A BIT OF SURVIVING HARD TIMES

Well, when the news is as bad as it’s been on some fronts lately and I find myself starting to get overwhelmed by it, my mind turns to other sources than the media for inspiration, meditation and rejuvenation. I learned that from my infamous Grandpa Seamus.

When they were young and Grandma Molly used to get real upset about the Depression news, Grandpa Seamus would invariably just real calmly get up, cross the room and turn the radio off. Then he’d walk out on the porch, put his weathered brown hands on the rough pine wood rail, and let his eyes drift to the majestic snowcapped Trinity Alps which rose like ice-shaggy Nordic gods and goddesses all around him.

If, when he walked back inside, Molly had turned the radio back on, he quietly unplugged it, tucked it under his arm and put it on a shelf higher than she could reach. He never said a word and he wasn’t angry. She knew that and since she wasn’t either…

Then, he’d go out to the barn and saddle up their two horses, Morgans both, while she got on the telephone box, cranked it and got ahold of Thomas Lightoot and his family to ask them to watch the place for awhile. At first, that was just the ranch. (Later, after their second daughter ~ and the one who survived ~ was born, it included her, as well.)

Then together, they’d pack their saddle bags and their blanket rolls, check the bandoleers and clean and oil their 44 caliber Colt revolvers and the Winchesters each of them owned. Yep, just like Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea, except Seamus looked like Glenn Ford and Molly favored Jessica Lange.

Together then, they rode into the peaks that had sustained them for so long and which hadn’t changed much in anyone’s recent memory. They lived off that land, as high mountain and allegedly barren as it might have appeared to those who didn’t know it. They fished by wading upstream and catching rainbow and German Brown by hand. They sparked flint to dry moss. They watched deer gather at dawn watering and sated eagles soar endlessly overhead, benevolent masters of their domain. They avoided brown bear by keen noses and cougar by knowing tracks and not crossing trail. They weren’t armed to protect themselves from these, but from men who came into the Alps for not the best of reasons.

And yes, now as I reflect on it, in some ways, it’s like they recreated themselves as Adam and Eve, with the snake being the radio Seamus unplugged and set on a high shelf.

I don’t know all of what they did on those rides and my experience is based on some of those times when Seamus and I did that. But yes, I suspect they also made love, teased each other, played tag, etc. That’s the way of it with folks born and raised in the Trinity Alps. And, I suspect, elsewhere. That "inner child" is still alive in most of them, right up to the end.

I do know for certain that Molly came back a lot calmer and embarrassingly (for her) in blush. And while she stabled the Morgans, Seamus got the radio down off the shelf, put it back where she listened to it, plugged it in and turned it on. Together they carried in the saddle bags, bedrolls, firearms, etc. While he started a cook fire in the Fraser potbelly, she called the Lightfoots to thank them and to say she’d be by to return the favor, meaning in this case, eggs from the henhouse.

In the years ahead, this ritual was to stand them well, even when it couldn’t always be observed in the specific. During the Depression, the army stopped buying horses and Seamus ended up riding shotgun on a prison van that delivered convicts from the county seat in Redding to the state penitentiary, Folsom Prison, not far from Sacramento.

It was one hundred eighty miles down a highway that followed the meandering and sometimes serpentine Sacramento River. In its early days, that highway was tenuous at best. Between the driving rains and the tule fog of winter and the hot and relentless jungle humidity of the summers, it posed considerable challenges even to hay wagons.

Seamus had a couple of close calls and Molly begged him to find another job. There flat weren’t any and when he didn’t, she took off on a train from Redding to San Francisco and stayed there for awhile. She had what we learned from her diaries after she died, some extremely interesting adventures. We never knew, completely, because he never talked about it, what it was like for Seamus to come back to a ranch with no wife.

Grandpa never asked her to come home, though, and it wasn’t because he was too proud. It was because he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. She had to come home because this remote ranch in the Trinity Alps, with him, was home. Her home.

Folks I’ve spoken with who remember them during this period have said that Seamus’ normally alpine blue eyes were gray a lot. And that he was considerably more taciturn than usual. This for a man who was even more legendary in the Alps for that than Calvin Coolidge was elsewhere.

