. There are thousands of examples of some, but the ones Wayne collected were unique or nearly so.

Wayne died far too young — perhaps the victim of toxic printing solvents — but his daughter Peggy Mathena last year completed work on Wayne’s book “Man & The Sea,” a collection of his photos and some of the most colorful stories about our local era of shipwrecks. A special limited edition is even printed on paper that washed ashore and was salvaged on the Long Beach Peninsula. See manandthesea.com for complete details and ordering information.

Few of us today would have the fortitude and reckless courage it took to sail the Pacific in storms like those that pound this coast. Events like the 91 mph wind that shook the area earlier this week are scary to drive in. Imagine what it would be like out on the open ocean in a creaking wooden vessel, with only the wind itself for power and the storm driving you toward this black shore.

It is stories like these that drive a few of us to collect the flotsam and jetsam of the past.

In my family, ‘We’re downstairs’ and darned proud of it

“We’re downstairs,” mom used to say. She wasn’t referring to our location in the house but to the fact that her dad’s mother started adult life “in service,” a housemaid in the Northeast England town of Washington, from which our first president’s family also emigrated.

“Upstairs, Downstairs” is the name of a 1970s British show much in the same mode as the popular phenomenon “Downton Abbey” today. It revolved around the upstairs-dwelling Bellamy family of London and their considerably more colorful flock of downstairs servants. During its first go-round on PBS when I was a kid, “Upstairs, Downstairs” seemed to be an accurate glimpse into a rigid social-class structure some of my ancestors escaped in the 1880s.

“Downton Abbey,” now in its fourth season on PBS, has better actors and production values. It’s also more prone to clichés and soap-opera plot devices — the noble-hearted valet falsely imprisoned for murder, the liberal young abbey co-owner summarily killed off in a convertible crash, etc. In my great-grandmother’s Great Britain, the sorts of behavior they get up to, upstairs and down, would have gotten you ostracized for life if not locked up.

While watching the show earlier this winter, the actress playing assistant-cook character Daisy Mason struck me as bearing a physical resemblance to my petite Great-grandma Elizabeth Bell. Far from the flighty and lovelorn Daisy, however, great-grandma was a magneto-like whirlwind of a woman who could melt steel armor with her icy-hot contempt. And unlike the 21st century actors playing “downstairs” women, she fiercely guarded her dignity and hard-fought status. When the end of World War I brought a crash in wheat prices that destroyed most of the middle-class wealth she and her husband had accumulated, great-grandma preferred poison to shame.

A good part of U.S. interest in these costume dramas are the anthropological insights they pretend to offer into American and British attitudes about social class. Even before 1776, in this country we’ve had a sense of superiority about not having the British sense of superiority. In the same way, my mom despised snobbery with a passion that verged on, well, snobbery.

There remains a stronger awareness of class divisions in the United Kingdom than here. Last April, the BBC published the Great British Class survey after collecting results from 161,000 people in an online test. (It’s still available. Although specific to Britain, it’s an interesting exercise to see where you might fit into the BBC’s seven modern social layers. See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22025328). The survey makes an effort to go well beyond simple matters of wealth and income, also including things like participation in cultural activities and social networks.

Harry Wallop, an author quoted by the BBC, observes about the UK, “Class used to be about how much you earned, how you earned your money on a Monday to Friday. Now it’s about how you spend your money at the weekend.” Here in the U.S., good old money and power are still the big dogs in the status game.

My “frienemy” late U.S. Sen. Malcolm Wallop, R-Wyo., was uncle of the current earl of Carnarvon, who owns Highclere Castle, where “Downton Abbey” is filmed. A descendent of one of the younger sons of nobility sent to the Wild West to raise cows, Wallop’s rambling mansion-esque ranch house in Big Horn, Wyo., was a comfortable and welcoming version of the grandiose stately homes that dot the face of Britain like high-maintenance pimples. But it was nevertheless an upper-class operation — named Polo Ranch, it promoted a sport that isn’t exactly popular among working cowhands.

Just because the U.S. operates under a social contract that pretends we don’t have a class system doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Sen. Wallop was a good example. At home, he was a sweetheart of a guy — fair, friendly, generous and egalitarian. But in the Senate he invariably voted on behalf of his class, helping lay the groundwork for the America of today where the wealthiest one percent has more than tripled their income since 1980, while middle and working class people have struggled to add an inflation-adjusted average about 15 percent.

Only recently have many average Americans started to wake up to this “great humbling” of national aspirations for better futures for our children and grandchildren. Even congressional Republicans piled onto the issue this week, bless their hearts.

In truth, working toward a better balance of success among citizens deserves to be a priority for both political parties. We can afford to be playfully entertained by fictional stories about British class differences, but we must not go any farther down the path toward wallowing in them here. For all its charm as an elaborate tourist trap, modern Britain is in many respects a sad place. A government survey late last year estimated that 750,000 Britons between ages 16 and 25 believe they have nothing to live for. They are chained to a murky economic bottom and have no realistic chance of ever being able to swim up to the light.

America’s wonderful sense of optimism partly depends on everyone being able to see a path toward advancement. Shame on us if we allow that hope to die.

An updated ‘code of the West’ offers guidance for our time

“The Code of the West” sounds like a book by cowboy author Zane Grey — and it is — but it’s a lot more, including a useful way of getting people today to think about the realities of rural life.

There’s a vast region of America where we live because great-grandma’s covered-wagon axle broke here or grandpa found work in a logging camp the next valley over. This shared past also still governs how we live today. Whether they know it or not, plenty of people descended from homesteaders who built lives from scratch, but weren’t averse to calling for help getting across a flooded creek or raising a barn. It stands to reason that ideas like independence, self-sufficiency and neighborliness go hand in hand.

Of course, homesteading also meant settlers were the recipients of some big gifts from fellow citizens — usually at least 320 acres of land, plus a school for your kids, and a sheriff to lock up Crazy Pete the Prospector when he got too drunk on Saturday nights. But still, in comparison with lots of other places, people mostly did for themselves.

Son of a gun

Growing up the son of a six-gun-toting Zane Grey disciple, I learned (approximately in chronological order) to: always know what you’re shooting at, walk, talk — but not too much, read everything, be respectful to everybody, stand up to bullies, don’t hesitate to get your hands dirty when that’s what the job requires, learn from your mistakes, build good fences, know who your friends are and always ready to make new ones, do favors without expecting thanks, pay your bills on time, find work you love, don’t hold grudges, and never mix whiskey and wine. As for the birds and the bees — we were too bashful about the whole topic to ever discuss it. Well into my teens, I kind of suspected kissing girls led to babies in some mysterious way. Little did I know…

In practicality, the code mostly came down to being honest, minding your own business and being willing to tow neighbors’ pickups out of snowdrifts regardless of their political or religious peculiarities.

The Oregon House of Representatives went so far as to endorse its own brief and idealistic version of the code in 2011 on a 44-14 vote. Some dissenters noted that Old West values once included a heck of a lot of racism and sexism. Perhaps the House should have added “learn from your mistakes.” Not everything that was once “right” remains so forever.

More usefully, some rural counties have in effect made a pragmatic version of the code into their own official zoning and lifestyle rules. See, for example, Siskiyou County, Calif., which issued a guide for residents (bit.ly/CodeOfWest) with items like:

“Fundamental to the theme of ‘The Code of the West’ is this concept: the right to be rural. Although self-reliance is required, rural neighbors need each other. A horse or two may live next door and there are wild animals living in the woods. Clean water, sanitation and access are your responsibility.”

Another example: “Don’t move next to a commercial forest and complain when the time comes to cut it or when logging trucks come down the road.” The same can be said in our area about logging operations and fish-processing businesses. One person’s nuisance is another’s traditional way of making sure their kids have decent lives.

The coastline of Oregon and Washington remains a remarkable outpost of the personal and environmental values that made the Pacific Northwest a worldwide legend. Beauty and creativity thrive here on an epic scale. Boy, are we lucky. But spend a little time perusing the updated satellite photo mosaics on Google Earth and you’ll witness just how massively things have changed here in the past 20 years. Forests are being carved up into smaller pieces, land near beaches is filling up with houses. The ample spaces we once enjoyed to avoid rubbing each other the wrong ways are going away.

We must have an ongoing discussion about our own version of “The Code of the West.” Heritage, hospitality and hipness can go hand in hand.

“Bonny and buxom”

On a closing note, as Valentine’s Day rushs toward us like Pepé Le Pew in the old Looney Tunes cartoons, it’s a proper time to remember that brides used to pledge to be “bonny and buxom in bed and at board.”

Dating from about 1,000 years ago when words had different meanings, this vow isn’t as racy as it sounds, sadly interpreting into something rather bland like “I promise to be nice and to make things you like for dinner.” But it’s a safe bet that knowing smiles were exchanged along with the words. Bonny and buxom are good principles to live by — for all genders.

Time travel made easy — ancestral memories live within us

If powerful parts of my great-grandfather’s actual memories live on inside my own cells, did he really die? Do I exist only within the boundaries of my own life, or can a distant generation’s love and loathing ripple through time and space? Does being a good person make our children and friends better in ways that outlive us?

Christmastime, sleigh-full of longing for departed loved ones, welcomes contemplation about if we’ll ever — or never — see our folks again. We imagine our children as old men and ladies thinking back on when we were alive. Here we are, puttering around and trying to be meaningful or amusing while reenacting cherished old family traditions. But will this only be a slender tendril of memory, something that dies forever when those who personally knew us die themselves? Or is there any hope for a kind of true immortality?

Traditionally, people swore by the total heritability of essential character traits, something that now makes us uncomfortable. If your dad was a reprobate and a scoundrel, it shouldn’t mean you are judged as predestined to be the same. Nor should we be permitted to coast along on the reputation of a saintly grandma.

But science has uncovered intriguing indications that aspects of who we are survive death — in subtle ways beyond teaching good manners or imparting fond recollections. If your great-great-granddaughter makes your dinner rolls perfectly, it won’t just be because you handed down the recipe. It also may echo the care you lavish upon them yourself — a habit of responsibility stamped into the fabric of existence. And maybe being nice to your dog rubs off on the universe.

In a story headlined “‘Memories’ pass between generations,” the BBC reports this month that descendents of mice trained to avoid a smell retain their ancestors’ aversion. “It is high time public health researchers took human trans-generational responses seriously,” said one authority in the field. This particular finding, he said, is “highly relevant to phobias, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders” and is “compelling evidence” that a kind of memory lives on.

(Other recent research finds that men’s diets at the time of their children’s conception have long-lasting impacts on child health — yet another previously unknown type of posterity…)

My scientist friends will be swift to note that it is one thing to acquire negative reflexes from distant ancestors, but quite another to retain a complete imprint of personal traits or attitudes to living. But that isn’t what I’m suggesting. Rather, we all are parts of a continuum in which generations meld into one another.

If you miss your mama and daddy, as I do, look inside your soul. There they are! Wonder what kind of a man your Civil War ancestor was? A good part of him, beyond just his genes, looks you over in the mirror each morning — and possibly wonders why you’ve put on so much weight.

A different kind of time travel is also in the science literature this month. It’s been suspected for a while that particles can be created that respond instantly to one another, even if separated by billions of miles — something Einstein called “spooky action at a distance.” Work at the University of Washington shows that creating black holes — which can be as small as single atoms — simultaneously forms wormholes that can link unimaginably distant places and times. 

Another ramification of this, reported by Science Daily, is that a “particle, or a time traveler, [might be able] to make multiple loops back in time — something like Bruce Willis’ travels in the Hollywood film ‘Looper.’

“That is, at certain locations in spacetime, there are wormholes such that, if you jump in, you’ll emerge at some point in the past. To the best of our knowledge, these time loops are not ruled out by the laws of physics.”

All this overtaxes my feeble mind. But if I may suggest possible Christmas presents for your own time-travel enthusiast, H.G. Wells’ original “The Time Machine” is still entertaining and inspiring, much better than any movie version. “Time and Again” by Jack Finney is a delight. And “11/22/63” by Stephen King will keep your time traveler turning pages long into the night.

Genes link us across centuries and continents

One of my wife’s cousins died in southeastern Siberia a while back, a 4-year-old boy with brown hair, brown eyes and a spray of freckles. His parents loved the little guy, and buried him with an ivory diadem, a bead necklace and a bird-shaped pendant.

They were a traveling bunch and his grave is about 4,350 miles away from the more familiar family home in southern Sweden. We don’t even know his name. Little wonder, as he died 24,000 years ago.

It’s true that if you go far enough back, everyone is related to everyone, but my wife and daughter have a more verifiable connection with this little boy than would have been possible until this era of amateur genetics research. I buy genetics testing the way some men shell out money for boats or lottery tickets.

Donna, Elizabeth and the little Siberian all have mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) lineage designated by the letter U. They and 10 percent of other European-Americans are direct descendants of the same distant grandma who lived 550 centuries ago. (mtDNA is passed only by mothers to their children of both genders.) People with U ancestry are believed to be among the first to reenter Northwest Europe as the ice sheets retreated 10,000 years ago.

But no one knew until recently that the U family also migrated into the far reaches of Siberia, to what is now a small village just north of ancient, mile-deep and mysterious Lake Baikal. People we would recognize as European were part of the ethnic mix in the heart of Asia long, long ago.

There is an even bigger surprise in the boy’s genes. Scientists examining the boy’s other DNA is a 25 percent match with that of living Native Americans, according to Nicholas Wade, writing in the New York Times. American Indians naturally have mtDNA from the lineages A,B,C, D and X — but not U. But they do still retain many of the same other genes as the Siberian boy — he matches Europeans and Indians, but not East Asians.

Writing in the journal Nature, Dr. Eske Willerslev of the University of Copenhagen, concludes:

“Before 24,000 years ago, the ancestors of Native Americans and the ancestors of today’s East Asians split into distinct groups. The Mal’ta child represents a population of Native American ancestors who moved into Siberia, probably from Europe or west Asia. Then, sometime after the Mal’ta boy died, this population mixed with East Asians. The new, admixed population eventually made its way to the Americas. Exactly when and where the admixture happened is not clear, Willerslev said. But the deep roots in Europe or west Asia could help explain features of some Paleoamerican skeletons and of Native American DNA today.”

This helps explain how Kennewick Man, the skeletal remains discovered along the Hanford Reach in southeastern Washington state, appears to be a European-type person living in ancient America. American Indians and Europeans are not separate races, but relatively close cousins who met and mixed during the peak of the last ice age in Siberia.

All this has been a hot topic of discussion on the robust message boards and Internet forums devoted to citizen-based study of DNA. The original posting on the Eurogenes Blog (eurogenes.blogspot.com) on Oct. 19 was up to 119 comments as of this Thursday. Passionate arguments revolve around issues of genetics that most of us would find utterly over our heads. But the depth of this passion is often surprising. It shouldn’t be — in some important ways, genes are a fundamental piece of who we are.

I know the idea of gene testing sounds strange and extravagant to some, but learning these clues about who we are and how we came to be is intensely interesting. I strongly encourage you to get involved. I’m always happy to answer question if you have them. Feel free to write mwinters@chinookobserver.com.

Poisonous ‘arms race’ leads to hyper-deadly local newts

A 1909 news brief in Dad’s hometown newspaper, the Bellingham Herald, filled me with a warm glow of professional envy.

“MULE KICKS HIMSELF INTO ETERNITY

“Because a mule kicked him, Clarence Eddellman, 27, Bellingham’s dwarf expressman, gained revenge by putting a dose of strychnine in the mule’s feed, which proved to be the knock-out drop. His friends cannot account for his actions. “Stub” was in the employ of the Old Whatcom transfer barn at the time and was driving the mule daily... A warrant has been sworn out for his arrest.”

Not to be insensitive to the plight of either man or beast, but how often in a career does a newspaperman get to report on a mule-murdering dwarf fleeing justice on very short legs? This has to go down in the annals of bizarre Pacific Northwest crimes. (My version abridges the original.)

Aside from sheer tabloid sleaziness, this story and several others from the same period caught my attention for what they reveal about changing fashions in suicide and homicide. Writing of a newfound interest in poison might be enough to set the police pounding on my door, but I hasten to add that I’m neither depressed nor murderous. It’s just curious that deliberate poisoning of one kind or another was commonplace a century ago but is hardly heard of now.

It’s a good thing — strychnine was an especially gruesome way to die. The processed seeds of a tropical Asian tree, it once was an ordinary household product used to control mice and other pests. As always, it’s a bad idea to place deadly substances or mechanisms within easy reach of persons with imperfect impulse control.

Pursuing this topic has led up and down all sorts of fascinating trails. If only I had Sherlock Holmes’ email address, we could have an engaging chat about antagonistic interference with sodium ion channels.

As it is, I continued by looking into whether any members of the Strychnos genus of plants grow in the Pacific Northwest. It appears not, as they need more consistent warmth than we get. In contrast, poison hemlock is a noxious weed throughout the Northwest, though neither the Oregon or Washington weed boards identifies any in Clatsop or Pacific counties. This likely is simply for lack of thoroughly looking, as we have the right conditions for this notorious killer of Socrates.

This inquiry about plants in turn led to the question of whether any of our native frogs produce poison, as is often the case for tropical species. Again, the answer is no, but we do have one startlingly deadly animal right at our feet.

Rough-skinned newts, gentle orange-bellied creatures that can be observed on any forest walk, are arguably among the most toxic animals known to science. At least this is true of many newts living in Oregon; their otherwise identical cousins living in southwest British Columbia have almost no poison. The tetrodotoxin in newts is 10,000 times more deadly than cyanide. It is the same substance that makes pufferfish so dangerous to Japanese gourmets.

In what has been called an evolutionary arms race, the toxicity of Oregon newts is directly linked with the common garter snakes that enjoy eating them. A 2008 article in the scientific journal PLOS Biology (http://tinyurl.com/mdrjbtb) lays out the technical details. In essence, to avoid being eaten by snakes, newts from parts of Oregon and a few other hotspots have built up so much poison in their skins that a single individual contains enough to kill 25,000 mice. Meanwhile, the snakes build up increasing levels of immunity to newt poison.

Of local interest, the newts of Chinook and Warrenton are particularly poisonous, but our snakes have achieved a near perfect equilibrium of immunity.

Newts are nice little animals, harmless to everything except the insects and worms they eat, and any bullfrogs or herons stupid enough to try to eat them. They’re safe to handle, but you should wash up before touching your eyes. Best advice is let them go their way.

A single newt contains easily enough toxin to kill a human, as a drunken 29-year-old Coos Bay man discovered in 1981 after eating one on a dare. Unless you’re a garter snake, they reputedly taste absolutely awful. You’re not going to get away with slipping one into your mule’s feedbag or your landlord’s tea.

Observer chronicles pretty birds, hopeful hunters

Lounging beside U.S. Highway 101 like a hitchhiker in fancy pajamas, a ring-necked pheasant was in more danger from log trucks last Wednesday than from hunters. Like so many “wild” creatures here on the far western edge of America, habituation to tame humans seemed to have made it docile enough to approach and stroke its intricately patterned back.

An Asian species first introduced in America in 1881, ring-necked pheasants have been planted near Chinook for decades by the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife. They’ve naturalized quite well and are sometimes encountered on the Long Beach Peninsula and elsewhere in the county. Although theoretically bred just for hunting, many more people value them simply as decorative and exotic neighbors — walking Christmas tree ornaments.

Like the quail that delight by exploding into noisy flight like small, feathered landmines when I pass by in the forest, a good number of pheasants have taken up a Robin Hood existence in the woods. They are beyond easy reach of most shotgun-toters.

Pheasants have been a topic of interest in the Chinook Observer since 1901, when we reported on the top of page 1, “The Washington game law was shot all to pieces at the last regular Legislature. There is now said to be no law in the state protecting pheasant and quail.” In a lapse of attention, lawmakers accidentally killed off all the protections for imported game birds, along with axing the penalty for not buying a hunting license, then priced at $1.

Pheasant and duck hunting were major recreational activities for the men and boys of the Lower Columbia River a century ago, as they were for my dad up in Bellingham. Stalking birds with his three boys eventually became one of the most zestful aspects of his life and of ours. These splendid autumn days, the sun slanting down through the morning fog to set the Columbia aglow, put me much in mind of his innocent enthusiasm about the start of hunting season.

I know talk of hunting will put some readers off, but take comfort in the fact that we weren’t ever much good at it. Warmly nestled side-by-side on the bench seat of his Ford pickup, we’d listen to the football game while driving between the reservoirs and canals of the big irrigation project north of the reservation. At long intervals, we’d bail out, creep up to the edge of a waterway and lunge up, often finding nothing but placid water laced with long streams of algae. Coming home empty handed was counted as a victory over the smelly chore of cleaning ducks.

My distant predecessors at the newspaper wrote up many observations about hunting:

“The rod and gun club have abolished the by-law which fines a member $10 for crawling a mile on a lone teal and killing him with a club.”

— Sept. 27, 1901

“The fishermen and hunters have done a good business up the creeks and on the tidelands this week. The weather has been wet, dry, cloudy, sunshiny, warm, cold, hot, windy, calm and stormy — and that’s no josh. The tide reached 10 feet Monday noon, but did no damage; building and painting has continued without interruption, and on the whole the town is happy, with no kick on the weather.”

