Stories for 2002 Stories begin

January

Along the Sandy River, just to the east of Portland, I pass the cozy picnic restaurants, the Chicken and Dumpling, like flying fishes along side the stream. The grass and ferns glow emerald green against the winter grey damp, I could be in the East, back in Tennessee, North Carolina, Alabama, left face against the mountains. Images swarm from ancient Alabama, of damp green moss on rotting black pine logs. The fluid Sandy, the muddy Cahaba, on the last night of camp, each girl would take a piece of pine bark and drill a hole with it with her green scout knife. We would put a birthday candle in the hole and in the early warm night we all would send our bark ships down the Cahaba, past the towns of our imaginings.

The Job Corps site just west of Corbett has a Chinese dragon at its gate, carved from wood. The dragon follows me down again into the valley of the Columbia, where in the late afternoon the sun hits the mountains as in a Thomas Cole painting. The dragon breathes fire, and out of that stream of fire emerges the cloud princess. She pivots, and her strands of hair leaves smoke trails across the porcelian bluesky and musty cliffs. The landscape becomes a Chinese painting, the pines and snow-topped mountains with each line defined, junks sailed with the currents of the Yangtze.

To the north in Washington, snow lies deep in Snoqualmie Pass. Along the road it is layered like agate, the trees above pattern it like a green tweed coat. Above treeline there is only snow, like whip cream in the freezer. At the parks near the road, children driven from the false villages and dark chasms of Seattle ride down the heaps and hills on their sleds.

========

School started up today again at Portland State University and so did my Finnish 102. When I got to class, there were only four students there, which made me very sad. But since as always Marjo had started the class half an hour early, students filtered in for the next half hour, while the timely folk were subjected to prying questions:

"Miten sinun joulu on?" Or something like that, whatever "How was your Christmas?" is. Everyone just stared; they were in shock. What was this gibberish?

But then Ralph showed up with his Ducks hat on and told his story about taking his whole family to Tempe for the big game.
"78 degrees and sunny," he gloated.

Ralph, originally from Hibbing, is close to retirement and wants to visit his friend or cousin the neurosurgeon in Helskinki. Cynthia is a legal secretary and wants to visit her family in Lappland again. Ted is an industrial designer, has visited his relatives as well, and wants to go live for a "long time." Ken's grandfather was Finnish, but he is just now learning who he should visit. Bess is a linguist of Norwegian ancestry. The closest I can get is some Scottish ancestors named Stinson, but it doesnt matter, because I lived in Duluth for a while and got genes through cold osmosis.

A new student walked in, a young neo-hippie with a long pony tail and a little goatee. Since this was 102, Marjo asked:
"Do you know any Finnish?"
"I lived in Finland for a year. I was a rotary club exchange student," he answered. Everyone gasped. Then Marjo made him go to a map and point to where he had lived.

Ralph, Cynthia, and I sit at the back table. Ralph told us:
"I was eating lunch with the vice-president today,"
"He's going to help you with your parking problems?" asked Cynthia.
"No, I told him we need a second year. It's shameful only having one year."
We hope Ralph can pull his strings.

Carlene came in. "I kept rattling the doorknob, but no one would answer," she said. Carlene has been to Finland already even at her young age.

Two new students showed up, two men with dark hair. Marjo asked:
"Do you know any Finnish?"
"My mother is Finnish," answered the robust man in the Hawaiian shirt. Then we had to go around and introduce ourselves again.
"Mina olen Onekas,." said the man in the Hawaiian shirt.
"Mina olen Xavier," answered the older man with the white socks.
"Xavier doesnt sound Finnish," said Marjo.
"My wife is Finnish. This is my son. We named him "Onekas" for good luck..
"Class, do you know what Onekas means?" asked Marjo. No one did.
"It means Lucky," she said.
"Some people cant pronounce the "h" or the "r" so they just call me "Avie."
Lucky and Avie. That has more color than "Ted and Ken."
"Well," laughed Marjo, "Finns have no trouble pronouncing r's." Then she demonstrated. "Rrrrrrrrrr."
Then everyone in class who could roll their "rrrrrrrr's" started commenting and demonstrating as well. The new students chattered excitedly as we read our dialogues.

+++++++

"Occasionally, a fiddler or folkloric singers come aboard to provide impromptu entertainment. But mostly the entertainment consists of the scenery, and hours can pass by very swiftly while gazing at it. The ships slow down for the waterfalls, enabling passengers to take photos and watch the fluffy sheep and Icelandic ponies grazing on the ledges. "

We crossed the Gulf of Bothnia at Vaasa on the Wasa Queen, which kindly features a Lapin Kulta dispenser on its dinner buffet. In the line a handsome blond ferryman came to us and asked for our passports, looked at them and in disbelief returned to the office for a stamp. He then asked "Can I see the papers for your car?" The ferryman looked long and hard at the papers. Landing at Mariehamn, we had driven past barren grey customs bunkers in the constant grey light. But now leaving Suomi, we were suspicious. It was not unlike our arrival in Newcastle behind a battered VW bus full of Lithuanians.

We arrived in Umeå and the next day drove northwest through Sweden in the grey drizzle, behind caravans and campers. Signs said "Lappland Souvenirs." Slowly the highway rose, slowly the conifers gave way to alder, and alder to krumholz. It is not unlike the trip from Prince George Town to Skagway, but mercifully it is about 10 times shorter. At an undistinguished point in this subtundra, a sign said "Norge," which meant not only that the terrain was refrigerated, but that we were now in Norway. The sign is very modest, much simpler than the sign that says "Welcome To Alaska," but perhaps the spirit, though different, is the same. Shortly, a cowshed appeared on the left, and two officials in yellow fluorescent slickers appeared in the middle of the road with the orange cones..

"Where are you going in Norway?" They asked. As we were driving a German Ford, this was truly proof of English as lingua franca. Another proof was that after three weeks without speaking to a native English-speaking adult, I could not speak to a European with an American accent any longer.

"We are taking a big trip," I explained. "We are going south to Kristiansand to catch a big boat to take us to England, and then we are going back to Germany." The site of wizened alders makes one crazy. I imagined them on lookout for Swedish cars stolen by the immigrant Serbian mafia.

In Norge there are "fjells" created by peneplanation and uplift. Millions of years ago, the land was leveled by erosion to a gentle plain. Then, because the Earth is a harsh mistress, the plain was thrust far upwards to lie disjointed as desolate cairn and snow laden tundra near the tops of high brutal mountains. A month out of warm Jena with its American pollen guru Bob Thompson, we crossed the fjell at the highest pass in northern Europe, and then descended to a village beneath. We went into the community center-library-cafeteria so I could check my e-mail. My son immediately disappeared into the library. I stood in the line with my plate of lefse and half percent beer and it was then that I heard:
"Lori, that soup looks good."
She stood there, perhaps a little older than me, greying hair clipped to ear length, white windbreaker, sky blue T-shirt and draw string polyester pants. Her companion, Lori, looked the same but way stockier.
I turned in excitement. "Where are you from?" I asked.
"The United States," she answered in all honesty.
Right "Where from in the United States?"
"We're from Oregon. We're from The Willamette Valley."
"Really?" I answered. "We just moved to The Dalles from Texas."
"Up the Gorge," she commented, with what I recognized as supreme tolerance for pushy domestic alcoholics. "Lovely country isn't?" she asked, but turned hastily and picked up her tray to sit with her companion.

I sat down at my own table, buttered my lefse, and watched the young blonde at the computer with measured patience.

+++++

I took Freddie up to Colonel Wright Elementary for Show and Tell. In the large old room with high ceilings, almost all the children, brown and white, raised their hands for comments or questions. They waited their turn until called upon.

"We used to have two cats, but we backed the car into the driveway and the cat was in the driveway."

"We had a cat named after Bart Simpson, but he got parvo and died."

"There are two cats, one from the people next door to the people next door to the people net door named Tony, and the one from the people next door on the other side named Sparky and they would run out in the tall grass and try to catch mice, but there weren't any, but then one time there were lots of mice and Sparky caught one and then he put it in the swimming pool."

"We had a white kitten named Tiny but it isnt Tiny anymore."

"Does your cat crawl under the dryer like ours does?

---No, there isnt any room under our dryer.

Into the dryer. Ours crawls into the dryer.

---No, Freddie doesn't."

And then we went home, in the background the hills and orchards and pines and oaks, Mount Hood's white wizard cap obscured by grey mist.

+++++

Horses. Horses are the majestic gods of wasco county. Not even beyond the city limits, wherever a landowner can put a barn, there are horses. You can sit waiting to have your snow tires put on, and the woman sitting next will say to her companion: "That colt wanted out the door. He wanted to go where the hay was."

Two weeks ago, there was constant rain, and because it was so warm, snow melted in the hills, so that the creek by our house was the highest it had been, boiling thrashing past the dead equisetum and walnuts on the lower terrace. I drove up Mill Creek Road, to see how far the fury extended, past orchards and then past ranches, with now useless irrigation wheels on terrace meadows, and past the Mill Creek Grange, past the old homes whose intent had changed with the slow walk of history. Half the ranches had horses on their meadows, hay and horses. It was hard to tell which ranchers were serious. Then the pavement stopped and the valley narrowed, but I drove on up, finally with patches of white beside the road, and then there were fallen rocks on the gravel. On the streamplain to the left there was a pink log cabin, with a pink plywood addition, a no tresspassing sign, and horses grazing. There was only one lane through the rocks and the banks closed in, with pines and fir and solid snow. Then I drove into a clearing, with a yellow backhoe, a pile of tree length longs, and a battered brown and white Road Forger travel trailer. The road in the clearing was mud, it was all mud and it led upward to a narrow curved grade. Was this private property? What kind of people lived here? Would they shoot me? Would my red car get stuck in the mud and then would I starve or freeze? I turned and drove back. I do this often, but someday I will drive on and I will stay.

In college, I took Horseback Riding as PE. I took hockey and fencing as well, but those I hated. In my senior year I learned to jump, first over pieces of wood, but later we took the horses on trail rides. That year I lost my glasses galloping in the snow on trails along clear creek, in the Indiana woods.. If there was a log, we would jump it. People were in that class, both women and men, who had been riding since they were babies. They always gave me the gentlest horse, a greyish white gelding named Tony. On one ride we were cantoring at a clip and Kathleen, a thin shy woman fell and lay breathless on the muddy cold ground. Ugly terror was in her eyes because she could not breathe. "Had the wind knocked out of her," they said. She struggled to her feet and got back on the horse. Once I was jumping a small log and I lost my grip in mid-flight. I hit the ground broken by thorny shrubs, breaking open my upper lip.

"Are you all right?" asked Chip, who later became a rich doctor.

"I guess so," I said. But I wasnt. I could taste the salty blood in my mouth and I felt like I would faint. I felt like I would throw up.

"Do you want me to go back and get my truck?" he asked.

He galloped off on his spirited brown mare. Then he came back with his blue Scout. He drove me back and I went to the student health service.

"Well," said the nurse, "I don't think you need stitches. I'll put this adhesive tape on, so you will still be pretty. You might not care, but your mother will."

I finished the term, but I don't believe I ever rode again after the spring. The bubble had burst.

