 
# SCHMIDT'S SHORTS  
Stories to Make You Smile

By Wayne Schmidt

Copyright 2020 - Wayne Schmidt

Smashwords Edition, License Notes: My ebook is free. You are welcome to share it. This ebook may be reproduced or copied, in full or in part, provided its contents are not altered, authorship is included, and free availability is noted.

**Table of Contents**

### PREFACE

### ADVENTURES

~ A Story to Tell When I'm Old ~

(Excerpt from  "The Pecos Pig")

~ Flashbacks ~

~ Be Here Now! ~

(From  "Grand Canyon Rafting – A Dozen Little Stories")

~ Swamping the Grand Canyon ~

### FRIENDS

~ A Magical Night ~

(Halfway through my  8,300-mile road trip)

~ Jeanne Moons the Kayakers ~

(From  "Grand Canyon Rafting – A Dozen Little Stories")

~ A Joke ~

(From  "True Tales from the East")

~ Last Man Standing ~

### NATURE

~ California Birdin' ~

~ Valley of the (Leftover) Giants ~

~ Snow Visit ~

~ The One MPH Hiking Club ~

~ Kitties from Heaven ~

### FISHING

~ Not Just another Fish ~

~ I Saved Bambi ~

~ Getting It Right ~

~ Hawg Man, TV Fred, and the Great Deer Pee Exposé ~

~ A Big One ~

### CRAZY DAYS

~ Dark as Death ~

~ Ayn Rand Got Me High ~

~ The First Time I Never Saw the Ocean ~

~ Hard Crazy Lessons ~

~ My So-Called Summer of Love ~

~ Hippies, Not Communists ~

~ Living Life My Way ~

~ God Sends Maggots ~

### POLITICS & RELIGION

~ Ask, I'll Tell ~

(From  "True Tales from the East")

~ Why I'm with Her ~

~ Mourning in America ~

~ What the Heck's Going on in Oregon? ~

~ Blame the Mormons ~

~ Storm Clouds Gathering ~

~ You Can't Fix Stupid ~

~ No Free Will? ~

~ Why I Don't Believe in God ~

About the Author

# PREFACE

Here are a few dozen favorite stories that I've written. These are the ones that still make me smile. I hope they do that for you.

Most come from the past ten years of my blogs (Wayne's Blog). Several, recounting my crazy, younger days, are from my memoir, _Bare Naked Wayne_.

When a friend saw my first selection, "A Story to Tell When I'm Old," he responded, "But wait, you're already old." Exactly. (In fact, 74.)

Thanks to Eva for the title, Meredith for the subtitle, Jill for the cover pic, Kristen for edits, and Ben Graham for cover design and production. And thank you for reading.

– August 1, 2020 - Cottage Grove, Oregon

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# ADVENTURES

A Story to Tell When I'm Old

(Excerpt from  "The Pecos Pig")

Easter Sunday, noon. Forty-three degrees and raining, sitting here in my still-dead car at the Eagle Automotive Repair in Pecos, Texas, 1,843 miles from my home in Oregon. I am being rescued soon by Craig in his rented Prius. He's driving 400 miles from San Antonio, where I was supposed to pick him up at the airport. Then he will turn around, and we will drive 400 miles back to San Antonio, then 200 miles south. After our week of birding in South Texas, I will be back to retrieve my hopefully un-pig-damaged car. That is the plan. Assuming no more suicidal pigs.

A few days ago, on my way to San Antonio, I drove out of my way to camp in Guadalupe Mountains National Park. But the campground was full. So there I was, flying down deserted TX 652, hoping to find a motel in Pecos. Turns out, all the motels were full. But that's getting ahead of the pig. Which I didn't.

As the sun set over the pancake landscape, the pig (a wild javelina) came trotting across the highway, left-to-right, hesitating, then going. Bull's-eye! Like hitting a bowling ball. In my mirror I watched him rolling down the road, a 60-pound sack of dead lard.

No damage to the car was apparent. But 30 miles later, it died, too. I told AAA that I was 24.1 miles south of Orla and about 17 miles north of Pecos. AAA's message to B&B Wrecker Service, however, was south of Pecos. It took two hours waiting in the dark with erratic cell phone service until we finally connected. "They screw everything up," the guy said philosophically as he winched my poor car up on his flatbed truck. The best mechanic in Pecos is at Eagle Automotive Repair, he told me. He dropped me and my dead Honda Pilot on a weedy side street next to a ramshackle steel building and junkyard. The place was dark and deserted, with no discernable entry door or sign, surrounded by a rusty, barbed wire-topped fence. One street light and a full moon gave everything creepy shadows and a Mad Max glow.

After a long night half-sleeping in the back of the car, listening to passing trains and very early-rising roosters, I met Gary (the sum total of Eagle Automotive Repair) opening up. Over his first-of-the-day coffee, he learned about the pig, and promised he could fix my dead car.

Yesterday, I picked up my new replacement radiator. Edel, a friend of Gary's, drove me 95 miles from Pecos to Midland where we met Frank at Leo's Radiator Shop ("Serving the Permian Basin for 21 years"). The Permian Basin is the local oil field. Edel told me all about pumping oil from 4,000 feet deep, and getting it to refineries. While the rest of the country is in recession, here business is booming. With oil at $100 a barrel, they are pumping like crazy. Lots of jobs. No housing left. I asked Edel what guys who move here to work do when they aren't working. About all he could come up with was the local video rental.

Back in Pecos, I gave Edel $90 for the ride, when he dropped me and my radiator off in the early afternoon. I sat in the junkyard all day, waiting for Gary to get started on my car. He had promised to first install an engine in a little Isuzu truck for Paulo, another stranded traveler, from Amarillo. I rode over to AutoZone with Paulo to buy his new plugs. An odd fellow, a young, poetic Hispanic ("fucking going to fucking Odessa tonight for some fine fucking bitches"), who loved to ride a mountain bike and visit parks ("I can never find anyone to go with me"), and was in a panic to get back to work tomorrow ("or get fired"). In the end, something was wrong with his new-used engine, and it never did get fixed. Having heard my tale of pig woe, the last thing Paulo said to me was, "Well, at least you will have a story to tell when you're old."

Around 7:00 pm Edel stopped back again, just to see what was going on. We sat and watched Gary work on my car. It was not going well. Gary finally did get the new radiator in and hammered out the Pilot's bent frame, where I'd hit that pig. Unfortunately, he broke the A/C condenser in his hammering; Freon hissed out for ten minutes. Gary assured me that the car would run just fine without the condenser and A/C. So, okay?

But when Gary started to fill the new radiator with antifreeze – surprise! It drained straight to the floor. What he hadn't noticed was that the new radiator had a plug hole in the bottom (unlike the old radiator), but... no plug! After 30 minutes of trying everything in his shop to fit as a plug, Gary conceded defeat, and that's when I called Craig in San Antonio, to rent a car and come save me.

Gary's been by three times this Easter morning, trying to get out of town with his new wife, Emlyn. No more grease coating his skin. The last time he stopped by, Emlyn was waiting in his truck so I walked over and chatted with her, a lovely Asian woman of around 30, who Gary met through an online matchmaking service. During her frequent calls to Gary yesterday, I learned they call each other "baby."

So now here I am, sitting alone in my goddamn cold, dead car on this goddamn cold, gray, rainy Easter Sunday in goddamn Pecos, Texas. Goddamn pig.

(Sept. 5, 2009)

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### Flashbacks

When I returned to San Francisco for the first time since I lived there 40 years ago, the flashbacks were inevitable, even though the acid had long since worn off.

As a lost-in-life, hippy mailman driving a delivery truck back then, I had known my way around the city. In Chinatown this month, I couldn't believe I once had navigated its confusing jangle of back alleys and labyrinth balconies, delivering packages to old Chinese-Americans, who seldom spoke English.

I frequently worked in North Beach – birthplace of the beatniks and the neighborhood where my writing hero, author Richard Brautigan ( _A Confederate General from Big Sur_ and _Trout Fishing in America_ ), lived. I trucked boxes of books to City Lights Bookstore, founded in the '50s by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti ( _A Coney Island of the Mind_ ), and to all the tourist spots – Telegraph Hill, Lombard Street ("the crookedest street in the world"), and topless/bottomless joints on Broadway Street. My favorite delivery was to The Condor, where Carol Doda and her "twin 44s" danced. If I were lucky, a bare-breasted dancer would answer the bell and sign for my package. So to speak.

Some nights, I would wander along Broadway, watching the strip club hawkers at work: _Right_ _a-_ _bove_ _your_ _chair_ _on a_ _sol_ _-id_ _glass_ _cage..._ My favorite, I called "The Bullfrog"; his croaking voice, inviting sailors to "step right in," was low as a bullfrog's. He got upset if you giggled when you walked past.

On my recent return to San Francisco, I walked those same streets. The park, where once I had seen Richard Brautigan sitting alone on a bench, was filled with flocks of t'ai chi-ing Chinese-American women. Broadway's licentiousness had withered; a shabby Larry Flynt's Hustler Club echoed by-gone color. Chinatown was vibrant as I remembered, clogged with locals shopping for food – colorful boxes of fresh produce and seafood stacked early-morning sidewalks. Chinese-language voices chattered like wind chimes in the cool breeze. A bent, toothless woman with a bag of fresh, silvery smelt haggled price with customers surrounding her.

On Grant Street, a window display of ivory netsuke caught my eye. Netsuke – invented by Japanese more than 300 years ago – were used to cinch the cords that hung pouches to sashes (kimonos lacked pockets).

I first fell for the miniature carvings when I had lived in the city, often visiting the netsuke collection at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park. In fact, that moment in Chinatown, I was heading to the Asian Art Museum to see them once again. (The museum was created from the old city library; it now displays the Asian art once held by the de Young.)

The netsuke in the Chinatown shop window, however, were not limited to traditional depictions of monks and animals. Many were X-rated, carved, oriental Kama Sutra – all acrobatic positions finely rendered in ivory. I needed a closer look.

The shop was empty of customers, but jammed wall-to-wall with all manner of high-end Asian arts and crafts, including exquisite jade and wood carvings. The really good stuff was upstairs on a balcony, the steps blocked by a velvet cord.

I asked Carlos, the young salesman, the range of prices for the netsuke in his front window. He said one to several hundred dollars, then escorted me upstairs to see more netsuke and other fine art.

I stopped cold at the head of the stairs. "This is incredible," I mumbled. My delight at his sculptures inspired Carlos to show me his favorites – two-feet-long ivory tusks with dozens of figures incised in their curves. "These are museum-quality," I said, and told him how I was heading for the Asian museum that very morning.

"But you can't touch them in a museum," he smiled, and caressed the un-carved, ocher end of a tusk. "Here."

The ivory seemed alive, smooth and cool on my fingertips. It was like sneaking a feel in a museum, but without the guilt.

Carlos showed me a brilliantly lit display case crammed with netsuke. "Any chickens?" I asked. He opened drawers and boxes, but found only one mini rooster, which didn't impress me. Carlos wanted to sell me something, and I wanted to buy something. He showed me ducks and other miniature creatures, but nothing I liked. I focused, one-by-one, on the hundred or so netsuke (the majority in frozen stages of fornication). I asked to see an R rated one, a naked geisha sitting on her haunches. Ivory, probably from an ice-age Russian mammoth tusk. She was the one. _Sold_ , I thought. I threw out a number. "Would that do it?" I guessed. I was $30 too low.

"But would you do it anyways? That's my limit," I replied in my sternest tone. Carlos finally agreed and we started downstairs.

"Just one last feel," I said, and stroked again the carved tusk. That gave Carlos fresh salesman adrenaline, and he launched into a story about rare white jade, reaching for a delicate white sculpture in a display case to show me the jade's inner glow under the spotlight. His sales pitch started at $4,000 and eventually got down to $1,500.

"Carlos, you're killing me here," I laughed, while thinking: _My_ _wife_ _would kill me._ "No, I just can't," I concluded. "I spent all my money on chickens, building them  the Taj Mahal of chicken coops."

Carlos tried to laugh, but sounded deflated. I went on my way with my naked netsuke, an odd birthday present for my wife.

At the Asian Art Museum, I saw the netsuke, soaked up all the art culture I could absorb, and returned to the San Francisco sunshine. The broad plaza between the library-converted-to-museum and the City Hall was quiet. But scenes of anti-Vietnam War violence and hatred flared in my head.

* * *

The date was May 4, 1970.

My apartment had been just up Market Street and then a couple blocks up the hill on Haight Street. Walking to the library that day, I had stumbled into an anti-war demonstration, and joined several thousand people outside the nearby Federal Building. Lots of "right-on" and "power to the people" in the air. Country Joe McDonald sang the call-and-response _Fuck Song_ ( _Gimme an F!_ , etc.) and my favorite, the _Feel-Like-I'm-Fixin'-To-Die Rag_ :

Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,

Uncle Sam needs your help again.

He's got himself in a terrible jam

Way down yonder in Vietnam

So put down your books and pick up a gun,

We're gonna have a whole lotta fun.

And it's one, two, three,

What are we fighting for?

Don't ask me, I don't give a damn,

Next stop is Vietnam;

And it's five, six, seven,

Open up the pearly gates,

Well there ain't no time to wonder why,

Whoopee! we're all gonna die.

...Well, come on mothers throughout the land,

Pack your boys off to Vietnam.

Come on fathers, don't hesitate,

Send 'em off before it's too late.

Be the first one on your block

To have your boy come home in a box.

After speeches, the demonstrators marched across the concrete mall to City Hall to present an anti-war resolution to the Board of Supervisors. Everyone tried to crowd inside; Viet Cong flags – red and blue with a big yellow star – waved. Chants of _Ho, Ho, Ho Chi Minh_ echoed off the rotunda. Finally convinced to go back outside, the crowd clogged the sidewalks and street. That's when dozens of "blue meanies" (city police) arrived and started sweeping the area. I watched 20 kids get clubbed on the steps. From there, it turned into an off-and-on skirmish for the rest of the afternoon. The cops formed lines to keep the street and front of the building clear, so the jeering crowd gathered across the street in an open mall area. Rocks and bottles flew; one took out a window of a passing patrol wagon.

The cops carried three-foot clubs scarred with cuts and nicks. If they thought they saw someone throw anything, a squad would give chase, and people would scatter. Guys got hauled down and beaten. One was caught and clubbed by a cop, who found himself alone and surrounded by a lot of pissed off people; he pulled his gun and waved it at our faces.

Personally, I never saw the point in throwing things or being ugly about it all. Nonetheless, I was there because I wanted the war to end, which was the real point.

City Hall in quieter times

Everyone knew by then that there were demonstrations going on that same day across the country. In Lansing, for example, where once I'd lived, more than 25,000 people marched on the state capitol building, and 25 were hurt when a pro-war supporter drove a car into the march. Eastern Michigan University was under a state of emergency and dawn-to-dusk curfew. That very day at Kent State University in Ohio, four students were shot dead and nine wounded by National Guard troops.

In San Francisco, after things had petered out at the anti-war demonstration, I walked home and ate some supper, and later walked back to the library. It was all so peaceful. Nothing left but discarded pickets and broken glass. The rhododendrons were in full bloom. I picked a big pink blossom and took it home to fill my meager apartment with sweetness.

Being a hippy mailman back then was easy, but it sucked. I drove a truck every day in traffic jams and smog and hauled heavy packages up hills and stairs, dodging dog shit that seemed to be everywhere.

When not working, I bought fresh squid for bait in Chinatown and fished off the rocks at the entrance to San Francisco Bay, using a cheap saltwater fishing rod and reel I bought through the mail from L.L. Bean. Rarely, I caught rockfish and tiger sharks. The sharks seemed more like dogs than fish; their malevolent eyes would follow my hand, and they would snap at me when I took out the hook. One time, something enormous took my bait and headed into the setting sun. It easily stripped all my line and vanished, leaving me shaking. And once, I caught a 19-pound striped bass off the sand at Baker Beach in Marin County. I rode my Harley home across the Golden Gate Bridge with the great fish's tail sticking out of my backpack. Jaws dropped as cars passed me. It was a proud moment.

After my girlfriend from Michigan moved in with me, we spent free days in Golden Gate Park, along Bodega Bay, and on Mt. Tamalpais hiking and bird watching. She cooked and made our tiny place homey. She wore lily-of-the-valley perfume. We drank jasmine tea and ate Chinese food with chop sticks.

She enrolled at a local college, and I rode the bus with her to cinema classes to see avant-garde films. In Golden Gate Park, we watched old Italians play bocce ball and dreamed of learning the language and traveling to Italy. Sitting on wooden benches in the park's open-air amphitheater, we were enchanted by an outdoor performance of _A Midsummer Night's Dream_.

* * *

Four decades later, I sat on that same green park bench, stared at the empty stage, and the moment was so beautiful that it brought tears to my eyes. Here was where last I sat, a lifetime ago, watching Shakespeare with the then-love-of-my-life. Puck and love's foibles had made us laugh.

On this day in 2012, the final-love-of-my-life, my wife, was 500 miles away. She would enjoy this park, I thought, with its gardens, ocean air infused with eucalyptus, and a young man in a white sweater and black pants with a sword-shape of white down each leg, floating on the Earth through his t'ai chi.

The Vietnam War and its protests were long silent. Had all that really happened? The only protest I had seen on this visit was a small group of striking janitors, noisily picketing in front of their parking lot employer on Market Street.

I had forgotten the anonymity conveyed on you in the big city. Despite the loneliness, there is a freedom that comes with knowing you have virtually no chance of seeing anyone you know. Of course, "virtually none" is not zero.

* * *

Back in 1970, on a Sunday morning, in an early December rain, I had dropped half a hit of acid and headed for Golden Gate Park. From the foggy bus window, I spotted a bum on Haight Street who looked familiar – tall and lanky, scruffy beard, dark eyes. I jumped off and found an old friend from Michigan, Tom, selling the _Berkeley Barb_ alternative newspaper. He was dirty, ragged, and looked like he had been standing in the rain too long. He told me he was living on the street, selling papers, and sleeping in crash pads, the park, or, once in a while, hotels.

I gave him my other half-hit of acid, and we walked around the park, sat and talked, and went to the de Young Museum, where I showed him my favorite netsuke. Tom stayed with me a while, and then moved on with life back in Michigan.

A decade later, when I also was back living in Michigan, Tom and I ran a half-marathon together, on a gorgeous late-fall day in rural mid-Michigan, which was the best run of my life. We averaged 7:30 minutes per mile and finished together with energy to spare. Today, running one mile at that pace would kill me.

Back then, Tom was looking for love and used a dating service where, after many false starts, he found a wife. They moved to a farm in Minnesota. Tom developed a difficult disease, but he seems to have had a happy life with his family and farm animals, judging from the annual Christmas cards I still get from him. As I struggle these days through my solo runs in rainy Oregon, I often marvel at those two strangers that I barely recognize, running like gazelles in the Michigan sunshine.

* * *

As for my hippy, trippy self of so many yesteryears ago, that lonely guy wandering the city, lost in life – well, it turns out that I still have an eye for netsuke. I still hate war and warmongers. I still like birds and fishing and flowers and jasmine tea and bare breasts.

Wandering about San Francisco this month, I stood on the traffic island outside the Broadway Street tunnel and stared into its dark opening, peering into my past. I once had loved going fast in there on my Harley. I would ride to this spot late at night, idle until traffic cleared, and then fly as fast as possible through the half-mile-long tunnel – 85 mph was my best. The motorcycle's roar in that narrow, one-way tunnel was some kind of thrill, especially when a little drunk. Far out.

That had been my life for a few long years, living in San Francisco in the '70s – a mostly unhappy time filled with weed, acid, and ennui. Yet, it was where finally, at age 25, I figured out what I wanted to be when I grew up. Starting in San Francisco, I spent a lifetime creating the life I wanted for myself. And becoming the person I wanted to be. My return to the city of my spiritual birth confirmed how much I like how that all turned out.

(June 18, 2012)

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Be Here Now

(From  "Grand Canyon Rafting – A Dozen Little Stories")

By the second day of our eight-day raft trip through the Grand Canyon, I could tell that our guides, Art and Ann-Marie, already were sick of hearing stories about Flyin' Brian, the beloved young boatman who had guided some of us through the Canyon on two similar float trips more than 20 years earlier.

At the conclusion of my first one back in 1990, I had looked into a video camera and said, "This trip was absolutely perfect. Any other trip we might take will be measured against this one."

And that's just what we were doing at the start of our latest Colorado River raft trip. Those of us who had done it before were reminiscing and comparing – the gear, the food, the ice, the pre-trip hotel, the six-hour bus-ride to the river, the weather, and even the guides.

It was hard not to make comparisons. The first night we camped, to my delight, on the same beach where on my first trip I spent one of the most memorable nights of my life – riding out a colossal thunderstorm with our two swampers (crew), high on the cliffs, under sheltering ledges, and overlooking the campsite and river, as lightning electrified our view and thunder reverberated through the Canyon. When the storm cleared after midnight, the clouds had opened to a nearly-full moon illuminating the landscape.

Having now returned, years later, I climbed those same cliffs and found the very spot the three of us had huddled – damp, high, and happy. This time, though, the scene below was tranquil.

Back on the beach, I said, "Ok, Art, just one more Flyin' Brian question and I'll drop it for good. I know you're sick of hearing about past history."

I had to find out if memory had played tricks over the years, whether how I remembered a scary experience with Brian was even close to reality. It's a memory that still gives me chills after all these years.

I told Art that I thought it happened on Havasu Creek, an idyllic side stream of turquoise water, flowing through miles of canyon and over waterfalls of all sizes. I explained how on my first raft trip with Brian, we had hiked to a large pool where you could duck under a short waterfall and into a low-ceilinged cavern, and look out through the falling water. It was easy and everyone thought it great fun.

As I explained to Art, we had returned to the same spot on our second trip down the river, the following year. By now, Flyin' Brian had gotten to know me fairly well, which must have been why he suggested, "Wanna try something different?"

I listened and swallowed hard and made him go over the instructions one more time. Despite my intense claustrophobia, I knew I'd never have another chance for such a thrill. "Let's do it."

Brian plunged into the river, dove out of sight, and vanished. I gave him about a minute, as he'd instructed, and then followed. I took the biggest breath I could and dove down, finding the underwater opening in the cliff face, just big enough to swim into, right where he had promised. I kicked into the darkness, reaching the bend that turned right and up. Swimming through the underwater tunnel probably took less than a half-minute, but I remember it seeming longer. At the end, gasping for air, I popped up beside Brian in a cramped opening with barely enough headroom to keep our chins above water. Light filtered weakly from below. Brian laughed, said we had to get out within a minute or two before we used up all the oxygen, and that's what we did.

I described to Art how I remembered that little escapade and asked if he knew the place, "not that I'm even remotely suggesting I'd want to do that again." Art knew the place. I asked whether it was anything close to as scary as I remembered. "Worse," he said. "It's called the Green Room. I've only been there twice."

I told Art that I couldn't believe Brian would take me to such a place. Art explained, simply, "He's crazy."

I showed Art a snapshot I'd brought with me of another place on the river. Flyin' Brian and I are perched daringly on a rock projecting into space, the river distant below. In my mind, I could see myself repeating my pose in that stunt. I asked Art if he knew the spot, but he couldn't place it. He didn't roll his eyes, but might as well have.

It's not like he had anything against Brian. In fact, it turned out that they had been roommates for a year. Art's lovely sister, Teresa, had been a swamper for Brian on our second trip, and we were pretty sure she had broken Brian's heart.

That's all nice nostalgia, but, you know, you're supposed to _be here now_ , and all that...

Ann-Marie looked at the photo and thought she recognized the spot, but said the trail up to that overlook had worn away, and they seldom took visitors there. But we'll see, she said. "Maybe we can get you up there with Art and recreate the shot."

As it turned out, we did set up camp one night within sight and hiking distance of that same picturesque overlook. But by then, we were creating new memories from new experiences with a new group of people and that was enough. Hiking up that cliff to recreate an old memory wasn't even a consideration. And definitely not returning to the Green Room. Be here now.

(Oct. 1, 2014)

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Swamping the Grand Canyon

Swamper Wayne & Boatman Adam – Mile 124

I slipped face-first off the raft and _ker-splashed_ into the frigid Colorado River. My plunge surprised me as much as the 13 watching passengers. We were in the bottom of the Grand Canyon, where it's not a great idea to go for an unplanned swim. Too late, Boatman Adam had yelled, "Grab his feet!"

As a volunteer "swamper" (crew), I found myself in over my head – in more ways than one. We were barely half-way through our eight-day trip. An old-hand boatman had told me three rules for swampers: "Don't get hurt," "Wash your hands," and "Drink water." Unspoken was a fourth: "Don't fall in."

I fell in while trying to retrieve a lost water bottle floating along the cliffs. Just two days earlier, with brilliant form, I'd snagged an errant red bag that had fallen off our boat and into the river, while lying on my belly on the front of the giant, gray-and-aqua-colored raft as it chased downstream, my outstretched arm directing Adam at the Honda outboard, then leaning down to the water at the last second to swoop up the bag.

_Voila!_ Just like I'd watched Swamper Shaun do on our rafting trip a year earlier (that time, me riding as a passenger). I was pretty proud of myself, and the passengers all clapped. But as Proverbs says, "Pride goeth before a dunking." Or something like that.

Fortunately, I'd executed my surprising dive into calm water and out of the river's vicious currents, whirlpools, and rapids. I surfaced and sputtered water, to the bemused audience of downturned faces on the raft, "No damage done," I lied, then swam to the water bottle, handed it up, and started to get hauled back on board, only to be greeted by a chorus of, "ChapStick! There's a ChapStick floating behind you." Oh, shit, it had come out of my pants pocket, which meant an ignominious swim back to capture my lip balm. As if my predicament wasn't mortifying enough. No damage done, my ass!

Finally, I dragged myself up onto the raft, to discover that our second raft, with another 13 passengers, Boatman Trevin, and Swamper Shaun, also had watched my performance. All gave me a round of applause. I slunk back to my seat next to Adam in the motor well, where he brushed off my apologies. Later, I learned that one of the passengers had christened my dive a "Half-Wayner."

Canyon Swamper

Your biggest job as a swamper, on a raft filled with paying passengers, is to learn really fast what the hell you're supposed to be doing. I know that every job has its own arcane details, but you get eased into most jobs. Swamping has a steep learning curve. Like, go, now!

The one thing I insisted on being shown by Boatman Adam ahead of time was how to tie bowline knots, for the rope at the front of the raft. He did, and I practiced in the warehouse, where the rafts are loaded over two days, with supplies and ice, before getting trailered to the river, to meet the passengers. One of the coolest things about the swamper job, as I'd watched other (far, far younger) swampers do on prior raft trips, was hopping out first at stops to tie up the raft. You jump off onto sand or rocks, or scramble up cliffs, to find a secure hold for the bowline. It's not something you want to screw up in front of an audience of antsy rafters waiting to pee. Plus, your knot actually has to hold, for obvious reasons.

Then there's this complicated looping of the bowline, when you depart, keeping it compact and ready for the next stop. It is a lovely routine, sliding the rope through your fingers, giving the coils an awkward twist with your left hand, and finishing with some wraps and winds and pulls and a clip to the bow strap, and you hop aboard as the current sweeps you and the raft away.

There's a right way and a whole lot of wrong ways to do a thousand things, such as:

-How to tighten your life jacket.

-How much bleach to put in the hand-wash bucket. And in the dish-wash buckets.

-How to load and strap down, then unload, once a day, each raft's 50 bags, 13 folding chairs, 13 ammo cans, bags of cots, a full cook kitchen with tables, etc.

-How to store eight days of ice, food, soft drinks, and a whole lot of booze.

-How to filter river water into 20-liter cans, then heft them to their spots, for refilling water containers on a bouncing raft, and in camp.

And as many questions:

-Do you wash this greasy pot first in the river? Where's the scrubby?

-Where do I sleep?

-Should I wash my hands again before chipping ice for drinks? (yes)

-How do you steer this thing?

While learning the swamper routine, you're fetching drinks for passengers from three drag bags (juice, soda, beer), which hang in the river by ropes from the side of the raft, and restocking the bags morning and night. Watching out for the safety of the passengers. Ensuring their life jackets are buckled. And answering questions. "Wayne!" More questions. "Wayne!" Endless questions about all things Grand Canyon. "Wayne!" I did love it.

Fortunately for me, my dear friend, Adam, was a boatman of infinite patience with my amateur swamping. Shaun, the swamper on our other raft, checked my knots when I asked, and helped me figure out which end was up.

Swamping is exhausting, but here's the thing. The boatmen have longer lists, way bigger responsibilities, do the cooking, and safely drive the boats through some of the gnarliest rapids anywhere. Even after having been on four previous trips, I was surprised to see, close-up, how hard the boatmen work. Then turn around and do it again, sometimes more than a dozen trips in a season.

Canyon Thrills

On the first day, as Adam lined up for our first really big rapid, I couldn't convince any passengers to sit way up front. "I guess I have to set an example. Okay for me to go up front?" I asked Adam? He grinned.

