Oct. 21, 2021

Schoolchildren swam in sunlit waters Saturday.

Sunbeams were pouring in through two sets of south-facing atrium windows at the town swimming pool, spreading out in long shards of light along the pale blue bottom. The windows and the bright water were evidence of brilliant architecture in a town where architecture is an afterthought when it is thought of at all.

A 40-something, dark-haired visitor from El Paso was checking out the pool, surprised it was as old as he was, and not looking run-down. He didn’t see the broken ventilation system, sections of new flooring pulling up and faulty seals leaking moisture into its brilliant windows.

Our town is on the downside of fortune but when the sun is shining, we abound in glories.

The cloud of winter dropped on Aug. 2, the day after the fair. Summer’s longest stretch of sunshine, combined with the town’s biggest party, exploded the COVID pandemic. Active cases climbed near 60, including dozens who’d received the vaccination. Blame was spreading faster than the virus.

It was the fault of the fair. It was the fault of the bars. It was the fault of that hippie chick who knew she was sick but went out anyway, hanging close with dozens of her innocent friends. Moms yet. On the heels of blame came shame and whispers of who was sick and why they hadn’t notified their friends.

It was our retribution, including on ourselves, for a week of fun, neighborliness and good-feeling. Our town of Presbyterians was becoming Israel bearing the trials of our faith in a wrathful god. Is it any wonder that our ancestors, in the grip of plagues and war and other miseries, created idols in the heavens? What ever on earth was deserving of worship?

We are the smartest of the apes, separated from our hairy kin only by a veneer of customs we call civilization. Yet every time we puncture its thin crust we are stunned. Alaskans, nearly first in the nation to receive the vaccine, recently led the nation with its infection rate.

Is it any wonder?

In Postcard, Alaska, we live the myth that we are tougher and smarter than our countrymen down south. We embrace the myth, then we demolish it every day. It’s funny and pitiful and deserving of mockery.

This week the number of known infections in town dropped back to zero. Masks started disappearing and social gatherings – a storytelling event, a chess tournament – are back on the calendar. Shall we roll the dice again? How about another spin on the COVID rollercoaster? The people at the medical clinic must hate the rest of us by now, we with our faith in luck and the fates and our own exceptionalism.

But the Greeks in the heavens watch us and delight in the show.  It’s one they wrote. A comedy full of errors. A tragedy born of hubris. Our lives and masterful creations shot through by a tiny, invisible germ.

June 27, 2021.

A dozen or so of us gathered Saturday afternoon at the American Legion Hall to say goodbye to Judd.

Mark and Julie Cozzi, who looked after Judd in the last months of his life, put together the event: cold cuts, salads and a table full of desserts. A bowl of puffed cheese curls that were Judd’s favorite. A couple of his small, stone carvings and a photo of Judd with his sons.

Billed as a simple gathering of friends, it couldn’t have been any simpler. Mary Manual stopped in. So did Joe Orlando and the Heywoods.

I told the Cozzis what impressed me about the man is that he came here in his 50s to take on the job of carving boulders. Most people who come here at that age are looking for a vacation cabin or a position involving a rocking chair.

The chatter was all about Mullady’s last jab at authority. He left a giant boulder near Fifth Avenue apparently in defiance of former manager Debra Schnabel. Judd also had once mixed it up with the bald eagle foundation over the price of one of his relief carvings, a white marble eagle now on the west lawn of the Soboleff-McRea apartments.

Mullady had an ornery side, which is maybe why he fit in here.

Later in the day, the Fjordland skipper rowed a dory carrying his daughter to her beachside nuptials at Viking Cove. There was a big crowd at the mansion that’s become an event rental, in violation of the code that established the neighborhood as rural residential with cottage industry.

The neighbors and the event hall owners are duking it out, Haines-style, in the newspaper. It might have been sorted out years ago but the planning commission can’t ever seem to stand up to its own rules. In the absence of enforcement or peace-making, neighbors go to war against each other.

Down at the harbor, the town’s biggest developer is building a block wall out the lookout window of the Lighthouse Restaurant, destroying what was once the prettiest view from any dining table in town.

Over in Skagway, there’s a drag show on Broadway this weekend in celebration of Pride Month. People will celebrate their differences. It’s only 15 miles and a universe away.

May 20, 2021.

Some years we have spring.

Some years, winter just rolls right into May. Spring went the way of the Chilkoot eulachon, wherever it is these things go.

Some eulachon went to the far side of the Chilkat where they’re impossible to harvest. Historic eulachon fishing at 4 Mile and 7 Mile was obliterated by the airport expansion 30 years ago. Nature doesn’t always bounce back.

The Tlingits took great precautions preparing for eulachon. Don’t fish too soon. Don’t disturb the waters. No dogs or menstruating women in the water, Tlingit elder Austin Hammond would say.

Eulachon oil, Tlingit penicillin, was not to be messed with.

Whites get as cranked anticipating spring, with its promise of staving off insanity. People start talking about it in March, as the daylight grows, while we’re still deep in rugged winters.

Maybe this year too much talk jinxed the season, spooked it like a “scout” eulachon turning around near the mouth of the Chilkoot, “No, not this year. Conditions aren’t quite right.”

It’s May 20 and there’s still ice on Lily Lake. The tulips have been up for days, but they’re not opening.

Some who endured our winter won’t do it again. “I’m tired of spending my life waiting for better weather,” said one person who is heading south. Friends and future acquaintances in Santa Barbara and Bend and Bellingham will hear stories of unimaginable, dreary darkness and those will be accurate.

Who can blame a person for leaving? Life is short and winter is long. The expression is carpe diem, not carpe nox.

If ever wanting for a sandbox, a Haines kid could have one now.

Besides death and destruction, December’s slides delivered mountains of sand to people downslope. Who knew our mountains were made of the stuff? There’s a whole new beach of it just upstream of Chilkoot River bridge. What to do with it all? Make cement? Plant carrots, one friend said. They love sand.

If the sun shows up, the summer could produce a bumper crop bigger than carrots. A half-dozen plant sales testify to the staying power of the gardening craze that mushroomed with last year’s lockdown. The microbes in dirt, scientists say, are nature’s upper. Dirty hands make a happy head. Maybe it’s some evolutionary connection to survival.

“Plant potatoes,” the local forester advised me 25 years ago while we were walking a patch of forest I’d just bought.

Public works guys repainted the crosswalks on Main Street this week, as they do on this week every year. And they drove the street sweeper around, brushing a winter’s accumulation of gravel off the shoulders. In a more ordinary year, we’d be a month out of the international bike relay and bicycles would be everywhere.

