Fear of Flying

 “Every creature is made up of both ugliness and beauty, and must be granted the time to manifest in all aspects.” Italo Svevo, A Very Old Man

Traveling by air in the US sucks -- unless one has the money to fly first class. If you sit with the paupers in coach, as I do, it all feels like one continuous rip-off. Cramped seats, endless exhortations to sign-up for the airlines’ credit card, WiFi that should be complimentary but isn’t, limited overhead storage, exacerbated by baggage fees that force passengers to carry their luggage onboard. Paupers board last, after the passengers who need assistance, those with small children, active duty military (our knee-jerk, thank-you-for-your-service obeisance), Platinum, Silver, Gold, or Bronze club members, and, of course, the elite in First Class. By the time paupers reach their seats all nearby overhead storage is invariably taken, which means you have to stow your luggage in a bin in a row behind you, a real problem if you have limited time to make a connecting flight. Good luck retrieving your bag once the plane lands, stops, and the scrum to exit begins; you might as well try to swim against a tidal wave. All you can do is sit and wait, while the minutes slip past and your chance of making your connecting flight fades. 

Then there’s TSA, that lovely gift from 9/11 and the War on Terror, still part of our lives two decades later. What I most hate about TSA is the inconsistency, and I’ll give you an example. On Saturday at the Portland airport, I was required to remove my shoes and place my Kindle in its own bin; on Sunday, at the same airport, I was ordered to leave my shoes on and keep all my electronic devices in my bag. Is the inconsistency designed to keep the terrorists guessing or just a cruel joke on passengers, decided each day on a whim or by coin flip? The TSA lines in Portland were long, snarled, slow, and maddening.  

I cursed the moon, sun and stars, Portland, all of Oregon, the god-damn late arriving Tillamook bus, TSA and United Airlines. 

The bus from Tillamook, where I went to visit my brother as I have done every September for the past five years, was thirteen minutes late leaving the transit center, and that thirteen minutes proved to be crucial. The bus was scheduled to arrive at Union Station in Portland at three p.m. and my flight to San Francisco departed at four. I knew it was going to be tight and making the flight to San Francisco and then on to Santa Barbara depended on everything coming off just right. I had to catch an UBER from Union Station as soon as my feet hit the pavement, hope the traffic to the airport wasn’t heavy, and get through TSA. As usually happens when you’re in a hurry, everything conspired against me: my UBER driver hit one red light after another and with uncanny skill got behind every slow moving car, bus or truck, and never once exceeded the posted speed limit, which I completely understood from his point of view, but his strict adherence to the law of the road was not advancing my cause. I watched the minutes pass on my phone knowing my chances of getting home were slipping away. I dashed into the airport and headed for the TSA line. When I saw the queue of people waiting to be screened I thought, “Well, I’m fucked.” I had about five minutes to catch my flight and the queue was  barely moving. TSA agents barked commands. There was a snafu with the boarding pass of the man in front of me. When I finally cleared the screening process, I grabbed my bags and shoes off the conveyor belt and hightailed it toward my gate in my socks. Too late. The flight had left. “Oh,” the lady behind the United counter said, “we waited for you as long as we could.” Fuck, fuck, fuck! I thought. Motherfucking fuck fuck. The gate agent re-booked me on a flight the next day, leaving at eight a.m. I sat down in the empty waiting area, caught my breath, put my shoes on and called my wife. It was just after four. The thought of sixteen long hours in an airport wasn’t appealing, but I also didn’t feel like spending money for a hotel room. My wife thought otherwise and said she would do some quick research and call me back. Ten minutes later I was in an UBER headed for the Howard Johnson Portland Airport on northeast Sandy Boulevard. “It looks decent enough,” my wife said. 

