No Exit

For many months I have tried to convince myself to vote for John Kerry. This effort was driven by my nearly total disapproval of the terrible job that the current administration has done with our involvement in Iraq. In the end, however, I cannot do it. Regardless of how poorly Bush has handled our foreign policy, I cannot get past the "contribution" Kerry made to the processes that lead to more than three decades of shitty treatment for the veterans of our armed services who served in Vietnam. I genuinely believe that Kerry was (and remains) motivated almost entirely by self serving ambition, rather than a true revulsion of the horrors of war. I continue to belive that it is this kind of ambition that drives him today. I don't like, trust, or want either of them in that office, but of the two, I prefer the nut-case to the turn-coat. Put another way, I would probably be willing to serve under Bush, but would never serve under Kerry. With Bush I would at least know that the primary enemy would be in front of me. I can tell you from personal experience that this is at least a little consolation in battle, even if the battle plan is a disaster, and the officer-in-charge a little too gung-ho.

All this in case anyone might be curious.

Bad Hats

I've been spending quite a lot of time out in the eastern stretches of Oregon lately, and the other day found myself nearly out of gas in a little town named Fossil. As far as I could tell, the town only has this one gas station, and as I pulled into it I was immediately concerned - only one grade of gas is sold here, and it has an 84 octane count, considerably lower than the octane needed to keep the engine of my 88 BMW convertible "happy." As I stepped out of the car, a stocky little boy came out of the station and began to take the hose down from the pump.

"Wait a minute," I said. "I need gas with a higher octane number than this. Do you have an additive or something in there that will take care of that problem?"

"Surenuff," mumbled the boy, and he darted back into the station. He had a yellow plastic bottle in his hand when he came out only a few seconds later, and we proceeded to read its label together. After some stumbling over pronunciation and measurements, we determined that it would, indeed, take care of a fourteen gallon tank, and he went about the serious business of filling up the car.

"Are you the owner of this establishment," I asked?

He grinned a sheepish little grin and said, "Nawww. This is my daddy's station. He's back there (motions towards the service bay), working on a car."

I ambled over to the doorway, looked in and nodded to the man, who nodded back and then returned his attention to the engine compartment of a very old and beat up Buick Le Sabre.

"What's your name, son?"

"Kevin," said the boy, all seriousness and attention to the business of filling up the tank.

"How old are you, Kevin?"

"Twelve," he said, and puffed out his chest a little. "Twelve going on thirteen."

I'm happy that child labor laws haven't kept this kid from having something productive to do this summer, because Fossil doesn't appear to offer a whole lot for a boy Kevin's age.

The town takes its name from the incredible abundance of fossils once found in the area, and is just down the road from the Clarno Unit of the John Day National Monument. I'd been visiting with the coordinator of the Hancock Field Station, and had planned to head back to Portland immediately when my empty tank forced me into Kevin's station. The population sign says there are 425 souls in Fossil. There's not a lot to it other than a couple of reastaurants, Kevin's gas station, and a very old dry goods store. I went into this throw-back to the past before I headed back to Portland, and ended up buying the World's second ugliest hat. There were only two to choose from, a green one and a gold one. I picked the muckle-dun-green job, which has a gold embroidered elk on one side of the crown and a shiny black decal of an elk head on the other. Crowded as that makes it, there is still room for the words, "ELK-A-HOLIC between the two images. I had to have it.

I left the Worlds ugliest hat (the gold one) for the next desperate shopper. It has some equally hideous graphics on it as well, but it's the copy that takes it over the top: FISH-A-HOLIC.

Drowned Rats

I had a lot of important things to do today - the kind of work schedule that has you running all over the house, feverishly creating lists on irregularly shaped scraps of papers in every room, and then running all over town, cursing yourself for leaving all those important documents back at the house.  I was just finishing a proof-reading chore for a friend of mine - who is currently gripped in the jaws of a tough doctoral program and really needs the extra set of eyes - when I heard my cat, Dixie, let out that tell-tale cry she produces whenever she has brought a "surprise" home for Daddy.  I quickly wrapped up the proof job and headed upstairs to see what poor, defenseless creature she'd packed home this time.
 