The turning point for them was in 1938, I think, when a blizzard struck especially hard and out of nowhere. It froze the Alps and turned the Sacramento Valley into a flood plane that stretched as far as one could see. The prison van Seamus was guarding didn’t make it. But he did.

To this day, no one knows what he went through to get home. But, like I said earlier, it was one hundred eighty miles or so to Redding and it took him a week. He stayed overnight and then it was three days or so on snowshoes, with a pack full of tinned goods, back to the ranch, not knowing what to expect but mostly figuring on frozen hell.

As he crunched the final few yards through the snow cloaked forest which surrounded the ranch, he caught a gleam of light through the trees. His throat got thick, his heart started hammering and his eyes rolled to the Heavens in the briefest but sincerest of prayers.

On the porch waiting for him was Molly in deerskin, holding a lantern in one hand and her Winchester in the other. She was standing in the doorway next to a mountain lion hide stretched on the outside wall. And from their cabin came the smell of roasting venison. He looked at her and she nodded, so he came on ahead. And at the bottom of the cabin steps, he got out of his snowshoes and unslung his back. As she stepped aside to let him in, he handed her a brand new radio.

They stayed married for 55 years and he passed on first. She followed him less than a year later. The ranch on which they lived is now at the bottom of Whiskey Lake, in Shasta County, (Northern) California.

They’re gone now then; all physical traces absorbed back into the earth from which they both came, at some point in time or another. They’re at peace with the planet and the planet with them.

Has their time among us meant something and does it still? I suspect so. I’m still here. And I doubt seriously if I’m alone in those regards, eh?

Thanks, then, for the ear. Take care, stay well and God Bless. Until next time…

With thanks to Mike Browne and the Tomatoman Times TomatomanMike, for the example, and my god-sent brother Dennis for the nudge.

Rusty

SOMETIMES “LOSING IT ALL” IS NOT QUITE ALL IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE EITHER

                        

For a man of considerably modest financial means, I've been blessed with a real interesting circle of friends. One of them lost a million dollars in the stock market just about the time I found out I qualified for unemployment and am therefore not in immediate danger of imminent collapse.

Like most rich folks I know, he worked hard for it and for the right reasons. He figured that the more money he made, the better he could provide for his family. No, he wasn’t born into whatever it is we call the financially better off than most of us are. And at a year shy of 50, he’s wondering whether it’s all been worth it because in all this struggling, he sort’ve got out of touch with the people he’s doing it for and now what he wishes for most is love.

I may be naïve, but in my experience, that happens to all of us, at some point in time or another. I’ve seen what it can drive a person to, especially in hard times, and what it can drive a community, a region and a nation to, as well.  As tragic as it is, sometimes it can happen for a good reason, though.

In the first place, at the rate this high lifestyle is costing the planet, if it’s not slowed down some, there’s going to be less and less to pass down to our sons and daughters, and their sons and daughters. That’s one good reason to re-evaluate our priorities. And whether over-industrialization is causing the greenhouse effect or not, it’s certainly not helping it any. I’m sure that streets with horse-drawn transportation didn’t smell real good but I can’t imagine Chicago a century or so ago ever ranking out as bad as LA does on a warm commuter evening today.

Second, when we’re working as hard as it takes to make more than we really need, we’re sacrificing the enjoyment of it. We’re stressing out, shortening our lifespan and guaranteeing that most of what we’ve got left isn’t going to be that much fun either. More importantly ~ at least in my house ~ we’re not being there for those who love us and need to be loved in return.

Third, it’s hard to pay attention to things going on in the larger world when we’re constantly that tired. It’s easier to react than it is to think things through. None of us, from the meekest to the mightiest, makes the best decisions under that kind of stress.

For Americans, at least, there’s something else that happens to us as a nation. We forget that this is a land where all of us ~ regardless of any other qualifer except being a human being ~ are equal under the law and in the eyes of that God In Whom We Trust. We forget that we’re a family and that families pull together, however much they may disagree, bicker and spoil Thanksgiving consistently. We forget that deep down inside, most of us want the same basic things and that maybe it’s just a matter of scaling down the size of that stuff before the planet gives up on us or we kill each other in the quest of more rooms than we can live in and more cars than we can drive at one time.

