Memories Of An Old Man

Posted on February 23, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

I awoke this morning to find a sparse ground fog irradiated by the light of a nearly full moon hanging in a cloudless, late February sky.  The fog is just dense enough to make a mystery of the fields beyond the pines, and suffused with just enough moonlight to highlight every branch and twig of the pines, leaving privacy only to their needles.

A morning composed from the stuff of dreams.

I spent yesterday in two meetings on the campus of the University of Washington where I graduated sometime during the last millennium.  The purpose of the first was to share with a University employee my memories of a program in which I was involved during the time of its campus infancy, a period for which those that presently administer the program have only a few records residing on hand-written, three-by-five cards filed in dusty filing cabinets somewhere in the basement of whatever building in which they are housed; the purpose of the second was to coach two bright, vibrant, impossibly young law students in preparation for the face-to-face negotiations they will undertake this coming Friday in Denver as a part of an inter-law school transactional competition in which they are presently engaged.

It was a day of memory and experience sandwiched between now and then, sandwiched between the induced recollections of the initial stirrings of intellectualism and the first tastes of freedom enjoyed by anyone attending college for the first time far from the safety of the home in which they were raised, and the present tense of a long life baked from an idiosyncratic, but not unusual, mixture of successes and failures measured out in cups, teaspoons, and dollops of personal experience, well spiced with serendipity, both bitter and sweet, and the tang of choices long since made.

Two images stand out from the day: Sitting in a waiting room talking to my luncheon companion, only to look up to see a friend with whom I graduated from the University walking in front of me and the warm handshake and brief conversation which followed;  one of the two young women whom I am coaching running out the front door of the law school at full speed in a desperate attempt to reach a class in another building for which she was already late.

Memories splayed against the surreal landscape of morning.

Posted in Our Place in the Firmament, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | Comments Off on Memories Of An Old Man

The Final Journey, Part One

Posted on February 17, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

By the time I was born in April 1945, Bob Weiss had already fought for the Allies in Europe and won a Silver Star in the small French town of Mortain.  How much of his further ‘travels’ throughout Europe courtesy of the US Army preceded my birth, I will never know, but surely a substantial portion. He was twice wounded there before being discharged and returning home to the University of Chicago Law School to study and settling down in the city of Portland, Oregon to practice law.  The extent of these early European ‘travels’ is unknowable, except to say that it likely involved thousands of miles undertaken in the least desirable of conditions – in constant combat for the most part, as an officer and forward artillery observer.

Ironically, Portland is my birth place due to the fact that my father’s war service consisted of working on the construction of Liberty Ships in the Columbia River shipyards.  Bob’s residency in Portland was a conscious decision rather than an accident of birth, and was probably substantially informed by the horrors of war he witnessed during his service.  We were not to meet until some 25 years after my birth.

Bob traveled extensively throughout his life,  and not all of his travels were limited to the physical realm.  During the course of a long life, he became a well-regarded lawyer acknowledged as such by both clients and fellow members of the bar, a published author of nonfiction (Fire Mission, his version of the events at Mortain) and fiction (Mardi Gras At The Monastery and Other Stories), a poet, a playwright, a public speaker, an honored veteran (receiving from France, late in life, the title of chevalier in the Legion d’honneur for his service at Mortain, in addition to the Croix de Guerre, two purple hearts, and a silver star given to him while he was in the Army), and a beloved lifelong hero to, and friend of, the residents of the City of Mortain, a city in Normandy that he returned to several times during his physical travels.  At his memorial service last August, the Mayor of Mortain sent a wreath and a bilingual spokesman to read the Mayor’s eulogy about someone who had served his city so well in its time of greatest need.

Bob was also a mentor, companion, advisor, colleague, and friend to more people than I dare to name for fear of inadvertent omission.  It doesn’t matter whether I name them or not, since each of them knows who he or she is and is personally aware of the mathematical constants that filled each of his relationships – the ability to listen carefully and suggest a common sense solution to a problem or an alternative course of action to one especially dreaded, his unrestrained laughter, sense of humor and shared mirth, his willingness to become the wartime officer he once was whenever there was a need for one of us to buck up, his willingness to speak his mind candidly and honestly in a manner suitable to any situation in which you might find yourself, and the warmth and depth of his smile.

This active life  allowed Bob to engage in a lot of discretionary physical travel – to speak, to serve his clients, to serve the welfare of his partners and friends, or to simply enjoy the fruits of a long life (he died at age 92).  But his family and friends have all known since his memorial service that he had one last journey to undertake, and yesterday I learned of the date in May when he will finally come to rest and travel no further.

His final journey will be to Arlington National Cemetery, where he is entitled to be interred due to his war service and his Silver Star.  He looked forward to being buried there and was proud of the honor to be given to him by a grateful country.  He took comfort from the notion that he was to be buried among his comrades-in-arms, his fellow citizen soldiers who fought during World War II.  He believed in, and took comfort from, the spirit inherent in the term ‘citizen soldier’ and was proud to have been a member of a generation that answered a call born of great need.  He took the term as a compliment for the beliefs and bravery of an entire generation, often telling me that he was nothing special, that he was just one of so very many.