+++++

At first I thought it was from a smokestack, dirty cotton greyer than the grey Portland sky, but traffic slowed at the I-84 switchoff. The sooty cotton puffs came from a old blocky multi-story building, and as I drew closer, flames licked at the timbers as if a campfire. How could anything in Portland be dry enough to burn? Thin parabolic strands of water resembling stretched saliva were aimed at the building. At the OMSI exit on the east bank of the Willamette, I thought of getting off and looking, but did not. I gazed down through the road at the exit and the street was bright red a hundred feet high, like a great heated ingot. Bracketed as it was the street seemed to lead into the gates of hell. I wondered if someone had crashed an Alaskan Air jet into the Portland Ballet. Not in Cascadia!

I tuned off of Kaja Brown's Christian hip-hop show, to which I was dutifully listening, and scanned the FM spectrum. A friendly dj obliged me. "Now you were wondering where all that smoke was coming from!" Not me, I knew where it was coming from, the gates of hell. But he assured me that it was a 4 alarm fire in an abandoned produce warehouse. "They've got the roads blocked off, so don't bother to go look. KSEL has got it covered!"

I decided to go back on 26, south of Wy'east. And then at ZigZag, I saw the blond by the side of the road, thumb out. "Herrenjestas!" I exclaimed and pulled immediately through the slush of the right lane and stopped.

"Where you going?" I asked.

"Just to the Sun Bowl. Government Camp." he said. A strawberry blond with a clipped beard and a rust ski jacket, he was not shy in sharing the details of his life. "I'm sick of this hitching. I've been out here too long. Gotta get my car fixed. I'd fix it but the weather is too bad. But I will tomorrow."

He worked at the Sun Bowl restaurant as "kitchen manager," but did a lot of cleaning to get his 40 hours in. He was 26 and had come up over a year ago from San Antonio with a friend. "It's not like Texas," he said. His friend had called to make sure they could get paid well, since they had to move all the way up to Oregon.

"They offered us $7.10 an hour, so we thought that was pretty good." Not like Texas I guess.

The slush turned to snow, and people pulled off to put on chains and on the other side take them off. 26 was packed with skiers. We pulled into the lot. To my right, the lift glowed with stars against the darkening snow, white as the sky. I let him off and reemerged onto 26.

The road ahead was relatively clear of traffic, but the lane to Portland was stalled for three miles with skiers. A double flammable liquid tanker had stopped in the "middle lane," just stopped with the driver inside, deciding it was just a bad day to drive up from Bend. After my red car passed the end, we hit near-blizzard conditions. I followed in the tracks of a grey SUV at 20 miles an hour. After ten miles, a plough and its yellow lights came through, a string of ten cars behind it. Our own plough was invisible and ineffective, white as everything else. We turned on 35 and passed Mt Hood Meadows and Copper Spur. The snow turned again to slush. At the side of the road, there were 11 buses taking their chains off. Finally it began to rain. I leaned back in my seat. I had had my thrill for the week!

====

Yorkshire, 2000--Imagine the rustic indoor pool at the Akbar Campground in Wensleydale, famous for its cheeses. Outside the ephemeral drizzle cuts the view of grazing cows. Here there is night.

I walked over to the snack bar, ordered a thing of chips, and then went over to the bar, and ordered a pint of strongbow cider. "You from America?" asked the bartender, who looked like a weightlifter. "Yep." "I was in America for 10 months...my sister lives in Denver." "Where are you from?" I asked. "New Zealand. I really liked the skiing in Denver. I'd like to go back there and live. Hey!" he yelled animatedly. "No running!" He dashed to the pool, "What the bloody hell do you think youre doing?" he screamed at a kid, and then cam back and poured out my cider. I picked up my gargantuan greasy fries at the window, put a lot of vinegar on them and poured out a little pile of salt.

There was a little lounge area where I sat in peace, listening to the people at the next table talk about....my mind fails. But not for long. Ian came over dripping. "I'm getting out. That place is like a mine field. That one girl keeps jumping in on people intentionally. She tried to crack my head open. I'm hungry." "But at least they speak English," I said, giving him a five pound note. I sipped my cider and dragged sour potatoes across salt. He returned with a lot of sausage and fat greasy chips.

Sitting across from us were two wet boys about 10 or so, resembling young raptors, eating greasy chips. One asked me: "Are you from America? Are you here on holiday? Does he carry a gun?" "No gun," I said. "Where are you from?" "Dollington." "Oh, Dollington." Darlington. "Does he carry a knife?" Ian grinned and reached into his backpack. He pulled out the light wood handled knife I had bought him in Finland. The merchant had said, "This knife is good for if you have to meet up with the big animal on the handle." One boy had bought a knife with a fish on the handle. I personally thought Ian would be more likely to need a filet knife. Ian flashed the huge steel blade of Slayer of Reindeer In the Taiga. The raptors stared. Ian said nothing.. "His name is Bobby," the small one continued. He's my cousin. We're here with our grandparents."

The next day, we bought a small inflatable boat for ten pounds, I blew it up and Ian took it to the little pond. When I went to find him, Bobby was pushing the wee boat around with Ian and his cousin in it. "I've lost my bleedin' shoe. My grandad's gonna kill me!" The bottom of the pond is a gooey muck.

At night you can lay in your tent and the flashes of light and bass booms will seem just like fireworks or an approaching storm. If you drive North from Leyburn to Richmond, over the moor, however, you will see signs that say "Military Range."

===

At Oregon Employment the clerk asked a woman, "What was it you were interested in doing? I need to put something down here." Clerks always smile here in The Dalles. The woman is in her forties and is wearing a blue cotton velvet vest with gold trim. She has brown hair. "I don't know. Maybe working with animals." "Veterinary assistant? What have you done before?" "I've never had a job before. Just done volunteer work." The clerk smiled, "Why don't you take this form and sit down and list some things you would like to do?" Stand for hours at a check out counter. Clean motel rooms.

=====

1994 was a good year to travel. I had with me two children, one and five and we went to Scotland. It was the last year we went cheap and spare. It was my first year with the new version of my family.

At Perth, we turned left, and stopped at a campground in Crieff, flat and littered with dull olive striped stationary caravans and with European tourists. There was no room for us. We drove on, and ten miles along saw a tent sign...and pulled in to a tan stone farm house. Then we drove up the narrow gravel road. Unlike most UK campgrounds, this one was formed along a winding stream gully, with the sites terraced. The large, flat sites were taken by an international conference of Pentecostalists, whom I would know to sing all nite. I drove the blue Vauxhall up farther, steeper, as if in the interior of a tree branch. Cars from the UK were clustered at the end, with their big house tents. At the very end, though, I stopped in a site that was difficult to pitch with one of those villas. Obscured by trees on the down side, it was the tip of the branch, bounded on two sides by wire fence and cow pasture that ran up great hills.

It was here that I first let Ian walk to the bathroom himself, at age five a victim of sibling displacement. The bathrooms themselves were world war II surplus steel, with floors that had real linoleum and a terrifying give. You could imagine the thrifty owners saying "Ach, lets buy these for ten pounds apiece, start a campground in that useless wee burn." We felt the same way about opening cans for meals and eating cold; let's pretend we're really camping here. Who needs a fire when there are distilleries nearby?

"You could just drive down to the toilets," said my neighbor in the huge villa, a battered black Peugeot overlapping the lane.

"I hate to back this thing. I can never get used to the steering wheel on the right," I said.

"You from America?" he said. "I could back it up for you."

"Yes, no, but thank you. Where are you people from?"

"Newcastle." He stopped to correct one of his boys whom Ian had been playing with. Boys trip a lot over their own feet. "Come in and sit awhile."

So we did. They gave me Newcastle Ale and they wore Newcastle jackets. There were beds and a stove, built in, and things were unpacked nicely, like a real house. You could look out over the east pasture through the plastic windows.

The night was long to come, and when it did, I lay in my down bag and listened the sound of a lone Highland Piper coming over the dark hills.

++++++++

Group I is at a restaurant. One of us, Carlene, has to be the waitress.

"Mina olen kasvisyoja." I say. "Mike on hyva?" I'm a vegetarian. What is good?

"Ei taalla!" Says Carlene. "Not here!" and pulls the menu away.

"Halutan olutta." I say. "Niin, saan vain vetta." I'm angry now. There is no beer ("olutta") on the menu, so I am stuck with "vetta," or water. Carlene, the author, is underage and can't serve alcohol.

Group II fares better. Onie has prepared a menu called "Ravintola Rasvainen Hirvi" The Greasy Moose Restaurant. He serves olutta, punaviinia, and valkoviinia...and greasy moose.

Kalakeitto--fish soup. "That's the stuff you put the fish heads in, huh, Ralph," I asked.

"That's what gramma always did.. See the flavor's in the glands around the gills."

"You cook it long enough, it all turns to gelatin anyway. What kind of fish did you use?" offered Ted.

"Pojoinenpaukki," said Ralph, in the slur he learned from his childhood.

"What's that?" I asked.

"It's a kind of pike...northern pike..." I could feel the skin sliding away under the knife.

I rolled my eyes. "I know that. Was that up in Hibbing?"

"Hibbing, Ely...we were in the logging camps."

The he said, "I'm the oldest living Tuoli...it used to be Tuoliainen, but they shortened it. There were four of us."

Carlene said "That's nothing. I'm the oldest of eleven. The youngest is six months."

Ted had been thinking about death. "All my grandparents died of heart attacks. It is like you know your fate."

"Grandpa died of kidney failure, but it was from drinking too much," said Ralph. "In northern Minnesota you either die from alcoholism or from being shot by a jealous husband."

++++++

I bought a whole case of your cookies from my neighbor.

They're not worth $4.

I already spent $200 on groceries.

Is that your grandmother helping you?

Erin and I sat by the subfreezing automatic door of Fred Meyer. Hypothermia was closing in. On our table lay stacks of Campfire Candy:

At first I thought the man in the suit and cane was just a smart ass. He kept hanging around, not an ordinary transient looking for a warm place, but very different, like an English gentleman. He'd say things like:

"I like that hat. How long have you had it?"

And being the Dalles, folks would smile and say,

"I like it too. I've had it since 1967."

"Find everything OK?"

"Yes, certainly! Thank you!"

Then I noticed the Fred Meyer badge on his coat.

"What is your position at the store?" I asked.

"I'm on light duty," he paused. "I'm in the meat department."

"The meet department?" I said.

He was nonplussed. "I'm the head meat cutter. I had an accident a couple weeks ago on the job, so the doctor said I cant turn my head. So they gave me this job.and I get my usual wage. I get $16 an hour to do this. I'm the highest paid employee...the highest paid wage employee in the store. This really bothers them. They don't mind so much if the bottle clerk is on light duty."

"You seem to have a sort of knack for this. Sort of a savoir faire."

He walked up to me. "You see what it says on this badge?"

"Larry?"

"It says "Since 1982. I've had this job for 20 years. Before that I worked at Safeway for ten. I'm used to meeting the public."

"You certainly dress for it."

"I have about 10 sport coats. They're worth about a dollar at Goodwill, so I keep 'em hanging. These white shirts...always wear white shirt and a tie on the job. A while back I bought some black Tshirts, had pockets in them so I could put a pen in them, then they said I couldnt wear black, had to wear grey, so I went back to wearing white shirts and a tie.