Maybe when we don’t have so much stuff to take care of, we’ll find more time to enjoy what we’re really doing this all for. Maybe love’s not supposed to come with so high a price tag. And maybe losing it all is really a chance to start over and do it right this time.

I sure hope so. I’d hate to think we’re going through all this for nothing.

IF JOHNNY COMES MARCHING HOME

                               

Last week, one of the young people in my life announced that he’s joined the United States Marine Corps and will be leaving for basic training in San Diego shortly before Christmas. The news hit me harder than anything in recent memory and the pervasiveness of a silent cyclone of emotions has colored my thinking in every other regards as well. Somehow, I sense I’m not alone in these regards. More precisely, I hope I’m not.

This young man has signed up for a full four year enlistment in the toughest branch of the American armed services. They’re generally first on the scene and they’ve traditionally taken the brunt of whatever action in which they’ve been called to engage. They have a justifiably proud and noble tradition. I’ve served alongside Marines; I’ve gotten drunk with them and I’ve gotten into bar brawls with them. I’m friends with several of them and the saying, "Once a Marine, always a Marine," is true. There are no EX-Marines.

There are a lot of them in Arlington, though, and in cemeteries in big cities and small towns from one end of this vast nation to the other. There are also thousands of them in VA Hospitals and private institutions and they span at least three generations. They are also continuing to kill themselves because they cannot live with the things they experienced in combat. I can relate. After 35 years, I still have bad dreams sometimes and Fourth of July is not my favorite holiday.

As things stand now, this young man will likely be rotated between Iraq and Afghanistan. If conditions continue to deteriorate in South America, a tour of duty down there is not out of the question either. His chances of making it home unscathed are slightly better than his chances of being killed. He’s a nice young man from a logging community. He hasn’t seen a lot of life yet but he loves his country and right now feels the call to duty. He figures that he can serve best with the best. There is absolutely no faulting either his motivesor his logic.

This young man isn’t just another number to me. He’s not some profile, some abstract concept, some rank and last name on a military table of organization. He’s a bright kid with a heart of gold and he’s got a lot to offer here at home. He loves horses and he loves logging and he’d like to try making a living using Morgans to haul out dead Douglas fir to sell to local mills or chop up into firewood and market to his neighbors. No, he hasn’t got the plan perfected, but he’s working on it. Hell, when it comes right down to it, he hasn’t lived long enough to have much perfected but his dreams. He’s shared some of those with me and they’re good, decent, wholesome, modest and do-able dreams. And they all go on hold the moment he boards his flight for San Diego in December.

He wanted to talk to me about what he’s facing and, as you can imagine, I dreaded that for the one question I was afraid he’d ask.

I told him that once he got to San Diego, forget everything in his life that came before and focus intensely on the moment. I told him to obey every order without question or without even thinking about it. I told him to ignore the grousing of his buddies or any of the things they might try to get away with as their way of coping with Marine discipline. I said to make friends with those who acted as he did. I told him to learn everything he could and to give 100%, whether he was polishing brass, peeling potatoes or learning how to survive after his last round was expended.

I told him as well to take the time between now and his December departure to spend with his girlfriend, his family, his friends and his community. These are the memories that make a difference. I grew up in a real dysfunctional family and I envied those of my buddies who had more of those kinds of memories than I did. I think in many cases, they came out of the experience better for them.

There were other things I could have told this young man but I’m not much for sharing war stories or even swapping them with other vets. When I was in college, I interviewed nearly a hundred of my generation’s veterans for a project the university had going. I got to be real good friends with one of them and was there when he killed himself because he just couldn’t forget what happened to all of his buddies but him on a hill in Vietnam.

I’m glad this young man didn’t ask me if I thought he was doing the right thing or more specifically, if I thought our country was doing the right thing. I don’t know anymore. The right thing for whom? Seems to me that the World Community doesn’t think it’s right for them or there’d be a lot more of them contributing militarily. Right for the Iraqis or Afghanis? Even a cursory examination of their history would suggest that they’ve been quarreling among themselves since time immemorial and no empire from the Egyptians on down has ever been able to change that. We’re not doing a very good job of it either. We’re spending a lot of money we don’t have and we’re losing a lot of young men and women who are a more vital resource than any we really have.

