Off The Grid

Photo by Walter Henritze

A friend borrowed our cabin for a few days and, as she was amused to report later, her teenage daughter spent a considerable portion of her time there hanging out of the bedroom window with her arm craned out as far as it would go, trying to get reception on her cell phone.

I think you can get reception sometimes when the wind is right and the planets are all in a row if you walk out about a hundred yards and waggle your phone at the highway. You might need to swing a chicken too, I don't know. I don't know how any of this works. I don't know how the internet gets through the plasma in the air or if the cell phone system is vibrating in ether, or, really, which humors are involved at all. Because I don't understand any of it, I don't take it personally. Even at home, I can't count on being able to summon up a given website at a given time. Sometimes it works and sometimes it don't.

But here in the cabin it don't. Guaranteed. We got a land line for emergencies. Like if one of us drops dead, or forgot to water the cat. It's a Princess Phone. It works unless a tree falls over the wires, which does happen kind of often.

This place even has antique air. I don't know what the components of Cabin Smell are, but they surely include mildew, and maybe the aftermath of a mouse social. We bring Pootie up here because he likes to get away from the hustle and bustle of city life as much as anybody, and when he comes back home he smells a little fusty, like the cabin.

But if we decide to come up to the cabin for a few days, we can expect our email to pile up. We can expect voice messages to pile up. There's no way to let people know that we're not responding because we didn't get the message, and not because we're hammered with messages and haven't gotten around to it yet and might never. I put in my blog posts in advance, but what if my commenters suddenly conclude I don't love them anymore because I'm not replying? Can they wait a couple days before dumping me altogether in a snit? I wouldn't have believed it if, 25 years ago, you'd told me one day I'd get fifty letters a day, and a bunch of them would be people wanting me to

Like something. I used to get, like, one letter a year from most people. If I wasn't home to answer the phone, I never even knew it rang, and there was no answering machine. Communication used to have patience built right in.

Now I find myself concerned that some little cyber-snippet has gone unacknowledged. It's fretty.

Pootie is an expressive guy. "Pootie wants to know," Dave will say, as the Poot nods enthusiastically, "if there's any more chocolate." Nod nod nod. "Pootie wants to know," Dave will interpret, "if the basketball game is on." Nod. When we get home, I will press Pootie's head to my nose to inhale that rich, dear, complex aroma of dust and mildew and ferny woods. It makes me happy. Pootie is a great communicator. It's just that he has to be right there with you.

Hot On Hood

Basically, if at some point on a hike I say "it's just up here around the bend" and Dave says "you do realize we could actually die," you know the Price and Brewster family has had a normal adventure. Dave likes to anticipate the worst so that anything short of death seems like a bargain. I don't care if we die as long as I don't have to be aware of it beforehand.

In this case, we'd come up to Mt. Hood in order to get away from the heat. It was slated to be 100 degrees in town and theoretically the idea of being 6,000 feet higher, where in a normal year we might have snow, back when we used to have normal years, sounded cooler. I think the way most people do it is they drive up to the Timberline Lodge and slug beers inside where, if it's not actually air-conditioned, it is at least a massive enough building that it maintains an even temperature. We didn't do it that way.

No. What we decided to do was see about a few little trails we hadn't been on before. It's getting harder to find those. But we discovered a little nest of them at the end of a dead-end road and we started exploring. It was hot in the shade. But the trails all interconnected, and weren't long. Which gave us plenty of options to bail out. There was a little lake with salamanders in it, a very good sign. The network of trails was like an overturned bowl of spaghetti, and we figured we'd noodle around until we'd exhausted them.

And then we came upon a sign at an intersection. One trail said: "Timberline Lodge 2.5 miles." Really? Dave looked at me. I looked at Dave. Done deal. We can do 2.5 miles on our hands without shaking out pocket change. There's beer at the Lodge. Off we went.

Well, up we went, at a dead trudge. The trail was boulder-strewn and dusty and there wasn't any shade on it anywhere. It was like a spa for scorpions. If it wasn't a hundred degrees, it was one whisker-on-a-desert-rat shy of it. We had water, but salt began to crust on my face. That's about when Dave began to talk about death. He doesn't have a good sense of direction, and it's easy for him to imagine that the trail will go on for fifteen miles and they'll have to send out trained corpse-sniffing badgers to find our papery remains.

And yet, we did paw our way to the top, and Timberline Lodge was there as advertised, and they still sold beer, and the nice waitress allowed as how we could supersize it for a buck, and sure enough a crane came in and lowered a couple massive glasses onto the table for us. And Dave had a second one just to check quality control, and we went outside, where it was still possible to bake a pizza on one's backpack, and, with almost no forethought, and for the first time in forty years, we stuck our thumbs out and got us a ride to the bottom of the mountain.