On the way to the hotel I saw an abandoned encampment on the side of the road, two pop-up trailers parked back-to-back, amid a bunch of debris, mangled folding chairs, tires, and a red porta-potty with a gaping gash in its side that resembled a lopsided smile. The trailers had been torched. Thoughts of a hot shower, something to eat, and a night of sleep ran through my head, but when the driver pulled up to the HoJo my heart dropped. Sketchy doesn’t do the place justice. The parking lot was full of older cars, some of them with the hoods up and the doors thrown open. The thirty-something woman behind the counter in the office looked like she had firsthand experience with hard-living. It took her a while to check me in because the phone kept ringing. “Well, we need to get her out of 106,” I heard her say. The white walls of the office were dingy, scuffed. “Breakfast Area” read a sign on the wall behind me. My room was on the second floor of Building 3. Up a short flight of stairs, through a metal door with a sign that read, “Keep Door Closed.” When I opened the door to room 231 I caught the sickening smell of stale nicotine. One king bed, nothing on the walls except a flat screen TV, a desk and office chair, mini-fridge, and a dresser with three drawers. The blue-gray carpet was threadbare and drab, the grout in the bathtub dark with mold. One towel was on the floor. I decided against a shower. I pulled the comforter back and examined the bed for bugs, hair, nail clippings, stains. Finding no evidence of any I parted the curtains and slid open the window to let some air in. There were gaps in the rusted chain link fence between the hotel property and the grungy house in the lot next door. A woman’s gruff, pack-a-day voice echoed below. Holy shit, I thought. Where the fuck am I?

I ordered some Indian food and two bottles of beer to be delivered. It was ridiculously expensive, but I don’t eat cheap fast food. It arrived about a half hour later, courtesy of a man named Chris, but when I got back to my room and opened the bag I found no utensils, napkins, wetnaps, nothing, and of course I didn’t have a bottle opener and there sure as hell wasn’t one in the room. I cursed the moon, sun and stars, Portland, all of Oregon, the god-damn late arriving Tillamook bus, TSA and United Airlines. With diligent effort I managed to pop the cap from the beer bottles with my belt buckle, spread a towel over my lap and dug into the chicken and biryani rice, eating it with my fingers like an Afghan sheep herder. 

By eight p.m. I was in bed with the lights out and the black-out curtains drawn, reading Samuel Beckett on my Kindle -- appropriately bleak material given the circumstances. Dull light spilled around the black-out curtains. From time to time voices echoed in the corridor, a door slammed, heavy footsteps crossed the floor in the room above me. The alarm on my phone was set for 4:30 a.m. I figured I’d get up, wash my face, brush my teeth, and order an UBER; better to arrive three hours early than late, and at least I could get a cup of coffee and a scone or muffin. Though I told myself not to, I kept reaching for my phone to check the time. 

9:00. 9:17. 9:53. 10:12. 10:47. 11:28.

I didn’t sleep at all, I just lay there with my eyes shut, listening to the noises. Around midnight a pattern emerged that would continue non-stop for the next three hours. First a door in the corridor creaked open and then banged shut, followed by the sound of someone in flip-flops slap-slap-slapping down the hall, through the metal exit door, which banged shut after them. Only minutes later this pattern was reversed, the exit door creaked open, slammed shut, the flip-flops slap-slapped, and I heard the beep of a magnetic key opening a room door and then slamming shut. I could have peered through the peephole to see what was going on but decided it was better not to know. Over and over I heard the same pattern of sounds, punctuated occasionally by a woman’s voice, and once by a man’s. Around three-thirty a.m. I heard three rapid bangs echo from somewhere outside the hotel, but I couldn’t tell if these were gunshots or a car backfiring, nor if they were near or far away. Shortly thereafter I heard a siren in the distance, then another and another, all which seemed to be growing closer and converging before fading away. I resumed resting with my eyes closed.

I was up before my alarm went off. I packed my stuff and ordered an UBER. The car would arrive in twenty minutes. I tracked the car’s progress and left my room when it was five minutes away, plenty of time to get to the pick-up point near the office. When I left my room the corridor was empty and silent, but once I exited the building I found myself in an active police crime scene. Red and blue lights flashed from half a dozen Portland police department vehicles and a large crime scene lab truck, and the entire hotel property was criss-crossed with yellow and orange police tape emblazoned with Police Line Do Not Cross. Cops were milling around in twos and threes, talking. Police radios crackled. My driver was due to arrive any moment and I couldn’t see a way off the property, so I stepped over the tape and hailed two cops by waving to them. “You have to go all the way around,” they said. All the way around where? I thought, starting to panic that I would miss my ride and be stuck in this Twilight Zone of a hotel. I finally made it out to the street and saw the red Tesla driven by Ivan. Salvation.

While I was waiting for my flight to San Francisco I Googled Howard Johnson Portland Airport. While there was nothing about that morning’s incident, I did discover that there had been a stabbing at the property in 2011, and that for months it had been a temporary shelter for the homeless, which explained the junk cars and downtrodden types I saw hanging around. A couple of stinging reviews described open drug dealing and prostitution, brawls and filth. The complimentary breakfast advertised with such fanfare on the hotel website was derided as a piece of dry white toast. 