Bob’s final journey can only be undertaken with the assistance of family and friends, but it will be a journey chosen and anticipated by him.  It will be a well earned journey to a place of honor, a journey on which Helen, I, and others will accompany him.  And while his physical remains will find a final resting place there among the brave, his spirit remains alive, free, and thriving in the conjoined memories of his family and the legion of his friends.

Posted in Friendship, Our Place in the Firmament | Comments Off on The Final Journey, Part One

Snake Bit On The Farm

Posted on February 10, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

It has been a hellish fortnight here at the Farm, but, when all is said and done, hell has proven not to be such a bad place after all.

It all began the day Helen took her car, a 2004 Subaru Forester, in for servicing.  She had been complaining that the car seemed to be floating, and, sure enough, it needed an entire new set of shocks.  But the bigger deal turned out to be the fact that her dashboard light wasn’t burned out after all.  No, the problem was that the on-board computer’s mother board was burned out, and it would cost a hell of a lot more than a new light bulb to replace.  We were looking at repairs equal to the trade in value of the car, so we went ahead and bought a new Forester for Helen since she had been talking about a new car for some time.

Not such a hellish event, is it?  The fact of a new car takes the sting out of so many things.  It took most of the day to accomplish, however, since we had to deal with all of the various salesmen, managers, and assorted hangers-on who make car dealerships across America their home.  A new car buying experience is like being swarmed to death by a herd of cockroaches; while they are simply striving for survival in a competitive world like the rest of us, there is simply no pleasant way to experience the process of being shaken down while conscious that you are being had; of being eaten alive.

But we did get a new car out of the deal, so we were pleased with the outcome even so.  Pleased, that is, until we drove home to find a very cold house.  It seems the furnace had died sometime during the previous 24 hours.  Oddly, a furnace service company was scheduled to arrive the very next morning, so I didn’t bother to call our usual serviceman.  But when the service guy arrived, he reminded me that he was only there to service our two propane stoves – a fact I had forgotten in my excitement over the fact that he was on his way and the house would soon be warm again.  But he did his best at a cursory review of the furnace even though it wasn’t within his expertise, and then cleaned the propane stoves as promised.

Since he was not an expert in furnaces, I called our regular service person who blithely informed me that he was busy and couldn’t possibly arrive any time soon.  When only vague promises and no specific arrival date was forthcoming, I told him that I would use the folks who were already on premises, instead.  I went back to the propane stove service guy, and he arranged with his office to have a bona fide furnace service guy at the house that very afternoon.

That’s when the real fun began.  The furnace service guy arrived as promised, and quickly discovered that there had been a short somewhere in our heating system – a heating system that consists of an air handler (I have now been educated, and have learned that what I once thought of in pre-snake-bit days as a furnace is merely an air handler) and a heat pump.  Have you ever tried to isolate a short in an electrical system?  No?  It’s somewhat akin to trying to discover the hiding place of the aforementioned cockroaches.  By the end of the first day, we knew two things: (a) there were several hundred dollars worth of new parts required, since the short had taken out the circuit board which controls the air handler, and (2) the service guy did not have the parts on board his truck.  Clearly, I should have anticipated both things.

Did I mention that the day in question was a Friday?  Of course I didn’t.  Even I can see that by re-reading what I’ve written above, but you somehow knew it anyway, didn’t you?  And you fully understand what that meant, don’t you?  Yes, dear reader, we spent Super Bowl weekend huddled in front of our newly serviced propane stoves during the day, and freezing our asses off at night despite the quilts.  It is perhaps the only time this year – or any year, for that matter – that I have blessed an overly strong El Nino, since the February temperatures have been in the high 40’s instead of the customary low 20’s.

I greeted the service guy Monday afternoon with exuberance and confidence, knowing that I was about to get warm.  He put in all the new parts, including a new fuse that had blown – a specialized part that only the manufacturer of our particular brand of furnace (make that air handler) employed, consisting of a screw top cleverly glued to what appeared to be a common, garden-variety automobile fuse.  He powered up the heating system to my great joy – and the hybridized fuse blew out within a millisecond.  And, since it is not just a common, garden-variety automobile fuse which the service guy had oodles of safe within his van, it had to be ordered; and, since it was now 5:00 PM, it wouldn’t be available until late the next afternoon.  And that’s not to mention that the service guy obviously hadn’t yet found the source of the short circuit.

Another propane fired evening awaited us.

The service guy returned the next day, filled with determination and promises of quick resolution.  He didn’t have a new fuse with him; he had something better.  He called it a popper.  If the circuit shorted out again, the popper would open like a circuit breaker instead of blowing out like a fuse.  Instead of having to replace it another day, you would simply push the popper back in to restore the circuit.  Clearly, no mere fuse, nothing of glass and tin, was going to stand in the way of glorious heat this time!  We’d conquered the little bastard!

