a dog's life

Promises To Keep

2006-11-12T06:15:00.000-08:00

More than thirty years after the fact, the Vietnam War still haunts the American psyche. Increasingly we hear the word "quagmire" in relation to the conflict in Iraq, as well as the opposing voices of those who reference "bugging out" or "cutting and running" or even "the last helicopter to leave."

The overwhelming victory of our forces during the first Gulf War was supposed to have put the ghost of Vietnam finally to rest. America, by most accounts, had finally purged herself of that demon. Our military was strong, our national self-assurance and will were reinvigorated and refocused.

But even then we held back at the final moment, not wanting to get dragged into a conflict we could not easily exit. In fact it was mainly Colin Powell's insistence on having and adhering to an "exit strategy" that prevented the final push to Baghdad.

Instead, we pulled back at the critical moment and asked the Kurds and Shiites to rise up against Saddam--the implicit message being we would support them. But rather than support them we stood by and watched as Saddam regrouped his forces and then went on the offensive, slaughtering those who had taken up the fight in our place.

We blinked not once, but twice in this instance. And then turned away. Rather than showing strength we revealed our timidity once again, a record that extends back to Somalia and the ignominious pull-out after the Marine barracks bombing in Lebanon. Worse yet, it recalled the broken promise to S. Vietnam, and reinforced the idea in the minds of those who would do us harm that the United States is a paper tiger--scary to look at, perhaps, but easily cowed and fundamentally harmless. Or to paraphrase using a slightly different metaphor: America is a weak horse.

A rout of the Taliban in Afghanistan and a similar early result in Iraq the second time around seemed to once again dispell the idea that an enemy could trifle with us with impunity, a notion reinforced by the eagerness with which Qhadaffi and Assad sought to cooperate with rather than continue to oppose us. Unfortunately, our prolonged and difficult stay in Iraq has resurrected the ghost of Vietnam. We are once again seen as timid, irresolute, unsure. And the more it appears we may again "cut and run" the more emboldened our enemies become.

The fact is, there can be no cutting and running this time. In Vietnam we were lucky to be fighting an enemy that had no intention of following us home. That is most obviously not the case this time. Al Qaeda has already announced its intention to blow up the White House in the wake of an election it sees, rightly or wrongly, as a mandate for American defeat.

One of the more delusional suggestions currently making the rounds posits that our leaving Iraq will actually constitute a victory, inasmuch as the Shiites and Sunnis will consume each other and do the work of blunting Iranian and al Qaeda influence with no need of any further involvement on our part. Aside from the moral problem of once again leaving behind those who believed we meant to stand and fight with them, there is the the question of whether such a strategy--if that is what one calls it--would work. What seems more likely is that Iranian influence will prevail and come to dominate the country. Sunni and al Qaeda opposition depends largely on assistance from Syria. There is no reason to believe that Assad would risk alienating the Iranian mullahs in such an environment. Some Iraqi Sunni resistance may persist for awhile, but absent Syrian support, both Sunni and al Qaeda instransigence should largely come to an end. It is even possible that Hezbollah and the al Qaeda component in Iraq will realize they have more to gain by cooperating than by opposing one another. Assad and Ahmadinejad have already made that determination, why shouldn't their proxies?

The better course would be to break up this alliance. We are in a position to do it and can with a modicum of determination and will. If Mr. James Baker is serious about setting a realist agenda for our policy in the Middle East he should volunteer for a mission to Damascus in order to convey the message that we expect Assad to deliver the heads of Hezbollah leaders Nasrallah and Mugniyah (wanted for bombing both our embassy and the Marine barracks in Lebanon) and al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu al-Masri. Tell Assad he has two weeks to comply.

Whether he does comply or not, we will have set in motion an irreversible course of turning Syrian influence away from Iran towards us. Whether it is accomplished under Assad's leadership or the next to ascend to his position should matter not one whit to us. For our purposes all that matters is sending the proper signal--that we are not going to retreat but instead charge full ahead, meaning we intend to keep all of our promises and win.

I am a little world made cunningly

2006-09-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

Muslim rage is once again on display, this time over critical remarks made by Pope Benedict XVI concerning the subject of forced conversion by violence. [TigerHawk has a roundup and excellent commentary, here.] The reaction is reminiscent of the so-called Cartoon Intifada, and just as childish. And predictably, there are those who should know better--the New York Times, among them--who are demanding the pope apologize for having the effrontery to offer an opinion.

Aside from the obvious irony that the Muslim reaction here only reinforces Pope Benedict's suggestion that violence is seen by some as an effective coercive tool, one can add the NYTimes cluelessness about the nature of the very business they are in. So let me give them some of their own medicine and ask: How dare they offer an opinion? (And why aren't Catholics rioting and burning down editorial offices the world over in response to such criticism?)

These are obvious points, and I don't mean to dwell on them, important as they are. Rather, I am more interested in exploring what it is about Islam that seems to accept and even condone this kind of behaviour. I am talking here about the willingness of so-called moderates to allow their religion to be displayed in the worst possible light. Surely the rather too-easy surrender to blind rage and violence must embarrass a good number of the adherents of this orthodoxy which advertises itself as The Religion of Peace?

I ask, Where are the voices of dissent among the true believers? Or is the question better asked, Why is it that dissent is so often punished with ostracism and death? And what, exactly, do the bullying imams who orchestrate these jihads of protest and revenge ever submit to but reflexive anger and hate?

I submit--dhimmitude at the NYTimes notwithstanding--that the non-muslim world, and even a good portion of the muslim world itself, is rapidly tiring of the "engraged muslim" bit. At some point ire rises to meet ire, and what then?