— Nov. 1, 1901

“Ed Babbidge is economizing on his meat bill since he got married. He carries a gun with him on the steamer and drops some kind of duck every day for dinner. His last shot was a mud hen — by mistake — which he presented to a friend.”

— Nov. 15, 1901

“The Chinook Rod & Gun Club was treated to [a visit]. Alex Gilbert, the Astoria capitalist, was out shooting with the boys and one lone canvasback settled among the decoys. Alex blasted away with both barrels; the duck paid no attention. Jack Craig was stalking a cripple. Next broadside of three barrels that Alex shot was a success. It knocked the eyes out of most of the decoys, killed the canvasback and Jack took what was left, one shot in the hand and one on his head. Jack came running up to Alex and asked him, ‘Here! Are you shooting ducks or only me?’ … Jack says he had to get pretty close to ground sometimes during the Phillipine war, but he never had to hug mother earth so close as when he looked into Gilbert’s gun and then behind it saw him with the light of battle in his eyes.”

— Dec. 9, 1904

And then there is the account of ducks being cleaned for Christmas dinner, their crops found to contain numerous small gold nuggets pecked up from a local creek. I’m keeping those details to myself. Maybe it’s time to oil my shotgun.

The humble tin can was key to our region’s early success

Cruise ship passengers walking past the large Astoria Warehousing complex on Marine Drive surely must look up at the fading American Can Company sign and idly wonder why a small town needed so many containers.

Most of us who live on the Lower Columbia know about our region’s glory days as the world capital of the fish-canning business. But even we can scarcely appreciate the massive industrial efforts and innovations that went into more than a century of canning.

In its peak year of 1884, the Columbia fishery generated about 31.5 million cans of salmon. Astoria and Ilwaco were also closely involved with Alaska, which by 1902 was producing up to 106 million cans of salmon a year. Trainloads of canning supplies came in and trainloads (and ship cargoes) of full cans went back out. The waterfront must have been truly abuzz.

Even if a salmon-based alien civilization appeared in water-filled spaceships and blasted out all the Columbia-Snake dams, the eventual resurgence in fish runs wouldn’t bring back canning. Transportation and tastes have changed. Except for sandwiches and a few recipes, there’s not much use for canned salmon when you can select fresh or frozen. For our grandparents, however, canned salmon was a delicious, affordable and routine menu item. (I suppose intelligent space-based salmon would strenuously object to their relatives being eaten, so it’s probably just as well that humans remain in charge of the hydropower system.)

Like so many other things we take for granted, the whole process of preserving food in sealed containers is comparatively new. Invented by a Frenchman in 1795, by the time of the Columbia River industry’s heyday, a book reported, “The world could not dispense with canned foods and live; for without them progress would be halted, effort hobbled, if not extinguished, armies dispersed, the great progress of the world stayed and thrown back upon itself shattered. Deprived of canned foods, all nations would fall into greater depths of depravity than theretofore known because the world has been enabled to climb higher through the improved food it feeds upon.”

America led the way in canning, with the first metal containers being used in 1839 to preserve lobster. A 1914 industry publication recalled that the term “tin can” was short for “tin canister,” and that they were initially made one at a time by a tinker at the rate of about 60 a day. Tin doesn’t react with most foods and was an affordable option at the time. Most cans today are made of aluminum, steel or alloys. In the early days of the industry, can seams were sealed with lead and labels contained strict warnings to immediately empty the contents after opening, before the lead could react with air and leach into the food.

Salmon canning started in 1840 in New Brunswick, Canada. The Hume brothers (an Astoria street is named in their honor) started canning salmon on the Sacramento River in 1852, coming up to the Columbia in 1866. Up until the mid-1880s, most Columbia salmon was shipped by sea to England, but completion of the Northern Pacific Railroad eventually brought rail rates down and millions of cans began going Back East. The great “Salmon Rush” was under way.

“Salmon Can Labels,” a limited-run book written by Susan R. Kilka in 1994 as her graduate thesis, is a unique examination of the canning and labeling process, particularly focusing on the San Francisco-based West Coast printing industry. German immigrant Max Schmidt was a leader of the industry, growing it from nothing in 1872 to a huge enterprise by his death in 1936. In 1922 at the time of the Alaska Packers Association’s 40th anniversary in business, APA alone had bought 2 billion labels from Schmidt at a cost of more than $1.5 million.

Many remain fascinated by label art, with numerous surviving examples coming from Schimdt. One of the firm’s early designers recalled going to Fisherman’s Wharf and buying a fresh salmon, which he nailed to his drafting table so as to have an example to go by.

American Can Co., founded in 1901, divested itself of its packaging business in 1986. After a variety of mergers, its nearest corporate descendant is Citigroup (Citi), the New York-based financial conglomerate. It’s interesting to think that Columbia River salmon played a part in making this famous firm a success.

I am well along on a project I mentioned in this column a year ago, an electronic database of salmon labels. It’s not yet available to everyone, but if you send me an email with Salmon Label in the subject line, I’ll send a link so you can take a look. Write editor@chinookobserver.com.

South Bend native captures the oyster industry

There’s very little that would induce Pacific County’s oyster growers to gather in a darkened theater on a gorgeous late-August afternoon, all scrubbed up, combed down and surrounded by shyly beaming spouses and children.

There are always about five dozen wave-tossed tasks waiting to do, stewarding oysters along on their multi-year voyage from seed tank to dinner table.

It’s pretty unique for small-town working people to ever get to be the audience at a world-premiere documentary about themselves. That’s what happened Saturday in Raymond, Wash., when its elegant old community movie house was the venue for Willapa Bay Oysters.

It’s even rarer for a nonexpert to gain the trust and access achieved by filmmaker Keith Cox in this industry that often behaves as if it wishes an invisible force shield and Star Trek cloaking device could conceal the bay’s existence from the outside world.

Although oyster growers themselves would never be so fancy as to say so, referring to their business as an “industry” comes close to missing the point. In some ways they are more like the alchemists of the ancient world, turning dust not into gold but coveted shellfish.

Cox, a South Bend native with a first-class pedigree on the bay, throws open the curtain on this esoteric business and discovers gold of his own, in the form of awe-inspiring people, scenes and sounds. His project, spanning eight chapters that are encapsulated in the film shown in Raymond, has taken three years so far. A movie-industry professional who most recently has worked on the new Man of Steel and The Hobbit, Cox has a great eye and ear.

Ultimately, it’s easy to envision Willapa Bay Oysters becoming a segment on PBS’s NOVA series or the National Geographic Channel. You can find snippets of it on YouTube. If it gains a wide audience, the oyster growers of Willapa will have to learn to live with fame – what a terrifically appealing bunch of people they are.

Here are some excerpts of my email interview with Cox.

Why the fascination with Willapa oystering?

Truthfully I was originally more interested in doing something for the local communities as a way to give something back, than I was specifically attracted to oystering. After being inspired by my great grandfather Frank Turner, and grandparents Dick & Martha Murfin for their preservation of local history through the Ilwaco Tribune newspaper which they ran for over 50 years combined, I was just interested in doing a project which could help preserve an aspect of local history. I was friends with some of the oystermen, but my fascination has really grown throughout the project more than existed in the beginning.

Was there something you found especially surprising?

At first everything was surprising. I didn’t know anything about oystering, literally nothing. I don’t even eat oysters. At first I became captivated by all the oystermen themselves and the multi-generational family farms, so much history tracing back to the beginnings of the industry. … It surprised and fascinated me to learn that oyster beds that are right next to each other, not miles apart, literally right next door, can have different growth rates for the oysters … The water currents of the estuary are so complex and constantly changing, each farmer has had to learn what techniques work best for each of the various oyster beds.

What are you most proud of with this project?

When I discovered that several oystering families had taken 8mm home movie films in the 1950 and 60s, it truly felt as if I had discovered the most valuable “buried treasure.” … I am proud that this project can contribute new elements of that history to be preserved as a companion to those wonderful historical resources.

I was struck by the intergenerational nature of the industry and particularly about young women becoming passionate about it. How about you?

Although women have likely contributed to the industry since the beginning, its fun to see a younger generation of women passionate about carrying on the family tradition. Not just working on the farm or in the processing plants, but helping run the businesses.

Who would you say are the greatest characters of the modern-day oyster business here on the outer coast?

Leonard Bennett, Jim Kemmer and Phil Olsen are definitely some of the “characters” of the modern-day oyster business. They are all farmers who come from multi generations of family in the business, but they just have endless stories, never a dull moment when around them.

Meeting most skunks doesn’t stink

The only skunk most city people will ever see close-up is Flower in “Bambi.” They could do worse. Although human speech isn’t a common trait of the species, Flower is otherwise a decent representative of her kind — shy, pretty, fairly intelligent and unlikely to spray anyone with stinky stuff unless her back is against the wall.

“Skunks under the bunkhouse” was a phrase that brought me pleasure as a boy, news of gentle subversives introducing a whiff of natural chaos and harmless danger on Grandpa and Grandma’s farm. Typically showing up with a few babies in tow in the chilly mountain springtime, a mama skunk was a celebrity in a fancy fur coat, like someone you might fleetingly spot as she dashed from her condo to the ski slope. Three or four babies bobbed along in single file behind her, tails proudly held upright, starlets oblivious to any human paparazzi who might be watching. They are scandalously cute.

Farmers have to be pragmatic about managing animals, their own and any wild intruders. Sentimentality and even affection don’t provide hens with immunity from ending up in the stewpot or lambs from the freezer. But Grandma clearly felt the same way I do about skunks, seeing them less as nuisances than as free-spirited entertainment — so long as they stayed out of the chickenhouse. I think they did, instead being mostly attracted by cat food set out for an ever-changing cast of feral tomcats and domestic strays delivered to the countryside by irresponsible townspeople.

Even with half a dozen skunks occupying the space beneath the bunkhouse floorboards, you weren’t bludgeoned by odor. They have a peculiar sense of courtesy and really don’t just go around napalming everything that moves. Nor do they tend to stay in any one place for long.

“Fortunately skunks have various ways of warning when they are threatened, giving an intruder ample opportunity to back off. Dogs, however, tend to ignore this warning. That’s why it’s hard to find a human who has been sprayed, but easy to find a dog that has!” says the informative Russell Link in his invaluable “Living with Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest.”

Skunks eat just about anything you can imagine and are wily hunters. Unfortunately, one of their strategies is to patrol the sides of highways looking for road-kill, often ending up victims of cars themselves because of poor eyesight. Their smell serves as a kind of memorial marker for months after one has been struck by a car. It is one of the signature aromas of the rural West. Some passersby wrinkle-up their noses but I don’t think it’s unpleasant — though it makes me sad to think of all the skunks and other blameless creatures that die on our highways.

Stanley, a skunk my daughter Elizabeth and I met on Aug. 11, is an orphan. My cousin-in-law Bob Silsby took mercy on Stanley and his seven siblings after lethally evicting their mother from beneath his house in Glendo, Wyo. Some of the neighbors formed an instant attachment to the most docile little guy. To make sure they got him back, they gave him an identifying temporary magic-marker tattoo on the top of his head when he and his siblings were delivered to a taxidermist to have their scent glands removed.

Now 22 pounds and a year old, he had just had a bath — an experience he adores and which turns him into wiggly, real-life stuffed toy. He settled in for a long cuddle with Elizabeth as we all discussed his merits like indulgent relations praising a handsome and inquisitive toddler. In theory, Stanley might live to be five or six as a pet, compared to around four if he were an adult in the wild. But he’s going to need to cut down on the treats if he doesn’t want to end up with skunk diabetes or some such thing.

It’s illegal to turn skunks into pets in Oregon, though it is permissible to bring them in from other states, subject to various restrictions. Pet skunks are banned outright in Washington. I’m glad Stanley was provided with an opportunity to be pampered by a loving family, even if most skunks should be left alone to pungently explore the world under the wild skies.

Chinook words and tales capture essence of place

It’s tempting to believe that if everyone who lives here woke up one soggy morning speaking Chinook, our whole world would change forever.

There’s nothing original in the observation that what we speak imprints itself on the reality we perceive. Chinook was born of this place that positively churns and boils with its own character. Even if English is increasingly the common language that binds interactions around the globe, Chinook may always be the best way to understand this utterly unique kingdom of water and mystery.

This is the case with every local language. Each language, dialect and even regional accent captures aspects of a people and the place where they make their home. We are a species that moves around a lot, but maybe the deepest and best lives are those that stay rooted to one home, just as the mightiest old cedars are inseparable from the hillsides where they began as seedlings. We, and how we speak, become one with a particular homeland.

In his “Myths of the New World,” Daniel Brinton comments, “The spoken and written language of a nation reveals … to a certain degree its unavoidable mode of thought.”

The highly complex original Chinook language, along with other native North American tongues, “banish any conception except as it arises in relations to others.” Brinton goes on, “It is nothing uncommon for the two sexes to use different names for the same object…” Native languages fluctuated constantly, with individual villages adopting or dropping words in as little as a couple years. This all makes for dynamic communications that weave people together within their surroundings.

No one alive today uses the Chinook language as it once existed, its last native speakers having died in Pacific County more than a century ago. Some members of the tribe are making an effort to resurrect aspects of it from the quite-good records that were made in the 19th century — Tony Johnson is one notable leader of this effort.

Robin Taylor, a passionate if controversial advocate for the tribe, recently gave me a copy of Edward Harper Thomas’ 1935 “Chinook: A History and Dictionary,” which was among the last formal efforts at comprehensive understanding of the Chinook jargon while it was still in somewhat widespread use. The jargon contains only a small sub-set of the overall Chinook language, being a composite of about 500 Chinook, Salish, Nootka, English and French words. (The Salish-speaking tribes are mostly gathered in the Puget Sound and Grays Harbor areas, while the Nootka are on the west coast of Vancouver Island.)

Since an early version of Chinook jargon was being spoken in widely dispersed parts of the Pacific Northwest when the earliest white explorers arrived, it’s clear it is a product of native ingenuity. Thomas recounts a theory that it originally developed to accommodate the exchange of slaves for dentalium shells between the Chinook and Nootkans — dentalium being the money used by West Coast tribes in the prehistoric era.

The fact that 221 of jargon words have a Chinook origin indicates the tribe’s power. The Chinook were said to effectively dominate the vast coastline between the 42nd and 57th degrees of latitude — from roughly the modern Oregon-California border to Gulf of Alaska. As a result, the tribe’s words became the largest part of the mutual trading language.

Edward Thomas highlights the ways in which the Chinook passion for trade helped put a very different stamp on white-native relations here as compared to the American Southeast, where there was a now-extinct Indian trade language.

“The early whites in the Mobile region [Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida] coveted the territory of the native inhabitants, and cared little for their trade, as there was neither gold nor furs to be had, less for the Indians, and nothing at all for their languages. … All the white settlers wanted of the Gulf natives was their lands. These they got. Everything else was consigned to oblivion.”

In contrast, “A different situation existed in the far Northwest. Here the first contact between the natives and the whites was with explorers and traders. Exploration discovered a wealth of furs. Ships from all countries came to trade in the world’s greatest fur marts. These were followed by Astor, the great Northwest Company, the autocratic and powerful Hudson’s Bay Company and hundreds of lesser traders. The Indians were needed. They were the producers of the vast wealth gathered by these great concerns and their independent competitors. … The Indians held the key to all this fur wealth.”

This pattern, in Thomas’ view, partially helps explain why the Oregon Territory was somewhat slow to attract white residents despite the region’s obvious advantages. “Settlement would have spoiled all this [fur-related economic activity]. The fur companies and traders guarded the region jealously against all invasion.”

“Kutkos: Chinook Tyee” published in 1942 by Mildred Colbert, a descendent of early white settlers, is among the most accessible adaptations of old tribal tales. It was republished in 2006 thanks to Peninsula historian Joan Mann. It’s well worth your time.

Although we won’t ever revert to speaking Chinook, incorporating more of its lessons in local classrooms would enrich all our lives. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, long-forgotten Chinook words are still woven through this reality.

Annual theatre week strengthens Chinook-Ashland links

Angus Bowmer, Chinook schoolteacher and Oregon Shakespeare Festival (OSF) founder, brought workingman sensibilities to live theatrical performances. They’re supposed to be fun, not fancy.

Shakespeare himself was aiming for popular entertainment, not high art. Thinking of going to one of his plays makes some modern people hyperventilate in a panic, but in their time plays like “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” were regarded in much the same way we see Monsters University — not a chore but a diverting, welcome way to spend an afternoon or evening — “plays” instead of “works.”

Everyday pragmatism is at the heart of Pacific Northwest theatre. Arnee Hansen, whose dad was one of Bowmer’s students here in the 1920s, recently recalled for me that Angus started putting on community plays to buy uniforms for the basketball team. Bowmer coached them to the Pacific County championship in 1929.

It’s wonderful to see Bowmer’s traditions continue in various ways in Chinook:

• The Peninsula Association of Performing Artists (PAPA) is presenting “The Wizard of Oz” at the Fort Columbia State Park theatre in Chinook on weekends through Aug. 4. PAPA is a bit like encountering a shipwrecked crew of Broadway actors who spilled out of a tall ship onto our storm-tossed shore and decided to start putting on musicals. A small-town miracle, it wouldn’t be much exaggeration to say PAPA can hold its own with OSF. Tickets and details are available at www.papatheatre.org.

• The “new” Chinook School that replaced the one Bowmer taught in will soon be revamped thanks to Washington state funding. In the meantime, the separate fully restored gymnasium building — housing a stage Angus inspired — has become a brilliant community-gathering place.

• One of the most exciting of these events will occur in mid-November, when OSF Executive Director Emeritus Paul Nicholson and festival actors come to Chinook to present selections from this season’s plays and conduct acting workshops for Ilwaco and Naselle High School students. (OSF actors will also be at Seaside High School in November.)

I wasn’t born with the gene to politely fake enjoyment and become harder to impress with each passing season, like a cynical old trout that’s spat out every type of artful fishing fly. Standing ovations should be rare rewards, not passed out like a politician’s lies or a hussy’s kisses.

In an epic bout of theatre that may require a couple years of recuperation, my family and I attended seven plays in seven days in Ashland earlier this month, including two Shakespeare comedies. The real standout performance of the summer, however, isn’t 400 years old but brand new — the sublime “The Unfortunates.”

Mostly taking place in the traumatized imagination of a soldier awaiting execution, ultimately “The Unfortunates” is a joyous story with roots that twine deep into the American subconscious, framed by the folksong “St. James Infirmary Blues.” I know it sounds ridiculous. We might not have taken a chance on it except that it has the same corps of a cappella hip-hop performers known as 3 Blind Mice who blew us away in OSF’s soul-awakening Hamlet in 2010.

I’m 100 percent with director Shana Cooper when she says of “The Unfortunates,” “Perhaps the greatest gift is how it has revitalized my belief in the capacity of music and theatre not only to inspire but to heal and to redeem.” A sincere standing ovation for this tour de force of originality that pays homage to everything from Rocky Horror to Albert Camus. In its weird and rough-edged way, this is a play that I can envision enduring for 100 years.

OSF’s re-imagined “My Fair Lady” and the lighthearted female-empowerment adventure “The Heart of Robin Hood” also brought me to my feet this year. All the casts are outstanding. However, two individuals I’ll remember forever are Anthony Heald as Alfred P. Doolittle and Tanya Thai McBride as Plug the Dog. Completely overturning his infamous role as Hannibal Lecter’s slimy psychiatric nemesis in “The Silence of the Lambs,” Heald is the ultimate charming rapscallion in Lady. And the young McBride, who also has a big speaking part in “Midsummer Night’s Dream,” cracked me up as the best dog ever. I wanted to go backstage afterward and reward her with a scratch behind the ears. Man’s best friend has never been so hilarious. 

Our beach can sustain a 50-50 split of clams

Wildlife conservation concerns certainly aren’t always misplaced. Rocky Mountain sage grouse are now at such a perilous point that efforts to aid them might make spotted-owl “recovery” look measly as a sparrow. As recently as my boyhood, we used to shoot a half dozen “prairie chickens” in the cool morning dew and fry them up with paprika over a popping sagebrush-fueled campfire for picnic lunch.

Round here, you can barely flip a pebble into the water without hitting something that’s zealously regulated. Some of these species really do — or once did — face serious threat of local or total extinction. There are types of North Pacific rockfish that reproduce slower than Tolkien’s ents, the giant tree-men with such low libidos that they misplaced all their wives. Some upriver runs of spring Chinook salmon also are near the edge of disaster, though I wonder whether we are leaping through flaming hoops of agency red tape to avoid catching fish that are essentially identical to their unprotected cousins, except for preferring water from slightly different-tasting rivers.

Caution is warranted. Over the centuries of human ascendancy on earth, there are ample examples of our encountering different creatures so delicious and stupid that they no longer exist. Our world would be better if it still included wooly mammoths and Dodo birds.

Whole industries have sprung up based on our fervent desire to avoid similar screw-ups. If a person’s intrinsic self-worth as a human being — and his or her paycheck — are linked to saving something, then by gad, you can bet it’s going to get protected, almost whether it needs to be or not.