I think I will stay close to home for a while. 

Over the Bridge and Back Again

“It is the mark of illiberal regimes that they make free speech more difficult even outside their borders.” Yuval Noah Harari, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century

I have just returned from my annual trip to Oregon to visit my brother. He lives in a working-class neighborhood in Tillamook, one block from the Hampton lumber mill which churns out wood products twenty-four hours a day. We loaded two bikes on his Jeep Cherokee and set out for Washington under blue skies. We crossed the Astoria Bridge, always a thrill for me since I have few opportunities to see a river as wide as the Columbia, and headed for the small town of Ocean Shores. In years past we explored Westport, Grays Harbor, Port Townsend, Tokeland, and Aberdeen. Ocean Shores has a population of around six-thousand souls. Two of its larger hotels were shuttered temporarily, and when we inquired about vacancies at another we were told there were none because of a shortage of housekeeping staff. Help wanted signs were ubiquitous. Despite the labor shortage, we noticed quite a lot of new construction -- houses, condos, and commercial spaces. I wondered if the city mothers and fathers were following a Field of Dreams strategy -- build and they will come. We finally found lodging for the night at a Comfort Inn. The young woman at the front desk told the customer in front of us that due to a shortage of staff she worked seven days a week for most of the summer. 

After an uneventful evening we drove back to Astoria the following morning, crossing the bridge minutes before a maintenance crew set up, which slowed traffic in both directions for several hours. We rode along the bicycle path that parallels the Columbia, watched a couple of big container ships, and saw two Blackhawk helicopters fly under the bridge. We had dinner on Pier 39. The window of our first floor room at the Hampton Inn faced the river, and we could watch the container ships at anchor get turned all the way around by the current. The barking of sea lions went on most of the night.  

Back in Tillamook by midday the following day, we cleaned rain gutters and wiped the bikes down while listening to Mojo Nixon’s show on Sirius XM. I was interested to learn from some of my brother’s friends about Tillamook real estate, which, as in many other unlikely locales in our country, is experiencing price wars, with potential buyers offering thousands of dollars above the asking price. Where the money comes from I have no idea. I wonder if this phenomenon is another example of irrational exuberance that will come crashing to earth sooner or later. 

Whenever I travel I realize how little I know. I can finally distinguish a Douglas fir from a spruce, but there are many other species of tree I can’t name. I don’t know much about fishing, tides, currents, and very little about bow hunting. The older I become the less I seem to know, and much of what I think I know is tinged with doubt. Our world is drowning in information, yet knowledge seems to be in short supply, and wisdom is even more rare. One of my brother’s friends, Larry, immediately struck me as intelligent because he listened more than he spoke, and when he added something to the conversation it was thoughtful. I must learn to listen more. This blog is of course filled with my opinions, notions, biases, prejudices, gripes and inchoate thoughts. The modern world is bewildering, and it very often scares me. What is real, what matters, how can we help? 

I drove from Tillamook to Portland in a steady rain, through the state forest on Highway 6, a twisting road prone to rock slides in spots. I left my brother’s house early so I could take my time. My rental car hydroplaned once or twice. It was early in the morning, dark, and fortunately there was sparse traffic headed east; I kept to a steady 45mph. My night vision is suspect and at times it was hard to see where the road was heading. I alternated between high and low beams, and when a vehicle appeared in my rearview mirror I pulled over to let it pass. No sense pissing off the locals. 

Travel is a luxury, but it’s one of the best ways to learn. 

Escape from Banjo Land

 

 “It’s rush hour now, on the wheel and the plow/and they’re breaking down the distance between right and wrong.” Bob Dylan, Ring Them Bells

I picked the wrong time for my annual trip to visit my brother in Tillamook, Oregon, and the wrong means of transportation. Uncomfortable about flying due to the risks of Covid-19, I decided to pack the 2008 CRV and do my version of a Sam Shepard/Bruce Springsteen/Hunter S. Thompson road trip, driving a long distance alone, with 9 hours of music on a Spotify playlist I created to keep me company, GPS for navigation, and some snacks to munch on. I knew when I made this decision that California was in the grip of the Summer of Fire, a gruesome preview of what is coming if we do not stop pretending that the devastating fires, hurricanes, and floods happening all over this planet are caused by some force other than human activity. Climate activists, scientists, and indigineous people have sounded the alarm for decades, to deaf ears and blind eyes. The climate crisis is happening right now, before our eyes, and we are ill-prepared for the shocks to come, the consequences of our actions. Our obsession with bigger, newer, shinier, cheaper, faster, and more profitable is threatening our ability to live. 