We are all--believer and unbeliever--made cunningly

Of elements, and an angelic sprite;
But black sin hath betrayed to endless night
My world's both parts, and O, both parts must die.

I Agree With The Lebanese PM... I Think

2006-07-20T12:21:00.000-07:00

According to a story in the Milan-based newspaper Corriere della Sera, Lebanese Prime Minister Fuad Saniora says Hezbollah has created a "state within a state" in Lebanon and must be disarmed:

"Hezbollah has become a state within a state. We know it well," Saniora was quoted as saying, for the first time leveling such an accusation against guerrillas that effectively control southern Lebanon.

"It's not a mystery that Hezbollah answers to the political agendas of Tehran and Damascus," Saniora was quoted as saying. "The entire world must help us disarm Hezbollah."

He went on to say that first there must be a cease-fire.

Now, it seems, someone in the PM's office has reconsidered and said the PM was misquoted. What he really meant to say--surprise, surprise--is that Israel is the real problem after all:

"The international community must help us in (getting) an Israeli withdrawal from Chebaa Farms so we can solve the problem of Hezbollah's arms."

(I just did a Google search for Chebaa Farms, so the reader will excuse my ignorance on this point, but it would seem to me that the problem--contra to Saniora's contention--must still be seen to be unrementing Hezbollah aggression following Israel's previous withdrawal. A quick review of my search result indicates that the UN had previously stated that Israel had completely withdrawn from Lebanon--the Chebaa Farms are not considered part of Lebanese territory. So the present conflict tracks back to the failure in the interim to "solve the problem of Hezbollah's arms." Lebanon has not fulfilled the requirements and responsibilities of sovereignty entrusted to it by the provisions of UN Resolution 1559.)

Despite the later attempt to modify his words, Saniora did seem to forthrightly address the problem of foreign influence on Lebanese affairs:

"The important thing now is to restore full Lebanese sovereignty in the south, dismantling any armed militia parallel to the national army," he was quoted as saying. "The Syrians are inside our home, and we are still too weak to defend ourselves. The terrible memories of the civil war are still too alive, and no one is ready to take up arms."

He also said that Israel is not helping the situation by continuing the current campaign:

"They are bombing civilians and creating sympathies for Hezbollah where otherwise there wouldn't be any," Corriere quoted him as saying.

And I would agree. Unfortunately, it would appear that Israel will get no thanks for addressing a problem that should never have been its responsibility to resolve.

The Neighborhood Bully

2006-07-16T08:43:00.000-07:00

It has not gone without notice that Israel has recently been attacked from areas it had previously occupied but relinquished, leading to the wry observation that Hezbollah--which means Islamic Resistance--seems committed to resisting Israel's good faith attempt at exchanging land for peace.

So now Israel is put in the position of becoming the Neighborhood Bully once again.

One can't help but feel for Lebanese victims of Israeli aggression here. Innocent men, women, and children are no doubt dying; civilian infrastructure--roads, buildings, as well as food supplies and water facilities--are being destroyed. Given the povocation, it would seem that Israel is reacting with disproportionate force, and in the eyes of many this alone constitutes a crime, as if this foray into Lebanon is meant to purposely target innocent civilians. If you see that as Israel's intention, then you probably conclude that Israel is evil. You might also agree with Ahmadinejad when he says that Israel "must be wiped from the map of the world."

True to Ahmadinejad's words, the Iranians are doing their part to destroy the Zionist entity by supplying rockets--and who knows what else--to the noble Islamic Resistance. Resistance after this fashion is acceptable, you see, because Iran is not the bully, Syria is not the bully, Hamas is not the bully, Hezbollah is not the bully. You guessed it. Israel is the bully. One has but to remember that simple fact, and all the countervailing others become inconsequential.

Could it be that launching rockets on Haifa--targeting presumptively innocent Israeli civilians--should also qualify as some kind of a crime? Could be, though Israel's critics will still likely give Israel's other enemies a pass on that score. The only war crimes in this conflict will wear the the six-pointed star.

Inevitably, Israel's critics will also declare: For the sake of the world, the world's powers must insist that Israel submit to the dictates of International Law. They will do this while ignoring the armed resistance of the Islamic Resistance to the mandate of International Law.

That's what Israel gets for being the neighborhood bully.

What Tehran should do now

2006-07-14T15:00:00.000-07:00

Whether or not Tehran was behind the Hezbollah incursion and abduction of Israeli soldiers, if the mullahs are smart they will turn the event to their significant advantage.

Instead of stoking the fires of conflict, they should be tamping them down. They should go to the U.N. and announce they want to help broker an immediate cease-fire. They should offer to use their influence with the Syrians and Hezbollah to return the Israeli soldiers uninjured, if only Israel will withdraw and stop killing innocent people.

They should softly speak with the oh-so-calm, sane voice of reason. By so doing they will not only blunt and thwart Israel’s potentially killing thrust against Hezbollah and save Assad further embarrassment and discomfort, they will also show that Iran's leaders can be relied upon to act rationally in crisis. They will gain the world’s trust and so will be allowed their nuclear ambitions.

All they have to do is act like the good and rational people they almost certainly are not.

How can you run when you know?

2006-02-10T05:54:00.000-08:00

He was managing editor for a mid-sized regional paper, a slightly-balding man of sixty who even now believed he and his generation had changed the world for the better.

He remembered Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers. He remembered Woodward and Bernstein. He believed the press had to be both brave and free to serve as a bulwark against tyranny. (He had once actually written those very words in an editorial.) He used to be so proud and sure of himself, but as he shaved he looked searchingly in the mirror and softly sang: Na, na, na, na, na, na...