If you are a cat owner - or even if you are simply familiar with cats - then you know that the really good ones are almost always killing machines.  You know also that keeping even one around the house is a sure to result in fewer birds and small rodents around the property.  And, It is likely to result in a more carnage strewn around the interior of the house as well.  For example, we had a cat named Boris when we lived in Dallas, Texas, many years ago.  Boris was a wonderful alley cat who just walked into the yard one day and decided to hang around for the next seventeen years.  Boris was a huge cat, and his favorite form of recreation was to take down squirrels.  I'm not talking about the namby-pamby little gray squirrels that you find up here in the Northwest - these were Texas size fox squirrels, the kind that cause even a full-grow dog to think twice before they tear into the fray.  Boris was, of course, very proud of his hunting skills and liked to show off by leaving the headless bodies of his squirrel victims lying in the middle of my wife's art studio.  She was always very grateful.
 
At any rate, when I heard Dixie's tell-tale yowl, I knew I would be faced with the unpleasant task of retrieving the corpse (or, worse still, the still-living battered body) of her latest hunt.  But I wasn't prepared for the fact that this particular victim was a still-blind juvenile rat pup about two inches long.  The poor creature was just sitting on its haunches, bobbing it's little head around, its nose going a mile minute and its little eyes scrunched as tightly shut as possible.  Dixie was sitting directly across the hall from it, and when I came closer she uncharacteristically let me get to the creature without complaint and simply sauntered off into the living room to have a good lick.
 
So, there I stood, small beast in hand, trying to decide what to do next.  Typically there is not much left for me to do in these cases but to dispose of the remains in the trash barrel outside.  Oh, in rare instances, the critter appears to be able to function on its own, so I give it a rest in a box or bucket, and then take it off somewhere in the yard where I can release it without the cats getting to it right away.  But in this case, the next steps were not all that obvious.  There is something about the helplessness of a blind baby creature of any kind that typically dislocates the decisive part of my brain, particularly where a dirty deed may be required.
 
I hate killing and killers, so it is probably crazy that I keep cats.  But most of the time I view their native instincts to be positive forces in this neighborhood.  The rodent populations are absolutely thriving, and were it not for the various cats around here I am sure we would be as overrun with vermin as we are with the raccoons and slugs.  Still, every once in a while the cats get a humming bird or some other delicate and harmless creature, and I find myself both disgusted and depressed.  Now, faced with the duty of determining this baby rat's fate, I found myself even more distressed than usual.  My first instinct was to find that old terrarium I had stashed in the garage and set up a nursery.  But then I thought, "This is a RAT, for God's sake!  The kind of filthy beast that was (partly) responsible for the hideous deaths of millions of people not all that long ago.  He could even be carrying rabies right now, for all you know.  Kill the little devil and get it over with!"
 
About this time the little raised its little head, bobbed it hopefully in my direction, and made little gargley mewling sounds.  I immediately lost control and, after quickly placing the little guy in a plastic cup lined with shredded napkins, I dashed into the garage to find (1) the terrarium, and (2) the syringe.  I keep the syringe on hand for things like getting glue into tight places in furniture, or for shoving worm mash into reluctant baby bird beaks.  No luck on the terrarium, but I found the syringe almost immediately and was soon back in the kitchen, trying desperately to get the pup to swallow a bubble or two of warm milk.  I was in the middle of my third pass with this substitute nipple when I paused and considered what was going on here.   This was, after all, a rat pup, and I was a being an idiot to try to sustain his little life beyond the next several minutes.  No was certainly no future in this household for the little guy, and putting him back outside for nature and/or the cats to finish off was too cruel to contemplate.
 