And while the popper didn’t get in the way, something else did.  And what that something else was, was beyond the service guy’s ability to find on that darkening afternoon.  (Since the service guy has been featured long enough in this story as a faceless meme, we ought to give him a name.  Let’s call him Drew, since that is, in fact, his name.)  Drew is a nice young man.  Despite the ongoing lack of a fully operational heating system, he gave me confidence.  He fretted and persisted; he explained and demonstrated; he researched on his own time, and kept coming back for more – not unlike the Canadian heavyweight champion, George Chuvalo, who, in his one and only championship fight with Smokin’ Joe Frazier, went down repeatedly but stubbornly refused to go out.  In fact, Drew came back a total of 4 times in all.

No, make that 5 times with a question mark.  More below.

Drew was now focused on the heat pump.  He first focused on its circuit board, from which he could get no amperage readings.  He told me that heat pump manufacturers had not yet given servicemen a way into circuit boards to be able to diagnose their possible shortcomings properly, so all they could do was measure whether electricity went into the damned thing and came out again – which wasn’t happening.  He was convinced the circuit board should be replaced; it was likely, he concluded, that it had been blown out by the short circuit just as the air handler’s had.

Well, even if circuit boards are expensive, I now had hope of heat and reasonable expectation of warmth.  In fairness, I should say more robust heat.  The replacement of the circuit board in the air handler (and a couple of other fried connections) had allowed us, the night before, to run the heating system on its emergency heat setting.  So the house was considerably warmer than it had been in the days of propane only, and dead-of-night trips to the necessities for things not to be written of here were no longer trips though a gusty snow field to an arctic outhouse.  But emergency heat is thin heat – it warms the ambient air by means of constant furnace  – air handler – operation, but does nothing for such things as tiled floors or frozen souls (or soles, if you prefer).

Drew came back the next day with the new circuit board.  He plugged it in, reset the thermostat as needed, threw the large circuit breaker near the heat pump into its on position and ….. nothing happened.  Nothing, that is, except that the popper popped.  There I was, the proud possessor of a new heat pump circuit board, a much larger, redesigned, more efficient version of the one it had replaced, and nothing worked except the popper.  I should have been pleased with the new circuit board since it was promised to be more efficient, but I was now somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 of seriously displeased.  Peeved even.  Another night of emergency heat stretched before us.

Drew was now reduced as a person, crushed in his manliness.  He had failed us, and was calling in the Seventh Cavalry.  He promised to return the next day with Jim, a more senior, more experienced service guy, and they would find the source of the short together.  He was abjectly apologetic.  He was taking things personally, and I could tell he had a sense of failure.  I felt bad.

He had just a few additional parts to test that afternoon so that he could be certain he and Jim would return with a full panoply of necessary parts in order to avoid further delay.  He would be out of our hair in a matter of minutes, but he wanted to be certain they could achieve victory on the morrow.  It was when he turned to conduct his very final test that our neighbor took out the telephone pole located at the most awkward turning point of our private lane while swerving to miss a deer.  A god-damned, common, garden-variety deer.  Not only did the telephone pole suffer a direct hit, all power to the neighborhood went bye-bye for the next 5 hours – meaning, of course, that Drew was unable to complete his final electrical test since it required an active electrical circuit.

It was only long after Drew had folded his tent, stuffed his van, and left us to our fate that the power came back on.  They had to tow the neighbor’s car away before they could fix the power, and the tow truck took its own sweet time arriving.  It was 9:00 PM before the power came back on.  In the interim between Drew’s departure and the return of power, we had gone back to using the propane stoves.  No new episode of Season 6 of Downton Abbey for us that evening.  No siree!

During the pre-dawn hours of yesterday, the phone rang and I picked it up on the library extension.  Drew was outside in our driveway wondering if he could come in and look at something before he went to his first scheduled appointment that morning.  He hadn’t been able to  sleep due to worry and concern, and he knew I was an early riser for I’d told him so.  So, dressed in my pajamas, I went downstairs to let him in.  I then went off to shower and fix him a cup of coffee since he clearly needed a stimulant.  He was in a funk.  By now, I was worried about his mental health.  He was very down on himself, feeling that inviting Jim in was an admission of failure.  I tried to buck him up by noting that the experienced hand always knows when to call in the troops, but  my preaching wasn’t working.

When I finished my shower, dressed, and took the coffee out to Drew, he asked if he could look in the garage – the home of our new car, our new car which produced far more heat than the air handler in a much shorter period of time.  I said yes, and then asked why.  It might be the wiring between the heat pump and the air handler, he replied, and he wanted to know where the lines went through the house in case they had to pull new wire.  Amazingly, I knew just where the wall had to be opened to achieve this, since both the furnace and the heat pump were newly installed when we’d built the library 8 years ago.  The spot in the garage wall near my car – the now oldest car in our fleet – had recently been re-patched, and I sadly reconciled myself to the prospect of it being cut open again.

I left Drew to do his thing, and he came back inside twenty minutes later to tell me that while he had to leave for his first appointment, he had good news.  It wasn’t the wiring.  No holes need apply.  It was the damned heat pump, after all.  He would be back with Jim, and thanks for the coffee as he’d needed it.  His spirits were low.  I bucked him up as best I could with a story of an early failure of my own during my first years of practicing law.  Failure happens to all of us, I told him; the trick is to learn something from the experience.  I was, by now, seriously worried about his state of mind.

