Friday, December 17, 2010

KILLER AT THE MALL

Here’s a little secret: I usually carry a gun. Like more than 100,000 other Oregonians, I have a concealed handgun license. That means every day I ask myself – carry or not carry?

If I’m hiking in mountain lion country it’s a no-brainer. Of course a gun makes sense. But the Valley River Mall, which was where I was headed the other day? Then I thought: mall shootings, Christmas craziness, foreclosures, guys out of money out of work out of luck out of hope. So on my one-day Christmas shopping marathon I holstered the Glock 9mm under my belt. OK, the odds are really low but what if...?

As I hustled out the mall’s exit, ignoring displays of Christmas sausage, special holiday deals and a cosmos of bright shiny objects, I bragged to myself, That may have been the fastest successful Christmas shopping trip in this mall’s history. Plus, just ten days before Christmas at high noon and I was parked in the first space right in front of the mall entrance. Timing!

Actually, my mall visit, stop number three on my excursion, wasn’t really “shopping” at all. It was “buying.” I had to buy one trinket that I had seen in an ad and I walked straight to the mall directory, found the store, went there, bought the little doodad for my wife’s Christmas stocking and walked straight out to my car.

I took a few minutes to study my shopping plan. Next stop: Home Depot. Thinking of the heavy lunch-hour traffic I decided to exit via the back of the mall parking lot. Past the JC Penney, across the parking lot, past the Firestone tire place and then on my way. 12:20 p.m. La de da.

Police shoot suspect after gunfire at mall, blared the next morning’s newspaper headline.
Police chased down the man after he reportedly fired a number of shots from a handgun as he stood in a packed Valley River Center parking lot at 12:26 p.m. Police said the man was between JC Penney and a Firestone tire outlet when he fired several gunshots.

Six minutes? Is that how close I came to crossing paths with this nut with a gun? What if I had stopped to look at a window display? What if I hadn’t parked so close to the entrance? What would I have done if I had been right there six minutes later when the guy was shooting at his demons?
No one was injured by the gunshots outside the mall, but at least one vehicle in the mall parking lot was struck, Eugene Policy Chief Kerns said.
What if that one vehicle had been mine? What would I have done? Sure, I’d have floored it if that was an option. But what if…?

A SWAT team caught the guy a few miles away and shot him sitting in his SUV “after he ignored their instructions and made constant, unpredictable motions.”

As for me, I may have narrowly missed my first gunfight. Some days it’s all about timing.

***

I went for a morning run in rare winter Oregon sunshine. I put Handel’s “Messiah” on my headphones. I wondered about the man I thought of as “the nut with a gun.” Turns out he was a professional killer – I’m glad we didn’t cross paths. Trained by experts in the U.S. Army, his name is Michael Thomas Mason, 27, a veteran who served combat tours in Afghanistan doing God knows what awful things. Mason confided to a former neighbor that his experience in Afghanistan was “very extreme.” And now this. He’s lying in a hospital near death.

Handel’s soaring oratorio praising an omniscient God didn’t fit the mood. I stopped and put on some early Harry Connick, Jr. I wonder what was the last music that Michael Thomas Mason heard.

Near the end of my run I found a penny in the street. You know, “See a penny, pick it up, and all day you’ll have good luck.” I carried it home and tossed it in my little pond, wishing Michael Thomas Mason happy dreams. The penny bounced on some ice and just laid there. Was that God’s way of saying “no”?

~ ~ ~

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Monday, December 13, 2010

AND YOU THINK YOU HAVE TROUBLES?

If you think life has dealt you troubles, compare them to this account by Marie Dorion with her two young boys, ages five and seven, from the winter of 1813-14 in the snowy wilderness of northeast Oregon and Idaho:

“About the middle of August we reached the Great Snake River, and soon afterwards, following up a branch to the right hand, where there were plenty of beaver, we encamped; and there Mr. Reed built a house to winter in. After the house was built, the people spent their time trapping beaver. About the latter end of September, Hoback, Robinson, and Rezner came to us; but they were very poor, the Indians having robbed them of everything they had about fifteen days before. Mr. Reed gave them some clothing and traps, and they went to hunt with my husband [Pierre Dorion II]. Landrie got a fall from his horse, lingered a while, and died of it. Delaunay was killed, when trapping: my husband told me that he saw his scalp with the Indians, and knew it from the colour of his hair.

“The Indians about the place were very friendly to us; but when strange tribes visited us, they were troublesome, and always asked Mr. Reed for guns and ammunition: on one occasion, they drove an arrow into one of our horses, and took a [cape] from La Chapelle. Mr. Reed not liking the place where we first built, we left it, and built farther up the river, on the other side. After the second house was built, the people went to trap as usual, sometimes coming home every night, sometimes sleeping out for several nights together at a time. Mr. Reed and one man generally stayed at the house.


“Late on evening, about the 10th of January, a friendly Indian came running to our house, in a great fright, and told Mr. Reed that a band of the bad Snakes, called the Dog-rib tribe, had burnt the first house that we had built, and that they were coming on whooping and singing the war-song. After communicating this intelligence, the Indian went off immediately, and I took up my two children, got upon a horse, and set off to where my husband was trapping; but the night was dark, the road bad, and I lost my way. The next day being cold and stormy, I did not stir. On the second day, however, I set out again; but seeing a large smoke in the direction I had to go, and thinking it might proceed from Indians, I got into the bushes again and hid myself.


