The Tavern At The End Of The Street

We measure things in lifetimes, and not necessarily long ones. Even a five-year-old talks about things she's known her whole life. It's hard to take the long view, if you're a human, which is why we're sucking up all the fossil fuel as fast as we can just in case we wreck our climate beyond redemption later. It's just the way we are.

Right down on the corner, there used to be a terrific little restaurant called Bernie's Southern Bistro, with a faithful staff and a friendly outdoor patio, and if you wanted to get your blood congealed to bacon-grease consistency, this was just the place to do it. Hush puppies, blackened catfish, fried okra, fried green tomatoes, fried pickles...you could get a salad. A "Fat Boy Salad." Everyone loved the place and now it's gone.

The owners of the building had renovations in mind. So for a couple years now it's been accumulating layers of graffiti, and finally now it's being stripped to the rafters. Plenty of young people talk about the old Bernie's as though it were a Portland institution, and for a short lifetime, if you're twenty, it was. But before it was Bernie's it was the Chez What? before the Chez What? moved down the street and then folded.

And before that, back when the street ambience ran more to plywood and iron window bars, it was Johnny's Jar Room, noted--although not widely--for serving beer in Mason jars. And before that it was the Homestead Tavern. It was the Homestead when we moved in 42 years ago. Our dog Boomer used to waltz in there for a bowl of Heidelberg and the barkeep would call us up to fetch her back. Boomer didn't smoke but if she had she could've done it right at the bar. Stuff changes.

Naturally, like everyone else, we figured that was all there was to know about 2904 NE Alberta Street, because history begins with us. But that was before the siding was removed, revealing a spiffy Coca-Cola mural dating from 1948. The owners had no idea it was there but it can't be saved on account of the high lead content of the paint. The nanny state doesn't allow unabated lead because it could lead to lower intelligence in children who might then grow up to believe wearing face-masks in a pandemic is sissified or treasonous, and we can't have that. Below the Coca-Cola mural was BILLY ROWE'S in gigantic lettering. As it turns out, Billy Rowe and his wife Doris owned the tavern in 1943, despite being Mormons, although God smote them for it years later, when they both died in a head-on crash. The churchly allegiance of the oncoming vehicle's driver is unknown.

I guess it was Duke's tavern after that, and no one seems to know when the mural was sided over, even though it happened well within Dave's lifetime and he grew up ten blocks away. We forget. We forget. It's just the way we are.

Now, before the new façade goes up, we can see the massive old planks of the building, presumably original, dating back to 1922, when the streetcar ran through. But squint harder at those planks and you can see what really came before: old-growth Douglas fir forest, home to life in crazy abundance, razed and ruined not that many lifetimes ago, never to return. We forget. We forget.

Duck! It's Betelgeuse!

The internet is abuzz with rumors of the imminent demise of the star Betelgeuse, but it also claims that illegal immigrants are allowed to vote and Hillary Clinton has people murdered, so I wouldn't get too worked up about the star. The huge bright star has dimmed appreciably in just the last month, however, which could be a precursor to its becoming a supernova, or not.

As awesome as that would be--you'd be able to see it in the daytime--it's probably fruitless to spend the night in a lawn chair waiting for it. You're liable to be chilly, and also disappointed.

Because although Betelgeuse is a big fat red star and is entirely expected to blow up sooner rather than later, "sooner" is a relative term: the human lifetime is not a standard measure for any number of things happening in the universe, no matter how we might feel about it. And besides that, the idea that Betelgeuse is going supernova at all is misleading. As a recent philosopher once put it, it depends on what the meaning of "is" is. If that sucker lights up the sky this month, it really did it in the fourteenth century, and we're only just hearing about it.

Betelgeuse is an Arabic word meaning Orion's Armpit. Orion, the Great Hunter, is the biggest brightest constellation in the sky and viewable from every hemisphere, right where he was installed by Zeus as a favor to a couple of goddesses. In spite of a nice set of nebulas below his belt he is universally assumed to be facing us, which makes Betelgeuse the star at his right shoulder. He is instantly recognizable by his belt and by the line of stars descending from it which we're going to go ahead and call his "sword," and never mind what those goddesses say.