Once upon a time he would have sided with his news staff, but it was he who had made the final decision not to publish. Half the staff had quit in protest. And just this morning came news that authorities at UPEI, a university in that vast land to the north once synonymous with freedom and salvation for so many of his generation, had confiscated all copies of a student newspaper that had dared carry the offending cartoons.

Na, na, na, na, na, na...

The words to a song, the anthem of a generation, now came back to mock him:

Gotta get down to it.
...
Should have been done long ago.
...
How can you run when you know?

Na, na, na, na, na, na...

Hiroshima Memories

2005-08-11T07:57:00.000-07:00

August 6, 2005 marked the 60th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. What follows is a rendition of a conversation I had with my father concerning his memories leading up to and following the event.

I asked if there had been rumors of a secret weapon beforehand. The question allowed me to approach the subject without being too obvious, and would encourage, I hoped, reminiscence. Dad seldom spoke of those years, never without prompting. But if one were somewhat oblique, he could be coaxed into talking. I remember listening as a young boy while he and another man discussed at a dinner gathering their time in the Pacific. At one point I wondered aloud if they had been in the same boat. Of course, everyone laughed—and laughed less heartily again when the other man said, Yes they had been in the same boat… just not in the way I imagined.

Sometime during that same dinner—or actually, in the interval before dessert—Dad related a story of getting lost while gathering bananas, ending up behind Japanese lines. Fortunately the men in his unit realized when he didn’t return what must have happened and began piping Glenn Miller into the rain forest so he could make his way back. For forty years those two stories accounted for most of my knowledge of Dad’s time overseas. So I decided this fine August day, as we sat together on the side porch drinking iced tea, to ask about the bomb.

“No, we didn’t have any idea about that,” Dad said. He took a drink of his iced tea and set the sweating glass back down. “It wasn’t like it is now. The news didn’t report every little thing. There was more a sense of patriotism back then. And censorship was strict. Even before we left to go overseas the Army cut out any mention of the west coast in my letters home.”

“Where did you end up?”

“Zamboanga City, Mindanao. The Philippines. I wrote in one letter about Aunt Minnie and Uncle Dan, ending with a verse from Philippians: Do not be anxious over anything, but let everything be done by prayer and supplication and thanksgiving to God. Everyone puzzled over that for a bit, especially as I didn’t have an Uncle Dan. But Sis figured out what it meant and got out a map. Minnie and Dan they reasoned must mean Mindaneo.”

“It’s a wonder you weren’t arrested for being a spy.”

“Ha. Well, I did get called in once for complaining about mistreatment in one of my letters. They gave it back and told me to rewrite it.”

We sat quietly, feeling the heat of early August and the Sunday quiet combining to make a languorous, lazy afternoon. From somewhere high in a tree a cicada began its shrill, rising buzz. I waited for it to stop.

“Did you know you were headed for Japan?”

“Nobody told us, exactly, but it wasn’t top secret.” Dad lifted his glass and looked at it, seemingly reflecting on a place now half a world and half a lifetime away. “We pretty much knew where the last stop would be.”

As a younger, more naive person I had thought that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima unnecessary, believing there were better alternatives. What I didn’t appreciate then was the determination of the Japanese not to give in. The military had already decided the only alternative to unconditional Japanese surrender would be armed invasion of their many-island nation—planned as the OLYMPIC operation— and projected losses for both sides that would have dwarfed what occurred as a result of using the bomb. Imagine Iwo Jima and Okinawa on a much bigger scale. Mom put it succinctly to me once back in my then-radical youth: “If it hadn’t been for the bomb, your father wouldn’t be here today. And neither would you.”

Now I wondered aloud what it must have been like as a 19 year old to face the prospect of what seems now, and must have seemed all the more to my father then, an unavoidable and imminent confrontation with death. To have that threat suddenly removed through an agency of secret and almost unimaginable invention—a deus ex machina, as it were, delivered from the sky—must have been an incredible relief.

“Yeah, we were all pretty happy. But you know, they told us it would be 75 years before anyone would be able to safely go in, because of the radiation. And yet two months later there we all were—thousands of us—walking through the middle of what had once been Hiroshima.”

“They never should have let you...” Mom, who had been listening in the kitchen, came onto the porch and sat down. I knew what she meant. Already Dad has had three bouts with cancer; Mom is pretty sure she knows why.

We sat in silence for a bit, listening to the cicada start up its shrill ruckus again. It seemed there was not a whole lot more to say about the subject—at least not today. As it turned out, the Japanese were amazingly co-operative and friendly during the occupation, which probably wouldn't have been the case if not for the bomb. Dad befriended a young girl, and might have adopted her had the Army permitted. But that is another story, and one I don’t really know. This story ends—in my mind’s eye, at least—one November day when a young soldier stood in the cold before a destroyed tower with a skeletal dome. Sixty years ago.

A Reflection on Incomprehensible Mercy and Grace

2005-06-23T09:19:00.000-07:00

It’s strange how one moment life can seem as it always has been, and the next be all changed. I’m thinking of a calm summer evening quite a long time ago now when, while out walking my parents' sheltie, MacDuff, I encountered a crowd in the village park assembled to watch a balloon launch. Slowly the purple pool lying limp on the grass blossomed and rose up staggeringly as if drunk. While the grownups stood watching the children ran shrieking from the growling make-believe monster with the indigo breath. MacDuff joined to protect them, barking at the dangling tethers. But then the mood changed subtly when the older brother of a boyhood friend ran sprinting from the field, and as she walked away I heard a woman half-whisper: “Rick just got word John’s in a coma. They don’t expect him to live.”