Not in play at the moment of my decision was what would happen in Southern Oregon only a few days after I arrived in Tillamook. 

The drive to Oregon was mostly uneventful. It was warm and sunny the Sunday I started north on the 101 freeway. From San Jose to the California border the sky was smokey and the sun the hue of a ripe peach . When I reached Redding in the late afternoon it was 111 degrees. At six the next morning when I headed out it was already 71. When I pulled into my brother’s driveway in Tillamook, just after noon on Monday, it was an astonishing 85 degrees, cloudless blue sky overhead, and windless. When I called my wife to let her know I had arrived safely she told me it was over 100 in Santa Barbara. 

By three a.m. on Tuesday morning a hot wind was howling with gusts up to 70 mph. When I went outside in the morning the CRV was covered with dust, trash cans lay on their sides, and drifts of leaves had collected against the fence surrounding my brother’s yard. The leaves were green, torn from the trees a month before they would have fallen on their own. In other parts of Tillamook the wind uprooted trees and downed power lines, forcing road closures. My brother moved to Tillamook in 2006 and has seen all kinds of weather, but never before had he experienced a freak windstorm that pushed an overheated wind like a California Santa Ana. 

Do we have nothing in common? Do we disagree on everything? When did we become so distrustful of one another? When did we lose our confidence as a nation and become so fearful of the world? 

We left Tillamook on Wednesday morning, headed for Westport, on the south side of Grays Harbor in Washington. It was warm and the sky was hazy with rust-colored smoke. We loaded bikes on my brother’s Jeep Cherokee and started out. Before we got out of town we saw the plume of smoke rising from the forest behind the golf course. For more than twenty years my brother worked on Hot Shot fire crews in the Los Padres National Forest and northern Arizona. “We normally get about 90 inches of rain a year,” he said. “This year it’s down to 60 inches. It’s dry back in there. If that fire  spreads fast it could be a big problem for local firefighters. They don’t have much experience with wildfires.” The 101 northbound was open so we headed on, crossing the Columbia River on the Astoria Bridge into Washington about four hours later. I noticed at least a dozen dead birds on the bridge. 

My brother sarcastically refers to Tillamook and other small towns in Oregon and Washington as Banjo Land, meaning Hicksville, populated with rednecks and narrow-minded folks, a generalization he knows is too sweeping to be true. But when you are Santa Barbara born and raised it’s hard not to make comparisons -- and find nearly every other place wanting. It’s rare in Santa Barbara to see the front yard of a house littered with the hulks of old cars, refrigerators, tires, and junk. It’s equally rare to see Trump 2020 yard signs. But like the rangeland around Yreka in northern California where I saw signs that read, FARMERS FOR TRUMP and SAVE BABIES, VOTE TRUMP, the rural towns we drove through looked like Trump country. I saw many American flags and a dozen Trump 2020 signs. As the scenery passed I thought about these small towns, and how they contribute their sons and daughters to fight America’s wars. Proud and self-reliant, these people don’t like being told what to believe or how to live their lives by people of my bent or the federal government. They vote Republican. God, America, guns, freedom to own a big gas-guzzling truck. I think the honest ones know that climate change is caused by human activity. They may not have liberal-style sophistication, but they’re not stupid. From what I saw, they are practical, capable people making their way through life, raising families, working the fields or the rivers and sea. I’m not willing to write these people off, even though I assume we would disagree on many subjects. I want to know why they see Trump so differently than I do. If nothing else, we’re still Americans. That meant something before the working-class got hammered by big money titans on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, and divided from each other by racial animosity, religion, guns, immigration, depictions in the popular culture. Do we have nothing in common? Do we disagree on everything? When did we become so distrustful of one another? When did we lose our confidence as a nation and become so fearful of the world? 

We rode the bikes around Westport, checked out the boats in the harbor, followed a bike trail to the beach where many surfers and stand-up paddle boarders were enjoying the gorgeous afternoon.  A few hours later I stood on the jetty and watched the sun dissolve into a nearly horizontal line. There was a cool breeze, the sound of the waves, an uncommonly lovely moment that I wished I could share with my wife and kids. Peace is very hard to come by these days. I closed my eyes and breathed in the sea air. 