Like home renovation, the bike industry was a winner in the COVID lottery. During last year’s lockdown and social distancing, people bought them like never before. “It was crazy,” the local bike mechanic told me. Demand swamped supply.

That’s not a bad thing. Facebook is full of memes about “not going back to the status quo” after the plague. COVID provided a breather from the rat race. Rats discovered that spending time with family, sleeping in, or riding a bike was more enriching than racing.

The race can rest in peace, they say.

April 29, 2021.

A camper pitched a pup tent at the state campground at Portage Cove this week.

The tent was down by Thursday, when heavy, cold rains came and swarms of schoolchildren made their annual pilgrimage to the cove beach to see tiny critters crawling in the low-tide ooze.

The students learn that if you’re stubborn enough, your shell is hard enough, and your constitution is engineered to withstand months of freezing temperatures, you can burrow down in the mud deep enough here to survive and see another summer – or at least some warmer days – eventually arrive.

Across the street from the beach a once-pretty Fort Seward sign has been shedding letters.

The “o” is falling out of “Fort” and a hole remains where someone pried off a carved, banner design that said, “Haines, Alaska.” At the base of the sign, decay spells out “National Hist ric  andmark.”

The sign was crafted by Bill Heritage, a kind and quiet soul who donated his carpentry around town. When they’re not overlooked, acts of generosity can be so soon forgotten here. Bill’s sign deserves better.

Near the ash-black snow piles on the Parade Grounds, I ran into an old friend who talked of pulling up stakes after 25 years. After wrecking its waterfront with empty parking lots, the town will become an ore terminal and a mine, and all the fish will die, he said.

But it was April talking.

A proposition to make the town a sanctuary city for guns has roiled city hall. Entire battles of the American Revolution were fought with fewer guns than you could find in the houses on a single street here, but apparently our armaments aren’t quite secure enough.

The proposition was put forward by a newcomer to local politics not yet aware that late spring is trench warfare circa 1917. Keep your head down because someone opposite you is just waiting to blow it off. As the arrival of newcomers never ends, the shootings go on forever.

Barnaby Dow, one of the better reporters who worked here, called it the “Haines Hate Gun,” describing it as a weapon that rotated freely and found its victims almost indiscriminately. “Who is the Haines Hate Gun pointed at this week?” he’d say.

Throw real guns in the mix and the potential for stirring up civil hatreds blooms like so many crocuses breaking the surface of our cold, wet soil. By the time they blossom into lifelong resentments, the sun will come out and we’ll all forget what it was we were thinking at the time.

It’s April talking, and May not coming soon enough.

March 25, 2021.

In these parts, a heavy snowfall never ends in sunshine, which explains why the town took an unofficial holiday yesterday when our most recent one did.

Neighbors went skiing or snowshoeing. Folks launched boats in Portage Cove. Friends posted blue-sky landscape photos on Facebook.

Sunshine and fluffy snow coincide in California and Utah, not coastal Alaska.

Former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond once famously granted a holiday to state workers in Juneau when the sun finally came out there one spring. They deserved it. How anyone survives a winter there is a mystery to me, and I survived four of them.

A Juneau winter is like childbirth. After you get through it, you have no way to explain how you did. Worse yet, its painful memories subside enough in summer that many survivors are willing to endure it again, and the bleak cycle continues.

Our winter would have been enough without a summer of rain and a year of COVID and a disastrous tourist season and a fatal landslide and millions of dollars of damage to roads and homes and personal property.

It’s been a rough ride even without a mad president and a violent attack on the U.S. Capitol.

Our snow tally stands at 204 inches in town, a lot though still less than the all-time record, 360 inches that crushed us in winter 2011-12. Between all those snow events that started Nov. 1 came a lot of rain and gray skies, and not much sun.

So yesterday we celebrated sunshine, and about six weeks from now, if everything goes right, we’ll celebrate warmth. What people celebrate in Phoenix and San Diego, god only knows.

March 5, 2021.

Anyone having trouble grasping the concept of a “carbon footprint” should burn firewood that was a tree growing in 1771.

We’ll be doing that.

I’ve been out scavenging firewood from December’s fatal landslide. Acres of it are strewn around Chilkoot Inlet. It’s mostly north-facing hemlock, dense, heavy, old stuff. With a magnifying glass, you can count more than 250 rings on a log just 12 inches in diameter.

Because it’s green and wet and has been growing for more than two centuries, an 18-inch-long round of it weighs 50 pounds. A stick of it will dry for years before it’s ready for the woodstove, the crudest use for such a wondrous creation of nature.

Robin Lee Graham, who sailed solo around the world as a teenager in the 1960s and became a logger briefly afterwards, said he quickly tired of falling trees and took up furniture-building to better honor the wood.

Dick Carlson, a lifelong logger who cut big timber before the invention of the chainsaw, told me he always wondered as he was taking down a tree, “Can they feel this?” Carlson joined the Sierra Club when he quit working in the woods in his 70s.

My favorite homage to the forest was the practice of a Tenakee homesteader so upset about clearcutting that for years she used only a bow saw to cut her firewood. She earned her warm house as much as anyone does anymore.

Trees felled by the wind are known as “windfall,” a word that also describes a fortune that comes as a surprise perhaps because early loggers were so grateful when the elements performed the more dangerous part of their jobs.

I’m thinking of what these logs would be called. A chunk of collapsing mountainside bedrock brought them down, killing two young people here, displacing an entire neighborhood and delivering to us tons of free firewood. Our lives are full of such ironies but while gathering that wood it’s hard not to feel like a vulture, capitalizing on someone else’s misfortune.

A local mill operator told me there was an effort under way to use some of the logs in a memorial to the victims of the slide. Such a consecration might be in order, a way to honor all the living things we lost when our landscape shifted a tiny bit.

Meanwhile, I am sharpening my saw and strapping on snowshoes and sledding chunks of these magnificent trees up to the roadside.

Feb. 7, 2021.

It’s February and Howsers is still stocking its shelves with egg nogg. As the only purpose of the stuff is to give comfort, the dairy section says everything about the town’s mood: Still traumatized.

There’s stand-up paddleboard yoga at the swimming pool and its board of directors say the fair will return this year, but we’re still more than a smidge off kilter.

The reason is the people can’t get together. We talk a good line about rugged individualism but getting together is what this town is all about. It explains all our bars and churches and events like “River Talk,” where people drop $7 to hear the guy down the street go on about his first marriage.

It also explains recall petitions, screwball public meetings and crazy letters-to-the-editor. We talk mostly to our friends until together we convince ourselves of all kinds of “hold-my-beer” foolishness. Talk gets things done, even things not worth doing.