So, it was time to say goodbye to the rat baby.  But, how to do it?  I have spent a lot of my life in rural environments and am very familiar with the occasional need to end a suffering creature' s life.  The first time I had to do the deed myself was when one of our dogs had his back broken by a passing car up on the highway.  I was 12, and used my brand new .22 rifle to do the job.  It was probably the hardest thing I had to do for the next eight or nine years.  What I learned then, and was to learn many times again, was that it takes a lot more time and effort to kill something than you might think, regardless of the critter involved or the method of "deliverance" chosen.  Guns and bullets are probably the quickest and most humane methods, but they are a little excessive when it comes to things like broken birds or lost rat babies.  Freezing is nice and "sanitary," but it is a very lengthy process and - as I once discovered with a sparrow I attempted to dispatch without resorting to one of the more gruesome methods - can take more than a day to be certain of the results.  In the end, perhaps the simplest and most humane way is to drown the thing - which is what I proceeded to do with the little rat baby.
 
It was a pretty gut wrenching thing, I must admit, and I ended up crying pretty much as hard for that damned rodent as I did for that wonderful Shepard I left dead in that Arkansas hay field almost fifty years ago.  But as I bundled up the little rodent's body and gently put him to rest in a corner of the garbage can, I found myself suddenly marveling over how deeply we humans tend to connect to the animals and other living things in this world.  When we look at ways to describe our species that might show how we most differ from other living things on earth, maybe we should focus on this deep and totally natural connection we have to the incredible living world around us, rather than to, say, our "intellectual" or linguistic abilities. 
 
So the deed is done and I will get back to my chores again in a minute.  Pouring my heart out into this electronic maelstrom called the internet has helped me feel a little better.  Pity it couldn't do anything for the rat.....
 

No Spiders Today

For the last few years I have become accustomed to raising the lid of one of my outdoor storage boxes and finding a hundred or so tiny little spiders making their break for the great outdoors. The egg case is almost always in the back-right corner of the box and the jail break usually takes place in early June. This year the egg case was there, right in its designated place, and I checked it daily all through late April and early June. No action, I am sorry to say, and by mid-June I wrote it off as a lost cause. I guess the very hard freezes we had this last winter did the poor little buggers in, because I have been scrupulous in regard to keeping chemicals and the like away from the nest.

When I lifted the lid this afternoon, I felt an unusually sharp pang of sorrow at seeing the now-moldering nest hanging there on the plywood. I didn't realize until today how much the appearance of those little guys mattered to me. You see, the way these newly hatched spiders behave is to hike out to some promontory where the wind blows by unimpeded. Once there, they turn into the wind, hoist their tiny spinnerets into the sky, and shoot out a relatively long thread of spider silk. When the air catches this thread, the spider lets go of terra firma and is instantly airborne. What really captivates me about this moment is that the spider has no idea - nor do we - of the fate that ultimately awaits the tiny creature when the wind has completed its portion of the event. God alone knows where that minute speck of protoplasm and related ganglia is headed.

The spider is, of course, simply doing what spiders do, and I would be the last to advance any notion that might anthropomorphize its behavior. Still, for all of that, I find the spider's act wonderfully emblematic of how each of us must ultimately lead our lives, if we are to be as human and free as possible. And, while this knowledge sometimes fills me with a wonderful, existential delight, it also sometimes fills me with a deep and almost inexpressible sorrow.

Cat Behavior

My cats have been acting strange lately.

Think about that for a moment.

Ok, I have two cats and their antics have been more extreme and bizarre than usual.

Jack has been climbing trees and jumping from branch to branch, occasionally landing on one that is so small a blue jay would make it sag. What typically follows is a lot of wild claw action as Jack desperately scrambles his way back to some part of the tree that will support his weight. The other evening, enticed by a preening chickadee, he pulled this stunt and propelled himself across a considerable expanse of empty space. He ended up on what can only be called a twig. His life passed before my eyes, while shredded bits of leaf and branch rained on my head. Somehow he made his way down without falling. Once on the ground, he crouched at the base of the tree with a very strange look on his gray-stripped puss, and then galloped at top speed up the neighboring tree, only to repeat the same antic even higher off the ground. I had to leave the area - my nerves were shot.