Back in Tillamook on Thursday, the sky was hazy with smoke and very fine ash.  My brother cleaned the Jeep while I read. We smoked some weed and listened to Mojo Nixon’s Outlaw Country show on Sirius XM. We watched the Weather Channel. We talked about our parents. 

My plan on Friday was to drive down the 101 to Eureka, spend the night, and then continue on my way home. I’ve never driven the 101 from north-to-south, and I thought it might be cool to hug the coast. I felt some apprehension about the fires, but the 101 was open when I started out at six a.m. My Road Trip playlist was on as was my GPS, and I was feeling fine until I saw the flashing red and blue lights up ahead, and then the orange letters of a sign announcing that the 101 southbound was closed. The GPS tried to re-route me down a country road but that road was also closed. The next route the GPS suggested was blocked as well. I was starting to feel trapped. Eureka wasn’t happening. To get home I would have to return the way I came, on Highway 22, then 18, then I5 through Medford and Ashland. I pulled into a rest stop to cancel my hotel reservation in Eureka and call my wife. By now it was 7:30 and the sun was behind a dense dome of smoke. My phone was down to 10% battery power. What the fuck? The charging adaptor wasn’t working. I switched it out for a spare and that adaptor also failed. Neither adapter worked in either port. No phone. No GPS. No paper map. I had had no problem charging my phone on the way to Oregon, but now, when I needed it most, it was useless. After a couple of wrong turns I found my way back to highway 22 heading east. The smoke was still thick and visibility poor. 

At a gas station mini-mart I bought a new adaptor, two cans of Red Bull, and a cup of coffee. Fortunately, the new adaptor worked. I called my wife and asked her to cancel my hotel reservation in Eureka, and then I settled in for some serious driving into what looked like the apocalypse. Passing through Medford I saw the destruction, like a bomb had been dropped. Buildings leveled, metal twisted, cars burned out, a chimney here and there. It reminded me of the Tea Fire in Santa Barbara more than a decade ago. All in all it was seven hours before I crossed into California, and another ten before I reached Santa Barbara at 11:30 p.m. I only stopped to pee and get gas. When I crawled into bed, my comfortable, familiar bed, I still felt as if I was moving, driving fast on highway 41 in the pitch black night, the smell of smoke in my nostrils, and Bob Dylan whispering in my ear. 

The Isolation Diaries No. 9

"I haven't heard about testing in weeks," the president said. "We've tested more now than any nation in the world. We've got these great tests and we come out with another one tomorrow that's, you know, almost instantaneous testing. But I haven't heard about testing being a problem." Donald J. Trump, March 30, 2020

Some days ago, I wrote that Donald Trump’s statements about the Coronavirus pandemic would become more unhinged and batshit as time goes on and the Trump Gang’s incompetence becomes glaringly clear. In the past two days Trump has boasted about ratings for his daily press briefings, comparing them to Monday Night Football, claimed that if only 100,000 Americans die from Covid-19, it should be considered a success for his administration, and, as noted in the quote above from March 30, repeated his dubious claim that the US has tested more people than any nation in the world.  

Let’s talk a bit about testing, one of the most important elements of a containment strategy. In the county where I live this is what’s happening, as reported by Tyler Hayden of the Santa Barbara Independent: “Of the 88 known COVID-19 cases in Santa Barbara on Monday ― a dramatic jump from 47 just three days earlier ― 14 people are hospitalized, with 10 in the Intensive Care Unit. Nationwide testing shortages continue to minimize the true scope of the regional outbreak, as only 726 Santa Barbara residents ― or just over 0.15 percent of the county’s population ― have been screened.” 

In the midst of a devastating pandemic, the President of the United States uses a daily briefing -- not to reassure or comfort the nation -- but to brag about his TV ratings. Viewers tune in to the briefings because they want information about the virus and the federal government’s response, not because they love Trump or believe his bullshit. Human beings are fascinated by trainwrecks, car accidents, magicians and carnival barkers. Most of us would stop and watch if we happened across a Great Dane fornicating with a chihuahua simply because that’s not something one sees everyday. As always, Trump draws the conclusion that makes him feel good about his pathetic self.

Sweet Jesus. 

Is the choice between saving lives or saving the economy? Is it that black and white? Can the country have a functioning economy with millions of sick citizens? For business as usual to return isn’t the first order of business to control the virus? 