It also strikes me that the thing about making peace with guns is that you’ve got to maintain it with them too. Only in this case, the "guns" are our sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, husband and wives, boyfriends and girlfriends, mothers and fathers. I live with these folks. I see them by the hundreds daily because my home is three blocks from the University of Washington. I’m starting to see some of them after they’ve come back from places like Iraq and Afghanistan. Now I understand why it was so hard for people to look me in the eye when I got back.

It just seems to me we’ve got to come up with a better way. How many more of these kids do we sacrifice before we accept that there is more than one way to make peace in this world?

Tags: US Marines, Seattle, Washington, Rusty Miller, Merritt Scott (Rusty) Miller, patriotism, McCain, Barack Obama, peace, World Community, Arlington, Semper Fidelis, veterans, Veterans Administration, Iraq, Afghanistan, University of Washington, Vietnam, war, peace

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IN PRAISE OF BOTH PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES

September 12, 2008

I’m watching The View this morning and the guests are John and Cindy McCain. I like the McCains, even though I’m not of their political persuasion, which is why I’m not voting for John. But if he ever moves into the neighborhood, I’d like to meet him. He and I have a couple three things in common, including Vietnam service and a passionate love of this country. Even when we disagree, I know he has the best interests of the nation at heart. He’s also not afraid to compromise for the popular good. These are traits I value in a person and I think they’re necessary to be a good national executive.

But it’s Friday, and I don’t do politics on Friday. I’m just enjoying a man whose war record I certainly admire. To me, he’s a model of courage and character. He also recalls a quality not often mentioned in a political context anymore. John’s got integrity. If I needed help patching my roof before the next day’s rain, John wouldn’t wait to be asked. He’d be there with a pickup truck full of roofing material and friends. And towing the hot tar for the shingles. It would be a natural reaction for him. And when we invited him to have supper with us, we’d let him say the grace, even though we’re Catholics. He believes in the same god as anyone else and he’s said that a lot. I wonder if we were the only ones listening.

But, as I said, I’m committed to a more liberal agenda. However, I feel pretty much the same about Barack Obama as I do John McCain. They both have the qualities and character traits I value in a leader. They also have intelligent, dramatic, independently-thinking significant others who are not afraid to disagree with their husbands publicly. To me, that’s a kind of domestic checks and balances which translates into a fairer hearing for the opposing view. I like it that John and Barack came together yesterday. They lent the occasion the dignity, the austerity and the respect it deserved.

It rankles me that "my party" (whose symbol is a jackass, by the way) makes an issue of McCain’s age and appearance. It reminds me of the comments I heard about Mick Jagger in my native country of Canada after one of their concerts there. It was as though the audience expected them to stay young forever and resented them when they did not. Hey, I can handle someone feeling afraid of growing older, even though I cannot personally relate to it. What I CANNOT handle isafflicting the rest of us with an attitude we don’t own. Translated:

Some of us grow older.

Some of us grow better.

Some of us just grow.

Get over it, folks. Nobody except Peter Pan and the folks in Camelot live forever. The Stones still put on one heckuva concert and John McCain has the inner strength and dedication which is to his generation what imagination and daring are to the young. Like Barack Obama, he’s also got a loving family so for him, it’s never going to be THAT lonely at the top. And as John said on The View, with regards to Hillary Clinton, with whom he is friends and has a good professional relationship, "We’ve worked together before and we certainly will again." I’m absolutely certain he feels that way about the other senator who is also a colleague.

I also like it that both of them occasionally put their feet in their mouths. And that the people around them do too. I get nervous around superior people or those who promote themselves as more saintly than thou. Me. WhomEVER. I’ve seen perfectionists polish the joy right out of life. Those for and with whom I’ve worked tend to be so anally retentive you’d swear they were housebroken at the point of a 12 gauge over and under.

Noooooooope. Give me someone who occasionally trips on his lip. I could use a lighter moment or two and Lord knows how much the lesser gods enjoy mortal slapstick. I think that’s why I loved Dan Quayle so much. He was the best act on the Potomac for awhile.