I had not seen him in years, though there was a time when we were thicker than thieves. It’s funny to say that now, considering my first memory of John is of him stealing a pack of ‘Go Fish’ cards from me in second grade. I sulked until the teacher made him return them the next day but then, predictably, we became chums and built a tree house in the Norway spruce outside my parents’ bedroom window. All that summer, hidden by concealing boughs we commanded the world, calling out to passersby on the sidewalk and startling them (to our delight when we did) with our disembodied voices.

During the course of a day John would invariably announce, “I need to get some kicks,” and drop abruptly to the ground, starting for home. I never knew quite what to make of these sudden desertions and would look at my pitch-stained hands, trying to decide whether to keep climbing or head for the jar of Getzol cleaner that waited by the porcelain sink in a dark corner of the back room.

I think we were always jealous of one another, in different ways. John’s father was tall, thin, tanned, and, in my memory at least, always immaculately, if casually, dressed. He seemed perpetually ready to go either golfing or out to dinner. Sometimes when I was there he would come from work and without changing his clothes have a game of catch with us in the shadows of the back yard, throwing dispassionately to each of us in turn, saying nothing. The sound of the ball smacking against our gloved hands was early instruction in rhythm and grace, and the utility of unspoken communion. Even then I think we subconsciously knew a game of catch sometimes substitutes for words when fathers don’t know what to say to their sons.

Once, while we stood beneath the crabapple at the front of our house, John told me his father always carried a hundred dollar bill in his wallet. He might as well have told me they were millionaires. I remember my dad coming home one night after driving the bus to a basketball game, standing in the living room, happily announcing he’d made an extra ten bucks. Even that amount seemed more than mere pocket money.

John’s father was the oldest son of C. J. Winchip & Sons, supplier of petroleum products for the north southern tier. The tanker trucks that came and went from his business had to sharply bend and come nearly to a standstill, momentarily exposing their vulnerable bellies to disaster as they negotiated the hillside turn immediately above town center. One day, it seemed inevitable to me, another truck would come barreling down the road at just the wrong moment at too great a speed and engulf the downtown in a conflagration. But no such disaster ever occurred and C. J. Winchip & Sons uneventfully embroidered the shoulder blades of our town’s Little League Tigers for years after, never once making it to first page of the tri-county news.

Just beyond the far corner of our block in those days the old concrete sluice plant still stood, overlooking the tracks and the backyards of houses even further below. It was a dangerous place, off-limits, and we knew it. But inasmuch as our summer days consisted of unsupervised hours we eventually ended up there, irrepressibly drawn by the danger. We obsessed on the possibility of dying, not knowing then what it meant, and beyond the merely inconvenient knowledge that we weren’t to go near it, there was nothing to keep us from the abandoned plant; the open loading dock door beckoned like a mineshaft. Maybe if we had been told there were rattlers inside we would have stayed clear. Or maybe the lure of that danger would have tempted us in deeper. As it was we ventured only as far as the vertical wood chute that led straight up two stories to an opening from where we could jump, or at least dare each other to do so.

I honestly don’t recall who took the challenge first. I like to think, since I was half a year older, it was me. A daunting divide separated us from landing in a large mound of leftover sand. Initially, the distance loomed greater than the allure of the jump and somewhat cancelled it out, yet the distance was not nearly as troublesome as the suggestion you were chicken to go.

So, I jumped. My feet kicked out from the ledge they had left, and for a suspended moment I was free, flying, until the world caught and dropped me to my knees. But I was unhurt and knew then I was indestructible, all the rest of that summer. John just as carelessly played to the fates after that, knowing he was indestructible too. But sometimes, in seeming deference to mortality, he would pause—standing mid-stride on a crumbling foundation wall, perhaps—and, contravening all our brazen assurance, soberly tell me: Remember… I want red roses for my funeral.

There isn’t much more to tell about our childhood together beyond a few further details that wouldn’t merit inclusion, except they’re interesting to me. Every autumn dad would buy a bushel basket each of Cortland and McIntosh apples and John would always take one on his way out our back door. The last year his family lived in the small house up the street he got a Superman costume that I don’t remember him ever actually wearing. His older sister held a Halloween party for the neighborhood kids that same year, turning off the lights, telling the tale of The Tell-Tale Heart so convincingly it scared the bunch of us witless. I also witnessed John and his younger brother Flip, in what may have been their final cooperative act in that house, tumbling together through the picture window that separated their dining room and porch. It seemed they were always going at one another, so it seemed odd a couple of years later when Flip told me, after I’d punched my own brother and sent him home crying, that brothers shouldn’t fight.

But boys will be boys, whether they are brothers or not. It came to a point where John and I fought so much it eventually destroyed whatever had bound us together. We were in the end too volatile for one another. Even sledding became an unfriendly contest to see who could come closest to disaster, pulling up on one runner while attempting to scrape the bark of a tree with the other. Once, misjudging, I collided full on and was saved only because my boot caught at the back of my Radio Flyer. The vicious laughter coming from the top of the hill echoed a week later when—after he called me Fannyfart and I called him Winshit—John declared his family owned Crandall’s Hill and I was to get off it and never come back. Yet, despite our mutual aggressions, which seemed so immediate then, the memory that stands clearest for me now concerns a quiet half hour we spent in the attic of that big house on the hill, sitting in a block of sunlight illuminating the floating dust, as we tried to unravel the mystery of water’s being both hydrogen and oxygen combining in a way we couldn’t even dimly comprehend.