My favorite klatch was Pete Sterrantino, Bill O’Neill and Richard Kohart. Twenty or so years ago, these crustaceans held down a table at Mountain Market and could talk you in or out of any notion you might entertain.

They were a rogue council of elders and after a session with them a person thought more favorably about whatever drudgery occupied them before they decided to go for a coffee break. I suspect Mary Jean was paying these three on the side to cut down on the number of free refills.

As a new reporter in Haines, I had zero interest in high school basketball games, the town’s No. 1 winter attraction. Then I learned the action on the court was half or less the reason people went. Hearing new gossip was the main draw. I could usually find at least a couple stories tame enough to write up in the newspaper.

Monday nights at the Halsingland Hotel were another rich vein for news. Owner Arne Olsson would buy rounds of duck farts for the house, then start musing about town happenings and eventually get to some little-known skullduggery down at city hall.

Early on he succeeded in getting me drunk enough that I couldn’t remember the revelations the next day so I started taking notes on matchbooks in the men’s room during pee breaks.

Small talk is big entertainment in a town this tiny and it goes way beyond keeping up with Duly Noted. When local women held “Stitch and Bitch” nights, a bunch of us others started “Drink and Think,” a gathering that became louder and more revealing as jugs of wine went down.

The morning after one of these nights, a woman I was sweet on stopped at my cabin to apologize for what she’d said to me the previous night and I had no idea what she was talking about. That’s good value for a night out around here.

Jan. 21., 2021

“Unwarmed by any sunset light

The gray day darkened into night

A night made hoary with the swarm

And whirl-dance of the blinding storm.”

• John Greenleaf Whittier, “Snowbound”

Haines, AK – The sun disappeared between Jan. 5 and Jan. 18,  with not even much light in the sky to speak of. The rain rained. The clouds clouded. The fog fogged.

We started putting our bottle of vitamin D pills on the counter where we wouldn’t forget taking them with breakfast. Even the cat became edgy. Making dinner, cleaning the house, just rising from bed in the morning required some ambition.

We’d been warned. A satellite photo of it coming to Alaska that circulated on Facebook described “Largest Low Pressure System in History Heading Toward Alaska.” The curse of the scientific age is we see our disasters coming at a distance, stealing from them the element of surprise.

Understanding prevents us from mythologizing events that should rightly become legends.

Dan Henry of Haines tells a story of being in Petersburg or Wrangell toward the end of a month of continuous rain. The story went that Dan stepped into a bar where most of the citizenry was by then holed up. All inside were drunk, but silent, experiencing a dread that was palpable but unspoken. To utter one extra word would light a fuse on a giant powder keg about to blow the town apart, in Dan’s telling.

The story may have been apocryphal, but it stuck in memory. In terms of capturing a mood, Dan’s hard to beat. His tale of an encounter with the “hairy man” of the Pacific Northwest while backpacking in an Oregon wilderness is why campfires are lit.

I’ve asked people who were here for the 10 inches of rain that fell in two days Dec. 3-4, the rains that brought down a mountain and killed two people, what the deluge felt like. Surprisingly, no one remembers it as particularly fearsome. Perhaps we become inured to continuous rain like soldiers in war zones become numb to the sound of distant shelling.

Rainstorms and their attendant foreboding make great art. They set ablaze pages in Ken Keysey’s “Sometimes A Great Notion” and Pierre Van Paason’s “Earth Could Be Fair.” Incrementally creepy days presaging an apocalyptic storm comprise most of “The Wave,” Peter Weir’s award-winning film, a noire classic.

There’s a reason the most cliché opening line in literature is “It was a dark and stormy night” and there’s a reason we choose to live in a place where those nights are plenty. It says something about us and what we embrace.

It is about who we are but in a way we don’t talk about.

January 13, 2021

Haines, AK – We are deep in the January thaw, the false spring and cruel trick that make winters in Southeast Alaska long and difficult.

Snow melts back. Temperatures warm up, sometimes into the 50s. We stop wearing our heavy coats. Then, after our guards are lowered, winter lashes back. We’ve had entire weeks in April colder than ones in January of the same year.

The late Miranda Stuart of Haines, who lived in Nome before settling permanently here, summed it up well: “I’m used to spring break-up. I’m just not used to it three or four time every winter.”

The changes it forces in our routines and wardrobes, the messes it makes of our skiing and ice-skating, the hazards it brings as snow turns into ice, the gray pall that typically accompanies it, the January thaw is practically all bad and there’s no getting used to it.

This winter there’s something else we’re not getting used to: The scar on Mount Riley, the very wide, very white stripe where a chunk of mountain came down, taking with it the lives of two very kind, very promising young people.

You can’t look out on Portage Cove without seeing the slide and you can’t see the slide without imagining the horror faced by its victims in their final moments. It’s a mental image we can’t revisit but we also can’t avoid, at least not until the slide is replanted with trees or otherwise disappears.

The December landslides haunt our town because they traumatized so many of us. I was out of state when they occurred so I escaped the initial trauma and for that I’m grateful. But the panic was palpable when I returned here two days later. Friends were shaken.

Being forced or asked to leave your home because nature has unleashed its mighty power is a genuine fright, one that makes us acknowledge that we don’t have a tight grip over our lives. It’s unsettling to experience personally the truth that there are deadly forces beyond our control and some of them are unpredictable.

I was housesitting a Fort Seward attic apartment in October 1999 during one of our great storms. The ferocity of the winds and water battering the top of that old building seemed biblical, I remember saying at the time.

It’s no wonder that the Bible Belt rests in the heart of the Great Plains, home of the tornado. A giant, speeding funnel cloud coming at you with a force that could throw you into the next county would tend to work better than a thousand Sunday sermons for investing in a person faith in a higher power.

Consider that for several days after Mount Riley’s fatal slide half the residents of downtown were advised to “listen” to the hillsides above their homes to check if they weren’t coming down on them and their loved ones. That was terror. And the feelings that at least some of those residents experienced was trauma, defined by Webster’s as “a painful emotional experience, or shock, often producing a lasting psychic effect.”

Bruce Springsteen said earthquakes were a big reason he returned to New Jersey after years of the good life in California. Not even The Boss could keep the ground from shaking. A lifelong friend who lived 20 years in Santa Cruz, Calif. gave up all that sunshine this year and moved back to small-town Wisconsin after wildfires forced her to evacuate her idyllic cabin amid the redwoods.

In Haines, more than in many places, we build our own homes, to our likes and specifications. Due to months of bad weather, our homes become refuges from the inhospitable world outside.

That we can still be vulnerable while nestled snugly inside them is a terrible thought, one that like January thaws, we might never get used to.

