SPIRIT OF 76?

FOR POSTERITY OR AS A POST MORTEM

11/04/08 – Seattle, Washington
By the time you folks are reading this, the election returns will likely be in. As I write this, they are not. I’m not thinking about winners or losers. I’m thinking about how the game was played. I’m also not just reflecting on the politicians but on the slice of constituency I’ve experienced offline in a neighbourhood comprised mostly of University of Washington students and faculty, working people and the mercantile infrastructure. I’m also thinking about several online chatrooms I frequent and which, by the demographics of their regulars, represent not only most of America, but a slice of Canada, the UK and Europe, as well.

I’ll be 60 this March and I cannot recall an election which brought out more of the worst in some and the best in some others. Offline, we don’t discuss politics that much and when we do, it’s always an unemotional "force field" analysis. Name calling, lying and defaming candidates or people of opposing parties is simply considered rude because it’s non-productive. It’s also embarrassing to witness. We have an innate sense of human dignity which may be passe east of the Mississippi but which forms a cornerstone of not only our political philosophy and world view, but the way we behave toward one another. To put it bluntly, regardless of who wins an election, we still have to live with one another as family, friends, neighbours and community.

There was a particularly rabid viciousness to the online constituency I witnessed. It was savage, vile, profane and, for the most part, extremely unimaginative. It involved personal attacks which had nothing to do with the issues at hand or the qualifications of the candidates involved. It presumed an inherent superiority of one party over another that was nothing more than another aspect of the national arrogance. We castigated George Bush when he turned out to be wrong, but when he wanted to play Patton in his race to the Rhine to avenge 9/11, we cheered him on. He took that, rightfully, as mandate and became not president, but monarch. It didn’t take a coup to put him on the throne. It took the constituency.

Since, by birth I am also a member of the International Community, I was ashamed of the conduct I witnessed. I am just as American as anyone born here and I was brought up in Northern California by Americans. I’m a Vietnam veteran, a journalist who has covered politics in three states and someone who has organised and run two political campaigns. My coverage was unbiased and the campaigns I ran were clean ones. Neither would have been possible without a constituency which demanded that level of integrity and eschewed the crap that doth make hypocrites of us all.

Regardless of who is inaugurated in January, Capitol Hill will remain. There will be no rioting in the streets, no Stalineque purges, no calling for heads to roll. The government will go on because that is what THIS government does. McCain is no more the devil than Obama. And regardless of who emerges victorious, the "vanquished" will still be a member of the Senate in good-standing, with the gratitude of his peers and supporters for giving it his all.

My concern is for the constituency and who they will blame next for their troubles in their race to escape personal responsibility. I will also be wondering what happened to the words of the people, by the people and for the people.
I wonder what the framers of the Constitution, many war veterans of the bravest experiment since the Magna Carta, would think of us now.

MY INSPIRATION: HOMEWARD BOUND, AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

                               

TRIBUTE TO HOMEWARD BOUND: THE INCREDIBLE JOURNEY

It’s said that the older one gets, the wiser one becomes. I’m glad that’s true, apparently, of most folks. The older I get, the weirder my life becomes. And so to adapt and adjust and stuff… Yeah, like THAT’LL work with you guys. (sigh)

I get my inspiration from some strange places. For all of my experience in LA and in the entertainment industry both as a staff magazine writer and under the mentorship of character actor and screenwriter True Boardman, Jr.; and despite the number of years I watched traditional hero in crisis saves the town, the country or whatever and even if he/she dies, they’re remembered forever movies for the courage to keep going, it’s like, "Hey, I was partly raised on a ranch but I did NOT come to town on a horse, okay?" (And not that there would have been one flipping thing wrong if I had, by the way.)

I was talking to animals before I was conversing with humans. For the first three years of my life ~ true story ~ I didn’t utter a single humanly intelligible word. They thought I was partially autistic. When I finally did open my mouth in their direction, I spoke in complete sentences. And they consulted upteen specialists before they asked Grandpa Seamus what he thought. He just shrugged and said,

"It’s obvious to me that up ‘til now, the lad hasn’t had anything to say to us."