Here on the shore north of the Columbia’s mouth, there’s a feeling that razor clams are in the category of “not a bit at risk, but let’s protect the crap out of them anyway.” This is partly based on the observation that there are still many clams in Oregon sands, despite a continuous season that stretches on and on. In Washington, clam openings occur only a few days a month in the cooler seasons. To an outsider, selection of clam dates can appear as mysterious and arbitrary as the designation of movable religious feasts by some secret denomination of hooded priests.

There is near-universal agreement that Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife’s clam experts led by Dan Ayres are knowledgeable, friendly and dedicated — and mistaken about how many clams must remain unharvested each year to ensure perpetuation of a healthy future population. Last fall, after years of intense Long Beach Peninsula lobbying, WDFW upped the percent of clams that could be removed from 30 percent … all the way up to 34.5 percent. Even this conservative change resulted in 42 digging days on the Peninsula in 2012-13, compared to a 10-year average of 26. So far, so good.

For decades starting in the 1890s, razor clams were extracted from local beaches with gusto unmatched by anything in the modern era. Recreational digging was virtually unlimited at the start and became a strong lifestyle theme on the Pacific Northwest’s outer coast. Tourist-oriented Ilwaco Railway & Navigation Company, 1888-1930 under various owners, was nicknamed the Clamshell Railroad. Tens of thousands of happy diggers used it to access the shoreline. Clams also were a marketing motif of the Astoria & Columbia River Railroad connecting Portland and Seaside.

Commercial digging hoovered up more clams, literally on an industrial scale. Centered on the productive beaches from about Tillamook Head north to the Quinault Reservation, at least a dozen or so significant companies produced canned clams over half a century. A 1930s recipe booklet produced by Warrenton Clam Co., one of many shellfish-related items I’m collecting to eventually give to an appropriate museum, provides this account of the harvesting process:

“Warrenton clams live on the fresh seaweeds and the ocean washed kelp, the plants of the ocean, for they are wholesome little vegetarians in their choice of diet. … They dig into the clean white beach sand and there clam diggers hunt them at the exact moment when the receding tide covers them with a foot or less of sweet salt water, washing them clean and adding to their fresh flavor of mingled sea and sunshine. Once captured the clams are taken immediately to receiving stations and are from there hurried by motor trucks to the packing houses.”

Sounds thrilling.

No doubt there was overharvesting. Certainly the long lines of cars coming north across the Astoria Bridge on clam days indicate conditions are better under the modern Washington system than in Oregon. But it is not unreasonable to push for a 50 percent allocation to humans of this species that often dies of natural causes at maturity. Fifty percent could allow consistent three-day openings throughout the fall, winter and spring, pumping money and fun into coastal Washington towns. And like natural salmon that die at their spawning grounds and enrich the forest, a good share of clams ought to be left for the birds and crabs. Fifty-fifty is a fair split.

The delicious tradition of clam digging deserves a new squirt of life for this new century.

Celebrate family ties and sacrifices this July 4 weekend

The Fourth of July is a reminder of how much I miss living in close connection with cousins. In my family as in so many others, July 4 is about celebrating our love for one another both as fellow Americans and as kin.

Maybe the need to be surrounded by biologically related friends is an artifact of antediluvian times, a yearning for a band of near-brothers we can count on not to drop spears and run away when the rhino charges. Or maybe it’s just recollections of noisy Sunday pot-roast dinners, swiftly followed by noisier wars of tag out in the yard.

For 30 or 40 years, whenever learning someone is from Alaska, I usually manage to ask whether they eat at my cousin John Hoback’s big Sea Galley restaurant in Anchorage. Conceptually, I know Alaska’s a vast expanse. But with so few people, surely everyone must eventually dine at the state’s best seafood joint?

Astonishingly now old enough to be dynamic young retirees splitting their time between Alaska and Arizona, John and his wife Verele came through town this spring in their Winnebago, working their way up U.S. Highway 101. John’s parents Frank and Lucille in West Seattle were virtually a back-up set of parents to me. But when John and I last met in person, he was going through the hotel/hospitality management program at Washington State University and I was about 12. Still, I’d have been able to identify him from across a crowded room by the amused twinkling squint of his eyes.

We talked of many things — of John working the mechanical bilge pump in his dad’s small boat out of Valdez before the big quake, of lovely Lucille’s relatively benign magazine-hoarding fixation, fueled by Publisher’s Clearing House. These touchstones of shared heritage automatically bind us closer than might seem possible, considering how little actual time we’ve spent in one another’s company.

But we mostly talked of children. Of 13 first cousins on the Winters side of my family, John and Verele are by far most accomplished in terms of replicating the traditional happy web of interconnected kids and grandkids. All their children are well established in life. In the never-ending joyful lament of parents across all time and space, we celebrated their success while regretting they don’t all live close enough to touch. This subject is front and center for me, as in just another heartbeat or two, my own beloved 16-year-old daughter Elizabeth will be off for college and independent life.

When John and Verele moved back up to Alaska in 1982, and even more so when our grandpa left his Michigan family behind to come to Washington state in 1902, it was a separation from parents, cousins, friends and nearly all that came before. John recalled how phone calls down to Seattle ran 50 cents a minute in the ‘80s. But Verele reassured me that our age of instant texting and photo transmission greatly en-hances the ability to keep sharing day-by-day discoveries, experiences and passing thoughts that all nurture a strong sense of family.

With the exception of the four who grew up in a battlefield of alcoholism, neglect and abuse, we 23 Winters and Bell first cousins can count ourselves lucky to grown up in the 1950s and ‘60s. Not counting the threat of nuclear destruction — dreary but also kind of exciting in a James Bondian kind of way — we had it amazingly good. The streets we played in were safe (or seemed so) and there was no doubt in our minds that we would grow up to be astronauts or Perry Mason or Sgt. Joe Friday.

We sacrificed a lot of earthworms to the trout gods in little mountain brooks, especially on holiday weekends when the whole batch of us might travel up to the cool heights. This love of fishing was hardwired into us every which way. Aunt Alice in Blaine, Wash., recently recalled about Grandpa Winters that he “Loved to salt water fish from the rocks of the bay after crossing over the railroad tracks which you can’t do now. He made his own fishing poles out of long bamboo rods.”

During the Depression Grandpa worked for the Works Progress Administration, which was a government agency that put people to work. Aunt Alice said she was embarrassed about it at the time but realizes now what a hard worker he was and admires him. He dug ditches and put in sidewalks all day long. Later, he got a job making cross arms for the railroad — the RR crossing signs at the street intersections. He worked up to his knees in the creosote pits every day all day and that is probably a factor in his death later, working around all that toxic matter. Probably breathing it in, too.

Retouching and freshening family bonds will be at the forefront of American life this weekend. Take time to talk with your relations about the family that has gone before. Each generation makes this nation what it is with selfless generosity, working in tar pits so our kids can have decent lives. The best way to express thanks for all this is to remember.

We lost a member of our family this spring. I came home from work and found our elderly Welsh corgi, Bina, had up and died while lying in her favorite place for raccoon observation. Her life paralleled my daughter’s childhood, as we picked her out of a Portland litter when Elizabeth was in kindergarten. We recalled how Bina missed and mourned her brothers and sisters in the weeks after we brought her to Ilwaco. Today, I know she is scampering in the company of all her enormous clan of brave little cousins in the cow pastures of heaven.

Spy scandal makes the hermit life look good

Among the hermits, Dominick was a family favorite. Although he was a loner, he darted among conversational topics and spicy old-country foods with the enthusiasm of a Yugoslavian dolphin cavorting in a school of anchovy. Plus he lived in a magical shack.

In our privileged age in which actual privacy may be the last and least-appreciated luxury item, really getting yourself “off the grid” has become a sort of rare, rebellious vacation from “the recorded life.” The small minority of Americans who travel to undeveloped countries report feeling like they have shaken off an invisible cobweb of electronic entanglements. Beyond its confines, it is easier to see that “net” is the key word in Internet.

Without deliberately deciding to, most of us have joined a kind of human hive mind, a powerful collaboration of consciousness communicating constantly via Internet, cell phones and mass media. Government, along with corporate banking and investment, milk us like ants tending mounds of aphids.

There are, it must be admitted, benefits gained by running with the herd. At least for we living in modern western societies, the days are over of having to sweat about rampaging Cossacks or Normans burning down the village. Instant entertainment is a matter of pushing a button. If we manage to halfway stay ahead of our bills, it’s possible to convince ourselves we’ve got it mighty good compared to our ancestors.

Safety and security are the payoffs of Prism — the vast secret monitoring program that became public knowledge last week. They are omnipresent, busybody sharks trolling our digital wakes, sniffing for faint patterns of trouble.

The Daily Show offered this pithy headline: “Good news! You’re not paranoid.”

Well, actually, you still may be. The somewhat sad fact is that the vast majority of us are too goshdarn boring to ever be worthy of anything beyond robotic attention. Any flesh-and-blood government snoop who spent his time waiting for me to do something conspiratorial would end up shooting himself in despair. Of course, actually culling through our electronic flotsam and jetsam falls to computer algorithms — mindless, unemotional and infinitely patient.

My concern isn’t so much that we are susceptible to constant spying, but that we have become so inured to it. The only thing genuinely shocking about Prism is that some seem to be utterly surprised to learn of it. It was somehow more acceptable as long as we could only speculate about its existence. Now, there’s no way to ignore that being eavesdropped on is a fundamental fact of the 21st century. We squirm at the realization that we have to take an actual personal position on it.

My position: We have sold our souls to the company store, trading privacy and genuine individual freedom for a kind of homogenized comfort.

What’s the alternative? Even if Prism is turned off — and it won’t be — we all will continue to be bugs trapped in the clear, sticky amber of modern life.

I find myself thinking with nostalgia of hermits I have known. They all viewed even old telephone landlines with Trotsky-like suspicion. Banking consisted of gold dust and silver dollars buried beneath sagebrush out beyond the privy. Not completely admirable, they weren’t much for personal hygiene or paying child support or income taxes. They weren’t just off the grid, they may have been off their rockers.

The Duncan, my family’s gold-mining complex on the southern end of the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming, was part of a historical district particularly rich with eccentric old men.

Shorty Haddenham lived in an astoundingly squalid trailer down Pickax Road from us. Though Dad regarded him as deeply untrustworthy, I and most other acquaintances were at least in awe of his skill with a gold pan. Shorty had the touch — just the right shake and twist to swiftly separate gold dust from waste.

A blogger (http://tinyurl.com/looogmt) wrote about Shorty last month, “I forget who told me the story, but Shorty had another nickname ‘Wet Pockets.’ I was puzzled by this nickname until it was explained Shorty worked in the Rock Creek washing plant when it was recovering gold in the 1930s until the outbreak of World War II. Apparently, it was discovered that his pockets were wet from high-grading gold off of the concentrating table, and he was dismissed. I don’t know how much of that story was true, but Shorty was a very interesting character.”

Though not blighted with a dodgy reputation, Dominick was in the same subspecies as Shorty — unwashed guy in suspenders. Squatting on a Bureau of Land Management parcel in an arid setting, his little two-room home contained a secret. In the combination kitchen/bedroom/sitting room the sound of continually rushing water formed a miraculous auditory motif, a mystery solved when he opened the door to his back room and revealed a fast-gushing artesian spring of delicious ice water.

Dominick could sidestep reality, but the BLM? Not so much. They burned him out. But you know what? Despite considerable searching, I never found that spring again. I wonder if the spring and Dominick were partners — traveling companions in the ghost towns of the West. He was a fairly old man when I was a child, but somehow it wouldn’t surprise me to encounter him in the street tomorrow. The rules for ordinary people just didn’t stick to him.

If you hear the music of living waters where there shouldn’t be any, tell the old guy lounging nearby that Matt says hi.

There is a place in the world for wild men, or ought to be.

Practice won’t make perfect if innate talent is lacking

“Practice makes perfect” is a commonplace saying that grates against my experience of the world — the kind of twaddle grownups rattle off to kids as a magic elixir for success.

If I’m not really good at something almost instantly, I figure life’s too short to flail away at one skill when there are at least 50,000 different major ways to spend our precious moments. And who wants to be perfect anyway?

We’re supposed to admire the stick-with-it-ness of those who strive for decades but rarely exceed a .150 batting average. Bless their misguided hearts if they find joy in it and don’t care a whit about public ridicule. But if all that effort is being spent in a vain attempt to make it into Cooperstown, well that’s just sad. Try something else, why don’t ja?

My curmudgeonly views are validated by a study published May 15 in the scientific journal Intelligence, conducted by psychologists from Michigan State University.

To quote MSU’s article, it takes more than hard work to become an expert. Associate Professor Zach Hambrick finds that innate ability and polishing a skill from a young age are among the genuine keys to mastering a complicated activity. He rejects advice to the effect that some ridiculous amount of painful, stinky effort — 10,000 hours is often cited — will turn a 98-pound weakling into a ninja master assassin, or a chainsaw carver into Michelangelo.

“The evidence is quite clear,” Hambrick writes, “that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice.”

None of this means we shouldn’t practice what we want to do well. “Practice is indeed important to reach an elite level of performance, but this paper makes an overwhelming case that it isn’t enough,” Hambrick said.

This makes sense. If you are person who wants and needs to have a single key motif in your life — a true passion — your first step should be to learn who you are and what you are capable of being. Then, by all means, practice like crazy. Practicing what you’re passionate about isn’t “practice” in the sense of tortured drudgery. It is simply living fully by pursuing what comes naturally.

There are several root causes for these mismatches between what people strive toward and what they are actually good at. Sometimes it’s a consequence of parents forcing their own dreams upon their children. Sometimes it’s because individuals desperately want to make money and think they can do so by copying somebody else’s formula.

Mostly, though, it’s a result of trying to glom onto a kind of counterfeit passion, an imaginary life-ring in a frightening ocean of life. Spending all those hours practicing some esoteric skill becomes a way of avoiding the agonies and delights of wallowing around in the exquisitely messy business of being human.

It’s better not being great at anything unless you can at least be OK at being a person. Some the best folks I know passionately practice being ordinary.

I know he’s not to everyone’s taste, but author Stephen King had something good to say last week on the subject of writing. He was interviewed by Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air.

“I don’t want the reader to feel like this is all a sort of pre-fab creation. I want it to feel organic, to feel like it grew by itself. I’ve never seen novels as ‘built’ things. I have a tendency to see them as ‘found’ things. I always feel a little bit like an archaeologist, who’s working to get some fragile fossil out of the ground, and the more you get out unbroken, the better you succeed.”

The same approach works for life. Discover what’s in yourself, and try to get it out unbroken — intact and untamed.

Hand talk: A window into forgotten ways of seeing the world

“I can remember being with him, walking down the street, and meeting Chief Yellow Calf, the Arapaho,” my uncle wrote, as I continue mining family memories for a novel-in-progress for the kids of the Wind River Indian Reservation. “My Granddad was legally blind but when he was fairly close, he could recognize people. He knew the sign language and when we were close to Yellow Calf, his fingers and hands began to move. The same with Yellow Calf and when they came up to each other, they grunted a few things then moved on. I stood there amazed. I was probably 7 or 8 years old. He then told me who the man was.”

Yellow Calf (1860-1938) was a remarkable person, sometimes called the last chief of his tribe before they transitioned to a council form of government. In 1931 when Great-Grandpa Ed Alton (1874-1934) greeted him, Yellow Calf had been working for four or five years to revitalize the Crow Dance in the communities of Ethete, Lower Arapahoe and Mill Creek. I was baptized in Ethete and went to primary school in Mill Creek.

It’s thought the deaths of two of his children sparked Yellow Calf’s emersion in the old religion. “The Crow Dance ceremony was performed when someone made a vow to sponsor the ceremony in return for supernatural aid,” explain the authors of “Arapahoe Politics, 1851-1978.” A cousin to the older and better-known Ghost Dance, the Crow Dance was among the earliest efforts to restore a sense of prestige and belonging to tribal youth, unmoored by reservation life. A tough old chief fighting to the end to save kids — he deserves our enduring respect and affection.

Yellow Calf’s immediate ancestors were living in ways that suited them just fine until the ancestors of we European-Americans suddenly dropped in, uninvited. Implicit in our attitudes towards Indians, even today, is a certain disdainful wondering why tribes weren’t busily “advancing” when we “discovered” them. Even a relatively admiring observer of the Plains Tribes in the late 19th century wrote, “The trail of their migration on the vast prairies is like the track left by a vessel on the troubled waters of the ocean.”

Although his theories aren’t universally accepted, UCLA geographer Jared Diamond made an interesting case in his 1997 book “Guns, Germs, and Steel” that human cultures — he mostly focused on New Guineans — conform to the environments in which we find ourselves. We make the achievements we are forced to make, taking advantage of whatever resources we are lucky enough to have at hand. Archaeologist Barry Cunliffe’s latest book, “Britain Begins,” shows that for thousands of years the lives of my ancestors weren’t so very different from those of Yellow Calf. The name “Britain” itself is rooted in the Greek word for the islands’ inhabitants — prettanoi — painted or tattooed savages. The only discernable technological innovation over a scan of centuries might have been a somewhat different shape or decoration on clay pots.

The intelligence and sophistication of American Indians is nowhere better illustrated than in sign language. They were illiterate, but sign was a dazzlingly nuanced form of communication permitting members of different tribes to convey complex ideas based on boldly imaginative metaphors.

“The whites have had the power given them by the Great Spirit to read and write, and convey information in this way. He gave us the power to talk with our hands and arms, and send information with the mirror, blanket, and pony far away, and when we meet with Indians who have a different spoken language from ours, we can talk to them in signs,” said Chief Iron Hawk of the Sioux.

U.S. Cavalry Capt. William P. Clark studied sign in the 1870s and ‘80s and left a treasure trove of a book about it. At some point, I might devote an entire column to the subject, but here are a few particularly pleasing examples of non-verbal words:

Bad: The movement being similar to what would naturally follow if one were to pick up what was supposed to be a rope and it should turn out to be a snake.

Bear: The conception is a rolling motion in walking.

Angry: The signs for mind and twisted.

Crazy: Brain and “in a whirl.”

Disgust: Heart and tired.

Dream: Sleep, see, good and know.

Forget: Heart, no and keep.

Homesickness: Heart and look.

Milky-way: Dead man road.

Monkey: Half, “white man” and dog.

Cougar: Mountain and jump.

Perhaps: Two hearts

The planet Mars: Big fire star

21st century connectivity makes coast even more appealing

Living here on this wondrous but remote coastline, there still exists an unparalleled rarity — a zealously guarded isolation that some of us internalize as a feeling of sanctuary. In our blood there are empty shores, craggy fiords, face-stinging storms and mist-fed forests. We’re never so alive as when ghosting along an old cape trail through the lichen-draped forest, the luxuriant ferns and dewberry bushes.

We know the difference between a black bear track made an hour ago and one made during the night rain. New cub tracks showed up on the street below my house last week, upping the need for caution. We watch the mud in hope of a cougar print — something like a large dog’s but without claw marks, since cougars retract them.

“I wonder if yesterday a cat sat curled in the branch of a tree, watching me. Perhaps I was being sized up as predator or prey. Maybe she watched me and finally decided I was too big to mess with. Or perhaps she wasn’t hungry,” Crystal Mountain blogger Kim Kircher writes of this life-amplifying tracking game, after seeing a big cat’s footprints on a hike.

For each of us who rejoices in the untamed life, there are many more who find it entirely repellent. How many have we all seen who flunked coastal living? In the unwritten book of professional-hiring practices for this area, entire chapters are devoted to the topic trying to manage and mitigate the negative perceptions of spouses whose adventure gene has been bred out of them. A depressing number of folks measure quality of life in terms of blocks to the nearest Nordstrom.

 For many in the middle — who love seeing wilderness if not necessarily eluding apex carnivores within it — this coast is a choice whose popularity is certain to intensify. With 8,000 Baby Boomers turning 65 every day for the next 16 years and real estate market entering a spring thaw after the Great Recession, a flood tide of robust retirees will be seeking out their Pacific Northwest beach dreams in Clatsop and Pacific counties.

Land development patterns probably will skew a little more toward high ground than in the past when people were ignorant of the Cascadia tsunami zone. But even this uncertain — it’s not like the San Andreas Fault has slowed building in California. Most likely, incomers will decide to accept some degree of risk in return for coastal views, beach proximity and lifestyles.

In considerable ways, living here in the future will be transformed even more than it already has been, thanks to Internet technology.

Last week, I finally got around to digitizing, sharing and listening to a conversation with my grandmother, recorded a couple decades ago. Born in 1901, she recounted helping her dad haul freight in a four-horse wagon on a 50-mile circuit that took days. At home in her little stucco house in the cottonwoods, she shared a multiple-party phone line into the 1980s, with different patterns of rings telling each residence along the way whether to pick up. Of course they all did, all the time. Quietly eavesdropping on the conversations of others was a key recreational activity.

We are still so early on in this Internet age, our stories to our grandchildren will seem like those my Grandma’s did to me — relics of a bygone time, charming but unmissed. Already, isolation here has no real relationship to what it must have been like 50 years ago. Although the rural Northwest should be agitating hard for better broadband service, even what we have is like exaggerated science fiction compared to Grandma’s party line.