"Hmm!" I said.

"It bothers them that I get four weeks vacation. But I'm retiring next year. Got two houses here, I'm selling one of them...moving to a retirement place in Arizona.

"Its pretty hot there in Phoenix," I said.

He continued, "Not in Pheonix, in Tucson. Its further south but higher up, so it's cooler. It's a gated community, two gates you have to get through. Just senior citizens, 55 years and older. No kids."

"No kids, hear that Erin!"

"You can have your grandchildren there, but no kids living there, no bikes and stuff. By the time you're my age you're ready for it."

He didnt look much older than me. I wondered if I would ever not want other kids around.

Later, a man walked by and gave us a dollar. "It's a donation," he said.

Then Larry came by and said "That guy's from New Zealand. That was a Superbowl bet. He didnt know anything about the Superbowl so I said, "I bet you a dollar, you want a west or east coast team? And he said "West Coast."

++++

"You look like a floozy in that dress."

When I was in high school, my father, who was almost 60, would buy me an outfit every month. An observer would think, how lucky! First we would go to Yieldings in the tiny mall in Vestavia. My father liked Yieldings. Then I tried on outfits until my father saw something he liked. Sometimes my mother would say:

"I like the tailored look."

I tried to find a balance between my parents and the kids at school. Luckily in the mid-60s, both preferred a conservative look. The voice of contemporary disfunctionality analysis whispers "Your parents loved you, Judy." But I think not here, I think they loved the tailored look.

I learned to drive the second summer I tried, when I was 17 and had graduated from high school. I was restricted to driving for 2 weeks per each attempt with a AAA instructor, my father's thoughts being that I could not be trusted to practice until I actually had a license. He let me drive his car, a powder blue Thunderbird, only once, descending the Green Springs Highway down Shades Mountain. It was pretty scary and he never did it again. So when I got my license, he set out to buy a car. He drove all sorts of cars...fords, chevys, renaults, volvos. One day we were in a chevy show room on the Southside and he saw a shiny gold camaro with turbo-glide. He gasped:

"What do you think of that one?"

I thought it had 4 wheels and an engine and he might buy it.

"Oh its beautiful!" I exclaimed.

And that was how I came to "own" my 1968 Camaro, Alma LuVerne.

One day, my friend Cathy and I drove down the Montgomery Highway to Montevallo to check out the college. Returning we pulled into a Dari-Freez in ALabaster and picked up a couple shakes. Cathy was driving and took the turn out too sharp and Alma LuVerne hit the drainage ditch.. It was as if the bottom had dropped out of the road. A thick liquid ran down my face. Were we still alive?

"God, Judy, you have milkshake all over your face!!" She couldn't stop laughing.

I wiped off my face. We got out and scrambled up the bank. How do we get out of this one?

No difficulty. We stood by the side of the road, a blonde and a dyed redhead in bell bottoms. A Holsum bread van pulled over real quick.

"You ladies in some difficulty?" the driver asked. "Let me get this chain out of my van."

He put the chains on Alma and pulled with the bread truck. She came to the road surface like a cat at the vet.

"Thank you so MUCH!!!" Cathy exclaimed. We got in the car and she lit up a Cigarette. I drove.

I slowed down at Pelham for the speed sign. There was so much mud on the tires that Alma didnt stop, she just skidded completely around on that cement four-lane. My heart jumped into my throat. But no one was behind us. The skids left big clods of blood red mud all over the road.

+++++

The white minivan ahead of me in the Mayport Ferry queue has Georgia plates and two fluttering American flags on its roof supports. The owner comes back to check the cooler and she also has a vest made from an American flag. The ferryman, a black gent, resembles the statue boy on the lawns of my childhood. Unlike the white men, his arms move in huge sweeping gestures and he bows and tips his hat as he assigns lanes. His huge teeth shine like oysters, like shells on the white sand beach, as he grins. "Have a good weekend!" he greets in parting.

On the right, you can eat a blackened grouper sandwich for lunch at the Sand Dollar. While you drink your ice tea, you can see the small ferry, ragged shrimp boats, the Happy Dollar Casino boat, and a huge saltie from Singapore moving out to sea with containerized cargo. There is not much more here human, shrimp stores, a couple bars, sport fisherman. Over the bridge to Talbot Island there is the road and the ocean and the land.

The land far below is Eocene, 50 million years old, in gentle coastal plain tilt, but more immediately below are the sands and clays of the Miocene Hawthorne Formation. On the ridge tops are Quaternary coquinas...carbonate rocks made almost entirely of shells...from some high stand of sea level. The sands here on this barrier are white as the snow on the clearcuts of the Cascades.

The trail is to Black Rock Point. Across the road is salt marsh...a wildlife preserve...but this land is dry because the clean sand does not hold water. Along the sides are pines...pond pines perhaps, live oak, a few streaks of Spanish moss, magnolias, ericaceous shrubs, in dense thickets. Sometimes there are palms, towards the ocean there are broad thickets of sabal pametto, fans in the February breezes. The air is a song of birds, there are so many and they move so often.

By the ocean is a cold winter beach. Live oaks and palms lie dead like whales on the beach, perpendicular to the ocean, stripped branches like schools of smelt. The black rock is four inches thick and if it is wet, you can kick it and pieces will come off. This little layer of pitted peat is from a time when this beach was salt marsh, the shore was farther out and perhaps sea level was lower. In the cut bank that separates the beach from the woods, there is a lense of large shells, perhaps what they call a "storm deposit." Now on the beach there are only a few scattered oyster shells. The shell beds are similar to the walls of slave quarters across the bridge, slowly falling to ruin with time.

The ocean extends for thousands of miles. It is the grey-brown color of The Hood and though you cannot readily see it, it is moving sand particles down the coast.

+++

Bracketed by my class Wednesday nite and my little radio show on Sunday at noon, and by 3000 miles of air travel between secondary airports, I had less time than I ever had at folk alliance. The $198rt 11:55pm flight out of Portland didn't do much for my mental alertness, and the wonderful field trip...nothing to see in Jacksonville, Ha!....took some time.

I came back with about twelve usable CDs, the other 8 mostly compulsory I am taking in to the s/s dj at KPSU who says he's gotten about 15 promos so far. This has been my first year as a dj doing what you folks call "world" music. My target was European, however, I was willing to pick up angloceltic and amer traditional as well. I did one session at the exhibithall. Many of the label and regional booths...realWorld, Shanachie, Quebec, Appleseed...were unmanned. I went past the German Profolk booth and found there were no performers this time, they just had the wonderful sampler. Northside obviously wasnt there. The Swedish concert dude gave me ONE additional Swedish album...and even though I attended the entire small nordic showcase I only got a CD from one of the bands, Zar, from the unmanned Danish booth. I heard Toolie (Irish-nautical) jamming in the hall and that was about my only "contact" CD.

The official showcases were for the most part not along my official lines, so most of the stuff I was really interested in started at 11:30. In fact most of the stuff actually took place at 11:30 sharp. This meant that I couldn't just drop by and pick something up because there were a limited number of places to be at one time. Like maybe 3 or 4 showcases at one time.

Having gone to NW Folklife in Seattle last summer, I know there are zillions of American ethnic folk performers. Very few were at FA, however, and those were the ones that always come and I already have their CDs.

Cleveland was sort of the apex for that sort of thing. To be fair, though, most of 'em don't give a &^& about radio anyway. Well, the upshot of all this is that being in a "minority" genre it would be great if I could at least have some way of picking up whatever few CDs that are available. I think having a "box" that shouts "POLKA!!! CELTIC!!! FOLK DANCE!!!" would be enough to scare off most singersongwriters. I cant IMAGINE getting too many promos!

So maybe I try to go to Essen for WOMEX this fall, cut class and come back with a better selection of CDs for not much more $$$$ investment, richtig?

Well, I actually had a great time. I did see a lot of music, Vance Gilbert sure must do weird house concerts! Loretta and her hardanger, the Swedish accordionist, the aquavit. Keelaghan. Welsh cow horns. Sitting in the mosh pit for sacred steel, "Praise the Lord!" Listening to Deb Cowan do backup vocals. The trip to the beach was great (I am, after all, a paleoecologist), the free food on the "Concorde" floor was great even though the new girl accused me of stealing a diet coke (they were free), the long chat with the good looking s/s in the hot tub was great, nice room with no kids was great. But I did feel for the first time that this was not really "my" conference. When thingf trim down to manageable size for the mainstream, the little genres get cut accordionly.

A couple other "complaints" though that I have:

1) Dancing...where were the dance classes? I've had a great time learning Morris and Eastern European dances...and the evening dances with the hotbands?

2) Singing...well, I know where the SH wasn't. In Toronto Ed Miller and someone else did a public singing in one of the rooms. Where did these go?

MARCH 2002

In the autumn of 1972, after I graduated and with no where to go, I drove to Iowa. My last roommate, Joan, was studying poetry with Kurt Vonnegut at Iowa Writer's Workshop. Like myself and many of my best friends, she looked about 14. Her constant companion a rum and coke, she read poems about running, dyinrses, the blood and eyes popping like sweat from their bridled faces.

One day, we decided to drive to Wisconsin. Joan had a friend from the English department at Earlham named Barb who lived near Sun Prairie. The trip upwards was sunny and uneventful. Barbara lived with her boyfriend and a Beagle named Petey in a small modern rental house, on a farm near Madison. We sat on the long lawn and watched the unnamed river. A silver boat appeared with men inside, the men with camouflage suits and long guns, a sudden invasion.

Barbara rose up and yelled, "Petey come here!"

The men did not move.

"Don't shoot! Those ducks are pets!"

"This is a public waterway. If they are pets, you keep them in!" said one of the men sternly. But he did not raise his rifle. Barbara stood and watched until they had gone downier.

We drove back to Iowa early in the morning. Near Dodgeville, with the sun rising in my face, I went to pass the slow car in front. Swinging into the left lane, I came face to face with a ford pickup. Brainless, I kept going onto the left shoulder but could not brake fast enough. Alma Luverne came fatally face to face with the Carboniferous.

"Are you OK?" I asked Joan. Neither of us were wearing our seatbelts.

"Yes," she answered in her usually mild manner. "Are you?"

I really was not, because I had slammed my elbow against the black steel of the door. But it was a secret.

I got out and stared at Alma. There was limestone and grass in the radiator, which had earlier been mildly crunched at a fast stop of a black '54 Buick on National Road in Richmond. The owner had just shrugged when he saw his bumper. But now, Alma's left front fender was crunched, preventing wheel from moving.

"Are you OK?"What happened?" asked a woman. She had been in the pickup and had called the police. In a moment the Dodge County Deputy arrived.

"Are you OK?" He asked. Then he asked me for my drivers license.

"I don't have it," I said. He had one leg that was strait at the knee. He did not walk well. I figured he'd been shot in the war.

"You don't have it or you don't have one?"

"I don't have it. It was a paper license and I washed it so it fell apart. I applied for a copy and my father was going to send it to me..."

He looked at me. And then I said,

"They just have paper licenses in Alabama. It's kinda backwards."

"You know where I'm from? Mississippi! You think Mississippi is backwards?"