Years later, my mom told me a story about how she had once lived in that house on the hill as a young girl and how one day, when everyone else was gone, her oldest sister Anita had built a fire entirely of kindling that burned so intensely the flue turned cherry red in the wall. Fearing the house was on fire, my mother fled down the hill with her doll carriage in tow. There is also the story she relates of passing the house she would live in years later, looking up to see the widow Foote, dressed all in black, sweeping the back roof with a broom. I’m drawn to consider the strange and reciprocal nature of these stories, and the continuity they imply. There seems to me to be an element of the ineluctable about them. They tell me something of where I came from and point, in some way, towards the place I have always been heading. They give some indication of who and what and why I am. So, recognizing these retellings as a means of determining and divulging some truth, I go back to the very beginnings of my association with the house I would grow up in. I can still feel myself slipping on the wet flagstone walk as I came for the first time to the side porch and feel the scary anticipation of entering into our new home, where I found my grandfather (my father’s father, who never talked in my presence) standing on a stepladder in the cold dining room as he worked to remove the old pipes that had frozen over winter. Years later, listening to my mom relating stories as she put away dishes in the kitchen, I thought about all the elegant cast iron radiators that were removed, busted up, and left piled by the drive, and asked what had happened. “Sierra let the house freeze when he left,” said my mother, rising up on her toes to put a bowl away. “While we were waiting for our loan, Winchips made a better offer. The radiators and the plumbing meant nothing to them because they planned to put in oil heat anyway.” Closing the cupboard, lowering her heels back to the floor, she added, with a hard glance, “I think Sierra did it on purpose, hoping to get us to back out.”

In some ways I think John and I never had a chance. The covetousness and suspicion that began our relationship, and was to eventually destroy it, seems now to have been imbedded in the genetic code of our friendship. I am sure neither of us could have done anything other than what we did, which was to exist for a time as two boys growing up together in a small town. Maybe that is enough.

The last time I saw John he came walking diagonally across the road to where I sat taping the dash of the Sprite I was preparing to paint. We had not seen each other in years and to this day I wonder about that, and why I hadn’t even missed him. The vague notion that he’d gone away to military school pops into my head, but otherwise I can’t account for the gap in our contact other than to offer the most mundane explanation—or, simply, he’d gone his way and I’d gone mine. At any rate, that day he crossed the road to see me it was as though we had never met. He stood for a moment and looked at what I was doing then reached for the oil gauge, tracing the silver rim with his finger. “If you smear Vaseline around your gauges,” he said helpfully, “you won’t have to tape them.” And that was the entirety of our interaction, almost. There was no ‘How have you been? What have you been up to?’ Just, “If you smear Vaseline around your gauges, you won’t have to tape them.” It was as though our childhood together had never occurred.

*******

The memorial service was held in the parlor of the Kopler-Williams Funeral Home, where folding chairs were set up to accommodate the fifty or so people attending. Before the final invocation John’s oldest sister and his younger brother, Phillip, each stood to give their dedications. But it was a nephew who made us all laugh, revealing a recognizable playfulness in the adult I’d never known, by relating his Uncle John’s counsel concerning which branch of the military to join. “Go with the Marines,” he had advised with a wink. “They have the best uniforms.”

At the graveside ceremony I met acquaintances I’d known and not seen in years, boys who had ‘joined up’ out of high school and were now grown men. They wore dark suits and had shaved so severely the skin where their sideburns might have been shined. We all shook hands and briefly talked of old times, though I detected between them a bond that excluded anyone who had not served. And that excluded me.

A small canopy covered the open grave and the metal apparatus that would lower the casket. Everyone crowded close to hear the priest say his few final words reminding us that we should feel not sorrow but joy, knowing the body and spirit of the departed was now tendered to the incomprehensible mercy and grace of our beneficent Lord Savior, amen. And then came the twenty-one gun salute, the initial salvo making most everyone jump, but a little less each succeeding time until there was finally only silence and, far off, the bugle blowing taps. Only when the ceremony was over did it all become suddenly real for me, seeing the tears in the eyes of John’s two youngest nieces as they turned away and started back for the cars.

As I walked up the street from my parents’ to attend the after-interment gathering of family and friends at the house on the hill, I felt the new dress shoes too tight on my feet and a tie wrapped too snug at my neck as I remembered fondly the carefree days of barefooted, bare-chested freedom, and afternoons spent with a friend squishing soft road bubbles with our fingers and toes, entertaining no concern beyond cleaning the tar off before supper.

I met a young woman at the party who, when she learned of my early association with John, smiled warmly and said, “I bet you have some stories to tell.” Later, when we’d had a couple of beers each, she accompanied me into the trees behind the house. We sat down on a log and I recounted the time my brother and Flip started these woods on fire and how my mom knew when he came running through the back door and the siren began to sound, that both actions were linked. My mother said she had never seen anyone as pale as my brother that day. The young woman smiled at my story, though it wasn’t, perhaps, what she had anticipated. Neither of us said anything more until, seeing my gaze drift towards her breasts, she asked if I'd like to touch them. And without waiting for an answer, she slipped the straps of her dress from her shoulders.

*******

This morning, I stopped by my parents’ and noticed our old tree house was gone. It had been there--the last rotting remains of it--until only a few days before and I can’t help but wonder at the strange coincidence of its disappearance, just now, after all these years.

*******

It’s strange how things happen, how circumstances transpire, how events unfold—how one moment life can appear as it always has been, and the next be all changed. This evening before dark I got a call from my brother Jeff. The conversation started innocuously enough with, “Hi. How are you? What’s up?” and devolved into a revelation that Lois Wilt had just phoned. At first I understood my brother to mean she still wanted the display case we had discussed my building a year ago—a conversation which I, to my sudden embarrassment, had completely forgotten. But that wasn’t the reason for the phone call at all. After a slight pause, my brother cleared his throat. “She said Duane Newhouse is in a coma. They don’t know what the problem is, exactly. Some kind of virus, maybe, but it doesn’t look good.” And so I learn about another friend from my past.