Dixie, the other weird creature, has been on a killing rampage - mice and birds and dragonflies and anything else that attempts to move in the back yard. They are going down in droves, with one pitiful carcass after another showing up at the back step, or in the study. She is doing the bulk of her dirty work in the back gardens, and has perfected what I call the "ICBM Lunge." This is a perfectly perpendicular leap of nearly five feet that brings her instantly up to hummingbird level. Once at full elevation she explodes into a dozen or so wildly swinging paws. She's deadly accurate. The other evening my wife and I were sitting on the back porch, gazing serenely across the now tall and lush gardens, when Dixie rocketed into view among the day lillies. Poised at the apogee of her leap and batting away at an unsuspecting bumblebee, her copper colored body - caught in the last rays of the setting sun - somewhat resembled a lake trout in full and glorious flight.

I wonder if there's maybe too much mercury in the cat food?

Tree Trivia

There's a large, beautifully shaped magnolia tree in the back yard. In the spring this tree is almost totally covered in blossoms, each one roughly four inches long and wide. The dominant color is pinkish white, and the perfume can be pretty heady.

There's a trade off for all this gorgeousness, of course. I think of it as Nature's Law of Compensation, which states that, "For any wonderful thing encountered there is an equally awful thing that must be dealt with." This is the same law that virtually guarantees that the most beautiful people you will ever meet are also among the most vapid or hopelessly screwed-up ones as well. With this tree the trade off is the incredible mess it creates in the yard when it is done knocking your socks off.

First, sometime in late April/early May these flowers drop to the ground in deep drifts of rapidly dissolving petals, creating a stinking, slimy mess that takes several days to clean up. The tree, by then, is covered with tons of shiny new leaves, and for a few days it simply sits there looking almost as beautiful as it did when it was festooned with flowers. Then, beginning in early June, it begins to drop its seed pods.

The seed pods for this variety of magnolia are about two and a half inches long by three eighths wide, and resemble small pickles. Once off the tree they begin to turn black and desiccate. These pickles are just the right shape to torpedo their way deep into the grass (making them very hard to rake up), and just the right texture (100 grit sandpaper) and weight (about .085 ounce) to resist the suction of a Toro recycling lawn mower. Picking these little devils up turns out to be best accomplished using a pooper-scooper. And picked up they must be, or the yard will soon be as buried in a layer of pickles as it was in snow bank of flowers. Besides, they compost quite nicely.

As I began the irksome task of picking up pickles this time around, I began to wonder just how many pounds of "fruit" this particular tree produces. So, I counted them. The process was pretty simple: First I collected enough to fill a two-and-a-half gallon bucket, which happily turned out to be right at or around a thousand pickles. Then each day I would pick up all the pickles I could find, keeping track of the number of buckets as I went along. I kept the process going for two weeks, until the rate of fall dropped enough to make it possible to ignore them, and was amazed by the production results: approximately 30,000 pickles fell in the two week period, which works out to about 160 pounds.

I can hardly wait until the fall, when the mass of leaves from this incredibly messy tree begin to make amber and orange drifts across the backyard...

Reed College Seeks....

...a director of career services (Chronicle of Education). Reed is a (very) liberal arts college located in the not-so-liberal city of Portland,OR. It ranks third nationally (the ad says) "as a per capita producer of Ph.D.s." What struck me as wonderful about this ad is that one of the "preferred qualifications" is a "refined sense of humor." I haven't seen anything so wonderful since an ad for a college president at a California college that listed "high tolerance for ambiguity" as a required skill set.

What does "a refined sense of humor" in academe look like, I wonder? Someone like Dave Barry could have a field day with that one (Dave Barry, Opus, and Get Fuzzy are about as refined as I get). And what is there about "career services in a liberal arts environment" that would make a refined sense of humor a preferred skill set? I blush to ask.