That's when we got to ride in a patrol car to the Dodgeville, Wisconsin jail, myself to be held in custody for not having a drivers license in my immediate possession.

"Hey, I have a AAA card!" What luck! "Will this $50 bail bond here on the back work?"

I guess so. I guess I was sure to jump bail and they would get the $50 from AAA.

They had towed poor Alma somewhere. Joan and I walked out onto the highway and there we were, two 14 year olds in bellbottoms, hitching. A car stopped immediately, the first of three lone men, kind men who liked young women and whom we would tell giggling the story of our wreck, in that sad still morning. And then I waited in Iowa City for two days.

My father called, "You sure totaled that car! You are lucky you are ALIVE!!! But they gave me $300 in trade on trade for a '67 Dodge Charger. They say it's a real nice car for a girl. You can drive back to Alabama now, your fun is over"

"It didn't look that bad to me," I said. I figured it would drive if they straitened the fender a little, but maybe the axle was bent.

So I rode the bus to the Chevrolet Dealership in Dodge Chargerville and picked up the car. It was hideous, but the wheels worked.

In February, he called me in Des Moines. "They want me to send the title on the Camaro so they can sell it. They got a racket going up there. I sure got gypped on that one." Bunch of slick guys up in Wisconsin.

+++++

-Did you actually see written Finnish words when you were growing up, I asked.

-Oh yeah, Gramma read the newpaper in Finnish. She got The Communist Worker...Työmies. It came from Vancouver, answered Ralph.

What do you remember, grandmother?

"RURAL" is stamped on my birth certificate. In those days, there was no municipality where we lived on the middle mountain. Shades Mountain looked down over the valley to Red Mountain, where Great Vulcan, God of the Forge, looked down on the Valley of Birmingham, the Magic City. We had three acres at the crest, looking both ways, like Janus.

In the back yard, which faced Vulcan, we had a grey cement block barbecue and a bed of gravel. I ran along the cement blocks at the side, full tilt fell into the smooth quartz pebbles. WHAM!

"You were almost three then," said my mother.

"It was what they call a 'greenstick fracture,'" said my father.

There were mysterious words written on the plaster of paris on my left arm. The gauze around my fingers was hot and sweaty, and grew grey and dirty.

They shot off fireworks from the TV stations on Red Mountain on the 4^th of July. We sat in our backyard on metal chairs and watched, my parents and Nana and Georgie, my mother's parents. The sparklers in my hand patterned light through the air. In the early evening, you could see lightening bugs, and catch them in jars. Now, my younger daughter draws lines with sparklers and sets off fireworks in the basalt gravel driveway. Where are the little bugs?

Would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams home in a jar? I put a thick plastic sheet on the small screen of our televison. Then I drew a line in crayon so that Winky-Dink, cartoon Star, could cross the chasm.

The cocker spaniel T-bone that I got for my birthday had a coat the color of a caramel apple. One day I asked where he was,

"T-bone ran off to New York," my mother said.

It grieved my parents so much that he'd been run over on Shades Crest Road that they did not buy another for years, but it did not bother me much. It was my grandfather's dog, not mine, and followed him everywhere.

I had black velvet pumps with gold braid around the foothole. I stood on the lawn at Junie Garza's and watched while the other children played. Her father was a dentist.

I stood in the dusty playground at Mrs Honea's school on Diaper Row, near the boundary of Homewood and Birmingham. It was called Diaper Row because the returning vets from the war lived there with their young families. My mother and grandfather...my mother never learned to drive...talked with Mrs. Honea.

"You could leave her in kindergarten another year, but she would just be bored." Mrs. Honea's private first grade depended on Scorpios like me who missed the September deadline for public school. Such fools. White or nigra, there was no way to beat the boredom of the Jefferson County School System.

I spun around again on the Merry-go-whirler.

All this has passed through these cold fingers, one more round bartender, make it a double if you can.

A couple without a car was staying at a middle cabin in the loop. The woman was a gaunt blonde and the man had black hair. I thought they were maybe Russians. They looked Russian. One day the man came up and asked me:

"Are you going to the meat market?" He didnt speak very good English, ususual for someone his age.

"No," I answered distinctly, "today I am just driving to Kaustinen." I couldnt imagine going to a meat market. The term made my skin crawl.

Three minutes later I realized he meant "grocery store." There were no longer meat markets here. What a fool I had been. What stories would he have told during the five minute drive into Evijärvi proper?

In the morning my son Ian would sit on the beach and stage battles amongst the green plastic soldiers he had bought at a gas station in Sweden. Every so often, he would sit on the porch with Slayer of Reindeer in the Taiga and whack off a bayonet.

In the afternoon, we would drive for 20 minutes into Kaustinen. Why is there an album called Kaustinen, Texas? Because, despite its mystique, Kaustinen looks very much like Caldwell, Texas. There is a homey feel of cruising the Kolache Fest without the compelling heat of September in Texas. There was never a problem parking. People parked along Highway 21, but also you could park on the dirt lot. On the last day we returned to our silver German ford. Nearby was parked a brown 1981 Volvo in poor condition. Both the owner, with dirty ash blond hair and snaggly yellow teeth, and the vehicle stood out against the Finnish Welfare State that surrounded them. Whenever someone walked close, the shabby man would ask for money, and the passerby, being Finnish, would seem confused and concerned. I talked loudly in English to Ian, and the man left me alone. But now I could say "Mene pois...en viitsi!"

The year before, I'd walked up to the food kiosks...raukakioskille...which look very similar to food booths at the North Texas Irish Festival or Cropredy.

"What is this?" I asked.

"It's a BURRR-Ritto," said the vendor. "Want a taste?"

But this year, I stopped at a fish place. Tiny silver fish sizzled blackened in a giant wok.

"What are those?" I asked.

The vendor, a hansome wiry blond, answered, "We call them "muikku."

"What?" I asked."

"We call them 'little fish,'" answered the man.

So I bought little fish, and then another day I bought a salmon plate (lohi is the Finnish word for salmon). The lohi plate on yellow styrofoam cost about $5, the fish was very thick, and the potatoes ("perunat") were very good.

One evening we stood in line in the main Kansanmusiikii building, waiting for the special kantele concert in the auditorium. It had stalled because one of the players had stalled somewhere on the highway. We were right by the café area, where attendees of a buffet were sampling several types of potatoes and makkara. A polka band was playing for the buffeteers, while a Turkish band on the main stage played above close circuit.

Then two blond people walked up. The man next to us, who looked to much an ethno- hippie to be a native, said very distinctly:

"yes, hello, how are you?" Damn, a Brit, right next to us in line!

The woman answered him cooly, the way Nordic women speak.

"I'm camping," he explained distinctly.

"Oh?" said the woman.

"I've got back problems. So now I have a new air mattress. It is very comfortable," he said distinctly.

"This is my friend Risto," introduced the woman. Risto was a tall robust blond and his English was not good. The Englishman spoke even more loudly distinctly.

"I am moving to Finland now. My wife has a job in Turku."

"Oh?" said the woman.

"I am going to write about Finland. I am going to write about the everyday things Finns do from the viewpoint of a foreigner."

We saw the Briton later, sitting alone with a glass of wine.

"I was going to ask him about his back," Ian commented.

I would stay out later, into the white night, but Ian always got bored at 11pm. We would drive home to our little warm cabin with the dim twilight guiding our path on black pavement through the metsä, our headlights superfluous. Always, though, the sun would set and at 2am it would be dark. As you go north, the night becomes brighter and later. When we would later drive into subarctic Norge, this would not be the case, it would be grey all night.

++++

The old man sat on the retaining wall outside Fred Meyer. Weatherbeaten face, long grey matted locks, ragged clothes, everything spoke of the open road.

"Hey," he asked slyly when he saw me, "you need an old man?"

I shook my head, smiled, and walked on past the bottle and can redemption machine. Oregon imposes a 5c deposit on fizzy drinks, and the Fred Meyer machines are a popular place for bums to gather. At last I had found a great way to meet men in The Dalles: picking up litter. I dumped my shopping bags in the trash can at the front of the store and then went in, avoiding Larry from the meet department.

Picking up trash as a service project began in a selfish way. One day there was an unusual amount of trash on the other side of the creek we live on, property owned by the Mid-Columbia Senior Center, known for its hopping Bingo games on Thursday and Saturday nights. I scrambled over rocks and slid down embankments, finding more than I had bargained for. The thrill became addictive and now I have picked up litter all over the Mid-Columbia region..

Cascadian ecoterrorists and treesitters in Salem and Olympia mandate recycling opportunities which half the population welcomes with open arms, but the other half makes up for this legistlation by generating huge amounts of litter. Perhaps organized recycling and pristine landscapes are just not part of the Mexican ethnic tradition, nor part of the tradition of the American West. And picking up the litter is a good way to excercise, work outdoors, and see the sites. Sometimes, when the shoulder is narrow up against a basalt escarpment, it is dangerous work. Oregon would not have to scramble over assisted suicide laws if terminally ill patients would just go and pick up litter along the Historic Highway.

One day I was over to a Klickitat County pull-off near where I buy gas at Jim's Dallesport RV Campground and Store. I have not bought gas in Oregon since I drove the second U-Haul in during August of 2000. In Washington I can still be self-sufficient and ram the nozzle into the gas tank myself. In Oregon buying gas is just a passive act of paying to have some guy shove the nozzle in. At the pulloff the cigarette butts were as think as winter wheat in the fields of the Tygh Valley. I gave up on them and went for the big stuff: cardboard cups, styrofoam cups and popcorn, Camel packs...one with squashed new cigarettes still in it, plastic shopping bags, a broken license plate holder reading "Hood River," chip bags, nacho containers. Then my toe hit something in the weeds by some basic igneous rip rap. "Damn, " I said. "An entire jack!" It was a blue metal tire jack. I hoisted it into the Windstar. Maybe someone recycled iron. A minute later I looked behind more rocks. In the crevice was a metal pipe and on top of the pipe laye a couple of plastic tubes, like the tubes you use to core soft sediments in a lake. I picked up the clear pink pastel tube. It had a bulb on it which read "Happy Hookah Water Pipe!" "Well," I reasoned, "Someone has stashed their hash pipes here." So I put back the pink tube. Bouzoukis, rembetika and narghiles danced through my head. Suddently I was in the backstreets of Athens.

But on that day, I'd just been in the little triangular park on the way to Fred Meyer. The park wasn't so fertile, though the plastic Coke bottle I'd left lie on Monday was still there. Over against the building, the abandoned former home of Dave's Pizza,.someone had left an entire box of used fluorescent bulbs and then someone else had smashed them against the bark chips into tiny thin white shards. I sighed in resignation. The broken glass I always leave.

APRIL 2002

Sidney, BC, 2002

Through the grey fogbound straits where the Cedars Stand watching...

It is a three hour ride from Anacortes to Sidney through the San Juan Islands. The boat slips pasttall forested islands, most rimmed by vacation homes like oranges beginning to mold It stops at Orcas and Friday Harbour and Haines to load and unload. On the final island of the San Juans, the white moldy spot is very large, and here we disembark.

The customs line is 45 minutes long, cars twisting in a semi-circle during the wait. Near us, a hoser agent beckons the opening of a Uhaul towing a battered silver suburu hatchback with Washington plates. He shifts a few packing cloths and then the Uhaul pulls out for Victoria or points to the North. The north end of vancouver Island is farther than the distance we have driven from Oregon. But it is only about a quarter of the height of British Columbia.