Neither one of these men is going to achieve all he wants in office and that’s due in a large part to something else both seem to remember. They are there to serve the national constituency. They work for us, not the other way around. And I think we, the voters, have learned what fatal folly it is to surrender so much control. We’re going to be paying a lot more attention from here on out and we are going to be a lot quicker to demand a public accounting.

Under two generations of Bushes and under Dick Cheney, we came very close to establishing a dubiously benevolent monarchy in Washington, DC. While I can appreciate the nobility in both Barack Obama and John McCain, I am also an American and I will bow to no one except the gods of my choosing.

I’ve yet to kneel before another human being. I expect I’m not alone in those regards.

 

Tags: John McCain, Barack Obama, Vietnam War, political humor, America, Canada, Mick Jagger, The Rolling Stones, perfectionists, Dick Cheney, Bush, Merritt Scott (Rusty) Miller, Rusty Miller, Seattle, Hillary Clinton, The View, Washington State Democratic Party, Washington State Republican Party, Christine Gregoire, Patty Murray, Maria Cantwell, Ernest Callenbach, Herb Michelson, Peter Pan, Camelot, Democrat, Republican, Dan Quayle, William Lars Bladine, Jeb Bladine, Peter Wong, KUOW, University of Washington, Seattle Times, Seattle Weekly, Cream, Garrison Keilor, The Prairie Home Companion

THE SKAGIT VALLEY MASSACRE

                                     

The Skagit Valley, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skagit_County,_ some sixty miles north of Seattle, stretches like a northern Plain of Jars from the Cascade Mountains west to Anacortes and the San Juan Islands of the upper reaches of the Puget Sound. Encompassing some 1900 square miles and a population of 117,000, it is a quietly flourishing land but not a densely settled one. In many ways, it is a place time has left largely alone.

When I lived there, in the small fishing village of LaConner, my neighbors included novelist Tom Robbins, Washington State poet laureate Robert Sund and abstract artist Guy Anderson. Stormy in winter, radiant in spring, tulip fields lovely in summer and hauntingly lonely in autumn, it was, as well, a magical and pervasively mystical place, thanks in large part to the strong presence of the Swinomish (Indian) Confederation and their reservation on Fidalgo Island, across the Swinomish Channel from LaConner.

This week, thanks to a Tuesday rampage by a lone white male with a history of mental problems, six people up there, including a woman deputy sheriff, are dead and two are seriously wounded. At this writing, the media are still gathering information but enough has come out to easily visualize the bloody and random trail of carnage he left before turning himself into the Sheriff’s Department in Mount Vernon, the Skagit County seat. http://www.kirotv.com/news/index.html

In Seattle, it is a story which has overshadowed the war in Iraq, the aftermath of Gustaff and the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota. For all the diversity of our neighborhoods and what would only pass as a metropolitan lifestyle this far removed from places like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago and New York, we remain perhaps embarrassingly rural in orientation and predilection.

As much as we abhor this kind of violence within our own county and city limits, we accept it as a tradeoff. And as enchanting as places like the Skagit are, it’s tough to make a living if you’re not either from there or hired into the area. But we weekend and vacation there. Some of us retire there. A few of us, self-employed, do make lives for ourselves there.

For the rest of us, it’s the hope and belief that people can live among one another without fearing such excesses of human behavior. As naïve as that might seem east of the Mississippi, it’s worked in the Pacific Northwest pretty successfully, even in the boisterous days when timber was in trouble in Oregon and marijuana replaced it for awhile as the state’s top cash crop.

Long after the vigils, the tributes, the funerals and the memorials, we will wonder if this could have been prevented. We will pressure the courts to compel the man who did these things to explain why. Small town city councils will meet to discuss law enforcement issues and there will be an upsurge in the purchase of firearms and home protection systems. And neighbors will be watching other neighbors for indications of silent stress about ready to go ballistic.

In time, like after fire, flood, earthquake, volcanic eruption or sea-borne storm, the wounded will heal and the bereaved at peace. This will the subject of family Bibles and local history. Despite our innocence, we realize that of all the natural disasters which can and have afflicted us, what we are capable of doing to one another in rage, fear or madness is perhaps the most unpredictable and profoundly resonating.

We need not seek to know for whom John Donne’s bell tolls. Certainly it tolls for us.