As a wannabe scientist, one of my favorite transformations is collaborative research. Check out www.zooniverse.org for opportunities to help classify galaxies, explore the surface of the moon, or study the ocean floor. And of course genealogy is exploding. For example, turn to the vast volunteer resource www.findagrave.com to obtain photos of ancestors’ tombstones in faraway places. The opportunities for outside connections are limitless, and growing all the time.

What all this will mean for our economy and life fulfillment is still almost unimaginable. In a very real sense, when made universally accessible — and it will be — inexpensive universal communication and collaboration promise to demolish most of the negative aspects of isolation. Even now, I can listen to one of this year’s astonishingly early tree frogs and share the sound in real time, face-to-face on Skype with a cousin living eight time zones away. This is available to all of us.

We inhabit an incredible place in amazing times, a sanctuary married to the universe.

Wouldn’t it be exciting to live among hobbits and trolls?

One of many ways in which J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories spark our imagination is their resurrection of human-like creatures that exist in the half-light between folklore and dreams.

It may be this that has driven box-office receipts for “The Hobbit” to almost a quarter-billion dollars, despite reviews that were goodish but hardly enthusiastic. The plot is as stretched and thin as Gollum’s snake-like spine. One could easily read the book, maybe twice, in the three hours it takes director Peter Jackson to get the hobbit and his dwarf companions to within sight of Lonely Mountain, where most of Bilbo’s adventures transpire.

But it certainly succeeds in transporting viewers to another world — or at least a mighty strange version of this one — where eagles are the size of Cessna airplanes, mountains come alive and various proto-, quasi- and supra-humans are almost commonplace. Only a generation ago at most, and certainly no more than two or three, such a movie would have utterly convinced our parents or grandparents of the reality of wonderfully lively kinds of alternative people. They’d have been mounting expeditions to the Ural Mountains looking for goblin caves.

Tolkien was both a maker and a borrower, fantastically creative but also relying quite heavily on European folk traditions and more modern influences like William Morris of the Arts and Crafts Movement. English, German, Norse and other cultures of the dark old forests are crawling with tales of giants, trolls, faeries and other creatures resembling those Tolkien brought to life. Were they beautiful and wise? Not so much.

It’s been theorized for decades that some of these mythological creatures are products of campfire stories based on memories so potent they have cascaded down through thousands of years. Since the first Neanderthal remains were discovered in Germany in 1856, some have believed these robust creatures that died out perhaps 20,000 to 30,000 years ago were the original templates for trolls or even the Abominable Snowman.

Other fossils more recently discovered in Indonesia have come to be called hobbits, based on their small stature. Species dwelling on islands, even including wooly mammoths, are prone to miniaturization. It’s possible to conceive of Europe perhaps hosting similar micro-humans before, during or immediately after the end of the last ice age about 12,000 years ago.

Another type of recently extinct archaic human, the Denisovans in southeastern Asia, are now known from DNA extracted from a single foot bone. And there are other possible examples. Some Native American tribes of the Great Plains and Rockies have a strong tradition of tiny, cannibalistic people whom you would emphatically not want to dress in doll’s clothing and leave in your children’s room. A supposedly intact body went missing in Wyoming in the 1950s.

In a way, Neanderthals are still with us today. After having been regarded from the 1980s as a complete dead-end, DNA research now shows they live on in non-Africans. Most Europeans are about one-40th Neanderthal. And Denisovan DNA lives on as well — at least in New Guinea, Australia and some neighboring islands, and perhaps elsewhere.

Writing in Edge, paleoanthropologist Christopher Stringer asks, “What is a modern human? Some of the most fascinating ongoing research topics in the next year or two will be homing in on the DNA that some of us have acquired from Neanderthals, that some people have acquired from the Denisovans, and that some African people have acquired, perhaps even from Homo heidelbergensis.”

We didn’t exactly evolve from Neanderthals — most of our DNA originates from Africa about 200,000 years ago. But Stringer thinks there’s a good chance these various hybridization events — sometimes also known as one-night stands — provided evolutionary advantages still with us today.

Personally, I’d enjoy having human-like cousins living among us. On the other hand, we’re so prejudiced against other races, imagine how unpleasantly some would behave toward Neanderthals … though perhaps not to their faces. I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t want to make them mad.

Maybe we’ll get the chance someday to meet them. Also in Edge, Ryan Phelan talks of her work at Revive and Restore — “de-extincting” species, while trying to take all the daunting ethical and technical issues into account.

NOTE: There is hardly any project more interesting than Edge itself, which has the goals “To arrive at the edge of the world’s knowledge, seek out the most complex and sophisticated minds, put them in a room together, and have them ask each other the questions they are asking themselves.” Check it out yourself at www.edge.org.

Uncle Mel: Sneaky would-be killer in my family, and yours

Uncle Mel visited last month. He’s a cut-up. Can’t say I really love it when he drops in, though he’s taught me a lot. Talked me out of being a lawyer, for one thing. Favors don’t come much bigger than that.

You may know him better by his full name, melanoma. He kills about 48,000 people a year, including some 9,180 Americans in 2012, about one an hour. Northwest Europeans, so privileged in countless ways, have a much better chance of making Mel’s acquaintance — five times more likely than Hispanics and 20 times more than African Americans.

Since 2004, Mel meets an additional 3 percent of us each year, though I wonder if this is largely because we’re becoming better at recognizing him. His calling card is a new spot on the skin or a spot that is changing in size, shape, or color. Another important sign is a spot that looks different from all of the other spots on your skin. Sometimes melanoma does not fit the “rules.” Talk to your doctor if you get a funny feeling about anything — or if something bugs your dog. Mine let me know he didn’t like the smell of the spreading freckles on my left temple this summer. Better make time for that overdue dermatology checkup, I decided.

Although the overall number of cases is up, according to the American Cancer Society deaths among non-Hispanic whites have been falling since the early 1990s — but only among we who have more than a high school education. A study this year says this may reflect people with lower incomes getting more exposure to the sun during outdoor jobs, coupled with less awareness of melanoma and scant access to health care.

I’ve got education and good doctors, and intervened early during each of Mel’s three visits in the past 25 years. Full implementation of the Affordable Care Act in 2014 will provide routine medical access to millions. Noticing Uncle Mel before he gets more than skin deep will save lots of lives.

I was sure stupid about the sun. Far too much time unprotected on high mountains and equatorial coral beds. What a spoiled brat I was to get those days. But it’s not that hard to avoid a sunburn.

Genes are the other issue. In general, an average of 2.9 out of 100 men of European ethnicity will get melanoma. Men with my MC1R and SLC45A2 genes are about 40 percent more likely to meet Mel. But maybe there’s something else lying undiscovered in my genes that keeps skin cancer shallow and relatively safe. This latest one was Stage Zero. If you’re going to meet melanoma, this is the way to do it.

But your face isn’t the place to get it. Counting last week’s surgeries, I’ve had enough hide removed over the years to make a lady’s change purse. It’s healing OK. Could have lost my ear. Or an eye. Didn’t. Grateful. I’m having a contest for best story to explain it to strangers.

Listen up, wives — after age 40 your husband is twice as likely to get it than you are. If you see something that worries you, insist he get it checked out. You can absolutely save his life.

My adventures with Uncle Mel are over until next time. He keeps my priorities straight. Thanks. Don’t be in a rush to come back.

 Speaking of genetics, both the science and the industry are in rapid transition:

 • At DNADTC.com, we can now have our own complete genome sequenced for an introductory price of $5,495. This is less than a decade since the first complete sequence was finished at a total cost of roughly $3.3 billion.

 • Spencer Wells at National Geographic Society and Bennett Greenspan at Family Tree DNA have launched Geno 2.0, an amazingly in-depth citizen-driven genetics project. For $199.95, it goes a very long way toward exploring your family’s genetic origins — your personal tribal background. (http://tinyurl.com/azpcb7a)

 • Among many recent academic papers of interest, one in the November issue of Genetics is particularly intriguing. “Using genetic analyses, scientists have discovered that Northern European populations — including British, Scandinavians, French, and some Eastern Europeans — descend from a mixture of two very different ancestral populations, and one of these populations is related to Native Americans.” Cowboys and Indians are cousins. (http://tinyurl.com/bnsh7kj)

 Bob Pyle’s latest is a great read

 There aren’t many men or women who can say they played a leading role in saving more than 100 million acres of Alaska wilderness for future generations. Mardy Murie did the deed in cooperation with U.S. Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas and others.

My Uncle Tom Bell was young zoologist with the Wyoming Fish and Game Department just after World War II when he came to know Mardy and her husband Olaus in Jackson Hole. Now nearing 90 and closing up his personal affairs after a grand lifetime influenced by the Muries, his papers are being archived at the institute Mardy established to continue her work. She died in 2003.

Mardy was an inspiration to many, including celebrated nature writer Robert Michael Pyle of Grays River, who includes her in the pantheon of great 20th century conservationists in his new book, “The Tangled Bank: Writing from Orion.” It is Pyle’s lively and charming compilation of a decade spent observing our natural world and the people in it — a sort of earthy hymnbook.

 Although ageless as an erudite Santa Claus and doubtless with many more books still in his future, “Tangled Bank” has a distinctly “Pyle’s Greatest Hits” feel to it. This isn’t to minimize its originality, but rather speaks to its concentrated essence of what I’ll call “Bobisms” — wise and finely polished observations about stuff ranging from the universal to the pretty obscure. The extinction of beer yeasts following Prohibition, the mating habits of leopard slugs, and rescuing wayward turtles are among his subjects.

Largely written from home here on the Lower Columbia, these are essays strictly limited in length to fit a magazine format. They were honed by good editing and are accessible in a way some of Pyle’s longer books are not. If quality and insights are a guarantee of literary immortality, “Tangled Bank” is the writing that Pyle will be remembered for.

But it’s hard getting people to read good things and perhaps even harder to get them out of their armchairs and outside, which is the fundamental message of “The Tangled Bank.” Taking its title from a passage written in Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, “The Tangled Bank” is intended to inspire personal explorations of nature. Closely observing what used to be called “natural history” in the making and following up on our curiosity invests life with meaning.

“In a life with its fair share of darkness, I have found full-body baptism in the plain and glorious particulars of life to be a powerful antidote to despair,” Pyle writes. “The fact is that the details of our natural surrounds offer infallible fascination and a route out of morosity. In a world deeply flawed by the infantile excesses of our own kind, this is no small potatoes.”

We are steadily hacking away at our world’s tangled banks, the wild places where the moment-by-moment drama of life and evolution occurs. We live in a society where watching nature documentaries on TV has become a substitute for watching the interplay of species in our own untamed woods. It’s all but invisible to most that unique creatures are disappearing almost daily in what appears likely to be one our planet’s most profound extinction episodes.

Pyle writes of the “extinction of experience” — “the loss of common local species within people’s easy reach leads to alienation, apathy, and further extinction — a particularly vicious cycle of disaffection and loss.” This erosion in our experience and enjoyment of life is insidious. Suppose Stellar jaybirds gradually cease to be seen around a home. They might be missing for a couple years before most of us would notice. Does their loss cost us anything? Pyle would strongly argue yes, that a significant element of joy has been subtracted from your life, perhaps forever.

But this is not a preachy or doom-ridden book. At least in Grays River, Pyle finds many who might not necessarily all vote the same, but who do still know they reside within a big, messy, wonderfully complicated environment. Just maybe, “The Tangled Bank” will inspire the next Mardy Murie.

We all have our cherished family veterans, ordinary heroes

 His wasn’t a noble death. Apart from a few of his many descendents scattered across America, no one remembers his name. If he has a grave, it is unmarked; possibly his corpse was dumped into the Niagara River. He was a rifleman, a husband, a father of four, a young life expended at age 29.

Sooner or later, all deaths evaporate into anonymity. Those who loved us pass away themselves. We become memories of a memory, our names and images only captured on perishable paper or pixels. The ripples we left in world all eventually sink into the eternal and calm ocean of life.

But there is something in the death of a young soldier that has always deserved more. We think of all that was foregone: The joyous weddings of daughters and sons, the warm afternoons with friends in old age, the comfortable love of mature wives. The young soldier, dead in the service of his nation, gives up everything we can imagine and more. With their blood and suffering, they purchase everything we hold precious and deliver it to us as gifts for which we are forever unable to say thanks.

They are strangers who push us out of the rampaging path of fate, dying in our place. Delivered in a single moment of fate and pain, their gift courses forward through the rest of time in the form of a nation preserved and children who might never have been born but for their sacrifice.

I’ll never know why my fourth Great-Grandfather John Neeley decided to become a volunteer in Capt. Abraham Brundage’s company of rangers on the frontier of New York and Canada on Sept. 23, 1812. He may have become caught up in the patriotic fervor of our young nation, fighting against the gross indignities inflicted by Britain on our seamen and international shipping. Or perhaps like many Americans before and since, he thought Canada would be better under the wing of the USA — and that we ourselves might benefit from the acquisition.

It’s sure his mourning wife and children wished he had just stayed home. Instead, he marched off and fought in the Battle of Queenston Heights — one of several stupidly mismanaged attempts to invade Canada at the start of the War of 1812. He and 834 other U.S. soldiers were captured after heavy fighting. He may have been imprisoned inside an overcrowded privateer, a privately owned British naval ship moored in the river. He died 200 years ago this Wednesday, possibly of an infection from a battlefield cannon-recoil injury.

When researching the life and death of an ordinary soldier, scarcity of information is less surprising than the ability to learn anything at all. It’s easy to think kindly thoughts about lost warriors — and for politicians to mouth platitudes about them. Real appreciation requires real memory, genuine refection on what we owe. But we mostly only forget.

John Neeley would, I think, be still proud and amazed by America.

I imagine him amused now at the idea we ever needed to forcefully dislodge the British Empire from North America — that all worked out fine in the end. “Invading Canada” has become shorthand for an unthinkable foreign policy. (A few months ago, Politico reported, “The State Department is denying that a planned closed-door meeting between U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Mexico Foreign Minister Patricia Espinosa is about a secret plan to invade Canada. … A reporter asked: ‘This isn’t some secret thing to invade Canada or something like that?’ ‘No, no, no,’ State Department spokeswoman Victoria Nuland said during a Tuesday briefing to laughter from reporters.”)

Commenting online recently about the War of 1812, a citizen intelligently noted, “If you want to learn how not to wage a war properly, study this one carefully. The leadership on both sides was, with a few brilliant exceptions, for the most part catastrophic. … I suppose the best one can hope for in some wars, is not to win it but just to survive it.”

I think John Neeley would agree. He would tell us to make mighty certain a war is unavoidable before we spend young people’s lives on it. I know he’d say the best way to honor the soldiers of the past is to treasure and care for the soldiers of today.

Here’s a hug for you from my heart, great-great-great-great-grandpa.

Monsters of our very own

“Serpents are born in the human spine,” is the kind of statement that might lead to a schizophrenia diagnosis today. In medieval times, it was an acceptable theory by a prominent theologian.

On a superficial level, it refers to a 13th century suspicion that worms in the cadavers of evil people literally grew up to become snakes and dragons. More metaphysically, it speaks to the widespread belief that humans are essentially implanted with an immoral seed that leads to our own undoing — and that for some, the human metamorphosis includes steps beyond death.

The medieval mind wasn’t so different from our own. Faced with death and darkness and bumps in the night, they filled in the blanks best they could with what one chronicler called “apparitions,” “fantasms,” and “prodigies.” Nowadays, they’re ghosts, vampires and zombies.

Curse you, foul monsters! Die! Die! Die! When will vampires and zombies perish? This question has primetime relevance with the final movie in the teen-vampire Twilight series due for release Nov. 16, AMC’s “The Walking Dead” currently shambling through its third season, HBO’s “True Blood” titillating the masses, and plenty of pretend bloodsuckers and brain eaters preparing for Halloween parties in coming days.

“Ye gods!” my dad might exclaim. What is it with people and their tiresome crush on horrific demons? A sign of some intrinsic flaw in the modern American psyche, or some ghastly spiritual malaise?

The answer is, “Naw.” For many centuries, there has been an ingrained fascination with the possibility of physically living beyond death.

Ask most anyone where vampires are from and the answer will be Transylvania, a real region of Romania, which the Victoria gothic novelist Bram Stoker selected to be the home of Dracula — meaning dragon. And at least until recently, most Americans have confined zombies to Haiti and voodoo.

But actually, there are deep Scandinavian and British traditions surrounding creatures far scarier than the sanitized bubblegum versions of today. My goodness — in the mythological Olympic Peninsula of Twilight, vampires don’t even burn to cinders in the daylight. Instead, they just twinkle like Christmas ornaments. Ho-hum.

Homegrown monsters

 If you really want to scare the kids this Halloween, turn off the lights and recount some of the reports collected in England by Walter Map and William of Newburgh in the 1100s. Their vampires and zombies (also known as revenants) will not become teen idols.

William, one of the most reliable historians of his era, recorded one particularly chilling instance of vampirism in which two sons took vengeance on the demon who killed their father.

“And whilst they yet thought they would have to dig much deeper, suddenly they came upon the body, covered with but a thin layer of earth. It was gorged and swollen with a frightful corpulence, and its face was florid and chubby, with huge, red puffed cheeks,,, But the young men, who were mad with grief and anger, were not in any way frightened. They at once dealt the corpse a sharp blow with the keen edge of a spade, and immediately there gushed out such a stream of warm red gore that they realized this vampire had battened in the blood of many poor folk.” They burned the body and many witnessed the aftermath. A plague that had been ravaging the town immediately ceased.

In Scandinavian traditions brought to Britain by the Vikings, the afturgongur — after-walkers or those who walk after death — were regarded as a terrible nuisance. Like the undead barrow-wights from which Frodo and friends acquire their elven swords in “Fellowship of the Ring,” our ancestors believed powerful men became reanimated and malignant inside their grave chambers. Stones carved with magical incantations in runes were stationed to keep these walking dead from infesting the living.

One of the ancient Icelandic sagas tells of the zombie Thorolf, “uncorrupted, and with an ugly look about him... swollen to the size of an ox. ... the oxen which had been used to haul Thorolf’s body were ridden to death by demons, and every single beast that came near his grave went raving mad and howled itself to death. The shepherd at Hvamm often came racing home with Thorolf after him. One day that Fall neither sheep nor shepherd came back to the farm.”

All these tales from cultures with direct connections to our own local ancestral origins have deep resonance, retaining an ability to shock — things so awful they make draught animals scream in terror.

So if these nightmares wiggle their way out of our backbones, what can kill them? For a really tough job, the gypsies looked for a dhampir, a son engendered by a vampire upon a living woman. But mostly, the legends speak only of courage, not stakes through the heart.

Be brave, my friends, on the bleak winter nights ahead.

Postcards are cheap little time machines

 If you need a lesson in how fast and thoroughly everything changes on our coast, old postcards are cheap time machines. Skipping ahead to the moral of this story, in 2112 everything will be at least as different from today as today is from 1912.

People here and everywhere have a difficult time planning much beyond next payday. Especially along the ocean, we could sure use a better grasp of the fact the world explosively pulses with creation and destruction.

Here on the north side of the mouth of the Columbia, the Seaview and Long Beach dunes are transitory lands, while on the south side, parts of the Clatsop Plains are “new” in virtually every sense except for human memory. Ever optimistic when it comes to our own self-interest, we hopefully regard these accreted acres as permanent additions to North America — gifts from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and their jetties.

Postcards from just after 1900 show basalt outcroppings in the surf below North Head and within the nearby cove called Beard’s Hollow. A postcard from 30 or 40 years later depicts men contemplating encroaching sands that were swiftly filling in what had obviously been a prime recreational fishing area. Visit today, and forested dunes surround the old Fishing Rocks — the shore is hundreds of feet to the west. Where will the waves be a hundred years from now?

Counting on a stable shoreline has always been a bad bet.

Aside from obvious land-form changes, postcards produced over generations for this well-touristed region reveal almost-complete transformations in what we do for fun, how we get around, what we do for a living — even how we physically look. Beyond changes in fashion, things like facial structure and stature have shifted in the matter of only a few decades.

 Traits like increasing height can be easily explained by better nutrition, but the phrase “melting pot,” rarely used anymore, perhaps is a better explanation for the quick evolution in how people look. Recent European immigrants from genetically isolated populations preserved distinctly different appearances from what we would consider “modern American.”

Buggies, hay wagons, steam locomotives, dirt roads, frequent shipwrecks, ferryboats and full-length swimming dresses are some of the countless signs of a bygone time captured in old postcards. It’s a safe guess that we will seem as quaint and old-fashioned to our great-grandchildren as these turn-of-the-last-century people and practices seem to us.

So are postcards yet another of the ridiculous things I collect? Well, yes and no. Early on in my career at the Chinook Observer, I entirely deferred to my predecessor Wayne O’Neil in this pursuit. He found many wonderful images of early post-settlement life on the coast, to such an extent that it seemed futile and impolite to compete with him. But especially since his death, many postcards and other photos have gravitated my way.