I believe at this point, Helen was certain I’d lost it.

Hours passed, and then a knock on the door.  Helen was at a restaurant lunching with friends, so I knew it wasn’t her.  I opened the door to find Jim standing there – a very large, white-mustachioed, much more seniorish-than-Drew Jim who exuded self-confidence visually and effortlessly with few words and a lack of braggadocio,  and who embodied the promise of a painstakingly methodological approach to finding whatever it was that was causing the short.  He knew nothing about Drew returning, but was ready to go to work if only he might use our bathroom room first.  And no, he didn’t want any coffee since that was the cause of his problem in the first place.

In Drew’s absence, I told him what I knew, carefully using the term ‘air handler’ to exhibit my expertise.  I explained to him that I was worried about Drew, because he thought himself a failure.  “Like that, is it?” Jim mused while looking at me as only two men of considerable experience and of a certain age can do when discussing the young of the species.  I explained that, according to Drew, the problem was in the heat pump.  Jim sniffed and shone his light over the air handler anyway.  Then he went outside and went to work on the heat pump.

An hour passed and I heard the back door open as he came in to check the thermostat for information.  Only it wasn’t Jim, it was Drew.  I hadn’t heard him drive up.  I welcomed him warmly – to use an adverb in short supply in the house.

I went outside a few minutes later to find a 60 degree day, Jim sitting carefully on a small step stool, and Drew deep into the bowels of the heat pump.  Jim was talking Drew through it, helping him understand the need for methodical patience and careful tracking.  Drew was feeling better about himself, and so was I.  It was a spring-like day, after all.  I decided to take a short walk down the drive before returning to my appointment with Agatha Christie; it was just as warm outside as it was inside, so I might just as well blow off a few cobwebs.

I went back outside again an hour later to find them winding up for the day.  They now knew where the short had originated.  A heat sensor on a pipe carrying extremely hot effluent had failed; a heat sensor far underneath the machinery in a location that required the heat pump to be dismantled and then reassembled after it had been replaced; a heat sensor which would be replaced on  yet another day as they, of course, hadn’t one with them after all.  But again there was good news: the circuit board was fine and I could keep my $500.

They had further good news.  We would no longer have to rely upon emergency heat, since they had bypassed the failed heat sensor to allow the heat pump to work without shorting out.  When I expressed my fervent hope that we wouldn’t be blown to smithereens during the night because of the bypass, Jim merely sniffed at my ignorance.  I shut up and counted my blessings instead.

So I’ve woken up this morning after having enjoyed a full night of real heat, the full-blown, heat pump aided variety.  The tile floor in the master bathroom no longer feels like the surface of the Mendenhall Glacier, and the air in the library no longer has a frosty edge.  No, the new heat sensor hasn’t been installed yet, and, no, I cannot yet be certain that everything will work satisfactorily once it has; but I have hope.  Drew’s confidence has been restored by means of Jim’s kindness and step-stooled oversight, and the world is once again a more ordered place.

As I write this in our library, I have to wonder whether Jim is just a caring old goat and a good mentor to younger servicemen, or whether he might really be a sort of Tom Sawyer – with the heat pump having been substituted for a certain well-known, best-beloved, white picket fence in a sort of modernized morality play.  Somehow the image of Jim sitting complacently on his step stool with Drew on his knees in the dirt poking about in the innards of the heat pump, avidly following instructions being delivered at the point of Jim’s finger or whatever tool he happened to be holding was greatly reassuring.  For just as surely as we’ve been snake bit, it seems certain that patience, methodology, and careful item-by-item elimination undertaken beneath the caring gaze of a virtual demigod must have identified, once and for all, the cause of the short circuit and saved all of the days to come.

I’ve learned a lot from this experience, but I just hope the goddamned heat sensor does the trick.

If it doesn’t, I think I’ll scream.

Posted in Our Place in the Firmament | Comments Off on Snake Bit On The Farm

Snowfall

Posted on January 4, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

Color comes first to the sky – a pewter cast that engulfs all other light and gives the air a substance so real that it might be grasped, chewed, and swallowed as if a breakfast of oatmeal.  Its veil appears first on the eastern horizon, but quickly spreads in forewarning across the sky until every living thing, every comprehensible shape abiding in the landscape, becomes cast and silvered into statuary.  Everything assumes an ethereal glow as this light casts only the true image of  who or what it is, sculpting its bare essence into a stillborn profile.  Only the birds retain their outward identity, streaks of color shot through the pewtered gloom as if still brightly colored ribbons woven into an otherwise faded rag rug handmade by an ancient relative, continuing to forage as if nothing – nothing at all, nothing of such grand immensity – had come to alter their world.

Then, a single flake falls, then two, then multiplicities.  The flakes are small and round at first – pellets of white falling straight down, advance troops for their larger comrades who will follow.  They are much too small to be able to drench the world in white, and, at first, the earth seems amused by them.  It seems to toy with this early snowfall, its outcroppings playing peekaboo with one another as if  the pellets were toddlers needing to be entertained.  For, in its immensity, the earth suffers from an arrogance which refuses to admit that it might be smothered.  In truth, its arrogance is warranted, for at their deepest, snowdrifts can only smooth its profile, hide its insecurities and faults, and clothe, but not cloak, its basic shape.