“On the third day, late in the evening, I got in sight of the hut, where my husband and the other men were hunting; but just as I was approaching the place, I observed a man coming from the opposite side, and staggering as if unwell: I stopped where I was till he came to me. Le Clerc, wounded and faint from loss of blood, was the man. He told me that La Chapelle, Rezner, and my husband had been robbed and murdered that morning. I did not go into the hut; but putting Le Clerc and one of my children on the horse I had with me, I turned round immediately, took to the woods, and I retraced my steps back again to Mr. Reed’s: Le Clerc, however, could not bear the jolting of the horse, and he fell once or twice, so that we had to remain for nearly a day in one place; but in the night he died, and I covered him over with brushwood and snow, put my children on the horse, I myself walking and leading the animal by the halter.


“The second day I got back again to the house. But sad was the sight! Mr. Reed and the men were all murdered, scalped, and cut to pieces. Desolation and horror stared me in the face. I turned from the shocking sight in agony and despair; took to the woods with my children and horse, and passed the cold and lonely night without food or fire. I was now at a loss what to do: the snow was deep, the weather cold, and we had nothing to eat. To undertake a long journey under such circumstances was inevitable death. Had I been alone I would have run all risks and proceeded; but the thought of my children perishing with hunger distracted me. At this moment a sad alternative crossed my mind: should I venture to the house among the dead to seek food for the living? I knew there was a good stock of [dried] fish there; but it might have been destroyed or carried off by the murderers; and besides, they might be still lurking about and see me: yet I thought of my children.


“Next morning, after a sleepless night, I wrapped my children in my robe, tied my horse in a thicket, and then went to a rising ground, that overlooked the house, to see if I could observe anything stirring about the place. I saw nothing; and, hard as the task was, I resolved to venture after dark: so I returned back to my children, and found them nearly frozen, and I was afraid to make a fire in the day time lest the smoke might be seen; yet I had no other alternative, I must make a fire, or let my children perish. I made a fire and warmed them. I then rolled them up again in the robe, extinguished the fire, and set off after dark to the house: went into the store and ransacked every hole and corner, and at last found plenty of fish scattered about. I gathered, hid, and slung upon my back as much as I could carry, and returned again before dawn of the day to my children. They were nearly frozen, and weak with hunger. I made a fire and warmed them, and then we shared the first food we had tasted for the last three days.


“Next night I went back again, and carried off another load; but when these efforts were over, I sank under the sense of my afflictions, and was for three days unable to move, and without hope. On recovering a little, however, I packed all up, loaded my horse, and putting my children on the top of the load, set out again on foot, leading the horse by the halter as before. In this sad and hopeless condition I travelled through deep snow among the woods, rocks and rugged paths for nine days, till I and the horse could travel no more. Here I selected a lonely spot at the foot of a rocky precipice in the Blue Mountains, intending there to pass the remainder of the winter.


“I killed my horse, and hung up the flesh on a tree for my winter food. I built a small hut with pine branches, long grass, and moss, and packed it all round with snow to keep us warm, and this was a difficult task, for I had no axe, but only a knife to cut wood. In this solitary dwelling, I passed fifty-three lonely days!


“I then left my hut and set out with my children to cross the mountains; but I became snow blind the second day, and had to remain for three days without advancing a step; and this was unfortunate, as our provisions were almost exhausted. Having recovered my sight a little, I set out again, and got clear off the mountains, and down to the plains on the fifteenth day after leaving my winter encampments; but for six days we had scarcely anything to eat, and for the last two days not a mouthful. Soon after we had reached the plains I perceived a smoke at a distance; but being unable to carry my children farther, I wrapped them up in my robe, left them concealed, and set out alone in hope of reaching the Indian camp, where I had seen the smoke; but I was so weak that I could hardly crawl, and had to sleep on the way. Next day, at noon, I got to the camp. It proved to be the Walla Wallas, and I was kindly treated by them. Immediately on my arrival the Indians set off in search of my children, and brought them to the camp the same night. here we staid for two days, and then moved on to the river, expecting to hear something of the white people on their way either up or down.”


Alexander Ross, who recorded her account, concluded, “This ended the woman’s story of hardships and woe.”

[From: Adventures of the First Settlers on the Oregon or Columbia River, 1810-1813, Alexander Ross, Oregon State University Press]

Marie Dorion has been called a “lost heroine” of the West
(http://www.uintahspringspress.com/index_files/LostHeroines.htm). Two years before this nightmare she was the second woman to cross the continent (after Sacajawea). During that disastrous expedition she was pregnant. The family stopped to give birth in the eastern Oregon mountains on Dec. 30, 1811, along what became the Oregon Trail, and then caught up with their party. Her infant son died eight days later.

Like I said, and you think you have troubles?

~ ~ ~

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Wednesday, December 1, 2010

LAST MAN STANDING


I’m the last man standing. Once three of us stood for the picture taken nearly forty years ago. We’re looking out on a lake in the Missouri Ozarks, three butts to the camera. Me and two high school buddies on our last adventure together.

Bill – the guy with the orange towel covering his head’s blistering sunburn – is dead. Danny – the one in the center who already looks a bit chubby – died last week.

The three of us had driven to the Ozarks from Michigan where we had gone to school together. We camped and water-skied every day for a week. We dove off reservoir cliffs and once found a water moccasin curled on a sunny ledge. I learned to drink beer. Until then I couldn’t stand the taste, don’t ask me why. It was my social handicap: You don’t drink beer? – always delivered in an incredulous tone – was a conversation killer. I sat on the beach and after the first couple they started tasting pretty good. “I’m proud of you, Schmidt,” said Bill.

The reception for his funeral was at his mother’s house, a tiny box on the corner of two gravel streets in Burton Township, an auto-worker suburb of Flint. Bill was the class clown – cynical but funny. He wrote in my Senior yearbook:

We had fun in this crummy hole, never forget it. I know you will be a big success in life, maybe.

I think he was trying to get out of that crummy hole when he died in Los Angeles. I never heard the full story but Danny said he was murdered by one of LA’s infamous Freeway Killers.