There's nothing like it, except maybe surfing (which I've never done). The 37-foot raft nosedives down the back side of a modest wave, into a massive riverine hole, then folds back on itself as it climbs the curl of a gigantic standing wave that crashes over the front of the raft, threatening to sweep you away in its power. You sit on the raft's floor, just behind its nose, and hold on for dear life to straps and ropes, as a good share of the Colorado River crashes on your head. Perhaps there's a second wave waiting, then a series of smaller splashes, as you take stock, completely drenched by ice water in the triple-digit desert sunshine, your adrenaline high and laughter slowly subsiding.

Grand Canyon rapids are legendary, such as House Rock, Sockdolager (one-two punch), Granite, Hermit, Crystal, and Lava Falls Rapid with its infamous Ledge Hole, to be avoided at all costs. The boatmen make it look so easy, but my view from the back of the boat showed me the complexities of threading the right line through hundreds of rapids, avoiding rocks (almost always). Flying by, sometimes you see, lurking just below the surface, boulders carved into jagged saw blades. Or, backed by dark, unforgiving whirlpools.

It's not enough to know one way to navigate each of these rapids. Water levels dramatically change daily, due to changing water releases upstream from Lake Powell and the Glen Canyon Dam's power generating plant. Rainstorms, and resulting flash floods in side canyons, also affect water levels (and sometimes flush boulders into a rapid and change it). So, for every rapid in the 277-mile trip, a boatman has to know how to run each in low water, high water, and everything in between. And know whether anything has changed since last time.

Eventually, our passengers ventured to the best seats up front on the raft, and whooped it up. I shared with them advice I'd gotten on another trip: "If a wave comes over and you feel like you're underwater, just don't let go."

Canyon Alchemy

It was a magical start to our trip. Even Adam, with 130 trips down the Canyon, had never experienced it, though he knew it happened once every year. We were in the right place at the right time. So affected were we by our happenstance that days later, sharing the beautiful memory with merely a mention, was enough to well up tears.

After the first night of group camping on the river, a hike up North Canyon is typical. It's a good walk into one of Grand Canyon's famous side canyons, mostly in morning shade, up some rocks and not-too-steep cliffs, for about 50 minutes. The trail is bordered by hallucinogenic jimsonweed; canyon cliffs glow psychedelic red in the early sunshine. At the end of the trail is a series of slick, rock water-slides, dropping into a chest-deep pool.

As we had approached the end of the narrowing canyon, we'd heard hints of music drifting down. Adam hushed our group, and we crept closer in silence. We heard a bit of chatter, as if an introduction were being made, then the music of strings: ethereal melodies emanating from the depths of the Grand Canyon.

Still out of sight of the musicians, our group stopped in some shade, each of us sprawled on rocks or sand, as the notes of a live, string quartet filled the canyon with Beethoven and other composers unknown to me. In the profound beauty of the moment, many wept openly in our great fortune.

After the little concert, we learned that the musicians and their instruments were accompanying a special, annual raft trip, wherein they played at various Canyon locations for their passengers.

Sharing that music in North Canyon brought an emotional cohesion to our own group of strangers. How could it have not? Connections are made in the Grand Canyon. Connections to the Earth. Connections to history. Connections to other passengers. Connections to our true selves.

Something about the encompassing whole of the Grand Canyon rafting experience reveals people's essence. Whether we want it to or not. Meeting that person in the Canyon can be life changing.

Canyon History

In Redwall Cavern, an icon of any Grand Canyon rafting trip, I touched history, and it moved me. It was an artifact no more impressive than a one-inch X, whacked into the top of the boulder with a chisel.

We'd heard about the mark from another boatman, back at the raft company's bunkhouse in Kanab. Adam knew just the place she was describing, and he found it. We put our fingers on the spot that Robert Brewster Stanton in 1890 set his tripod to take a photograph of where the railroad he wanted to build would blast a tunnel through the cliffs above this spot in Redwall Cavern. Stanton chiseled that X.

One evening after dinner, I told the story of Stanton's failed scheme to our passengers – gathered with their folding chairs, like a classroom on the beach – of how we almost built a railroad right through the Grand Canyon, but for the fortuitous drowning of its visionary, Frank Mason Brown. We had earlier seen the dark whirlpools where Brown met his watery fate, and the bend in the river where his body last was seen floating away. (My ebook, _Hubris, A Railroad through the Grand Canyon, and the Death of Frank Mason Brown: A Parable for Our Time_ , can be downloaded online, free, or read at  Wayne's Blog.)

Another fatality of Brown's venture was the drowning of crew member, Peter Hansbrough. We camped on the beach below a spot edging the cliffs where his skeleton (identified by his boots, still attached) was buried. Marked in black on the wall above his grave: "PMH 1889" Not that he cares now, but Hansbrough got a great view, looking over the Colorado River to the panorama of Point Hansbrough (named by Stanton), a spectacular headland of sheer cliffs that forces the river in a great oxbow around its base.

From Stanton's journal:

"Jan.17, 1890. 7:30 am. After breakfast this morning we took the remains of P.M. Hansbrough and buried them in a mesquite grove under the marble cliff on the left side of Canon... I offered a short prayer, not for poor Peter but a petition that we might be spared his fate, but if called upon to meet the same death, that we might each be prepared to go. We covered his grave with marble slabs, and Gibson cut on the cliff beside it 'PMH 1889.' Standing over the grave is a marble wall 700 ft high."

Canyon Friends

Elves Chasm is a magical place, a side canyon aptly named. Across a pool of water and behind a waterfall, you enter an open cave dripping with water, moss, and maidenhair ferns. You half expect a hobbit to scurry away. Climbing over slippery boulders brings you up and out on a flat rock at the top of the waterfall. You gather your nerve (the first time that can take a while) and jump into the pool below – maybe a twelve-foot drop. Your feet barely touch the gravel bottom, and you pop up to the cheers of the audience, feeling as if you just accomplished something important.

Adam brought his mask and snorkel and went diving in the pool for bounty. He came up with a bracelet made of thin, black elastic cord, braided nicely. I put it on my wrist and told him, "This means we're going steady."

It's the damnedest thing. Adam is 45. I'm 27 years older. Do the math. Our friendship is not normal. But it seems to work. Adam says the Canyon is the place he's always felt most "himself." Same for me. I think that's enough.

Canyon Perfection

"The passengers can't possibly know what a rare, perfect day we just had," Adam said to me, as he worked on making dinner, on the beach. "They probably think it's like this on every trip – nobody there when we hike up Deer Creek, drifting in the current eating our sack lunches, not too hot, finding no one else at Havasu Creek, getting this spot to camp, one of the best."

I hadn't thought about the day in those terms. "You're right," I said. "How could they know?"

"You go tell them."

So I did. And we all reminisced about the scary, cliff-side trail to reach the oasis up in the Deer Creek slot canyon. About parking our rafts right in the mouth of travertine-coated Havasu Creek, walking upstream in the tropical-sea-colored water to play and look for fossils. The starting point was a narrow opening in the water between cliffs, the current too fast and deep for most to wade or swim, so Adam had used a rope and float to haul each passenger through, one-by-one.

As I'd done so many times throughout the week, I marveled out loud: "Who does this?!"

By nightfall of our perfect day, everyone had gone to bed, and I was alone on the beach. The full moon was blocked by immense cliffs across the river, but it lit up the tops of other cliffs farther back and downstream. A shooting star scorched across Scorpio's heart. The raft where I slept, for a change was tied in a slack back-water, instead of run up on the sand. It rocked and shifted and sighed all night like a lullaby.

Day 6 had been perfect, but my body was not. My legs were sunburned, my fingernails destroyed, my hands covered with nicks and abrasions. I'd lost some of the spring in my step, with knees sending warning signals that there better be an end to this nonsense pretty damned soon.

Canyon Survival

It was our last stop, right after our rafts hit the flat water of Lake Mead. It's where the brawling Colorado River dies in a flaccid reservoir. It's where the rafts' 26 passengers, after a hurried last round of hugs, transfer mid-river to a big jet boat, which swoops them across the river's muddy shallows in 40 minutes to their waiting bus at the boat landing, ready to carry them from Eden, back to the jarring anti-Eden of Las Vegas.

Our own trip on the now-vacated rafts, however, would take more than four hours. But first, the rafts' two immense side-tubes had to be unstrapped, deflated on shore, rolled up, and hefted onto the deck. For that final feat of strength, Adam diplomatically motioned Shaun to help him, allowing me to preserve what little was left of my back. And dignity.

Ready to push off, Adam put the outboard in reverse. I dug my heels in the sand, my whole body pushing into the beached behemoth's bow. After some side-to-side revving of the engine, we slid riverward. At that point, it dawned on me that my usual straps on the side tubes that I'd always used for hopping onto the chest-high raft now were gone. There I hung off the bow, dragged along, feet trailing in the water, without enough strength left to pull myself up with the raft's ropes. When Adam realized my plight, he rushed forward, grabbed me under my armpits, and hoisted my sorry carcass onto the deck.

"You guys used me up," I explained, meekly. I had survived swamping the Grand Canyon, but barely.

I was happy. Though a hard, half-day job of unloading the rafts awaited back in Kanab, I'd done it. Made it through my swamper adventure with Adam, in one piece. A worn-out piece, to be sure, but at least intact. And I did it a week before my 72nd birthday.

I'd just spent eight days with a great friend in our favorite place on earth, sharing my passion with a bunch of strangers, all decent people. My fifth rafting trip through the Grand Canyon, with a sixth already chartered for next year. Adam's again the boatman, but this time, I'll be a passenger. Swamping the Grand Canyon once was enough.

(July 10, 2018)

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# FRIENDS

### A Magical Night

(Halfway through my  8,300-mile road trip)

On Sanibel Island last evening, Larry worried that my head might explode. It was a night of magical, mind-blowing serendipity.

We had arrived for dinner at the home of his friends, Peter and Mallory, and were immediately introduced to a group of four women, who had been visiting for the afternoon. It was hard to concentrate on their names; the view from our hosts' deck was a strip of mostly-deserted white beach, and then the Gulf of Mexico, as far as you could see. The surf swished back-and-forth.

Making small talk, I asked one of the women where they were from.

"Watertown, New York."

I paused just a moment before confessing, "I was once engaged to a woman from Watertown."

Suddenly, I seemed to have everyone's attention.

"What was her name?" someone asked.

This time, I paused so long that I could sense people's discomfort. Did I really want to go there? What if one of them was related to her? Plus, that episode was not exactly my finest hour. But it was too late. I said her name, Mary C.

No one seemed to recognize it. I added, "Maybe you know her boyfriend from when I met her. T M."

Quiet murmurs and knowing smiles. They all knew about T. After all, he was, at least in his day, quite the handsome stud. Plus, he owned an island and a big boat.

They had a few more questions to fill in my story.

How'd you meet? In a little town on the St. Lawrence River, in 1979, she had pulled me into the street dance with a Dixieland band playing _Just a Closer Walk with Thee_.

What happened? She dumped me, thankfully.

I asked them, what about Rick, who lived on the river, the guy I'd just spent three days with on the other side of Florida? Did they know Rick? _Check!_ How about Rick's friends? _Check!_

What about Save the River, the group I worked with from its founding, to protect the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River from a U.S. Army Corps of Engineers boondoggle. _Check!_

What about the Corps' first public hearing, 40 years ago, when I came out from Michigan to speak, along with 500 locals, raising hell about their proposal? _Check!_ They were there.

What about that Pete Seeger fund-raising concert in Alex Bay that I'd attended back in the day. _Check!_ In fact, two of the women said they'd been singers in the warm-up act that night.

How about Save the River organizer, the late-Abbie Hoffman, and his partner Johanna, who is still my friend? _Check!_ "Johanna is my godmother," explained one.

I shared a story of my boat ride with Abbie in Johanna's boat, when he hit a reef and sheared off the lower unit of her outboard engine. _Check!_ They knew that red-and-white boat well.

I recalled how after the accident, we finally made it back to Johanna's dock well past dark, and she had dinner waiting, assisted by two young girls. I struggled for their names. "Violet?"

"Velvet?" someone replied.

"That's it!" I said. "They were two hotties!"

At this, the women exchanged looks, then couldn't hold in their laughter. I was afraid to ask.

Addendum: After I posted this story last night, my friend Rick read it and texted me: "You should have asked. The other 'hotty,' besides Velvet, was Monica, who you took the picture with that you sent me." No wonder she's grinning.

(Mar. 26, 2018)

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### Jeanne Moons the Kayakers

(From  "Grand Canyon Rafting – A Dozen Little Stories")

It's the second question everyone seems to ask, right after, "How was your Grand Canyon raft trip?" Once the concept sinks in of having slept out in the open with creepy-crawlers for seven nights and bathed each day in the cold, muddy Colorado River, what follows is: "But where do you go to the bathroom?"

Some 27,000 people every year float through the Canyon on trips ranging from days to weeks. That's a lot of shit. And it's not like there are porta-potties along the way, and the time is long past when visitors could safely bury their poop in the sand and burn their toilet paper. Thanks to demands of the river's professional guides, since the 1970s the National Park Service has required that all wastes be hauled out. The old wilderness travel mantra, "Take nothing but photos; leave nothing but footprints," is working in the Grand Canyon. Visitors see not a trace of litter.

At camp each night, a toilet is set up nearby, discretely placed to be shielded by boulders or trees. "You'll have the best bathroom wallpaper of your life," Boatman Art had promised at the start of the trip. He was right about that, but I never got the idea that anyone took their time in order to savor the views. The portable contraption consists of a big metal box with a regular toilet seat atop. On the path leading to the toilet, a wash station is set up; if the toilet paper is missing, the throne is occupied. Each morning, the box, growing heavier by the day, is closed up, and two guides muscle it back to the raft, where it is stored below deck until evening.

That all sounds nice and neat, and for the most part it is. But remember – we had 32 people pooping in that one box. We learned a new concept, which I trust needs no further explanation: "crowning."

After a few days of learning the routine, figuring out when the lines were busiest, and who you'd best not follow, Eva discovered that all she needed to do before nature called was say to our boatman, "Hey, Art. I hear it's crowning."

Art would sigh and slump his shoulders, resigned to his duty – "All right" – then head off to tamp down the crown of turds.

Peeing was another matter entirely. The rule was simple – you pee in the river and never in the sand or in side-streams. And you better be peeing a lot in that hundred-degree-plus weather. Art warned us that 90 percent of all illnesses and even injuries in the Canyon stem from dehydration. So we drank and drank and drank – mostly water, but other liquids, as well – all day long and far into the evenings. To stay hydrated.

How do 32 people find privacy to pee in the river? It turned out that privacy was an evolving concept over the course of the week. Early on, normal modesty ruled, with people wading waist-deep into the river or walking far down the beach to be alone, particularly those who needed to squat. As days wore on, however, Boatman Ann-Marie's advice seemed more appropriate: "If someone's watching you pee, you're not the one with the problem."

That's all well and good, but try telling that to poor Jeanne. During a lunch break on the beach, she had been advised by Eva: "Just down around those rocks, there's nobody there. No one can see you." So that's where Jeanne headed. And that's where she was squatting, calf-deep in the water, pants down, bare ass pointing riverward, when five guys in kayaks rounded the bend.

Now the problem with standing in the river is that often the bottom is a vacuous mix of sand and silt. Jeanne tried to stand to pull up her pants, but her feet had sunk so far into the sand that she couldn't get her balance. It must have been quite the show.

An hour or so later, our motorized raft caught up with the kayakers. "You want an encore from Jeanne?" I shouted as we passed them. Their smiles were their answers. That's when I noticed that several had GoPro cameras affixed to their helmets, having likely immortalized Jeanne's moon.

The story of Jeanne mooning the kayakers may have prompted some of the women on the trip to take up Boatman Ann-Marie's offer to teach them how to pee standing up. I watched them one evening all head into the moonlit water next to the raft for their lesson. They seemed excited by what they had learned, but I didn't ask for details.

(Oct. 1, 2014)

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### A Joke

(From  "True Tales from the East")

_Let's not take ourselves so seriously that we forget to laugh. – Chris Palmer, "_ _Laughter, Comedy and Environmental Activism_ ," _March 2009_

"I have just one question for you, Doug. What the fuck?"

Doug had walked over to shake my hand at the reception following a memorial service for our mutual friend, Craig. We all had been the closest of friends for many years. But Doug doesn't talk to me anymore. I thought, what better time to put aside the past? Doug thought otherwise. "Not here. This isn't the time," he hissed.

I had traveled 3,000 miles from Oregon to be at this service in Sterling, Virginia. "Seems to me, this is it," I replied. Doug turned on his heel and disappeared.

We once worked together at the National Wildlife Federation (NWF). Some years back, I had been flattered to be the only work colleague Doug had invited to his wedding. We had biked together most lunch hours, and I knew much of his courtship, marriage, and sad, too-soon divorce. Now he appeared to hate me.

"Even if my offense was as heinous as Doug believes, does this make sense?" I had asked friends over lunch two weeks earlier when I arrived in Washington, DC. "It's not like he has friends to burn."

I sure don't. I had come back to the East Coast to see Craig before he died. And while losing one irreplaceable friend, I wanted to refresh as many other East Coast friendships as I could in two weeks. So I was sad about Doug. He is a weird guy. Artistic. I always liked that about him. He made life more interesting, and that's no small thing.

Doug's snit was all about a picture. Actually, a parody of a picture. Here's the story: Years back, Doug got himself featured in a little blurb with his picture in _Men's Health_ magazine. I don't remember why. Someone – probably me, but I don't recall – took Doug's head and Photoshopped it onto the bodybuilder hunk on the magazine's cover. Ha-ha. Everyone had a good laugh.

Fast-forward to last October. No one's laughing much. Presidential politics is on the big stage and Sarah Palin has just entered, stage far right. Over at NWF everyone is obsessed with global warming; Doug's job is to get his colleagues in the wildlife science profession to take the crisis seriously. It's a group that tends to be conservative, but Doug had just made a huge step forward. The Wildlife Society, a professional group for wildlife biologists (like Doug), had devoted an entire issue of its journal to climate change. In it, Doug wrote: "Our profession is facing a problem that will likely become the single most important factor to affect wildlife since the emergence of our species."

Justifiably proud, Doug had sent me a copy. There he was in full color on the cover ("Adapting to Climate Change") along with a couple of geeky-looking federal biologists, the U.S. Capitol in the background. "Don't get any ideas, like with the _Men's Health_ thing," he said in his attached note.

_Hmmm_ , I thought. I've got a little time...

So you decide. Is it funny? I'll tell you this: it still makes me grin.

Original version:

Edited version:

Doug seemed mildly upset when he responded to my email with the faux picture of him, Sarah Palin, and John McCain. But after he started getting email cracks from other mutual acquaintances (I sent it to 20 or 30 of our closest friends), he flipped out. His next email ranted about how this time I had gone too far, way over the line, etc. Best I can recall, it was something about how this was just what The Wildlife Society was afraid of: being sullied by partisan politics. Really? Really?

Immediately I sent everyone an email explaining that Doug was not amused and asking them to please not forward the picture. I sent Doug an apology, telling him that I meant no offense. It was our last communication until that unpleasant encounter at Craig's memorial service.

Sarah Palin has resigned as governor of Alaska. Craig's wife, Jean, told me that her relatives in Alaska still believe Palin can do no wrong. They continued to praise her even after the election, in a note at the bottom of their Christmas letter to Jean. Some people just don't know a joke when they see one.

(July 6, 2009)

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### Last Man Standing

I'm the last man standing. Once three of us stood for the picture taken four decades ago. We're looking out on a lake in the Missouri Ozarks, three butts to the camera. Me and two high school buddies on our last adventure together.

Bill – the guy with the orange towel covering his head's blistering sunburn – is dead. Danny – the one in the center – died last week.

The three of us had driven to the Ozarks from Michigan where we had gone to school together. We camped and water-skied every day for a week. We dove off reservoir cliffs and once found a water moccasin curled on a sunny ledge. I learned to drink beer. Until then I couldn't stand the taste, don't ask me why. It was my social handicap: _You don't drink beer?_ – always delivered in an incredulous tone – was a conversation killer. I sat on the beach and after the first couple, they started tasting pretty good. "I'm proud of you, Schmidt," Bill told me.

The reception for Bill's funeral was at his mother's house, a diminutive box on the corner of two gravel streets in Burton Township, an auto-worker suburb of Flint. Bill was the class clown – cynical but funny. He wrote in my senior yearbook:

_" We had fun in this crummy hole, never forget it. I know you will be a big success in life, maybe."_

I think he was trying to get out of that crummy hole when he died in Los Angeles. I never heard the full story, but Danny said he was murdered by one of LA's infamous Freeway Killers.

At the reception, Bill's mother showed me some poetry he had written. Who knew? I wish I had a copy; I just remember it was beautiful writing. I urged her to find a way to get it published, but I'm sure nothing came of it. She probably thought I was drunk, which was entirely possible, thanks to Bill and our Ozarks jaunt.

Danny had the boat and car. He always had the best toys. In high school he started working as an electrician in the auto shops during that hey-day of Michigan's car building ephemera, when Flint was known as "Buick Town." He worked long hours, made lots of money, and lived alone in a mobile home. So he always could afford nice cars, boats, and motorcycles.

I lost track of Danny a dozen or so years later. I tried to find him but that was before the Internet and I gave up. I did find an article in a Muskegon newspaper reporting that a "Daniel Lentz" had been killed in a motorcycle accident near Lake Michigan. Danny never called himself "Daniel," but I went a long time wondering if he were dead or alive.

Last year I finally tracked him down using the Internet. We traded emails every few weeks. He sent me pictures of his home, set in the wooded hills, pastures, and farmlands of central Tennessee, on the Kettle Bend of the Duck River, where he had moved 20 years ago. He called himself the "hermit on the hill." He had undergone a quadruple bypass, given up drinking and smoking, and been retired for nine years. "I found that being retired is what I was born for. I am really good at doing non-productive things," he wrote me.

Danny's gloomy streak that I remembered had darkened. He complained of "clogged arteries, arthritis, worn out joints, and just being lazy." He intended to rid himself of his "stuff," buy a camper, and travel for a few years. "I wanna chase nice weather for a while, and then I will be ready for an old people's apartment. Then I will start smoking again, and that will finish me off."

I felt sad for him and invited him to visit me in Oregon "before you check out for good." A few months ago, I tried again, but he was in the middle of putting his property up for auction, so couldn't come. He promised to visit next summer.

I guess Danny found that faded Ozarks picture of the three of us, when he was cleaning out his things. He sent me a copy the month before he died.

I don't really know what happened. Probably a heart attack. I thought it odd that I hadn't heard from him since the date of his auction in mid-November. Sunday after Thanksgiving, I emailed him a _New Yorker_ cartoon that reminded me of his goal of winnowing his stuff. Two people are standing in an empty house. A bare bulb hangs from the living room ceiling, a shiny brick on the floor. One guy says: "I've simplified my life by converting all my possessions into one gold brick."

A few hours later, I got a message in Facebook, titled "Hi, from Danny." But it wasn't from Danny. It was from his sister, Trudy, who was using his Facebook account to notify people that Danny had died two days earlier. No details, nor was the online obituary much help. It just said he had "passed away at the Maury Regional Medical Center in Columbia, TN."

One by one, that seems to be how we lose our friends. Some get snatched for no apparent reason. Others check out with a chart full of bad habits. After a while you have to ask yourself: Why me? How did I survive all the accidents, booze, close calls, drugs, ... zealotries. You could fill an alphabet's list with all you've dodged. Why me? Was it healthy living? Good genes? Luck?

Maybe it was God. I've always had people who said they were praying for me. Although that's not something I do for myself, it couldn't hurt. Good vibes can never hurt.

(Dec. 1, 2010)

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# NATURE

### California Birdin'

The 150th bird of my trip was, alas, only a common junco. Far more poetic would have been the falcated duck I was chasing. This rare vagrant from eastern Asia had been spotted in the marshes of the Sacramento River, more specifically, Colusa National Wildlife Refuge, way, way off track. It's such a mystery, how bird vagabonds appear so far from home.

My own wandering had taken me south from Oregon to Los Angeles, there to meet Rick, whose normal home is a forested, auto-less island in the St. Lawrence River, in upstate New York. We both were as out-of-place in L.A.'s traffic as that lost duck.

But you chase birds where the birds are, so we followed the San Diego Freeway south to Newport and on to La Jolla, then east to the deserted Mohave Desert. Miraculously, even amid Southern California's endless sprawl, there are pockets of spectacular nature – estuaries, refuges, parks, and, sometimes, irrigated farm fields that fill America's grocery stores, as well as bellies of hungry birds.

Ibises – thousands at a time – clouded the sky, each in dark silhouette with legs and down-curved bills outstretched. They rose from green fields freshly flooded with that rarest of desert commodities – water. Hundreds of whimbrels – a kind of large, brown curlew – walked the fields, pecking and poking their long bills for worms and bugs, fattening for their upcoming spring flight back to the Arctic tundra. Flocks of mustard-yellow-breasted western meadowlarks filled the air with beautiful fluty, tinkling song.

Actually, there is plenty of water nearby in the Salton Sea, but it is stinky and thick with saltiness. The birds, however, don't seem to mind and make the Salton Sea one of the top birding spots anywhere. White pelicans and all other manner of water birds visit the inland sea, protected, in part, by the Sonny Bono Salton Sea National Wildlife Refuge. Imagine that – a wildlife park named after the dead Congressman from Sonny & Cher.

Rick and I drove the uplands around the refuge looking for the one bird I had hoped to add on this trip to my birding life list – a burrowing owl – which was supposed to be common in the area. The bird was my nemesis; I had searched the same fields in vain on a prior trip, nor had I found one on my Florida birding trips years ago. For miles, we drove slowly, stopping often to scan with binoculars and scope over vacant fields. Not one owl.

At the refuge headquarters, I struck up a conversation with a young Mexican-American biologist, just returning from a nature hike with a group of school children. I admired the green bullfrog he had in a bowl, complimented him on his work, and agreed about the importance of environmental education. Then I sprang my burning question: "Anywhere you could recommend to see a burrowing owl?"

I had come to the right place. He started to give me directions to a spot where he had built an artificial burrow for the owls – basically, a buried box with access via a corrugated drain pipe. "Here, I'll just show you," he said, when I confessed confusion about his directions. So we walked – walked, mind you – not more than 100 feet across the gravel parking lot to the entrance. "There," he pointed. Across a ditch was a white drain pipe angling from the dirt. A burrowing owl stood inside, staring back at us. He seemed bored.

It was worth the effort; they are cute little critters, about nine inches tall, soft and chubby, just fitting the diameter of the fake, drain-pipe burrow. "You made my day," I said, and the biologist seemed happy about that. Rick also was happy, and not only because it was his first burrowing owl, too: "Now maybe Wayne will quit bitching about not ever finding that damned owl. He was driving me nuts!"

I don't know why Rick took up birding when he retired a couple of years ago, but I'm glad he did. I've been watching birds since the 1950s, and Rick already can nearly keep up with me. Not bad for an old, creaky, AARP-ready guy. Him, I mean.

Rick and I made it through five days of close quarters and nonstop birding, which is remarkable, since we felt like the Odd Couple – Felix and Oscar. I look at maps ahead of time; Rick would rather wing it. I pack the car with precision; Rick tosses his stuff behind the seat. I'm casual tea; Rick's mandatory coffee (and is dysfunctional in the morning without it). I want everything "just so"; Rick is, shall we say, a bit more flexible with his organizational wants.

After four days of intense birding, however, I could tell Rick had lost the spring in his step. Seeing another new bird didn't seem that important any more. But I talked him into one more night, this time camping in Joshua Tree National Park. Few birds, but an incredible, pristine landscape, and a night sky found only in the winter desert. Through our birding scope, we saw five moons around Jupiter, and gaped at the cosmic clouds in Orion's sword, perhaps birthing lives as ours at that very moment.

A just-past-full moon rose over the mountains. Neither of us spoke from its first peek until it emerged almost whole, a bit of the top nibbled away by darkness. Throughout the show, a great horned owl hooted in the distance. Now and then, coyotes barked like dogs, not 200 yards behind our campsite. Only at times like that, with friends of decades, do you talk about the shape of the universe, death, God or not, dark matter, Big Foot, the condition of your prostate, and that bird you keep hearing across the desert night.

Birding is like fishing in that often you don't catch the thing you're chasing, despite crazy effort. That's what happened to us trying to find a rare Crissal thrasher near Borrego Springs. Our guide book gave explicit instructions on where to hike on the dried mud flats punctuated by dead mesquite trees, thorny brush, and discarded appliances. I had found the elusive thrasher once before in Arizona, and the habitat looked the same – desolate and a bit spooky. But this day, the thrashers, which streak around the ground somewhat like stunted roadrunners, stayed silent and in hiding. Nor did we locate any LeConte's thrashers, in recommended desert locales nearly as ugly.