We walk to Ralphs on Carrillo Street. Traffic is light. An MTD bus rolls down Figueroa Street carrying one passenger. Today we don’t have to wait in line. The shelves are well-stocked, the meat section looks like it would on a normal day, almond milk is available, and we even score a 9-pack of toilet paper. It’s sitting right there for the taking. I almost can’t believe it. Up by the check-out counters the blue tape on the floor has been replaced with real signs that say, “Wait here,” and now between the customers and the checker there’s a sheet of plexiglass. Goes to show how the abnormal becomes a whole lot less strange in just a few weeks. 

What will the new normal be when we come out the other side of this pandemic? When the danger passes and we emerge from our homes (if we’re fortunate enough to have a home), will we be like residents in a neighborhood or city that has been under aerial bombardment, curious to see what’s destroyed and gone forever, what can be salvaged, rebuilt, dusted off and restarted? 

On the walk home I call my brother in Tillamook, Oregon. He tells me its windy and damp, temperature in the mid-40’s at three in the afternoon. Eight weeks ago my brother stopped watching all TV news and tells me the effect on his nerves has been dramatic, like shedding a water-logged coat. Is Trump still in power, he asks. Yes, I say, but this virus has him by the balls and every last one of his deficiencies is exposed. Will that matter in November? asks my brother. I’m not sure, I say. It’s all upside down. In the end I suppose it depends on the good judgment and commonsense of the American people, and by that I mean the decent people who voted for Trump in 2016 out of desperation and disgust, who felt abandoned and neglected by both political parties. These people don’t attend Trump’s creepy rallies, wear MAGA caps, or believe everything Trump says. They tossed Molotov cocktail votes in 2016 because they were fed up with being run over and left for dead by the economic wheels. They rolled the dice once with Trump, but I’m betting they will not be fooled again. I hope you’re right my brother says. Hey, do you have enough TP?

My family remains healthy. My daughter had two online classes today. My son is experimenting with Julia Child recipes and claims to have added a pound to his 127 pound frame. Gabriel is surviving forced isolation much better than we thought he would. 

100,000 dead Americans is acceptable to Donald Trump. The projected figure of as many as 2.2 million dead was that high because the Trump Gang dithered for nearly six weeks, ignoring advice from inside the administration that Covid-19 was coming. Trump brushed aside the warning, said we were ready, that Covid-19 would pass the great and powerful and exceptional USA by. Trump was blase until the cases multiplied and the stock market nosedived. 

The rent’s paid, the power’s on, the water runs clear from the tap, and we have enough food and drink. We have enough money -- for now. We’re fortunate, incredibly fortunate. 

Blood Ties

“No doubt the future will bring more causes, more necessary repairs to American democracy, and more need for passionate civic activism.” Elaine Weiss, The Woman’s Hour. 

There’s no comparing where I’ve been for the past week with where I am now. Tillamook, Oregon, where my brother lives, is rural, small town America. It’s a place where the school bus driver is your neighbor, and he drops you off in front of your house. For several hours over a couple of days, I sat in my brother’s garage, sipping IPA’s and listening to outlaw country music on his Sirius FM boombox. The sky was gray and cloudy, but the rain stayed away, and on my last afternoon the sun broke through the clouds and it was warm. Every hour or so I’d jump on my brother’s black adult tricycle and pedal around the neighborhood, across the little park to the lumber mill. I didn’t see many people. Some of the streets are paved, full of potholes and rough patches, and some are packed gravel. There are no sidewalks. Homes sit contiguous to each other, though every lot isn’t fenced. I saw dilapidated, fall-down houses the likes of which one almost never sees in Santa Barbara. Pick-up trucks and boats parked on the front lawn, old furniture, car axles, tires, rusted out refrigerators. An easy pitching wedge from my brother’s front gate sits an abandoned house slowly being taken over by blackberry vines. I went past the house several times, wondering each time about its story, its history, and what the sagging walls would tell me if they could speak.

A huge American flag flies over the lumber mill. Along with the Tillamook Creamery, the mill is one of the biggest employers in town. I thought to myself as I rode the tricycle around that I had stepped into an Elizabeth Strout novel. The comforting familiarity of a small town, where people know your family, and most graduate from the same high school, but with a corresponding lack of anonymity and privacy. Although Oregon is a liberal state, it has pockets of conservatism and I’m sure its share of Trump supporters. I tried to stay away from the news and politics on the trip, but when you carry an iPhone it’s hard to completely escape the news and noise, the latest Trump outrage or scandal.  