At the reception Bill’s mother showed me some poetry he had written. Who knew? I wish I had a copy; I just remember it was beautiful writing. I urged her to find a way to get it published but I’m sure nothing came of it. She probably thought I was drunk, which was entirely possible thanks to Bill and our Ozarks jaunt.

Danny had the boat and car. He always had the best toys. In high school he started working as an electrician in the auto shops during that hey-day of Michigan’s car building ephemera when Flint was known as “Buick Town.” He worked long hours, made lots of money and lived alone in a mobile home. So he always could buy nice cars, boats and motorcycles.

I lost track of Danny a dozen or so years later. I tried to find him but that was before the Internet and I gave up. I did find an article in a Muskegon newspaper reporting that a “Daniel Lentz” had been killed in a motorcycle accident near Lake Michigan. Danny never called himself “Daniel” but I went a long time wondering if he was dead or alive.

Last year I finally tracked him down using the Internet. We traded emails every few weeks. He sent me pictures of his home set in the wooded hills, pastures and farmlands of central Tennessee on the Kettle Bend of the Duck River where he had moved twenty years ago. He called himself the “hermit on the hill.” He had undergone a quadruple bypass, given up drinking and smoking and been retired for nine years. “I found that being retired is what I was born for. I am really good at doing non-productive things,” he wrote me.

Danny’s gloomy streak that I remembered had darkened. He complained of “clogged arteries, arthritis, worn out joints and just being lazy.” He intended to rid himself of his “stuff,” buy a camper and travel for a few years. “I wanna chase nice weather for a while and then I will be ready for an old people’s apartment. Then I will start smoking again and that will finish me off.”

I felt sad for him and invited him to visit me in Oregon “before you check out for good.” A few months ago I tried again but he was in the middle of putting his property up for auction so couldn’t come. He promised to visit next summer.

I guess Danny found that faded Ozarks picture when he was cleaning out his things. He sent me a copy a month before he died.

I don’t really know what happened. Probably a heart attack. I thought it odd that I hadn’t heard from him since the date of his auction in mid-November. Sunday after Thanksgiving I emailed him a New Yorker cartoon that reminded me of his goal of winnowing his stuff. Two people are standing in an empty house. A bare bulb hangs from the living room ceiling, a shiny brick on the floor. One guy says: “I’ve simplified my life by converting all my possessions into one gold brick.”

A few hours later I got a message in Facebook titled “Hi, from Danny.” But it wasn’t from Danny. It was from his sister, Trudy, who was using his Facebook account to notify people that Danny had died two days earlier. No details, nor was the online obituary much help. It just said he had “passed away at the Maury Regional Medical Center in Columbia, TN.”

One by one, that seems to be how we lose our friends. Some get snatched for no apparent reason. Others check out with a chart full of bad habits. After a while you have to ask yourself: Why me? How did I survive all the accidents, booze, close calls, drugs, … zealotries. You could fill an alphabet's list with all you’ve dodged. Why me? Was it healthy living? Good genes? Luck?

Maybe it was God. I’ve always had people who said they were praying for me. Although that’s not something I do for myself, it couldn’t hurt. Good vibes can never hurt.

~ ~ ~

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Friday, July 16, 2010

LONG STRANGE TRIP

Ospreys really hate eagles. You can tell when one has its nemesis in sight – it flies over the river fast and straight with a bad attitude. When you see that, sure enough, there will be a bald eagle cruising through the osprey’s home territory.

Eagles are bigger but osprey are more agile in an aerial fight. They dive like a missile, honed by a life of dizzying crashes into the river to catch fish. The beleaguered eagle, with its own acrobatics, often does a barrel roll to escape.

Surely there are enough fish in this stretch of the Umpqua River for a few eagles but the two resident ospreys will have none of it. They want the fish all to themselves and their babies sitting high on the nest platform built by the farmers who own all this land along the river. While I fish the farmers work their fields of blueberries and grapes, irrigated by the river’s water, and make wonderful Umpqua Valley wines.

A share of the fish does go to other resident critters – river otters, great blue herons, mergansers, sometimes grebes. Dead fish get snapped up by a big flock of vultures that live here and by raccoons that prowl the river banks. They all seem to coexist with the ospreys just fine.



Just below the rapids you can hover the boat almost motionless in the mid-river eddies while deep, dark currents sweep by carrying stories I can’t read. A bullfrog croaks. Cedar waxwings twitter above, catching bugs on the fly.

I feel like that sometimes, hanging in the current, levitated from life while others’ stories sweep past. It’s a good feeling. A luxury. Fighting nothing.

A friend sent me an email titled “This is going by way too fast.” It is. Yet while time lasts I’m blessed to spend much of it here on this river, chasing bass or steelhead or coho salmon or chinook salmon or shad, depending on the time of year. Watching beavers swimming, deer drinking. It is a glorious place with every nook and cranny filled with life. Yellow-breasted chats chattering in the riverside shrubs; day after day, all spring and summer, they sing the same songs from the same place every year. You can count on it. Huge ungainly turkeys flop into the air to then glide silently across the river looking for a fresh crop of acorns, talking quietly among themselves.

Patchworks of greens coat the mountains, cut-over with hardwoods and conifer mixes. Douglas fir is king, quickly outgrowing all the other trees. Grassy meadows are baked brown; summer rain in Oregon is as rare as winter rain is common.

The river’s basement is exposed here and there. Because of winter floods – placid summer flows can rise thirty feet then – the bedrock stays bare. Thick stone layers tilted to the modern sky were once layers of mud and sand on the bottom of an ancient ocean of our imagination. With momentum starting from 6,000 feet high in the Cascade Mountains, the river slices through these rocks, over eons finding fault cracks where the continent has shifted along its margin with the Pacific Ocean. In places the river narrows and its depth quickly drops to sixty feet.