Nov. 7, 2020

Bisbee, Ariz. – The coyote gets flattened in the road every time while the road-runner motors about unscratched. Loony Tunes got that much right. Arizona’s next millionaire will be the one who turns a buck on road-kill coyotes and skunks.

It could happen. There are entrepreneurs here. They advertise “Snake Avoidance Training for Dogs” at Sahuarita. They hawk condos in Phoenix. At Wyatt Earp’s Oriental Saloon in Tombstone, they charge $6 for a draft of Bud Light.

Arizona is a sales pitch and an adventure park, with lots of empty spaces in between.

As in Hawaii, a visitor wonders just why more people don’t live here. Sure, it’s boiling in summer and drinking water can cost more than soda pop, but that’s small change for eternal sunshine and blue skies. A Michigan Militiaman who moved here might buy an old motel on Route 66, find a nice lady friend, and forget all about kidnapping the governor.

I’m here on presidential election night very deliberately to slip into a claw-foot tub at the Copper Queen Hotel in Bisbee, a hippie enclave nearly a mile high and eight miles from Mexico. The Queen is a fine downtown refuge, old enough to have ghost stories, dented and stained enough to be cheap but still refined enough to offer a covered, patio bar out front and rocking chairs on its third-floor balcony.

A gulch that looks up at bare, ochre peaks and blue skies, Bisbee gives the effect of a mountain fortress and oasis. On its narrow, shadowy streets Poncho Villa and Emiliano Zapata may have stopped to share a drink and talk revolution.

Bisbee was the first city in Arizona to recognize same-sex marriage. It’s festooned with rainbow flags and peace signs. Hanging from the highest flagpole on the entrance to town is a banner reading “Black Lives Matter.” Sixty percent of the town’s workforce has been to college. A good liberal could become stuck here for 20 years or a lifetime before realizing what happened.

The town’s fancy buildings are owed to copper. Between 1880 and 1974, eight billion pounds of it were clawed from these hills, including from the Lavender Pit, a 1,000-foot hole on the south side of town that so resembles a canyon that RVers pay to spend a night next to it. The miners moved out when the fast money dried up, and the hippies and artists moved in.

Slow money won the game, as it always does. Now people pay dearly for a miner’s bungalow on these hills, and weekenders from Tucson crowd its galleries and tasting rooms, shopping at Vavoom or getting their fortunes told by Madam Molly. Inlaid tiles at its entrance spell out J.C. Penney on Main Street, but Penney’s is gone and an eclectic fashion shop has replaced it.

Bisbee is a coveted address. It was named Best Historic Small Town by USA Today and Best Small Town in the West in 2016. Those accolades rankle the dime-store cowboys 20 miles away in Tombstone, who re-enact the Gunfight at the OK Corral for a living on an asphalt main street covered in gravel that completes the preserved-in-amber effect.

They sell the past in Trump’s Tombstone and the future in Biden’s Bisbee. Something for everyone, then we vote with our wallets and our ballots.

I finish writing a couple letters in the tub and turn on the TV around 11 p.m. reporting Trump is winning. But I wake up in a blue state, where Biden wins, recreational pot wins, Democrat Mark Kelly’s victory gives his party control of both U.S. Senate seats, and the rich are going to pay more school taxes.

For the Democratic swing, pundits credit suburban moms in Phoenix, Latinos, and retirees from California but one can’t help but wonder if Trump’s personal attacks on John McCain didn’t also turn it.

New U.S. Senator Kelly is the husband of Gabby Giffords, the Arizona congresswoman who was shot and critically wounded after Sarah Palin created a map with a bulls-eye on Giffords’ district.

Palin, who apparently believed she’d found her people in Arizona, starting building a 8,000-square-foot mansion near Phoenix in 2015. A unnamed Canadian bought the place last December, unfinished, for $6 million.

Oct. 30, 2020

Council Grove, Kansas – The American West has moved several times.

During the colonial era, the “West” started at the Appalachian Mountains. A hundred years later, it started at the Mississippi. These days, according to demographers, the West starts in Colorado.

To the eye, the West begins where the people run out and the land begins, which might as well be here. The Flint Hills of eastern Kansas rise just high enough for a person to take in the size and emptiness of this country. It’s daunting, inspiring and reassuring: just land as far as the eye can see.

You can’t look at such places without wondering why some of the world’s dispossessed peoples – the Gypsies, perhaps, or the Jews – couldn’t just have a big chunk of this to themselves, ending centuries of strife over some barren homeland elsewhere.

The “grove” in this town’s name describes the last hardwood trees for hundreds of miles. The larger oaks became gathering places and unofficial “post offices,” where pioneers in covered wagons would post notes as messages for those who followed.

Wagon trains stocked up in Council Grove, the point-of-no-return of the Santa Fe Trail, the last provisions, the last timber for making wagon repairs and the last refuge from Indian attacks before the 650-mile push on to Santa Fe.

From here, settlers bumped through seas of grass up to 10 feet tall, populated by tens of millions of buffalo, plus elk, antelope, deer, bobcats, prairie chickens, coyotes, foxes, badgers, and myriad birds. The ocean of grass extended over 170 million acres in what are today 17 states between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains.

Nineteen miles south of Council Grove is the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, 11,000 acres or about 4 percent of the original prairie. It was created in 1996 as a private-public partnership, partly because locals opposed creation of a national park.  (Similarly, locals in Haines, Alaska in the late 1970s opposed a national eagle preserve in their town while the National Park Service was rebuilding neighboring Skagway, Alaska into a tourist mecca.)

Tallgrass prairie preserves have been created in Illinois, Oklahoma, and Manitoba, aiming to recreate the wild landscape the settlers gazed out on before cattle and the plow broke the land.

Council Grove looked deserted when I checked in at the Cottage House Hotel on a Sunday evening in late October. The three-story Stella movie house was boarded up and the historic Morris County State Bank building, a stately brick structure at the town’s main intersection, was advertising for a tenant.

The temperature was 25 F. and snow was predicted, an early storm. The announcer giving the farm report on the radio talked about its impact on winter forage. The lobby in the 153-year-old lodge was quiet as a crypt and already decorated for the holidays, including a Christmas tree. The night clerk gave me a curious look.

“What brings you here?” she asked in a tone that suggested I’d taken a wrong turn. I told her I came to see the tallgrass preserve. She betrayed no reaction. When I commented that the place seemed empty, she reassured me that the inn’s half-dozen adjoining motel rooms were full. Mostly deer hunters and construction workers, she said.

The mythical region of the country known as the Great Plains starts west of here but you wouldn’t know it. In a windy snowstorm this landscape looks as unforgiving as any, with little shelter except a few embankments where cattle huddle to escape the wind. The heart of the Plains is also the red heart of America, a straight, deep red line that in the 2012 presidential election extended unbroken from Mexico to Canada.