 

THE SPEARGUN AND PEOPLE WHO DRINK WITHOUT GETTING THEIR LIPS WET

 

                                                   

 

One of the younger adults in my life just happened to drop by unexpectedly on Friday night last and managed to cross the moat, slip through the bars, sneak past assorted guards and turn a big brass key in a squeaky lock without me being aware he was within seven klicks of my Bastion on the Sound.

I complimented him on his stealth and after he locked the door behind him and hung up the big brass key, he walked over and sat down in the chair he bought and which is reserved for him. It’s an ergonomic wonder, I’ll give it that. It reminds me of a dentist’s chair but that’s not something you say to a friend about a chair he really likes. Also, it doesn’t take up much room and it blends in real good. I know this for a fact because I can’t recall at the moment what color it is. It’s also silent and that, I think, is its most endearing quality. Were its owner nearly half so reticent.

Especially when I’m watching a movie. I don’t go to theatres to experience films I really want to see because I find the audience reaction too distracting and, in many cases, waaaay too much rain on my parade. Also, the popcorn’s not that good and ridiculously expensive. And it doesn’t do any good to try to smuggle some in. The air’s too clean in Seattle and hot buttered popcorn with salt and a little garlic is harder to hide than the fragrance of a fifty year old bottle of English Leather aftershave or cologne.

So in order to totally experience a film, I need a private screening. I’m also 6’3" and I can’t do anything about that either, except slouch, which is not good for the spine. One grandfather sat tall in the saddle, the other at the wheel of a fishing boat, and it’s not good karma to break with that kind of family tradition. At least not in my experience. And yep, I’ve tried.

My friends know this about me and it’s a peculiarity among several they’ve come to tolerate, if not accept. Especially on a Friday night without a date and no one else to hang out with. Max is 24. I am almost old enough to be his grandfather. Tonight, however, was a little different because of the movie I was watching. And also because I had six pints of Irish ale and a big tub of popcorn on the coffee table, upon which I also had my stockinged feet.

I was watching Jaws and that baffled Max for a bit. Max does know that I was on destroyers in the West Pacific during the Vietnam War; that I have fished for trout in high mountain streams and lakes, for striped bass in the Sacramento River and for salmon off the coasts of Northern California, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia. I don’t talk about this stuff a lot but when it seems appropriate, I share an episode.

The reason Max was taken aback a bit was that he also knows something else about me. When I was stationed in San Diego, I enjoyed snorkeling into a grotto not far from the Scripps Institute in La Jolla. It was an era of intense activity at the Naval Training Center and elements of the First Fleet as well. But on that relatively remote stretch of beach, it was as though none of that existed

Especially in that grotto. The tunnel leading into it was about twelve feet down, some six feet in diameter and maybe fifty feet long. It opened into a benched dome I could stand up in and into which light filtered from a distant crevice or several. It was like a mini-cathedral to me and those Sunday afternoons in the summer of 1969, as good a place as any to think about helping kill people and maybe dying in the process. In some ways, in was an incredibly spiritual experience. In which a speargun had absolutely no place.

I wasn’t there to take from the ocean. I was a pilgrim passing through, as it were. I was not, until the speargun, a threat to any of those who dwelled on the lands I was crossing. I was this vaguely familiar pale-skinned lifeform in a bathing suit, swim fins, mask and snorkel. I stayed on the surface until I was ready to submerge. Then I took a deep breath, dove, entered, swam, surfaced and climbed out to sit down Indian style on smooth rock cushion and let the air that came in dry me out while I lost myself to my own thoughts and prayers.

One of the guys in my barracks back on the navy base was also into diving, as it were, but he was a SCUBA diver who loved to hunt fish for food. He had a deal going with a local restaurant, which paid him in either cash or in a meal for him and his friends. So he was always going out with a speargun and when he’d made enough from his business venture, he upgraded and offered to sell me his old one.

We were at the base EM Club having a pitcher with a bunch of his friends and the shark and barracuda and manta ray stories were hanging almost as thick as the smoke from 500 cigarettes. I wasn’t much for talking and there was no way I could steer the conversation, especially when it got around to me and my aquamarine lifestyle. They acted, Gerhardt and all his buddies, like I had a death wish submerging in those waters without protection.