In recent months I’ve been fiddling around with design concepts and content for online interactive books of local historical photos, salmon and shellfish labels, maps and other images. If it all comes together as I envision, this will give everyone immediate access to all these accidentally salvaged bits of our past. Beyond hoping people will buy high-resolution prints, my ulterior motive is to put our visual history at everyone’s fingertips.

Knowing the past is not an immunization against future mistakes. But our own lives can achieve richer context via knowledge of what came before us. In a very brief time, we will be funny-looking nameless people who mystify and amuse. Perhaps we can at least aspire to the faint dignity of knowing who we are.

Hanford seems like 1950s science fiction, but its risks live on

Imagine your grandpa as a young man — not some hypothetical guy, but your actual cigar-smoking, belching, church-going grandpa — making the stuff that killed 80,000 people and ended World War II.

The Hanford site in southeastern Washington is a page out of the old do-it-yourself engineering magazine Popular Mechanics — maybe an imaginary special 1964 supplement devoted to backyard nuclear reactors. Most vibrantly at the preserved 1940s-era B Reactor, what comes through is an impression of ordinary pipefitters, electricians, civil engineers and an occasional physicist creating craftsman-like solutions to problems as they encountered them for the first time ever. They were normal blue-collar workers making history.

Even Enrico Fermi, the 1938 Nobel Prize winner who oversaw key aspects of Hanford’s Manhattan Project, comes off not as a lofty genius or madman, but as a pragmatic technician doing his job — fueling a weapon to defeat military dictators intent on world domination. One of the U.S. Department of Energy’s charmingly geeky site interpreters points out three glass-faced gauges in B Reactor’s retro control room. Using only a slide rule, Fermi was able to tell by their readings that deep within the reactor’s workings a sensor was misplaced by an inch. Guiding a workman via primitive intercom, Fermi nudged it into precisely the correct location.

All this transpired in an era almost untranslatably long ago in terms of technology. For example, some readers will wonder what a “slide rule” was — a mechanical non-binary calculator. All these men — and one lone woman — were applying fundamentally 19th century skills to the task of converting uranium into miniscule amounts of plutonium in the B Reactor.

After a shockingly toxic refining process, this plutonium was used in the “The Gadget” and Fat Man bombs — the first and third nuclear detonations. Fat Man was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, on Aug. 9, 1945. “The Gadget” was set off at the Trinity site in New Mexico about a month earlier. (I used to have a neat piece of fused nuclear glass from Trinity until my dad decided it might be dangerous. This seemed overly protective until I learned Fermi himself died of stomach cancer at age 53, one of many nuclear warriors to die in a similar manner.)

B Reactor sits in the midst of sagebrush and broken pavement in the 640-square-mile Hanford site, which is itself smack-dab in the center of nowhere — or so it seemed when an Army colonel selected it in 1943 for America’s most ultra-top secret project. It’s still not a simple place to visit. When more people do, it’s easy to imagine the kinds of exaggerated prose that will result: a grotesque tombstone in the desert, a ghost-infested abandoned warehouse, a Twilight Zone portal into a dark and inverted reality. Some will discern a hulking graphite cube used by men to tease into existence a substance that any sane god would have taken better pains to hide from his unreliable children.

What you actually see close-up, though, when wandering around B Reactor is a profoundly unforgettable artifact of mid-century America — both good and bad. On the positive side, these largely forgotten people were absolute artists at their individually small jobs. Wires aren’t merely attached to terminals. They are tapered around them with obsessive perfectionism.

On the dark side, give a bunch of boys a nearly limitless budget and absolute secrecy, and what you get is a mess of monstrous proportions. An obvious but irresistible metaphor concerns the orchards that were cut down to keep evicted civilians from sneaking back to harvest the apples. More than half a century later, their geometrically arranged stumps survive in Hanford’s arid climate. Far-bulkier roots spread invisibly underground — just like much of the toxic waste lost in the plutonium-refining process.

The real problem, according to the Environmental Protection Agency, isn’t escaped radioactive substances, but various chemicals utilized in the reactors and other facilities — especially hexavalent chromium or “chrome 6.” Added to Columbia River water to keep it from corroding the insides of machinery, this cancer-causing substance was made famous by Erin Brockovich’s legal crusade in Hinkley, Calif. At Hanford, vast quantities of chrome 6 and other poisons were stored underground in huge leak-prone thin-walled iron tanks. As I emphatically asked a Department of Energy speaker, “What were they thinking?”

Hundreds of monitoring wells and sampling tubes track the movement of toxic plumes. Tests in the river’s gravel bottom find it there. EPA offers reassurances that it immediately dissipates to safe levels once it mixes in the river’s vast flow. Nor does EPA find anything to worry about inside Columbia fish. I’m partially reassured, but won’t be feeding my kid any bottom-feeding fish caught in the Hanford Reach.

One elaborate new facility is devoted to pumping up Hanford’s groundwater, removing everything that shouldn’t be in it, and then pumping it back down. This process will continue most of our lives. Good luck to them, and to we who live downriver. Another vast plant will melt solid wastes into glass blocks for permanent storage. But it is stalled awaiting a determination about whether it will actually work safely as now designed. (See related editorial.) Once it is powered up, large areas of this facility will be off-limits to humans forever — everything must work perfectly for decades without hands-on intervention.

I encouraged a reporter to write a book about all this. A great history of the space race is called “The Right Stuff.” My title for the Hanford story: “The Wrong Stuff.”

2012’s little wild blackberries have been tidbits of heaven

It’s been an exuberant summer for little wild blackberries, nugget-sized explosions of Pacific Coast flavor. Gathered within sound of breaking waves, there’s something of the ornery storm in each one. I can picture fog witches wafting about on moonless nights, picking them for their passion potions.

The first finishers arrived a month ago, deceptively dark but shy of sugar. A wise old home species, they appreciate the urgency of completely utilizing every halfway decent day here on Bad-Weather Beach. For the past 10 days they’ve mostly been sweet as kisses. Like a high-school romance, the fact the end’s so near makes them all the more delicious.

In a process reminiscent of the 1960s board game “Operation,” I make my hand small as possible and snake it through gaps in the prickle-covered vines, braced for the electrical shock of them penetrating to a nerve. Accumulating about six at a time makes a mouthful.

Aside from making certain they’re shiny black with no hint of powdery mold, it’s best not to look too closely. They probably contain “accidental protein” — tiny spiders and worms. Les Stroud, TV’s Survivorman, would be proud.

“Gathering” is an inaccurate description of my activities, since they never make it home. I come back to the house looking like I just voted in an Arab election, right thumb and fingers dyed bright reddish purple.

A fellow Washington columnist has noted, “Seeking out Little Wild blackberries may not equal the quest for the Golden Fleece but it comes close.” You know you have a true friend if they drop a clue about their berry-picking patch.

Like most members of the rose family, blackberries are a promiscuous bunch, mixing genes together with abandon. This makes it a little challenging to define exactly what’s what. Our little wild blackberries, also sometimes called western dewberries, are labeled with the scientific name Rubus ursinus — meaning blackberry of the bears. They were first scientifically described by famed Scottish biologist David Douglas, perhaps in Pacific County in April 1825 after his eight-month voyage from England in the William and Ann.

Around here, the other species we encounter are Rubus laciniatus and Rubus armeniacus, the cutleaf evergreen and the Himalayan blackberries, both invasives introduced by white settlers. These are still weeks away from ripening. A week of rain at the wrong time can mean the difference between barrels of berries and barely enough for a few jars of jelly.

Newcomers are invariably thinking about the evergreen variety when the topic of wild blackberries comes up. These are the giant fence-devouring brambles bent on world domination. Evergreen berries are three times bigger than little wild ones, and have a third as much flavor. To me, Himalayans have a slightly off-putting chemical taste. But they’re still preferable to salmonberries, Rubus spectabilis, which have by now just about finished fruiting for the year. They ordinarily have a watery, washed-out flavor in keeping with their anemic pink-tinged yellow color.

In fact, it may be their color that elevates blackberries and their cousins from amusing local obsession to actual significance as food. Along with several other berry species, they are a prime source of anthocyanins and other complex chemical compounds.

Pacific region blackberries and wild black raspberries (Rubus leucodermis) contain up to 589 milligrams of anthocyanin per 100 grams of berries, compared to 320 mg per 100 g for the fabled and expensive acai from Brazil.

 As with all things dietary, different studies say conflicting things, but this intense coloring is thought by many to have beneficial affects on everything from type 2-diabetes to cancer, heart disease and Alzheimer’s.

But the best reasons to go berry picking are flavor, fresh air and exercise. The little black guys also engender feelings of continuity with our region’s first people, who called them klikamuks. There is a coastal Indian tale that they represent the blood drops of a woman who fled up a tree to escape her enraged jealous husband.

Think of her. Be not jealous of anyone else’s berries but grateful for our own.

Better watch out: Turkeys gone bad are very bad indeed!

Ilwaco Citizens for Chickens is a Facebook group advocating legal flexibility to keep a few hens inside city limits. The city council will decide the matter soon. I’m mostly in favor, so long as I can summarily execute any illicit roosters — the noisy little bastards have startled me out of sleep far too early on numerous Asian and Latin American mornings.

What’s to like about chickens? Not “chicken” — as in fried, rotisserie or with dumplings — but actual clucking, pecking chickens? When’s the last time you thought about that buffalo wing or delicatessen tender filet as having recently been part of a living creature?

This isn’t a plea to quit eating them. Like most Americans, I consume my weight in chicken each year. Sunday chicken-and-gravy dinner, including a shameful half-pound of butter, is a family favorite. But it will never match my grandmother’s, in part because the chickens I fry were never personally liked by anybody as individual beings capable of their own engaging or irksome behavior.

Chickens and other domesticated poultry are not mental giants, largely because they are usually raised in such dreary circumstances that they have no reason to be smart. How interesting would you be if your entire life were spent inside a wire cage barely bigger than yourself?

But it is slander to suggest, for instance, that turkeys are so stupid they drown from ignorantly staring upward in a rainstorm. If anything, those raised in factory settings are like over-sheltered children who injure themselves in a panic or become smothered in a pile-up if startled by thunder or some other unfamiliar phenomenon.

Turkeys, chickens and ducks raised in family-farm settings aren’t pets, but do get to have genuine and content-filled lives. Grandma’s chicken coop was sort of a village in its own right, with her yearly flock sorting out their own hierarchical pecking order. Grandma was the empress, imposing summary justice on bullies. She was a relatively benign dictator, dispensing dinner scraps and making sure her girls were comfortable. If a particularly juicy-looking grasshopper was too slow off the potato leaf, it would brighten a hen’s afternoon, courtesy of Grandma.

Collecting eggs was a chore I always enjoyed, having something of Easter morning about it. Now and then, a hen would introduce an element of “treasure hunt” to the enterprise by attempting to hide a nest off in the maze of farmyard outbuildings and machinery. Farm eggs, enriched by a diverse diet, are as deliciously different as wild Chinook salmon is from pale Atlantic aquaculture fish.

Caring about them didn’t mean hens were immune from becoming dinner themselves, though I recall nature being allowed to take its course for a few particularly gentle old birds. Hens tend to go “off lay” as the days grow shorter in the fall. Retirement usually meant the stew pot. Nowadays, these “spent hens” are treated as industrial waste to be disposed of cheaply as possible. We cheapen ourselves whenever we regard another living thing as worthless.

My grandparents’ meatiest poultry dramas involved bigger fowl, like ducks, geese and turkeys. They once raised 10 geese to adulthood, only to have the entire flock decamp one morning for the town sewage lagoon three miles away, where they lived out their lives in smelly exile.

In 1989, a couple years before I moved to the coast, the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife began transplanting Eastern turkeys to the Long Beach Peninsula in cooperation with the Bear River Archers club. There was a promise that “This [transplant] will provide a lot of people a chance to see a turkey in the wild.” (Ben Franklin urged other early U.S. leaders to adopt this wily and adaptable bird as our national symbol, but lost the argument to the more imperial and photogenic eagle.)

I’ve never seen a local wild turkey, but a reader last week said a neighbor is angry, blaming him for a hooligan gang of turkeys that traipses through his yard into hers. Perhaps the transplants from 23 years ago have been breeding in secret and are finally ready to launch their insurgency.

We’d better watch out: Grandma’s turkeys scared me far more than bears ever have. Turkeys gone bad are very bad indeed.

Forest fires are a deadly element of the Western mystique

In the American West forest fires are said to possess a mythological life force, a fierce and cruel personality. Were we inclined — as our distant ancestors were — to turn natural forces into gods, forest fires would be North America’s most hungry and demanding deity.

If you’re a child of an Old West family, chances are pretty decent you’ll have listened to a Sunday supper story of some youth who died fighting fire. It’s not that there have been such an enormous total of such deaths, but they make a particularly deep impression on western folks. Their sooty bravery and sweaty honor speak of tribal sacrifice in the dark and ancient woods of northern Europe. We want to know such heroes, even if our actual connection is scant.

Celebrated for his lyrical “A River Runs Through It,” Montanan Norman MacLean is one of the few writers to meet the challenge of interpreting the tragedy of a fatal forest fire. In “Young Men and Fire,” MacLean brings a journalistic scalpel to the task of understanding the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire, which claimed 13 lives.

A demonic circumstance is born when a ground fire superheats the crown branches overhead, and then gets a sudden gulp of fresh oxygen from a wind gust. Harry T. Gisborne, a pioneer in the study of fire behavior, studied one such blowup in Glacier National Park in 1929 that demolished two square miles of timber in less than two minutes. (This usage of “behavior” also shows how we invest fires with malevolent consciousness.)

“The crown fire is the one that sounds like a train coming too fast around a curve and may get so high-keyed the crew cannot understand what their foreman is trying to do to save them,” explains MacLean.

MacLean writes of Gisborne: “Returning two days later, he found the perfectly balanced body of a young grouse, neck and head ‘still alertly erect in fear and wonder,’ the beak, feathers, and feet seared away. Within a few yards was a squirrel, stretched out at full length. ‘The burned-off stubs of his little hands were reaching out as far ahead as possible, the back legs were extended to the full in one final, hopeless push, trying, like any human, to crawl just one painful inch further to escape this unnecessary death.”

Though not in the same league as “A River Runs Through It,” MacLean’s fire book is crowded with illuminating observations. A retired Forest Service veteran narrowly spared from the Mann Gulch disaster commends the back-wrecking work ethic of a Mennonite crew: “Them sons-of-bitches was the world’s champion firefighters. … The rest of us bastards was dead by midnight.” Just dead tired, mostly.

I’ve been in two forest fires, carefully tended as an ignorant civilian reporter, but close enough to see how fast things could go wrong. The first time was in Wyoming in the late 1980s, when it seemed as if every lodgepole pine in the state was hell-bent on destruction. Not for nothing are forests famed for being disorienting; in dry Wyoming, there’s not even the directional clue of moss growing more profusely on the north side of trees. Add an eye-stinging canopy of smoke and I can easily imagine wandering into a flaming cul-de-sac. From a quarter mile away, the sound was like the distant roar of the ocean surf, suffused with the gun pops and cannon shots of exploding trees.

My “favorite” fire, if I can be forgiven for having such a thing, was in the forest around Ilwaco’s Indian Creek Reservoir in 1991. It wasn’t much, as fires go, other than demonstrating that even our supremely mossy forests are perfectly capable of burning. Most memorable was soaring over it like a startled hawk in a Department of Natural Resources helicopter, thanks to my friend and County Forester Rex Hutchins. We had to land on a clear-cut hilltop to deposit another DNR employee who was motion sick. I enjoyed a feeling of superiority nearly as much as the view.

We’re assured that forest fires are a force of renewal, clearing the way for fresh life. But we mourn for the old — cherished mature trees and everything from spiders to badgers that suffer the flames. Watching TV coverage of conflagrations in southern Oregon and elsewhere, we’ll be awfully lucky if more young men — and young women, too, nowadays — don’t end up dead in this hot July in the mountains and desert.

Willapa oysters earn celebrity endorsement: Mark Twain!

“If you don’t love life you can’t enjoy an oyster; there is a shock of freshness to it and intimations of the ages of man, some piercing intuition of the sea and all its weeds and breezes. They shiver you for a split second,” Eleanor Clark wrote in her 1964 “The Oysters of Locmariaquer.”

Clark, an exquisite writer in her own right, was married to Robert Penn Warren. She shared his ability to peel away reality’s superficial outer layers and touch the truth within. (Warren’s “All the King’s Men” remains a relevant exploration of American political corruption.) As Clark realized, oysters are the concentrated essence of their home waters — each a precise little masterpiece painted by the environment.

Pronounced “loc-maria-care,” Locmariaquer’s oysters are big, flat belons from France’s Brittany peninsula — now also grown commercially on Puget Sound. Here on the outer coast of Washington, Olympia oysters are the hometown species. If belons exude suave Breton charm, their cousins the Olys are wisecracking bantamweight GIs who rescue Normandy and seduce all the pretty girls.

They certainly seduced Mark Twain. His adoration for Willapa Bay-grown Olys is profiled in June’s Smithsonian magazine. In May 1864, Twain bailed out of the gold fields of Washoe County, Nevada, taking up residence at San Francisco’s Occidental Hotel, a place he called “Heaven on the half shell.” The 28-year-old reporter on his way to celebrity made $35 a week and blew it all on a fancy room and the oyster buffet.

For our 19th century ancestors, oysters were hamburgers, tacos and pizza all conveniently pre-packaged in durable single-serving containers. They were fast food, but delicious and nutritious.

Along with other new arrivals in the city by the bay, Twain “developed a taste for the tiny, coppery Olympias. The Oly … was the classic gold rush oyster, a staple of celebrations and everyday meals in San Francisco restaurants and oyster saloons. Olys appeared in oyster soup and stew, stuffed into wild poultry and, of course, raw,” according to Smithsonian writer Andrew Beahrs.

Ninety percent of Gold Rush oysters came from Shoalwater/Willapa Bay in Pacific County. Although the same species was available in smaller quantities from Tomales Bay, Calif., those from Washington were larger and milder-tasting, according to a 1963 state publication, “The California Oyster Industry.”

It took around six days to reach San Francisco from Oysterville or Bruceport by sailing ship. Several vessels did nothing but service the industry by hauling 100-pound sacks or 32-pound baskets. On arrival, some were immediately sold with at least a five-to-one mark-up, but a substantial part of each cargo was laid out in beds in San Francisco Bay to fatten and stay fresh until needed. An especially drunk miner might pay as much as $1 per oyster in 1850, the equivalent of at least $30 today.

By the end of the 1850s, Shoalwater was shipping about 35,000 baskets a year — more than 1.1 million pounds. With completion of the Union Pacific trans-continental railroad in 1869, California’s loyalties swiftly shifted to Eastern oysters. This is probably just as well, since Washington state’s native stocks had virtually been strip-mined.

Smithsonian’s story notes that Olympia oysters currently command $2 apiece at Swan Oyster Depot in San Francisco. Southwest Washington oysterman Bill Taylor supplies them. For $120, another company offers three dozen via the Internet and FedEx, barely enough for a bedtime snack for Twain.

Willapa oysterman Warren Cowell keeps our local Oly oyster tradition alive, carefully nurturing a 60-acre bed. Many make a post-harvest journey to Denver, where they are highly relished. (Cowell, by the way, is a fine and reasonable guy. Don’t prejudge him based on an email being circulated to oppose his candidacy for county commission.)

My friend oysterman Dick Wilson of Bay Center has doubts about Olys as a commercial venture, noting they take three years (or more) to grow to anything like marketable size. He says local oyster growers mostly encounter Olympias when they mingle in local beds with the justly popular and ubiquitous Pacific oysters brought from Japan decades ago.

“I find the flavor rather strong (with a zinc taste) but of course since they are so small it does not last long, regardless of what Hemingway says. Some people like this taste and I don’t mean to knock it, but our Pacifics from Willapa will spoil one’s appreciation for eating the small brown Native,” Wilson says.

And what did Hemingway have to say?

“As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold white wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.”

I hear chardonnay and Olys calling. They are the distillation of our bay — pure, swift tides and a universe of reflected daylight. They are heroically delicious once pried from their tiny fortresses.

Welcome back to bees of spring; looking ahead to honey

A single yellowjacket came bulleting out of the woods like a drone jet on an assassination mission against the Taliban. It nailed me on the neck and half a second later lay squished in the dirt. “Why the hell did you do that,” I asked rhetorically, rubbing a welt that felt full of dirty battery acid.

“Reportedly, the record number of stings sustained by one person — who lived to tell the tale — is 2,243, proving that bee stings are much more of a pain than a danger for the 99 percent of us who do not suffer a systemic reaction to bee venom,” according to Northwest garden writer Wendy Tweten. Although she’s a fan of related species, Tweten concedes, “Yellowjackets give other wasps a bad name.” If earth is ever invaded by extraterrestrial aliens, let’s hope they aren’t highly evolved yellowjackets — freakishly easy to anger and armed (or butted) with chemical weapons.

My next run-in with a member of the “bee family” came last weekend driving around Baker Bay with the window down. A bumblebee collided with the side mirror and ricocheted onto my chest, causing a momentarily swerve within my lane 50 feet above the water. One of those plausible but hard-to-prove theories, someone suggested years ago that otherwise unexplainable one-car fatalities often are the result of distracted drivers over-reacting to a bee or wasp in the passenger compartment. I pulled over in a hurry, dusted the stunned bumbler onto the road shoulder, wishing her a speedy recovery.