Although signs advertise its place on the National Register of Historic Places, Council Grove with its shuttered buildings and bitter October weather looked years away from celebrating a Tallgrass Prairie Festival, or welcoming anyone from outside to do much of anything here.

Oct. 25, 2020

Jefferson City, Mo. – There’s a black man on the main block of High Street, this capital city’s main street, and he is bawling. Everyone can hear him.

He’s a good-looking man with a kind face, maybe in his 30s. He is approaching strangers, pleading: “My daddy just died and I need $28 train fare to go to his funeral. Can you help me? That lady over there just gave me $5. Can you help me pleeeeze? I mean no disrespect to you. I mean no harm. I just need a little money.”

When he is declined, the man howls in anguish. Then he apologizes and looks around and continues to weep and to sob. The man is making the shoppers on High Street uncomfortable.

A white man who looks to be the proprietor of the Sweet Smoke barbecue joint comes out the door to give the sobbing man a hard look. A squat, white couple walking toward the sobbing man look up, then turn and head the opposite direction.

Two muscular, young white men are driving down High Street in a full-size Chevy pick-up, Trump-Pence flags and American flags flying from the truck bed. They return every so often, revving the truck’s engine as they pass by. Then they come back with more pickup trucks, and more flags. The men are making the shoppers uncomfortable.

This riverside settlement was named for Thomas Jefferson, the great dreamer and revolutionary who raped his black slave woman while establishing the pursuit of happiness as the unequivocal American right.

Jefferson paid for Lewis and Clark to pole up the Missouri River past this spot. He bought half the American West on the notion that if everyone could only get enough land and set up a small farm, maybe the nation would be alright. It wasn’t.

Jefferson died and 35 years later Missouri split down the middle during the Civil War. The governor took his papers and set up a pro-South capital to the west, in Booneville. The Unionists held the government buildings at Jefferson City. Citizen armies from each side staged raids on the other’s capital and on each other, more than 1,000 battles and skirmishes.

Two blocks away from the crying black man, a fat, white bride is celebrating in Carnahan Memorial Garden beside the governor’s mansion. Her white gown and veil make her larger yet, a billowing snowball of a young woman surrounded by equally oversized kin. A thin, red-haired man in the wedding party looks awkward and out of place.

A wedding photographer takes the square-shouldered groom a few blocks downhill to historic Jefferson Landing, posing him on a stairway there, and on a brick-cobbled street beside the railroad tracks. The groom looks like a trucker or a farmer, square in shape, difficult to push around.

The bride is bouncing down the garden’s stone steps, laughing, happy as only a fat bride on her wedding day can be.

The cashier across the street at the High-Rise Bakery sells a customer a day-old baguette as fresh-baked. The High Rise is closing in minutes, so the customer will get no refund on biting in and finding it stale.

Desire and aggression are this country’s Missouri and Mississippi, pushing along everything in their paths, flooding their banks as a matter of course.  When the floods come,  people will act surprised.  They will say that no one could not have imagined such a thing.

And the fat white bride in the pretty garden on a sunny Saturday laughs like she owns the place.

Oct. 17, 2020

Chicago, Ill. – From near the top of the massive Chicago Public Library building on Michigan Avenue, an edifice that has hosted presidents and potentates, drapes a banner with a portrait of Breanna Taylor, along with this exhortation: Say her name.

Brutal politics and weather mark this town, but so does defiance. Chicago weaned Studs Terkel and John Belushi. Saul Alinsky and Clarence Darrow. Hillary Clinton and Robin Williams and Shel Silverstein and John Prine.

Gritty homelands spawn rebels. The waitress at Lou Mitchell’s bakery cuts me a slab off a loaf of danish and when I tell her it’s too big, she says, “Too late,” and hands it to me anyway.

At Grant Park, a block from the Breanna Taylor banner, our nation’s first black president gave his first acceptance speech 12 years ago.

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible, who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time, who still question the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer,” he said.

So many black people wept for joy.

Union Station and downtown are desolate Thursday morning, the streets and buildings too big for the few people and cars there. On Wabash Avenue, in front of the Trump Tower, two ragged protesters – one from California, the other from New York – man a sidewalk memorial to COVID victims, strewn with dead flowers. I ask to photograph them and they hit me up for a tip.

I pedal over to Jackson and Michigan, the official start of Route 66, the legendary motor trail that led to hope and prosperity in California. There’s no monument, not even a marker. I ask a security guard nearby about the intersection and he tells me that people come and photograph the sign there.

It isn’t easy to find. The size of speed limit sign, it rests about 10 feet up a light pole and says “end Historic Illinois Route 66.” Maybe the Chamber of Commerce didn’t want to celebrate a road leading out of town, so they reversed its direction.

I pedal west out Roosevelt and turn south on Pulaski, passing through the medical district, the university district, and neighborhoods of blacks, Poles, Lithuanians and Mexicans, the simmering American stew pot. It’s 18 miles long and named for the Polish radical and military general who fought with George Washington against the Brits.

The street was Crawford Avenue until 1935, when Chicago’s Polish population hit a high of 450,000 and immigrants boasted their numbers were only bigger in Warsaw. Perhaps one day Chicago’s Chinese population will approach Shanghai’s and the street will be renamed for a future hero who dies trying to bring freedom to China.

Heading southwest out of town, a person can’t help but be haunted by two questions: Where is everyone going? How much stuff do people need?

Some of the answers can be found at the CenterPoint Intermodal Center, a 4,000-acre campus of windowless warehouses for titans like Amazon and Walmart, each looking big enough to house the Pentagon with room to spare. Described as North America’s largest inland port, CenterPoint rises from the cornfields of Elwood like a giant UFO about to devour the town of 2,200.

Twenty years ago, Elwood officials approved an industrial park at the site. What they eventually got was 8,000 trucks per day, harrowing traffic accidents and warehouse jobs that start at $12.50 an hour.

“They weren’t supposed to wreck the lifestyle of everyone here,” village manager Nick Narducci told the Chicago Tribune in 2014. “Give us back our little town the way it was.”

Lawn signs around Elwood already oppose to the next faceless corporate campus: NorthPoint.

In nearby, historic Frankfort, Ill., Judy, the woman working in the town museum says yuppies are looking to move in, but they don’t want to fix up Frankfort’s quaint, Victorian houses, refinish their hardwood floors or caulk their leaded-glass windows. They want to put up brick McMansions with two-car garages like ones that line nearby Highway 45.

Here’s why: The old houses aren’t big enough to hold a modern family’s stuff.