Soon, larger flakes begin to fall, summoned in response to the drowsiness settling over the earth.  They drift downward in soothing waves of ever-increasing density, until finally the air is a blanket of white and even the birds are driven to cover – driven to the depths of the pines, the yews, the junipers, the dense, winter-weary, tatterdemalion thickets of this-and-that and whatever-you-may-call-it that cover the hillside behind the house where they will wait out the snowfall until it becomes time to reclaim their solitary vibrancy and emerge from their miniaturized sanctuaries into a frozen cathedral of silence where they will be anointed as its only liquid grace notes.

And so, for now, the earth holds its breath and waits in silence, one foot slightly forward in anticipation, but otherwise frozen into immobility.  The earth will hold this pose for as long as it takes in an epitome of patience, not tiring until the snow’s fabric begins to fray, not moving forward until snowdrifts only cover the deepest or most remote places – those places into which the sunlight rarely intrudes, if ever.

Proof of winter has finally come to Humptulips County.

Posted in Humptulips County | Comments Off on Snowfall

Trips Around The Sun

Posted on January 1, 2016 by Gavin Stevens

It is early morning on another new year’s day.  This is my 70th celebration of a new year, my 71st year in residence on Sol’s third planet – the one we call Earth.  Several of my annual trips around this sun have been notable from my standpoint, but the most notable began 35 years ago on this very day.  Helen and I lived in Seattle then, on the crest of Queen Anne hill in a two-story brick home overlooking the city.  We decided to fully embrace the symbolism of this day by getting married in that house on that morning, with a potpourri of family and friends as witness.

While I am a reluctant celebrant of New Year’s Eve itself, the first day of each new year has always seemed full of magic, full of the possibility that a dream or two might yet be caught before the conclusion of another trip around the sun.  The day itself is nothing more than symbolism since, in the only sense that matters, each day is its own new beginning.  But this day’s mythos is so powerful and compelling that it has become the focal point for our culture’s contemplation of whatever may lie ahead.  Placed by an unseen hand, on this morning intrigue and mystery wait for us in a plain brown box lying on our front porches, its contents either coiled and poisonous like a cobra lying in its basket, or bright and shiny like a child’s birthday toy wrapped in ribbons and bows.   We can never know which, never know whether the forthcoming passage around our sun will be more full of joy than sorrow, or vice versa.  In this condition of profound ignorance lie the seeds of further personal challenge, seeds waiting to be nurtured by our sense of self-worth and our spirit of dedication.  Whether we want to or not, we will again be compelled to flex our mental muscle in demonstration of our coping skills, but on this one day we are allowed to pause and reflect, to prepare as best we can for whatever awaits.

Since I am not a fan of rear view mirrors except when driving, I almost never spend the waning days of an old year in consideration of the past, however immediate or ancient.  The view forward has always been my preferred focus.  Helen shares this philosophy; like all artists, she is well attuned to the virtue of possibility and is always ready to seize upon whatever it may yield.  But, like everyone else, both of us look backward on occasion, especially when circumstances such as a death in the family mandate a reconsideration of the past.  But whenever we do, we try our best to find lessons rather than disappointment, grace rather than pain, fond memories rather than anguish.

In keeping with this shared spirit, on this day 35 years ago we chose to clasp hands and step into the future together.  We made a conscious, considered choice to embrace the day’s symbolism, and it’s a choice I’ve never regretted throughout all of the ups and downs that couples share during a lifetime together.  I draw from and upon Helen and am better for having done so, even as my quirks remain my own: I am stronger with her assistance; wiser with her knowledge; more aware due to her vision; and braver because of her courage.

So while this is a special day in our nation’s culture, it is an especially wonderful day in Humptulips County.  I am thankful I had the good sense to make the choice to join with Helen for these annual trips through the glare of our sun, and grateful to her for sharing the voyages with me.

Posted in Friendship, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | Comments Off on Trips Around The Sun

The View From The Back Roads

Posted on December 29, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

It is winter in Humptulips County.  Foliage is sparse and the days are wet and overcast, with only hints of snow.  One wet day follows another in bleak and endless succession.  So as I drive our back roads (as I am wont to do whenever given the choice), I look for little things, for details, for anything which might serve as cinnamon or raisins to relieve the monotony of these daily servings of nature’s porridge.

Days like these serve to spotlight humanity’s work.  Against winter’s backdrop, each of the products of humanity’s efforts to tame the landscape stands out in visual relief: yellow fire hydrants; rust red or dun-colored barns; asphalt roofing in varying patchworks of green, red, black, or gold; black, red, and green metal fence posts supporting oxidized strands of barbed wire and enclosing fallow fields; tall brown telephone poles blackened with tar and crowned with blue or grey transformers; dirty off-white fencing surrounding mucky horse pastures; brickwork demonstrating all the possible manifestations of redness, stippled and striped with greying mortar; homes in all of the colors mixable by man (including several which neither nature nor any self-respecting plein air artist would ever include in any respectable palette); the immediate shine and gloss of the tarmac on which I drive.