Ahead and to the side, Canadian customs opens the hatches of two small cars driven by men. Ahead of us, however, the two white teenager-laden rental vans ahead of us go through quickly.

"Where are you going? Where are you from?" asks the agent. "Are you carrying any fire arms?"

"No," I say.

"Carrying any food?"

"I think I have a Mexican pastry left." You can get these at either Albertson's or Fred Meyer. "Popcorn and jellybeans," added Erin from the back seat.

"Are you carrying any firearms? Any mace?" the agent asks again.

"No," I answered.

"You don't have a hand gun under your seat?"

"No," I answered and then burst out laughing. The agent smiled.

"What's that on the seat beside you?"

"It's a computer." I lifted the pillow. My HP Pavilion was cradled between a comforter and a pillow. One bump and it would blow up and I would have to load Windows again.

He waved us on.

One night I ate in the Impressions restaurant at the base of the Harbour Towers hotel. I ordered eggplant-spinach ravioli and select fresh vegetables and a pint of Homer.

"They have two Filipino women who do it. They get paid $50 an hour." said a woman by the window."

"She was a daughter of a billionaire, so she did things in her own way," said a man by the next window.

I listened to the women behind me.

"She married a poor Dutch painter. She is part royal in descent..."

"She was Russian, then..."

"Yes, she was. They've been married 50 years...50 years of misery. He's been on oxygen for two years...."

"Now there's a case of being nice to someone and then they bite your hand right off."

My mind drifted. My memories were drawn by a nice young man on the deck of the Washington State Ferry. His strawberry blond pony tail blew with the wind in the light grey March Sky of the Juan de Fuca. I like the impish look of men with strawberry blond hair. Then my thoughts drifted to my screen idle Orlando Bloom, with his cute, impish ears. I would rather be eating with either of these men than by myself.

The woman behind me said, "The younger Jim McNeal seems like such a good family man. He goes to soccer games and things like that all the time, but he is SUCH a womanizer."

I took a bite of my half baby carrot, slushing it down with a sip from the dark pint.

+++

Ocean Beach, Washington, 2002: I thrust the Travel Coupon Book at the clerk and asked, "Will this work?" and she said yes. Paradise was again ours. Free continental breakfast, hot tub and pool, plus miniature golf in the second floor conference room.

"Hey, lets make our own configurations!" said Ian, pulling two rectangles of floor carpet into one.

"Hey, look, try not and hit any of those balls towards the windows!"

When Erin and I went out in the morning, it was pouring rain. We set out over the vegetated dunes. Here there were no trees, no palms, just grasses and a few scattered ericaceous shrubs on the tumultuous ground. We dodged the lakes in the swells.

"There's a duck." Erin pointed at a lone green mallard head.

The rain had lessened to a drizzle. The land became level, bare, and damp, sloping so slowly to the Pacific that each wave would roll in for 20 feet. The beach was dark like the wallpaper in a Portland restaurant, the sand patterned and tricolored. The chocolate-colored silt and clays are lighter and are held longer by the waves than the white quartz. The mafics...the dark minerals, a legacy of Pacific rim subduction and vulcanism...have a higher specific gravity, and are left behind to form patterns, sometimes rippled, sometimes herringbone, like the snow...like snow on the branches of rainforest cedars. On the coast of the Olympic peninsula., the herringbone patterns of young hemlock and Sitka spruce are wallpaper on the mausoleum of clearcut carnage.

That early in the day, there were no other people, just birds. Gulls patrolled the intertidal areas waddling like obese security guards, tiny snipes skittered like little raptors. Half sand dollars and crabs lay like chicken bones at KFC.

"Look. This crabs loved ones would see nothing recognizable when they found these remains," said Erin in disapproval. "Those gulls pick these sand dollars up and drop them to break them open," she added, suggesting a future in zoology.

"Look," said Erin. "A fort." Someone had dug into the sand and built a cottage like the tree forts we had as children. They had used drift logs on the sides and top. Erin found more, and fortified the roof, lashing the edges with a length of found rope.

To the west, there was nothing between ourselves and Japan but the silty chai latte waves and a white fishing boat.

++++

.Horse With No Name" holds a dear place in my life, as it is a memory marker. When I visited my friend Joan in Iowa City in 1972, shortly before we crashed the car in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, we visited a bar called The Deadwood with some of her friends from Iowa Writers Workshop. At the time, The Deadwood was in an old building on Dubuque Street. Someone in the bar had put a dime in the jukebox and started up Horse With No Name. One of the poets asked "Who is that by?"

And I said, using an assumption, "Neil Young."

Everyone believed me. Like horrible mistakes often are, it is the only memory I have of the early Deadwood.

The Deadwood was soon to meet the same fate as my Camaro. In the winter, the roof collapsedwith the weight of snow. No one was in the building at the time, but that goes to show what bad shape the bar was in in the first place. The Iowa City Government replaced that whole block, which stood long afterward like vacant ghosts, with Portable Modulars placed dead in the middle of the street. By the time I got back, The Deadwood was a portable modular mainstay. When I was in grad school at Iowa, there were three places we would go to drink: Nickelodeon, Joe's and The Deadwood. The Nickelodeon was painted entirely black inside, except for some fluorescent squiggles. Nothing went on there, but there wasnt much smoke. Joe's was crowded and popular. Brian Witzke and John Swade often played the pinball machines there; this was inthe days before electronic games. The trick was to manhandle the machines so your balls would get a lot of points. Witzke at 23 was tall and built like a 14 year old, all angles and bones, big teeth. A pretty goofy guy, smart too, once I saw a pastel green pop test that he'd screwed up on hanging around the paleo lab. He'd written his name "Brain Kerwitz." Why? Actually it hung around and gathered carbonate fossil dust for months, so I saw it a bunch. He had a certain lanky grace as he shoved and jerked the ball track back and forth after 3 or 4 beers.

But once I was sitting with the boys in The Modular Deadwood. With us as well were a couple ofolder guys (like maybe late 20s) who'd been to Viet Nam. One whom we called Stork, because he liked the girls, was from Cedar Rapids, and had been in the infantry. The other was called Raven, in place of an unpronouncable Danish surname. He was from Cedar Falls and had been an army journalist because of his English degree from UNI. Later he would be known as Bob from Anchorage, but that is another story. Both were to later get high paying oil jobs. Brian Witzke would later stay and work at the Iowa Geological Survey all his life. John Swade would die in a few years of cancer from using tetrabromoethane to pick conodonts, which are tiny microfossils from the Paleozoic. I would end up in rural Oregon studying Finnish 103.

One evening, we all sat in the Deadwood at a wooded table coated with an inch of polyurethane. In those days you could get a beer for 40c in a plastic cup, like those used today at Raquet Club keggers. Witzke was onto something. He was smiling, like always, and said "Dammit, that's a bunch of bulls t." He pounded his fist on the table. A full plastic cup of beer flew into the air, hit the table on its side. All the Miller ended up on the lap of my ragged bell- bottoms.

"Thank you," I said.

+++++

Strollers stop at our bridge to watch the churning grey waters of Mill Creek, though the latter carry this spring only a fraction of the power they have in the past. Mill Creek arises in the east foothills of the Cascades, in two forks which join, their collective waters tumbling past fir and hemlock, past ponderosa, past meadows and double wide manufactured homes of weird hermits. Then The City Of The Dalles traps them in a municipal water reservoir, ignoring the pesticide rich Columbia that Snakes at its feet. Released, the waters pass meadows with mares and cows and llamas, upscale homes, and orchards. Finally, Mill Creek passes our house, 20 feet and 2 terraces below our back door.

The Dalles means "ledges of rock," in our case the Plateau Basalts. They all look about the same. Our town is filled with them; one minute you could be walking down a street and the next WHAM! you've stepped 40 feet off A Dalle onto the Church of Christ Scientist. After it leaves our yard and the 9th Street Bridge, it is not long until Mill Creek becomes a miniature Columbia, with a Dalle 20 feet up on each side and little green flood plain flanking it. In order to take the shortcut to the Columbia Photo Studio and the adjacent Don's Carpet and Espresso, as well as the Safeway, you have to cross this abyss. Luckily, at the end of Jordan Street, there is a 4' pipeline with a grate and railing on it to guide your crossing.

You can stand on this little bridge and look at the glade below, through which winds Mill Creek and a little paved road the color of basalt. There are also two little green sheds in the glade, falling apart. When I first saw the property in 2000, a shell of a travel trailer was huddled on one side of the pipe. Now it is just a heap of rusty sheet metal.

Last week I was crossing to bridge to take my pictures from Victoria to CPS, where they have the two big dumb labradors lying on the floor...I guess you could call them "Photo Labs"...and I noticed the electric hook ups. Random poles held grey boxes. Despite several NO TRESPASSING signs, I went down the metal steps that go off the bridge. Maybe I'd get shot, but it would be death in the search of knowledge. The two little houses were former restrooms and smelled like sewage. Beadboard still separated the two compartments but the harvest gold toilets were smashed. There were no showers. Then I walked the asphalt road. Off to one side lay another corpse of a travel trailer, and a shed, collapsed beyond reconition, but still hooked to an electrical box. The road was like a needle with an eye, ending in a circle in the glen. There were three poles with electrical boxes in the eye, but no trailer remains, just mud and debris. On the outside of the road were additional poles, all numbered. I followed the road along Mill Creek under the pipe bridge. There were more poles and boxes and numbers along the basalt wall. Electrical wires dragged on the ground. At the trailer I had seen from the bridge, there was nothing left recognizable but a white Frigidaire, like the one we had in our basement when I was a kid. My dad would call it an icebox, but it was electric. Purposeless debris was scattered around the green and black glen.

Why the demise of this Garden Of Eden? Was it an increase of property taxes? War? Pestilence? In my opinion, the answer lies instead in the incredible Flood Of 1996, when they sandbagged the Senior Center and water rose almost up to Ian's window. Mt Hood had erupted enough snowmelt to bury the little trailers under 17 feet of churning water.

+++

This was some weekend! Erin and I began driving to a kantele workshop in Portland at 6:50 AM on Saturday. This included a concert on Saturday night at the Sons of Norway in Vancouver, Washington. It was an opportunity to learn air strumming during the mass ensemble! On Sunday, I took Erin back to the workshop and went to my show. At 11AM I recorded an interview with Pat Kilbride, who was in Hawaii, on equipment I was not sure of. At noon I did my show, my special fund drive guest being my fellow SH singer Peter Irvine. I was thinking it was an imposition.

"Look!" said Peter, "I grabbed a whole box of stuff to play!"

"I guess you've been on radio before."

"Oh, yeah," said Peter excitedly. "I did a show for four years in college on a station just like this."

It was nostalgia time plus. I let him load the CD machines. Then I went back and picked up Erin. We went and hung around downtown a while, then went and sang Sacred Harp. There was a friend of a tenor there named Connie who had grown up in Alabama, near Tuskeegee, who sang treble with me for a while. We were all supposed to go eat dinner and then go see Northern Harmony, but Erin and I were sure about musiced out. We went home.