Now here I am, 50 million years after sediments from long-gone mountains eroded into long-gone oceans by long-gone rivers, loading up my little boat with a select few chunks of this rocky mélange for my home landscaping on another small mountainside 45 miles north of here. A long strange trip, indeed, that me and my new old rocks are taking.

~ ~ ~

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Thursday, June 3, 2010

DISCOMBOBULATED

Screaming and attacking me over and over, diving with talons stretched forward, the big silver hawk swooped within inches of my frenziedly waving arms. His nest had to be nearly underfoot in the wet prairie. I surely looked berserk, dancing and yelling at the sky. The Harrier’s assaults had me thoroughly discombobulated.

“All right, I’m going,” I shouted and backed away. But then I thought, this is pretty cool. How often do you get attacked by a hawk? So I returned to my route and got chased in the direction I was heading. Good thing since my bird guide was laying on the grass where I had swung my book bag fending off his first dives.

On my way back to the car he nearly nailed me while I took a blurry snapshot. Watching him through the camera’s screen as he tucked his wings high above, then dropped at me like a rock made him look way smaller than the real hawk that swooped by so closely I could feel the wind from his wings.



What a rush, though I felt a little silly running from a bird. Who would have thought?

Like that big oil spill in the Gulf. Who would have thought?

Now they’re all waving their arms at the sky, trying everything they can think of to stop the killer oil. Discombobulated. Since no one thought such a mistake was possible no one had a plan for how to respond. All really smart people, I’m sure, trying their best to do their jobs. Because we can’t think of how such a thing could happen, then it won’t. The definition of hubris?

I’ve spent a little time in Louisiana’s marshes. It is essential habitat for ducks and geese from throughout North America. Even without the oil spill the marsh was vanishing before your eyes. Every 30-45 minutes a football field-sized area of that marsh disappears into open water. Lots of reasons. Salt-water intrusion from oil and gas development in the marshes killing vegetation. Higher water levels from global warming. But mainly it is the loss of sediment recharge from the Mississippi River that drains erosion from the center of the continent. Dams and levees block most of it from reaching the Gulf and its marshes.

For all the hand-wringing now underway the marshes were already doomed. It was just a matter of time and no one was willing to do much about it. The famed marshes now in the news were disappearing quietly. The source of all those Gulf-dependent jobs and that much-ballyhooed Gulf culture was dying quietly.

Now comes Big Oil and its Big Booboo and the politicians and bureaucrats and oil mucky-mucks are tripping over themselves to save the priceless Gulf marshes. Maybe that is the silver lining in this tragedy. Maybe in the long run it will provide impetus for protecting and restoring the marshes.

But I doubt it. Today I heard that they just issued a permit for another offshore well in waters off the Rockefeller refuge in western Louisiana. It’s only in 117 feet of ocean instead of a mile. And they are taking extra-special care to do it right. I’m sure they will be careful. Until the next inevitable discombobulation.

~ ~ ~

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Tuesday, May 18, 2010

REVENGE OF THE PECOS PIG

[Note: The story of The Pecos Pig is on my September 2009 blog.]

Goddamn pig. Goddamn Texas.

When the air conditioning went out in my Honda Pilot last week I just knew it had something to do with that javelina I hit two years ago in the Texas boondocks. I shared those suspicions with Derrel, my Service Consultant at the Eugene Honda dealer. I explained how the radiator and A/C condenser had been busted up by the pig and replaced by Gary, the Pecos, Texas mechanic. I spared Derrel most of the sordid details of my weeks stuck in the hell that is Texas awaiting parts and fixes to my car, the blown head gasket in El Paso after Gary “fixed” everything, the endless string of cheap motels, the UFO museum, and so on.

I went for a long walk. Several hours later Derrel called to confirm that the A/C condenser Gary had replaced was, as I suspected, the culprit. But, he assured me, it had nothing to do with the pig. A rock somehow had flown through the grill at just the right angle and punctured a line on the condenser, which looks like a mini-radiator. That let all the Freon escape; hence, no A/C. He said he could have a new condenser sent and ready for installing by the next morning -- $641.

Before I drove home for the day, sans A/C, we both lay down on the pavement and he pointed out the bubbling leak where the newly charged Freon was leaking out again. I was a bit skeptical about the rock theory but what do I know?

When I got back the next morning I was half expecting Derrel to tell me that the condenser hadn’t gotten there yet. Like my replacement head gaskets in Texas that had to be “cross-shipped” to El Paso by a transvestite on a bicycle but that’s another story and this wasn’t supposed to be a pig-related repair anyway. Indeed, the condenser had arrived in the nick of time. Perfect. Put ‘er in and in a couple of hours all will be good as new.

I went for a long bike ride. Two hours later Derrel called – surprise! – there were complications. It wasn’t a rock after all. At that point it would have been appropriate for Derrel to snort like a pig into the phone but he didn’t, of course. He explained that, as I had feared, the condenser had broken due to the half-assed repairs in Texas which had led to a stress failure due to stuff bent by that flying pig and now not fitting properly. He said his mechanic was going to try to bend things back “without getting a body shop involved.”

That’s when it started to pour down rain so I biked to a picnic shelter along the river in Eugene to wait for the next call with news about my pig-plagued Pilot. Later when the homeless guys showed up I took off and rode back to the Honda shop.

The good news: the condenser and the bent framing was fixed. But I could tell by the way Derrel was talking low into the phone that I wasn’t heading home quite yet. “Why can’t we get some Freon from …” Perfect. How can a major car repair shop run out of Freon? It’s not like I needed a supply of uranium, for Christ’s sake. Oh well, compared to Texas this felt like just a hiccup.