Our last stop heading back to L.A. was an urban nature park, Whittier Narrows (just off the 605 and Pomona Freeway interchange). Once, cardinals from the eastern U.S. had been found there, but, as we learned, no more. However, the local volunteer naturalist, Lou, had plenty to tell us about all his park's highlights. And he insisted that we just had to see the pair of Egyptian geese at a concrete-lined pond a mile down the road. "Follow me," he said, and headed for his car. There they were, waddling around like any other well-fed park geese. Lou insisted that they were wild birds flown off-course from the Nile Valley, not domestic birds released by someone. I wasn't convinced but kept my mouth shut.

I will give him this: I was ready to identify a lovely flock of all-white doves that flew over my head as exotic ringed turtle-doves. Lou informed me, however, that it was a flock of caged doves that recently had been released at a wedding party. Later, as promised, he emailed me some nice photos he had taken of his local birds, including the famous pair of Egyptian geese.

(Photo by Lou Orr)

After dropping Rick in L.A., I headed north and caught the sunrise at Malibu Lagoon. Surfers were already out, bobbing in the gray sea. I'd never seen fancy homes extended on stilts onto the beach and past the high tide line. Imagine looking down from your deck into the swirling Pacific Ocean. And worrying constantly about your multi-million-dollar home washing out to sea in a storm, or shaking into the water when the Big One comes. Those poor people.

Rick promised me I would be "stepping over" snowy plovers on Malibu's beach, and that's just what happened in the barely-dawn light. A threatened species, they are lucky to be so adorable – wee white puff balls with big black eyes, pattering over the dry sand, rather than hanging out by the water's edge like most shorebirds. Saving them means prodigious efforts up and down the coast to protect their nesting beaches – restricting ORVs, dogs, and even birders, and protecting them from predators. It sure seems worth it to me.

On my ninth and last day of winter birding across Southern California, I had my chance to see that super-rare falcated duck. It looks a lot like our native green-winged teal, with a similar iridescent green and bronze head. But the falcated duck is bigger and has long, sickle-shaped wing feathers (hence the name), and white under its throat. At least, that's what the book says. I stared at hundreds of green-winged teal in the refuge, but talk about looking for a needle in a haystack! I could never turn one into the Asian visitor.

My birding trip's highlight wasn't even a bird. Instead, it was the sight of a thousand elephant seals on the beach north of San Simeon. The big males, weighing as much as my fully-loaded SUV, roared and sparred in the surf, killing time until the pups leave their mothers and the big boys' important business of copulating can resume.

I drove the coast all the way from L.A. to Monterey, passing spots I last had seen from my Harley in the '70s. There was Lucia, where in 1967, the Summer of Love, I had spent one memorable night in a commune. And there was that beach near Big Sur where I had slept on my 21st birthday and accidentally set the beach grass on fire. California Dreamin'. Another story for another time.

(Feb. 16, 2012)

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### Valley of the (Leftover) Giants

It's a remote, hard-to-find place, deep in the Coast Mountains – one of the best last remnants of primal Oregon. I counted growth rings, many thin as a knife blade, on the red trunk of an old giant recently felled across the trail by a winter gale. It had been a seedling before the Pilgrims arrived in New England.

The Valley of the Giants is a small, obscure preserve surrounded as far as you can see by cut-over mountains, and managed by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, an agency generally indifferent to trees that you can't cut down and sell. This is the country where TV reality show's "Ax Men" do their work. You get to the Valley of the Giants via a 30-mile maze of private timber company roads with big red signs warning "recreation users" of a litany of rules for the privilege of driving on their logging roads. Not permitted: campers, recreational vehicles, trailers, motorcycles, all-terrain vehicles, fires, target shooting, camping, wood cutting, etc., etc. It's a small miracle that any old trees escaped in this part of the state. But they did and are safe now. It's an official federal "Outstanding Natural Area."

The largest giant, the "Big Guy," blown down 30 years ago, was a Douglas fir more than 600 years old and 230 feet tall. You can squeeze through a slice cut in its fallen bole.

I first learned about Douglas fir trees in college. I never had seen a live one, but loved the way its scientific name rolls off your tongue like a melody: _Pseudotsuga menziesii_. My old dendrology textbook, which I still carry in my car, says that a Douglas fir can live for 1,400 years. A tree that old could be 15 feet wide and far taller than the length of a football field.

I can believe that, having visited the Valley of the Giants. Yet despite its grand-sounding name, it really is the Valley of the Leftovers. I'm sure that all the true giants of the Northwest were among the first trees cut. Maybe in future centuries some of these minor giants will survive to break tree bigness records. We'll never know, but it doesn't matter. They exist at the moment.

(Mar. 20, 2010)

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### Snow Visit

I visited snow yesterday. The big rain we got the day before dumped snow on the mountains you can see from town. That meant over-full waterfalls and white-bedecked fir trees. Up I went.

As a general principle, I hate snow. I've always detested snow even though I spent most of my life living where winter means snow. No more. Not here in the Willamette Valley. Now I enjoy snow on my own terms. Kind of like grandchildren.

Kids are a wonderful thing, don't get me wrong. Everyone should have some. Hopefully, when young, so there's still time to recover and live a selfish life after they move out. For one thing, without them, you can't get grandkids, one of the best parts of the whole deal.

But when you have kids around, it's not often that you get to listen to snow dripping onto moss, Pacific wrens warbling in tune with the creek, and absolutely nothing else. I drove up to the edge of snowline. The trail was muddy with globs of slush falling from 200-foot trees. Fog hung on the cliffs. Hillsides gushed water like colossal plumbing failures.

Everyone should eat a little fresh-fallen snow now and then – say, once a year. It's living with snow 24-7 that's so awful. Driving in it. Walking in it. Shoveling it over and over and over.

Now my snow shovel mostly gathers dust in the garage. That's as it should be. Now my snow is in balance: close but not too close. I can visit it when I choose. And if the weather changes and crap starts coming out of the sky, I can head for home where it almost never snows.

(Mar. 14, 2010)

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### The One MPH Hiking Club

Have you ever been somewhere outdoors so captivating that you forgot, however briefly, about everything else? When you were truly in the moment? Wilderness can do that to you.

This year, I spent a lot of time in the wilderness forests of Oregon with my friend, Neil, who has a personal connection to these places.

We call ourselves _The 1 MPH Hiking Club_ , though our pace can barely be called _hiking_. More like _sauntering_ , allowing time for swapping questions, taking photos, telling stories, and being surprised.

"I don't like either the word or the thing. People ought to saunter in the mountains - not 'hike!' Do you know the origin of that word saunter? It's a beautiful word. Away back in the Middle Ages people used to go on pilgrimages to the Holy Land, and when people in the villages through which they passed asked where they were going they would reply, _'A la sainte terre,'_ 'To the Holy Land.' And so they became known as _sainte-terre-ers_ or saunterers. Now these mountains are our Holy Land, and we ought to saunter through them reverently, not 'hike' through them." – John Muir

A flock of gray jays bombs me and Neil, raucous as a band of bored teenagers. A brilliant flame on the forest floor, appropriately called orange peel fungus, catches our eye. And there! – fresh elk tracks.

The big trees entrance us. Like the Ents of Tolkien's Middle-earth, these elders of the wilderness forest speak to us of a world unmarked by civilization. We marvel at their beauty, their tenacity to survive centuries of change to their homes. What have they seen? What secrets do they know?

Mature forests that escaped logging and fire are dominated by these behemoths, here in the mountains of western Oregon, where we live. Over and over, Neil and I stop to touch trees that are, as he describes, "a whole 'nother class of ancient." As each new giant stops us, we gawk upward, make wild guesses of its height, its age, rub its bark, try to grasp its silent essence, shake our heads, and move on. Some trees are so huge that we quickly run out of adjectives, reverting, simply, to pointing: "That's a big tree."

The more big trees, the more our questions, and the slower our pace. When did fire last burn here? From our guide books, we learn that the oldest trees – wider than we are tall – are probably "only" 700 years old, since most every forest in Oregon has burned at least once since then. Neil and I speculate, argue about forest secrets, like why various kinds of trees are common here, but not there. Is it from differences in elevation, moisture, past fires?

And why did a mountain lion poop on this particular spot on the trail? That monotonous hooting high in the hemlocks – is it a northern saw-whet owl or northern pygmy-owl? Always, we're left struggling to understand how things got to be the way they are. The closer we peer into the wilderness, and for each question we answer, the more questions we have. And the more surprises.

One morning, a dozen miles inland from the ocean, the forest was cloaked in fog. Sunbeams cut through the thick canopy of branches, reaching 200 feet over us. Each of the trees' countless, needle-covered boughs was tipped with a drop of dew. Then, at just the right angle, a single drop high above caught the sun like a crystal, and burned as a rainbow-colored diamond.

"You're hallucinating," Neil scoffed, when I tried to describe the apparition. I wanted to show him, but apparently, it required a unique set of angles – eyeball to droplet to sun. You had to have your head in exactly the right place to experience the miracle. Move a few inches one way or the other, and the fiery visage vanished. Fortunately, a ways down the trail, we both hit that magical geometry again, and an otherwise indistinguishable drop of dew on a hemlock boughlet high in the forest, caught a sunbeam from 93 million miles away, and froze us in our tracks. When you find yourself in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, is that merely luck?

These wild, virgin paradises are now protected from logging, in no small measure, because of Neil. He was the attorney who took on the U.S. government, 35 years ago, filing lawsuits to save the last uncut, old-growth forests in Oregon. Long story, short, his success helped lead to passage of the 1984 Wilderness Acts. Those federal laws set aside or expanded 31 wilderness areas in Oregon (175 new wilderness areas, nationally).

Neil wrote a moving, intensely personal account of that history, which might make you cry. It did me. (Wilderness, Luck & Love: A Memoir and a Tribute )

Which brings me to Neil's bucket list, and The 1 MPH Hiking Club. Neil wants to hike in all 31 of the Oregon wildernesses that he helped preserve. A grand goal.

I'm just tagging along on the easier hikes, happy for the chance to see, up close, supremely beautiful places. So far, we've made it together to six on his list (Drift Creek, Waldo Lake, Diamond Peak, Boulder Creek, Cummins Creek, and Menagerie Wilderness), plus another three wildernesses lacking that official designation (Gate Creek, Gwynn Creek, and China Loop Trails).

Typically, we'll hike seven or eight miles, round-trip, which at our 1 mph pace, means we can be far from the car when shadows deepen and the sun drops behind the mountains. That's when we pick up speed, our gliding footfalls muffled by damp conifer needles that blanket the trail. It's an eerie time of day, when we hope to see a mountain lion. So far, no luck.

Each wilderness is different. Low-elevation coastal rainforests drip with lichens and moss. The biggest Douglas firs take your breath away. Their bark is deeply furrowed with age, the ground littered with their cones. The biggest are the tallest trees in the world, once reaching over 400 feet, taller even than the biggest redwoods.

East of the Coast Range, the Cascade Mountain wildernesses that we visited are higher in elevation and not quite as soggy. In Boulder Creek Wilderness, there is an expansive area called Pine Bench. It's a grove of centuries-old ponderosa pines, which grow ramrod straight, their bark covered with golden-orange flakes of bark that look like pieces from a jigsaw puzzle. Frequent fires have kept understory cleared, sculpting a landscape from Hansel and Gretel.

Vistas open from meadows and fire-cleared areas of these trails, to the volcanic peaks of the high Cascades: Mt. Jefferson, Mt. Washington, Three-Fingered Jack, Diamond Peak, the Sisters – the highest topping 12,000 feet, most capped by glacial ice. How much time until they erupt again?

"It's humbling, being in an area like this that has endured so long," says Neil. "We're a blink of the eye."

Like those saunterers of the Middle Ages, we are pilgrims in Holy Lands, where wilderness quiets our minds, sharpens our attention, puts us in the moment, and connects us with the Universe. We marvel, in reverence, at our blessings.

(Dec. 16, 2018)

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### Kitties from Heaven

It would be easy to conclude that our new kitties are a gift from God. After all, with impeccable timing, they fell right out of the Arizona sky and into our hands – kitties from Heaven. They say He works in mysterious ways.

We had driven a thousand miles from our home in Oregon to Bullhead City, in order to get two kitties from a wild momma cat, who had decided to have her litter in our friends' desert patio.

Why would my wife, Eva, and I go to such lengths to get the same kind of kitties you could find in a local shelter or a give-away box in a supermarket parking lot?

We Were Not Worthy

For nearly a year we had been trying, unsuccessfully, to buy a new cat. After 19 years, our beloved old cat, Lucy, had given up her ninth life. Thinking about filling our pet void, we had gone to a couple of cat shows, and it was the big and charismatic Maine coon cats that caught our eye. We wanted one. Maybe two.

We quickly discovered, however, that when it comes to buying a Maine coon cat, it's a sellers' market. The breeders have waiting lists, so it's not as simple as handing over the going price of $1,200 and driving home with a kitten. Each breeder first must determine if you are worthy of owning one of their precious Maine coon cats. It seemed a lot like trying to adopt a kid – prying questions about what kind of parents we would be. Apparently, not good enough since no one would sell us a kitty.

In a last-ditch effort, last winter we went to a cat show in Portland, certain we would find a breeder who would put us on a waiting list for their next litter. Lots of Maine coon cats and several breeders were there. Eva dutifully smiled, bought their home-made cat calendars, and promised that if only they would consider us, their darling ball of fur would be given a dog-free, kid-free, smoke-free, indoor castle as a home. We offered to put down a deposit. When one breeder insisted that a sole kitty would be too lonely, we said we would consider two. "Stay in touch by email," was the typical response.

So we did, but our entreaties went nowhere. We started to feel like rejected supplicants before Those-Who-Would-Bestow-Cats, apparently not worthy of such a noble creature as a Maine coon cat.

That's why when we saw on Facebook that our old friends, Ray and Ann, in Bullhead City, were looking to give away wild kitties born in their courtyard, driving a thousand miles seemed like just the thing to do. Besides, with their palm-shaded pool, good wine, and spectacular desert sunsets, why not? The kitties would be a bonus – a timely gift from the cosmos, warranting the long trip to claim them. To hell with those uppity Maine coon cat people.

Gone Kitties

"They're gone," Ray said to me on the phone, just a week before we were to leave. "Momma took them over the roof and into the desert and they're gone."

He explained that Momma Cat had gotten nervous about the increasing attention people were giving her cute progeny. She had no patience for people handling her babies, so had carried them off into the wilds, Ray had concluded, one kitty at a time.

After giving me the bad news, he paused to let it sink in. "We're coming anyways," I said. Ray seemed relieved.

Kitties in a Palm Tree

When we got to Bullhead City, we stared at the empty olla lying where Momma Cat had birthed her babies in the patio. The quiet, enclosed space is dominated by an immense canary palm tree – to ring arms around its trunk would take two people – and its great fronds drape the house's tile roof. The palm tree and desert shrubs gave Momma Cat easy access up and over the roof to the surrounding Mohave Desert. We marveled that she had so quickly vanished with her brood.

It was Eva who heard them first, that faint but unmistakable mewing of kittens. As we stared up into the palm tree's impenetrable tangle of sword-like vegetation just a few feet beyond reach, Momma Cat's face materialized like Alice's Cheshire Cat – but no grin here. Her eyes burned with maternal savagery that said, "Put a hand up here and I'll rip it to shreds." She had moved her kittens only as far as the palm tree.

Over the next few days we learned Momma Cat's routines, which consisted of nursing her well-hidden babies in the palm tree, coming down when the patio was deserted to eat and drink from the bowls provided by Ray and Ann, and heading into the desert for evening carousing and hunting. It was during one of her absences that we first spotted several of her kittens out exploring the palm's canopy.

Maybe, I thought, maybe we could catch one of them. I placed ladders in strategic locations around the patio, then headed to the Bullhead City Walmart to buy a long-handled fishing net.

An Infestation of Cats

"Fisherman?" asked the Walmart checkout lady as she rung up my net.

"That would be a good guess, but no."

"Cat?"

How could she have guessed? I gave her an abbreviated story of our kitties in the palm tree.

"Oh, you should get pictures. Put them on the Internet. Or Facebook, or something," she said.

I smiled.

As other customers in line waited patiently, she proceeded to tell me all about the litter of cats in "the abandoned house trailer next door." She didn't know what she was going to do about them. Apparently, the city was being overrun with an infestation of feral cats. There was talk of trapping, spaying, and releasing the females, but nothing had come of it.

"Well, one thing for sure," I said as I took my receipt. "If we catch these kitties, it will be like them winning the Kitty Jackpot."

Timing

Back at Ray and Ann's, now armed with my net, we waited and watched for the kitties to venture out again. But the week sped by with no more sightings. On our next-to-last evening, we decided to have dinner at a sushi restaurant. It was Ann's birthday.

After a less-than-memorable meal, we sped home in hopes of catching the kitties out and about just before sunset. Plus, I had some pressing business to attend. Eva took up watch in the patio, while I sped to the bathroom to deal with the impact of our desert seafood meal, thereby missing the drama unfolding in the palm tree.

It seems that Momma Cat had chosen just that moment to lead her litter out of the palm tree, onto the roof, and off into the desert for somewhere she felt was safer for her kittens. As I returned, Eva pointed to the roof and I sprinted up the ladder, Walmart net in hand.

When Momma Cat spotted me, she ran to the ridge of the roof, where she stopped to wait for her kittens toddling along the roof's edge. But the leading kitten lost its footing and slipped over the edge, landing with a soft bounce on the patio pavers. Below, Eva, now joined by Ann, scooped up kitty number one. I moved gingerly over the roof's clay tiles, hoping to net at least one of the other kittens. Momma Cat yowled in horror. That's when kitties two and three slid off the roof, landing shaken but uninjured.

We knew there were two more kittens in her litter, but there was no sign of them, apparently still impossibly hidden in the palm tree's tangled fronds. I retreated from the nearly dark rooftop to the patio.

There they were. Three kittens, with two of them now ours – a calico female and an adorable cream-colored male with over-sized ears and paws. Ours. Winners of the Kitty Jackpot.

Had we returned from dinner a few minutes later, they would have already vanished into the desert night without us ever seeing them. Had we returned earlier, Momma Cat probably wouldn't have risked leading them from their palm tree haven until after dark. Strange, how the timing worked out so perfectly. Divine providence? If, as the gospel song claims, His eye is on the sparrow, then why not kitties?

Sonny & Skye

We spent a good share of our two-day drive back to Oregon trying out names for our new kitties. Sonny & Skye fit. They now are about nine weeks old (we've had to guess about their exact birthdays), healthy and happy, and living a life of cat luxury. Grain-free kitten food, wet and dry. Toys and more toys. A cat play tower that I built. You might even say they've landed in a cat's Heaven on Earth.

Kitties from Heaven

We don't know the fate of Momma Cat's last two kittens. Since Ray & Ann have observed Momma Cat already behaving again like the cat slut that she is, I'm guessing that those kittens won't survive Bullhead City's searing 115 degree summer.

If it helps, you can believe that those kitties "have gone to a better place." Or, "God wanted them in Heaven." Or, if you're a Mormon, "they'll be reunited with their family one day."

The trouble is that we really don't know if they were Christian cats. They might have been Buddhist cats. If so, maybe God will send those lost kittens back to Earth, one day to fall out of a desert palm tree into a life of cat luxury. Kitties from Heaven. It happens.

(June 27, 2015)

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# FISHING

### Not Just another Fish

Sometimes a fish is not just another fish. Last week when a big salmon smashed my Halloween-orange plug dragging in the river's current, it satisfied a ten-year quest. And, at the same time, atoned for a fishing flub that has haunted me for 34 years.

_ZZZZ-zzzzz-zzzz!_ To a fisherman, there's nothing like it – the scream of a fly reel's drag. It means you are hanging on to a truly big fish – on a fly rod, a rare event. Yet here on my home water, I finally had hooked a big one on my fly rod. _ZZZZ-zzzzz-zzzz!_

It had been pitch black when I got to the river. Getting my boat ready to launch by flashlight, I heard a familiar disembodied voice from the darkness: "Hey, Wayne."

"That you, Don?" I answered.

As usual when the fall salmon run is on, the parking lot already was busy with a handful of fishing guides and their clients, readying for the day. Don was one of the guides I'd swapped fish stories with for years. "So how'd you do the other day?" he asked, walking over. We'd last chatted two days earlier at the same pre-dawn spot.

Profanities spewed from me of their own accord: "Goddamned fish. I can't get a fucking bite to save my life," I fumed. "I swear, I'm cursed this year." I paused. In the worst way, I didn't want to ask but knew I had to: "How'd you do?"

"We got ten."

I understand why guides almost always boat more salmon than me. After all, they do it every day for a living. They've got two clients with lines in the water, or three lines when the guide also fishes. Even more important, they can shuttle their vehicle and boat trailer to a take-out point far downstream and ride back to their starting point in their clients' car. That means they can cover miles of water floating downstream in their shallow-draft drift boats, navigating rapids that my boat can't handle, and never have to motor back upstream.

So I recognized Don's big advantage, but still. Ten salmon? I grabbed my heart. "Don, you're killing me here."

The last thing Don said to me before I backed my boat trailer down the ramp was, "Don't be afraid to use plugs. Drag them in that shallow water in the rapids where you fish and they'll grab it."

Anchored in my spot, I thought about Don's advice. I'd already spent several early-season days fishing the method that had worked for me in prior years – drifting gobs of fish eggs in the current. The best ones emit a trail of stinky, white "milk" that salmon can't resist. Except that they had, not counting a few "jack" salmon I had hooked – the small ones that inexplicably return from the ocean after just one year, instead of the usual two to four for the big adult salmon returning to spawn.

Why not take Don's advice? After all, over the years, I'd caught plenty of salmon on plugs with my spinning rods. But how about a radical twist? This was the year I had vowed to catch a salmon on my special fly rod. Why not tie a plug on the end of my fly line's leader? It's not something I'd ever read about in fishing magazines, but what the hell?

I call my fly rod "special" because it was a gift from a friend precisely ten years ago. It was the year before we moved west from Virginia to Oregon. I had travelled that fall to attend David's wedding in his home in far-northern Vermont. That was when he handed me a rod case with his favorite Sage, graphite, four-piece, eight-weight, nine-and-a-half-foot steelhead rod. "I want you to have it," he said. "You'll get more use out of it in Oregon than I ever will."

And I have, especially with smallmouth bass and shad. But a decade later, I still was waiting for that first really big fish to test my special fly rod. I figured I owed it to David. Now that his ten-year wedding anniversary had arrived, it seemed only fitting that I catch something worthy of his gift.

Fly rods are designed to cast weightless fluffs of feathers, not big, hulking salmon plugs. Picture those lovely scenes in _A River Runs Through It_ : a brightly-colored fly line arcs through the air behind a wader-clad angler, water droplets on the line sparkling in sunlight, the cast straightening at just the right moment, then shooting forward to deliver a tiny fly silently on the water – described by author Norman Maclean as "an art that is performed on a four-count rhythm between ten and two o'clock," referring to the imaginary clock that defines the position and movements of your fly rod.

Flinging a heavy plug with a fly rod is far less poetic, though not entirely bereft of grace. Standing in the back of the boat, coils of loose fly line at my feet, I swing the long rod in a pendulum arc in front of me to carry the plug and some 15 feet of line to one side, then power the rod in the direction of the cast and let all that loose line zip through the rod guides. On a good lob, the plug will sail 50 or 60 feet, plenty far enough.

When that salmon grabbed my orange plug wobbling in the current, the violence of its strike was shocking. Fishing that way, you retrieve line hand to hand, pointing the rod tip nearly straight at the plug, so when a fish strikes you feel the jolt of its savagery, almost as if the rod wasn't there.

As the reel music played – _ZZZZ-zzzzz-zzzz! –_ I scrambled to the front of the boat, rod held high with one hand, to throw overboard the anchor rope (tethered to a float) and chase my fish, headed downstream. The 90 feet of fly line was a distant memory and the backing line was quickly disappearing. My chase was powered by a foot-operated electric motor; the fleeing salmon was powered by... by what, exactly?

I have a good friend who loves marine life and believes that sport fishing is cruel and unusual punishment for innocent fish. I always reply, compared to what? A salmon that gets gill netted and thrown into a commercial fishing vessel's hold – is that a more fishy-humane outcome? How about eaten alive by a bear or an eagle? Or, if among the lucky few that survive the battering migration upstream for hundreds of miles to spawn, then slowly becoming the swimming dead, aimlessly adrift while being consumed by white fungus? It just seems to me that a short battle with a fisherman, then a quick bonk on the head, might not be seem so bad in comparison. Memorialized in picture and words. And turned into a gastronomic delight. Of course, that's all easy for me to say.

Through long minutes, my very-much-alive salmon surged back and forth across the river, repeatedly pulling line out, which I'd then furiously crank the fly reel handle to recover. _This is what I've been waiting for so long,_ I told myself. _Maybe finally..._

But anything can go wrong when you are fighting and netting a big fish, especially doing it alone. Hooks pull out. Lines break. Knots come undone.

Which is what had happened to me 34 years earlier, the last time I had a really big fish hooked on a fly rod. David and I were fishing a remote river in British Columbia. We had figured out how to catch the resident trout and whitefish. But we also had seen occasional silvery, heart-racing flashes of big, sea-run fish – salmon or steelhead, we weren't sure which. Then one morning one of them grabbed my fly that was hanging in the current far downstream. At that point in my fishing career, I'd caught lots of fish – even a few big ones – but nothing had prepared me for this fight with a wild steelhead as long as your arm. I splashed clumsily downstream in my waders trying to recover line. For memorable minutes I felt the fish's power. Just as I started to believe I might actually land this monster, the steelhead leaped high as your head, and the line went dead. Nothing.

"What happened?" screamed David, who was downstream and closer to the fish than I ever got.

I reeled in my slack line. The curly-cues at the end of my monofilament leader – the place where the hook should have been tied – told the sad tale. My knot had failed. Would I ever live down such a rookie mistake?

Months later, an acquaintance of the fishing persuasion spotted me sitting in a business conference and seemed unusually glad to see me. He made his way down my row and plopped next to me, handing me with considerable fanfare a small brown sack. Inside, I found some hooks, leader material, and a little brochure on how to tie fishing knots. Smart ass.

Thirty-four years later on an Oregon river, I was finally able to wipe that smirk off my memory of his face.

My salmon tired after its berserker runs and was soon netted, whacked on the head, weighed (14 pounds), and put on ice in the cooler. As is typical with fishermen, once you catch one good fish, you figure you must know what you're doing. After using my off-beat plug-on-a-fly rod method to boat one salmon, I just knew I could catch a second. I stuck with it for another seven hours. That's right, seven more hours fishing, with absolutely nothing to show for it. That's a lot of casts.

I cleaned my salmon riverside. The vultures arrived almost immediately. Like magic, the first one appeared in branches above, beady eyes in its bald red head staring patiently. Then a few more birds showed up, the _whop-whop-whop_ of wings sounding like distant helicopters. Eventually, there were two dozen black shadows of death soaring overhead or looking down from the trees, jostling with noisily flapping wings over the best place to wait for the inevitable feast of salmon head, guts, and scraps. I've learned the hard way to be sure there are no perching branches directly overhead when cleaning fish. There may be worse things to land on your head than a stream of shit from a bird that eats fish guts and roadkill, but offhand, I can't think of any.

As soon as my boat left the shore, the vultures moved in, arguing over the salmon carcass with loud hisses, then grabbing choice tidbits and flying off to dine in peace. By the next day, nothing would remain but a skeleton. The fish filets, of course, went home to my freezer, and the fish eggs, since it was a hen salmon, got cured as bait for catching more of her kin.

Near the end of my fishing marathon, a guide with his clients motored by, intrigued by my unorthodox fishing technique. "It's not really fly fishing. What do you call that?" he called out, watching my plug swing back, then fly forward.

"It's not pretty but it can work. It's quite a thrill when one hits," I replied. All three men in the other boat smiled and nodded in understanding. I didn't mention that it could be 34 years between thrills.

(Sept. 23, 2015)

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I Saved Bambi

It's not often you get to save Bambi, but that's just what I did yesterday.

The lost black-tailed fawn was stranded on a ledge along the river. Behind it, sheer rock banks were slicked dark with moss and rain. In front, deep, frigid water. It must have slipped in upstream during the night and clambered onto this false refuge. Now trapped, the fawn was wet, shivering, and, I'm sure, lonelier than it ever had been in its life.

What to do? Mama deer was nowhere to be seen, with no way to find or help its wayward fawn. Should I let nature take its course, however cruel that sometimes can seem, or should I help this pathetic little deer?

I had discovered the waif during my early-morning fishing. Below the fawn's perch, the cliffs stretched downward into the water, exposing an ancient earth-rending fault that created a deep channel where salmon pooled on their mysterious voyages to redds of their birth. They spawn, then die, a hideous wasting process, slowly melting them with white fungus. Near the end, they cruise as ghosts, dead fish swimming. It's nature's way.

I had a friend, a wildlife biologist, who foreswore any intervention with nature's way. You don't try to save orphaned raccoons. You don't feed the birds. You don't need wildlife rehabilitation centers. And, you sure as hell don't rescue Bambi.