Portland has been called, at least by the local Kantele players, the Kantele Capitol of Amerika. They say its because there are more kantele players in the area than anywhere else. In Feburary, I heard of a kantele workshop during a talk by Christine Perala on the Kalevala. A month later, I tracked down the workshop by e-mailing Gerry Henkel in Duluth, who found a reference on an events site in Canada called "CanadaFinn."

The workshop was held in the Worldview Conference Center in Portland. It is part of an Christian seminary which has impoverished students from around the world. Erin and I went. I am not really a Kantele Player, I merely started play tunes on the 5 string that I bought in Finland. I tune it minor and play things like "Wayfaring Stranger." The 10 string allows a person to play a wide variety of fiddle tunes, for example, "Farewell To Nigg" and "Sheebeg Sheemor" and "Ashokan Farewell." Going to a workshop allows a person to find out what one should be doing instead of using the kantele as a Celtic fiddle.

Our teachers included Merja Soria from California, Arja Kastinen from Finland, and Wilho Saari from Washington. Erin was unusually well behaved and became the obvious star of our duo. She thought all the teachers were wonderful. But I enjoyed learning from Wilho Saari, who taught fingering instead of chords and strumming. Saari, by the way, is the word for"Island."

"Kiitos," I thanked Wilho.

"Are you Finnish?" he replied.

"No." I said.

"I'm not either. My wife is, though."

"You have an accent," I defended.

"That's the way people talk in Naselle," he explained.

One of Wilho's phrases was "Here, take this." He handed us two xeroxed booklets of his compositions, each with a title like X-51 or XIII-34.

"Where do you get these titles?" asked a woman with a ten string. She had been inspired to take the workshop because she had used a kantele player on her last CD.

Wilho pulled out a thick book, XXX. "I put my compositions in books like these. I just finished my 30th book." Then he added," I use a computer program to write them down. But this winter my computer crashed. It just made me sick. I had backups for the first half, but...I'm hoping to find someone to retrieve them off the hard disc.

"Hey, what's this "Sea Gypsy Motel---Lincoln City"?" asked the singer.

"I guess that's where I wrote it," said Wilho. Another tune is noted "Banquet In Vancouver."

Wilho is a retired school teacher. His maple ten string was made for him by his son in law when he retired in '93. Now he is one of the best known kantele players in the Northwest. The other kantele he plays is a 35 string model made in 1948 in Finland by Paul Salminen. It belonged to his father, Wilho Saari, who not only played every day after work in Nasellebut traveled Cascadia playing at various celebrations. Our Wilho did not learn to play until 1982 on the big one his father had left.

"I am going to give you some homework," Wilho told Erin.

Later someone would tell Erin, "I will make a kantele for you." It was a fine place for children.

======

Yesterday, I drove to Goldendale the back way, over the Columbia Hills. All you have to do to go this way is turn left at the winery at Dallesport, and drive up past the sign that says "Primitive Road No Warning Signs Next 10 Miles." Then you climb up on gravel, passing the Dalles Mountain Ranch preserve set forth by the State Of Washington. Now in April there is water, and the green fescue and wheatgrass ripple and shimmer like the waves on Beto Vasquez' web page. Here there are patches of bluebonnets lupines and yellow eyed susans, like a Texas roadside. You can look down over the Columbia, and its dry brown and black banks that mask the wheat fields of the Oregon interior, up to Biggs, down to The Dalles.

Near the top, though, the blues and yellows yield to the faint whites and yellows of small flowers and rubble. I did not allow the time to get out and check the genus. At the very top of the hill there is a radio tower; yesterday men and trucks reading High Mountain Cable were digging ditches there. Then coming off the other side you can see the rolling green Klickitat Valley, with its green grass and wheat farms. I drove past sheep and cows, a black horse standing and a white horse rising, through Centerville, Washington. Many fine old vehicles lie here, trapping time, Packards, Chevys, Studebakers. Only an old school remains open and a woman and child walk Centerville Road, stopping long before Goldendale.

Above Goldendale, close on the horizon, rises the white of Mount Adams , and Satus Pass, which cradles US97 to Yakima. Below these leviathons and by the Chevron Station lies the Arroyo Family Mexican Restarant. The lunch buffet, for which I had come, was no longer in service. I ate the special, one cheese enchilada, beans and rice, and paid the bill.

"This has been a long day," the small dark woman at the register told me.

"How long have you been here?" I asked.

"Only since 10:30. But the food service people didnt come this morning."

"No dinner huh?"

"We are about to run out of some things in the kitchen now. And I just got into a fight with two of the guys back there." She laughed. Her accent was thick, but she was very articulate. "I think I am going to go into cash and carry, this is too much."

+++++

The boy looked startled when he saw Erin in the black shirt and hat. Joseph explained. "Every team has to have a girl." Erin grinned. So it is in The Intermediate League. In the Juniors, there are more girls, so every team gets a kid named Austin. Joseph, larger than his nine years would justify, has his own problems. Last week, his powerful arms hit the ball far into left field. Then, his great body lumbered deliberately into second.

"He would have made it into home if he could just run," commented Erin.

This was the second time Mountain Fir Construction had played Hattenhauer Fuel Oil Distribution. Erin was at bat in the black Hattenhauer shirt, head like a huge cherry in her helmet. She can run but cannot hit. The women in the bleachers yelled "Go Erin!" After two strikes and three balls, the Mountain Fir boy threw the ball right at her feet. The players were tired. It was 9:30, forty degrees, and the sky was as black as the players shirts with maybe some cookie crums on them.

Treyvon was up next. "He's a good hitter," said someone. "Go Treyvon!" screamed the mothers in the bleachers. But darned if the little grey Mountain Fir boy didnt walk him as well. Man on first and second, Dakota Redcloud swung. Treyvon Mann started to steal second, but Erin Day didnt budge.

"That guy better watch what's goin' on. That other guy had to go back," commented a stocky grandfather in a cowboy hat."

"That ain't a boy, that's a girl," corrected his twin.

"Don't care if it's a boy or a girl, that guy's still gotta watch the game."

Then Dakota Redcloud hit the ball into the outfield. Erin ran to third, and then into home. She ran like the great Gorge winds that were giving us frostbite. The Fir Boys were after her. One second later, the ball and the catcher hit home as well. "Safe!" yelled the umpire.

"Why don't you go with your mother and pick up trash?" suggested my husband the next day. Ian had to do one half hour of environmental service for Earth Day. It was a science assignment.

"The ball field was full of trash at the last game," he continued. I prefer the interstate, as there is a certain challenge to not getting killed or frisked. But it was no longer my decision. Erin decided to ride her bike. My son, for all his twelve years, could not ride a bike.

"I didn't learn to ride a bike until I was 19," I said for the zillionth time in his defense.

After the de-trashing. I looked over by the dugout.

"I'll hold it up while you start peddling," Erin was saying.

Twenty minutes and one Fred Meyer bag of trash later, Ian had ridden all the way to the concession stand.

Usually I leave the glass alone, but I saw the big chunk on the ground and said "Oh what the heck."

++++++

Victoria, BC, March 2002: There is nothing better than relaxing in a hot tub. Well, maybe almost nothing. But the silence of my pleasure was broken by one of my fellow dippers.

"Excuse me," he said. "I noticed you were here yesterday too. Are you on vacation? Where are you from?"

"Yes, we live in Oregon." I answered. "Yesterday I could hardly stand it because it was like a blender in here.

" Yesterday I'd felt like an ice cube in a boiling margarita blender.

"There was something wrong with the pump. I'm here on business. I had a glass of wine now I am about to fall asleep." Maybe more than one, as far as I could see.

"What do you do?" He looked about 30, with slick dark hair.

"I'm a broker."

"A stock broker? Where are you from?"

"Vancouver." That was all the way across Tierra del Fuego. "We have a young company. It's one of the few like it in Canada. We don't give people advice. We go through the web and our clients give us instructions." This was highly condensed; he talked at length against the power of the surf. You could tell he loved his business. "I used to work for a bank, but there, you have to do things you don't believe in just to keep your job. We hire bright young people."

"Why young people? " I asked with no hint of malice.

"Because they arent afraid to take risks. I could lose my job and live in my car and it wouldn't bother me, I could just get another job. You have kids, you're afraid. Your heart is in your children. Younger people aren't afraid, you haven't been rejected yet."

"I guess so," I said.

"You know why I decided to talk to you? Because you look like you're an old hippie. You should see me on weekends. People I work with say they don't even recognize me."

"Oh?" I said. "There's nothing wrong with running against the culture," he said. "But you have to know how things work or you drown."

+++++

"You dabble quite a bit..."

Yesterday when I went to sing, Connie said: "I sang with the Wiregrass singers." She had gone all the way to Ozark, Alabama, to do nothing more than sing with the Wiregrass Sacred Harp.

"How many are there?" someone asked.

"Fewer were singing than we have here in this room," she said. "The age range was from about 78 to 82." She was exaggerating, later she would admit there was someone there in their 50s. She went on to explain that they had these singings after family reunions, and that though many younger people there, they were not singing.

"What is different?" someone asked.

"A lot! They use the red book, but they also sing from the Colored Sacred Harp. But I don't know what else. I'm not a musician."

I was covertly dressed for a Jag Panzer/In Flames/Iced Earth Concert at 8pm, at which I would be frisked and carded. I like that contrast; it is like flying from Sweden to Morocco, but actually living in neither place. Where I actually live is a hippie commune in Northumberland with a bunch of wizards flying around on brooms with moons and stars on their hats.

That evening, between JP and IF at the Roseland, I was washing my hands in the restroom. A woman asked:

"You here because the kids dragged you?"

"No, I'm here because I like metal."

"Me too," she said. She had the same 3 inches of grey grown out from the last dye job, but had been able to keep the red color going. Mine had turned a medium peach brown. She was wearing a pink shirt and jeans.

"My husband and I come to all of these. The kids tease me about it."

"What kind do you like? Everything?"

"Yeah, everything." She hestitated. "Try Floater. They just play up from California to here. Sound like Pink Floyd."

"Floater," I repeated.

May 2002

"Mom, if someone does something illegal, and I know about it, will you turn me in?"

I thought, Oh no. They make TV movies about this stuff. "What was it that was illegal?"
"Well, see here's my new game, and it's a copy Dan gave me. He burned it off a copy someone burned for him."

"Well," I said, "I can't say much, since I bootleg CDs." I'd just burned this great Viola Turpeinen CD off an LP Ralph from class had loaned me. It belonged to his grandmother. The family ran logging camps in fin de siecle northern Minnesota and you had to be tough. She would get special tobacco sent from Helsinki and spit long distances, just to intimidate loggers.

"Dan's family has an orchard," said Ian.

When the trees bloom, The Dalles has the Cherry Festival Parade, with a path from Albertson's past Safeway, across Mill Creek, and downtown on second which is a one way. Leading off was about 100 motorcyclists, ranging from Dreadful Seepage on Harleys to an elderly woman on a 500cc Honda with her Llaso Apso in a cat carrier behind her on the seat. We are all friends here.

Following like a metaphor drove the Three Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Unkown to many, "The Dalles" is Klickitat for "speed trap." Beware! The Horsemen were, in wing formation, The City Of the Dalles Police Department in a white sedan, The Wasco County Sherrif in a jaunty white SUV, and bringing up the rear most terrifying of all in its black darth vader cars, The Oregon State Patrol.