Took all of thirty seconds. Evidently we don't look very menacing anymore. "Or," I said to the nice snowboarder who picked us up, "maybe after all these years I've still got it." Actually, I don't know if I've still got it, but I admit I did stick it out a little.

"Or maybe he's still got it," the man said, hooking a thumb back toward Dave. God bless America. Everybody's a little more relaxed. It's all good, as long as someone's still got it.

Red, White, Blue, and Dust-Colored

So they're going to redesign the Postal Vehicles again. Probably a good idea. Mail carriers deliver mostly packages now and their vehicles are set up to deliver antique letter mail from twenty years ago. But they used to change the vehicles every now and then just to rattle the crew.

I personally preferred the ones we started with in the '70s. They were little right-hand-drive Jeeps and you could reach everything you needed from the front seat without dislodging a butt cheek. Each one had its own idiosyncrasies. If you were a lowly sub, you'd get to choose something particularly quirky from the bottom tier of the fleet. It took a certain amount of mental agility to switch from the one with the window that wouldn't go down to the one where you had to stand on the gas and the brake at the same time to modulate your speed. I hadn't been working there too long before the day I tried to save time by sliding open my door as I was coasting up to a stop, and it slid clear off its rails and cartwheeled down the street behind me. Fortunately no bystanders got decapitated but I do remember looking in my rear-view mirror and thinking: even without a decapitation event, this isn't ideal. I could probably get in trouble for this. But I backed up, hauled the door off the pavement, and stuck it back on the rails good as new, making a mental note that Jeep 998 is the one where you have to be careful of the door, and if I had a choice, I'd try to get the one where the engine didn't turn off even when you took the key all the way out. Because that one had a stellar emergency brake.

A tidy bunch

Big change after the first couple years. The Jeeps were repainted WHITE red and blue from the former BLUE red and white. The extra paint gave the rivets a little more integrity. We got used to the white. Everyone liked to use Route 532's Jeep because the carrier, a neat dresser with aviator shades and a lounge-lizard beard, had it tricked out with wall-to-wall carpeting. For me, it didn't make up for the cigar stench or the fug from the pine-tree deodorizer.

The Jeeps were troublesome but entirely too useful and soon enough we had them all swapped out for Ford Pintos. The big hump running down the middle for the power train proved to be a pain in the ass to arrange mail trays around, but worse, Pintos were already famous for blowing up whenever someone tapped them on the rear bumper, which is probably why the Postal Service got them cheap. And whenever we drove them up to a stop sign, we could hear an ocean of fuel sloshing back and forth underneath us like an ominous tide. It was like straddling a low-tech rocket. For the first time, we had three-point seat belts, too, so we wouldn't be able to bail out immediately when we were set on fire. Nobody missed them when they were towed away.

A few forgettable station wagons (K-Car? Aerostar?) were trundled out and abandoned and then they

came up with the first vehicle specifically designed for us, and not whacked together out of an existing fleet with extra trays bolted on. The LLV was supposed to last for twenty years, and maybe it would under the care of someone who had purchased it for personal use, but the best of us sought only to keep the daily damage to a minimum. The LLV required actual training to operate. It was an opaque box. There would be no looking over your shoulder to back up. Instead, it was decked out with dozens of mirrors on all corners, some of which were aimed at other mirrors so that you could make out what you were about to back into, as long as you knew which mirror to check and as long as it wasn't raining; and some of the mirrors were purely there for extra jazz. Most of us were never sure if we were looking at traffic coming up on our left, traffic behind us, or a video of little toy cars. We each had half-day training on the LLVs and were pronounced good to go as soon as we could drive five minutes without crushing an orange cone.

Within a few months all the predictable problems were solved by a new edict from Management that we were no longer allowed to put our vehicles in reverse. This meant we couldn't get in or out of the garage. The edict was altered slightly so that you could put your vehicle in reverse if no one was watching, but if you hit something, it was totally your fault because they warned you.

These are the vehicles that are being phased out now. The new ones will allow you to stand up in the back and have lots of room for packages. The mirror situation probably won't have improved. If you have to track the trajectory of your sliding door as it goes sailing down the street now, you're probably out of luck.

Getting To Know You

In a number of states it is now an official position that you should get to know your fetus before you have it evicted. And that is why it has been suggested that a doctor should conduct an ultrasound of the fetus and describe it in detail to you. Democrats, in general, don't see the point of this, although actually they do. So there have been other suggestions.

Taking a page from the elections department, where hanging chads are examined by a member of each major party, some legislatures are proposing that a Democrat and a Republican should be in attendance during the ultrasound, since it is assumed that a woman who has already had to get used to having one extraneous being in the room is not going to mind a committee.