Humans take everything personally. Orion might be a great hunter to some, but in some quarters he's a bison, and elsewhere he's a child's string game, like Cat's Cradle. In any case, even if you see a sword hanging from a belt, how it's hanging is a trick of perspective, because them stars ain't anywhere near each other.

Reminds me of the time we were admiring the view from East Zig Zag Mountain, from which five serviceable volcanoes can be seen, and a young woman asked me what the mountains were. So I told her. Mt. St. Helens on the far left, then Rainier, etc. She thanked me and went back to her picnic rock where I overheard her boyfriend explain that I was full of shit, because Rainier is to the left of Mt. St. Helens.

Which it is, from Portland. But not from East Zig Zag. Mt. St. Helens could have been spewing ash and geologist shrapnel into the air and he still would have called it Rainier, which (he further explained) is much bigger than that little dinky one I pointed out. (It's also fifty miles further away, Idiot Lips.)

So from here we see a nice big great hunter but if you could see the same stars from some other elbow of the galaxy it might totally be Mildred, The Needlepoint Artist. Hope her sore shoulder gets better.

Happy Birthday to my niece Elizabeth!

Pele's Flapping The Sheets

I've said it before. People take things so dang personally. One little thing goes wrong and it's all about them. Everyone bitches about the crappy weather on the weekend, but crappy for whom? There could be legions of salamanders who couldn't be tickleder about it, but nobody thinks about them. They think only of themselves.

I guess it's just our nature. We've got a hell of a thing going on in Hawaii right now that anybody should be honored to witness but it's being described as leaving a "path of destruction." Yes, it's possible you and your car and your house and your slower offspring and everything you've ever loved and cherished could be melted on the spot, but let's get some perspective here. This is clearly an act of creation, not destruction. You've got brand new real estate welling right up out of the ground before your very eyes.

We had much the same sort of event right here in Oregon not that many million years ago. Same kind of basalt flow. It flowed mostly westward at a decent clip until it hit the ocean and got chilly. Generally speaking, the basalt was said to flow at a rate a human being could outrun, although he would have to outrun it for a solid week. That was usually the sticking point, or would have been, had people been invented yet, but they hadn't, which cut down on the whining.

There are various ways in which molten rock meets blue sky. For instance, you could put a wedge of sea floor underneath the shoreline and keep shoving it down until it got so deep the pressure remelted it, causing volcanoes such as our own Cascade Mountains to pimple up about a hundred miles inland. But in the case of our huge shield-volcano basalt flows and the Hawaiian ones, it's because there's a hotspot underneath. Some spot in the deeper earth layers is perennially hot and churns out lava. Could be in the mantle, could be one floor higher; they're not sure. It's the spot where the fire goddess Pele sits and fans herself and complains that everybody's mumbling and the music is shitty now, and many people have left gifts for her as a bid for leniency, bouquets and leis and virgin teddy bears, but it doesn't work. (She wants chocolate.)

Pele doesn't move around, but the lithosphere above her does, so it twirls out a nice apostrophe of islands over time. In the case of the Hawaiian chain, it's the southeasternmost island that is newest and they are progressively older to the northwest. There's a volcano newer than Hawaii but it hasn't broken the water surface yet, and nobody counts it until they can drop a parking lot on it. That's another narrow-perspective thing people do.

Our own basalt flows have quite sturdied up the landscape for us. Apparently we are sitting on enough basalt that it could have covered the continental U.S. evenly up to twelve meters ("meter" is French for "yard"). We and our parking lots stand now as the westernmost legacy outpost of the old hotspot that is currently under Yellowstone. Ain't nothin' but heat coming up around Yellowstone and no end of wonders to behold, but even here you'll find people all cranky about not being allowed to annoy bison with their snowmobiles. If there were any justice in the world, these are the people who would get their asses geysered.