Eventually they got some Freon from somewhere and after six hours I was on my way, $751.47 poorer. While I waited and watched the rain falling on the lot full of new Hondas I listened over and over to Bobby McFerrin:
Here’s a little song I wrote,
You might want to sing it note for note:
Don’t worry;
Be happy.
In every life we have some trouble;
When you worry you make it double.
Don’t Worry;
Be happy.


Wednesday, May 5, 2010

BEFORE CHARLIE KILLED HIMSELF

Before Charlie killed himself he made one last trip to the dump. He wanted to leave things neat and tidy for his family.

The dump lady was pretty shook up about it. Charlie had just left with his emptied trailer. It was a typical Oregon late-winter morning -- dark gray and green and pouring rain.

I had pulled up to the little entry shack where you pay before dumping your garbage. I don’t really know the dump lady but see her every couple of weeks when I haul out the recycling and trash.

There’s a dollar off if you recycle at least ten pounds of stuff. And another dollar off for the senior rate. “Two bags, senior, recycling,” is about all I had ever said to the dump lady. I give her the seven dollars and she says, always stopping to think about it first, “That’s, ah, in Bin Number…” and directs me to one of the four giant steel bins that later gets trucked to the Lane County landfill.

But this day the dump lady needed to tell me about her tomorrow-to-be-dead customer. “He said he was in a hurry to get home because he had to call all his friends today and let them know.” I was waiting for Bin Number directions, rain splattering in my open window. “You know, he’s the second person in Cottage Grove that’s done this.” I turned off my engine.

It seems that Charlie was old and had cancer and just didn’t want to suffer through chemotherapy. So he decided to wrap things up, neat and tidy, and be done with it. (Assisted suicide is legal in Oregon.) Tomorrow was the day. But first he had to get rid of a trailer-load of junk.

The dump lady and I speculated about what we would do if it was our last day like that. We agreed that going to the dump in the rain probably wouldn’t be a priority.

But on the other hand, why not? Charlie was doing an admirable thing. Based on my experiences dealing with a house full of stuff to get rid of after someone dies, Charlie was doing his family a big favor. There’s a fuzzy line between heirlooms and junk. Generally, few of the first and a whole lot of the other. One day that recliner is a treasure. The next day a dead albatross, likely hanging from the neck of somebody once dear. One day a lifetime’s worth of priceless objects. The next day junk fought over by the kids.

Today I took another load of recycling and trash to the dump on a typical Oregon early-spring morning -- light gray and green and showers. I had been wondering how Charlie’s story turned out and wanted to ask the dump lady. Actually, I don’t even know the guy’s real name but had started to think of him as “Charlie.”

The dump lady and I went through our little routine about fees and directions and then I asked her, “Did you ever hear how it turned out for that guy who was going to kill himself?”

“Oh yea, I asked the fellow who had helped him move his stuff. It went off right on schedule. A doctor was there. His sister arrived the next day. I guess she was going to try to talk him out of it.”

We agreed that she probably couldn’t have changed the guy’s mind. But you never know.

“It wasn’t how I would want to go,” she told me, “but it’s your own choice. I voted for it.”

Oregon’s Death with Dignity Act was approved by voters 16 years ago. It “allows terminally-ill Oregonians to end their lives through the voluntary self-administration of lethal medications, expressly prescribed by a physician for that purpose.”

From the back of the dump lady’s shack grunted a smoker-raspy voice from an unseen woman: “It should be legal in Florida.”

“Lots of old people there who should use it?” I laughed.

Enunciating each syllable the now-hostile voice said, “That - is - not - what - I - meant - Sir!”

I suppose death is no laughing matter. The showers had passed and a truck honked for me to hurry up.

“Well, they’re lined up behind me so I better go,” I said. What I didn’t say was, “I wonder how many are lined up in front of me?”

“You know, I never got his name,” she said.

“I always thought of him as Charlie.”

She tried it on. “Charlie. All right, we’ll call him Charlie.”

~ ~ ~

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Wednesday, April 14, 2010

DOCTOR DINO, GLEE AND THE BIG BANG

Doctor Dino says the universe was created 6,000 years ago. He’s a Bible guy. I watched him on the local access channel the other night. I think he’s from Tennessee.

Dr. Dino has it all figured out. What about his namesake, the dinosaurs? Well obviously, Noah took only the baby dinosaurs on the ark. Dr. Dino seemed to have an answer for everything (DVDs available). He was exhausting.

I have a lot of Facebook friends who I suspect pretty much agree with Dr. Dino. My relatives are evangelicals. And recently I picked up a whole bunch of new Facebook friends when I joined a group created for alumni from my high school back in Flint from the ‘50s and ‘60s. Many appear happily religious. For the life of me I can’t remember most of them, even when I look back at my ancient high school yearbooks. Still, I’m fascinated by the peeks into others’ lives – and the varieties of religious experience – that Facebook provides.

Last week on Facebook an old friend from the East Coast was complaining of an interminable train ride to New York City with his partner: “Thank God Bill packed cocktails!” Next was a post from my Michigan pastor friend happy that his son had gotten a housekeeping job: “GO GOD!” The pastor says that a lot in his posts. His Facebook friends seem to like it.

Speaking of cheerleaders, last night on TV the cheerleading coach on “Glee” said this:
You may be two of the stupidest teens I've ever encountered. And that's saying something. I once taught a cheerleading seminar to a young Sarah Palin.
Whether or not Sarah Palin legally qualifies as an “idiot,” as Keith Olbermann boasts frequently, the woman certainly has a following. The fawning comments I see on Facebook are a mystery to me. I’ll bet Dr. Dino thinks she is one hot babe. We look at the universe and see different things.