Sept. 29, 2020

Media, Pa. – The green and rolling lowlands surrounding this hilltop, county seat town once were dotted with horse farms and creekside mills.

A march of subdivisions starting more than 100 year ago buried the creeks beneath asphalt and replaced a quiet countryside with the drone of lawnmowers and hum of traffic.

Rose Tree Hunt Club, dating to the 1700s and once boasting a race track and grandstand, became Rose Tree Park in 1975, 120 acres of sloping lawn, enough to escape even the sight of automobiles.

An obscenely large flag pole was erected after Sept. 11 and an inevitable monument to fallen cops and firefighters was added, but the place so far has been too big to ruin. A thousand families could spread out picnic blankets and still be safe from COVID.

Televisions are giant and never turned off here. Trump and Biden ads keep up with ones for cars and drugs with horrific side-effects. The so-called news channels buzz with pundits calling pre-game on tonight’s presidential debate.

Down the street, a friend says she’s ready to turn out her son who subscribes to the president and his madness. She tells him she wants back the money she spent on his college education. In this subdivision of 390 homes, Biden signs are popping up, without a single one for Trump.

The president’s neighborhood is down the road in poorer, angrier Aston, the Sparta to Media’s Athens. A man in a new pickup truck last week cruised its neighborhoods, hoisting a giant flag that said, “Trump in 2020. Fuck Your Feelings.”

My brother, who is slow to anger, was outraged. At 6-4, he doesn’t fear much. He delivers food at night in dangerous neighborhoods unarmed. He delivers in Aston and knows the town’s politics, but what does the flag say to children, he wondered. He wanted a piece of the clown with the flag.

The agitator-in-chief has managed to set the nation on fire and it’s burning in Portland, Louisville and Kenosha, Wis. The embers have spread to places like Aston, Pa. Our arsonist-firefighter now claims he alone can save us from the flames.

It doesn’t matter if the president’s half-billion dollars in loans are backed by the Russian mob and now he’s acting as their agent, the effect is the same. Trump is tearing down our country, its honorable traditions and institutions, one incendiary statement at a time. His mob cheers or hoists flags while progressives despair, or worse yet, cower.

Republicans like George Will and Cindy McCain are supporting Biden because fires they helped start are now threatening the republic. They appeal to a political middle class that gets smaller each year because their creed dismantled an economic middle class that is disappearing. Moderation does not appeal to poor people, or to rich ones.

Meanwhile, Trump has torn the mask off the Republican agenda and taken it to its logical extreme – a monarchy, backed by a gentry. He is buttressed by poor and low-educated whites vulnerable to imagery and oversimplification, and by evangelicals eternally devoted to white, male saviors.

The presidential election may rest on Pennsylvania.

Outside Philadelphia, Trump’s minions are legion, including Republican legislators who required that mailed-in ballots be contained in separate envelopes. So elections officials are discarding legitimate, completed ballots on the grounds that they are “naked.”

Naked is how power is wielded in America now. Naked is the aggression that passes for political discourse.

Sept. 16, 2020

Media, Pa. – The public radio announcer says temperatures will be “brisk” tonight, dropping down to the sixties.

The roadside produce stand replaced its sign for peaches with one for cider, pumpkins and local apples. Yard signs for town elections are blooming amid the ones warring between “Black Lives Matter” and “Blue Lives Matter.”

Philadelphia, too hot in summer, enjoys autumns as pleasant as ones anywhere. But dread hangs over the place, the same sickly fog that envelops the entire nation like smoke from a forest fire. It stretches from the lawn signs in Juneau, Alaska urging, “Don’t Give Up” to Rachel Maddow’s commentary assuring viewers that it’s okay to feel terrible.

This part of Pennsylvania, with its rolling subdivisions and Quaker heritage, is voting bluer than ever. Democrats picked up four Congressional seats here in 2018 and last year, for the first time since the Civil War, won control of Delaware County, the 570,000 people living between Philadelphia and the Delaware state line.

People who for years supported Republicans locally and Democrats nationally have abandoned the GOP altogether. Could voters in 2020 do what they did in 1980 – sweep out the dominant party from top to bottom?

In terms of political philosophy, 40 years is a generation. The liberal reforms that started when FDR was elected in 1930 were effectively over by 1970, the shift stalled only briefly by Jimmy Carter’s election, owed mostly to Gerry Ford’s pardon of Nixon’s unconscionable villainy.

In 1980, people nationwide went to the polls and voted Republican all the way down the ballot. In Wisconsin and Indiana, brilliant Democratic U.S. senators Gaylord Nelson and Birch Bayh were ousted by lightweight GOP challengers Bob Kasten and Dan Quayle.

Serving three terms, Nelson was a veteran of the Battle of Okinawa who helped found Earth Day and championed consumer protection, small business and civil rights. He was an early opponent of the Vietnam War. Kasten was arrested for driving drunk on the wrong side of the road in Washington, D.C. and later endorsed Rudy Giuliani and Donald Trump.

Bayh of Indiana was the only U.S. Senator to author two constitutional amendments. He pushed for the Equal Rights Amendment and for abolition of the Electoral College, then lost to Quayle, who compared himself to John F. Kennedy but couldn’t spell the word potato.

In the presidential race, the second-rate actor Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter, a nuclear engineer, farmer and successful governor who put solar panels atop the White House. Reagan took down the solar panels, ramped up the military and sidelined programs that trained workers and shared taxpayer money with cities. The Gipper’s team included 138 cronies who were investigated, indicted or convicted in scandals, an all-time, presidential record.

History teachers in the future might describe 1980-2020 as America’s “Dark Age,” when militarism, greed and corruption washed over the nation like so much overflowing sewage, before the reform era started with the election of Joseph Biden.

That’s a dream that a decent person can have, should have and maybe must have to get up out of bed each morning and go through the motions of life as usual. It’s easy to dream it here in the City of Brotherly Love, the home of the quiet and thoughtful Quakers, a racially mixed city crowded with universities.

But as much as half the country is still beholden to a madman whose madness grows more virulent and reckless each day. As the headlines get more outrageous, as extremists take up arms, as the norms, traditions and laws of the nation are junked for cheap political points by charlatans in power, what’s left is a feeling of loss, anxiety and dread.

Sept. 6, 2020

It’s just as well there wasn’t a state fair this year, I think while digging up five garden beds for a meager bucketful of potatoes. What would merit a blue ribbon potato during the rainiest summer in a rainforest?

Back in the day when it was an agricultural and craft event, the fair was held on the third weekend in August, affording gardeners exhibiting their vegetables the benefit of a full growing season. School sometimes started the day after the fair ended. Inevitably, wind and cold blew in, adding to the sense of summer’s finale.