The Republican doctor will begin by remarking on the length of the fetus's fingers, and exclaim that he has the hands of a violinist.

The Democratic doctor will point out that this is also a good attribute for a pickpocket, and that in any case the Republicans have eliminated funding for music education in the schools, leaving the accordion, drum kit, and boom box as the only choices readily available to children.

The Republican will say that although the little tiny soul is not actually visible in the ultrasound, probably because it is being blocked by the elbow, it is most assuredly there and has been since before the blastocyst stage.

4. Little tiny soul

The Democrat will note that the image is cloudy and there is no feasible scientific way of determining for certain whether or not the fetus is already on the path to becoming a meth dealer, but there is no way to rule it out, either.

The Republican will comment that the child with all its perfect components parts (listed) will, if given the chance, be born into the Land of the Free.

The Democrat will say, clearing his throat, he doesn't know about Free, but it costs $241,000 on average to raise a child to adulthood, adding, however, that it is not at all unusual these days for that adult child to remain in the basement playing video games, whacking off, and getting Cheeto dust all over the furniture until he is well into his forties.

The plan has been implemented on a trial basis in a number of counties in Texas resulting, in every case, in bloodshed or the threat thereof, with the unarmed Democrat considered to be at a distinct disadvantage.

As a result, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg (a.k.a. Notorious RBG) weighed in on the issue, proposing that the single Republican doctor should indeed be the only one in attendance, just as soon as he finishes reading Where The Wild Things Are to a million frozen embryos.

Morpheus Had A Pillow-Top

You've probably heard of the Sleep Number bed. You can dial in your own level of comfort for your side of the bed depending on your personal doughiness quotient and the current mood of your spine. You get your own weirdly specific number. It's a miracle. With just a twist of a dial, it virtually eliminates divorce.

We have such a product because as a species, we've evolved into princesses. It wasn't that long ago people had to hole up in a cave to crash, after relieving some mammal of its hide. We didn't sit around. We did stuff, and we got tired and went to sleep when the sun did. We didn't lie awake at night wondering if we were going to run out of money.

Actually, there is some evidence that ancient humans did make a bed. They've found one in Africa that was 77,000 years old. It was a big pile of grasses. They're sure it was for a human and not a prehistoric giant hamster because it still had the tag that says do not remove under penalty of law and hamsters are known for having that criminal bent.

Beds got fancy at various points in history, especially if you happened to be a pharaoh or the King of France. But your average American bed in the 1700s was very small, as was your average American, and accommodated most of the family. If company showed up, you jammed them in there too. It was all armpits and stinky feet but nobody complained much.

My Uncle Cliff used to tell me how happy he was the day, once a year, the mattress ticking got fresh straw. The old straw would have stiffened up after assuming the shape of the occupant's lumps and bulges, and by the end of the year a youngster might have outgrown his own bed's personal topography. But if you're a kid dry-farming wheat and seeing a herd of dairy cows through the North Dakota winters, you're way too tough for a Sleep Number bed. You're not princess material at all. New straw was just about as good as it gets.

When we went on vacations, Dad always insisted on checking out the motel bed before he forked over the $16 for the room. It was his opinion that mattresses should be hard. I think that was because he preferred to stay put and not tip into the middle, and soft mattresses always got saucer-shaped. At home he and mommy had a double bed and switched to twin beds pretty soon after I (a very late addition) came on the scene. There might have been a connection.

I don't think I'd ever slept in a king size bed until I met Dave, and never mind how soon after I met Dave. It was a revelation. The other person might as well have been in the next county. Years later I encountered my first pillow-top mattress, and suddenly even Dave's big old mattress was obsolete.

Now I have a bed with serious acreage and plenty of cool spots to roll into. The pillow-top is stuffed with camellia petals and sustainably harvested unicorn belly fur, the layers interspersed with endorphins and air collected from just above a puppy's head. I love it.

Best of all, the covering is dimpled so even if my tiara comes loose, it won't roll too far.

Naked Came The Trilobite

Ten trekkers climbed the highest peak in Malaysia, took their clothes off, and snapped photographs of themselves, thus pissing off the mountain to the degree that, after thinking about it for a few weeks, it let fly with a fat earthquake. Four of the trekkers were fingered and detained and the remainder has apparently fled the country to points unknown, putting nerves on edge at the margins of tectonic plates worldwide.

The trekkers themselves have mocked Malaysian authorities who have accused them of causing the earthquake, but they're on shaky ground. I myself once climbed our state's highest peak in the company of a young man who stripped down to his hiking boots for photographs at the very top, in full view of Mt. St. Helens, and two days later that mountain shot off some thousand-plus feet of elevation. Coincidence?