Saw some lovely country, from the south jetty of the Columbia River to a country road in Sequim, Washington, from Astoria to Port Townsend, through places like Raymond where self-reliance carries real meaning, and a young woman with colorful gel fingernails named Abigail debated with herself over giving me change for a minimart cup of coffee with five ones or a five dollar bill. Exploring Sequim on our bikes, we passed the Dungeness schoolhouse, built in 1892, and now a landmark. It was easy to imagine a procession of children filing through the front door, farm kids who learned to read and write, basic math, geography and history, in this one building. No ipads, Chromebooks, Apple TV’s. White chalk on a dark green blackboard that had to be cleaned every day. Saw a red-tailed hawk not far from the school. Had the best ice cream I’ve ever tasted at the Dungeness Creamery. Talked to an avid bird watcher and a woman who told us of last year’s heavy snowfall in Sequim. 

My brother and I were not close as children. After a certain point he went his way and I went mine and our paths rarely intersected. I went into the Air Force and spent five years in Japan, he went to college for a couple of years and then joined the Forest Service as a firefighter. A lot can happen between siblings, hurts and misunderstandings collect and fester, but, somewhat to my surprise, I’ve found that the pull of shared blood is strong. Accepting our mutual flaws and idiosyncrasies is easier now. I don’t watch the Weather Channel to pass the time, but my brother does and that’s fine. He’d be bored by English Premier League football. Beneath our skins, in our bones, we share a lot of traits and proclivities, along with a love of the outdoors and a sense of time passing.  

The Sniveler

“Inequality creates liars and delusion.” Rebecca Solnit

Last week I flew up to Oregon to visit my brother who lives in Tillamook. We drove to Astoria, spent one night, and early the following morning crossed the bridge over the Columbia River into Washington, headed for the Olympic Peninsula. Over three days we made an arc from Port Angeles to the Quinault River, stopping along the way in little towns like Forks, where we visited a timber museum, and the lodge at Lake Crescent. The creator, whoever she is, went a bit crazy in this part of the world, creating breathtaking vistas, towering trees and abundant water, hills shrouded in mist. So much beauty you run out of awe. Seeing my brother again was wonderful, and I felt the ties of blood as I never have before. Actually brought me to tears, something that doesn’t happen very often. If you were to ask me why I cried I couldn’t tell you. Although Santa Barbara is holding to its beauty like an old pageant winner and remains a fine city to live in, it was good to get away and see new scenery, different people, container ships on the Columbia, big log trucks jamming down the highway on their way to mill, guys fishing for salmon, dairy cows, old barns, verdant pastures.

Sadly, my sense of renewal and peace quickly faded, this being, after all, Trump’s perverse America, where, according to the Orange Menace, we are winning on every level and becoming great again, where truth is put to the sword every single day, and an unqualified sniveling prep-school prick like Brett Kavanaugh is elevated to the highest court in our land by a gang of Republican mobsters.

Come one, come all to the kangaroo court, behold aging white men as they cast judgment on a brave woman who had lost before she ever sat down to speak. Revel in the tyranny of the minority. 30% of the country dictating how the game will be played by the other 70%. As a father, as a man, as a citizen, I feel powerless, invisible, and irrelevant. Who represents me and my values? Nobody. What do I want? That’s easy. Justice. Fairness. A more equitable distribution of riches. A balance of power. Respect for the environment, and a realization that there is more to life than accumulating money and stuff, that there are limits and natural laws we cannot ignore.  

I didn’t watch the Kavanaugh circus, knowing that it would only infuriate me, but I caught some of Kavanaugh’s remarks via Democracy Now, his poor me and my family routine, we are broken by false accusations, it’s a left-wing conspiracy on behalf of the Clinton’s, and so on, the usual tropes of the whack-job right. Kavanaugh showed no class, no judicial cool, confirming the old saying that the higher a monkey climbs, the more he shows his ass. (Apologies to monkeys.) This charade will result in Kavanaugh’s confirmation, no doubt, proving, again, how busted American “democracy” really is. Then the fun will begin -- for the rich and powerful, the corporations, the crazy evangelical Christians -- but not you or me, my daughter, your sister, the air we breathe and the water we drink.

Here’s an interesting tidbit pointed out by Thom Hartmann on his radio program. Back in 2000, during the Florida recount and shenanigans that gifted the presidency to George W. Bush, there were three lawyers deeply involved on behalf of the GOP: John Roberts, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh. Two of these jokers are sitting on the Supreme Court now. The third amigo is about to join them.