It is almost too much. It's not sadness, though one surely feels that too at such times, but rather a strangely felt affirmation I feel as I hang up the phone. I go outside and consider: Here I am, in the middle of writing about another lost friend, trying to find an ending when this ending comes, supplied courtesy of… another’s ill luck? Suddenly I feel chastened, embarrassed. I go outside and stand in the driveway looking east across the valley to the opposite ridge, and know in that instant of intensity and focus how extremely, extremely lucky I am. I look at the distant trees. I see their individual shapes and shadows. The sun is down, the world is headed for good night, and yet… here I am, still bathed in light.

I take the dogs up the hill, walking the roadside to the surveyors’ stake delineating the edge of my neighbor’s property a quarter mile away. Before turning to head back, the dogs overshoot the mark and then rush about-face to overtake me again. They run ahead, but I look around me and walk even slower, lingering in the twilight, listening to the birds singing their bedtime songs.

I stoop to pick up a discarded can at the side of the road and when I straighten and look down past the rocks to the pond below, I see a lone swallow sweeping across the reflecting surface amid clouds and sky illuminated by the now distant, mute sunlight. And then I see another swallow flying in perfect tandem with its corporeal other, veering close and then away, connecting but not touching, and I know then with a transcendent, calm certainty that I am looking at heaven.

Support

2005-06-10T12:40:00.000-07:00

Perhaps we’ve just missed them, but there seems to be a dearth of political cartoons dealing with a certain subject. We were having this thought upon waking and, while still in a somewhat inspired yet languid state, it came to us: We had a vision of Mr. Mugabe sitting atop a heaped pile of bodies, surveying the larger world as he intones, “Let no one say I am not supported by the people.”

The Imperious We--The Gulag of Our Times

2005-06-08T08:38:00.000-07:00

We were going back and forth with some friends the other day about the merit of the case for Guantanamo being called ‘the gulag of our times’. The opposition point was that strong language is sometimes needed to send a strong message and, anyway, to take offense shows churlish defensiveness at being rebuked. Ordinarily, we like strong language, the stronger the better. We have no objection to rebukes and condemnations cast down upon sinners. But, as others have noted and we have been quick to notice, the analogy fails somewhat due to matters of kind and degree.

We won’t burden our reader (in hopes there may be one) with a discussion of the Gulag and what it entailed, there being at least one good and rather large book written about the subject that can do the job much better. We shouldn’t dare presume to cover the topic in a short sentence or two and would direct anyone wishing to do so to go elsewhere in order to fill any gaps in knowledge and—dare we say it?—understanding.

No, our purpose is different. We would merely suggest that to use 'the gulag of our times’ as a characterization for Guantanamo represents an obvious lack of imagination. We think Amnesty, in this case, casts too small a net.

There may well be problems with Guantanamo, but we seriously wonder if the state of madness functioning (though not very well) under the name North Korea mightn't better deserve nomination as ‘the’ gulag of our times. A friend counters by observing one aims one’s criticism where it is likely to do the most good. We agree, but wonder how much good this (we think unfair) criticism will do.

We have read the Amnesty Report speech and agree with many of its concerns, and wish success to the cause of raising awareness of human rights abuses while seeking to curtail them. But it is our perhaps meager thought that in at least this one instance Amnesty has done the U.S.—and itself—a disservice by misdirecting a particularly harsh judgment, while effectively letting the keepers of the ‘real’ gulag of our times off the hook. We can’t help thinking that accusations directed (or not directed) in inverse relationship to guilt might be petty and foolish and, ultimately, defeating—defeating not only for the U.S. and Amnesty International, but to the just cause they both presumably serve.

The Turning Point

2005-03-03T08:55:00.000-08:00

“Have you decided which one you want?” Emma’s voice, hopeful and bright, preceded her through the kitchen. She looked over my shoulder as the question, more playful than serious, lingered in the silence.
Three puppies remained from the litter of four. The two females resembled their mother, Brie, a nondescript medium-sized mutt covered in fluffy brown hair. The solitary male took after their father—a short-haired black and brown Alsatian mix named Nemo that still hung dutifully about Emma’s place but belonged to another family half a mile down the road.
My thoughts concerned largely two things: burdocks and deterring trespassers. At first I resisted the notion of taking a pup, but the more I thought about it the more it made sense, and overnight I had made my decision. Given my frequent absences, the old farmstead represented an easy temptation. More than once I had discovered strange tire tracks crossing the back yard, and already a scythe that once belonged to my grandfather had gone missing. Maybe having a dog around the place wasn’t such a bad idea, provided it didn’t become a burr magnet.
Lifting the short-haired pup, I said, “This one,” whereupon Emma said I’d picked her daughter Adrienne’s favorite. She took him, wriggling, from my hands, put her nose to his, and whispered, “We’re going to miss you.”
With no more fuss than that, he was mine.