That made for loud, long and steamy nights at the bars during fair weekend, feverish rituals aimed at holding off winter’s arrival. Back then, before Haines was hip, most of the town’s few single people would be leaving town on the next ferry south. Those sticking around for winter would negotiate fair-time romances with great urgency.

Politics killed our late-summer fairs. To trim its budget, the Alaska Legislature eliminated its annual cash contribution to the fair, about $60,000 annually intended to encourage agriculture. Needing gate revenues and alcohol sales to cover the loss of state funds, the fair shifted its emphasis toward music and beer and away from crops and crafts.

As beer and music sell best in warm sunshine, the fair moved into July, before most gardeners harvest.  Gone now are the fairs that saw rows of crop exhibits, termination dust on Mount Ripinsky and tearful farewells.

The most disappointing of my spuds are “Tlingit potatoes,” a fingerling variety that became fashionable about 10 years ago when a traveling academic made a presentation explaining that Alaska Natives grew them before whites settled in Southeast. The variety came from South America, traveling north with Spanish explorers like Malaspina, the story went.

Tlingits would plant them at home in spring – head off to fish camp for the summer – and harvest them in fall. The story is fanciful but the reality is less romantic. Many of the spuds, at least this year, didn’t get much bigger than marbles. My guess is the Tlingits abandoned the fingerlings the minute they saw larger varieties like reds and golds.

Tlingits grew food to survive, not to honor tradition. It’s a point lost on many whites. Even some Alaskans will tell you that “true subsistence” activities shouldn’t involve high-powered rifles, outboard motors or plastic fish nets. Subsistence harvesters should have to use “traditional” gear, they say.

Hogwash. The truth is that the need to survive was only thing ever traditional about subsistence. A hungry man quickly adopts the best, most advanced tools to ensure his food supply. Any other approach would be foolhardy and potentially suicidal.

“Food security” is back to the fore in town discussions, ever since COVID hoarding emptied our store shelves of flour and rice. Short of Armageddon, it’s still not abundantly clear when Haines would run out of food. Trucks, planes and ships connect us to the U.S. mainland, after all.

We heard the same talk when the price of oil shot up in 2008 and again about five years ago when our freight dock was first reported falling down.

During the oil price spike, one self-appointed expert visiting the newspaper office predicted a tomato in Haines would cost $15 in a few years. When the dock was found to be collapsing, people said, “The freight company won’t be able to dock here,” or “We’ll have to truck in our groceries in and prices will triple.”

None of that was true, of course, though it proved that Alaskans panic as quickly as people anywhere. The freight company is now building its own dock. They make money moving things that we need and we earn money to buy the needed things they bring. They need us, we need them. That’s basic economics, older than the Tlingits.

How much we need miniature potatoes is a separate question.

Aug. 21, 2020

For a long time we watched Wednesday’s orange sunset, the end of a sunny day that snuck past the weather forecasters.

The last one like it was July 31, a friend said. Winds and clouds rallied back Thursday.

I spent the afternoon slicing up sockeye and getting them into the freezer. The gillnetter who sold them to me remarked on their shrinking size, holding up one the size of a trout. Out in the ocean, reds are not finding enough to eat.

Kings are getting smaller, too.

Tens of thousands of people make a living on Alaska salmon and 100 or so biologists, at most, are paid to understand them. That’s an equation that won’t pencil out.

One day in the future, Alaska fishermen will be going after Irish Lords and the sportsman’s association will hold a Sculpin Derby. Fisheries and fishermen don’t disappear. They just move down the species ladder: When one fish disappears, marketing people re-brand a junk fish to sell in its place.

It’s how dog salmon became “keta” and found their way into the aisles at Trader Joe’s.

It happens all over the world. At the Hong Kong fish market – an open-air affair without ice or refrigeration and only scary-looking critters to buy – brisk sales tell you we’re eating our way to the bottom of the ocean.

It’s not all bad. When I arrived in Alaska my mom, a Depression kid, asked me if I couldn’t send her a can of that good, Alaskan pink salmon. Hunger doesn’t quibble between humpies and kings.

My wife says she’s anxious to get back to town to go coho fishing. It’s a wonder that a woman who spends all summer in a tent wants to spend fall on a muddy riverbank, but my Aussie bride is more Alaskan than a lot of folks who live here, including me.

Without Canadians in town mopping them all up, we’ll be rich in silvers, she figures, but that run can be a crap shoot, too, and if the rain doesn’t let up, the fish will never see a Pixie.

In the 1980s, before the cruise ship dock was built and our entire tourism industry relied on luring RVers, we pushed hard to attract Whitehorse folks to town to fish. At the same time, cranks at Fish and Game Advisory Committee meetings complained the Canucks were catching too many.

Those RVs are camouflaged canning operations and cases are being spirited through the border for illegal sales at Canadian swap meets, the allegations went. So we invited the Canadians here, then we kicked them good for accepting our invitation.

These days the visitor’s center tells people to come see our bears, which we then shoot in our back yards. Seven bears killed so far this year because we can’t do so much as stow our food and garbage.

Maybe someone should phone McDowell Group down in Juneau and have them work up the cash value of a brown bear to the local economy over a 25-year lifespan, those bears that catch humpies in the Chilkoot River and thousands of tourists pay $100 each to glimpse the scene.  Biologists reported a few years ago they’re the same ones we shoot in our back yards.

Instead of enforcing local laws and fining people for leaving their trash out – something that Haines police can’t seem to bring themselves to do, anyway – we could just have folks pay restitution, the bear’s cash value. Isn’t that the way the free market works?

The fish are going away and we don’t know why. The bears are here, but we’re killing them. Show me the man who thinks a wise God gave man dominion over the Earth and I’ll show you a fool.

August 6, 2020

Wildly optimistic until today, the guys in the fire brigade were rating the local danger of forest fires as “moderate” despite a week of rain. A friend and I could have used a moderate risk of ignition last night when we couldn’t start a campfire using a road flare.

On Main Street, where reality holds a strong grip, the chiropractor-developer who bought up our downtown is putting a gabled roof atop the century-old Coliseum Theater building, its first. Flat-roofed buildings, the ultimate expression of temporary in this climate, are slowly disappearing.

Which doesn’t explain why our $17 million school renovation in 2007 didn’t include a sloped roof instead of an old-style, flat one. The little lady school art teacher, who knows more about sensible design than half the contractors around here, pushed for the gable design, but lost.

The ballyhooed, space-age “membrane” roof lasted about a year before it started leaking. It will never be right. None of them are. Turns out that gabled roofs are like face masks: Unnecessary until you experience the full consequences of not using one.