I think there are a lot of things everyone should be required to learn. Here's one that rarely makes the list: whichever patch of the planet you live on, you should know its story. You should know what got rammed or rumpled to give you your view; you should know why there are seashells in the middle of your prairie. You should appreciate how very tiny and ephemeral you are, and be humble, and enjoy the show, and try not to trash the place on your way out.

Imagine Regular Willy

Archie Bunker's in his chair, talking about a guy he works with. Why, the Meathead demands hotly, do you always have to call him "Black Willy?"

"So's you can tell him from Regular Willy," Archie says.

Well there it is. We're a long way from everyone getting to be Regular Willy. And no sooner do we  have awful events like last week's, when two black men were murdered by officers of the law, and five officers of the law were executed by a sniper on a personal mission, than all of America reacts with brief shock and retreats immediately to their own bunkers.

We do that because that's where we feel safe, with our own kind, and also that's where all our ammunition is. Dig in, and be ready to fight back.

We're a very defensive people. We're pretty sure everyone is out to get us. We are not really the home of the brave. We wouldn't be bristling with either firearms or insults if we were. Behind our bunkers, we sort through our arms.

Black men are all thugs.  Or look like thugs, which is kind of the same thing.
Cops are all racists. 
Black people kill the most black people.
We need more open-carry.
Not you, Rashawn.
No one gets pulled over and shot for no reason at all.
The sniper was a veteran who was ruined by our war machine.
The only thing that will stop a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun.
Unless the good guy is a black guy with a broken taillight and the bad guy is a cop.
You can't possibly know what it's like to be a police officer who takes his life in his hands every time he puts on the blue.

All sorted out?  Ready to aim and fire?

All righty! Let's get things rolling with a thoughtful essay about white privilege.

Are you calling me a racist? I'm not a racist. This is bullshit.

Okay sure. But if you can drive down the road and see flashing lights behind you and think oh crap and now I'm going to be even later and this is going to be expensive, but not even once entertain the notion that you might be dead soon, you may be benefitting from what some are calling privilege. If you can reasonably assume you might get in trouble for your own dumbass actions but not for who you are or how you look, you're being given the benefit of the doubt. And, no mistake, that's the way it should be. You get to be Regular Willy. Everybody should get to be Regular Willy. But everybody doesn't get to be Regular Willy.

If you're being introduced to the concept of white privilege, you're not being accused of anything. You're not being asked to apologize. Settle down. It's a call to empathy. You're being asked to consider that other people's experience is unlike yours. You're being invited to put yourself in someone else's shoes. A teenager being pulled over by a cop. Or, a cop. Or, for extra credit, a trained killer back from Afghanistan with a heap of rage and a gun. There are lots of shoes. If we're going to understand each other, we need to try them all on. It costs us nothing.

Imagine being a good kid. Or just a normal goofy kid who does stupid shit. And all your life you're followed around whenever you go into a store. Women cross the street to avoid you. You and your friends on the corner are regularly questioned by the police when you're not doing anything wrong, or you're pulled over for no reason. Over and over and over, yes sir, no ma'am. Your parents have had to teach you what to do with your hands and body when that happens so you don't die. Or, imagine being that mom or dad. How do you feel?

It should be so easy to imagine. If we could step just outside the bunker. If it weren't so comfortable in there. And there wasn't all that ammunition we'd be wasting.

And so now we witness our fellow citizens crying out in despair and screaming stop killing us, and count on it: a whole lot of white people are going to be affronted. They aren't killing anybody. They get their feelings hurt.

But they get to keep their sons.

I knew this guy, once. He thought it was nuts that black people are so worked up all the time. Overreacting. Like, buckle down, get over it, right? Get a job and ack normal. Same dude went on for hours about some rich lady on his mail route who looked all snooty at him like she thought she was better than him. Hours. One would think he could understand the sting of condescension and dismissal. And work from there to inconsequence and actual existential danger.