I thought about that approach, of letting the fawn suffer its fate to maybe survive, maybe not. What difference would it make, one deer, more or less, in the world?

While I fished, I checked on Bambi regularly, hoping it would take matters into its own little hooves. But each time I drifted by in my boat, it would just get agitated and look hopeless.

Sometimes life puts you in situations where you just have to do something you didn't plan on. When standing by, when pretending it's not your problem, isn't an option. I was alone on the river, bad weather was coming ("Get set for wet and cold," the online weather alert had warned), water levels were rising, and I didn't want to see Bambi's helpless eyes in my sleep.

Using my big landing net, I nudged Bambi into the 46-degree water, then shepherded it swimming toward the end of the cliffs about a hundred yards downstream. But the fawn quickly spotted an apparent escape route, and scrabbled its way onto another dead-end ledge, then up slippery rocks into a shallow, dripping cave. It curled up in the soggy grotto and stared at me. I decided to let it rest a bit, and went back to my fishing.

While Bambi shivered in its cave, I caught the second of just two salmon. I wouldn't realize until four futile fishing hours later that it would be the last salmon I would catch this year. Those perfect moments that you chase, no one ever tells you when they've passed. You just hope you spot them, and savor them, as they go by. No one ever lets you know that this will be the last fish you will catch today, or this year, or ever. You just never know.

I boated back to Bambi, edging up to the cliff and stepping out onto the slippery, black mudstone. Holding the boat's rope in one hand and a paddle in the other, I tried to nudge Bambi from its perch.

"Back to the water. Let's go, little buddy. It won't be any warmer later. Time to swim some more," I told it, and rattled my paddle on the rocks. Bambi lost its footing and slid toward me. I didn't want a deer sharing my boat, nor did I want to share its swim.

But the fawn slipped past me and splashed into the river, and headed straight for the opposite shore, two hundred feet away. No cliffs, just soft grassy banks, and beyond, pastures and vineyards of the Umpqua Valley wineries. It swam strong. Will Bambi be reunited with its mother? Will it survive the coming winter? At least it has a chance.

As I watched Bambi emerge from its river adventure, shake like a dog, and trot off, I waved: "You're welcome."

(Nov. 17, 2011)

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### Getting It Right

"I'm gonna kick your ass this year!"

Not exactly what you expect to hear booming at you from across the river in the early-morning stillness of Oregon's wine country. From my fishing boat, I recognized Mickey. He lives right on the river, and works the vineyards that stretch back from steep, wooded banks.

While fishing last fall, I had chatted with Mickey, who keeps his beat-up, metal rowboat upside-down on the river bank at the base of the 30-foot embankment below his simple camper. Mickey had watched me catch lots of coho salmon throughout the season, while he caught few. I was happy to share my secret with him – orange Kwikfish, size 11. Apparently, this year Mickey was stocked up with the numinous plugs and ready. Ready to kick my ass.

_Yeah, we'll see about that_ , is what I thought. What I shouted back, changing the subject, was, "How'd you keep your boat safe in last week's rains?" Mickey related his challenges of dragging his clunky boat halfway up the hillside, out of reach of the extra ten feet of river that the storms had brought. Water levels were just getting back to normal.

The river is an odd culture of professional fishing guides and their clients, local good-ole-boys, now and then a TV fishing show guy (see next story), and ever-hopeful newcomers – all of them addicted to one degree or another to catching big fish. Plus, there's Mickey.

Sound carries over water, so you hear things. From mid-river, I eavesdropped on Mickey and his two friends from Hawaii, who had been salmon fishing with him that morning. His visitors seemed in a hurry to leave and hadn't caught any fish, though Mickey had caught five. One was a 25-pound hawg chinook, bigger than anything I'd ever caught out there, so who knows? Maybe Mickey really is gonna kick my ass this year.

Despite his friends' poor fishing luck, the river was filled with migrating coho salmon, freshly arrived from the ocean and silver as brand-new quarters. Hooking one of those magnificent fish, full of energy for its suicidal spawning journey, is like snagging a dervish on acid. There's nothing like a giant, unseen fish, hooked and pissed, peeling line as your reel's braking-drag screams. It's a connection to a primal piece of the Earth.

A fish you don't even hook, however, can be almost as exciting – the ones that do a fish drive-by. At the end of a long cast as the fluorescent lure glows slowly into view from the gray-green depths, and just as you're about to pull it from the water, a silvery torpedo materializes, tracking the wobbling Kwikfish. First, the predatory face appears, then its great body, and in an instant the salmon harmlessly bumps the top of your lure with its nose and vanishes. Gone. Like that fish was just fucking with you.

* * *

A few days later, I noticed someone else had taken out Mickey's rowboat, and eventually our watery paths crossed. I met Josh, a friend of Mickey's. Josh sounded possessive towards the river, as in, "We keep an eye on fish caught in our river."

He and I engaged in the ritualistic sharing of fishing success or not. I had caught seven salmon the day before. "That's a good day on this river," Josh confirmed. "That's a good day," I concurred.

Josh looked sideways at me, "Wait a minute. I think Mickey has told me about you. Orange Kwikfish, right?" His tone became pleasantly deferential.

Josh was fishing with this garish purple plug. "Guys yesterday said it was the hot color. I don't get it," he confessed. After our conversation, he switched to an orange Kwikfish.

I'd like to say that Josh immediately caught a giant salmon on my recommended lure, but that didn't happen. Myself, I managed to catch a few coho over the course of the morning, but it was slow.

From a distance, I watched Josh hopelessly snagged on the rocky bottom, then finally, give up and snap his line. Something told me that he had just lost his only orange Kwikfish, and as I fished past him, he complained that was so.

"I've got one that's all chipped up and you can have it if you want," I said. "I don't think the chips really matter to the fish."

He pounced on my offer. I dug out the battered Kwikfish, motored close, and tossed him the lure, noticing that I had upgraded its set of treble hooks. "It's got super-duper hooks on it, too," I said, matter-of-factly. "I'm sure it's caught lots of fish."

Later, as I motored toward the boat ramp to leave, I again crossed paths with Josh, now a half-mile downriver from Mickey's place. "I just missed one," he beamed.

As he reeled in his line, I saw my old orange Kwikfish with its distinctive chips. "And on the magic lure," I said. "But now you've got a long row back upstream."

Josh seemed bemused and grinned broadly: "I would love to just row all day long."

He thanked me again for giving him the lure, and told me about the one that got away. I replied that it happens to everyone.

Your attention drifts. Fishing lines get nicked and break. Hooks get dulled on rocks and don't hold. Landing nets get tangled. The fish gets your line wrapped about your anchor rope or engine. In other words, big fish often get away. It's not easy getting everything right.

You may have been fishing for hours, even days, without catching anything. Then out of the blue – _wham!_ – a fish comes out of nowhere and smacks your bait.

Drifting away from Josh's boat, I added, "Don't get lackadaisical." I pondered what the hell kind of word that was to use. I watched a mink with a snake in its mouth run along the riverbank and wondered if the word, lackadaisical, had ever been uttered before on this river in all of human history.

At that point, including my prior fishing trip two days earlier that had been a complete bust, I had been casting for six hours without a fish. That's when – _wham!_ Right at the boat, in plain sight, a coho hit my orange Kwikfish. Of course it got away. I got lackadaisical.

After I watched a guide with his bumbling clients catch a salmon, using eggs, I switched, eventually catching two salmon.

Fishing over for the day, I headed upstream with my two-fish limit. There I found Josh, futilely casting a brand-new green Kwikfish, the hot color of the previous day, he explained to me. I asked if he would do me a favor and take my picture, and he readily agreed.

On a grassy point in the shade, I cleaned my salmon, bagged their eggs for later curing into bait, drank a Corona, and ate lunch in the shade. Santana played on my speaker, under a blue October sky. Light filtered through the hillside of bigleaf maples, resplendent in their Northwest ochers, rusts, and greens, and mirrored perfectly in the river's flat sheen.

For long moments, I basked in the contentment that comes from being in exactly the right place at exactly the right time, and doing exactly the right thing.

* * *

I finally ran into Mickey again out on the river the other day. The run was winding down and the fishing slow. We agreed that we needed some rain. I mentioned that I had been chatting the past few weeks with his friend, Josh, and had given him an old, orange Kwikfish.

"Yeah, I know. I'm using it right now," Mickey said, pausing on his beat-up wooden oars and holding up his fishing rod. Sure enough. Hanging on the end of his line was my old, chipped-up lure. "In the last couple of days I've caught five chinook on it."

Has Mickey kicked my ass this year, like he threatened early-on? Success on the river is a hard thing to measure. Besides, this year still has a few weeks of fishing left in it. Anything could happen.

(Oct. 23, 2013)

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Hawg Man, TV Fred, and the Great Deer Pee Exposé

Hawg Man introduced himself to me in the predawn darkness at the river's edge. At first, I didn't know he was a TV star. But it didn't take long.

"Don't you know who I am?" he asked. A trace of smirk was illumed by his boat and trailer lights.

Two days prior, he had beaten me to the boat ramp, and I had worried he was headed for my favorite spot, up-river. We hadn't really chatted, as they had pushed quickly into the river. He told his fishing guests, "On this boat, we never get skunked." Turned out, he roared right past my spot, fishing farther upstream than I had ever ventured due to formidable rapids and rocks.

Now, two days later, this time my boat already launched, I could take my time. I looked at him more closely. Handsome face. Trim. Really good teeth. Salt-and-pepper goatee and mustache, with same colored hair under a black cap featuring a red, white, and blue salmon.

"No, I don't know who you are," I smiled.

"I'm Glenn Hall. Got a TV fishing show: _Hawg Quest_." ("Hawgs" are huge chinook salmon.)

Sure enough, his boat said "Hawg Quest" on its sides, along with paintings of fish in a panorama reminiscent of air-brushed nature scenes that you see on the back of RVs going down the freeway. Big white letters proclaimed the boat's brand, "Wooldridge," which I learned was one of his TV show's sponsors. He proudly described his custom boat's luxuries: a fancy electrical system for his stereo, lines of blue LEDs lighting a floor area that seemed twice as big as my boat, four downriggers on chrome rails, built-in hoses to flush away fish slime, boat headlights – all driven by a 150-horsepower white Evinrude outboard, with a jet drive for skimming over shallow water. The supreme Northwest rivers salmon fishing rig.

"Most all the guys who fish here much know who I am," he said, not-so-subtly implying that I must not fish here much. I didn't tell him that I had been fishing this stretch of river twice a week for six years and, no, I really had no idea who the fuck he was. Instead, I asked him about his TV show and whether he had filmed his prior fishing day. I learned he already had 174 shows finished so didn't need any more footage. He told me the cable channel of his show, "the same one that airs the Mariners' games." I was pretty certain that's a baseball team, but I wasn't positive so didn't reply. I'll be sure to search for his show and DVR it, though.

Okay, he didn't call himself Hawg Man. But, really? Glenn? It was hard to picture this larger-than-life, macho self-promoter as a Glenn. I think Hawg Man is a much better fit.

Hawg Man was plenty full of himself, but here's the thing. On our prior day's fishing, when the salmon had skunked me, he and his buddies caught six chinooks. On this day, they would catch only two small ones, if I read correctly Hawg Man's hand signals as he flew past me heading home for the day. He flashed his TV star smile and waved, happy as you can be piloting your jet boat full-speed down a deserted river in Oregon's fall sunshine.

I was anchored for lunch in the shoreline shade, and had been thinking about our early-morning encounter. Hawg Man reminded me of another bombast I knew years ago in Michigan, TV star, outdoor-show guy, Fred Trost. Fred is dead now, but he and his big mouth cut a wide path in life.

Fred took over the then-iconic outdoor show, _Michigan Outdoors_ , and reinvented himself (from hustling _Bowling for Dollars_ on a Flint TV station) into a plaid-shirted, mustached caricature of a hunting-fishing guru for Michigan's outdoorsmen.

I didn't know Fred all that well, but well enough that he was always comfortable insulting me – usually about my balding. His jibes reflected his insecurities about his own thinning pate. Sometimes, we would cross paths in country-western bars with Fred and his latest rough-looking paramour. Fred prided himself on being a good-ole-boy.

Shameless self-promotion is essential to be a successful TV outdoor guy. Fred tried everything to make his show successful – printing a magazine, hawking outdoor whatnots, opening a "Fred Trost Museum of Outdoor Collectibles," even staging TV debates on outdoor sports or environmental controversies (which is where I had fit in, to occasionally appear on his show). What ruined Fred's life was his botched attempt at investigative journalism.

His big exposé was deer pee. Fred charged on his TV show that a Michigan company was selling fake deer pee. When hunters bought their little bottles of expensive deer urine, they were promised it came from does in heat. Deer hunters sprinkle this erotic juice around to mask their human odor and, presumably, attract horny bucks. Fred said it was all a bunch of hooey.

I found his pee-damning video online. Living forever in virtual reality, Fred seemed so comfortable, naïve really, when smiling into the camera and calling the deer-pee-peddlers liars and cheats.

But either Fred was wrong about the fake pee, or he just wasn't able to prove his libelous claims in court. In any event, he lost everything when the pee company sued him and won a $4 million judgment. Ever the wronged, camo-clad knight in his own mind, Fred vowed revenge on the legal system. He went back to school and got a law degree from a little college in Lansing. To the best of my recollection, however, this had no impact on the deer pee lawsuit or on Fred's life, in general. To me, he just seemed even more bitter and unhappy.

Then one day, years later, someone sent me an email with Fred's obituary. It said he had died of a rare lung disease at 61. Fred's friends called him "the first outdoor media star" and "a giant in the outdoors."

My encounter with Hawg Man, his TV-persona starlight glowing even in the morning darkness, reminded me of Fred. Though a flawed character, Fred really did love nature, hunting, and fishing. I wished he could experience just one more moment like mine on the river that day: Ravens talking their talk high in a dirty blue sky that's hazy from wilderness fires off in the mountains. Does and fawns grazing the river's banks, defined by round clumps of sedges that bristle like soft, green porcupines.

Turkeys gobbling in the hills; wrentits trilling like piccolos. Overhead, "whoosh-a-whoosh-a-whoosh," from wings of a vulture spooked from its dead fish luncheon. Flat greens and yellows dominating the landscape, wearing none of the riotous colors of Michigan forests in autumn, except riverside, where among the scrubby trees and shrubs growing at the limits of winter's raging floods are bright patches of flaming-red poison oak.

In one of my former lives (as newspaper reporter), I wrote a profile of Fred. He told me then, "Here's a way I can make a living, have an absolute ball, and get my message on TV about why hunting and fishing are honorable." But that was before his great deer pee exposé.

(Sept. 14, 2012)

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A Big One

This may be the greatest fish story of my life. And that's saying something, since I've been fishing for 60 years and have some pretty good ones.

Yesterday, I was fishing for smallmouth bass. It was a good morning – calm, sunny, and warm. Not another boat on the water. Yellow warblers sang from riverside bushes, _sweet sweet sweeter-than-sweet_.

I had put a few nice bass in the cooler. But, as so often in fishing, "the bite" had ended as abruptly as it had started. Just a few more casts...

I was fishing with what's called an "ultralight" rod and reel, designed to let you cast tiny lures with near-invisible fishing line. Six-pound test line, which is what I was using, means that if your line is in perfect condition – new, with no nicks – and if your knots are tied perfectly, the line could lift something close to six pounds without breaking.

My bass-catching Roostertail spinner – its half-inch body, bright yellow with black polka dots, and sporting a wee, gold spinner blade – stopped in the current, then moved away from my boat with authority. I caught a glimpse, three feet into the crystalline, green-hued water, of an immense hulk, silver with mottled spots on its back, suddenly irritated. The drag on my little reel, which now felt like a toy, squealed as line zipped away, tentatively at first, and then in a mad rush.

_Oh, this should be good_ , I thought, certain that I was seconds away from losing a huge fish that, unintentionally, I had tricked into biting onto a treble hook the size of my pinkie's fingernail. I figured the fish would go about 15 pounds.

A fishing reel's drag is designed to slow line being pulled out by a fish, without the line snapping. An ultralight reel, however, is built to brake the kind of small fish you fry in a pan, not fishy beasts that can tow your boat around the river.

I kept pace with my berserker fish only because of my foot-operated trolling motor. It runs off two big batteries and scoots along pretty good. Each time the fish rushed away, I would tear after it at top speed, while trying to ease pressure on that damned, annoying thing in its jaw.

After some time, I was able to maneuver close enough to get a look at my mystery fish. When it materialized from the depths, I realized it wasn't a steelhead trout, as I had guessed, but a chinook salmon, silver as a new dime and fresh from three years or so getting fat in the Pacific Ocean. I thought, hopefully, _Shit, I might actually be able to land this fish._

And eat it. Nothing from Oregon waters tastes better than spring-run chinook salmon.

Bringing the fish close enough to grab with my net was the challenge now. Especially since it was longer than the net was wide. On my first try, the net's rim bumped the salmon's nose, and it responded with appropriate outrage, surging under the boat. I dropped the net and buried my bent-double, little fishing rod into the river, trying to keep the line away from the boat's motors.

I went through two more rounds of chasing the fish's runs, pulling it close, then watching it swirl and streak away, little-by-little gaining confidence that I might against all odds beat this fish. Yet, I knew from experience that when fighting a big fish, anything can happen. Lines break, knots give way, hooks straighten... It's a long list and sometimes you have no idea what happened, and the fish is just gone.

Not this day. With my rod arm aching from the constant tension, on my fourth attempt, I nosed the semi-tired salmon into the net. As I hauled it in and laid the net on the boat floor, the salmon flopped once and the yellow Roostertail spinner fell away limply. Its little barbed treble hook hadn't even broken skin; apparently, all that had kept me and my fish linked was the steady pressure I had maintained. Perseverance furthers. Luck helps.

I used to have a friend who would, at unpredictable times while we were bike riding, let out a _whoop_ , when the spirit moved him. It would scare hell out of me, and anyone else nearby. He didn't care. _Why not?_ I thought, and let fly my own celebratory exclamation.

_Thunk!_ went the priest (the cudgel delivering last rites). _Thunk!_

My salmon weighed 14 pounds. I filled in my license tag – 32 inches.

It wasn't the biggest salmon in the river – some grow to more than 50 pounds. Not even the biggest or hardest-fighting salmon I've ever caught. What made this Oregon salmon so remarkable was catching it on a miniature rod and reel. I wouldn't have thought that possible.

By the end of my day's fishing, another boat was on the river, so as I was leaving, I pulled alongside to compare notes, as is customary. Plus, it was my chance to brag.

The trouble with fish stories, however (even good ones, I must admit), is that nobody really cares. If you're not a fisherman, it's hard to understand what the fuss is about, especially in light of all the fishless hours and days it takes to catch something good.

And, if you are a fisherman... Well, here's the thing: Fishermen are a lot like teenagers in that they're terrible listeners. They feign attention until your first pause, their cue to launch into their own fabulous fishing story, which always seems to involve a bigger fish or grander adventure than yours. Trying to tell your own tale tends to be a deflating experience.

As it was this day with Greg, who introduced himself, since he wanted to have coffee with me some day to pump me about my knowledge of the river, which he fished only occasionally. Not that it left him short of fishy blarney: "Yeah, those springers will bite anything. I caught one on a worm one time. Once, I hooked one on an ultralight, four-pound test line. Fought him for 20 minutes before I lost him. The line just wore out and parted." And so on.

The exception is my wife, who will listen raptly to my fish stories, and who embodies the wise woman described by Norman Maclean in his quintessential fishing story, _A River Runs Through It"_ : "...she knew how to cook them, and, most important, she knew always to peer into the fisherman's basket and exclaim, 'My, my!'"

Cook the salmon, my wife did last night, and we agreed it was a fine, fine fish.

(June 29, 2012)

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# CRAZY DAYS

### Dark as Death

I flipped off my flashlight to utter darkness. Not dark as in "a dark and stormy night," but dark as in buried alive dark. No sense of front or back or up or down, except a vaguely directed gravity. My eyes, seeking a glimmer of light, tried to adjust, but nothing changed. No hint of the hand in front of my face.

I leaned into my backpack cushioning a jagged wall of the long-closed mine and listened. Somewhere water dripped. A moan echoed from the tunnel's abandoned timbers, straining under the weight of the world above. A falling rock clattered.

I was alone in the middle of the night, nearly a quarter-mile below ground, evidence of cave-ins all around, and not a soul knew where I was. The copper mine I was exploring had been abandoned for more than 30 years.

If something happened, how long before anyone found me? Would time have meaning where there is no light? The dread was unbearable, and I turned my flashlight back on.

Far above, my bicycle hidden in the bushes, it was nearing midnight, which this far north in summer was just two hours past sunset. I had ridden 20 miles from my college dorm room in town. Then, waiting for dusk so I could sneak across an open field, past the "Keep Out - No Trespassing" signs, I had lifted rotted boards capping the mine shaft and dropped out of sight. After descending the first few hundred feet, I had paused to catch my breath, relieved that I wasn't going to get caught. I was alone. Really, really alone.

All to find a rare but worthless rock, called mohawkite, found in this mine on a remote reach of Michigan's Upper Peninsula. Arching off the "U.P." is the Keweenaw Peninsula, jutting like a stony finger 75 miles into Lake Superior. Here, hundreds of mines once were bored thousands of feet deep chasing copper-bearing ores. But only in this one spot did a peculiar assemblage of billion-year-old rocks have just the right combination of chemicals – primarily copper, zinc, and arsenic – that were mixed over eons to form the heavy, metallic blue-silver mineral, mohawkite. A rock found nowhere else on Earth but here in its namesake Mohawk Mine.

When you hold a piece of mohawkite in your hand, the weight is what you notice first. It's heavy like lead. Yet if dropped, it shatters like ice. Its color is not leaden gray but sparkles silvery across a rough surface. Where exposed to air, it weathers to blotches of color – unique compounds in shades from tea green to turquoise.

What circuitous paths carry us from here to there? I wouldn't have been underground if I hadn't decided to go to college at Michigan Tech, located in Houghton on the Keweenaw Peninsula. I was 19 and majoring in geological engineering. The school was 500 miles from my depressing hometown of Flint and the farthest I could get away and still pay in-state tuition. It's not that I wanted to be a geologist or an engineer. I didn't. It's just that I couldn't think of anything better to do. And I kind of liked rocks. Hell of a plan.

To get a general idea of where in the mine's miles of tunnels I most likely would find mohawkite, I had studied yellowing mine maps in musty file drawers at the college library. It appeared that the mine's 11th and 12th "levels" were richest in mohawkite.

A level is a horizontal tunnel extending from the mine's shaft. In the Mohawk Mine, every hundred feet deeper a new level was blasted out in two directions following the erratic seams of copper ore. Where a level interrupted a quality copper deposit, it might open into room-sized excavations, even breaking through into the next level above.

The mine's shafts (there once were six, the first dug in 1899) are 8 feet wide and 18 feet tall, penetrating the earth at a 54-degree incline, matching the dip of the ore-bearing seam. At that steep angle I could just barely clamber down the shaft's jumble of rocks, maneuvering hand-over-hand while holding my flashlight, all the while trying not to bang my bare head on broken timbers. In some places I was able to clutch the rusted iron rails that remained, once used to ferry miners up and down and hoist out millions of pounds of copper ore.

For the few decades it lasted, the Mohawk Mine made more than $15 million in profits and employed more than a thousand workers. Dirty, dangerous, unhealthy work, to be sure, but compared to what? How else could you make a living in the early 1900s in the U.P. wilderness where winter can bury you in 300 inches of snow?

I slowly descended the mine's shaft, keeping count until I reached the 11th level. All the U.P.'s old copper mines are shut down now, like this mine since 1932, and slowly filling with groundwater. It was said by my fellow geology students, who had talked to people who supposedly knew whereof they spoke, that the Mohawk Mine, which went down nearly 3,000 feet, was flooded with water at about 1,500 feet. I was still a few hundred feet above that so drowning was the least of my worries. Just to be sure, I threw a rock as far as I could down into the dark mine shaft. It flew for a long time, then bounced and rattled into the void. No splash.

I explored a few hundred feet of the tunnels. Despite my flashlight's anemic beam, there it was, silvery traces of mohawkite glittering in the reflected light. Some was exposed on a tunnel wall, once blasted by dynamite, now flat as a tombstone, and impossible to fracture with a hand pick. Other mohawkite-laden rock glistened in veins from lips of broken ledges, fallen rock, or discarded mining rubble.

I couldn't imagine spending my working life entombed in this rock crypt. Men once lived and died here. Blasting and cursing filled the air. Now all was silent. As I chipped and banged away with my rock hammer, filling my flimsy Boy Scout backpack with the best chunks and slivers until it strained at the seams, the echoes felt creepy. Like I was alerting spirits that I was there and up to no good. Old cave-ins sealed access to some of the tunnels, chilling reminders that the slightest thing could trigger a pent-up cave-in.

That's when I rested, sitting on broken rock, and turned off my flashlight to save the batteries. That's when the world turned dark as death. I jumped as if shocked when a cold drop of water landed on my bare neck. The air I sucked in tasted old, dank, and stale. _What in the world am I doing down here?_

Certainly, getting a bag of mohawkite was one reason. But how many rocks are enough? I made that perilous trip back down into the mine twice more, exploring other levels, collecting more rocks. Each trip, I would struggle back to the surface, canvas pack straps biting my shoulders and pedal down US-41 in the dark to my college dorm, with 25 or so pounds of rocks poking into my back.

It's not like I could brag about my stunts; that would have gotten me expelled from college (and drafted: _Good Morning, Vietnam!_ ). I don't know. Why do we do anything when we're young and trying to figure out how to grow up?

Earlier that year of my mine adventures, I had gone steelhead fishing on a remote U.P. river. I had to slog through several feet of snow drifts to reach the river bank. The sun was out, and thawing chunks of ice raced by in the current. At the mouth of the river, where it plunged into Lake Superior, I watched the flow disappear under a sheet of unbroken ice. Far offshore and barely visible was the end of the ice and open water of the world's largest lake.

I leaned my fishing rod against a leafless shrub and, still in my chest waders, struck out alone. A half-mile later, I was standing on the very edge of the two-feet-thick ice shelf. At my toes stretched 50 miles of deep-blue, empty water. Small waves lapped the ice, their irregular splashes the only sound. Wind from the U.P. wilds blew against my back and it dawned on me that if an ice floe broke off with me on it, I would die an ugly death.

I found no epiphany that day on the edge of Lake Superior's ice sheet. Just relief at surviving. Like after going down in that mine. Doing it for the thrill.

Was it really that simple? Or might it have had something to do with the crushing insecurities of youth? Courting danger to compensate for fears about a terrifying future? Burdened with still having something to prove.

Like so much that we accumulate over the years, most of those hard-earned rocks of mohawkite became dead weight and got buried in a hole along the way. Yet, not all. A few chunks sit on shelves in my house today. They've been wrapped, packed, and unbundled in a lifetime of moves from here to there. Their original burnish of blue silver is dulled with tarnish. But every now and then, I'll chip a corner off one to see again that fresh sparkle of raw mohawkite. Its naked glint will carry me back to adventures of my youth, alone in the depths, with nothing but a cheap flashlight, and all life's terrors and wonders luring me ever deeper, curious, driven to check out just one more level.

(May 5, 2016)

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### Ayn Rand Got Me High

"A man's ego is the fountainhead of human progress." – novelist Ayn Rand

Each time the aircraft warning light blinked red next to my head, I closed my eyes to keep from being blinded, clinging for dear life to the ice-cold ladder. As for why I was perched atop a 275-feet-high smokestack on a blustery February night in Michigan, I mostly credit Ayn Rand.

Technically, I suppose I should blame Crazy Rick. My long-time friend had a way of leading me into trouble. He was a wiry, tough little guy who, during our college years, loved showing off and bragging about his feats. Like how many miles he could walk while balancing on the iron rail of a railroad track without slipping off, a stunt he took straight from one of Rand's novels.

We both idealized the ego-crazed hero created by Rand – "a man who perseveres to achieve his values, even when his ability and independence leads to conflict with others." (Wikipedia)

Instead of "What would Jesus do?" we asked "What would Ayn Rand do?" Her philosophy proved a dangerous catalyst for our self-absorption.

Crazy Rick challenged his own considerable ego with daring nighttime exploits on the campus of Michigan State University, near where we lived. He had, for example, figured out how to sneak into the university's mammoth powerplant and reach its smokestack's ladder.

So late one night, there we were, standing in darkness just beyond reach of garish security lights, looking across a snowy field to the powerplant. We made a run for it, ducking past a line of coal cars waiting to be unloaded and into a long, enclosed structure that carried coal from mountainous piles along the railroad tracks to the powerplant's boilers. The giant, black conveyor belt was silent, and we crept up it into the plant. Once inside, we slapped off coal dust, then slipped across metal gangways and up several floors to a door leading to the roof and gigantic brick chimney, massive at its base and tapering to a twelve-foot diameter top. A ladder up its side faded into the night like an Escher illusion.