The reappearance of bees and their close kin puts the “buzz” into spring. Pausing to listen in a meadow perched above the Pacific, their voices merge into an insectile Gregorian choir, a prayer for pollen in an open-air cathedral. It’s a hypnotic sound, with a faint implied threat — don’t step on me!

The songs of bees never fail to make me think of two skinny ranch kids who lived with their dad near us in the 1960s, supplementing their living with a few hives. Their tiny house had hive-like qualities — few openings and severely restricted menu offerings — but actual beehives are infinitely tidier than theirs was. Most memorably, their home always smelled of beeswax and honey.

They constructed their own honeycomb boxes from soft, pale wood partitioned with sheets of prepared wax, into which the familiar pattern of hexagonal cells was impressed. This was done as a sort of building template for the bees, I suppose so more would fit inside the rectangular hives. The complete, neatly square honeycombs could also be easily packaged for sale. But mostly, our neighbors melted the combs and separated out their delicate honey concocted from alfalfa, dandelions and willow blooms. A tide of honey aroma wafted across the dusty county road, sweetening the lives of passing motorists, an unexpected gift.

To approach the hives, we’d dress in imperfectly sealed canvas coveralls and net-shrouded hats — so imperfect I was stung both times I tried it. Smoke has a narcotic affect on bees, so a vital part of the ritual included lighting a smoke-emitting bellows to inject a fog of confusion into the hive. The top was removed and some of the honeycombs harvested — easily one of the most satisfying of all human-animal interactions, though perhaps less so for the bees.

There is something peculiarly sticky about my memories of those far-away summer afternoons, no doubt strengthened by the sad early death of one of the beekeeper boys of a congenital illness. Maybe after also encountering it in the candles and polish of dark old churches, the scent of beeswax is for me a reminder of how quickly life itself melts away.

Honey, though, brings nothing but pleasure. My wife will attest I am a honeyaholic, as was my mother, whose extensive inventory was recently added to mine. I have enough for a very long time, which is fine, since honey stored in a cool, dark place stays good practically forever. Anyway, we are coming to the time of year when I’ll go through a bunch, sweetening fruit smoothies made with tart spring berries, bananas and canned coconut milk.

 “Honey is the most vital and nourishing of all gathered foods, ready-made and unimprovable from the hive,” English blogger Oliver Thring wisely observed last spring. “Mixed with water and left for a couple of days, the solution begins to ferment, and soon enough you get mead. From it and other intoxicants sprang myths, rituals and religions and the sputtering births of what, for better or worse, we call civilization.”

 Here’s to the bees, their stings a small price to pay.

Nostalgia for a good old dump and its discarded treasures

 When watching an end-of-the-world movie, do you ever think about how it would smell to be embedded in an actual landscape of devastation and dismay? (And what does it say about modern life that we harbor such pervasive fantasies about civilization suffering a head-on collision with chaos?)

 No apocalyptic vision could be complete without holy men. End-time images that spring into my mind come with two or three — in the form of local Indians who haunted our town dump prospecting for castoff treasures.

 It all has a semi-mythical tinge. Smoke from meekly smoldering piles of garbage wiggle this way and that like swamp gas in the anorexic mountain air, imparting a sharp acidic tang to the enormous, rumbling orchestral bass-note of sweetish rot. Dirt and bacteria are churned into the consistency of talcum powder and boil upward behind arriving pickup trucks, saturating every nostril with the not-unpleasant aroma of toasted primeval seabed.

 Conceivably, Indian men may have been employed by the town to push trash over the edge of what appeared to a child’s eyes to be a magnetically treacherous cliff. (It actually was no more than a 20-foot drop-off into a dry gulch.) More likely, the Indians found private value/entertainment in scouting out things they could sell or repurpose. They were silent and polite as ushers or gravediggers at a funeral, waiting for us to finish with our transitory occupation of their space, before meandering over as we drove away to attend to what we left behind.

 “Dignified” verges on insult when applied to these men who existed far beyond the boundaries of silly little white words.

 Town dumps themselves are unmourned artifacts of a fast-receding era — when American communities were more island-like, operating as semi-independent fiefdoms free of the Environmental Protection Agency. It is good that state and federal watchdogs no longer allow unspeakable filth to ooze out of festering dumps into surrounding ground and water. (Imagine the channel at the base of a wine press through which the fresh juice flows — except a “garbage press” is loaded with 40 years of soiled disposable diapers, crankcase oil and spoiled vegetables: a filthy cocktail from hell.)

 We now wheel a plastic waste tub to the curb once every week or two, then never think of its contents again. Much of our refuse is trucked off to dry counties east of the Cascades. A big one boasts of “Superior engineering, vigorous regulatory compliance and environmental security.” Their website doesn’t mention whether it still smells. I’m betting it does.

 Something is lost when we insulate ourselves entirely from garbage, turning it into a remote hypothetical issue and someone else’s problem — our sense of responsibility, for one thing. For another, even assuming you could gain access to some good trash before it disappears into the Waste Matter Industrial Complex, any remaining salvage opportunities are spoiled by modern identity-theft paranoia. Heaven forbid anybody should see your credit-card receipts. Is it fear, or shame?

 My friend Chris Amend used to run a service for homeowners overrun by accumulated stuff. We’d descend like avenging angels on rotting garages held up only by their contents. On one memorable occasion, we hauled away a whole stack of obsolete console TVs the size of tipped-over refrigerators. Ever wonder how a huge cathode-ray television reacts when shoved off the back of a truck going 60 mph? Pure entertainment; it was must-see TV. Yes, we picked up the pieces.

 We never came home empty, even after taking legitimately awful junk to the dump. It defies belief what people throw away. My brother still uses a perfectly good magazine rack liberated from the dump in Laramie. I sympathize with the impulse to rid oneself of decades of clutter, but at least try to find a new home for things before tossing them out.

 Feel free to call me before discarding your dad’s vast collection of ... well … pretty much anything but old TVs. I don’t want any iceboxes either, though the last one was most enjoyable throwing down an abandoned mine shaft. It sounded like the ancient suit of armor Peregrin “Pippin” Took accidentally dislodges into a bottomless pit in “Fellowship of the Ring.” If I were 17 and did it again today, the video might be a hit on You Tube.

 Thoughts of my town dump were sparked by high school classmate Alan Heuer in Taos, N.M., who said last week a Stonehenge mural he did for our school back in the 1970s was thrown out when they tore down the old campus. I don’t doubt someday his art will be so expensive they’ll dig up the dump looking for it. (See Alan’s incredible work at www.AlanHeuer.com.)

 In fact, it won’t take until the end of the world before entrepreneurs begin mining old dumps for all sorts of metals and other commodities. Already, in many foreign countries, nothing valuable makes it into a dump in the first place. If we’re so darned smart in the USA, we should get a clue.

Finally, some brighter news about syphilis

I’ve been thinking about dying. Not in a “woe is me” way, but ruminating over the peculiar ways in which some innocuous little illness or accident can end up transferring a person into the past tense.

For one thing, in week three recovering from the true flu, a pernicious cough puts me in mind of September 1987, which my dad futilely spent trying to hack-up terminal lung cancer. Once death is certain, we should be able to flip a switch and completely turn off the coughing, pain and other symptoms. “Yes, body, I know we’re in big trouble. Now just shut up!”

Flu isn’t all bad. Being stuck at home with a high fever for most of a week provided a rare stretch of enforced time-off. It was like vacation without any obligation to have fun.

Lying swaddled in blankets on the couch, perusing online death certificates and genealogical records was perfect in keeping with a theme of mortality and morbidity.

I learned Grandaunt Minnie died in the 1918 Spanish flu epidemic, a healthy 25-year-old mom one week and buried the next. And my 19-year-old first cousin twice removed John Henry Bell was blown to bits on July 1, 1916 — one of 19,240 British troops killed on that catastrophic opening day of the Battle of the Somme, the bloodiest date in UK military history. My twin Grandaunts Vernia and Verdia died a few months apart in infancy of cholera and meningitis.

Considering all this, is it any wonder I recently decided it was time for a checkup? Like all too many men, I so rarely go that I tend to see someone new each time. My wife has been so pleased with her combination M.D./traditional Chinese medicine naturopath, Dr. Daniel Newman, I decided to give him a try.

It was fairly incredible having a doctor devote two full hours to an initial consultation, inquiring into medical history in amazing detail. It felt like being a patient with fictional TV doctor Gregory House in terms of thoroughness, with the refreshing difference that Newman is completely sane, polite and humorous.

TV’s House is ending this year, and none too soon, after beating the heck out of just about every conceivable obscure disease and opportunity for physician misbehavior. One of House’s most famous observations may outlive the series: “Everyone lies.” Specifically, the process of medical diagnosis is much complicated by the ways in which patients shade the truth or leave out crucial details. On TV, brilliant medical detective work nearly always manages to circumvent this self-sabotaging pattern. Real doctors don’t often have time for this luxury.

I didn’t lie to my new doctor but it later occurred to me that I forgot some things he might consider relevant — like my childhood brush with tuberculosis, or all that mercury exposure.

 Although most people now consider it to be nothing but an awful toxin, this metal that is liquid at room temperature was widely used in my family’s traditional occupation of gold mining, as well as in medicine. I still have a bottle of it. My brothers, cousins and I used to frequently play with it as kids — its property of sticking to other metals makes it possible to instantly give a dull copper penny a shiny dime-like surface. Who knows how much we absorbed, since pure mercury tends to pass right through living organisms. A bigger concern is all the sodium cyanide used in gold refining — our mill building reeked of it. I hope that if it was going to kill me, it already would have.

Mercury particularly came to mind during my convalescence while catching up with back issues of London Archaeologist.

For centuries, mercury was regarded as one of the only treatments for syphilis — thankfully not among my family’s diseases. Fiona Tucker, writing in in 2008, tried to answer the question whether it did any good.

Tucker’s study found comparatively huge amounts of mercury in the skeletons of syphilis patients, even some who might have been charity cases at church-based hospitals. Based on bones alone, she decided mercury treatment wasn’t “a colossal hoax,” as some allege. Although it appears mercury didn’t extend life spans and did cause awful dental cavities, there also is some indication it helped curb the propensity of syphilis to eat into patients’ bones.

(Locally, Lewis and Clark dosed their syphilitic men with pills containing mercury. Efforts have been made to pinpoint their campsites by looking for mercury in old privies.)

All this reading about sickness and premature death made me very happy — happy to live in a time when so many things that used to easily kill us no longer do. For all our griping about the cost and complexity of modern medicine, we’re exceptionally fortunate to have access to many treatments that actually work.

Our current coastline is only a moment in time

Time travel is an ever-present sensation for geologists, who simultaneously view the world as it is and how it was, rather like examining a hunchbacked old woman while still admiring the vivacious teenager inside the same skin. They are walking testimonials to the wisdom of digging beyond surfaces and carrying the excitement of discovery throughout every possible waking hour.

My dad’s old business partner Walt Roberts was an exploration geologist — the Indiana Joneses of their field. Flying over the trackless marshes of the Magdalena River in northern Columbia many years later, I thought both of Walt’s stories of hunting waist-thick anacondas there and about “Love in the Time of Cholera,” Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s hypnotic novel about that zone of lovesick miasma and magic.

On first impression, we might seem to live in a place with a paucity of compelling geology or opportunities for scientific adventure. Heavy vegetation and annual detritus clothe our rocks in thick layers, quickly burying anything that stands still for more than a few seasons. Our most obvious rock formations consist of wave and flood-blasted basalts, the hard black cliffs of places like North Head — certainly picturesque, but not tempting enough to take a sample home for a spot on your sunny kitchen windowsill.

As so often, first impressions are deceiving. There is a lot of geology to think about here, if not necessarily to strike with your rock hammer. A big component of our coastline’s interest lies in the constant interplay of land and ocean and ice.

Talking this week with my friend Kathleen Sayce, a Renaissance woman of diverse scientific fields, I inquired about local bathymetry, landforms beneath the waves. This topic has been in my mind since recently writing about blue whale sightings off the Long Beach Peninsula, where they prowl above undersea canyons that focus and channel yummy nutrients upwelling from the abysm.

After we discussed the Astoria Canyon invisibly snaking away from the mouth of the Columbia River and the separate Willapa-Guide Canyon Complex just to the north, Kathleen remarked on all the drowned and hidden countryside to our west. At the time of the Late Glacial Maximum 13,000 to 10,000 years ago, the sea level was about 120 meters or nearly 400 feet lower than today, exposing a broad expanse of rich, flat plains sloping away into the Pacific. There was still a vast wall of glacial ice extending down into what is now Grays Harbor County, so the hundreds of square miles of now-vanished West Northwest would have been drier and much colder than today — a place where brackish-water-loving chum salmon spawned in abundant shallow creeks while moose grazed among the willows.

Splitting through this lush scene, the Columbia River’s snake-like course was thoroughly scoured by the epic series of Missoula Floods, the periodic draining of freshwater inland lakes fed by melting glaciers in the Rocky Mountains. In the interior of Washington state a few years ago, scientists launched a remarkable study of the horrendous extent and impact of these cataracts by searching out “bathtub rings” of buried mammoth-bone deposits. These graveyards mark the final tragic resting places of huge herds of now-extinct North American elephants swallowed by the floods.

The submerged lands to our west would be a marvel of geology and archaeology, if only we could bioengineer humans to comfortably explore underwater. (Possibly this might be a better use of money than imagining a colony on the Moon.) Not only are countless early human campsites and villages undoubtedly located offshore, but runoff and simple gravity dictate that potentially rich deposits of metals are located hundreds of feet underwater in alluvial ice-age deposits. Here on what were once the upper foothills of ancient mountains, we’re left with ample black sands but no gold nuggets — none that anyone has told me about, anyway. A Japanese-funded enterprise is vacuuming just such submerged gold from the seafloor off Alaska, though in waters shallower than ours.

It is one of the certainties of earth that the ocean shoreline never stays long in one place, and our talk turned to the impacts from melting ice sheets as humanity unlocks the carbon so laboriously stored underground by eons of heat and pressure. Greenland is fast melting, located as it is at latitudes ranging from that of St. Petersburg, Russia, north to that of numerous relatively un-icy parts of Scandinavia. If it all goes, the ocean will come up another 30 feet, submerging my downtown Long Beach office and much else besides. If a good bit of Antarctica also drips away, the Willapa Hills and Coast Range will become archipelagos — pretty chains of islands from which our descendents will gaze out at where we once lived, and contemplate our folly.

But for now, I do as my grandma did and practice peasant geology by collecting rocks during walks through the hills. Where developers have scrapped away patches of soil, I pocket polished stones torn from faraway mountains by ancient floods and ice. I think of times that were and times to come.

It's time for new economic directions for rural counties

For everyone passionate about the Pacific Northwest coast, Curry County’s unfolding fate is like witnessing a freeway accident in slow motion as victims are thrown through the air all akimbo, screams on their silent lips. (Well, this is a very over-boiled image, but Curry’s situation really is awfully darned bad.)

Far southwestern Oregon is a time capsule, with its back-road strawberry stands and summer heat teleporting me back to 1960s family trips there, which were marked by hypnotically long days on the highway. My wife, daughter and I still spend a week per year in that corner of Oregon — though we spend a lot less of it driving. I half expect to spot my 10-year-old self gazing across from a passing car, my kindly old cancer-destined dad smoking his pipe in the driver’s seat trying to get in just a hundred more miles before stopping for the night.

But my interest in the area’s economic plight extends beyond fond recollections and loyalty to my great-grandparents resting in their graves in Grants Pass. Though we here at the mouth of the Columbia have a number of advantages, in other ways all our rural counties face a similar set of problems.

The frightening economic avalanche bearing down on Curry, Josephine and at least 10 other Oregon counties is the expiration of millions in federal forest payments. In Oregon this $230 million a year made up for loss of timber revenue after lawsuits and other factors severely diminished U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management harvests starting in the 1990s. That funding stream has ended and few look for it to return. In Curry, it provided 61 percent of general government spending and 65 percent of road spending.

As the Salem Statesmen-Journal editorialized, “the situation is so dire in Curry, Josephine and some other Southern Oregon counties that they could be sliding toward government insolvency. That could have disastrous repercussions statewide.”

Curry is closest to falling off the cliff, but others aren’t far behind. Another cluster of impacted counties is in the northeast corner of Oregon, where Wallowa expects to let some paved roads revert back to gravel. (Anyone who travels around remote corners of Mexico can testify about how poorly this idea works.)

This situation generates much discussion among my small circle of amateur and professional regional economists. Some of our topics include:

• What do you do with an insolvent county? Even in what amounts to a localized economic depression, you still need everything from deputies to nutritional services for little kids. The most obvious answer would be for local people to start raising more money themselves, but nobody likes taxes — especially in rural Oregon, where Curry County voters turned down the most-recent levy 72-28 percent. (As recently as last year, here in Washington there was talk of combining some counties with neighbors. It was quietly suggested, for example, that Wahkiakum be split between Pacific and Cowlitz. But in the final analysis, the potential savings haven’t been seen as sufficient to make up for the trauma and inconvenience.)

• Unite broke counties with a neighbor? What solvent county would want the headache of supplying more services for desperate, tax-averse people? Oregon Gov. John Kitzhaber has most recently suggested farming out some services to other counties. This, too, will require money, in addition to subjecting local people to long drives for things like contesting a traffic ticket. Congressmen Peter DeFazio, Kurt Schrader and Greg Walden want to take another try at expanding logging, while environmental groups take a contrary tack, mostly wanting to hike hated local taxes.

• How do our Columbia River counties avoid a similar catastrophe? After all, our scenery isn’t vastly better than Curry County’s and our weather is considerably worse.

 Due to historical happenstance, Pacific County’s forests are predominantly private, while most in Clatsop County are state owned. In neither county have forests been perfectly managed, but we didn’t march up to the present day happily assuming federal checks would always roll in. We’ve supported taxes for a variety of worthwhile purposes. We live at the intersection of the ocean and the greatest river of the American West. We’re remote, but nowhere near as much so as either Curry or Wallowa. We’ve got major national and state parks, and an embarrassment of wealth when it comes to history.

The fact remains, however, that Northwest counties continue to struggle with crafting new economies that are less dependent on blue-collar, natural-resource extraction in an era when states and the federal government can’t afford to help as much as they once did. At the same time and partly for related reasons, coastal communities are aging as younger people move away for careers and life enrichment.

Some of my friends and I wonder if at least part of answer would be to take the pending congressional proposal a step further. But instead of permanently assigning half of federal acres for preservation and the other half for logging — with giant corporations still mostly left in the driver’s seat when it comes to value-added processing — we’d like to look for ways to put individual communities and counties in control of our own forests. Maybe with oversight to make sure that harvests are well timed, locally controlled forest cooperatives could manage a county’s lands with an eye toward ensuring steady income, reliable employment, recreational access, habitat preservation and permanent conservation of the most pristine or environmentally valuable places.

One thing is for sure. For too long, rural people of the Northwest have been treated virtually as peons on land we love. It’s time to try something new.

We inherit who we are from those we love

Thanks to all who sent kind words and thoughts about Mom’s death. Though I miss her deeply and always will, we parted on excellent terms. As I commented to a friend last week, she was a unique, strong, funny, eccentric and lovable person. It makes me smile to think of her. She was one of my best friends.

With perfect affection, I also must say she was a vengeful old warrioress when she imagined anyone had wronged her. She’d have ridden comfortably among our feuding horde of cousins in far Northeast England, whom other British citizens still view as Americans once did Appalachian hillbillies — incomprehensible rabble with a fondness for murder. It’s no accident words like bereaved and blackmail are the linguistic legacy that our Bell clan and others on the Scottish border bequeathed to the English language.

In 1524, the archbishop of Glasgow felt so strongly about our clans that he declared an official 1,300-word curse. He’s still just barely warming up when he declaims, “I curse their heads and all the hairs of their heads; I curse their faces, their eyes, their mouths, their noses, their tongues, their teeth, their necks, their shoulders, their breasts, their hearts, their stomachs, their backs, their wombs, their arms, their legs, their hands, their feet, and every part of their bodies. I curse them from the top of their heads to the soles of their feet. I curse them front and behind, inside and out.”

All this sputter likely didn’t trouble us then, nor does it today. With the exceptions of our legendary ancient war against the Grahams and Mom’s peculiar updated cross-fence version versus hometown archenemy Charlotte Dehnert, I believe the Bells and affiliated families have always been good, decent people just trying to get along. I trust Mom’s enjoying their company, cavorting around a clan bonfire in whatever pagan/nouveau-Buddhist Valhalla she finds herself. (We share a sappy but nevertheless sincere dream of customized niche heavens.)

Unraveling the mysteries our loved ones’ personalities is one of life’s greatest and most enduring challenges. Most of us hardly understand ourselves, far less the people who shape us. Even a shipwrecked sailor alone on a desert island is pressed on all sides by the invisible presence of his parents and role models.