Food trucks have popped up again around town, like so many mushrooms in the rain. They create a Tijuana look that undermines the work of folks, including restaurant owners, trying to hold up downtown buildings.

Food vans took hold about 10 years ago when the mayor and planning commission struck down the rule prohibiting commercial trailers. The mayor holds office by saying yes to most everyone and the hipsters say the vans remind them of downtown Portland, though Portland with vans instead of buildings would look a lot like Tijuana.

The pendulum of progress swings backward as much as forward.

On Friday we pedaled through the wood-chip trails of the fairgrounds on the night the place should have been awash in music, greasy fried food and the dinging bell of the high-striker pummeled by some brute. It was quiet as a crypt. Few scenes are as lonesome as an empty carnival ground.

Over at Jones Point we checked on the progress of carpenters building yet another scenic, waterfront picnic shelter, this one near the bones of a historic sawmill. Someone should be re-branding these as “bridal pavilions” and advertising them on the town’s website. There’s nothing people throw more money at than weddings and their unintended consequences: diapers, dentistry and college tuition.

Former City of Haines Mayor Dave Berry, whose family once operated the Food Center grocery store,  told me the key to business was selling something that people need and his old man figured that was toilet paper. COVID proved Dave Berry Sr. a genius. A friend who distributes groceries in the Bush estimated his company shipped 30 rolls to each villager after the outbreak.

Alaska Natives, probably more than anyone, understand that people can survive a while without food.

The alignment specialist who is saving our downtown said a few years ago he was considering erecting a clock tower atop the Haisler Building at Third and Main. I was hoping he meant the kind with a giant, four-sided, Roman dial like Big Ben, gonging the hours loud enough that you could feel the vibration in your chest.

We already have the fire siren test every noon and on a sunny day that sounds like a warning that an atom bomb is on its way. We could add some dignity to the disturbances around here and maybe the kids could learn to read the time off a clock with a face.

Today is the 75th anniversary of the day our nation dropped the bomb, flattening Hiroshima and killing up to 166,000 people, mostly civilians. It’s good to hear hammers pounding and someone building something on Main Street.

July 21, 2017

The fire brigade wrecked our summer, erecting Smokey the Bear billboards warning of forest fire danger. Now you could hardly start a fire playing with matches and gasoline on a windy day.

Even before the clouds and winds rolled in, someone said this isn’t so much summer as a warm winter, what with people holed up at home, away from friends. People are out hiking and catching fish and picking berries, but there are no weddings, no town celebrations, no live music, no hippie girls spinning hula hoops.

This is how the deaf experience the world.

The weeds are growing tall on the parade grounds. They surround the old hotel, making it appear older still. Its fate is a topic of town chatter. Some summer people are here somewhere, but except for a chance meeting at the grocery store, we may not see them again until next year.

The bars are open for those brave enough to risk their health for a drink, but many of their regulars got over that fear long ago. Down south, baseball players are suiting up for a short season without spectators, with canned cheering piped into broadcasts for effect.

With a big enough antenna, a person here can tune in to the Juneau AM radio station to hear Seattle Mariner games on Sunday afternoons. Listening to the languid commentary of announcers reporting balls and strikes, even without a crowd at the park, will bring familiarity if not comfort.

We are going through the motions. Breakfast, lunch, dinner. Projects to finish before real winter sets in. We are making do with an abbreviated world.

Down in Juneau, a friend bemoaned the weather, which is always wetter and darker than ours. It brought to mind a maxim about painting the outside of your house in that climate. “If you’ve waited until the Fourth of July, you’ve waited too long.”

Folks in Juneau live in a pestilent rain, so it’s a safe bet that they’re coping with disease better than we are. At coping, they are pros. “It’s time to leave Juneau when you’re no longer happy skiing in the rain,” they say.

Over in Skagway, the streets are as empty as in March. The behemoths of the cruise line business are missing and only God can save businesses that were extended before the ships scratched their season. That whole town is just a license to print money, we used to say. But they put all their eggs in one basket,  and a tiny, invisible germ downed the goose that laid their golden eggs.

In a month or so it will be time for citizens to run for local office, to become the leaders of this town that will have little in money or promises to offer. For those elected and those they will serve, their terms will surely be a test, a test of who we are, of what we value, and what we can be. We will be like children told that our father is no longer wealthy, that after years of plenty we must conserve and get by with less.

Our hunkering down – that starts in October with a bite in the air and a mad rush to finish summer’s procrastinated projects – will come early.

July 10, 2020

The guy who paints the stripes on our roads went askew at the town’s main intersection. They used a grinder to try to erase his wandering centerline.

That’s the kind of year it’s been. What should work hasn’t.

Back in February we were demonstrating for more frequent ferry service. Now we’re worried that stepping aboard will expose us to a deadly virus.

Way back in 2018, my father died. My oldest brother said it was his worst year. After our two other brothers died in March 2019, we agreed to stop asking how bad things might get. Better to not whistle up the wind.

After the deaths in my family, I sought advice from a friend whose husband died in a freak accident. Then she got cancer. Then she became sick from the cancer medicine. “One tragedy begets another,” she wrote. “It is just hard and it doesn’t get any easier.”

Yesterday I was talking to a man my age who has a good life, with a successful business he started and a loving, functional family. “I’m lucky,” he said. I  considered myself lucky for nearly 60 years. I used to talk the way he did. My friend with cancer said she “lived under a lucky star” until age 39.

I didn’t tell my new friend how quickly luck can go south. I wish him the happiness that comes with faith that we can become affixed to the alignments of lucky stars.

History tells us that plagues can lead to instability and instability can lead to unrest and after that, all hell breaks loose. Nations — even continents — of people become trapped in a spiral that descends into unfathomable suffering.

Guys like me were born in a lucky country in a lucky time, when the rest of the world was recovering from decades of war that spared our nation. We had great wealth and opportunity.

For many reasons, we are watching our nation’s advantages slip away. As a nation, we are becoming more like the other nations of the world – older, experienced, humbled, and not so youthfully optimistic or sure of ourselves.

The cracks in our nation’s foundation – income inequality, an unbalanced economy, racism, sexism, lack of health care – are widening under the strain of the coronavirus epidemic. For many of us, life in the United States could become more difficult still.

I’ve been told there is also a reckoning that comes when tragedies pile up, a humbling, a deeper appreciation for life itself, a satisfaction in just seeing another day. I’m too soon into my family tragedies to know this personally. We’ll see.

There’s also an old expression that adversity introduces a man to himself. Perhaps the same is true for towns and states and nations. Perhaps, through our recent trials, we’ll get to know ourselves. Perhaps that will be good.