Just a few days later, in May, I walked across the Albertson parking lot. I try not to drive in The Dalles unless I have to. A City Of the Dalles officer had an elderly man in a silver Pinto cornered.

"Can I see your license? Do you have a license?"
The old man was slow to pull it out. Perhaps the charge was driving too slow as well.

"Eighty four years old, that's really something. Whose car is this?"

Conversely, the Sherriff's Department mostly breaks up underage drinking parties at isolated lakes in the mountains. That's why they have SUVs, because some of the roads are close to impassible.

There were many types of vehicles in the parade. The Corps of Engineers from the dam was hauling a huge search and rescue boat. Al's Propane, Bob's Well-Drilling and Jim's Septic Service had their trucks all polished. There were nice backhoes, tractors, and The Dallesport, Washington Volunteer Fire District's engine. Washington is a free country, no income tax. Recently, Dallesport residents almost defeated the placement of streetlights on some streets, claiming it violated their rights. But socialism had come with new residents in upscale triple wides. People also had polished their semis to pull floats. On one float, the Latin Social Club had a mariachi band. On another that read "I'd rather be squaredancing," people danced non-stop. A religious float read "Cherry Festival---Jesus will save you from the pits!" Guys from the Federated Tribes of the Kay-Kee Ta Casino handed out decks of cards.

Then there were the Queens. The Cherry Festival Queens rode in sleek cars.The Queen of the Federated Tribes of Warm Springs rode on the HOOD ofa SUV, wrapped in a figured blanket, and with a lovely headdress. The ugly Drag Queens from the Dallesport [Washington] Demolition Club danced in short red sequined gowns and black wigs around a composite 1967 Impala. But most of the Queens rode horses. The Goldendale Queen rode a palimino [sp]. Queens came from The Dalles, from Cascade Locks, from Carson, even from Pendleton. But the prettiest of all was the Sherman County Rodeo Queen. Her horse had purple glitter on its hooves, to match her cowgirl costume.

"What an unusual gait!" said the woman standing next to me.

"Struttin'," commented her Partner, an obese man with a chihuahua in the bib of his overalls. "Only one kinda horse they can train to strut like that and that's the Tennessee walking horse."

++++

Trout Lake, Washington, is the end of the line, before the road rises into the deep primeval forests of Cascadia. KD's Bear Creek Café is the smaller of the two restaurants in Trout Lake. Attached to Joe's Valley Service Station, the kitchen is splattered in plain view on the far wall. The diner reminds me in miniature of a Waffle House somewhere between Charlotte and Asheville, where everyone was required to smoke in order to boost the state economy. When I was there in '94, I had to pull out my Texas drivers license to be declared exempt. But at Bear Creek, no one is allowed to smoke.

We sat along the counter, because the six tables were full, even at two in the afternoon.

"What's 'with veggies' mean?" the waitress asked.

"I don't know, it's your menu," I replied.

"What's 'with veggies' mean?" she asked the cook. "Is that with lettuce?"

"Onions and tomatoes," answered the cook, a perky middle aged tree hugger who was slapping burgers on the grill It was six feet from the counter to the back kitchen wall, so it was easy for them to converse. I ordered the sandwich on wheat with veggies. As a vegetarian, I am a conoisseur of grilled cheeses and this one got 9 stars.

Our aim was to visit the ice caves, part of the Indian Heaven volcanic field. During the early days, the caves had been the main source of ice for Hood River and The Dalles. After lunch, we drove on up Washington 141, up past the flanks of Mt Adams. At the last Snow Parc, though, Snow blocked the road. The sign said:

"Road Not Maintained Between November 1^st and April 1^st."

What a cold reception! Maybe the gas money for the May ploughing had been rerouted to give Navy Fighter Pilots a sense of purpose. And hence we were rerouted back 20 miles, back through BZ Corner and Husum, back to the Columbia, to try the road on the other side of the White Salmon River.

Again now, from Cook, we drove north through Mill A and ----, back into the Gifford Pinchot. Just north of the Big Lava Bed, downed trees lounged across one lane, fat acid volcanic boulders, and patches of snow made the road a near-impossible maze. It was the snow on the road that soon made it impassible.

The Big Lava Bed is the diadem of the Indian Heaven Volcanic Field. Spewed out in ca. 8500 YBP by a cinder cone in the north part of the field, it is not the naked lava you would expect. The Big Lava Bed is rather covered with dry forest: Douglas Fir, huckleberry, maple, ponderosa pine. On the open ground grow xerophilic mosses and lichens. Big rubbly blocks of the dark bubbly lava rock they call pahoihoi, tall as a small tree, are the result of the lava flow having cracked as it moved and cooled, to shifts when lava tried to flow into blocked tubes. There are no paths here in the Big Lava Bed, it is a greater maze than the road itself. Compasses cannot even be trusted, because of the iron in the rocks. And because we are in the Pacific Northwest, the sun that day was only a hazy dream in the sky. Ian and Erin plunged forward, climbing up and down over the blocks. I kept my eye on the red car, on the grade of the forest service road. A grey SUV rumbled past. I dreamed and saw the arches of Archean pillow basalts on flat rocks in forest, up on the Minnesota Iron Range at 2.7 BYBP. I thought of Joe Sisko and Barb and Julie pushing through raspberry thorns and the snow patches of late autumn '78, clear as the crunch of feet on snow and lichens. [you can see a current picture of our professor and the pillow basalts at http://www.d.umn.edu/geology/main/oj.html .]

"These lichens represent a symbiotic relationship between algae and fungus," I said.

"I know, " answered Ian. "In a devastated world, only lichens would be able to survive."

Past two ravines, they found a snow field.

"Be careful," said Ian. "You don't know what's ahead."

"I have this stick I'll use," said Erin.

I turned and contemplated the Douglas fir cones. Erin had told me, "During a forest fire, the mice had no where to go, so the trees said, 'come into my cones and tou will be safe.' And that is why you see the tails and two feet sticking out of the cones."

"I'm stuck, Ian, get me out. It's not funny," wailed Erin.

Erin's right leg was stuck in snow to her hip. Who knew how deep the gully really was? I thought of one of them falling through ten feet into a snowfilled chasm and suffocating.

"Dig me out," she commanded. "I cant move. I can't move my foot." Ian dug a little with the stick. They had no gloves; it was May. I wasn't about to climb down there unless I had to. I had no cell phone.

"You'll both have to dig. There's no other way to get out," I said. They stood there for a few minutes and nothing happened. Then they shoveled with bare hands to the point she could get her foot out of her rubber boot.

I thought of Shackelton crossing South Georgia.

+++++

There is something about geology that inevitably lures the appropriate people into its sinkholes and calderas, in hopes of not having to dress up for conferences.

They were all there. Brachiopod Lophophores. Suspect Terrain. Unstable slopes and rotational movement. Dike swarms. Cross bedding...all here at the Cordilleran Section Of the Geological Society of America Meeting. The theme was "Where Plates Collide!" Perhaps in the Skamania Lodge dining room, as scientists debate the abatement of landslides over lunch.

"Bob Stanton!" I yelled. Straight ahead of me, I saw one of my old committee members. He was now retired. Why had they let him out of Texas?

"We were going to stay, but I said to myself, if Judy could get out, so could we....ha ha, we were in one of those heat waves and we said, no, we'd leave. But we took a beating on the house."

"You had a lovely house," I commented.

"But no one wanted it. You know Texas, there were fields all over the place, they just put up more and more new houses." His ID tag was from a museum in Los Angeles. Thirty years, a textbook in paleontology, children grown up in Texas and moved away, solid existance vanished. "I was from California originally."

"You hear from my advisor?"

"Not really. They keep me on e-mail. They're interviewing for my old job and they seem to be hiring someone who's into big theories."

"I havent seen many people I know," I commented.

"Me either...you know you have two milestones. First your professors don't show up anymore. Then your collegues don't."

It was like we were arms of a spider, and the arms had been cut off by the Great Cordillera, yet we were shaking hands. It was as if we were rivers placidly flowing into the Gulf, and the channels had been blocked by lava flows at the new plate boundary, and we were both forced to flow into the Pacific. Everything to the East was sinking into the Atlantic rapidly.

In the evening, I drove to Newport, 40 miles over the Coast Range. I walked out at Agate Point, the sun and clouds through haze like white sheets slept on too long, the grey of the Pacific and the white of the long sand, cold wind from the north blowing sand out of swales low over the muted dunes, patterned like rippled snow in a blizzard, as fast as time lapse photography.

+++++

The Dalles, Oregon, April 2002: [cherry festival parade, cont.] Then there were the Queens. The Cherry Festival Queens rode in sleek cars. The Queen of the Federated Tribes of Warm Springs rode on the HOOD of a SUV, wrapped in a figured blanket, and with a lovely headdress. The ugly Drag Queens from the Dallesport [Washington] Demolition Club danced in short red sequined gowns and black wigs around a composite 1967 Impala. But most of the Queens rode horses. The Goldendale Queen rode a palimino [sp].

Queens came from The Dalles, from Cascade Locks, from Carson, even from Pendleton. But the prettiest of all was the Sherman County Rodeo Queen. Her horse had purple glitter on its hooves, to match her cowgirl costume.

"What an unusual gait!" said the woman standing next to me.

"Struttin'," commented her Partner, an obese man with a chihuahua in the bib of his

overalls. "Only one kinda horse they can train to strut like that and that's the Tennessee walking horse."

+++++++

Imagine your self walking up to the great Northwest Folklife festival. A handsome beggar stands near the entrance. "Can you spare some change for a cold beer?" he asks. The festival begins to shut down about 8pm, just about when I begin waking up. First it's the merchants and the food, then it's the music. Slowly choices narrow down to a couple events and the plethora of increasingly blind buskers.

I grabbed a vente cold chai and sat at a table in the main building. It was a monumental watch. Druzhba ("Bulgarian Village Music") Damir and Friends ("Hot Croatian And Serbian") and Orkestar RTW ("East European Dance Music"). As with those weird segregated beer areas which so endear to me the Pacific Northwest, you have to show an ID to dance. You must be 18 or older to dance Balkan, or sit on someones shoulders. I didnt have my ID with me, but others did. "Here's a ruchenitsa!" There were one or two huge circles going, fifty or more people; I marvel at how people do those complex steps over and over without a caller.

The last band was Balkanarama, from Seattle. Left with even fewer choices, orphaned children of euro-swing and tango-fusion,orphaned children of the night, began to filter in, loitering at theback of the dance floor, refusing the circles. The mood changed, the dancers, the band, with its hot sax and quasi-electricity. I slid the few Cds I'd bought beneath my chair (damned if I'm paying $17 for garageceltic) and stood on the floor, waiting a moment. The trick is to standbehind the line moving, faking the steps for a while. Now, though, there were so many step fakers that we formed lines ourselves. One two three layers of lines, to my right they changed, a middle aged man with expert footwork who bolted inward after the tune, two giggling hispanic girls, no one...oh god, I was at the head of the line. On my left, a boy in blackhung on my hand, like I was his mom. "Is this right?" "I have no idea." One two three, one two three four...how many people? A hundred, hundred fifty?