He was right and I’ll allow as how I’ve been making up for it some since. I don’t consider myself a vain man but I do love the sound of my own voice. When it doesn’t inspire me, it puts me to sleep. I’ve noticed it has the same effect on most others. I don’t know what you call that in your family but in my house, we call it "a win-win situation".

The movie I go to for inspiration is a Walt Disney film called "Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey" http://aolsearch.aol.com/aol/search?query=The%20Incredible%20Journey. There have been two versions, both by Disney Studios, and I’m talking about the 1993 remake. (http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0211900/journey/incredible_journey.htm)

Though filmed in the Canadian wilderness, it’s about a family who moves 200 miles across the Sierra Nevadas to San Francisco and accidentally leaves their three pets behind.

It’s the saga of an aging but wise golden retriever Shadow (voice by Don Ameche), this pizza loving Peter Pan adolescent bull terrier with consistently more guts than good sense named Chance (Michael Fox) and this immutably prissy but surprisingly adaptable lady Himalayan cat, Sassy, (Sally Field) and what they endure to rejoin their human family.

It really works for me on several levels and not always in this order.

First, it’s a study in how diverse personalities unite behind a common goal. For these three, it’s following their human family to a new home.

Second, there’s no religion, politics, philosophy or any of the other things we tend to hide behind as human beings when we are confused or frightened by one another.

Third, these three make mistakes but it’s because they don’t judge one another by them that they learn so quickly and adapt so well.

Fourth, there’s an enduringly resonant sense of humour flowing through this film. It’s the kind that doesn’t involve hurting other people or mocking the way other folks think and feel. I like to believe it’s the kind of comedy that makes God smile. I suspect the Deity could use a gentle laugh now and then, especially considering what we, also His children, do to one another in our competition to be the favourite child. Harder for us, perhaps, than contemplating a universe with no beginning, might be accepting the notion that just MAYBE God alone has no favourite child.

Fifth, based on my experience in the woods, it’s realistic in terms of inter-species teamwork. And it’s a cooperative effort that has been going on a lot longer than human beings have been around. Ironically, we were a lot more that way once than we are now. As far as I’m concerned, that puts an interesting spin on Darwin.

The production values are flawless and panoramic. Ameche, Fields and Fox become the characters they portray so the casting, as far as I’m concerned, was perfect. One also has the distinct impression that these three were in the same room, at the same time, with three separate microphones, doing this like radio theatre. The musical scoring was beautiful and as right on the mark and mood as the photography.

There’s one scene where Sassy falls into a river and is apparently swept away for good (mournful music in the background, panning close-up on the faces of the dogs, panning to a sunset as the scene fades). The reunion is a tear-jerker, not the least in part because the cat caught fish and the younger dog learned to like them. (Not altogether surprising. Trout are my favourite meal fish as well.)

Emotionally, to me, it’s like when I start to get a little stressed, a scene will pop up and/or I’ll hear the music; remember the exchange between Sassy and Chance over dogs drool and cats rule, and the wise but stern voice of Shadow, reminding them that they need to get home and as fun as it might be for the two of them, this inter-species bickering isn’t helping any.

Perhaps lastly, it’s based on a children’s story published in 1952 by a Canadian lady writer named Sheila Burnford (http://library.thinkquest.org/CR0211900/journey/incredible_journey.htm) Now I’ll admit I’m prejudiced as far as Canada’s concerned, considering where I was born. But to me, any children’s story so simply set and crafted, in so naturalistic a setting, and which, in its time, has gone so far beyond the shadow of the Maple Leaf to reach so many, suggests that perhaps we have not lost our innocence entirely.

I hope not.

Thanks for the ear, then, eh? And until next time…

Tags: Homeward Bound: The Incredible Journey, Sheila Burnford, Canada, inspiration, Merritt Scott (Rusty) Miller, Mick McGuire, The Northstar Journal, humour, dogs, cats, wilderness, philosophy, films, Walt Disney, Disney Studios

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.