I looked up Dr. Dino’s creation research on his website. It reminded me of my visit to the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, New Mexico (“The Truth Is Here”).



Lots and lots and lots of words. Throw in bits of obscure science. Or pseudo-science, it really doesn’t matter because who’s going to argue and if someone does there’s nothing better than talking and arguing. Dr. Dino has this sly smile, one that tells the believers that they are in on the truth and that it’s the rest of the world that’s nuts.

The Mormons – that’s my wife’s side of the family – they put Adam and Eve and the Garden of Eden in Missouri 6,000 years ago. They know this is true because the Angel Moroni told their prophet, Joseph Smith where to find these golden tablets buried in upstate New York. Smith wrote down all their secrets but the original golden tablets vanished.

I wonder if Dr. Dino thinks this is kooky stuff. Except for the 6,000 years ago part, of course.

Crazy as it is, a 6,000-year-old universe can be easier to picture than reality. I struggled through this book, “Before the Big Bang.” Here’s what the author (Brian Clegg) concluded:
Personally, I find myself in a real quandary. I very much like Turok and Steinhardt’s bouncing brane theory; it has a feeling of elegance that the much-patched and fudged Big Bang plus inflation theory doesn’t. Yet bouncing branes are dependent on the M theory with the baggage and worries about the validity of string theory that it brings with it. It seems whichever way you turn, there is no easy answer when it comes to the earliest moments of the universe.
Unless you go with Doctor Dino.

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Monday, April 5, 2010

EASTER MURDER

In case you are not Facebook friends with our daughter, Kristen, I wanted to share her brief account of our blood-tainted Easter adventures: She wrote:

“I would like an Easter do-over. One that doesn't involve runaway dogs, a hostage situation, and dead Taj Mahal chickens. Long story short, our dogs got out and our new German shepherd mix (just got her 2 weeks ago from Greenhill) killed a neighbor's pet chickens (who had names and lived in a "chicken Taj Mahal" as the lady put it). So in exhange for her dead chickens she was going to keep hostage our golden retriever (Duke, who we've had since before Mason was born) as retribution. It took all day, but we eventually got our dog back... and discovered that we live among some really weird people.”

I went along (packin’, just in case…) to pick up the dog in the pouring rain with my son-in-law. The chicken-distraught folks have a little wholesale nursery operation up Rat Creek Road. Banjo country. To be honest, I didn’t think the people were all that weird. More like old friends from the 60s. Who were really into their (now murdered) chicken friends. I’m sorry I didn’t get a picture of the chicken coffin with their names on it.

You just can’t plan for family holiday fun like this.

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Saturday, March 20, 2010

VALLEY OF THE (LEFTOVER) GIANTS

This remote, hard-to-find place deep in the Coast Mountains is one of the best last remnants of primal Oregon. I counted growth rings, many thin as a knife blade, on the red trunk of an old giant recently felled across the trail by a winter Pacific gale. It was a seedling before the Pilgrims arrived in New England.


The Valley of the Giants is a small obscure preserve surrounded by cut-over mountains and managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, an agency generally indifferent to trees you can’t cut down and sell. This is the country where TV reality show’s “Ax Men” do their work. You get to the Valley of the Giants via a 30-mile maze of private timber company roads with big red signs warning “recreation users” of a litany of rules for the privilege of driving on their logging roads. Not permitted: campers, recreational vehicles, trailers, motorcycles, all terrain vehicles, fires, target shooting, camping, wood cutting, etc., etc. It’s a small miracle than any old trees escaped in this part of the state. But they did and are safe now. It’s an official federal “Outstanding Natural Area.”

The largest giant, the “Big Guy” blown down 30 years ago, was a Douglas fir more than 600 years old and 230-feet tall. You can squeeze through a slice cut near its fallen bole. (Or take the Wal-Mart Detour (my name) around the immense uprooted base. I figured that if the check-out lanes at Wal-Mart were as narrow as that tree slice the store would go broke.)


I first learned about Douglas fir trees in college. I never had seen a live Douglas fir but loved the musical quality of its Latin name: Pseudotsuga menziesii.

I still have my old dendrology textbook and carry it in my car with a 40-pound box of nature guides. It says that Douglas fir can live for 1,400 years. A tree that old could be 15 feet wide and far taller than the length of a football field.

I can believe that, having visited the Valley of the Giants. For despite its grand-sounding name it really is the Valley of the Leftovers. I’m sure that all the true giants of the Northwest were among the first trees cut down. Maybe in future centuries some of these minor giants will survive to break tree bigness records. We’ll never know but it doesn’t matter. They exist at the moment.


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Sunday, March 14, 2010

SNOW VISIT

I visited snow yesterday. The big rain we got the day before dumped snow on the mountains you can see from town. That meant over-full waterfalls and white-bedecked fir trees. Up I went.



As a general principle I hate snow. I’ve always detested snow even though I spent most of my life living where winter means snow. No more. Not here in the Willamette Valley. Now I enjoy snow on my own terms. Kind of like grandchildren.

Kids are a wonderful thing, don’t get me wrong. Everyone should have some. Hopefully, when young so there’s still time to recover and live a selfish life after they move out. For one thing, without them you can’t get grandchildren, one of the best parts of the whole deal.

But when you have kids around it’s not often that you get to listen to snow dripping onto moss, winter wrens warbling in tune with the creek, and absolutely nothing else. I drove up to the edge of snowline. The trail was muddy with globs of slush falling from 200-foot trees. Fog hung on the cliffs. Hillsides gushed water like colossal plumbing failures.