The rutted dirt road, impassible in winter, made for a rough ride even under the best of conditions. Angling sharply from the top of McClure Hill towards the old railway bed halfway down, the road—little more than a wagon trail, really—levels briefly before resuming a precipitous, curving descent to the valley. Accelerating too fast toward this midway plateau, the van hit a bump. The back hopped up and bottomed violently, eliciting a whimper from my bewildered passenger that quickly escalated into a series of piercing, full-throated yelps. At the bottom of the hill I glanced back at the pet carrier, and tried to imagine how it felt to be suddenly extracted from the warm, safe company of siblings and thrust into such unpredictable strangeness. “It’s okay,” I said, but we both knew it wasn’t.
A mile down the river road I almost parked at the closed entrance to Lattice Bridge. Built in 1886, it is the oldest bridge on the Genesee River, and survives in no small measure because its two ends rest upon bedrock. Long, hand-hammered steel straps crisscross its sides, suggesting the trelliswork for which the structure is named. The river flows quietly here, and a peaceful solitude inhabits the place. Briefly I considered stopping, thinking a short walk might reassure my frightened companion, but if he were to run under the guardrails that blocked access to the bridge, there was the danger he might fall through one of the holes opened up in the rotting plank deck. The better course was to keep going, to get home as quickly as possible, uncomfortable as doing so would be for us both.
Nothing has meaning unless we express it. And all expression is approximate. For a quarter of an hour (which corresponds roughly to the more or less dozen miles of our trip) the two of us existed as strangers in close proximity, each painfully aware of the other, yet disconnected—woefully so. Nothing good, no transformation or redemption, can be made from belaboring that point. It happened, and is a mere sad part of a story. Certainly it’s best just to skip over some things and forget them.
A man once told of an experience he’d had at the age I was when he related this story: Walking along the river one morning he saw three logs lying alongside one another in still water. When he traveled back the same way that very evening the logs were gone. There had been no rain to wash them away in the interim; the current remained placid and calm. He put the incident out of his mind until one day an old-timer told him, “Son, those probably weren't logs you saw, but pike.”
I never would have recognized such magic had I not been tipped off to look for it, to see and recognize such certain small wonders emanate in the world. One day I was driving to school, going by way of the Lattice Bridge when I saw three small logs of my own submerged in a quiet place in the river. The next day they too were gone and I thought: Those weren’t probably logs you saw.
Driving this day, I pass the very same spot twenty years on and think, because the mind is an incessant compiler of disparate things, of something else, too. Just a little farther downriver a fault line demarcates the world where the water is higher by a foot and a half on one side, immediately lower on the other; here the tectonic plates once long ago shuddered and shifted, leaving the river literally broken.
One summer night I decided to cross along this line, keeping to the high side of the fall. The flat rock bottom, slightly up-tilted at the break, made a lip upon which to cross, creating both the quiet pool behind it and the purling overflow which plunged, bubbling, into the deeper water below.
The smooth river surface reflected the moonlight; milk-muddy opacity covered the intricacies of its depths. I sidestepped across the slippery rock bottom, feeling for each step as the current pushed incessantly against my calves, half expecting to fall any moment. Three quarters of the way across, a waking fish splashed and sped from the trajectory of my searching left foot; reflexively I crouched, and thoroughly soaked the seat of my pants.
But this day’s trip’s actual details from that point on—the taking a left onto the county road, crossing the bridge, entering the village and making a right at the single red light before the four mile drive remaining—have all dissolved into the overriding memory of the pup’s frantic, nonstop yelping the entire rest of the way home.

I drove up behind the house and parked by the back door. The pup, quiet now, once out of the pet carrier, still ran and hid beneath the van as soon as his feet touched the ground. At that very same moment the percussive squeal of air brakes releasing signaled the bulldozer’s arrival. The puppy crouched, as if frozen; I decided to take a quick run down the hill.
Don, whose bulldozer it was, stood to one side, watching the long trailer back up. He called something to the man driving and then approached me. Lifting a hand towards the machine behind him, he said, “We’re just going to unload this thing and go.”
I nodded, waved assent, and ran back up the hill, but when I again looked under the van the puppy was gone. I glanced towards the barn sitting perched on the knoll behind the house and quickly scanned left, trying to discern movement among all the inanimate junk and leftover weeds still cluttering the yard. And then I saw him, already halfway across the eastside field heading towards the river valley. It seemed impossible to catch him. He was moving too fast.
I knew by giving chase I would only scare him, driving him further and possibly faster away. For a split-second I considered what Adrienne would do and did the only thing I could think of. I yelled loudly: Hey!
The pup stopped and looked back, suspended between impulses, momentarily caught between flight and return. I waved both hands overhead and dropped to my knees and, remarkably, the pup did an abrupt about-face and started back.
In every life there are such turning points, moments of decision which influence all future events. We decide to keep going or go back, to pursue or restrain the impulse to pursue. We discover that simply being patient and open to possibility will allow good to chance our way. We learn to trust and be trusted.
I was still on my knees when the pup came running—tail wagging, panting—and jumped against my outstretched hands. I scolded lightly, asking, “Where do you think you were going?” He licked my face in reply and I let him, knowing there was no other possible answer.

Outrageous Fortune

2005-02-14T09:13:00.000-08:00

On Tuesday morning, August 11, 1803, Lewis set out once again to engage the Shoshones.

At nine miles, Lewis saw two Indian women, a man, and some dogs. When he had arrived within half a mile of them, he… unslung his pack and rifle and put them on the ground, unfurled a flag, and advanced alone at a steady pace… The women retreated, but the man stayed in place until Lewis was within a hundred yards.

Lewis called out “tab-ba-bone,” loudly and frequently. The man “absconded.”

Lewis had his men join him and proceeded… After less than a mile, topping a rise, they came upon three Indian women, one a twelve-year-old, one a teen, and the third elderly, only thirty yards away. At the first sight, Lewis laid down his rifle and advanced on the group. The teen ran off, but the old woman and the child remained. Seeing no chance to escape, they sat on the ground and held their heads down; to Lewis it looked as though they had reconciled themselves to die.

He approached and took the elderly woman by the hand, raised her up, said “tab-ba-bone,” and rolled up his shirtsleeve to show her his white skin (his hands and face were so deeply tanned he might have been an Indian, and his clothes were entirely leather). [Lewis’s men rejoined him.] From their packs he gave the woman some beads, a few moccasin awls, a few mirrors, and some paint. His skin and the gifts, and his friendly attitude, were enough to calm her down.

Lewis (through Drouillard’s sign language) asked the old woman to call the teen back, fearful that she might head off and alarm the main body of Indians. He was unaware that his previous attempts at contact had already alerted the Shoshone and that, in fact, a war party was at that moment headed towards him.