"Balkanarama!" said the MC in that mechanical way festival people queue performers. It was eleven, end of the show. "BALKANARAMA!!" chanted the dancers, clapping. "No, really we have to shut this down. The volunteers have been here all day," whined the MC. And so the dancers in black were left to move on to PolyEsther's, so close and yet so far.

+++

June 2002

The OMSI camp near Astoria lies between Long Lake and a swampy place. The reason it's beside a long lake is that it is on a old forested beach ridge of the Pacific Ocean. If you listen at night, when the birds are silent, you can hear what you think is an interstate, but rather it is the Pacific.

Every year the Portland Finnish School goes to the OMSI camp for Memorial Day Weekend. Because Finns are so quiet, it is little known that these Saturday schools for culture and language exist; there is even one in Dallas. We were invited because of my class, and because I too have children. The mothers, all but me, were Finnish, and the fathers were all American. They had all married beautiful, blonde women.

Much of the time, the children and the fathers played an ancient Karelian game called kontupallo. Everyone...except one or two players...had a square cardboard base and a cricket paddle. In the center, one or two players, depending on the size of the group, were "it"and had tennis or rubber softballs. Their goal was to hit one of the players on base with a ball, so that the second player would become "it" and they would get the base and paddle. The paddle was for defense, a player could bat the ball away. A secondary theme was to keep the ball in motion with bats so that the "it" [oddly appropriate as there is no gender in Finnish pronouns] would not be able to throw it at anyone. In addition, if an "it" saw a base unattended as a player dived to bat a ball, or swapped bases out of ennui, then they would also get a base and a paddle. Why would someone do this for six hours straight? Miksi? Koska tanaan lapset ovat heidan ystavien kanssa.

I helped baked Finnish rolls. What you do is take a chunk of dough, make it into a long cylinder, cut it into slices, and put the protorolls on cookie sheets. Then you let someone else bake them.

For dinner, the American men built a huge bonfire, which attracted a number of small children. The custom is to take a burning stick out of the fire, wave it around, and push it into someone else's eye, while your dad isnt watching. But a superceding unusual custom is to roast hot dogs (kuumat koirat), marshmallows, carrots, rolls, pickles, whatever is handy on sticks over the fire. "Great buns," said someone. "Kiitos," said a Finnish roll-maker, who winked at me. "We could have made them long instead of round," I commented. "That is true," she said, thinking. "But you know the Finnish way is to slit the hotdog into 2 parts, and then put it on a round bun with cheese, no mustard or catchup."

In the morning, an American husband stood with a couple buckets of mollusks. "Went down and got these on the beach this morning. Razor clams, these are great."

"Oooh," said Erin, looking at a clam with his doomed head hanging out.

"We got these plastic clam tubes, you see a clam popping its head up, you push the tube down before he gets away. I haven't done this before. Tommy uses a shovel. Gotta wait on Tommy to show me how to do this." Next time we passed, Tommy was there with his knife. I'd met him on the dock, a quiet man who swore there were catfish in Long Lake. "You slit it open like this. This stuff here it doesn't matter so much, but you need to get the guts out." He washed the guts out under running water.

+++

As you go east from the Pacific, water vapor changes to rain with the lowered pressures at increasing elevations, causing the depletion of available water for more rain. You get high enough, it turns to snow. Several weeks ago, I was driving past Cascade Locks (for which the Cascades are named) in pouring rain, looked up, and it was snowing above me, on the great hills of mountains that flank the freeway. The change of state phenomenon explains how in the morning, you can be in doug fir and ferns at the Starvation Creek Trailhead with a bunch of third graders and then at noon drive east for 25 miles, get in a The Dalles School District bus with a bunch of 7^th graders, drive over the bridge to Washington, and be in a dismal dead grassland steppe, all at the very same elevation. The atmospheric systems usually run out of steam before they reach Dallesport.

Starvation Creek is named for an event in the winter of....sometime early in the 1900s...where a Christmas train bound for Portland rammed into a 25 foot snowbank and was stuck for weeks. Passengers were reduced to eating several cases of oysters, two sides of beef, and some rabbits that the conductor found in the baggage car, and they had to gather wood when the coal ran out. Eventually someone came from Hood River on skis, brought them a hog, and paid passengers to dig their way out.

"Hey look!" I said to Keenan.

"Wow!" said Keenan. "A millipede!"

Children clustered around. Joseph, the star hitter from Hattenhauer Dist., pulled out his disposable camera.

"I saw it first!" said Keenan.

"Joseph, stand back or it will blur," warned Joseph's dad, his "Born To Raise Hell" and serpent tattoos glowing in the morning grey haze.

"Hey there's a bird down there. Will it fly again?"

"No, " answered a mother. "It will probably die. Leave it alone."

A local bearded tree hugger called Blue Heron and Ranger John from the Army Corps of Engineers met us at the entrance to Hess Lake Park. The lake is clear and natural, formed by rising water levels due to persistent damming of the Columbia and by a railroad grade being put at its east end. The Corps brought in the willows and hand watered them, but the cottonwoods came in on their own.

"You never know what you will find at this lake."

"Did someone really get a 4 pound bass?" someone asked.

"Indeed they did. I got a picture of it." Ranger John went on. "Someone stole a car once, stripped it down, dumped what was left in this lake. Secluded here. Someone found it while they were fishing, sheriff came and pulled it out."

We split into groups and looked for interesting ecology.

"Found a rattlesnake here, little one, cute as can be, all rolled up," he said, passing a pine grove planted by the Corps. "Aaron, you need to not move those rocks, you never know what might be behind them.

"I go deer hunting with my dad, we see a lot of rattlesnakes," answered Aaron. Aaron, thin and blond and with two earrings on his left ear, his baseball cap on sideways, was at the crossroads of culture.

"There's a dead bird," said Heather.

"How observant!" John praised. "Yes, it looks like a hawk got its kill there. I'd say a pigeon."

We moved on up to the dry basalt ledges, or "dalles."

"Here is something! See all those bones in this cave?"

The children, now as tall as me, fingered the bones.

"Hawk. Something caught him, brought him up to his den. I'd say a porcupine."

+++

In relatively wet weather, even when dry, there was a little waterway between our house and the split level next door. The first people, quite literally, who lived there were the Williams. The second people were the Schlesingers, who were from Wisconsin. "He was transferred here," went the story. No one in their right mind would have moved for any other reason from Wisconsin to Alabama. The Schlesingers had older teenagers, one named Mark played football. But the Williams had a boy my age named Lennox, whom they called "Len." For a while, he was my pal. We could step right over the tiny brook.

We boys lived in the woods. You could get to the woods by crossing Mountain View Drive from my house, and going into the vacant lot by the house where the people whose name I forget who had the Spitz lived. The word "acres" was an understatement. The woods were owned by the Alabama Power Company, at in our vicinity, and went on down to Rocky Ridge Road. Then it continued south over Double Oak Mountain, where there was a state park, which at the time still had its WPA charm. The woods, in fact, extended continuously, though cut by roads, through most of mountainous northern Alabama, surrounding towns and cities which cowered and simpered in its greatness. For most people regarding Alabama in the '50s and '60s, it is not hard to imagine towns cowering and simpering for political and social reasons, so perhaps this vision will be all the easier. But we boys did not cower, because we were the woods, as much as the pine and the oaks and the maples of the great southern mixed forest, as much as the sandstones and shales on which nurtured the trees.

An intricate, unmarked trail system pierced the forest like the burn patterns which are undeniable evidence of a UFO. Often a clearing held a tree fort, made of branches and plywood. Who had built the trails, the forts, the bridges over creeks? No one knew. It could have been the Cherokees. I was interested in history and urban planning...I watched westerns and cut plans out of Better Homes and Gardens, glueing them on posterboard to make an island village. Every clearing, every thin lichen covered outcrop on the shallow mountain soil, was a town, the trails were great roads, the tiny creeks were huge rivers.

I heard on the news how in the Rockies they were searching for a boy lost in the woods. "How could a boy get lost in the woods?" I asked my parents, confused. You just walked back the way you came.

Even families walked in the woods. In my highschool days, I'd walk in bass weejuns, careful not to tear my hose. When I got to college, I saw my first pair of hiking boots. "Why would anyone have hiking boots?" I would ask silently. What was wrong with Bass weejuns?

When I moved out of Alabama at seventeen, life would turn and fade from the mountains until then always on the horizon. After the college Christmases and summers, I would illogically turn northeast to Chatanooga instead of Nashville, driving at dawn on the freeway past Valley Head and Mentone, with the early mist and the sun eastward over the same great woods. Once, I stopped to get gas in Tennessee, lingering by the pumps in the wind.

"Ma'am," the attendant said grinning, "The wind sure is playin' the devil with your hair."

Now, I hear great commemoration of the strife in Alabama, but I remember so little of it.

++++

"She loved cooking and her Jeep"

---Obituary of a Sherman County woman killed in an accident.

At eleven this morning, I lounged against the side of the Eastwind Drive Inn on in Cascade Locks, waiting for three milkshakes: chocolate, cherry, and butterscotch. A big man walked up, perhaps in his late 50s with a weathered face and a turquoise and black plaid 100% Cotton shirt.

"Can I get three bacon cheeseburgers?" he asked.

"Can I get your name?" answered the waitress, a thin young woman with short hair, coal black like a burnt snag and 6 silver earrings. She was wearing an orange T-shirt that read "Stevenson Pump Repair."

"Jack," said Jack, and walked off towards the single restroom.

I picked up the shakes and walked past Jack's maroon Chevy. A young blonde sat aloof in the front seat, wearing the lowest cut black top I had ever seen in public. At first I thought Jack was a shameful old lech, but then I saw another person in black in back, a young man from the Portland Underground, rocking back and forth. BOOM BOOM!!! went the car speakers.

As I drove off I looked at the bumper. On one side of the Oregon license was an American flag. On the other was a sticker that read "Don't honk, I'm reloading."

+++++

Now, my children faithfully turn on the oldies station when they enter the red Windstar.

"Not your children's station!" is the slogan. How true. It's difficult, but not impossible, to find eight year olds with children.

And Windy has stormy eyes

That flash at the sound of lies...

And Windy has wings to fly

Across the clouds....

"The Oregon Fruit Growers Association is now hiring," goes the ad. "$7.10 an hour, great pay and a chance to work with a great bunch of people."

"When I'm 14," says Ian, "I'm going to get a job with them."

The pickers are in town. They are moving into the tiny cottages that the growers have, setting up tents in the backyards of the friends and relatives who stayed, swamping Albertsons, which has moved the now 6 foot high Mexican pastry rack to the front of the store. Pickers must buy curved silver buckets and harnesses to put on their fronts, and the display is also in the front of the store. A group of four men try them on.

"Aqui es un bueno cubo...."

Eleven men squeeze into a red Toyota pickup with California plates, the topper like a stream culvert.

"Lunchtime?" laughs an Albertson's employee leaving work.

In the gym, two muscular college students recognized each other. The woman was smaller.

"How was your first year? Doing anything this summer?," he asked.

"Great. Not much. But I've got a job with the cherries doing quality control."

"I did that last summer, but I had a job driving them in on a truck. Quality control, you never even see the trees."