I took a deep breath and exhaled a frozen cloud. "You coming?" Rick said, looking down at me from the ladder, just a hint of sneer on his lips.

Up and up we climbed, hundreds of steps. Cold from the steel rungs burned through our gloves. We paused often, hanging onto the ladder with our arms while trying to warm our hands, but the bitter wind cut through our jackets, and we had to keep moving. Far below, a few cars crawled silently along Farm Lane. Downtown East Lansing twinkled in the distance. An airport light blinked way off to the northwest. When we reached the smokestack's flashing red light, we knew we could get no higher.

In truth, the view from the top was a bit of a letdown – mostly snow-covered farmlands in the dark. We'd actually gotten a better view on an earlier climb. Weeks before, Crazy Rick had found a way into the university's other powerplant. Its brick smokestack was a local landmark, towering 239 feet above the center of MSU's campus, vertically emblazoned at the top with immense white letters, "MSC," for the school's name, Michigan State College, when the powerplant was built in 1948.

Getting in was easy. We crept up late one night to the gigantic metal door, used for letting in coal-carrying railroad cars, and hit a green button. I didn't know what to expect but certainly not the explosion of racket as the immense door rolled and clattered upwards. We ducked inside and hit a red button to reverse the door's direction. The powerplant's operating noise was so loud that apparently no workers noticed the door's starts and stops.

We sneaked up open metal stairways to reach a door to the roof and the smokestack's ladder. The 20-year-old stack was showing its age, and as we climbed silently in the dark, we bypassed several ladder rungs that were rusted nearly through and ladder anchors that were pulling loose from the bricks and mortar.

At the top, a glorious, bird's-eye panorama spread around us – the city's lights; glowing paths, streets, and buildings of campus; and looming below, across the dark ribbon of the Red Cedar River, was snow-covered Spartan Stadium.

Crazy Rick was like a monkey – strong, agile, and fearless. He roamed the rooftops of any building he set his mind to, always finding a way to sneak up there, whether through unlocked windows or by scaling walls. He also went below ground, exploring the ten-mile web of tunnels underlying the MSU campus, which house steam-heat pipes running from the powerplants to university buildings. I followed him on his four-story-high, slate-covered-rooftop romps a few times and down into the dank, rat-infested tunnels just once. What finally got me in trouble, however, was trailing him across a campus pedestrian bridge.

By "across" I mean under. It was dark and it was winter and I should have known better. But there was youthful testosterone in the air and ego at stake. What would an Ayn Rand hero do?

_If Rick can do it, I can do it,_ I told myself. Standing in the snow on the steep riverbank, I watched him grip the flat, frozen I beam on the underside of the bridge and quickly move hand-over-hand out over the river, feet dangling five feet above the water.

Back in high school, Rick and I had been on the wrestling team. He was good and won most of his matches. I was awful and lost nearly all of mine. During one after-school practice, our coach had teammates wrestle each other in "grudge matches," starting with the two lightest. The winner would take on the next heavier guy. You kept wrestling until you got pinned.

That's how I ended up paired against Rick, who was two weight classes lighter than me. It felt personal, the way he came after me. A bit scary, like he had something to prove. Although I was heavier, he was stronger and a far better wrestler. I vowed to not let him beat me and found some untapped fortitude to avoid humiliation. The coach reluctantly declared a draw.

Rick always wanted to best me, and under that MSU campus bridge that wintry night, he succeeded. The bare metal was brutally cold on my fingers as I inched out over the river. Halfway across I knew I was in trouble when I saw a tree branch from the opposite riverbank blocking our progress. I watched Rick swing like an ape, under the branch, to keep going, then scramble to the opposite bank.

I tried to copy his trick, letting go with my right hand to swing under the branch and catch the I-beam, even while knowing it was hopeless. My left hand lost its tenuous grip and down I went into the dark depths of the too-polluted-to-be-frozen Red Cedar River. I bobbed up and splashed to shore, slipping, sputtering, and shuttering, then sloshed the half-mile back to my dorm room.

It didn't take long. Within hours my body started purging that germ-infested river water in ugly fashion. In the middle of the night, I walked to the campus infirmary. When I explained what had happened, the nurse shook her head, then admitted me. I was in there sick for two days.

Here's how Crazy Rick got his name. When I had gone off to college after high school, Rick joined the Navy. Soon after, he told me, "Biggest mistake of my life," and shared his detailed, year-long plan to convince the Navy's shrinks that he was nuts, in order to get himself discharged. He said he had convinced everyone that he was the perfect sailor, but now was going to start acting, little by little, like a crazy person. I've forgotten the details, but his "act" worked perfectly. The Navy gave him a general discharge (preserving his G.I. benefits), and he returned to Michigan to attend college. That's how we came to call him Crazy Rick, though not to his face.

Back then, we were young and foolhardy, testing every limit, challenging authority, looking for truth. Ayn Rand's novels, since branded as "the most exquisitely adolescent of fictions" (essayist Nancy Mairs), gave us such nuggets of moral guidance as:

"Your mind is your only judge of truth – and if others dissent from your verdict, reality is the court of final appeal." ( _Atlas Shrugged_ )

Such were the foibles of youth. Some of us grow out of them. Some of us don't. There are still people who take Ayn Rand seriously. One guy online calls himself "The Profitability Coach." Send him money and you can learn how to "Live a Life and Lifestyle of an Ayn Rand Hero, Know Your Purpose, Build True Wealth, Love The Journey."

It's been nearly 50 years since my Red Cedar River dunking; I suffered no obvious lasting effects, but who can really say? That pedestrian bridge is still there, crossed every day by throngs of students. The iconic MSC smokestack we climbed was demolished long ago. The taller stack that we scaled still sits atop MSU's T.B. Simon Powerplant, which since has been expanded, repeatedly fined for air pollution, and now has two smokestacks. I'm pretty sure nobody gets to sneak in and climb either of them these days. Ayn Rand would not be pleased:

"One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

(May 5, 2016)

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### The First Time I Never Saw the Ocean

Growing up in the Midwest, neither Crazy Rick nor I had ever seen an ocean. "Let's go see the ocean," my friend proclaimed during one Christmas break from college. We would travel by our wits, hitchhiking, unburdened by bulky backpacks, money, or common sense.

We got out an atlas and decided that Norfolk, Virginia, was about the closest place where we could see an ocean. Not as good as Florida, but it had to be warmer than Michigan in December. With no more thought or planning than that, later the same day of our brainstorm, we were standing in the dark on the shoulder of I 75 outside of Flint, thumbs pointed south, cars and trucks whizzing by in clouds of blowing snow.

It was a different time (the '60s) and usually not too hard to get picked up. Travelling all night, by late the next afternoon we had covered more than 400 miles, escaped the snow somewhere in mid-Ohio, and reached the outskirts of Charleston, West Virginia, thanks to truck drivers, sailors on leave, misfits, and an occasional curious middle-class couple flirting with the danger of picking up two shaggy hitchhikers.

By 4:30, the sun was behind the mountains, and darkness and cold was pressing in. We were dead tired and could go no farther so decided to camp in the wooded hills outside of town, despite having no sleeping bags or tent. After all, we were young and tough and self-sufficient. In fading light, we scooped up in our arms huge piles of dead leaves for our beds. Our moronic theory was that leaves would be good insulation and keep us warm. We'd be fine. The next day we'd get to the ocean.

In the nearly-dark valley below, railroad tracks stretched east. "You ever hop a freight train?" I asked Rick. I was pondering our options in face of the prospect of 15 hours of darkness that we were facing.

"Sure, but it's dangerous," he said, then told me about nearly freezing in a boxcar, that he once had hopped, before the train stopped, and about another time getting beaten up by a railroad dick.

I was less than enthused as we hiked down to the tracks in the fading light to check it out. It was pretty clear that any train at this point would have a good head of steam coming out of Charleston and probably impossible to catch. Then there was the complication that we had no idea where the train would be going or how long before it stopped. We shuffled back to our frigid beds of leaves where, several hours later, we listened to a train's haunting whistle as it flew by into the East.

Even with our small campfire, we were too cold to sleep. We soon ran out of dead branches to burn. The hours seemed endless. By midnight we concluded that anything would be better than freezing all night on the ground under a pile of dead leaves.

"Let's go into town," we agreed. A few miles later, we found a 24-hour laundromat where we bought chocolate from a machine and managed to stay warm lying in half-sleeping stupor on wooden benches under the harsh glare of laundromat lights.

In the morning light, we conceded defeat and turned our thumbs north in ignominious retreat. So much for seeing the ocean.

Heading back across Ohio, a traveling salesman gave us a ride and regaled us with tales of the open road. "Wanderlust," he bragged, "It's something that gets under your skin. I've always had to see places for myself, check out the next state."

_Yeah,_ I said to myself, _that's just what I feel – an itch to see everything._

It would take another year and a half, but I'd finally see my first ocean – a grand vista of the Pacific Ocean from a Washington wilderness coast on a different hitchhiking trek. Eventually, I would have hitchhiked through nearly every state and a half-dozen Canadian provinces – enough miles to circle the globe.

Speaking of itches, it was on that disastrous hitchhiking foray that ended in the West Virginia woods, where I learned one important lesson: Even when dead, poison ivy leaves make the worst possible blanket.

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Hard Crazy Lessons

My friend Rick – this was years before he earned his "Crazy Rick" sobriquet – was sprinting in the dark between our pup tents when lightning exploded a nearby tree. The jolt knocked him flat in the flooded field. Thunder was immediate and deafening. Over the raging torrent, from the other tent, Arnold yelled, "Damn! That was close. You all right?" Rick crawled into my tent, seemingly stunned.

The vicious downpour had surprised us, just past sunset. It was 1962, and we were camped on a weedy hilltop overlooking the swampy edge of Lake Huron's Saginaw Bay. The storm had howled off open water bringing wind, nonstop thunder and lightning, and a deluge as if the big lake were emptying on top of us.

Rick was soaked and scared but unhurt. To the feeble light of candles, we stared at each other, sitting in an inch of rising water, my flimsy, canvas pup tent no match for the fusillade pounding outside. What were we thinking?

The three of us were still in high school that spring month. We had ridden our bikes 65 miles from our homes in Flint, in order to camp next to the Great Lakes. Check out the scenery. Maybe take a swim. We had pictured a nice sandy beach, not a mosquito-infested marsh. Our ignorance was matched by our crappy gear. Take my bicycle, for example.

Our family was poor. Few got rich working in the '50s and '60s as a fire-and-brimstone preacher, and that was my dad's calling. When I was nine years old, my parents scrimped and finally bought me my first bicycle – a shiny red-and-white Schwinn. I paid half.

Later, we moved from our bucolic, Indiana farm town where no one locked their doors, to gritty Flint, Michigan. The first time I rode to the city's swimming pool, without a bike lock, that Schwinn got stolen. Buying me a replacement was out of the question.

Taking pity, a lady in our church gave me a bicycle – actually, the pieces of an ancient bicycle, which had been taken apart and packed in grease in a box in her garage since World War II. I eventually figured out how to put back together that clunky, balloon-tired, single-speed bike, and rode it all through high school. Including on our ridiculous trek to Saginaw Bay.

Of course we should have known better. Even though there was no 24-7 weather reporting back then, the fierce headwinds we battled all the way north on M-15 should have given us a clue that we were in trouble.

My antique bike's frame and steel fenders were weighted down with camping gear, including a humongous sleeping bag and heavy pup tent – the kind of equipment you get when you have to buy the cheap stuff.

We struggled northward, Rick and me on our overloaded bikes, walking and pushing them when the gale in our faces became overwhelming. Arnold rode ahead on his moped – a glorified bicycle fitted with a sputtering motor that could reach a top speed of maybe 25 mph – then he would stop and let us catch up. Exhausted, we reached Saginaw Bay barely in time before dark to find a weedy farm field to pitch our tents. Between us and the water stretched an endless swamp.

We survived that ferocious, sleepless night but realized in the dawn light that we were finished. Everything was sodden. Arnold's moped was wet and wouldn't start. All I wanted was a warm, dry bed. We agreed that Rick and Arnold would stay with our gear, and I would ride home and send Arnold's father to the rescue.

I left my friends and pedaled south alone in the flat, gray light across flat, gray farmlands. Early Sunday morning and the highway deserted. I was soaking wet and chilled to the bone. Mile after mile. So tired. The blacktop was starting to dry in the early-morning breeze, and I realized that it was warmer than my body. Several times I got off my bike and lay flat on the pavement, absorbing a few calories of warmth, trying not to fall asleep and get run over.

I arrived home so dazed that I could barely talk and collapsed in bed. Fortunately, Rick and Arnold had found a pay phone and were eventually rescued later that day, no thanks to me. It would not be our last foolhardy adventure together. We had more hard crazy lessons to learn, back when we still had a whole lot of life ahead of us, and a whole lot yet to prove.

* * *

The winter following our aborted bike trip, the three of us decided to go camping near Flint in the Hadley Hills, a wooded, semi-wild, state-owned land of moraines and kettle lakes – remnants of the mile-thick glaciers that melted away from Michigan 10,000 years ago. I had my new driver's license, and drove us through snow drifts to the back country, in my parents' green and white '54 Ford. We lugged our mishmash of camping gear into the woods and stomped down snow for a campsite. We cut pine branches for insulation under our tents, like I'd read in my outdoor magazines.

After the sun went down the temperature plummeted to ten below zero. Our water and eggs froze solid. We managed to stay reasonably warm huddled like mummies in our sleeping bags, while wearing all our clothes, keeping just our mouths and noses exposed. The fog of my breath froze on the tent fabric, turning to ice crystals that rained back down.

Sometime after midnight, crunching boots and a probing flashlight on the tent walls woke us. Arnold's worried-sick father somehow had tracked our footprints in the snow from the deserted spot where we left our car, intending to retrieve us. He wasn't pleased when Rick and I refused deliverance, but insisted on dragging Arnold home with him. From our tent we listened to them packing up to the light of a hissing Coleman lantern, then tromping away into the darkness.

Rick and I should have gotten out when the getting was good. A heavy snowfall arrived in the morning. By the time we got our frozen tent and gear packed up and the Ford loaded, the road out was nearly impassable. At the bottom of a valley between steep hills we got stuck, miles from the paved highway. We walked until we came to a farm house. No one was home, so we rummaged around an outbuilding and discovered a pair of tire chains. We borrowed them, hiked back, and managed to get the Ford moving. When we passed the farm house we were surprised to see the owners were home. Rather than stop and thank them for the loan, Rick flung the chains into the driveway as we flew by. What must they have thought?

* * *

The next to last time I saw Rick was at my mother's funeral reception more than 15 years ago. In the years since our teenage misadventures, Rick had turned himself into "Crazy Rick."

He definitely looked crazy – black hair and beard long and wild like he was channeling his West Virginia, hill-country kin. Short, square-framed, and muscular, he likely would have been a coal miner in an earlier day. As we chatted in the church gymnasium, Rick's dark eyes darted about the room, betraying the paranoia that had crept into his brain over the years. He didn't stay long.

After college, we had gone separate ways. I started a career as an environmental activist. Rick got married, had some kids, and lived in squalor, based on what I saw during one brief visit. In a moment of local fame, he made the front page of the Lansing newspaper when he cut in half, two surplus schoolhouse buildings he bought for next to nothing from the township, intending to move each half down the highway and then reassemble them – I don't remember where. Or if he ever succeeded.

Our last, slightly scary meeting came sometime after our funereal encounter. One day, out of the blue I got a call from Rick, at my work in Ann Arbor. He seemed agitated, and insisted on seeing me as soon as possible. I suggested a late lunch at a local café, and he readily agreed. Yes, I assured him, they served vegan.

When I arrived, Rick was waiting for me out front. Within minutes of going in, he was loudly complaining to restaurant staff about our delay in getting seated. It promised to be a long lunch. Once we had ordered, I pressed him on the purpose of his sudden appearance.

Rick responded by grilling me about where I'd been on certain dates, asking if I had made such-and-such phone calls to the government. It was all very mysterious, but the look on his face said this was no laughing matter. He leaned over the table, his deep, penetrating eyes hardly blinking, staring into mine, like this was an inquisition.

I pressed him for an explanation, while professing innocence of whatever he thought I'd done. He was vague, saying it had to do with anonymous, untrue allegations that he was mistreating his children. For some complicated reason that I couldn't follow, he assumed the caller had been me.

I flashed back to the picture in my head of a couple of filthy, naked kids running about like free-range chickens in the dirt-packed yard of his house, back that one time I'd visited him. He was creeping me out, but I finally convinced him that I truly had no idea what he was talking about. At that point, he abruptly changed the subject and pulled from his backpack a thick, dog-eared report and placed it face down on the table, his forearm guarding it. It felt like I'd just passed a test. In reward, I was about to be offered secret information about UFOs, aliens, and the big, government cover-up.

He explained that his father had been in the military and come across certain secrets. Now, Rick was keeper of this hush-hush information that the government refused to admit. My eyes glazed over; I remember little of his passionate description of the conspiracy to which he was privy. As for his secret UFO report, he demanded, "If I let you read this, will you promise me you will take it seriously?"

I told him I was curious and would like to read it, but, "Honestly, I can't promise you that."

He was visibly insulted – more with my narrow-minded ignorance than with my personal slight, I suppose. He put his report back into hiding and, with that, our lunch date ended. I paid our bill, left a generous tip, and Crazy Rick walked away down Liberty Street and out of my life. I heard a rumor that these days he's toothless and homeless, but I couldn't say.

* * *

The last time I saw my other old camping friend, Arnold, also was at my mother's funeral – at the visitation at the funeral home. We hadn't been in touch since high school. I learned from Arnold that, unsurprisingly, he had spent his life working in a local auto plant. To my surprise, however, he had spent his spare time and retirement becoming a self-taught artist, sculpting metal into all manner of his visions. In the parking lot, Arnold opened his trunk and showed me several albums filled with photos of his creations. I gushed over his artistry, and he beamed.

We reminisced about old times and laughed about our ill-fated ride to Saginaw Bay. He asked if I had seen our old high school principal inside at the visitation. "I had to get out of there," Arnold said. "You know what he once told me?"

I shook my head, and he continued, obviously agitated: "Arnold, you will never amount to anything. He actually said that to me." Despite the sting of the insult, lingering still after decades, it was apparent that Arnold was proud that he'd "proved that asshole principal wrong."

A few months later, a small package from Arnold arrived in the mail. Inside was a strange-looking, two-tined fork, artistically fashioned from a pitted, foot-long, cast-iron spike. Like a blacksmith of old, Arnold had heated, hammered, twisted, and split the heated spike into this fork. A note explained that while diving in Lake Huron, he had retrieved the spike from the wreck of a sunken ship, the S.S. Ste. Marie, built in 1893 as a railroad ferry across the Straits of Mackinac, in the early 1900's.

(May 25, 2016)

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### My So-Called Summer of Love

Let me get one thing straight about my so-called Summer of Love, that famed, 1967, flower-children fantasy. I was a 21-year-old hippie, and I still wasn't getting laid. That might help explain a lot about my behavior during that – at least as far as I was concerned – poorly-named summer.

I planned to spend it hitchhiking across the country to San Francisco, the spiritual heart of the hippie universe. My girlfriend would have graduated from high school, and I saw no reason why she shouldn't come with me. Her mother had a starkly different view, noting that such travel with an under-aged, 17-year-old girl wasn't even legal.

So alone on a Saturday morning in June, on the shoulder of I-75 near Flint, I thumbed away alone, heading north to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, then west across the top of the country on US-2. Two days later, having crossed northern Wisconsin and Minnesota, North Dakota, and half of Montana, I was camped in a cattle pasture on the banks of the Milk River, 1,700 miles into my pilgrimage.

Just outside of Havre, Montana, a 79-year-old rancher and his wife had picked me up. They took me to their home back in the hills for lunch, and let me camp the night along their river. They raised Norwegian elkhounds and had close to 200 of them in their kennels. They offered me a job, but I declined. I was, like the writer, Jack Kerouac, _On the Road_. Plus, I couldn't imagine trying to sleep every night to the non-stop howling and barking of their dogs.

On the road and headed for Glacier National Park. It would be my first solo visit to real wilderness and I couldn't wait.

I grew up starved for adventure, devouring tales of hunting and fishing in outdoor magazines, reading books of exotic travel, and fantasizing about drinking water straight from a stream. Always, even in our boring Midwest locales, I found the wildest patches of nature I could reach by bicycle and created semi-hidden dens of make-believe wilderness. That's where, just once, I got carried away, imagining myself on a real wilderness stream, and filled my canteen with water straight from Thread Creek, a muddy stream fouled with pollution from farms and septic fields, outside of Flint. I took a sip, but came to my senses when the foul liquid hit my taste buds, and spit it out, suffering no apparent harm.

Unfortunately, for my first encounter with actual mountain wilderness, spring came late to the Rockies that year. The park's access road, Going-to-the-Sun Highway, was barely open, and the park's hiking trails were still buried under feet of snow. The hiking trail along the continental crest, that I had picked out from the park's brochure, was officially shut down due to snow and grumpy grizzly bears coming out of hibernation.

I ignored the signs and scary warnings, shouldered my backpack, and headed into the wilderness, anyways. I whistled and worried and talked aloud to myself, like I'd read to do in grizzly country, but saw no sign of bears. After a few miles of slogging through deep snow and fighting to not lose the trail, it finally vanished under an unbroken snow field. I gave up and headed uphill to see what was up there. After climbing several hours, I was above timberline, flailing through thigh-deep wet snow atop steep slopes of slick talus. It took me more than four hours to reach a ridge, where I set up camp for the night on a bare slope, where sun and wind had melted the snow. All night, I would find myself sliding downhill in my $20, L.L. Bean canvas pup tent.

Never had I been so far "out there." Late in the day, I stripped naked and let the sun beat my body. The mountain wind felt like a caress, while sharp rocks bit into my bare feet and butt. Vistas of snow-capped mountains and glaciers stretched in every direction. The air was alive with thunder from distant avalanches.

The next morning, after packing up, I climbed to the top of the nearest peak, Goat Mountain, and reached 8,849 feet in elevation, a half-mile above where I'd started my hike.

Before I left Glacier National Park, I wrote a note, filled with purple prose, to my girlfriend, back home:

"I'm cold and damp from taking pictures in the rain, I haven't eaten yet today, most of my food is gone, I am completely alone, the trails of the park I came to climb are impassible, and yet my spirits are 10,000 feet high, strangely enough. If nothing else were changed except that you were here beside me in the tent, listening to the hammering of the rain and hail, huddled together munching on my last chocolate bars, I should rather think I would explode with ecstasy."

I stuck out my thumb and headed west. I crossed Puget Sound on a ferry, then headed up the curvy, two-lane road out to Cape Flattery. There, the land ends. I volunteered to a stranger, also taking in the scene, "It's the first time I've ever seen the ocean."

"Too bad you had to start at the top," he answered, not taking his eyes off the view.

Indeed, there are no more spectacular vistas than along this coast of the Olympic Peninsula. I hiked down a stretch of its wilderness and found a little spot behind the dunes, surrounded by giant dripping ferns, to spend a rainy night in my leaky pup tent.

Heading south, another hitchhiker joined me – a guy from Nova Scotia. To escape the rain during our supper, we sneaked into an abandoned DQ building, sharing cheese and crackers and cooking dried soup with water that we drained from shut off pipes. That night we slept in the upstairs bedroom of a filthy, abandoned house, blocking the door for fear of rats. Creepy family portraits still hung on the walls.

After we got to Astoria, just across the Columbia River, in Oregon, we split up. At this point, I was down to $29. I splurged and blew my $1 per day food budget on soda, Fritos, cherry pie, and chocolate. I had to kill two days in Astoria waiting for general delivery mail. Before I left home, I'd ordered a pack fly rod, and it was supposed to be forwarded to Astoria. I wonder what ever became of that fly rod.

I arrived in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury on the last day of June, 1967. As advertised, it was hippies as far as you could see. Strangers shared pot; I was constantly stoned. I stashed my backpack overnight and went to the Fillmore Theater and saw Chuck Berry, up close. Not so groovy was later, when I slept in Golden Gate Park, in the shadow of Kezar Stadium, wrapped up in newspapers – which wasn't even the worst part. The worst part was waking in the cold, foggy morning under park shrubs and finding my blanket of soggy newspapers crawling with giant banana slugs. _Eew!_

A few days of Haight-Ashbury were more than enough for me. It felt like urban squalor; for me, not a happy place to be. Nevertheless, something must have gotten under my skin. Three years later, I was living right there. My address: 150 Haight Street.

When I left San Francisco, during the heart of the Summer of Love, I headed south down the Pacific coast. This was more like what I could relate to – nature. And more pot. My ride to Big Sur was like a scene from a Cheech & Chong movie – a van full of hippies smoking dope like chimneys. What's not to like? Power to the People.

We stopped mid-day to party at a house that clung to the vertical cliffs above the ocean. I met the owner, who had something to do with making movies in Hollywood. Later that same day, I found myself in the hills above Big Sur, and spent the night at an honest-to-goodness commune. I felt like a spectator in a hippie theme park.

At the commune, the toxic group dynamics were obvious: who's in charge of what?, who's not doing their share of communal duties?, who's fucking who? The communal food of rice and beans and such was awful. Inedible. I couldn't get out of there fast enough. I headed for the beach.

That's where my 21st birthday found me on the morning of July 4th, sleeping peacefully in sandy dunes at Big Sur, overlooking the Pacific Ocean. It was the turnaround point of my trip. From here, I was heading east for home, before I ran out of money and food. As I left the beach, I stuffed some waste paper, out of sight and under the charred log from my prior night's campfire. When I reached the highway, far back from the beach, I turned for a last look. Smoke was coming from the dunes where I'd camped – my campfire hadn't been dead. The grass was on fire and hikers were trying to stamp it out. That's how I started my 21st year – burning down the church.

Nature got her revenge. While hiking and camping in Yosemite National Park, I got into poison oak. The ugly oozing on my arms and legs (which meant for a miserable hitchhiking trek back to Michigan) started shortly after this picture was taken. A guy giving me a ride through Reno insisted that I get out and pose in front of Harold's Club, so he could snap this shot with his Polaroid. "You'll always remember this," he said, fanning the print to air dry, before handing it to me.

After all that, you might think that my whirlwind hitchhiking tour of the country would be enough adventure for one Summer of Love. You would be wrong.

* * *

Back in Michigan, weeks later, the blisters from my poison oak attack had mostly healed. It was the end of my last summer before my last term as an undergraduate at Michigan State University. I would be getting a degree in geology in December, and had not the slightest interest in becoming a geologist. Here was the extent of my life plan: dodge the draft and stay out of the Vietnam War. To top it off, I still wasn't getting laid. Is it any wonder that another ludicrous, road trip seemed like the thing to do?

My friend, Al, had also spent the summer of 1967 hitchhiking cross-country. We compared notes and concocted a new plan to hitchhike 650 miles to Montreal to see the world's fair, Expo '67. Al was my girlfriend's older brother, and we would become life-long friends. After what we went through together on our trip, how could we not?

When we hit the road, I had the grand sum of $25, and Al just slightly more. For provisions, we packed a box of saltines, a big jar of peanut butter, some jam, and a canteen of water. Al didn't shit for three days.

I carried the same backpack and camping gear that I'd just toted to the West Coast and back. Al didn't have a pack so instead carried a cheap suitcase. First with one hand, then the other, day after day, hauling that damned suitcase. Even now, Al has amazing upper body strength, and it may well have started on that ridiculous trip.

Late on a Friday, a ride dropped us on the western outskirts of Toronto. We walked for miles and miles and eventually found a place to climb into our sleeping bags. The next day visited the natural history museum at the University of Toronto, eventually winding up in the Yonge Street district. Al, a music fanatic, desperately wanted to spend some of our few dollars to see Sonny Terry & Brownie McGhee playing at a bar, but I talked him out of it. To this day, when I listen to recordings of their spare blues, I regret that decision.

It's tough to find a place to camp in downtown Toronto on a Saturday night. We ended up wedging ourselves behind a hedge row bordering a quiet-appearing, stone-block building. In the dark, we rolled out our sleeping bags alongside the foundation and collapsed into a dead sleep.

The sound of parishioners walking to Sunday morning Mass woke us. We opened our eyes and peered through the shrubbery branches to the sidewalk just inches away. Calves of a steady stream of people paraded by our noses, heading for the front door of the church, which we realized we were tucked against.

We got to Montreal late that day and found the city's largest park, Parc du Mont-Royal. The place has history, named by explorer Jacques Cartier, who visited more than 400 years earlier. All we wanted was a place to sleep, but a local constable spotted us and very politely asked us to move on. We halfheartedly asked him if we could sleep in a jail cell. Although Canadian cops seemed tolerant of American hippies, he said no. So we found a hidden spot in a ditch to roll out our sleeping bags, snuggling against head-sized rocks. Above us, the 103-feet-high illuminated cross atop Mont Royal stood guard.