Because these things are but details within a dreary landscape, because they stand out in isolation even as they strive to connect with each other or serve a common purpose, they seem transitory in their individuality and impermanent in their sum.  I marvel at the effort required to maintain them, much less to have built them in the first place; the totality of humanity’s work product, each single one of these exemplars of sustained effort, seems to me little more than an unsustainable beachhead in the grey/green primordial soup of winter.

And while I understand that this is only a view from the back roads where man’s touch is lightest, I find myself pondering the universality of its truth as I find my way home.

Posted in Humptulips County, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | Comments Off on The View From The Back Roads

Death In The Family

Posted on December 5, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

“All alone, I came into the world
All alone, I will someday die
Solid stone is just sand and water, baby
Sand and water, and a million years gone by “

Beth Nielsen Chapman, Sand and Water

Helen recently lost her sister Irene to cancer.  The last ten days or so were dedicated to arranging her funeral and dealing with the loss of someone so near, so close.  Needless to say, the experience was especially tiring for all concerned given the stress, the fear of our own impending mortality, and the thousand dramas that always accompany the death of an immediate family member.

But we are acclimating now, as the passage of time requires us to do.  There is an inevitability to the process of adjustment, just as there will be when one of us is the one to pass on.  And in that process is salvation; in that process is the understanding that we are all part of something greater, something that continues on its way even as we no longer are able to contribute our share.  Whether you call that something god, nature, the great mandala, or the life force, it continues on its relentless way toward an inscrutable goal we haven’t the capacity to grasp.

And in this way, each individual death is life affirming.  Affirmation is to be found both in the gathering of family and friends that inevitably occurs following the death of someone close, and in the fact of  our adjustment to a new reality no matter how difficult the process.  Affirmation is found in the realization that life is the sum of the whole, and that each of us is but a single integer within an inestimable entirety.  Affirmation is found in the knowledge that life will continue long after we are gone, no matter how different the circumstances in which it will toil on, no matter how different or unrecognizable to us it may become within the confines of those circumstances.

So here it is Saturday already – the second Saturday after Irene’s passage.  The first was more difficult because a funeral lay ahead; the second is easier since the funeral lies in the past.

And so it goes.

Posted in 'Tis a Puzzlement, Words and Music | Comments Off on Death In The Family

First Frost

Posted on November 22, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

This time of year in Humptulips County frost competes with fog for morning dominance.  Since it is still November, fog prevails in these battles much of the time, as it has this morning.  This morning’s fog is light and graceful in its ethereality; transparency is its hallmark.  Yet, despite the fog’s overall dominance, a touch of frost graces the needles at the very tips of our pines’ branches, decorating them with hints and rumors of the deep winter lying ahead.

Yesterday was different; for the first time this year, frost prevailed over fog.  Since our house is nestled within a cluster of pines surrounded on all sides by open fields, the view from our library windows made it appear as if we had been transported overnight to an enchanted land – the Misty Mountains or Neverland, perhaps; or, more likely, the fringes of Narnia.  Since the day was cloudless and bright, the fields sparkled long into the morning, serving as a reminder that it’s time to wear a warmer coat, and that boots, gloves, and hats should be taken from the depths of our front hall closet and placed to hand should needs dictate – as they certainly will almost any day now.

The holidays are at hand, the first only a matter of days away.  The seasonal shopping spree begins this coming Friday; Christmas carols will then rule the airwaves.  Yesterday, while shopping for groceries for the upcoming Thursday feast, we saw a house decorated for the season.  Its owner, apparently determined to be first and jump the Thanksgiving starting gun, had decorated its porch columns with bright red bows and the trees in its front yard with brightly colored plastic bulbs.  The effect was awkward; the sentiment premature.

But despite the impending commercialism, despite the gloom which has ruled our house of late due to the recent passing of Helen’s sister, winter’s brightness beckons from deep within this morning’s murk.  This morning’s touch of frost is its avatar and advance scout: suggestive of its stark beauty, and reminding us that the world is not ruled by petty human concerns but by the hand and mind of nature.

Posted in Humptulips County, Our Place in the Firmament | Comments Off on First Frost

The Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Not-So-Brave

Posted on November 20, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

“History does not long entrust the care of freedom to the weak or the timid.”

Dwight D. Eisenhower

“We are all born ignorant, but one must work hard to remain stupid.”

Benjamin Franklin

“Why do I say this?” Nels Gudmundson asked, moving nearer to the jurors now and leaning toward them, too.  “I say this because as an older man I am prone to ponder matters in the light of death in the way that you are not.  I am like a traveler descended from Mars who looks down in astonishment at what passes here.  And what I see is the same human frailty passed from generation to generation.  What I see is again and again the same sad human frailty.  We hate one another; we are the victims of irrational fears.  And there is nothing in the stream of human history to suggest we are going to change this.  But – I digress.  I confess that.  I merely wish to point out that in the face of such a world you have only yourselves to rely on.   You have only the decision you must make, each of you, alone.  And will you contribute to the indifferent forces that ceaselessly conspire toward injustice?  Or will you stand up against this endless tide and in the face of it be truly human?  In God’s name, in the name of humanity, do your duty as jurors.  Find Kabuo Miyomoto innocent as charged and let him go home to his family.  Return this man to his wife and children.  Set him free, as you must.”