How much behavior is hard-wired into our genes? Thirty to 60 percent is an accepted range of “heritability’s” contribution to us. In olden times when members of a clan or tribe weren’t exposed to a lot of outside influence, they tended to be much alike. Nowadays, children get oodles of feedback from teachers, the Internet and popular entertainment media. This definitely doesn’t mean they’re all becoming culturally homogenized pollywogs in a puddle, but it does round off some sharp edges. Unlike my distant ancestors, they most likely won’t burn your house down if they imagine you’re trying to snatch one of their sheep. More likely now to post a snarky note on Facebook.

It’s been 50 years since the death of Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist whose many contributions to modern culture include his understanding that parental love and care are the foundations of a healthy personality. When he started his studies a century ago, it was still common for parents to deliberately use coldness toward their kids as a way of bracing them for later reception by a cruel, hard world. In truth, a mama’s intelligent and nurturing affection always betters a child, and via her child, the world.

Jung’s pragmatic compassion also applied to the other end of life. “The afternoon of life must have a significance of its own and cannot be merely a pitiful appendage of life’s morning,” he wrote. This definitely speaks to me as my brothers and I step into our new role as family elders. As a tribute to Jung by the BBC noted, “For a culture with an ageing population like ours, Jung offers a vision of the glories of growing old, seeing it as a path to wisdom rather than a decline into senility. We shouldn’t despair over our mid-life crises, he thought, but seize them as the chance to find new vision and purpose.”

This is potent and germane advice for our society that expends so much energy glorifying beauty and capricious charms of youth. It is one of the vicious mistakes of the ongoing recession that too many older workers are being devalued and denigrated at the very time when their insights are most desperately needed.

Jung’s other contributions include our concepts of being introverted or extroverted, definitions that have never particularly fit my family, which responds to the outside world in a very situational and piecemeal fashion — we’re as extroverted as we choose to be. Mom, for example, was happy hobnobbing with Lady Bird Johnson, but cherished her final years of reading and study alone with only the company of a mentally ill cat.

Jung helped develop the field of psychological testing that remains a big part of corporate life today. Our company uses them for top managers and they sometimes prove really helpful in improving how we fit together as a team. As I continue trying to figure her out, I wish I had thought to have Mom take one. (If you’re interested, I found a simplified version online: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp)

Celebrating brilliant times in the old dark woods

“Downton Abbey” resumes on PBS this Sunday, warming the hearts of Anglophiles and soap opera fans alike. Basically an update of the popular old “Upstairs, Downstairs” formula of delving into the interior of an aristocratic British household, it’s a rare costume drama that rises above its genre and is genuinely entertaining.

Genuine is the key quality. Especially on TV, it’s awful hard to find.

The absence of TV is something that comes up a couple times in one of the best local histories I’ve read, “When Logging Was Logging: 100 Years of Big Timber in Southwest Washington.” Reminiscing about growing up in the logging camps of Pacific and Wahkiakum counties, elders recall how content-filled and fun their childhoods were in the era before electronic entertainment.

 “We didn’t sit around and watch TV. We were always outside using our imaginations. We had forts and playhouses in the trees around the camp,” Janet Souvenir Bryan recalled. “The main thing I learned there was how to be family. Kids could go to anyone’s house and get what we needed.”

Rowena Knopski Ehrlund cherishes this sense of everyone looking out for one another. “In the winters, our dads didn’t work if the snow got too deep, so they played pinochle at night with the neighbors. When things were tough, Mom might get up in the morning, and in the porch light might be a fresh package of venison. No one knew who brought it; no one asked. Whoever needed the meat, well, we all shared; we were all one family.”

Logging camps were isolated company shantytowns that sometimes lasted many years. There was a direct relationship between the quality of the cooking and the success of the camp, with men departing for more delicious and filling pastures in those far-away days of plentiful timber jobs.

Toonerville in the Upper Salmon Creek area was one that lasted a long time and generated a depth of affection that endures to the modern era. Doris Pearson recalled life there as a young bride with her husband Bertell. Each night a little girl from across the way would come begging for cookies around suppertime. “We gave her whatever we had, and she’d put it in her little apron pocket and leave to knock on the next door. One evening around dark she was called home, but had disappeared. Everyone in the camp turned out to look for her. Finally, someone thought to look in the Bowman’s outhouse and there she was, sitting on that special little hole with armrests they had made for their children, sound asleep, cookies in her pocket!”

All the stories didn’t end so happily. One haunting memory is of a newlywed bride whose speeder went off the logging railroad tracks, throwing her into a creek. She could be heard calling out for her husband as the current carried her downstream, where her lifeless body was found the next morning. These “speeders” look like incredible, dangerous fun — basically motorcycles or carts adapted to run on rails. See page B1 for more information.

And the men working in the woods had some of the most hazardous jobs that have ever existed in America, where “getting called back to camp during the workday never meant any good news for Weyerhaeuser loggers working in the company’s Grays River branch. It usually signaled that someone had been hurt or, worse yet, killed.” In older times, an injury in the forest above Deep River would lead to frantic efforts to keep the man alive and transport him down the waterfront to await a riverboat for Astoria.

Family-life segments of “When Logging Was Logging” are interspersed with detailed and deeply knowledgeable accounts of companies, loggers and techniques used in some of the world’s greatest forests right in our region. There is a story of a Crown Willamette crew of 21 harvesting 1.6 million board feet of fir on April 16, 1935, “the most productive eight hours of logging on record.”

Of course when white settlers first came to the area, there was no thought of such lush timber ever running low. But it did. On Feb. 25, 1983, the Weyco crew was called back to camp before noon. They feared the worst in terms of an accident, but the bad news was that one of the biggest employers in Pacific-Wahkiakum was closing its logging camp at a cost of 190 jobs. In 1984, Crown Zellerbach followed suit. In both cases, the closures were economically driven, not on account of meddling environmentalists. Logging continues but the glory days are kaput.

Pride and honor are the traits that really shine in the pages of this book, for good reason. “Loggers and their families remain the images of the area’s own ‘American West’ mythology as there were none stronger, harder working, more devoted to their families, or invested in the Willapa Hills than the loggers who initially walked into those dark forests. … They saw in those trees the houses and barns, schools, churches, and hospitals that would be built from the lumber they provided to the new nation they now called ‘home.’”

Ironically, considering how hard it is to find legitimate, honest stories on TV or the movies, this whole tale would make a wonderful drama.

A broken Europe is a dangerous Europe

 If you’re inclined to attach supernatural importance to numbers, last Friday contained a doozy — the 11th second of the 11th minute of the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month in the 11th year of the new millennium.

Although I enjoy a good superstition as much as the next guy, numerology tires me out. There’s no doubt human affairs are abuzz with astounding and disturbing patterns, but they’re not married to arithmetic.

Numerical coincidences aside, I’m worried that we’re at a historical crossroads, an “eleventh hour” in the old biblical Book of Matthew sense of being a time when it is nearly too late to avert disaster. In a refreshing change of pace, this one isn’t much related to U.S. mistakes, but to Europe’s.

There’s an understandable tendency in America to think most of what goes on across the Atlantic is of no concern to us. But that wasn’t true a century ago, when we were about to be dragged into World War I, and it’s far less true today after decades of deep entanglements.

Economic turmoil in faraway Greece may seem like an unlikely trigger for worldwide troubles of a degree that could have any serious consequences for us. Our great-grandparents had the same dismissive attitude toward the 1914 assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo. The resulting conflict cost 15 million lives, with another 20 million wounded. The armistice or treaty that ended it was signed and celebrated on Nov. 11.

Plenty of people foresaw a cataclysmic war on the horizon but were unable or unwilling to do anything about it. In fact, there were those who actively welcomed World War I as an opportunity to clear the air and force redress of intractable injustices. (Pro-war author Rudyard Kipling famously encouraged his son to join up, and then spent the remainder of his life regretting his boy’s battlefield death.) A web of mutual-defense treaties was like a landmine waiting for a misstep. The archduke’s murder was the stumble that set off the bomb.

My grandfather’s cousin Jack Bell died in 1916. A character created by novelist Pat Barker describes the scene: “He remembered the Somme, how the Northumberlands and Durhams had lain, where the machine-guns had caught them, in neat swathes, like harvested wheat.” My great-granduncle’s only child, Jack’s sacrifice was a real-world consequence of global political malpractice. I’m likely the only person alive today who still holds him in mind. He was just an innocent who died for nothing.

So why should we be concerned about the economic calamity swallowing up the future of Greeks and Italians? What does today’s European train wreck have to do with the events that led to a world war?

In military terms, not much at the moment. It’s possible to envision civil wars or military coups along the Mediterranean that somehow spill over to neighbors. But a full-scale continental or global conflagration is hard to imagine, based on foreseeable conditions.

What is predictable is that modern Europe’s complicated snarl of economic links — most obviously the single Euro currency — strongly risks ruining millions of lives. In fact, it probably amounts to near-certainty.

There are those in the U.S. who think bad news for Europe is good news for us. This is like rejoicing about a competitor’s store burning. In reality, America and Europe have only a thin wall between us. We’ll be scorched and smoke-blackened if Europe goes down in flames.

This isn’t to suggest we try to bail out anyone. The U.S. certainly doesn’t have extra cash to lend Greece or Italy. But we really do need to pay attention and safeguard our interests as best we can. An unstable Europe is a mad scientist’s laboratory that eventually spawns Hitlers and Mussolinis.

It’s no accident that the first of Greece’s primeval gods was Chaos. She’s still with us.

Friendly moon guides us in winter’s darkness

Well, it’s a marvelous night for a moondance

With the stars up above in your eyes

A fantabulous night to make romance

Neath the cover of October skies

—Van Morrison

October’s full Harvest Moon lighting up the Columbia estuary sent ripples shimmering across my imagination, thoughts of schooner-sized water skippers sliding westward, their skeletal insectile legs confidently skating above the churning depths.

More often in moonlit dreams, it is I who am gliding swift and effortless, my feet somehow elevated above the earth as if reality itself possesses a surface tension like smooth water, an invisible strength tangible enough to support a man if you sense how to use it.

Moon is a friend I miss seeing during the season of storms. But even in those terrible hours when it sounds like ravenous banshees are successfully clawing their way through my darkened window glass, it’s comforting to know Moon is still calmly shining just above the fray. If only my battered old pickup were capable of driving straight upward, I could glimpse her in just a minute or two at highway speed.

The movement of both the sun and moon have been compared to pendulums, majestically swinging through the days and seasons with rhythms our ancestors believed to reveal the secret mind of god. Who are we to say they were wrong?

We are just past fall equinox, when the sun’s annual pendulum is at the bottom of its arc and racing fastest toward winter solstice on Dec. 21. The length of our days is tumbling fast as the wind-whipped alder leaves. During the next 10 weeks, the sun will set farther and farther south and progressively reach a lower noontime height above the horizon. Like a pendulum, as the sun nears and passes solstice, it stalls in its progress along the horizon and down the sky. The word solstice literally means “standstill of the sun.” After a pause, it will begin racing toward spring like a Hot Wheels toy on a slick plastic track.

The moon’s patterns are far more elaborate, a spunky ballerina at a square dance for lumbering giants. As Dr. Judith S. Young of University of Massachusetts, Amherst, neatly explains at http://tinyurl.com/yfdyavl, “the moon does in a month what the sun does in a year, in terms of the changing rising and setting direction along the horizon.” Furthermore, because the moon’s orbit around the earth is tilted by 5 degrees, it exhibits a more extreme progression along the horizon and rises higher into the sky, in an 18.6-year cycle.

The moon’s maximum solstice, also known as a major lunar standstill, last happened in 2006 and will swing by again in 2024-25. The major lunar standstill cycle was the corner stone of the ancient Celtic calendar, a hypothesis now given greater weight by the fascinating discovery of an early Celtic “Stonehenge” in Germany’s Black Forest.

Based on a detailed analysis of archaeological excavation records, researchers came to the amazing but plausible conclusion that the royal cemetery of Magdalenenberg was laid out in such a way that burials mark the positions of major sky constellations as they were on a date in midsummer 618 BC. Long wooden poles planted in the earth by the tomb’s designers acted as a calendar based on lunar standstills.

“Julius Caesar reported in his war commentaries about the moon-based calendar of the Celtic culture,” ScienceDaily.com reports. “Following his conquest of Gaul and the destruction of the Gallic culture, these types of calendar were completely forgotten in Europe. With the Romans, a sun-based calendar was adopted throughout Europe.”

Although at least one other physical calendar survives from pre-Roman Western Europe, we have only conjectures about how it was used in daily or religious life. One good theory, along with much additional fascinating information, can be read at the Time Meddler’s Calendarium, http://tinyurl.com/3c2bss3. In Celtic tradition, Monday was Samhain, the festival marking the final harvest of the year.

After reading his description of all the leap months and days needed to keep the old Celtic calendar straight, it’s no wonder we went with the Roman one. (We still honor the old gods with our days of the week, however, Wednesday for example being named for Woden, chief of the Anglo-Saxon deities.)

The weather forecast predicts pretty clear skies for a few days and I’ll be keeping a date with the waning moon as she dances on the river.

Miscellaneous moon trivia:

• The next full moon, the Hunter’s Moon, occurs Nov. 10.

• A blue moon refers to the third full moon in a season with four full moons. The next one is Aug. 21, 2013.

• The dark side of the moon isn’t any darker than the side we see. When there is a dark new moon facing earth, the other side that we can’t see is fully illuminated.

Northwestese: New dialect for a better tomorrow

Imagine my surprise: I’m missing a vowel. You may be, too.

An “A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y” haven’t been stolen by a speech impediment or a stroke. Instead, like most Northwesterners, I only use 14 of the American English vowel sounds instead of the 15 described by linguists.

I can’t even wrap my mind around the one that is supposedly missing. It’s like trying to imagine what a hypothetical fifth dimension of space might be like. You just have to take scientists’ word for it.

Anyhow, it seems there is supposed to be a difference in the pronunciation of “caught” and “cot.”
Who knew? Not me.

Our apparently peculiar manner of saying these words is part of what some consider a Northwest dialect, most recently described by Seattlepi.com blogger Amy Rolph.

This hybrid regional way of speaking includes other traits:

• “Creaky voicing,” especially by women, which an earlier 2005 Post-Intelligencer story explained as, “Creaky voicing is easiest to describe as Clintonesque; when Bill Clinton is sounding folksy, that relaxed and scratchy manner of speaking is technically called ‘creaky.’”

• “Up-speak,” about which linguist Jeff Conn said, “Basically, this is the use of a rising question intonation on a declarative sentence, so that a statement like, ‘Then we went to the store,’ may sound like a question rather than a statement.”

• Vocabulary preferences, such as Portlanders saying, “We’re going to the coast,” rather than to the beach or the shore. In fact, in an article in Language magazine, Conn argues that the Portland area is the epicenter of our unique new dialect region. Being more remote, the speech of coastal Washington and Oregon may be even more distinctive sounding.

Here are some interesting observations about “Northwestese,” posted online by residents:

• “I was born in Aberdeen, Wash. ... and I lived there until leaving for the UW in 1971. My freshman year of college, a woman in a linguistics class came to me and said, ‘You’re from Southwest Washington, aren’t you — maybe the Grays Harbor area? I can hear it in your speech.’ To this day, I’m not certain what she was actually hearing.”

• “Among native Northwest males, I have always noticed what I call the ‘Northwest Mumble’ — a tendency to speak softly and without moving their upper lip.”

• “I have long understood that the voice of the Northwest was the voice of Goofy, the Walt Disney character. Pinto Colvig, the creator of Goofy’s voice, was once asked where he got the accent, and he said he was just speaking the way people did in his hometown of Gresham, Ore.” (Actually, he was from Jacksonville.)

For my part, the idea that we have our own way of speaking is something of a comfort in these times when so much American culture is either homogenized to the point of mushy blandness, or else dominated by the weird and bitter politics of other regions. We’re married to the other states by the dollar, TV, chain restaurants, shared pride in the achievements of the past, and the interstate highway system. But having our own Northwest dialect, food, traditions, manners and future is sounding darn good to me.

As opposed to Southerners, who drop their “Rs,” we insert them where they aren’t. I, for one, would a hundred times rather live in Ilwaco, Warshington, than in Atlanta, Gaja. With all due apologies to my hard-fighting Yankee Union ancestors, we should have let the Confederacy secede.

Part of my grander master plan for post-apocalyptic, quasi-independent Cascadia is that in addition to Northwestese, we’ll evolve a new free-range Outer Coast folklore. This thought has been re-sparked by reading “Thames: The Biography,” by Peter Ackroyd, an Englishman whose facility for drawing connections between far-flung ideas is truly inspirational.

You can walk across the River Thames on London Bridge in five minutes, but its history and embedded character seem 1,000 miles deep. Father Thames and his legendary spouse, the Egyptian goddess Isis, once inspired the ritual sacrifice of precious objects into their bottomless waters — ornate Celtic shields and Bronze Age axe heads now on display at the British Museum.

Wouldn’t it be great to imbue our Columbia with a personality and lively expectations?

Think of a future when our descendents, mumbling words with lots of extra “Rs,” deposit handmade gifts in Father Columbia in thanks for restored healthy runs of Royal Chinook salmon.

If we saw our great river as a god, would we treat it as we do?

September brings out the bears and berries

Do black bears get blackberry seeds stuck between their teeth? I wouldn’t want to get close enough to find out, but they probably don’t — unlike me.

There’s sure no doubt blackberries constitute a major part of their late-summer diet, judging by all the deep-purple piles of manure on my street. Do bears poop in the woods? Not so much, in my neighborhood. Wish they would.

Daily walks bring me into frequent contact with them. Duncan, my goofy bold terrier, flushed a large one from the Oregon grape bushes a few feet ahead us as my visiting younger brother and I strolled down toward the ocean a couple weeks ago. It stood on its hind legs a hundred feet away curiously peering back at us, wondering if we were threats or menu items as we removed the safety catches from our economy-sized cans of bear spray.

This all is entirely routine and undramatic, but I understand why it tends to discourage pedestrian use of some Pacific County trails. Wildlife authority Russell Link says in “Living With Wildlife in the Pacific Northwest” that “An adult black bear can easily weigh as much as a female grizzly, and more than a young or subadult grizzly of either sex.” They are impressive bundles of muscle and bone, capable of closing the distance between themselves and us in about 10 panic-stricken heartbeats.

I knew a judge once whose nickname among attorneys was Yogi. They joked he was smarter than the average bear — not smarter than the average human, mind you, but possibly able to hold his own in a legal debate with a bear. In the years since, I’ve come to feel that this was somewhat more insulting toward bears than to the judge. He really was rather dull, while I detect quite a bit going on behind their shiny wild eyes.

Especially in our relatively benign climate with plenty of berries and garbage to eat, female black bears can live into their mid-20s, males several years less — maybe they drive sports cars too fast in the off-season or fail to take their cholesterol pills. Anyway, I hope maturity means that most of those I encounter are well acquainted with humans and wise to the fact that tasting me would be more trouble than it’s worth. I nevertheless feel a personal stake in knowing what they do hunger for.

It turns out blackberries are fairly complete food, more nutritious than many supermarket fruits. A measuring cup of blackberries contains 2 grams of protein, 62 calories and 7.6 grams of dietary fiber. (I think that fiber is working just fine for my bears …) This is four times as much protein as an average apple, though with somewhat fewer calories. Blackberries are crammed with minerals and vitamins, with a cup of them providing half the daily adult human requirement for vitamin C.

But it obviously takes a lot of cups of blackberries to add up to a meal for a bear. “Fall is a critical season for black bears and they commonly acquire most of their annual fat accumulation at this time. Bears may forage up to 20 hours a day during fall, increasing their body weight by 35 percent in preparation for winter,” according to Link.

The British Columbia Environmental Protection Division figures that a medium-sized adult black bear needs to average almost 9 pounds of food per day. For a bear on an all-blackberries diet, this would translate into 28 cups, or nearly two gallons. Going by their droppings, some of our neighbor bears may approach this. But for the sake of variety, “They eat nearly anything including vegetation, fruits, fungi, insects, birds, mammals and carrion.” It definitely seems like our ancient forest in and near Cape Disappointment State Park is considerably less crowded with coppery red-legged frogs after the bears come back in the spring.

Bears have lots more tolerance for sour berries than I do. It takes until about Sept. 1 each year before blackberries manufacture enough sugar to tempt me. I sampled some last night on my way up the street. They glistened like bunches of polished black grapes, a sharp undertone of iron beneath the juicy sweetness. Usually, about now we’d get a spoiling spell of drenched days to turn them all to mush and mold. However, if this week’s forecast comes true, we and the bears are in for continuing ideal berry-picking weather — sunny and 70-ish.

I don’t share my dad’s taste for sweet homemade fruit wines, but some blackberry jelly will be a good way to honor summer during the dripping, leaden days of January. According to my great-grandmother’s 1873 recipe book, I should mash them, strain through cheesecloth, add one pound of white sugar for every three pounds of berries and let stand overnight. In the morning boil for 20 minutes, stirring well but adding no water. Have the jars hot, put the jelly in while hot, screw on the lids immediately, and tighten them again when cool. There’s no mention of pectin, botulism or pressure cookers and it comes immediately after a recipe for varnish for harnesses and carriage tops — so use your own judgment.