Everyone should eat a little fresh-fallen snow now and then -- say, once a year. It’s living with snow 24-7 that’s so awful. Driving in it. Walking in it. Shoveling it over and over and over. I used to use a snow shovel to periodically clean one of our teenager’s rooms. Everything on his floor would be scooped into giant trash bags – candy wrappers, dirty socks, video games, unfinished homework, CD cases, half-eaten pizza. The bags would go outside with the threat to let the garbage man pick them up.

Now my snow shovel mostly gathers dust in the garage. That’s as it should be. Now my snow is in balance: close but not too close. I can visit it when I choose. And if the weather changes and crap starts coming out of the sky I can head for home where it almost never snows.


Sunday, February 21, 2010

CAMPFIRE STORIES

It was one of my best ever. A roaring campfire under the desert sky. An unexpected gift of the universe.


When I pulled into the deserted campground there it was waiting for me at my favorite campsite – a huge pile of split oak and busted-up hardwood pallets, dry and ready to burn, left by the last campers.

I had camped there many times; Site A-6 overlooks miles of high desert wilderness of Lava Beds National Monument. Coyotes yip in the night; mule deer wander through mornings. The night sky is alive with cosmic wonders.

A year ago on almost the same February date I camped on the same spot. I had pulled in after dark to an empty campground. Bitterly cold and covered with snow. No firewood then. I decided that sleeping in my car would be warmer than on the ground in a tent.

As I finished my soup the neighbors showed up. Reminding me of Clark Griswold’s hillbilly relatives (Eddie & family in Chevy Chase’s “Christmas Vacation”), they spent the next hour hauling tents and clanging pots and pans from a ratty truck to their chosen campsite – just 50 feet from my car despite their having had the entire campground to pick from. They started a big campfire and had a good time.

Sociable I was not. I gave up sleeping in the car and set up my tent as far from the noisy neighbors as possible, wrapping myself in two sleeping bags and pulling in my head like a frigid turtle. Next-door the party went on.

A year later. No other campers. And this gift of a desert bonfire. Penance by the universe?

After exhausting that lofty question I toyed with the idea of trying to melt my empty wine bottle in the ghastly hot fire. That’s what Craig and I tried to do at my last really big campfire a few years ago. It was his idea. He said that mesquite wood burned so hot it would melt glass. So we built one hell of a fire out there in the desert north of Tucson, burning mesquite, creosote and slats from skeletons of dead saguaro cactus. We drank a lot of wine.

Our empty bottles did kind of melt after a fashion, having roasted all night in the mesquite coals. So what? Exactly what we said in the cold sober morning. We drenched the mesquite coals in water, threw the distended wine bottles in the trash and went on to the rest of our lives, Craig’s shorter, mine longer.

It brought me to that campfire in the Northern California desert, burning chunks of oak from who knows where. On my second night I still had enough wood for another campfire that attracted my new neighbors, Judy and Arthur from northern Alberta. They might have been Clark Griswold’s polite Canadian relatives, arriving quietly in a pickup with a modest camper on the back. Soon out of the dark came a greeting. “Would you mind sharing your fire? Or maybe you like being alone?” asked the 40-ish woman. I confessed that I did like being alone, but “come on in.” I offered them some of the syrah I was drinking and Judy poured herself a small serving in a red plastic cup I pulled out of my box marked “kitchen.” Arthur doesn’t drink, she said.
 
“Sorry I can’t offer you chairs, but I’ve only got the one,” I said. No, they were happy to stand, their faces glowing in the campfire light.

Judy and Arthur were from Hythe, a dot on the map near Grande Prairie, they said, though that didn’t really help me place it. Growing canola is a big thing there. “For the oil?” I asked, because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. Hythe is 700 miles north of northern Montana, which means it must be ungodly cold and nasty in the winter. Which is precisely why Judy and Arthur weren’t there, of course. Since December they had traveled south as far as Yuma, even venturing one day into Mexicali, amazed at the long wait to return to the U.S.

Arthur said that with Americans the first thing they brought up were strong political opinions and try to convince you of them. “But you don’t seem a typical American,” he suggested. I conceded that was probably so but I didn’t tell him that I was born on the Fourth of July. I asked him if most of his encounters were right-wing or left-wing opinions. Of course most were right-wing. Snowbirds in the Southwest – what else? “Americans are assholes,” I said, as if that somehow explained something.

We did agree that Yuma had few qualities to brag about. Except, apparently, grapefruits. Arthur told me about the incredible grapefruits that someone in Yuma had picked from his tree and given them. When they were gone they bought some more in the same area but they didn’t taste nearly as good. From that I learned that Judy and Arthur grow carrots on a quarter section of their land. “That’s a lot of carrots,” I said. Arthur agreed but said the taste of no other carrots could compare. They turn most of their carrots into juice that they use and share with family and friends. “That’s a lot of carrot juice,” I thought but didn’t say.

I felt like the local expert, telling them about places to go and things to see. I explained how the lava caves had formed (I had read the brochure), the exterior of the flowing lava cooling first like a giant paper towel tube while the tail-end of the lava flushed through. Arthur was anxious to explore the caves; Judy, not so much, being claustrophobic, like me.

I’m a big fan, just not of the park’s caves. That day I had stood by my car and watched bald eagles scattered across a new-mown hay field, finding orphaned mice and such, I suppose. I stopped counting at 25 eagles. The year before that same field in the national wildlife refuge had been flooded and held thousands of white swans singing ancient songs. I recorded them on my cell phone and (until that phone died) that’s the music I heard when my wife called me.


Judy and Arthur were curious about my bird watching passion. I said that it was a bit like collecting – keeping lists of the different species seen, by year, by state, by backyard, by lifetime. “You need good optics to enjoy it – spend $200-300 for binoculars.” I told them about the immense flocks of ducks, geese and swans that spend the winter in nearby refuges and gave them an extra map I happened to have for the local wildlife refuges. They said a pair of swans nest on their northern Canada property and I thought they might be among the tundra swans wintering right here. But no, the swans on their property are trumpeter swans, they said. That is a far rarer and larger bird.