About all I remember of our day at the Montreal world's fair is that the ticket to get in and the cost of a locker for our luggage took nearly all the rest of our money. I recently asked Al what he remembered. He told me that what sticks out in his mind about Expo '67 is the memory of "the very drunk kid choking on his own vomit. His friends asked us to help. We didn't."

Leaving English-speaking Ontario and hitchhiking across French-speaking Quebec to Montreal had been a surprising challenge. We had figured that even French-Canadians must speak some English. Nope. We suffered through long, awkward silences on our rides, feeling every bit the Ugly Americans. Between the two of us, we knew precisely zero words of French. Not even "hello" or "thank you," let alone, "how far are you going?" or "what road will get us the hell back to the U.S.?"

Trudging along the highway through Sainte-Marie, a friendly group of Quebecois hippies pulled up in a van and asked us in heavily-accented English, "Do you want to 'leev'?" Did we want to live? Like in a commune? Wait, you mean "leave." Yes, damn right we want to leev.

That's how we managed to get pointed in the right direction and back to the U.S. While in Montreal, we'd come up with the brilliant idea that as long as we had come this far, why not keep going and check out Cape Cod. It was only another 400 or so miles. After all, each of us had just hitchhiked solo to the Pacific Ocean and seen it for the first time, so why not do the same for the Atlantic?

We made it down to Cape Cod and headed out to Provincetown. When we figured we were within hiking distance of the ocean, we told the driver to stop, and he dropped us off in the middle of nowhere. We struck out across the dunes. The ocean had to be out there somewhere. It was a pathetic picture, the two of us plowing across miles of soft sand, up and down steep dunes, me with my backpack and Al with his suitcase. I can't remember ever getting to the water, but at least we got to see the Atlantic Ocean.

Heading home, we got dropped in the Bronx, so we walked across the George Washington Bridge into New Jersey and found a scrap of vacant dirt under the bridge approach, where we set up my pup tent and spent the night. We cooked dried soup on my mini-stove. In my entire life, I've never met another person who has camped out under the George Washington Bridge in Fort Lee, New Jersey.

Our trip went downhill from there. We managed to get across New Jersey, but on the edge of Philadelphia found ourselves stuck on the side of the road at a line of toll booths for fifteen lanes of traffic. Thumbs out, Al and I stood there all afternoon as thousands of cars rushed by, paid their tolls, and tore off into the west. We'd take turns, hoping for better karma, Al standing in front, then me standing in front. Nothing worked. City of Brotherly Love, my ass.

As nature called, we would, in turn, jump across a fence and duck behind the shrubs edging the lawn of a distant General Electric factory. As night closed in, we gave up hoping to get a ride and set up camp across that fence, sleeping fitfully.

In the morning our hitchhiking luck proved no better. We were stuck, and we couldn't figure out why. We knew it was more than twice as hard for two guys together to get rides, rather than alone. But this was ridiculous. We watched one hitchhiker after another get dropped – in front of us, behind us, it didn't matter – and get picked up. Even an occasional pair of people, seemingly no different than us, would get rides. Not us. We were stranded in a Mad Max purgatory – roaring traffic and screeching tires, suffocating exhaust fumes, baking pavement, no shade, no exit.

Mid-morning I told Al that we had to do something, and the only thing I knew to do was split up and meet back in Michigan. Al didn't want to do that, so we gave it a bit longer. When we hit eighteen hours and still no ride, Al gave in. We flipped a coin, winner to stand in front and more likely to get picked up first. I won.

Within 15 minutes, a car stopped and I was gone. As I learned later, Al had his ride out of there 20 minutes later. When we met up back in East Lansing, I got the feeling that Al was still a little pissed that I'd made us split up. I figured you couldn't argue with success, since I'd made it all the way home in just four rides.

Al, however, got kicked off the toll road near Harrisburg, forcing him to hitchhike on the back roads of Pennsylvania and Ohio. Some 20 rides and 24 hours later, he arrived home with tales of a near death ride with drunken teenagers in Toledo. I had been wondering what was taking him so long.

PACKING LIST FOR MY SUMMER OF LOVE:

Canteen  
Teflon skillet (in plastic bag)  
Spatula (in w/ skillet)  
Fork & spoon (in w/ skillet)  
Aluminum pie plates (2)  
Drinking cup (plastic)  
Svea stove (w/ inside: handle, cup, valve key, value cleaner, can opener)  
Bottle white gas (1 qt.)  
Pack & frame  
Sleeping bag  
Bag sack  
Foam pad  
Camera  
Film  
Tent  
Tent poles  
Tent stakes & cords (in bag)  
First aid kit (tape, Band-Aids, aspirin, mercurochrome, gauze, cream, needles, matches, tweezers)  
Fingernail clippers  
Sheath knife  
Pocket knife  
Shaving kit (razor, blades, sun lotion, soap in container, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, wash rag, ChapStick)  
Tissue  
Clothes: (Levis, belt, cotton socks (3 pr), Nylon socks (1 pr), Bermuda shorts, undershorts (3 pr.) Banlon short sleeve shirt, polo short-sleeve shirt, long-sleeve work shirt, sweat shirt, Levi jacket, down parka, swim trunks, bandanas (2 red))  
Towel  
Dish rag  
Book  
Compass  
Boots  
Sneakers  
Hatchet & sheath  
_Off_ spray can  
Notebook  
Pens (2)  
Stationery, envelopes, stamps  
Addresses  
Crayons (for signs)  
Maps  
Mirror  
Hand lens  
Matches  
Matchbox (waterproof)  
Poncho (w/ hood)  
Wooden recorder  
Sunglasses  
Glasses  
Watch  
Wallet  
Sewing kit (needles, thread, buttons, safety pins – in 35mm film canister)

Typical food I carried:  
Canned meat (Spam, Prem)  
Mustard  
Salt  
Crisco  
Chocolate  
Dried soup (chicken noodle)  
Fizzies  
Tang

Sometimes:  
Bread  
Raisins  
Peanuts  
Cherry pies  
Frito's

And rarely:  
Bananas  
Pop  
Apples  
Canned soup  
Pickles  
Hot dogs & buns  
Eggs

(

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### Hippies, Not Communists

As lightning flashed about us, I howled madly into the rain-clogged sky, hoping that Diane, inside our tent, couldn't hear my panic. Girders of the power line tower above were illuminated by the nonstop lightning. Otherwise, nothing to be seen but Saskatchewan wheat fields cloaking waterlogged, black muck, stretching to the horizon in every direction.

The torrent of rain had soaked me. I was up to my ankles in mud, trying to find a way to secure our frail pup tent's stakes. My girlfriend was huddled inside, wrapped in soggy sleeping bags, as the tent collapsed about her, in the wind.

All day, we had ridden through summer storms, hitchhiking east across the Trans-Canada Highway. At sunset, a trucker had dropped us at an empty crossroads. On the plains' horizon, the next round of thunderstorms was moving in on us. We hiked off the highway, up a power line road cutting through the wheat fields, set up camp, and tried to sleep. By midnight the thunderstorm had swept over us, pounding our meager tent into submission.

~ ~ ~

It was 1968, the year after the Summer of Love. I was done with college, for the time being, so Diane and I were going to spend the summer hitchhiking across the country. I got us a "drive-away" car to Seattle (a service where a company pays your gas expenses to drive someone's car, one-way). We would hitchhike north to Vancouver and then east across Canada to get home. That was the plan. Piece of cake! But then, heading home, we had hit Saskatchewan.

~ ~ ~

That dreadful night did end. We packed our sodden gear and caught a ride, which carried us out of the rain and prairies, and into the welcoming cover of Ontario's western forests. By the time we hit the U.S. border crossing station at Sault Ste. Marie, we felt human again, but must have looked shady to authorities.

"Unpack it all," the border guard said, pointing to our muddy, bulging backpacks. I gave him my best sympathy-seeking smile and said, "It is such a job re-packing everything." Which was true, but what really worried me was that he would find my stash of six .22 bullets, which would lead him to ask whether I had a gun, which would lead to a strip search, which would uncover the tiny snub-nosed revolver (serial numbers filed off) stuffed uncomfortably down in my crotch, which would send me to jail. He looked at us, sighed, then smacked the packs with his hand and dismissed us with a "go ahead."

Back in the USA, we no sooner got dropped at an I-75 exit, somewhere short of Michigan's Mackinac Bridge, when a border patrol car with two intensely suspicious cops pulled up. Damn, I thought, here we've safely hitchhiked from Seattle, crossed the Canadian border twice, and now 200 miles from home we've got to deal with these guys? The one in the passenger seat leaned out his window.

"What are you? One of them hippie-Yippies?"

"No, just students seeing the country for the summer," I professed.

"Are you a Communist?" he asked.

"Of course not. Why would you ask such a thing?"

He pointed at my mid-section. "Where'd you get that?"

I looked down at my belt buckle. _Ouch!_ A big bronze star with a hammer and sickle. A genuine USSR Army belt buckle, given to me by Charlie, a vet friend from high school who had swapped it from a Soviet soldier on a train in West Germany, I explained. Finally, the cops let us go on our way.

Hippies, sure. But Communists? No way.

~ ~ ~

I shift my course along the breeze;  
Won't sail upwind on memories.  
The empty sky is my best friend,  
And I just cast my fate to the wind. – Carel Werber

While not exactly casting our fate to the wind, our hitchhiking trip had been about as close as we could get. It hadn't been all mud and surly border cops. Diane and I had picked up our Buick sedan from the drive-away company in Detroit and headed west on I-94. We splashed naked in a South Dakota reservoir and hiked in the Badlands.

We backpacked in the wilds of Yellowstone National Park. I wore a red bandana headband, and Levis with a needlepoint hummingbird, that Diane had sewn on the leg. She wore her blond hair long, under a flowery scarf.

We dropped our car in Seattle and bought bus tickets to Vancouver. Just over the border the Canadian customs men very nicely informed us that we couldn't come into their country, since we didn't have enough money. We headed back south on secondary roads, because they told us not to hitchhike on the freeway. A nice old lady picked us up, heading to her cottage in the San Juan Islands for the weekend. She invited us along, taking the car ferry to her island. We set up our tent in her yard. She fixed us meals, and we walked around the island picking and eating thimbleberries. For the long life to come for that cheap little tent, it carried purple stains of berries, marking that idyllic weekend.

After leaving the island, we spent a nervous Sunday night camped in a scruffy vacant lot on the outskirts of Everett, Washington. I was glad I had a gun. In the morning, we headed east on US-2. Rides took us to Glacier National Park, a return for me that realized my prior summer's dream of being there with my love. We hiked into Canada, over the sheer mountain trail crossing snow fields and cliffs along the Continental Divide, and were waved through customs in Waterton, Alberta. From there we thumbed east into that awful rain and mud of Saskatchewan.

Before we left Canada, we camped on a cobble beach on the eastern edge of Lake Superior. We got clean in its icy water, and toasted marshmallows over our lakeside campfire.

As a couple, we had survived our dangerous travels of first love, but now were poised between romantic fantasy and reality.

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### Living Life My Way

_Going down that long lonesome highway  
Gonna live life my way._

That TV theme song was where I wanted to be in 1969 when _Then Came Bronson_ aired. For 26 episodes, cool Jim Bronson rode his Harley Sportster from one adventure to the next. In the opening sequence each week, Bronson pulled his motorcycle up to a red light in San Francisco, next to a tired commuter in a pork pie hat.

Driver: "Taking a trip?"  
Bronson, leaning over to the car window: "What's that?"  
Driver: "Taking a trip?"  
Bronson: "Yeah."  
Driver: "Where to?"  
Bronson: "Oh, I don't know. Wherever I end up, I guess."  
Driver: "Man, I wish I was you."  
Bronson: "Really?"  
Driver: "Yeah."  
Bronson: "Well, hang in there."

And off Bronson roars, across the beach, through the surf, and down the California coast highway. Salt and sand are never a problem for his motorcycle. His gas tank is never empty. His back never hurts. When his bike accidentally rolls into a lake, he can take it apart and have it running by morning, with only the tools in his bedroll. Best of all, his Harley never breaks down in the middle of nowhere.

There is a fine line between dreams and nightmares, a truth that I would be years learning. All my motorcycles were nightmares.

Take my first one, a red and silver Honda dirt bike. In the spring of 1967, my college roommate had a brother at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., who had a motorcycle that he wanted to get home. He said if I would drive it back to Michigan, I could keep it until fall. During spring break, I hitchhiked east to Georgetown. Late that first evening, he unlocked the Honda in a parking lot. It was dark and raining. I had never been on a motorcycle. I had never been in Washington, D.C. With a couple of instructions, off I went on my maiden motorcycle ride.

A few blocks later, a D.C. police car pulled me over. After checking my Michigan driver's license and hearing my tale, he informed me that it wasn't legal for me to be driving a motorcycle in D.C. with a Pennsylvania license plate and a Michigan driver's license. Luckily, he just sent me on my way. Obviously, he hadn't noticed (nor had I) that the license plate was expired. And, as I learned later, stolen. I never knew if the Honda was hot, too, but it probably was.

In the morning, I saddled up for my 600-mile ride back to Michigan. The rain had stopped, a relief since the bike had no front fender. Once I hit the mountains, it turned cold. I had a helmet with a visor, but no motorcycle clothes, just my Eddie Bauer down jacket, cotton long underwear, and hiking boots. I took the scenic route through Pennsylvania. It was slower than the turnpike, but I figured the views would be better.

Coming down the west slope of the mountains, I noticed a scraping noise under the bike. I tried to lean into a long, gentle curve and realized that the kickstand had come down and was sticking out, preventing me from leaning left to steer left. I hit the right shoulder at 70 mph. Soaked from the earlier rain, the mud slowed me quickly as I fishtailed down the bank, finally falling over. I checked for damages. The air filter cover had been torn off, but otherwise no apparent damage.

I seemed okay, too. I kept thinking of the drop-offs on the mountain switchbacks, just a few miles past, and got flutters in my stomach, imagining myself flying into space. I pushed the bike back to the pavement, wired the kickstand to stay up, and headed west into the quickly disappearing sun. By the time I reached Toledo, it was pitch dark and light snow was falling on I-75. I don't know how I made the last hundred miles to Flint that night. Never before or since have I been so cold for so long.

Budding "Bronson" & sister Karen

The next year I bought my own black, Harley-Davidson dirt bike. I tried to take trips on it in Michigan, but it was uncomfortable and never ran well. By the spring of 1969, I had saved enough money to buy a real motorcycle. I debated long between practical and cool, between a dependable BMW road bike and a Harley Sportster. Why settle for practical, I reasoned. I went with cool. So I thought.

_To Grandma, Love – Wayne '69_ reads the note on the corner of the 8x10, black & white photo. I got it back after Grandma died. Lord knows why I had sent it to her, that frail, white-haired, Kansas farm widow of my fire-and-brimstone preacher-grandfather. I stare out unsmiling from behind Woody Allen glasses, bare-faced, short hair – I was a school teacher at the time. That clean-cut image is jarred by my leather jacket and the glistening motorcycle I'm leaning against – it was brand-new, my dream, ocean-blue Harley-Davidson Sportster.

Michigan's late-winter snow covered the ground. My first trip would be somewhere warm, traveling like Bronson with bedroll and saddlebags. Easter break, I headed south for the Texas coast.

I suspected right off that my Harley was a lemon, but couldn't bear to admit it. I figured its oil burning would go away after it got broken in properly. But it got so bad that I had to add a quart of oil every time I stopped for gas, which was at least every 90 miles, since that was as far as the Harley's 2.2-gallon teardrop gas tank would take me.

It rained hard. A lot. I was wet and cold. The first night I camped under a freeway overpass, sleeping on the flat concrete up under the bridge. Eventually, I saw some of Texas – actually, it's so damned flat you can see all you need to see from just about any spot in that butt-ugly state. Worried about my bike, I gave up trying to reach the Gulf of Mexico and turned east for New Orleans.

Intending to camp for the night, I drove down a two-track path that ran under a high-voltage power line. As I bounced along, the mud got worse. Ahead was a puddle about 20 feet across. I decided (like Bronson would have done) to run it. Half-way across, the bottom dropped out and I stalled in muck and two feet of water. There I was, alone, soaked with mud, miles from the highway in who-knows-where Texas, the sun dropping fast, swarms of mosquitoes attacking me, and my motorcycle dead.

I could stand the Harley up, but the mud was too deep for me to push its 450-pound hulk forward or backward. I laid the bike on its side in the water and started cutting branches with my hatchet. I would jam them underwater into the mud under the tires, stand the bike upright and then lay it down on its other side. Next, I would bring in more branches, and repeat. Eventually, I inched the bike high enough out of the mud that I was able to wrestle it out of the quagmire.

I, the bike, and all my gear were soaked and caked in Texas mud, with no way of getting clean. I kicked down on the Harley's starter. Nothing. I pulled out my pup tent and went to sleep.

In the morning, miraculously, the bike did start, and I went on to New Orleans for a quick tour, and then east across Louisiana's swamps, into Mississippi. The bike was drinking oil faster than ever, however, until finally it was clear that I had to get it fixed. I found an old, one-man Harley shop in Meridian, Mississippi, and told the mechanic my plight. He was certain that new piston rings would set me straight, and, yes, he would do it on warrantee, but, no, he didn't have the parts in stock. He figured he could get them by bus from Jackson, Alabama, the next day.

That night, I slept in his ramshackle, grease-caked tool shed out back of the shop, rain dripping on my head, with my pretty blue motorcycle inside in pieces. Late the next day, I was on my way, with newly-installed piston rings. But the oil problem was worse than ever. Within the first hundred miles, I knew that my motorcycle was dying and would never make it north to Michigan. Die it did, just as the sun set over the Mississippi countryside. I pushed the motorcycle up a long driveway to the nearest house and talked the family into letting me set up my tent in their yard. In the morning, I left the bike in their garage and hitchhiked 900 miles home to Lansing.

Phil drove his van and a trailer that I rented ("for local hauling only"), nonstop, back to Mississippi, and we carted the motorcycle home. That Harley never did get fixed right. My next one did little better. Which is how I eventually ended up driving a shit-brown Pinto station wagon. Living life my way.

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### God Sends Maggots

_Well you might be deaf or you might be dumb  
You'll get the answer when the answer comes...  
It might be God trying to get your attention. – Keb' Mo'_

Why was I on top of a darkened church in East Lansing on a hot, muggy July night anyway? Better to ask, why do you do anything when you are young, single, and stupid? Probably as simple as being bored and looking for kicks. I suppose I deserved what I got.

The church was pyramid-shaped, with four steel beams sweeping from the corners on the ground up to the steeple. It was easy enough to climb like a monkey up one of the beams. So, one night, I did. At the top, in the dark, I stepped off the beam to the small flat roof under the steeple. Unfortunately, the "roof" was a stained glass skylight. My step went straight through the glass to nothing. I grabbed framing in time to catch my fall.

Broken glass tinkled onto the pews far below. A sickening feeling of dangling into space swept over me.

I knew I was cut as soon as I pulled myself out of the skylight and back onto the beam. Even in the dark, the growing wetness on my left ankle was apparent. With hands on each side of the beam, I slid backwards, toward the ground. The urban glow was enough to illuminate the bloody trail streaming past my face.

A three-inch gash on my shin, sliced by the broken glass, was deep and ugly. I took a bandana from my shorts and tied it tightly around the wound to shut off most of the bleeding. My shoe was mushy with blood. I walked two miles home. No way could I go to the hospital. No money. No insurance.

At home, I pulled off the bandana. The bleeding had stopped. The flesh was cleanly sliced nearly to my shinbone. No question that stitches were needed. What to do?

Lacking previous experience in suturing, I couldn't be certain if two-pound test or four-pound test was the better medical choice. To be safe, I took the stronger monofilament fishing line, threaded it on a needle, and sewed up the gash. It took about a half-dozen stitches to close the biggest gape. The stitches might have been a bit wide, but you probably can appreciate my interest in keeping down the number of times I poked the sewing needle through my skin. You'd think that sewing up your leg would be like slipping a needle through a banana skin, but it was more like stitching into tough leather.

I put Band-Aids over the cut and went on with my life, which took an even loonier turn. With little more thought and planning than it takes to say it, three roommates (Crazy Rick, Phil, and John) and I decided to ride our bicycles to California. We figured 20-30 days to get there (2,400 miles). That's where my love, Diane, was for the summer; my motorcycle was broken; I was motivated.

My bicycle was a big, blue, clunky ten-speed Schwinn "Continental." Late one Thursday afternoon, the same day Apollo 11 returned from the first moon landing (July 24, 1969), we aimed our bikes southwest from Lansing for the Pacific Ocean, riding all night in the dark. I had promised Diane: "I will break my back to get there by the 14th of August." To make that, we would have to average 120 miles per day for 20 straight days, riding with crappy bikes and gear, and almost no money.

Spoiler alert! We didn't make it.

Phil's knee gave out in northern Indiana the first day, so he turned around and rode home. John gave up the second day.

John & Crazy Rick (right)

Crazy Rick and I kept going. We had no decent maps, no tent. Rick used a sheet for a sleeping bag, and I had a mummy bag that was way too hot for summer. We had not nearly enough food, but lots of bugs, rain, and headwinds. We made it to the outskirts of Kansas City – 700 miles in seven days – and found ourselves burned out and nearly broke. There we sat on a bench outside a gas station at sunset, beaten and dejected.

The young guys closing up the station rescued us. They invited us to a party where we spent the night drinking cheap wine, smoking really bad Missouri pot from giant wine-bottle bongs, and agreeing that our bike trip was over.

The next morning we talked one of the guys into driving us to the bus station in Kansas City. Rick took his last few dollars and boarded a bus for home with his bike. I sold my bike to someone at the party for $25, which got me a bus ticket as far west as Cheyenne, Wyoming. From there, I hitchhiked to Palo Alto, where Diane was staying. My final ride dumped me a few miles from her apartment; I discovered that my last two twenties tucked in my pocket had disappeared, and I did not even have a dime for a phone call. I walked.

By the time I got to California, my wound from the church skylight incident finally had started to heal. My homeopathic sewing of my shin, however, had led to minor complications along the way. By day five of our bike ride, I had started to worry. The wound wasn't closing at all. It itched a lot. Maybe it was the sweat and dirt from bicycling every day and never getting washed? Maybe it was that fishing line? Maybe it needed exposure to air?

Sitting with my bike at a picnic table in a roadside park somewhere in Illinois, I had rinsed away the grime, and using the scissors on my Swiss army knife, clipped the fishing line stitches and pulled them out. As the last of the monofilament line came free, the wound stretched open wide. Squirming in the sun-lit gash on my shin was a mass of small white maggots.

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# POLITICS & RELIGION

### Ask, I'll Tell

(From  "True Tales from the East")

They say a secret is something you tell one other person so I'm telling you.  
– Peter Mulvey

Seeing the White House from Constitution Avenue was a special thrill. Even though I've seen that view hundreds of times, this one was different. Now Obama is in there. Apparently, the country had to teeter on the edge of chaos, run to the brink by charlatans and bandits, to wise up. Every place I went, I found friends with enthusiasm for Obama, the kind unseen in a generation.

None more than Johanna. After Craig's memorial service, I headed to New England. Rick picked me up in his boat at Johanna's dock in the Thousand Islands of the St. Lawrence River. Johanna was Abbie Hoffman's partner and had lost little of her '60s zeal for political activism. She had attended Obama's inauguration along with "my five lesbians," as she put it. She said something about them trying to exorcise the White House before Obama moved in.

Johanna was upset by Proposition 8 in California that made gay marriage illegal. Upset – not that it passed, but that new efforts to overturn it didn't go far enough in spelling out gay rights. Later, I asked a friend if he thought that again legalizing gay marriage in California would be a good thing. Larry, who is gay, said he thought it was an important step. I just don't understand why people get so agitated about it.

I can think of only one thing about Obama that has disappointed me: what's with this "don't ask, don't tell" bullshit in the military? It's not that complicated. Just end it, ok? It's really stupid.

I have to confess, however, that I am conflicted, since an earlier version of the country's homophobia kept me out of Vietnam, 40 years ago. I lost my student deferment at the peak of that folly, at the end of 1967. That was just after my very first visit to Washington, DC, for the anti-war march on the Pentagon. Sadly, we failed all efforts to make the Pentagon levitate.

By early 1968, Uncle Sam wanted me. Thanks to a hernia, I flunked my physical at the U.S. Army's Fort Wayne induction center near Detroit. Two months later, however, I was called back.

"So you're going to keep making me come back here forever until I get this hernia fixed?" I asked the bored, Army doctor.

"Yep."

"Then there's something else you need to know."

"What's that."

"I'm gay."

He actually rolled his eyes. But he wrote me out an order to see an Army shrink the next day.

Show time! Walking back to the reception area, I sashayed past an endless line of potential draftees, naked but for their skivvies. Dressed in my gay clothes (pointy shoes, tight black pants, flowery fake silk shirt, and an attitude), I got whistles and cat-calls. "Go ahead, you dumb shits," I said to myself. "Whistle all you want. Your asses are headed to Vietnam to get shot off, and my pretty ass is out of here."

Assuming I could convince the shrink the next day. That night, I and a handful of other nut cases were put up in a seedy hotel in downtown Detroit. My roommate (who seemed legitimately crazy) and I went to see "2001" at the big-screen Cinerama. As if life at that moment wasn't surreal enough.

Back at Fort Wayne the next morning, I ducked behind a barracks just before going in to see the shrink. I needed the performance of my life. I embraced my gayness and went in.

The shrink asked me about a "typical gay day." The rest is kind of hazy. When I walked out I didn't know if he had believed my act.

At the end of the day, at the final processing table, I watched the Army guy scanning the shrink's report, lying flat in front of him. Staring down, I read my upside-down diagnosis: "Non-aggressive, sociopathic sex deviant." Hey, don't forget the hernia.

My queer brand meant I had the draft thing pretty much covered. Just to make sure, though, I also had applied for status as a conscientious objector. I was turned down, but appealed to the State Draft Board. One day found me sitting before three ribbon-bedecked, retired military guys with short hair in a cavernous conference room in the Federal Building in downtown Flint, Michigan. They asked me questions like, "If Hitler was raping your sister, what would you do?" But I had studied hard for this insane test and knew all the correct, insane answers. On a 2-1 vote they bought my story.

Life back then was defined by the track of my draft cards: 2-S (student deferred), 1-A (ripe meat), 1-A-O (noncombat only), 1-Y (national emergency only), and my final prize – 4-F (no way, no how). Burned 'em all, eventually.

Robert McNamara, architect of that damned war, died this month at 93. He was brilliant, a reminder that tempers my excitement about all the brilliant people now in Obama's White House. McNamara long ago concluded that he had been "wrong, terribly wrong" about the war. That was, of course, after more than 58,000 guys, just like the ones I saw lined up in their skivvies in Fort Wayne, back in 1968, were killed for nothing, plus several million Vietnamese. And a generation scarred forever. Fuck him.

So go ahead. Ask me. I'll tell.

(July 16, 2009)

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### Why I'm with Her

Trump gushes that he loves "the poorly educated." He should. These Bigfoot, Noah's ark, Obama-is-a secret-Muslim believers are the only people who truly love The Donald. I know everyone is entitled to their own stupid opinion, but this is getting ridiculous.

The vast majority of the rest of us, other than a few right-wing loons, see Trump as a narcissistic bully, a lunatic, or worse. Even die-hard Republicans who grudgingly support Trump are embarrassed by his behavior.

Some will justify their vote by hatred of Hillary. She can't be trusted, they say. So, instead, they hitch their fortunes to a con man who lies as effortlessly as he breathes. There are a lot of dumb people in this country, and they believe this billionaire ignoramus is just like them. They're half right.

If this sounds terribly elitist, consider that exactly 50% of the country is of below-average intelligence. And their votes count the same as the other half. It's not that all poorly educated people are stupid. Or, that anyone with a college education is necessarily smarter than average. It's that Trump's base of support from poorly-educated (predominately white) people poses a genuine threat to the future of America.

Don't take my word for it. Listen carefully to any of America's accepted smart people – politicians, scholars, journalists, foreign policy wonks, TV talking heads, business owners, military leaders, and scientists (to say nothing of the rest of the world). Doesn't it count for something that almost none of these people, regardless of their political beliefs (e.g., arch-conservative George Will), find anything good to say with any sincerity about Donald Trump?

Of course, his Trumpettes dismiss such talk as from "the Establishment" with searing critiques of the status quo: _If these people are so smart, why is the country in such a mess?_

Unfortunately for all of us, there are no simple answers to fixing our messes. No wall, bumper sticker slogan, or goofy hats will fix what ails us.

In one of Trump's recent stream-of-consciousness speeches, he talked about contractors who work for him. He claimed that many of them can't even read or write, but are smarter than Harvard graduates. His audience ate it up. After all, these are the same folks who get all orgasmic when they chant, "build the wall" and "lock her up," and love their orange hero's wholesale insults to Muslims, Hispanics, women, journalists, and anyone from governors to the Pope who doesn't fawn at his magnificence.

For those who cheer his non-stop preening, Trump rhapsodizes: "My audiences are so smart!" As for the unenlightened, he sneers: "Our country is run by stupid, stupid people."