 I’ll be out picking early on these glorious late-summer mornings — with Duncan and the ever-hungry bears.

Twenty years were great; I’m trying for 40

Twenty years of doing any one thing invites the query, “Why in tarnation would you do it for 20 more?”

Marking two complete decades at the Chinook Observer last Wednesday leads me to ponder whether I’d like to sign up for another two.

The sheer quantity of life we each manage to wheedle, coddle and cajole from the universe is the most limited of assets. Without time, all our personal dramas about love and money and what to have for dinner simply evaporate from existence. A life without time is a book without pages.

Life quality is the other overhanging issue. Who would choose to live a thousand years locked in a coffin? Bill Murray’s character explores the quantity versus quality issue in one of my favorite movies, “Groundhog Day,” reliving the same day over and over again. He despairs and kills himself many times before coming to realize that everything he needs to experience joy is readily at hand — mostly in the form of helping others and partaking in all the intellectual riches that ordinary life has to offer.

Considering my grandparents and their children lived an average of 85 years — and a couple of them are still ticking — I figure that’s about my budget of time. So I’ve already spent about a quarter of my life at the Observer. Shall I go for half?

Running a newspaper is a matter of imposing rhythms onto a universe of limitless variety. Some of the tasks involved can become tedious, and there’s always another deadline tromping mud into your office. But newsgathering, politicking, gossiping, writing, managing smart and talented people — these are all the very essence of entertainment.

And then there are the people and events we cover, a kaleidoscopic and ever-freshening theater of characters. My little newspaper is the canvas on which the community is painted each week. And the life of a country editor offers the potential for a masterpiece in personal lifestyle design. I know very few dull and tiresome individuals in my business. We tend to have a good time.

So, to answer my own question: 20 more years? Sure, I’d love to. (And besides, modern retirement planning increasingly consists of toiling until the EMTs come and lug you out on a stretcher.)

What about our communities? What would I like to see them achieve or aspire to in the next fifth of a century?

Although readers make often-incorrect guesses about my political leanings, my main guiding principle is that people should have the maximum possible control over their own lives and resources. This doesn’t mean I believe in no government, or even necessarily in “low” government. In America, we are blessed to possess a government that can be customized to be whatever tool is needed to help people prosper. Right now, I’d like to see it putting more people to work, not laying them off.

But no matter what, these hard conditions will improve in time. People forget from one recession to the next that the “economic cycle” is called that for a reason — slow times follow busy ones. In fact, the beauty of our area coupled with moderate temperatures, ample fresh water and close proximity to the economic powerhouse of the I-5 corridor all give me considerable optimism about our prospects.

As much as anything, the fact that the area from Willapa Bay to Cannon Beach is so attractive to relatively young entrepreneurs will mean an increasing immigration here of dynamic individuals and couples looking for what we already have. Our environment, our history, our adventurous spirit, our do-it-yourself fortitude — and even relatively simple things like access to delicious seafood and other tasty products — these all make for an extremely enticing place.

To encapsulate my wish for this strong coast, it is that we’ll continue making it even stronger by adding value to the good things we grow here — everything from great kids to the world’s best oysters. Let’s keep supporting our schools and colleges. Let’s make sure agencies give businesses the freedom to succeed, while making sure we don’t get in each other’s way.

But if you’re looking for a job, don’t look at mine. I’m keeping it.

Call this place ‘The Strong Coast’

It’s been 20 years since I arrived at the mouth of the Columbia River. So what’s changed? And what hasn’t? What should change? What shouldn’t?

Answering the last question first, there’s an unassuming heroism that’s just hard-wired into lots of local genes. In the most recent example, last Friday good Samaritans and our Peninsula’s surf rescue team volunteers dropped everything, dashed to the scene and pulled a boy from the ocean.

Without this instinctive generosity of spirit, it’s possible there would be two families lost in mourning this week. Strong coast people were willing to instantly put their own lives at risk to aid others.

In the enthusiastic lead-up to the Lewis and Clark Bicentennial in 2005, I suggested Discovery Coast as a worthy promotional name for the beach from the Long Beach Peninsula south to Seaside and Cannon Beach. But taking the experiences of two decades into account, I now nominate the motto “The Strong Coast.”

These are people too tough to chew. It’s as if all the crazy windstorms, pressure-washer rains and meager gray light purify souls here, leaving a nearly invulnerable core of gristle, bone and diamond. I don’t claim to know them very well. Most have absolutely no interest in being in the newspaper or meeting the editor. I don’t know if they’d like to slap me on the back or punch me in the nose. But they’re my heroes.

Even so, if they did care what I want, I’d tell them to stay in school longer, drink less, keep their pickups insured, vote, be nicer to tourists, do more of their shopping in local businesses, start gardens, take more walks, quit filling in swamps, let the trees grow longer between harvests, plan to survive the next big tsunami, support Knowledge Bowl as much as basketball, get their cats and dogs spayed, avoid eating farmed salmon, and keep an eye on all politicians like our lives depended on it (because they do).

Asked when I moved here to identify the number-one regional issue, I answered “growth.” Arriving on Aug. 16, 1991, in the midst of joyous crowds attending Washington State International Kite Festival, I guessed that the world would soon beat a path to the clean green lands and waters of Willapa Bay and the Columbia River estuary. The Peninsula appeared to be a relatively sophisticated rural outpost of Seattle — loaded with history, personality and scenery. Although still in its scruffy stage, Astoria was obviously ripe for restoration.

That first winter, I thought all the stories about god-awful weather were just tall tales designed to scare off interlopers. Maybe it was all my previous years spent in Wyoming, hitting florescent golf balls through April blizzards, but the winter of 1991-92 struck me as more suited to San Diego than Cape Disappointment. This place was going to boom — I was sure of it.

My first real storm here came in my second winter. Stupidly, I drove an old Landcruiser rust bucket down to North Head. The lichen-encrusted forest lining the trail out to the lighthouse smashed together and gyrated like witches dancing on an electrified floor. Standing on the crest of the cliff, only the chain-link fence kept me from being thrown over the edge as a gale tore tattered flags of foam from the sea, spinning them hundreds of feet into the sky. I inhaled a newborn atmosphere conceived by the ocean and the storm, virgin oxygen never before held in human lungs. Driving back into town, power lines hung low over the roadway as if stretched and exhausted. “Aw,” I thought, “this is why people don’t flock here.”

A few more winters ticked by, until one hit when months of take-no-prisoners rain was the drenching theme. A century of building on too-small lots with ask-no-questions permitting resulted in floodwaters seeping from built-up lots onto lower neighbors. Wells and septic systems close together were a recipe for cholera, but we got lucky. The conditions were ripe but the germs were not. A critical Washington State Department of Health report was suppressed and withdrawn. But a slowdown in the real estate market allowed Pacific County to catch up with the 20th century. Drainage was improved and septic standards gradually tightened.

I could spend all the space allocated to this column merely listing names of a few good people I’ve met in these 20 years. Wayne O’Neil, my predecessor as publisher of the Chinook Observer, is a fine example of the kind of guy who created and sustained local communities. Endlessly generous, funny, a fine whistler, a booster of success in all the best positive ways — I can vividly picture his toothy smile.

The rampage of building I expected 20 years ago did finally arrive, toward the tail-end of our nation’s real estate bubble. As a result, we have a lot more houses — though still not many more full-time residents. Even after the recession years, the towns of Pacific and Clatsop counties are far tidier and prosperous-looking. Sidewalks, parks, trails, hospitals, schools and dozens of other features set the stage for future success.

I still fear that local people who made this place could find themselves priced out of it or unable to find decent jobs here. The coast’s drop in families with schoolchildren testifies to the validity of this concern.

But plenty still manage to put together lives here, tough folks on a strong coast. I’m proud to know you.

In the last part of my 20-year reflections, I’ll think about the 20 years ahead.

Twenty years on, still happy to be here

You’d never guess to look at her that my Aunt Lucille was a hoarder. Happy and cosmopolitan, she was a civilian personnel officer for U.S. Coast Guard District 13 in Seattle.

Her towering ocean storm of perpetually red hair was refreshed weekly in a salon downtown at Frederick & Nelson department store. Her closet was sardined with stylish F&N suits. Elegant clothes toppled from her dresser as if it was an overfilled popcorn popper. Mountains of lovely blouses grew upward with an inexorable tectonic force on her bed, forming a snug valley where she slept. And so on. A child of the old Depression, Lucille was determined to never run out of anything, ever.

Uncle Frank — curmudgeonly, secretly generous and boasting a baby-like complexion despite a lifetime of cigarettes — made truce with the teetering piles of unopened Bon Appetit magazines and the attic impassibly clogged with a Snoqualmie avalanche of cookbooks. He taught me to read the Daily Racing Form. Our laughing summer days together betting on the ponies at Longacres — him successfully, me less so — are rose-garlanded memories.

Twenty years ago this month, staying in their cavernous West Seattle basement among five decades of Christmas ornaments and my grandparents’ pump organ, I was looking for a job. Ever the contrarian, I was determined not to pursue more-obvious career options in law or politics. My sights were set on a newspaper editorship in some picturesque waterside Washington town.

Lucille, my dad and other siblings grew up in working-class Fairhaven on a hill above Bellingham Bay and the sawmill where Grandpa Winters worked. From the time I was 12, Fairhaven was the prototype for juvenile fantasies about a house in a forest with an expansive view of rich waters. There I would live out my life, chronicling our complicated Northwestern lives and futures.

Back in those blessed ancient pre-Internet days, the Sunday Seattle Times ran pages of help-wanted ads, including one from Steve Forrester seeking an editor for Pacific County’s Chinook Observer. He was looking for someone who could apply author John McPhee’s poetic prose to covering the drama of small-town life on the Washington coast.

As it happened, a few years earlier McPhee had profiled our family’s friend Dave Love, a geologist. Like most McPhee work, it was a stimulating marriage of science reportage and human interest. I greatly admired the book and learned from it. Anyhow, despite my 33 tender years, I talked Steve into letting me have the Observer.

Before the big corporations threw away even a thin veneer of stewardship in favor of fast money, mature second-growth forest hugged U.S. Highway 101 most of the way between Montesano and Long Beach. Glimpses of Willapa Bay came as a welcome relief from trees, trees and more trees, which were simultaneously inspirational and claustrophobic. Arriving at the Long Beach Peninsula, illuminated by pure and gleaming water, was like slipping across a border into a bright, free country.

I soon discovered that it is a place with a fairly thick backbone of productive long-term citizens, along with a lot of others whose life choices sent them bouncing westward until they reached the sea and had nowhere else to go. Despite my obvious and enduring flaws — arrogance, impatience, pretentiousness, naiveté, mediocre spelling and occasional tailgating all spring to mind — they made me feel at home. My office was only picketed once in the early years, and that had to do with my cartoonist’s painful jabs at politically activist national churches. On the other hand, I was the lucky recipient of many oysters, huckleberry pies and juicy conversations.

After meeting and falling in love with a West Seattle girl, I took her to meet my friend Edith Olson. Edith covered Oysterville for the Observer in the mid-20th century, and after a career in Alaska retired to Surfside where her main hobbies were writing historical stories for me, and being a thorn in the side of county government. Edith told my wife-to-be, “Now, don’t you take him away from us!”
We all grinned, and probably figured that was exactly what was going to happen — that I would shortly move back up to the city.

But as an old friend used to say, “fate wears many hats.” Here I am, coming right up on 20 years. My mom moved to the coast in 1992. West Seattle girl Donna Magnuson and I got married, raising our daughter here. The job and the place remain fascinating.

Uncle Frank died in September 1997 and Aunt Lucille in February 2005. Frank lived long enough to see me become a father and Lucille befriended my daughter, who still has a stuffed unicorn toy Lucille gave her during our last visit to her assisted-living apartment. She was one wonderful hugger and remained jolly to the end. Their love and support at the right times are why I’m the editor here in one of the world’s best places.

•••

In my next couple notebooks, I’ll be reflecting on what the past 20 years have meant to our area, and pondering our future.

A toxic tale of secret murder lingers on

A press release about the Heart Mountain Internment Camp brings back memories of a long-ago afternoon spent in the company of an old woman proud of a hate crime

Why would you boast to a 13-year-old about a secret multiple homicide? What if the person doing the boasting was an elderly woman, the sister of your grandfather’s best friend? What would you do if you were the 13-year-old?

These questions nagged at me again this week about 40 years after they first did. 

I found myself alone at the supper table with an unremarkable lady, probably then in her 70s. We were at my family’s weekend place in the mountains, where it was common to have a wide assortment of Sunday guests. I wouldn’t have the faintest recollection of her if it weren’t for the story she told me.

Farming in northwestern Wyoming during World War II, she signed up to employ young Japanese-American day-laborers imprisoned at the nearby Heart Mountain Internment Camp. Located in the vicinity of the small towns of Cody and Powell, the concentration camp received its first 292 inmates in August 1942 and eventually housed more than 10,000 people in tarpaper huts. After Pearl Harbor, they were forcibly removed from their homes along the West Coast, including here.

In a conversational tone tinged with toxic glee, she said she took her workers out to a remote trench on some pretext, shot them dead and covered their bodies with dirt. She said she reported to camp authorities that they had taken off. She was never much questioned about it — nor troubled by it in the least.

The whole episode was so bizarre that I chalked it up as some kind of wildly inappropriate joke, and my dad chose to do likewise when I later recounted it to him. Can’t remember now whether she said two boys or three. Can’t picture her face. Will always feel her presence sitting beside me on a wooden bench on a warm summer day, exuding a kind of vanilla-flavored evil, a giggling monster in a grandma costume. She wasn’t invited back.

Heart Mountain pops up from time to time, most recently last week in the form of a press release from Washington State University. 

WSU is being given the largest private collection of photos taken at any Japanese-American internment camp. Between 1943 and 1945, George Hirahara and his son Frank took thousands of photos at Heart Mountain. The collection is being donated to WSU by Frank Hirahara’s daughter Patti, who plans to personally deliver the final batch of the newly discovered negatives to the university in September. More than 1,000 of the images will be scanned and made available online.

Like most internees, Frank Hirahara picked up the pieces of his life after the war. After graduating from WSU in 1948 in electrical engineering, he worked for the Bonneville Power Administration in Portland.

The Hiraharas share a proud tradition of achievement with other internees. For example, as recorded in Dr. Karl Lillquist’s study of the camps for Central Washington University:

“Over 650 Heart Mountain evacuees volunteered or were inducted into the U.S. Armed Forces. … Many of the male volunteers and draftees joined the all-Nisei 442 Regimental Combat Team, which included the 100 Infantry Battalion and the 522 Field Artillery Battalion. The 442 earned the widespread respect of the military leadership for its bravery and fierce fighting in the European theater. The combat team’s motto ‘Go for Broke’ epitomized the attitude of many of the Nisei soldiers. Approximately 16 percent (63) of the 347 Heart Mountain evacuees fighting in the war became casualties.”

Looking unlike most other West Coast citizens in the 1940s, it was easy to paint those of Japanese descent as “others,” unworthy of constitutional or legal protections. In reality, they were just decent people trying to lead ordinary lives.

In the political climate of the time, being Japanese in America was dangerous. I can’t find any reference to young guys missing from Heart Mountain. I hope the old woman’s story was only a sick fantasy. But there really was injustice and suffering in all the internment camps.

The Children of the Camps Project reports that on April 11, 1943, “James Hatsuki Wakasa, a 63-year-old chef, is shot to death by a sentry at Heart Mountain camp while allegedly trying to escape through a fence. It is later determined that Wakasa had been inside the fence and facing the sentry when shot. The sentry would stand a general court-martial on April 28 at Fort Douglas, Utah and be found ‘not guilty.’”

At another camp, a guard who shot and killed an inmate was fined $1, the symbolic cost of the government-issued bullet he “wasted.”

Heart Mountain residents practiced a variety of civil disobedience, or at least tried to, in protest of unjust practices. Sixty-three refused to register for the draft until their civil rights and citizenship status were recognized. They were prosecuted and convicted, but pardoned after the war.

Families of internees — and many other Americans — now honor the brave and hardy survivors of the camps. For more information on Heart Mountain, see www.heartmountain.org.

‘Julius Caesar’ comes to life in Ashland

The festival founded by a Chinook teacher prospers, even though the theater named in his honor is out of commission

Just as there could be no Google News (or most television and radio news) without newspapers supplying the original reporting, our culture would be a paltry and anemic thing without the vigor and ideas provided by live theater.

I’m not talking about “Culture” with a capital “C” or “Theatre” pronounced with a fusty British accent. Instead, the works created by playwrights and first brought to life on stage are the raw materials that percolate downward, upward and sideways through all our daily lives.

Nearly four centuries after his death, Shakespeare still is the most potent example of this in the English-speaking world. His plots, words and phrases permeate everything from Star Trek and Bugs Bunny to “The Lion King.” Without him, we couldn’t say, “The gloomy critic hurried down the road toward the accommodation where he would later suffer a bloody and baseless assassination.” Shakespeare invented gloomy, critic, hurry, road, accommodation, bloody, baseless and assassination — plus nearly countless other words, including countless.

If you haven’t attended the justly beloved Oregon Shakespeare Festival, it’s impossible to appreciate just how lively, stimulating and fun it is. Angus Bowmer, who started his career as a schoolteacher and amateur director in Chinook, founded OSF in 1935. First under Angus and now led by sixth-year Artistic Director Bill Rauch, it isn’t about worshipping dusty old masterpieces. When it works — and it usually does — OSF feels like Shakespeare himself is alive just offstage, eagerly waiting to see if the audience laughs and gasps in all the right places.

This season, the outstanding example of this living collaboration between Shakespeare and today’s actors, director and audience is “Julius Caesar” in Ashland’s small and perfect New Theater. Exploring the slippery intersections between political assassination, freedom fighters, manipulation of public opinion, terrorism, friendship, trust and betrayal, this play feels shockingly and sickeningly relevant to our times.

Some feel intimidated by Shakespeare’s rich stew of language, but you don’t need to recognize every individual ingredient to still enjoy the overall deliciousness of the broth. It works best to allow the sometimes-complex sentence structures and unfamiliar words to flow into your belly and digest there without a lot of deliberate interpretation. (My daughter and I learned at the Globe playhouse in London this spring that when the plays were first written in the pre-sound bite era, human brains were better adapted to soaking up complicated spoken information.)

This isn’t a big issue in OSF’s nicely streamlined version of “Julius Caesar.” Always-interesting Anthony Heald of “Silence of the Lambs” and other cast members meandered around visiting the audience as reality imperceptibly melded with the beginning of the play. My daughter Elizabeth, her pal Monica and I were especially enwrapped in the company’s attention, as we had given a spare ticket to visiting actor David DeSantos. His friends enthusiastically greeted him, and us. He captured the girls’ hearts last season playing Laertes in “Hamlet” and has been in “House” and many other TV series — a nice guy and enthusiastic clapper.

Vilma Silva and Jonathan Haugen are ascendant as Caesar and Brutus. I won’t, as George Armstrong Custer did, attend “Julius Caesar” a hundred times. But I’d certainly love to see it again, if only Ashland wasn’t so cussedly far away. (Note to OSF: Astoria’s restored Liberty Theater would be a perfect venue for Northwest Oregon and Southwest Washington.)

This year has been the most challenging in OSF’s history, as the main indoor theater named in Bowmer’s honor was closed three days before we arrived, after the primary ceiling-support beam cracked in the middle of a performance. No one was hurt and repairs are under way, but there was a mad scramble to make sure the shows went on. Free “re-imagined” performances have been presented in Ashland’s old National Guard Armory and in the small theater at Southern Oregon University.

Although the Armory’s acoustics are everything you would expect of an old gymnasium, all these alternate shows have been experiences to savor and cherish. They are very much in the tradition of Bowmer’s original efforts in Chinook — actors on a simple stage, bringing plays to life with unadorned skill. (Bowmer Theater is still weeks away from being returned to service, but the festival soon will be moving its shows into a huge tent in Lithia Park — which also should be unique and memorable.)

Fifty years after Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” won the Pulitzer Prize, one of the Armory performances was a stage adaptation of the bittersweet Southern gothic novel. The sparse stage set and revival-meeting atmosphere seemed custom-designed for the subject matter. Although the U.S. has thankfully moved past the era of lynching, “Mockingbird” is in no sense merely an historical curiosity. Like “Our Town,” which OSF presented a couple years ago, it is a portrait of a certain sort of ghostly America that inhabits our dreams and sense of ourselves.

Another Bowmer play we booked, “August: Osage County,” won the Pulitzer in 2008 but is unlikely to ever join “Mockingbird” in the community-theater repertoire. Wildly funny and hard R-rated, it also vividly captures an imperfect facet of America. The play’s Weston family would be marvelous to have as neighbors to gossip about, but boy, you wouldn’t want to be one of them. I’m still chuckling days after seeing it in the SOU theater, but don’t go if you’re easily offended.

This season’s trials and tribulations and achievements would make Angus Bowmer beam with pride. His festival is as successful and relevant as ever, or more so. Attend if you can.