David Guterson, Snow Falling on Cedars 

I am surrounded by fog this morning.  Here, on the Farm, it is thick enough to taste, thick enough to blur even the outlines of the pines across our driveway, thick enough to be a brooding physical presence which may prove to be the essence of the day.  It originates from the nearby river; it occupies every nook and cranny that the morning light has on offer.  In it lies the lure of mystery.

But another fog lies just behind the physical one – a moral fog having no physical presence, but which is even more dense, even more defining of the day, even more mysterious since it has no discernible source save that of fear.  The heart of its mystery lies in the fact that it reappears throughout history with astounding regularity, despite the lessons we ought to have learned from having to defeat it at enormous cost whenever it reasserts itself.  The heart of its mystery lies in bullying, and the societal fear that gives bullying its opportunistic credibility.  The heart of its mystery lies in our foolishness and our ignorance, in our urgent longing to be safe from the things we are hardwired to fear.  The heart of its mystery lies in the fact that evil always seeks center stage and in the predictability with which humanity always greets its reappearance.  The heart of its mystery lies in our all-too-ready willingness to allow ignorance to prevail over knowledge whenever evil gets too near the spotlight.

This morning finds one candidate for president asserting that we need a national database of all Muslims living in America, whether born abroad or at home.  It is not clear whether he actually believes in the necessity of such a thing, and if I were a betting man I would bet good money that he does not.  For he is the consummate opportunist; for he is the embodiment of those who seek to use fear to their advantage – a palpable bully with enough street sense to comprehend society’s moods and to say whatever it takes to advance himself, who will wield fear shamelessly in his attempt to seize power, in his attempt to gain center stage for himself rather than for a considered set of shared ideals.

His story seems plausible to some in the face of their fears, in the teeth of an inexplicable reality.  After all, how are we to defend ourselves from an evil we cannot understand – the willingness of some not only to engage in the mass murder of innocents, but to take delight in the process – if we don’t act and act now?  His answer is to counter evil with evil, to suspend our rationality, to overlook the civil rights of an easily identifiable minority tasked by means of ignorance and fear with being responsible for the inexplicable, to take the easy road of blaming others for an enormity that we are constitutionally incapable of comprehending.

This has happened before.  In America, it happened in Salem in the 1600s; it happened  throughout the long decades following the Civil War when we hung strange fruit from southern trees, burned churches, and vilified and humiliated an entire people; it happened in the 1940s when we gathered up our Japanese citizens and put them in concentration camps solely because of their ancestry; it happened again after 9/11 when we carefully assigned colors to our levels of fear.  It happened in Europe in the mid-twentieth century in the form of the Holocaust; it’s happened across time in Europe and Asia in the form of pogroms committed wherever and whenever those in power or those seeking power needed an easy whipping boy to explain their lack of judgment or ability to rule effectively.  It’s happened in Africa and in South America. It’s happened wherever the human species has come to rest; it happens whenever the herd feels threatened, and bands together to defeat anyone or anything it can identify as the source of incomprehensible evil.  It happens whenever we fail to understand the truth of evil, whenever we seek easy answers to something we deem too complex to consider in the face of a perceived immediate threat, whenever those in power or aspiring to power seek to enhance themselves by offering simplistic solutions to satisfy a massive unease whose source is always shifting and murky, whenever immediate action born of ignorance is deemed better than a time-consuming, well-planned, considered response.

Never mind whether the chosen action will work, for something must be done, and done now.  Damn the high road; damn the rights our Founders saw as sacred, saw fit to embody in the Bill of Rights as a brake upon the injustice that seems to follow power wherever it goes and whoever wields it.  In the face of such a threat, we must have action for the sake of action.

Only later – only when the evil is no longer close to center stage – have we taken the time to apologize.  Only after many of those assigned the role of whipping boy have died or have been tortured or imprisoned have we recognized the error of our ways.  Only when it is too late for some of our victims to hear our apologies or for us to gather together enough resources to offer an effective apology to those who have been abused have we come to regret our actions.  Only when Mordor is once again a mere rumor have we deemed it safe enough to return to our principles.

We must ask ourselves now – right this very minute – whether it is possible to stand up for our principles in the teeth of despair.  This is a time for decision, for determining who we, as a people, really are.  The moral fog is gathering again, just as it will do again at some unknown time in the future.  We have been given yet another opportunity to prove ourselves.  If God is your judge, then you must ask yourself whether you will serve graven images or Him, and will obey not just those of his lessons you deem convenient, but all of them; if reason is your judge, then you must ask yourself whether the actions we are pondering make sense in the light of our accumulated knowledge and our stated principles; if the mirror is your judge, then you must ask yourself whether you will like what you see once you’ve cast your lot.