I suppose Trump's support is not all that surprising when you consider these beliefs held by Americans:

- 4 in 10 believe God created the Earth and modern humans, less than 10,000 years ago.

\- Half believe the story of Noah's ark.

- 3 in 10 think Bigfoot is "definitely" or "probably" real.

- 1 in 5 believes the U.S. government is covering up evidence of alien existence.

- 1 in 3 believes global warming is a hoax.

- 1 in 5 believes Obama is a secret Muslim.

- 1 in 4 believes in astrology.

- 1 in 5 believes the moon landing was faked.

- 1 in 4 doesn't know that the Earth revolves around the sun, and not vice versa.

I can appreciate the dilemma of those who reject Hillary's progressive political agenda. They fear (correctly) that a President Hillary will shift the balance of the Supreme Court for a generation. They fear (incorrectly) that she will try to overturn the Second Amendment and take away our guns. They worry that her plans to invest in clean energy, infrastructure repairs, health care, education, and worker training will bankrupt the country. Some even harbor secret resentment over how Hillary "stood by her man" during her husband's infamous dalliances.

What I cannot fathom, however, is how such Hillary fear and loathing can legitimize the moral gymnastics needed to vote for Trump. One Evangelical leader justified his endorsement of the hate-spewing hustler by explaining that Trump is a "baby Christian." I do not recall that Biblical concept.

We're being warned by a growing number of very smart people that Donald Trump is a genuine, existential danger to our democracy. I believe that.

In my first-ever Presidential election, in 1968, my choice was Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon. I was so outraged that Humphrey stole the nomination from peace-candidate George McGovern that I refused to vote in that election. Such naïve attitudes helped bring us President Nixon, and we saw how that worked out. No matter how bad things look, they can always get worse.

That's reason enough for me to vote for Hillary in November. I'm with her!

(July 31, 2016)

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### Mourning in America

I woke up on 11/9 [2016] to a landscape I no longer recognize. Scary weather is on the horizon. There is no silver lining in this looming shit storm, no way to lighten a dark future. The only mystery is the extent to which we are fucked. I'm mourning what awaits us all.

I've looked for solace from my favorite comedic commentators: Colbert, Bee, Meyers, Desus & Mero. Nothing helps. The poignant laments from the Daily Show's correspondents made me cry, not laugh ("That's not how you handle a pussy!").

How could this have happened? We can blame Comey, or Bernie, or Gary Johnson, or the too-late-to-wake-up media, or Paul Ryan, or Fox, or the Clintons' flaws – and all deserve blame. Nevertheless, with eyes wide open, close to half the country's voters intentionally picked Donald Trump to be leader of the Free World, holder of the nuclear codes, and role model for our children.

There will be no excuses for buyer's remorse. No one can be surprised with what we're going to get. The President-Elect's ignorance, vulgarity, dishonesty, racism, misogyny, bigotry, and pathological narcissism have been on display for decades – splashed on tabloids, publicized on his TV show, and creepily revealed in numerous on-air conversations with Howard Stern. Trump's endless, abominable smear on Obama's legitimacy left no doubt of his true character.

Then came the primaries. As a rubbernecker to a gruesome wreck, I watched the Republican clown car careen out of control and plunge into a septic cesspool. What emerged back then, like the creature from the black lagoon, was a cartoon humanoid covered in orange slime – the soon-to-be-President-Elect of the United States of America.

Throughout the debates, the Republican Party's new leader reveled in his delusions of brilliance, preening and sniffling and bullying and giving inchoate responses to complicated issues. He preyed on the deepest fears of working-class, white Americans, confirming their suspicions of The Other – scapegoats for all their very real problems: the Chinese, the Muslims, a rigged system, the Mexicans, the lying media.

"Ladies and gentlemen, either you are closing your eyes to a situation you do not wish to acknowledge, or you are not aware of the caliber of disaster indicated by the presence of a pool table in your community!" – Professor Harold Hill ("The Music Man")

Trump, the greatest con man in American history, closed his campaign promising that by electing him, "all your dreams, for the nation and personally, will come true." He proclaimed himself a messianic mensch, who was "what you've been waiting for your entire life."

I know we've survived terrible politicians before, men like McCarthy, Nixon, Cheney, and their henchmen. We'll probably muddle through with Trump and his crew of crazies. But there will be costs.

In my state of Oregon, some 400,000 people will lose their health insurance if Obamacare is repealed. Across the nation, millions of decent people fear deportation from their homes to foreign and unsafe places they may have never known. Parents have to shield their children's ears from vulgarities spewed by the heir to the office of Lincoln.

I'm not going to detail all the damage on the way: erosion of rights, critical setbacks to slowing climate change, protective regulations weakened, loss of moral standing in the world, and worst of all, an unpredictable foreign policy overseen by a stupid, dangerous man. It's all been explained many times by others.

And as for the rejected alternative to this gloomy apocalypse, the evil Hillary, the villainess in the Trump immorality play, I spelled out my thoughts on that last summer in "Why I'm With Her." What might have been, however, no longer matters.

Friends have called to commiserate and share their depression. Some grumble, only half-seriously, about moving to Canada. Some, like me, can no longer bear to watch the news, retreating from politics, to family and friends. But not all.

A few relatives and acquaintances are ecstatic about the prospect of making America great again. Most are professed Christians. Their enthusiasm for Trump baffles me. I wonder what Jesus would say.

"Lock her up! Build the wall!"

Is that what Jesus would say? Or this?

"It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God."

Trump's boosters, however, love The Donald precisely because he's rich. Like they want to be. They cheer and vote for a morally bankrupt, womanizing, conniving hustler with zero relevant experience because they've somehow conjured an image of Hillary that's even worse. They care more about emails than racism. I'll never understand.

"If there is a single sentence that characterizes the election, it is this: 'He says the things I'm thinking.' That may be what is so terrifying. Who knew that so many tens of millions of white Americans were thinking unconscionable things about their fellow Americans? Who knew that tens of millions of white men felt so emasculated by women and challenged by minorities? Who knew that after years of seeming progress on race and gender, tens of millions of white Americans lived in seething resentment, waiting for a demagogue to arrive who would legitimize their worst selves and channel them into political power? Perhaps we had been living in a fool's paradise. Now we aren't." – Neal Gabler, "Farewell, America," Nov. 10

Millions of words have been spent trying to explain why so many have been fooled by Trump's bullshit. Maybe it's not that complicated. I call it Wayne's Rule #1, a failsafe, four-word way to explain most any inexplicable human behavior: people are fucking morons.

(Nov. 12, 2016)

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### What the Heck's Going on in Oregon?

"What the heck's going on in Oregon?" I hadn't heard from my friend from back East in years, but he had to call to ask about the militia take-over of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. "What is it they want? I sure can't figure it out."

"They say," I answered, "that they want the wildlife refuge turned back to 'the people.'"

I told him what's behind the story of the hotheads who showed up in Oregon with their quiet arrogance and guns. It's a postscript to the state's bitter history of unbridled exploitation being challenged by a more recent environmental ethic. Just in the past few decades has Oregon gotten serious about repairing unchecked ravages of its once-astonishing natural riches. There's no way to do that without pissing off some people. It can be as simple as not wanting a rancher's cow shit to keep running into water that you drink or fish in. Or any more old-growth trees cut down. Or, as complicated as managing publicly-owned rangeland that's part of the ecosystem of a critical waterfowl refuge.

Ranchers don't want anyone telling them they can't operate like they always have. Or, ever get charged more for the privilege of using public lands. I can't say that I know any ranchers personally, but I'm guessing they're not unlike the farmers I knew back in Michigan – inveterate whiners forever bitching about government bureaucrats and rules, all the while taking government handouts and destroying publicly-owned waterways with their pollution.

I know the Malheur refuge well. It's a world-class birding hotspot. The 300-square-mile refuge includes salty lakes and seasonal marshes that are a critical link in the health and survival of North America's waterfowl populations. It's that important. During spring, the trees around its modest visitor center – now headquarters for the world-wide TV coverage of its armed takeover – are filled with migrating songbirds, including frequent rarities that attract birders from around the world. Once, I discovered there a Baltimore oriole, common in the East, but not here. I wonder how all the commotion created by this self-proclaimed militia has affected the owls that should be nesting right now in the evergreen trees out behind the building.

I've caught pretty little trout – redside rainbows – in the prettiest-named stream I know – the Donner & Blitzen River, which flows 30 miles through the refuge. It's not, unfortunately, named after Santa's reindeer, but is German for "thunder & lightning," coined by U.S. soldiers caught there in a storm while chasing Indians in 1864.

Speaking of which, I'm not the first to note that if we're going to give that federal land "back" to anyone, shouldn't it be to the Natives who lived on it first and got chased off by the guns and diseases of white people – self-serving zealots who were just like the Malheur takeover leader, Ammon Bundy, and included his Mormon ancestors?

I'm sure Bundy and his fellow seditionists miss the irony, that the local ranchers they purport to champion would be trespassers on Paiute land, but for the same federal government that they decry, stealing it from the Indians. In fact, yesterday was the 137th anniversary of the Paiute Trail of Tears, when federal officials rounded up tribal members and forced them to move north, marching through knee-deep snow to a reservation far from their homes.

The ongoing armed challenge to the government will change nothing, and eventually things will go back to normal. Malheur National Wildlife Refuge will again be treated by its federal managers with the respect it deserves. On this fourth day of their occupation, Ammon Bundy already is talking about a proper time for his band of the self-righteous to go home. Hopefully, that will be soon and only via a bail hearing. Many of them, I suspect, will be stuck with long-term legal battles with the very government they hate, regarding criminal charges that could put them in jail.

All for what? To make the ridiculous case that we should go back to letting the ranchers and loggers and miners do whatever they think best on the land? Sorry, but we can see how that worked out.

The online world is aflame with this story. Some wingnuts wax poetic in support of the Constitution and "patriots" like Bundy. Others, just as nutty, claim the government should give warning and then send in drones to wipe out the lot of them.

Meanwhile, the ranchers who caused all this fuss, the Hammonds, went back to jail this week for four more years for their arson convictions. Anyone who thinks about it will wince at the apparent injustice of such a stiff penalty. It's nearly impossible, however, to ever know the whole story.

The Hammonds had a long, apparently contentious, history with the federal agencies that manage the public land they use, and which surrounds their ranch. One thing for sure, a story like this is never as simple as some innocent ranchers burning some grassland. Nor does the fed's renewed prosecution of the Hammonds, however, completely pass the sniff test.

Last year, Oregon's governor was forced to resign, shortly after easily winning re-election to a fourth term, in a scandal involving his live-in fiancé, the state's "First Lady." Following unseemly revelations of her influence peddling, the U.S. Department of Justice rushed to take control of an investigation. U.S. Attorney Amanda Marshall forced the state's Attorney General to drop her already-underway investigation. Marshall never gave a reason for why she shut out the Attorney General. As it happens, Marshall was the same federal attorney whose overly-aggressive actions sent the Hammonds back to jail for their four-year terms. And brought Oregon the Bundys. I doubt this was the kind of publicity Marshall was seeking.

We can't know what Marshall thinks of the consequences of her harsh prosecution of the Hammonds, since she's no longer in her job. She resigned early last year under a cloud of personal scandal, being investigated for stalking a federal prosecutor who worked for her. Who knows how that all got started, but the poor guy must have been miserable. At the same time he was forced to file a complaint about his boss stalking him, he was under 24-7 armed protection because of threats to his life from the Mexican mafia, for a case he was prosecuting. Incidentally, the guy's wife is also a federal prosecutor. And Marshall's husband is a judge.

You couldn't make this stuff up.

And somehow, it all is connected in some strange way to Ammon Bundy and his gun-toting crazies and a national wildlife refuge established 108 years ago by Teddy Roosevelt to save waterfowl – particularly so people could hunt them. With guns.

So back to my friend's question: "What the heck's going on in Oregon?" I wish I knew. Finding the "truth" in a story like this is like peeling an onion – there's always one more smelly layer.

(Jan. 7, 2016)

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### Blame the Mormons

The armed takeover of a national wildlife refuge in my adopted state of Oregon is sputtering to its inevitable finale. Just four pathetic, leaderless militants – who now are under federal indictment – remain holed up at the isolated refuge. Yet, the question remains: how could this have happened? I believe one of the roots of this tragi-comedy has been short-changed in the media's saturation coverage.

At first it wasn't obvious. When I wrote "What the Heck's Going On in Oregon?" at the start of their insurrection last month, I missed it, too. But then Ryan Bundy, one of the militants' chief chuckleheads, explained his actions to a reporter:

"My Mormonism plays a large part in what I do – the biggest part."

Of course. Relying on divine inspiration explains a lot about the cult-like behavior in any act of terrorism. And no faith is better adapted to creating a religion after one's own, self-serving image than Mormonism.

Leaders of the takeover, the now-infamous (and jailed) Bundy brothers, Ammon (40) and Ryan (43), come from a seditious, Mormon family tradition. Their father, Cliven Bundy, led the highly-publicized, armed, anti-government protest in 2014 over paying grazing fees he owed, for using public lands in southern Nevada.

The feds backed down, and Cliven still owes more than $1 million in unpaid fees and fines. It seems self-evident that Cliven's divinely-sanctioned success in facing down the federal government inspired others, who claim their religious or political beliefs override the "tyranny" of government laws.

Cliven said God was on his side:

"If the standoff with the Bundys was wrong, would the Lord have been with us? Could those people that stood with me without fear and went through that spiritual experience...have done that without the Lord being there? No, they couldn't."

Cliven gave his 14 kids a lot to live up to. Ammon and Ryan probably figured that protesting the jailing of two ranchers, the Hammonds in Harney County, Oregon, who were convicted of arson on public lands, was their chance to live up to Dad's example.

Spoiler alert: they failed. After getting arrested, Ammon said from jail that the remaining four occupiers should go home. Dad didn't agree, and decreed (from his home in Nevada) that the refuge should stay in the hands of "the citizens." He told a reporter, "What this is saying, is that Cliven Bundy is taking control of things."

Ammon Bundy Speaks the Wisdom of the Lord:

Before he got thrown in jail, Ammon Bundy was the face to the world of the wildlife refuge occupation. Low-key, with trimmed beard, in flannels, jeans, and ubiquitous brown cowboy hat, Ammon used soft-spoken words that belied their fervid radicalism.

Ammon said he had prayed, and God told him to go to Harney County to help the Hammonds, and all the other ranchers, miners, and loggers, who should have unfettered access to public lands. The iconic Malheur National Wildlife Refuge should be "turned back to the people."

In an online video, Ammon spoke earnestly into the camera, explaining that his mission to Harney County was a revelation direct from God:

"I began to understand that what we were supposed to do is...get together individuals all across this country that understood and cared about what was happening. That understood that our Constitution was being violated, that it is hanging by a thread...

"They understood what is happening to Harney County would happen to all the counties across the United States and go into all the ends of the earth if there was not a stand made. And so I began to understand that I was to call all these people together, to ask them to come and to unite together in Harney County, and that we were to create a defense for the people of Harney County, so that they can begin to use their land and resources again...that they can get rid of the tyranny and the chains that are upon them...

"And I began to understand exactly how we should do it, exactly the steps that we were to take, and so I began to move in that direction... [These things] have only become more and more clear. They are wisdom of the Lord. And so I am asking you to come to Harney County to make the decision right now, of whether this is a righteous cause or not, whether I am some crazy person, or whether the Lord truly works through individuals to get his purposes accomplished."

He asked online viewers to join him in "this wonderful thing which the Lord is about to accomplish."

Ammon and his brave band of believers, armed with God, guns, and gall, stormed the unoccupied, winter-shuttered refuge headquarters, to make their stand on behalf of the Lord. Ammon said of their weapons:

"[W]e have them, and we're willing to stand with them in our own defense as we exercise our rights, and as we restore our rights back to our brothers and sisters."

He professed his "willingness to kill or be killed for my God and my countrymen."

As if having Cliven Bundy for a father wasn't burden enough, Ammon is saddled with a name straight from the _Book of Mormon_ , Joseph Smith's (the religion's founder) phantasmagoria as rich as _Lord of the Rings_. This helpful explanation from _Wikipedia_ :

"Ammon is the leader of a Nephite expedition from Zarahemla, sent to discover the fate of Zeniff and his people who have not been heard from for 75 years. Zeniff and his followers left Zarahemla and travelled to Nephi, their ancestral home, which was then in the possession of the Lamanites. Ammon is not a Nephite by birth but a descendant of Zarahemla and thus a Mulekite."

All in the Bundy Family:

Cliven Bundy claims the right to freely graze public lands around Bunkerville, Nevada, (just down the road from southwest Utah) because his Mormon ancestors worked the land before the federal government took ownership (ignoring, apparently, Paiute use of those same lands prior to the Mormons' armed takeover). Whatever the spurious merits of Cliven's argument, there is no arguing that the Bundys' Mormon roots are relevant to the mess the Bundy brothers created in Harney County, Oregon.

In the beginning, there was Dudley Leavitt, the Bundy boys' great-great-great-grandfather on their mother's side. He was among the very first Mormons on earth.

Leavitt was born in Canada in 1830, just north of the Vermont line. That same year, not far away in burned-over scrublands of western New York, a self-styled treasure hunter and seer, Joseph Smith, published the _Book of Mormon_ and launched his new religion, declaring himself its Prophet.

In case you missed the Broadway play, here's a thumbnail: In a vision, the angel Moroni came to Smith and directed him to buried golden plates inscribed with the history of an ancient American civilization, between 600 BC and 421 AD. Smith translated the mysterious texts by staring at special stones in the bottom of a stovepipe hat, dictating his visions over several years. Taking a Pope-like role, he proclaimed that only he held the keys to the mysteries. Throughout his life, Smith continued to receive "revelations" from God that would spell out the kooky rules for his new "latter-day saints," such as "plural marriage," special underwear, and how to get your own planet to rule after you die.

Leavitt's parents were among the first to fall for Smith's elaborate con, and gave up everything to follow him west to create the New Zion – a collective, utopian settlement that eventually would lead to theocratic rule over the whole earth. What they found was a real world violently hostile to their religion. Mormons were murdered, homes torched, and some, including Smith, were tarred and feathered. Smith and his followers moved again and again around the Midwest in fruitless efforts to gain their independence from niggling government interference with their affairs. Smith preached that Mormons were under no obligation to obey laws they deemed contrary to their "religious privilege" (e.g., polygamy).

In Missouri, Smith was arrested for "overt acts of treason," but escaped to Illinois. Five years later, he was again in jail for treason. That's where Mormonism's "Prophet, Priest and King" was murdered by a mob of 200 men who stormed the jail. (Smith left behind 40 wives, including at least ten whom were married to other Mormons.)

At Smith's funeral, 13-year-old Dudley Leavitt joined the line of believers who filed by Smith's body. Already, the boy had suffered bloody noses at school for defending his religion and the Prophet who talked to God and angels. At that moment, staring into Joseph Smith's dead face, this direct ancestor of the Bundy family reaffirmed his dedication to Smith's vision.

When Brigham Young was chosen as Smith's successor as 1844, Leavitt was in the back of the audience. His new allegiance to Young would result, 13 years later, in the absolute worst day of Leavitt's long life.

In 1846, his family traveled the Mormon trail to Utah, where Leavitt started his own family, eventually marrying four women. The last was an Indian girl, who had been adopted by a Mormon family as an infant. Leavitt had been traveling away from home, trading molasses and dried fruit for essentials, and a church elder intervened and insisted that he marry the young girl. Imagine coming home from a business trip and surprising your family with a new wife in tow. And an Indian girl, at that.

Leavitt no doubt felt obligated to do his part to accelerate the whitening of the dark Indian race, as called for in the _Book of Mormon_. Native Americans, after all, are the cursed Lamanites that Joseph Smith said would eventually transition into God's favored, white, "delightsome people."

That's how Mormons justified their common practice of buying Indian children from destitute parents, taking them in as part of their own families, all the while insisting the purchased children were not slaves. It was simply part of God's plan to redeem the cursed Lamanites and turn them white.

The Other 9/11 – the Mountain Meadows Massacre:

On September 11, 1857, at Mountain Meadows, a rolling valley 30 miles north of St. George, Utah, a homegrown, ragtag Mormon militia murdered in cold blood 120 men, women, and children traveling in an oxen-powered wagon caravan from Arkansas to California. Only the 17 youngest children were spared.

Dudley Leavitt was there that day and did his duty to the infallible Brigham Young and to God, in that order. As a leader in his Mormon community and church, Leavitt could no more refuse a directive from his church elders than swear an oath to the devil.

Those Arkansas emigrants got caught in a larger battle by Mormons against the federal government. Brigham Young, the Mormon President as well as Utah Territory Governor, had trumpeted, "Any President of the United States who lifts his finger against [my] people shall die an untimely death and go to hell!" Young railed against the tyrannical federal government infringing on their rights (e.g., polygamy) and ignoring their interests.

U.S. President Buchanan declared the Mormons in Utah Territory to be in rebellion, and war was in the air. Federal troops were on the way to oust Young as territorial governor.

Whether or not Brigham Young personally gave the order for the Mountain Meadows massacre is immaterial; the church had made it clear that outsiders were a threat to be given no help in their travels. To make matters worse for the Arkansas travelers, a Mormon missionary (Mitt Romney's great-great-grandfather) had just been murdered in their state.

And so the Mormon militia was called up and attacked the Arkansas emigrants during their breakfast. The first shot killed a child. The surviving emigrants were surrounded for four days. On September 11, under the militia's treacherous use of a white flag, all were lined up. The order to the Mormon militiamen was given: "Do your duty!" What followed was an orgy of violence, as all but the youngest emigrants were shot and clubbed to death, their bodies stripped naked, wagons and belongings looted.

Despite the enormity of their terrorist crimes, almost all those Mormons got away with it. Brigham Young and the church stood up to the feds, lied and blamed the Indians, and only one person (John D. Lee) was ever punished for the atrocity. Not Dudley Leavitt. Not church elders. And certainly not Brigham Young.

Whether or not Leavitt had actual blood on his hands that day (he claimed late in life he did not), this self-righteous man was part of it all, and he was guilty as sin.

Eventually after years of dodging federal marshals charged with arresting polygamists, Leavitt and his family ended up in the polygamist community of Bunkerville, Nevada. He died peacefully at 78 and is buried in the Bunkerville cemetery, not far from where the Bundy family grew up.

It's easy to caricature strange, Mormon fellows like Dudley Leavitt. But for most of his life he was happy and successful, respected by those around him, loved by his wives, adored by his children and grandchildren, and reportedly kind and generous to Indians. That he was not solely a one-dimensional, anti-government militant, however, can't exonerate his hideous, criminal acts. As with today's Mormon fanatics.

Captain Moroni:

Take, for example, one of the Bundys' biggest fans and a participant in the Oregon wildlife refuge takeover – the self-named Captain Moroni, aka Dylan Anderson, of Provo, Utah.

Upon arriving at the wildlife refuge occupation, he claimed to a radio reporter, "I didn't come here to shoot. I came here to die."

He didn't die. Instead, Captain Moroni spent his 35th birthday (Feb. 5) rotting in an Oregon county jail, along with his Bundy buddies and six of their fellow conspirators.

In Mormon mythology, the "real" Captain Moroni (not to be confused with the Prophet Moroni, son of Mormon, who came as an angel to Joseph Smith to show him the golden plates) was a commander of the Nephite forces in America in the 1st century BC. According to Mormon scripture, he was "angry with the government, because of their indifference concerning the freedom of their country" and as a result threatened to "take my sword to defend the cause of my country." In addition to fighting the bad Lamanites, Captain Moroni had to contend with an evil man, Amalickiah, who aspired to be king of the Nephites. When Captain Moroni raised a "title of liberty" (writing on a torn piece of his coat on the end of a pole) as a call to arms for his people to govern themselves and worship as they saw fit, so many flocked to his call that the villain of the story, Amalickiah, simply backed off and went away.

Perhaps the modern-day Captain Moroni believes he is called by God to the same destiny: to make the federal government just go away. Like Moroni's piece of torn coat, the militants want to pull a battered copy of the U.S. Constitution from their pocket, wave it in the air like the magical "title of liberty," and expect the federal government to back off and go away.

Dylan Anderson is on Facebook (at least was, before his unfortunate incarceration). He seems like such a mild-mannered Mormon, not a religious fanatic, a guy claiming Captain Moroni as his Doppelganger. In one post, he jokes, "Wonder if heaven is like church that never ends, or if that's what hell will be."

Two years ago in announcing his wedding plans to his Facebook friends, he fairly purred with Hallmark, quasi-racist sincerity:

"Here (sic) name is Cynthia. We must have wished on the same star at the same time. The ocean is deeply majestic & romantic to us both. Our honeymoon will be a not fully planned adventure down the Oregon Coast and down into Northern California... everything from a high dollar hotel with a (sic) ocean view to sleeping on the beach. She has a lot of Native American in her so it comes natural to her. I call her my squaw. And so our wedding theme shall be the ocean. Hope a lot of people who come will wear something like a blue tie or even a seashell necklace to add to the mood."

(I'm reminded of Dudley Leavitt's fourth wife, the Indian girl he wedded to help whiten the race of the cursed Lamanites. But I digress...)

From Anderson's Facebook page, I learned that his favorite movie is _Robin Hood_ ("the Russell Crowe version"), _Man Vs. Wild_ is his favorite TV show, and his favorite quote is "Keep your friends close and your enemies at gunpoint."

A favorite link is to a video, " _The REAL Bundy Ranch Story: Feds Forced to Surrender to American Citizens._ Here is the video you WILL NOT SEE on the mainstream media."

One of his most recent posts: "Just because your (sic) paranoid doesn't mean they're not after you." But not one word about Dylan Anderson's secret life as Captain Moroni.

The Bundys' Martyr:

As everyone knows, one militant, Robert LaVoy Finicum was killed when the feds finally moved in on January 26 to arrest the wildlife refuge occupation's leaders. After being unmolested by law enforcement for weeks, despite their blatant crimes at the refuge, these guys had gotten so cocky that one day they all loaded up in a convoy of three vehicles and headed north to Grant County, where they expected a warm reception at a community meeting.

You'd have thought they were bound for a religious camp meeting, instead of the senior center in the town of John Day. The lead van held the "Sharp Family Singers" – a single mother and seven of her ten kids, who had driven 1,500 miles from Kansas in a blue van with "Spirit Driven" in big letters on the sides, to serenade the occupiers at the wildlife refuge with bluegrass gospel songs, just as they had done two years prior for Cliven Bundys insurrection in Nevada.

Finicum was next, driving a truck packed with video gear and speakers for the big show, along with four occupiers, including Ryan Bundy. Others, including Ammon Bundy, followed in a Jeep. They left the refuge mid-afternoon for the 100-mile trip and kept their vehicles spaced out for what they imagined was sensible security.

The lead van drove right past the police, and the singing brood went on to sing their songs of Jesus and America to those gathered in John Day. But back on the deserted highway, police vehicles with flashing red lights pulled up behind the truck and the Jeep. Finicum reluctantly stopped in the middle of the highway. His front-seat passenger got out and surrendered. Finicum then told his other passengers to get down, and he floored it.

At full speed, he drove right into a well-planned law enforcement roadblock down the road. Finicum swerved left, got stuck in the snow bank, jumped out of the car, and was shot and killed – reaching twice (or pretending to reach) for his gun. The FBI's overhead video proves he was executed by the police, claim some of Bundys followers.

Of course, it shows no such thing. Shawna Cox (59), a mother of 13 from Utah, was in the truck's back seat. She described the scene to _The Oregonian_ , "[Finicum's] running away from the vehicle, screaming, 'Shoot me, shoot me, shoot me.'"

No one should be surprised that Finicum got himself killed on purpose.

Finicum was a neighbor of Cliven Bundy and shared his Mormon religion and radical politics. He wrote a novel entitled Only by Blood and Suffering: Regaining Lost Freedom, the story of one family's struggles to "survive in the face of devastating end-times chaos."

On just the fourth night into the wildlife refuge occupation, Finicum sat in the snowy dark in a rocking chair, guarding the refuge's entrance road, covered in a blanket and blue tarp, a rifle on his lap. He told an NBC reporter, "They're not just going to come with a guy holding a rifle, and put cuffs on him."

Like his Mormon forebears who were seeking the New Zion and just wanted the federal government to leave them alone, Finicum said of federal law enforcers, "I hope that they go home."

When the reporter told him bluntly that he was obviously violating the law and an arrest warrant was inevitable, Finicum warned that he would never be taken alive:

"I have been raised in the country all my life. I love dearly to feel the wind on my face. To see the sunrise. To see the moon in the night. I have no intention of spending any of my days in a concrete box."

Three weeks later, in a split-second decision in a snowbank by the side of the highway, Finicum made good on his promise. The grandfather and father of eleven died one day before his 55th birthday.

Finicum, no doubt, held secret hopes of being a martyr to his anti-government cause. Besides, as a Mormon, he could expect a pretty good package of after-life benefits. Not 72 virgins, but a pretty nice setup, nonetheless, depending on which of Mormonism's three heavens he ended up in. Compare that to Finicum's only other option – a "concrete box."