I told them of my encounter last year with noisy neighbors and my theory of the firewood being penance by the universe for my awful experience. It was clear by then that Arthur was a man of religious conviction; I could hear the prairie Mennonite roots in his conversation. “Yes, everything has a purpose,” he said. “For example, the purpose of this fire might have been to warm you. Or to warm us.” I said, “I just made it to create something beautiful.”

Arthur mentioned that while they had stayed in Palm Desert they attended a “bible prophecy conference.” I offered that they certainly seemed open to a variety of experiences and Judy readily agreed, naming examples of “going whatever direction the truck is pointed.” They seemed particularly amused at having navigated ten miles of a rutted road near Parker, Arizona, to reach a notorious bar “just for the experience.” The road was so bad they had to walk the last mile. “I went up to one pickup going by us to ask for a ride and the woman just rolled up her window and kept going,” said Judy. I suggested that in that part of the world she could just have easily been met with the barrel of a gun. It seemed to fit the spirit of their story. But Judy and Arthur didn’t have much else to say about the notorious bar.

I know Parker to be a miserable little collection of trailer parks, existing only because the government built Parker Dam on the Colorado River to create Lake Havasu and pump its water to L.A. I figured my wife, who partied in Parker when young and whose departed lunatic mother once had been married to a Hell’s Angel, would know the bar. And it later turned out that she did, indeed, remember it, or at least a biker bar of similar locale and renown. But that’s another story.

Judy excused herself to go make supper; Arthur was in no hurry.

“So what about the bible prophecy conference,” soon-to-be-sorry I asked. It was as if Arthur had channeled my dead father, an evangelical minister who fancied himself a biblical prophecy expert. Among my literary inheritance: “Revelation Made Plain,” “Palestine and the Jew Today in the Light of Prophecy” (8th edition of 1939, available for 25 cents from Fundamental Truth Publishers, Findlay, Ohio), and my favorite, “The Future of Japan in the Light of Biblical Prophecy.” Written Sept. 8, 1945, its forward prophesizes:

Probably no one can fully anticipate all the cunning maneuvers that the wily Jap leaders may perpetrate in the months ahead. But the important thing to note is that, whatever they do, the ultimate purpose is to advance the long-range program of unifying Asia for another assault upon the white man.
Arthur didn’t mention Asia as he told me about the bible prophecy conference in Palm Desert, although I can’t be positive since I kind of zoned out after a while. Something about Ezekiel 38. I perked up when he mentioned meeting “Ask the Rabbi.” Apparently, you just go up and ask the Ask the Rabbi anything you want. I’m not sure if he’s in a little booth, on a street corner or where. “So what did you ask him?” I said. Arthur recited some esoteric question about the family of an Old Testament character. “Wasn’t he impressed with your question?” I asked, certainly impressed myself. “No, everyone there had good questions,” Arthur said.

If Ask the Rabbi had been there at the campfire I would have asked him why I had been blessed with the free firewood. But he wasn’t. I’m still trying to come up with a good question in case I ever actually do run into Ask the Rabbi. You never know.

We stared at the stars for a while. Arthur pointed out the North Star like he was introducing me to his old friend. We spotted a planet high above. It was an excuse to get out my bird spotting scope. I couldn’t see any rings (not Saturn) or a string of moons (not Jupiter). It was too high in the sky for Venus. It had to be Mars.

I swung the scope to the glowing, gassy nebulae in Orion’s sword. I think Arthur was pleased. Although it’s not like the pictures you see from the Hubble Telescope, you’re seeing it in person. Between the cosmological mysteries in the sky, the geological stories under us, and our own epistemological lives to reflect upon, there was plenty for two strangers at a campfire to talk about.

Arthur is an IT expert, although I never figured out how he made any money at it. He had strong political opinions about Facebook vs. Buzz, “open source software” vs. Bill Gates, Google vs. Wikipedia, and so on. He seemed pretty paranoid about privacy on the Internet. A guy from Hythe, Alberta who grows carrots. Go figure. “Arthur,” I said, “personally, I just don’t care. Anyone wants to pay attention to the art I create of my life is free to do it.” Still, I’ve got to figure that Arthur won’t be too thrilled to read about himself here.

The next morning I met Judy and Arthur as I was pulling out of the campground. I shut off the engine and we chatted about destinations. I was off to hike in the Lava Beds wilderness.

It is a spare desert, especially in winter, but a glorious landscape, nonetheless. There are contrasts in black and white: miles of black lava flows against the icy-white of distant Mt. Shasta; vees accenting the intense blue heaven are black wings on white snow geese. Yet there are lime-green things growing on silver bark of juniper trees, stunted and gnarled atop mile-high mountains; Halloween-orange lichen growing on lava; and a riot of color on the waters of nearby Tule Lake: goldeneyes, buffleheads, canvasback ducks, wigeon (American and a few Eurasian), shovelers, gadwall, ruddy ducks, Canada geese, white-fronted geese, pintails, mallards, ring-necked ducks, mergansers, grebes. And clouds of snow geese.
 
Judy and Arthur were headed for Hood River (Oregon) and Judy’s sister (a glass artist, I had learned the night before) after exploring the park’s caves and unless something else caught their fancy. They are like their wandering trumpeter swans. Unusual birds. Wintering in the south but thinking about, slowly pulled every Spring back to the Far North.

Arthur and I exchanged email addresses. The last thing I said to him was, “See you online.” You know, I’ve never said that to anyone before. Weird, eh? Our virtual campfire.