But one thing is surely true at all times such as these, times when the herd instinct is at the height of its power – each of us must choose for ourselves if reason is to have any chance of holding sway over ignorance and fear.

What’s your choice?  For it’s certainly time to raise your hand and be heard.

Posted in Civics, Politicians and Other Lower Life Forms, Ponderings on the Meaning of Things | Comments Off on The Land Of The Free And The Home Of The Not-So-Brave

Aswim in the Deep End

Posted on November 11, 2015 by Gavin Stevens

It’s dark outside, the house is silent as everyone but me is asleep and there is no outside ambient noise at this hour of the night, and the light at my desk is just sufficient to grant me a small pool of warmth in which to write.  It is one of those nights when sleep is impossible, when daydreams contain more power than those that rule my sleep.

I’ve spent the better part of my working hours since retirement writing a novel about the domestic front of the Vietnam War.  Two days ago, at his invitation, I sent the manuscript off to be edited by a published, well-reviewed novelist.  Even though he will be paid for his work, he is a volunteer in the sense that he only edits manuscripts which interest him.  So I find myself unable to sleep in the teeth of an impending moment of truth.

It’s hardly the first moment of truth I’ve faced, and certainly not the greatest.  Ironically, the greatest is the genesis of my novel’s narrative – a moment I spent in 1969 in front of a federal district court judge waiting to hear whether I would be allowed to finish my legal education in the ordinary course, or would have to spend the next few years as a guest of the United States Army in Vietnam; a cusp in time that might well have determined that I should live when so many others were being sent to die, and that I should remain physically whole when so many others were being maimed in body or spirit; a moment that was so thematically rich that even a 24-year-old product of an isolated culture and a narrow world view was capable of appreciating its drama for everything it was.

Accordingly, I am not so much losing sleep this morning as daydreaming in the silence.  For if I’ve learned nothing else in my 70 years, I’ve learned that when dreams hang in the balance I should enjoy them as much as possible before the truth sets in; enjoy them to the fullest by measuring the strength of  my fears against the scope, breadth, and depth of my hopes.  And since I’ve already taken the irrevocable step of mailing the manuscript and the editor has  acknowledged its receipt, I might as well take the time to dream awhile before returning to my chosen work.

It isn’t my fears that are keeping me awake: It isn’t that I care whether my editor will like the manuscript or not, as I already know from being told that he finds its essential narrative of interest; It isn’t that I care how he will judge my work, since I have enough self-confidence to believe that, so far, I’ve given my personal best to the effort and he is well aware of my inexperience.  No, what’s keeping me awake is that I have the good fortune to have an editor capable of telling me whether the narrative is compelling, even if flawed; capable of assessing whether or not the protagonist and his friends have come as alive on the page as they are in my mind.

I have no doubt that he will offer a host of suggestions for improvement of the manuscript.  I already understand from our exchanges that he will be rigorous in his commentary and lavish with his colored pens, but I find that prospect exhilarating.  I am well aware that good, personally involved editors have always been necessary for an author to produce something approximating literature.  I am excited by the prospect of the challenges he will no doubt present to me, and by the long hours of re-writing they will, no doubt, induce.  I can even imagine what some of his criticisms may be: there are portions of the manuscript that I keep worrying about, wondering whether they truly further the narrative or are simply too precious to my ego to be discarded without the assistance – the insistence – of a strong editor.

I relish the prospect of more hard work on the manuscript much more than I relish the prospect of being ‘finished’ with it.  If I am finished, it will be time to find an agent.  The process of finding one is demeaning and I will be incapable of exercising any control over it.  But I have an abiding affinity for hard work, an affinity which has long served me well and has served to differentiate me from many others.  I am well aware that I am only a single member of an overwhelming host; that I am neither the best nor the worst of humanity at things which interest me.  As I ponder that essential truth in this morning’s silence, I can hear my grandmother’s voice preaching common sense, reminding me once again of the benefits of being the best at something that I can possibly be.  Time has taught me the truth of this goal with each step I’ve taken along my way; experience has always been eager to demonstrate anew the contentments or sorrows inherent in achievement or failure.  My grandmother’s best lessons were always about the benefits of studious application, not the glories of spiritual or intellectual illumination.

I find myself at peace with the act of casting my work in front of another for review.  I’ve watched my more creative friends do this from time to time – watched, for example, artists hang their work in galleries and await the inevitable criticism, await the discovery of things which they had no intention of putting in their work by clueless viewers wishing to seem sophisticated.  This does not mean that I am complacent, just that I know that I’ve gone about as far as I can go without assistance from someone more knowledgeable about the ways of publishing than I am.

This project was always about discovering whether I could write a novel to my own satisfaction, not whether I could publish it.  But a funny thing happened along the way – my characters became my friends, and they convinced me they wanted their stories to be heard.  So it is incumbent upon me to take yet another step, to see if the manuscript is publishable.  As a former senior partner once told me when as he sent me up to argue a critical motion in court without the benefit of advance warning: “There’s nothing better than jumping into the deep end to see if you can swim.”

Posted in Words and Music | Comments Off on Aswim in the Deep End