But because he has never felt mortally threatened by a cop, he can't imagine that police work might attract a certain percentage of bad-ass, dangerous bullies. Instead they're all brave heroes with really hard jobs to do, and their victims must have done something to deserve their fates. He simply could not imagine that if you kept your head down and stayed on the straight and narrow--you know, mostly--you would have anything to fear from the police.

Except our lives and experiences are not all the same. And if your reaction to black lives matter is all lives matter, you're not listening. You're behind your bunker, on the defense, and not paying attention to other people's testimony. And that is all that's being asked of you: that, right now, you consider that black lives are in fact disposable in a way yours is not. Jesus. Pipe down and just listen.

That won't kill you.

The Edge Of Flight: Part 2

When we last left the Nuthatch Family, a scrub jay has flown off to a tree, possibly with a nuthatchlet. I can't quite tell if the jay had anything--it was all too quick--but it does Not Look Good. I'm utterly bereft. I want to call the authorities. I want to call the President. It had taken a whole month to make this little dude, and also I'd just videoed him, up close and personal. I was invested. After a while Dave (the nuthatch) is back in the tree again. I wonder if there are any more babies in the nest. Then he goes into the box empty-beaked and comes out with stuff. And again. And again. It's like he's tidying up after a party, picking up the Solo cups and paper plates. There are clearly no more babies. I don't know how many there were; I don't know if I missed any earlier ones. Within an hour Dave is continuing to clean up and sitting on branches acting fluffy and flappy and flirtatious. Was he planning a new brood?

During commercial break I looked it up and it seems it's unlikely. Usually they have just the one nestful. I guess he's just a neatnik. I do see another nuthatch fly straight through the tree and away, and I don't get a good enough look to be sure, but it was slow, more prop plane than jet, so I think it's the first baby I saw. Good.

Then the Missus comes back. She flies into the nest box with Dave (the nuthatch) already in there, and then she turns around to fly out. But she's stuck. She's STUCK! HOLY FUCK! Her foot is all tangled in some nesting material/pine-resin glop and she's flapping like mad, but she can't go anywhere. Dave looks out and now they're snapping at each other, like he wants to get out but she won't let him, and she's snapping back I'm fucking stuck you idiot, take this shit off my foot, but he doesn't get it, and then he flies out anyway when she ducks.

She's picking at the stuff her foot is stuck to, but getting nowhere. I'm growing desperately upset. I don't want to freak her out by opening the window and working on her foot, and I don't know how I'd go about it, anyway. Dave (the man I married) looks out the window and says "Uh-oh."

"What 'uh-oh?'"

"Scrub jay on the fence. He's hopping closer. He's looking up. He sees her!"

Amazing how fast I can lose that hesitation. I fling open the window, put my hand out to cup her back and wings with one hand and free her foot with the other, and she takes one look at me and blasts out of there. She lands in the tree. Dave (the man) and I stare. Yes, she still has a foot attached. Yes, it's still working. She flies away.

And for the rest of the day, for hours, for hours, Dave (the nuthatch) sits on a twig and beeps. He beeps loud, he beeps long, he beeps fast and he beeps slow. He goes to the nest box to look in. He comes back out and beeps. The next day he's still at it. And the next. Beeping and beeping. Checking and checking. He's beeping himself hoarse. He keeps going in and out of the nest box to make sure. We don't see any babies. We don't see the Missus. They're all gone.

Perspective is a theme for me. I like to think of things from different perspectives. This little drama has many. There is the perspective of the insect being nabbed out of the air in the prime of its three-day life and jammed into a beak. There is the perspective of a nest of baby scrub jays, waiting for dinner. There is the perspective that this kind of drama is playing out all the time, everywhere, and we just aren't paying attention. There is the perspective from outer space, where all these scenes, and ours too, are revealed to be trivial. I should be able to accommodate all these points of view at once; I have that habit.

But I can't. This time I have my own perspective. And it's a lot like Dave's (the nuthatch's). And on this, the fourth day since his entire family went away, he's breaking my beepin' heart.