The leaders of the world laughed at the President of the United States this week. Laughed at his hubris, his fantasy world, his phony accomplishments, his bluster and stupidity. In this bizarre time certain things bear repeating: Donald Trump, aside from being an idiot, is a failed human being, devoid of empathy, compassion, and decency; the Republican Party is a political party in name only, it is actually a criminal organization; deregulated capitalism is killing the planet; it has been decades since US elites feared the public.

Wisdom, courage, justice and moderation are almost non-existent in America. This week proved it beyond a reasonable doubt.

Welcome to Oregon

I made a short trip to Tillamook, Oregon to visit my brother. We hadn’t seen one another for eleven years. I flew into Portland, rented a car, and drove west in the rain. When I crossed into the Tillamook city limits I was pulled over by an Oregon State trooper for speeding. The trooper politely introduced himself and said he clocked me doing 68 in a 45 mile per hour zone. I didn’t realize I was traveling that fast. The trooper asked what brought me to Tillamook, I told him, he handed my license back and advised me to slow down.

Welcome to Oregon.

My brother’s first house in Tillamook was located on Trask River Road, a stone’s throw from the Trask River, but he has since purchased a manufactured home on a cul-de-sac in the city proper. The street is crushed rock and full of potholes, and without sidewalks. The houses of his immediate neighbors are well maintained, but many homes on the adjacent streets are weather-beaten, sagging, yards littered with rusted cars, refrigerators, and motor homes. Maintaining a house in that wet climate isn’t easy, and some folks don’t bother trying. Why park your truck on the street when you can park on your front lawn? Coming from Santa Barbara, a city obsessed with its appearance, its beauty and refinement, and the astronomical cost of its real estate, where the crappiest house costs a Midas-sized fortune, I wasn’t used to seeing dilapidated houses, pot-holed streets or trucks parked on lawns.

About 5,000 people call Tillamook home. There’s an elementary school, junior high, and high school (Home of the Cheesemakers!) in town, a big Hampton lumber mill, the Tillamook cheese factory (major tourist draw), a hospital that appears to be fairly new, and the air museum just outside of town, a relic from World War II. There’s not much to see downtown. On my first day we drove up to the Trask River in my brother’s Subaru station wagon. In less than ten minutes we were in the country, passing dairy farms, houses that were set well back from the road with plenty of distance from their nearest neighbor, pastures where cows grazed on green grass. It rained off and on. I saw a few houses that appeared to be abandoned, overgrown with wild blackberry vines; an excavator parked in a field was suffering the same fate, and I wondered who had parked it and how long it had been sitting there. My brother told me that most of the dairy farmers were members of the Tillamook Creamery Association. We saw some log trucks and some trucks hauling milk. We hiked along the Trask for a mile or so. My brother has a degenerative back ailment and he moves slower than he once did. Water dripped from Douglas firs that towered 60, 80, even 100 feet above our heads onto the damp forest floor. Ferns, tangled vines, rotting logs; thick moss -- thicker than I’d ever seen -- hung from the branches of trees, like long beards. We didn’t see another soul. The sound of the Trask followed us. “The river is pretty tame this time of year,” my brother told me, “but come January and February it rages like you can’t believe.”

My brother is experiencing serious fear and loathing of Donald Trump. I have never known him to be a political person, I didn’t know he voted, but Trump and his band of kleptocrats have knocked my brother for a loop, and, like many, many Americans, he feels an intense embarrassment almost every time Trump opens his mouth or takes to Twitter to spew his violent, vapid, vicious idiocy. He rations the amount of corporate news he watches; most of the time, his television is tuned to the Weather Channel. He doesn’t own a computer, a tablet, a Kindle, a laptop, an iPhone, and has no electronic footprint; he still writes a paper check when he does his grocery shopping at the Fred Meyer store.

We drove all over Tillamook county in the two days I spent there, from the forest to the coast, Netarts, Cape Meares, around Tillamook Bay to Garibaldi. It rained, hard at times, and then the sun would make a brief appearance and steam would rise off the pavement and the pasture land. After nearly 50 years in California I don’t know if I could live in a wet, damp, chilly climate like Tillamook but I enjoyed the beauty and diversity it had to offer, and the experience of walking in the deep woods was rejuvenating. My brother is happy there and lives a simple existence. He manages his back pain by swimming every morning at the YMCA, but by 6:00 p.m. or so he needs to get off his feet. He reads a lot. He fishes for cutthroat trout on the Trask when he can.

It was good to get away, good to renew the ties of blood, good to step off the treadmill of daily routine, work, chores, obligations. When I returned home I felt wealthy.