They were pretty convincing so I put out about a third my pay for this speargun with surgical tubing and some real sharp spears. Once Gerhardt got his money, they started talking about women and since, at that time, I had a girl back home, I got ready to leave. But as I was getting up, Gerhardt grabbed my arm.

"Tomorrow’s Sunday. You going out?"

"Yeah," I replied, jerking free of his grasp.

"I got a bet going with these guys you won’t dive with that speargun. Life could get real interesting for you around here if lost money and got laughed at."

They went with me and made sure the speargun was loaded. I dove with it and everything went fine, or so it seemed. But when I got up into my personal cathedral, the breezes felt different. Instead of warming me, they chilled me. I started getting scared, something I’d never been before in this place. Something told me to get out as fast as I could and never, ever come back.

I dove, with the speargun, and as I was looking down that tunnel, something came in that filled at least half of it and I lost half my air with a short scream. I knew there was no way out except straight ahead so I just closed my eyes and started kicking as hard as I could. Speargun in tow.

I brushed past it in the darkness and it did not have scales. I cleared the tunnel, shot to the surface and started swimming back to the beach. My erstwhile companions were laughing at me and pointing at something beyond me. I was in no mood to look over my shoulder until I was wading to the relative safety of dry land. When I got there, I turned around, looked out over the stretch of Pacific Oceans I’d just covered and there was a young adult dolphin treading water and laughing his cetacean butt off at me.

So were Gerhardt, his friends and maybe a couple three dozen others gathered to enjoy a true communion with a sun which can cause melanoma and an ocean world which, if disrespected, can kill in more creative ways than any humans since Cro Magnon decided not to share his turf with Neanderthal.

So, Max knowing all this, waited until the second commercial and asked me why I was watching a movie which reminded me of something that frightening. In return, I asked him if he’d ever noticed that when people took a drink in that movie, their lips were never wet when they took their cup, mug or glass away, even in the cabin of Robert Shaw’sboat when old Jaws was closing in.

Max looked at me and asked me who I thought was going to win the national election for president.

I told him probably the speargun. And people who can drink out of a cup, mug or glass without getting their lips wet.

                                                             

The Shamrock Saloon Redemption of Noxious Ned Malloy

Hi again, folks.  Like most of you, I imagine, I like to take a break from the real pressing issues of the day, kick back and have a little fun.  I like to read and I’m a fan of our regional writers like Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Jack London and Robert Service; people who lived in the Pacific Northwest and wrote about their experiences here.  Here’s a story I just wrote which I hope brings you a tenth of the enjoyment their work and the contemporary works of bloggers like Tomato Mike (http://journals.aol.com/tomatomike/TheTomatomanTimes) have brought me.

Thanks for the ear, then, eh?  Take care, stay well and God Bless.

Rusty

 

The Shamrock Saloon Redemption of Noxious Ned Malloy

It was a hot summer afternoon in the remote granite peaks of the deep Cascades of northeastern Washington State and the town's only paved street bubbled and baked.  Inside the Shamrock Saloon, a dozen bikers looked on, handguns drawn, as their leader, Noxious Ned Malloy smiled and waved his big revolvers at the patrons seated at the bar and at tables beyond.

"You probably know this ain't a hold-up.  You fine, upstanding citizens got a reputation.  I'm here to try it out.  I want to find out just how far you folks will go to protect this honest, hard-working, peaceful little community."

Nobody said anything but neither did we drop our eyes.  They watched us watching them for a moment or so, and then from the end of the bar, hidden by two big loggers, our small Catholic priest, Father Michael McGuire, yawned and dismounted his stool.  His pint of Guinness in his right hand and the pool stick he'd been using most of the afternoon in his left, he looked at Noxious Ned with an upraised eyebrow and clicked his teeth.

"Lad, ye ought to be ashamed of yerself, coming in like this on the Sabbath.  And with such preposterous behaviour.  Does your sainted mother know you act like this in public?"

Noxious Ned looked at the diminutive cleric.  "And who the devil might you be, little man?"

"I might be Mary, Queen of Scots, you insufferable blight on the butt of all manhood," Father Michael replied amiably.  "But as it so happens, Ned, I'm here to save you."