His funeral back in Utah drew a huge crowd. Events for the "LaVoy Finicum's Last Stand for Freedom" included a memorial horse ride and benefit concert. He was buried in a pine box.

Blame the Mormons:

There is a line running from Finicum's death and the Bundys' takeover of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge straight back to Joseph Smith's 19th century hallucinogenic visions and his new religion's founding principles. As Ryan Bundy said, Mormonism was "the biggest part" of their motivation.

Nevertheless, religion is not the only factor involved in the conflict. The Bundys' self-serving interpretation of their Mormon faith also coincides with a widespread animosity across the rural West toward government rules and regulations – an attitude not necessarily linked to religious beliefs. Not all of Bundys' supporters are Mormons.

One unusual sympathizer is the Oregon sheriff of Grant County, Glenn Palmer. He's big with the right-wing "Constitutional Sheriffs and Peace Officers Association." (See _High Country News'_ Feb. 2 report,  "The Rise of the Sagebrush Sheriffs: How rural 'constitutional' peace officers are joining the war against the feds.")

It's no wonder the militants thought they were untouchable when they headed up to Grant County, in search of more public support. They were convinced that Sheriff Palmer would protect them. Palmer has repeatedly insisted that under the U.S. Constitution, the federal government has no law enforcement authority in his county. He met twice with the refuge militants, but refused to divulge what they discussed. On that fateful day, when Finicum committed suicide by cop, Palmer was scheduled to speak at the militants' community meeting in John Day.

I wonder if Sheriff Palmer feels any guilt over Finicum's death. After all, but for his encouragement, tacit or otherwise, it's doubtful the militants' convoy would have made themselves sitting ducks to be ambushed by the FBI and Oregon State Police on that deserted highway.

Not all Mormons support the Bundys. Many find them an embarrassment. One Mormon blogger wrote, "Ammon Bundy does not represent my religion... I cringe every time I have to read articles linking his misguided messiah complex to my Mormon faith."

The peculiar religious basis for the Bundys' armed showdowns with the federal government is rooted in a strain of Mormonism founded after World War II by prominent right-wing Mormon leaders. They claimed to promote ideals of maximum individual liberty, free of (non-Mormon) governmental interference. It's a fringe wing of modern Mormonism.

Ammon Bundy perfectly echoed its libertarian theology, when he declared his intentions for the Harney County occupation:

"While we're here, what we're going to be doing is freeing these lands up, getting the ranchers back to ranching, getting the miners back to mining, getting the loggers back to logging, where they can do it under the protection of the people – and not be afraid of this tyranny that has been put upon them."

Despite official denouncement by the Mormon Church of the Bundys' actions in Oregon, its sanctimony rings hollow. The church has a history of persecution, victimization, violence, secrecy, and antipathy towards the federal government. Its members are readying for the Last Days, certain they have a manifest destiny to fulfill. Mormonism's self-righteous theology has propelled a few, like the Bundys, to take armed leadership roles in the anti-government movement always simmering in the West.

The Mormon religion owns the Bundys. They share the same DNA. These militant extremists were created in the image of their religion's founders. That's why I say about the troubles in Harney County – blame the Mormons.

(Feb. 7, 2016)

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### Storm Clouds Gathering

Are you afraid yet? I sure am.

"At this time, we can see storm clouds gathering." – Jim Mattis

For the first time since our country was torn apart 50 years ago by the Vietnam War, I'm afraid for the future. Our President is a lunatic, unhinged from reality, and a danger to the planet.

His bizarre and disturbing behavior is unconstrained by ethics, truth, reality, or, increasingly, by law. It is, however, predictable. No matter what inexplicable thing he does or says, look close enough and you'll find what's in it for our malignant narcissist President: money, votes, power, and fame. Always, 100 percent of the time, it's firstly about himself.

Our man in the White House will say and do anything to get what he wants. There are no limits to his amoral pathology. These are scary times.

I've always believed this about politicians: _No matter how bad things look, they can always get worse._ With Trump, things will always get worse. Always. Even slimy Mike Pence would be better right now.

That, however, is no option since Trump's not going anywhere until the end of next year. We're stuck watching The Leader of the Free World grow ever more detached from reality, erratic in his megalomania, and incoherent in his blather.

As bad as things look today at the end of summer [2019], they are going to get a whole lot worse between now and the 2020 election. More Trump-fueled hate will inspire the spilling of more blood of innocents, leading to more "thoughts and prayers" and little else. More pollution laws will be gutted, more natural areas defiled. More farmers will go broke. Our suicidal race to climate-change catastrophe will accelerate. And all that could be the least of it.

What's going to happen during the next 14 months as reality crushes in, and Trump sees his reelection slipping away? What crazy shit will he try in order to hold onto power? Slash everybody's taxes? Sue the _New York Times_? Launch the _Trump TV_ network? Try to buy Cuba? (Or sell Puerto Rico?) Put tariffs on tacos? Find Jesus? Drop some bombs? Get Melania pregnant? Start a war?

And what, then, in November 2020 when, after all his madness sputters out, he still loses? Dispute the results? Cry _foul!_ and _fraud!_? Refuse to get out of bed? Blame it on the Deep State? Declare a national emergency, delay a transition, and get the Supreme Court to find some excuse to throw or nullify the election?

Trump is nuts. He's capable of anything.

I know, I know. "It can't happen here." But I keep picturing newsreels of pre-WWII Germany. The Nazi rallies; the slogans and chants; the charismatic strongman with his silly hair, lies, and jingoism; the throngs of adoring, ordinary people; the nationalism and racism; attacks on free press; violence against the "other"; and the cowardly silence of enablers and opportunists. That all seemed like ancient, Nazi history until Charlottesville, and those grainy, black-and-white images were replaced by neo-Nazis in hi-def color, marching with Walmart Tiki torches and chanting, "Jews will not replace us!" Declared our President: "Fine people."

Trump is "The Chosen One" to his flock, proclaiming in the last days before the 2016 election that he would bring "the change you've been waiting for your whole life." As if he were sent by the Almighty, he promised: "I alone can save you."

He's embraced by God-loving people as an answer to their prayers. Evangelical preachers fawn over him. This guy! The most self-centered, venal, mendacious, amoral, incompetent President of my lifetime. (And I lived through Nixon!)

That's one hell of a Faustian bargain, these Christians have made to get their judges appointed, and their freedom restored to once again be able to say "Merry Christmas." Is there no limit to their fatuity?

Their faith in their MAGA hero, however, is going to be stretched beyond imagining as his pace of corruption accelerates: more lies, scandals, incompetence, lunacy, broken promises, leaks, exposes, and worse.

Which is why Trump will lose in 2020. Badly.

That's why I'm afraid. What kind of damage can he and his inept and corrupt band of sycophants do in the meantime, in a futile attempt to deny reality?

History will not be kind to Trump. It will reveal him for his true, pathological self. It will collate his abuses and crimes, and his damage to our institutions. Like other disgraced, self-serving leaders who once were loved by their base (again, Nixon and Agnew come to mind), Trump will be forever reviled as a tragic aberration.

In the meantime, what can I do but speak what I believe. For to remain silent is to be complicit in the great crimes against our country and our ethos that now are underway.

As if warnings from Jim Mattis, Trump's own Secretary of Defense for two years, aren't scary enough, now comes Sheryl Crow ("Story of Everything"):

" _Sometimes I break down, these are surely troubled times, oh yes they are."_

My friend, John, tells me to chill out. That all this political mayhem is distant from our lives. That my hens' eggs will be as delicious tomorrow as they were yesterday. He makes a very good point. It's a reminder to savor the beauty all around us while it lasts, even as the sky in the East grows steadily darker.

(Sept. 3, 2019)

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### You Can't Fix Stupid

_If you believe coronavirus is overhyped, I wish you wouldn't read my story. It will just piss you off. You'll find it elitist, self-righteous, and condescending. Which doesn't make it not true. Still, why put yourself through it?_

~ ~ ~

I think I've figured out why so many people are ignoring public health rules about social distancing. Why the majority of people in the community where I live, and most other places, never wear masks. Why they think it is, at the least, overhyped, and, at the most, a hoax. And really, really inconvenient.

It's like a switch was flipped this past Memorial Day weekend. The lunacy of packed pool parties, on the news, is obvious. But it's everywhere. Simple things: Shoppers ignoring one-way aisles. People travelling to other states for trivial reasons. And no way are they going to wear a mask! Too this... Too that...

Yet, nothing has really changed. The virus is resident in far more people now than when this all got started. Four in five of those infected are asymptomatic. Eighty percent! Given the increasingly casual behavior of so many people, how can we not have another serious spike in infections? What biological explanation can avoid that inevitable fate for us?

Aha! There's the problem. It's science.

Science? But on the other hand, "a lot of people are saying..." blah, blah, blah. In TrumpWorld, everyone's entitled to their own facts, science be damned. Those scary stories about the pandemic are, to borrow Al Gore's term, inconvenient truths.

Why should I be surprised, however, at people's irrational rationalizations of their selfish behavior? The ones poo-pooing health agencies' warnings are the same people who believe that Noah's ark was real (half of Americans). It includes the one in four who believes the sun revolves around the earth. Many of these ignoramuses are the same people who believe that the Deep State is out to get them. And their guns.

How have other countries done so much better than us in tamping down the spread of infections? The immediate answer is obvious: people took social distancing dead-seriously. But why? Their people aren't any smarter, or dumber, than our country's people. I'll bet lots of New Zealanders believe things as ridiculous as Noah's ark. So why the startling difference in body counts?

It's about leadership. And empathy. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that having a moron in charge of a pandemic makes a difference. Our man is certifiable. The technical term is malignant narcissist.

This crazed fabulist has contrived dangerous nonsense and displayed Orwellian incompetence at every turn. Never mind that each breath he takes is devoted to his psychotic vanity. His fans, that 40-some percent who love his flabby ass, they hear what they want to hear. He gives stupid people license to let their stupid flag fly.

Scientists are boring. They don't really know. Their numbers are inflated. Trust your gut. And no matter what, never wear a mask. They're for sissies.

That's our president. That's our leader. He's modelling behavior for the narcissism now sweeping our country. The behavior I see in the aisles of the local Walmart starts at the top.

These are the stupid people who are tempting fate, and putting people like me at risk. I'm damned lucky to live where I do. The infection rate here is minimal – just 67 cases so far in a county that stretches from the Cascades' crest to the Pacific Ocean. But I'm not sure that good record can hold. We're right on the I-5 corridor connecting California and Washington, both states with serious hot spots.

While the chance of infection from the coronavirus may be low where I'm living, the costs would be severe. In our family, from our youngest to the oldest, we have underlying health issues that could make any infection fatal. And while the overall mortality rate from COVID-19 is low, that ignores the 20% of cases that require hospitalization, often resulting in terrible health consequences.

One of my hyper-religious acquaintances told my wife on Facebook that she was being self-righteous in her caution. As for her especially vulnerable family members (i.e., granddaughter, daughter, son-in-law, parents, husband), "I'd suggest you keep them isolated."

It's much like Jesus said, "Verily, verily, I say unto you, the strong shall inherit the earth. You have a right to party."

It's all about freedom. The freedom to be stupid, apparently. Sadly, you can't fix stupid.

Which brings me to my sad conclusion: we are fucked. This pandemic is going to be around for a lot longer than necessary. It's just tragic. And stupid.

(Apr. 27, 2020)

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### No Free Will?

Maybe there's no such thing as free will. What if every decision we think we make is actually controlled by our genes? What if free will is an illusion?

I turned 68 last week, and that's what I've been thinking about. I've been wondering how I got where I am. About how anyone gets where they are. About how much control we really have over any of it.

What if we are where we are, and we do what we do, for reasons that are totally out of our conscious control? Perhaps everything important about us has been predetermined by the luck of the DNA we inherited. What if it's all Darwinian fortune?

Are we really so different from the rest of nature? Might human behavior be genetically programmed as tightly as the instinctive acts of animals? Does a bird, for instance, ever sit around contemplating which direction it should head for the winter? Does the neighbor's cat wake up and make a thoughtful decision about whether to chase birds after breakfast or take a nap? All of nature is driven by genetically-coded instincts and by learned behavior that also is delimited by genes. How can it be that humans are free to control their own destinies? Are we somehow unique in nature?

We have no say in whether our genes made us smart or dim, with a skinny butt or fat one, white skin or not, beautiful or ugly, tone deaf or prodigy, gay or straight. Why should qualities of our character be any different – honest or dishonest, disciplined or scattered, timid or adventurous, religious or atheist – those features that define the essence of who we are and what kind of life we live?

I've somehow managed to get from zero to 68. For most of my adult life I've considered myself lucky – blessed with reasonably good health, better than average intelligence, and the discipline to avoid getting caught doing anything dramatically stupid, like going to jail or to war. Well, except for maybe one or two things. In any event, now that I'm living my ideal retirement, I've got to ask myself: What'd I do to deserve this good fortune?

It certainly wasn't because me and God have been such good buddies; I can't see how He would do me any favors. Although I will admit that I've always been secretly grateful for family and friends who tell me, "I'm praying for you." My thinking is, that it can't hurt, and maybe all those good vibes being sent into the vibosphere are responsible for blessing me. Who knows?

~ ~ ~

Fifty years ago, my high school senior class voted me and my ex-girlfriend the two in our graduating class most likely to succeed. I'm pretty sure I voted for myself, although I couldn't for the life of me have pictured how that success would play out a half-century later.

The last time I spoke with that ex-girlfriend, Karen, was 25 years ago during our 25th high school reunion. I couldn't attend but called the reunion in Michigan, from a pay phone in a little French restaurant in Las Vegas. I was living at the time in nearby Bullhead City, Arizona, and working as a land developer. From the distant banquet, several ex-classmates got on the line with me. Karen was the last and we chatted for a few minutes. Sadly, I neglected to ask her if she felt her life had been "Success All the Way," like our yearbook predicted. Now I'll never know since she died last year.

Shit! She was about my age.

That's the thing. Once you pass 60, birthdays force you to think more than ever about mortality and the meaning of life. Especially with all the people dying, who are no older than you.

Through Facebook, I get regular notices of obituaries of former high school classmates. The latest one was for a guy in the class a year ahead of me. I know nothing about his life except this one thing I learned. He was 68 – my age – when he died.

I looked up his picture in our yearbook, but it didn't ring a bell. Next to the guy's senior picture they had included this aphorism: "Heaven sent me down; Heaven knows why." Well, whatever Heaven's intent may have been, I'll bet the guy in that Class of '63 picture never thought he would die when he was only 68. Who does?

Take actor Matthew McConaughey's father, who died in bed from a heart attack at the age of 64 – while screwing Matthew's mother. It probably wasn't fair to his wife, but if you've got to go, I suppose you could do worse. (As Howard Stern noted, "He came and went in the same breath.") Still, 64 ( _"Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?"_ ) no longer sounds that old to me.

A few days back, I saw on Facebook that a friend had turned 74. She claims she no longer thinks of anyone in their seventies as old. That's encouraging. Because recently I attended my grandson's kindergarten graduation. When that kid graduates from high school (class of '26), I'll be turning 80. Hopefully. If my genes hold out.

~ ~ ~

The Apostle Paul said, "When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things." That's how it's supposed to work. You graduate from kindergarten, grow up, and learn to act like an adult. For most everyone, that means you have a job: You get up every day, you go to work, you pay your bills. Everything else follows.

Some otherwise normal people seem incapable of following such simple rules for life. Can genes explain – and maybe justify – the drifters among us, those self-defined victims floating through life without direction, waiting for their big break, the big score?

If we really have free will, how then can we explain self-destructive choices? Do any of us really choose to become alcoholics, perennially unemployed, impulsive, or obese? What is it that can make seemingly intelligent adults act like children?

External circumstances, of course, can truly be out of one's control – disease or war, for example. But what about internal circumstances equally out of one's control – such as bipolar disorder, ADD, or depression? At what point on the mental health scale do such genetic issues override free will? Always? Never? Something in between?

How can such people ever find a comfortable place in the world? How do any of us? Especially if the invisible influence of genes on our behavior is what's in control.

Could it be that thinking we can change who we are by force of will, is delusional? That would mean that the assholes, morons, and criminals among us really can't help themselves. To say nothing of fat people.

(July 8, 2014)

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### Why I Don't Believe in God

"How did you decide you don't believe in God?" My friend's question came after reading my recent blog (Cosmic Connections), where I had mentioned, in passing, that I don't believe in aliens, Bigfoot, the Deep State, God, etc.

Bill's a passionate Christian and, paradoxically, a fan of my (not-infrequently irreligious) writing. So I wasn't surprised to get his message. As teenagers nearly 60 years ago, we shared an oppressive religious upbringing, attending the same Evangelical church where my father was pastor. Bill kept his faith; me, not so much.

Me & Bill – First Missionary Church (Flint, MI) – 1961

Back then, it was natural to try my family's religion on for size, but it was never a good fit. I didn't wake up one day and decide I didn't believe in God. It was more like how you give up on an old suit or dress that once may have been your favorite. It's hung in the back of your closet for a few years, you've added a few pounds, and your taste in fashion has changed. Now and then, you take it out and think about wearing it again, maybe try it on in private, but it never looks right and doesn't feel right, and finally, it goes out to Goodwill, along with a box of old electronics and kitchen gadgets. If someone else can be happy wearing it, good for them.

One thing I do miss from my God-believing days: the prospect of getting all my questions answered in Heaven. Wouldn't that be cool, finally having all the mysteries of the universe explained? Like the ultimate Google. Did Oswald act alone? Why is there something rather than nothing? Are UFOs real? Will the world end with a bang or a whimper?

But the thing is, at that point you're dead, so would you care? Even if you finally got your wildest curiosities satisfied in Heaven, then what would you do with yourself for all the rest of eternity? Learn the harp? Play chess with Jesus?

Honestly, Heaven sounds dreadful (as in my story,  When We All Get to Heaven). If you've been a proper Christian, after you die, you end up in a place in the sky where the streets are paved with gold, to spend forever singing God's praises. Lots of angels. Pearly gates. No more pain, no more sorrow.

Some believe Heaven is whatever you imagine it to be. Gardens. Sunshine. Calorie-free ice cream. I heard one hard-scrabble believer explain to a reporter, her conception of Heaven: it will have really nice appliances.

Mormons, if they've been good, get their own planet after they die, where they will reunite with all their dear, departed kin. Then there are the Muslims with their special reward of 72 virgins.

You have your Rastafarians, Taoists, Scientologists, Buddhists, Wiccans, Baha'i, Hindus, Hopi – 4,000 religions exist on Earth. Before them, thousands more – the pyramid-building Egyptians and Inca, the Mongols, Celts, Visigoths, Hellenists, Aborigines, Mycenaeans, Sumerians. And before them? On it goes in infinite varieties of religious beliefs, back to the beginnings of human consciousness, each culture with its own true image of God (or gods).

Pick a god. Or make up your own. Pick a Holy Book. Or write your own. Believe that God talks to you. Who's to prove you're wrong?

* * *

Belief in deity goes hand-in-hand with belief that every human has a soul. Look at the 30,000-year-old cave paintings made by early _Homo sapiens_ in Europe. Their transcendent art suggests that everything in their world, including themselves, had spirits.

"Where did the idea of the soul come from? The truthful answer is that we don't know. What seems clear, however, is that belief in the soul may be humanity's _first_ belief." ( _God, A Human History_ , Reza Aslan, 2017)

Worship of multifarious gods is a common humanity we share with the ancients. Something in our evolutionary journey, a quirk in our genes, makes it natural for people to believe in the supernatural. And particularly in Western religious belief, in a soul that lives on after death. Today, nine in ten Americans believe in a monotheistic God or some higher power.

The popularity of a belief does not, of course, make it true. People believe all sorts of nonsense. At least half of Americans believe the Bible's version of a paternalistic, all-knowing, all-powerful, personal God. (Presumably, the loving New Testament God, not the spiteful Old Testament God, who once had 42 children mauled to death by bears, simply because they had teased one of His prophets for being bald. (2 Kings 2:24)) That's about the same proportion who are convinced that ghosts are real (45%).

There are otherwise-normal-appearing Americans alive at this very moment who believe with all their heart that the Earth is flat. They're oblivious to the lunacy of their contorted explanations and futile attempts to make the irrational sound rational. They have faith that everything they can't see with their own eyes or read about in the Bible is fake. The Earth looks flat and nothing in the Bible says it's not. Their conviction is based on faith, the ultimate defense against skeptics.

"Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen." (Hebrews 11:1)

At least half of us believe the story of Noah's ark and a global flood. Never mind that the Bible's version is adapted from a 4,000-year-old Babylonian myth, invented on the fertile, flood-prone lowlands of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, a fable the Jews learned of during their exile in Babylon, 2,700 years ago. Today in Kentucky you can visit a "life-sized" version of the phantasmal, Biblical ark just off I-75 (Exit 154).

Some true believers take raft trips through the Grand Canyon to confirm their fantasy of a young Earth. In their figment, they condense a geologic tableau spanning billions of years of Earth history into a few thousand years of Biblical mythology. That's the kind of thing that religious faith can get you: certainty that Noah's flood created the Grand Canyon.

Of course, the Grand Canyon was carved over the last six million years, not a few thousand years ago. And the Earth isn't flat, no matter how much faith the nutty Flat Earthers have.

Now, it may be an awkward question, but where on the crazy scale do you rank Flat Earthers, compared to faith-filled, young-Earth-believing, Bible literalists? Sure, these Christians know the Earth isn't flat. Since Galileo's time, they've even conceded that the Earth isn't the center of the Solar System. But because of what they read in the Bible, they're stuck with believing that the universe was created in seven days, 6,000 years ago, and that Adam & Eve and a talking snake started all this.

Two out of every five people you see driving down the freeway believe the Garden of Eden story is true. Millions of years of evolution? People descended from apes? Phooey! It's all lies. Like the fake news.

I understand some kinds of faith. I have faith that the sun will come up tomorrow. Faith that it's just a matter of time before the Big One hits the Pacific Northwest. Faith in my family. Faith that the beep means my car door is locked. But faith in God? Nope.

* * *

Our universe had a beginning, 13.8 billion years ago, and it is expanding. That means some parts of the universe are so far away that they can never be seen from Earth because light hasn't had time to reach us during the finite age of the universe. Beyond that impenetrable cosmic horizon, called the Surface of Last Scattering,

"...lies a region containing at least 23 orders of magnitude as many galaxies as those inside... It is likely to be many orders of magnitude greater. Our visible universe can be likened to a grain of sand in the Sahara Desert." ( _God and the Multiverse, Humanity's Expanding View of the Cosmos,_ Victor J. Stenger, 2014)

Our existence is a mystery. Consider that the atoms making up our bodies were created from nuclear fusion in the hot cores of stars that died and scattered their elements across space, billions of years ago. That's literally what we're made of. Star dust.

"Again and again across the centuries, cosmic discoveries have demoted our self-image. Earth was once assumed to be astronomically unique, until astronomers learned that Earth is just another planet orbiting the Sun. Then we presumed the Sun was unique, until we learned that the countless stars of the night sky are suns themselves. Then we presumed that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was the entire known universe, until we established that the countless fuzzy things in the sky are other galaxies, dotting the landscape of our known universe." ( _Astrophysics for People in a Hurry,_ Neil deGrasse Tyson, 2017)

Numbers describing our known universe are so immense as to be essentially meaningless to a human mind. Take our own Milky Way, with 300 billion stars ( _The Universe in Your Hand: A Journey Through Space, Time, and Beyond_ , Christophe Galfard, 2016). What would 300 billion grains of sand amount to? You would have to fill 30 dump trucks. One grain of sand for each star in the Milky Way.

Some 150 billion galaxies are within sight of Earth. So how many stars exist in the Universe? Do the math. And virtually every one of those stars has at least one planet. Scientists estimate that there exist sextillions (with 21 zeroes) of planets capable of supporting some form of life.

"Who knows how many and which other extraordinary complexities exist, in forms perhaps impossible for us to imagine, in the endless spaces of the cosmos? There is so much space up there that it is childish to think that in a peripheral corner of an ordinary galaxy there should be something uniquely special. Life on Earth gives only a small taste of what can happen in the universe." ( _Seven Brief Lessons on Physics,_ Carol Rovelli, 2016)

Pick up any random rock, and think of how many lives it has lived. Its elements came from space, after eons of travel through the universe, to form the earth, 4.5 billion years ago, and be cycled and recycled through the building and breaking of continents and oceans, to survive and end up in your hand. That rock, like every atom in our bodies, has a mind-boggling, cosmic history, and will be recycled in unimaginable ways throughout a future stretching beyond time.

There are questions with answers transcending human comprehension. At least for now. What came before the Big Bang? Is "before" even a valid concept? What's inside a black hole? Does "inside" even make sense where time, itself, ceases to exist? What is dark matter? Is it possible that our known universe is but a speck in a multiverse? What is human consciousness?

Could it be that the existence of such unanswerable cosmological and metaphysical questions, the staggering scale and complexities of the universe, is the very proof that God exists? The ultimate demonstration that all of this never could have happened by chance? Since we can't explain the universe and where it came from, does that mean there must be a God who set it all in motion? A micro-manager who decreed the laws of physics, but who also appreciates being thanked for all things good, has his eye on the sparrow, and picks which team should win, based, presumably, on who has prayed to Him the hardest? If you ask God to "bless this food," but then choke on a fishbone, did He just get distracted for a moment?

"To accept the substantial uncertainty of our knowledge is to accept living immersed in ignorance, and therefore in mystery. To live with questions to which we do not know the answers. Perhaps we don't know them yet or, who knows, we never will.

"To live with uncertainty may be difficult. There are those who prefer any certainty, even if unfounded, to the uncertainty that comes from recognizing our own limits. There are some who prefer to believe in a story just because it was believed by the tribe's ancestors, rather than bravely accept uncertainty.

"Ignorance can be scary. Out of fear, we can tell ourselves calming stories: up there beyond the stars there is an enchanted garden, with a gentle father who will welcome us into his arms. It doesn't matter if this is true – it is reassuring.

"There is always, in this world, someone who pretends to tell us the ultimate answers. The world is full of people who say that they have The Truth. Because they have got it from the fathers; they have read it in a Great Book; they have received it directly from a god; they have found it in the depths of themselves... There is always some prophet dressed in white, uttering the words: 'Follow me, I am the true way.'" ( _Reality Is Not What It Seems: The Journey to Quantum Gravity_ , Carlo Rovelli, 2017)

### * * *

As I approach what is definitely starting to look like old age, questions of mortality, God, and the afterlife become more poignant.

"Is God the animating force that connects all living things, as our prehistoric ancestors seemed to believe? Or nature deified, as the early Mesopotamians thought? Or an abstract force that permeates the universe, the way some Greek philosophers described it? Or a personalized deity who looks and acts just like a human being? Or is God literally a human being?

"Creation may very well have originated purely through physical processes that reflect nothing more than the articulation of the most basic properties of matter and energy – without cause, value, or purpose. That is a perfectly plausible explanation for the existence of the universe and everything in it. It is, in fact, just as plausible – and just as impossible to prove – as the existence of an animating spirit that underlies the universe, that binds together the souls of you and me and everyone else – perhaps every _thing_ else – that is or was or has ever been." ( _God, A Human History_ , Reza Aslan, 2017)

Brilliant minds have found creative ways to explain their belief in God, like Medieval scholars debating how many angels could dance on the head of a pin. Their books could fill a Costco warehouse. Is it, in the end, arbitrary what a person believes about a creator-god?

"A godless world is as mysterious as one suffused with divinity, and the difference between the two may be less than you think." ( _Seven Types of Atheism_ , John Gray, 2018)

Do I really believe in a godless, indifferent universe? Believe that life ends in a soulless nothingness? Do I think I'm right and the vast majority of humans, including all manner of geniuses and morons, who believe in a Supreme Being, are wrong? After all, even Albert Einstein had his religious side:

"Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible concatenations, there remains something subtle, intangible and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything that we can comprehend is my religion" Einstein, quoted in _Pantheologies: Gods, Worlds, Monsters_ , Mary-Jane Rubenstein, 2018.

And so, back to my friend's question about why I don't believe in God. My short answer: I can't see any reason why I should. As for an afterlife:

"Being dead is like being stupid. It's only painful for others." – Ricky Gervais

(May 15, 2019)

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About the Author

Wayne Schmidt is happily retired, having worked as an environmental activist, newspaper reporter, desert land developer, and hippie mailman. He and his wife, Eva, live with their kitty and chickens in a small town in Oregon's lovely Willamette Valley.

Other eBooks by the Author

Available online:

-Bare Naked Wayne

-Life with Big Green: A Memoir

-Hubris, a Railroad through the Grand Canyon, and the Death of Frank Mason Brown

Connect with the Author

Wayne's Blog (wayneaschmidt.blogspot.com)

Instagram: @wayneaschmidt

WayneASchmidt@aol.com

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