In that case, and also in the case of the Malaysian visitors, the climbers' motivation was the same: they were expressing their sense of freedom, they were getting closer to nature, and they were young enough to be pretty goddamn proud of how they looked.

There's a good record of evidence that public indecency has a direct causative effect on earth movements, so much so that we can conclude with confidence that if there is an earthquake anywhere, somebody somewhere was probably naked. Similarly, it is also true that such events always happen in threes, given enough time, after which we start counting over. There is some disagreement on the issue in scientific circles, although scientists can generally be discounted because of their habit of writing snotty personal emails. However, they do make a good point that there used to be a lot more tectonic activity when the world was younger, long before humans were invented, and even longer before pants were invented. Still, the science is young, and it is expected to be years before we can devise methods of verifying episodes of naughtiness among trilobites.

Vagaries of climate can similarly be traced to untoward human activities, as was recently noted in the California legislature, when an assemblywoman declared that the terrible drought was caused by God's wrath over abortion. And there might be something to it. I once voted for a presidential candidate who merely favored abortion rights, and I not only didn't get my man, but we ended up with some weird massive war. There was a Dick hanging out then too.

And whereas I am certain that the trekkers in Malaysia did somewhat tardily cause the earthquake, I'm not so quick to maintain that the mountain was pissed off. Could have been it was just excited. I'd have to see the photos.

Cisgendered, And It Feels So Good

Me and Uncle Bill

So it was a couple weeks ago I first saw someone refer to herself as "cisgendered" and had the usual reaction ("what now?"), and the prediction, made to Dave, that although I'd never seen this word before, I would now see it several times within the next week. Actually, I saw it twice more that same day.

I looked it up, of course. I don't mean to be disrespectful with the "what now" reaction, but there is a rather large range of ways of being human, and more and more words all the time to slice the human experience into its component wafers, and it can be a little overwhelming for those of us who still routinely leave one ingredient out of a five-ingredient pie.

"Cisgendered," a new coinage, refers to the state of feeling pretty much like the sex everybody always thought you were. In other words, "reg'lar." And at first it would seem one didn't really need a term like that, but, of course, the point is to drive home awareness of the existence of other ways of being. Which (the awareness) is a good thing. "I'm cisgendered, and you're transgendered" is thus a replacement for the more common thought "I'm a man, and you're just weird." It's a little like if we started calling ourselves "colored" so as to become more mindful that some people are albinos.

I probably got an introduction to the concept of transsexuality earlier than most in my generation. Nobody used to talk about it as much as we do now, but I learned I had a transsexual aunt when I was sixteen. I never had trouble accepting that there were people who did not feel any allegiance to the sex they were told they were, because clearly that was the case, but I didn't quite understand it, either. And not because I felt so strongly that I was a girl, but because I didn't.

I kind of don't care, either way.

I certainly never felt like a boy. But I also had no interest in the sort of things girls were expected to do, or be. Pink horrified me. I was not a tomboy, or at least not a good one. Couldn't throw a ball. Couldn't get too far up a tree. I did like catching frogs, but I'd never have tried to frighten anyone with one (out of consideration for the frog). I had a huge collection of stuffed animals and every single one of them was a boy, except for one that was handed down--a bear with a rubber face and eyelashes painted on--"Mrs. Teddybear." Mrs. Teddybear was the least interesting animal I had. I loved my own mommy but the prospects for females seemed dull.

When I tried to imagine what it felt like to be a girl, whether "in a boy's body" or not, I couldn't come up with much. Even now, if I were to prioritize a list of adjectives that described me, my sex would come pretty far down the list, and I'd put it in just to help you recognize me at the airport.

Maybe my confusion is because I'm so very cisgendered, but I don't know. I tend to see my life as an adventure with a frame of mortality around it, full of opportunities to create and to revel in Creation, and the suit I get to wear for the ride feels irrelevant.

There's a flap now over Bruce Jenner's transformation to Caitlyn and in particular his introduction in a high-glamor shot. (I did find myself thinking: what 65-year-old woman is named "Caitlyn?" What's wrong with "Debby?") I used to be put off by done-up women, myself. Forty years ago a friend put it this way: "I don't like female impersonators, and I don't care what sex they are." I thought that was cute, but it's not really true. I think male female impersonators are a lot of fun.

So it's fine for Caitlyn, and all the rest of the hair-dying, skin-slathering, Spanx-wearing, made-up women in high heels out there. I just don't really get it.

I would, just once, like to be able to put on a nice blouse and skirt and have the right shoes for the outfit, all at the same time. Just once.