Noxious Ned laughed.  "Save your breath, Father.  I'm beyond redemption."

"Well, lad, that's not for me to say," Father Michael shrugged.  "Your soul's not the issue."

"And why's that?" the bearded blond biker sneered.

"Because today is the day you were meant to die, Ned Malloy," our small cleric informed him simply..

Noxious Ned laughed.  "I just knew there was a real special reason I got up this morning."

That seemed to irritate Father Michael but it also could have just been the heat.  His tufted blue eyes simmered and there was the hint of a snarl in his voice when he said to Noxious Ned,

"Put your guns back in your holsters, Ned Malloy."

"Or what, old man?"

The Guinness from Father McGuire's warm pint glass seemed to float in slow motion through the air and as it splashed over the dumbfounded face of Noxious Ned, the pool cue slapped the guns from his hands and then moved in to double him over, straighten him up, double over again and then sort of let him collapse in a black leather and blue bandana heap on the sawdust floor.

By that time, Molly O'Hara, proud owner and proprietor of the Shamrock Saloon, had her "customized" 12-gauge auto on the bar and aimed at the other bikers in general.  One of them spat out,

"You can't get all of us with that."

"Nope," Molly agreed.  "Just the stupid ones.  You stupid?"

Father Murphy chose that moment to retrieve Noxious Ned's big revolvers and dazzled us for a moment or two with his handling of the venerable Colt .45 Peacemakers.

"Ah, Miss O'Hara, with all due respect, Lass, let's not be rude to our guests.  They're all bright lads with marvelous futures before them."  Then he cocked both big revolvers and asked the brave biker, "Lad, how many of you ~ smart and stupid ~ do you suppose the lovely Molly O'Hara and I could together account for?"

By this time, Noxious Ned was coming around and at Father McGuire's request, we helped him to a table and poured him a glass of beer.  Then we sat down with him.   He ran a boxer's hand over his face, rubbed his eyes, yawned and surveyed the scene for a moment.

Then he started to smile.  The smile turned into a grin and the grin, into a chuckle.  The chuckle grew to a laugh that mounted in intensity until it rebounded off the rafters and seemed to shake him to the very core.  Tears streamed down his cheeks and he gasped for breath.  When he finally got control of himself, he told his men,

"Put your guns away, lads, before they kill us all.  They told me what I wanted to know."  Then he looked at our fair Molly O'Hara and added.  "And if these 'peaceful citizens' still want our trade, get thirsty and tip big."

Molly O'Hara stared back at him and touched a raft of her flaming red hair.  The biker blushed and her shotgun disappeared back under the bar.  Ned then shifted his gaze to Father McGuire and the revolvers the little priest still held and with which he was showing off for the crowd.  Our priest looked at Noxious Ned in return and shook his head.

"They'll be waitin’ for you in that church at the other end of town, lad.  Next Sunday and every Sunday after that.  As long as you think you need them to be a man."

Ned lowered his gaze for an instant, then raised it back.  "Aye, Father."

Father Michael's eagle eyes bored quietly into Noxious Ned Malloy and a chill swept through us all, Catholic and Protestant alike.  Even though his voice dropped to almost a whisper, the intense fury of it carried to every ear in the saloon and it felt like he was taking hold of Ned Malloy's eternal soul as he warned him, ever so softly, ever so sweetly and ever so gently,

"And if you ever behave like that again in my parish, you disgrace to all Irish manhood, by your own sainted mother, Ned Malloy, I will use your guns to send you straight to Hell."

After that, things settled down and toward dusk, it got cooler.  Ned Malloy ended up getting out of the renegade biker business and became a mechanic who could fix everything from a McCullough chainsaw to a Chevy big block to an Evinrude 40-horse outboard.  He also courted Molly O'Hara and she let him chase her until she caught him.

Father McGuire apparently never did get ahold of Ned's soul though.  Molly O'Hara's husband has never been to that church at the other end of town.  Every year, though, at our annual town celebration, our little priest does some dazzling stuff with those six-shooters.  Ned watches and smiles and applauds along with the rest of us.

I guess he figured out he didn't need them big Colt .45 Peacemakers to be a man after all. 

until next time

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