The Indians were overwhelmingly superior. It would have been the work of only a moment for them to overwhelm Lewis’s party, and they would have more than doubled their firepower in rifles and gathered as loot more knives, awls, looking glasses, and other trinkets than any Rocky Mountain Indian band had ever seen.

But rather than assuming a defensive position, Lewis laid down his rifle, picked up his flag, told his party to stay in place, and following the old woman who was guiding, advanced slowly toward he knew not what.

Of course, it all ends favorably for the explorers, the old woman anxiously explaining what Lewis’s repeated incantation of “tab-ba-bone” could not: that they were white men, and meant nobody harm. But one can easily surmise a far different outcome for this first meeting between the Shoshone and the Americans had Lewis not encountered and befriended the old woman first.

The favorable intercession of fate and good fortune continued when Sacagawea, who had stayed back with Clark, rejoined Lewis at the Indians' camp.

In the midst of the excitement, one of the Shoshone women recognized Sacagawea. Her name, Jumping Fish, she had acquired on the day Sacagawea was taken prisoner, because of the way she had jumped through a stream in escaping the Hidatsas. The reunited teens hugged and cried and talked, all at once.

There has hardly been a movie with a more moving or, for that matter, less probable plot twist. And yet, the script gets better.

Dispensing with Drouillard and the sign language, [Lewis] decided to use a translation chain that ran from Sacagawea, speaking Shoshone to the Indians and translating it into Hidatsa, to [her husband] Charbonneau, who translated her Hidatsa into French, to Private Francis Labiche, who translated from French to English.

Scarcely had they begun the cumbersome process when Sacagawea began to stare at[the Indian Chief] Cameahwait. Suddenly recognizing him as her brother, “she jumped up, ran & embraced him, & threw her blanket over him and cried profusely.”

(Excerpted portions taken from “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” by Stephen E. Ambrose.)

First Contact

2005-02-08T08:53:00.000-08:00

The Corps of Discovery needed horses in order to get beyond the Rocky Mountains, and contact with the Shoshone was necessary in order to secure them. And though confidence in his abilities was the spur that drove Lewis and—by extension—the expedition, at this critical moment his confidence became a detriment. “With regard to the Indians he was seeking, he neglected to think through his situation. He just blundered ahead on the unshakable and unacknowledged assumption that he was such an expert in handling Indians that when he met a Shoshone he would know instinctively what to do.”

Why Captain Lewis did not think it was necessary to bring Sacagawea along to help make contact with her people is baffling. Up to that point she had proved a resourceful and even indispensable guide. She knew the area and remembered details of her earlier life. In fact, she had informed Clark “that the expedition’s camp was precisely on the spot where the Shoshones had been camped five years ago when a raiding party of Hidatsas discovered them. The Shoshones had retreated three miles upriver and hidden in a wood. But the Hidatsas had found and routed them, killing four men, four women, and a number of boys, and making prisoners of four boys and all the remaining women, including Sacagawea.” Lewis notes in his journal that Sacagawea seems unmoved by the experience: “I cannot discover that she shews any immotion of sorrow in recollecting this event… or of joy in being again restored to her native country; if she has enough to eat and a few trinkets to wear I believe she would be perfectly content anywhere.”

It is remarkable that Sacagawea—a girl still, after all, at the age of sixteen—should have been possessed of such rigid self-control. But no doubt she had acquired it as a matter of survival. Just as remarkable, though in a less complimentary way, is the fact that Lewis, “who could be so observant about so many things, including the feelings and point of view of his men, could be so unobservant about Sacagawea’s situation. A slave, one of only two in the party, [the other being Clark’s slave, York,] she was also the only Indian, the only mother, the only woman, the only teen-aged person. Small wonder she kept such a tight grip on her emotions.”

In any event, Lewis set off with a small party without her. “If he ever interviewed Sacagawea about her people, he didn’t consider it important enough to put into his journal. If he ever asked her what the country beyond the Divide was like, he didn’t write about it. Clark’s asking her how to say ‘white man’ in Shoshone was the full extent of the captains’ interrogation of the most valuable intelligence source they had available to them. That Lewis did not bring her along on the most important mission of his life is inexplicable.”

First contact occurred the morning of August 11, 1805. Lewis, squinting through his telescope, related later that he saw “an Indian on horse back about two miles distant coming down the plain toward us.” When they were about a mile apart, the Indian stopped. “Lewis pulled his blanket from his pack, threw it into the air, and spread it on the ground, which he understood to be a signal of friendship. Unfortunately, ‘this signal had not the desired effect, he still kept his position.’ He was glancing from side to side. It seemed to Lewis that he was viewing [them] ‘with an air of suspicion.’

“Of course he was. The Indian was, probably, a teen-ager out on a scout, curious… but cautious, brought up to fear all strangers… Coming at him were four armed men. How could he not be suspicious? Especially since the Shoshones had just suffered a serious loss of people and horses from a Blackfoot raid.”

Undeterred, Lewis spread out the supply of trade goods he had brought along and, leaving behind his rifle, advanced. “The Indian [sat] upon his horse, and watched, until Lewis was within two hundred yards. At that point, he turned his horse and began to move off slowly. Desperate, Lewis called in as loud a voice as he could command, ‘tab-ba-bone,’ repeatedly.” But the Indian was having none of it. At 150 yards, Lewis repeated ‘tab-ba-bone,’ held up some trinkets and peeled back his shirt sleeve to show his white skin. But as he recounts, these efforts had not the desired effect, for at one hundred yards, the Indian “suddenly turned his hose about, gave him the whip, leaped the creek and disappeared in the willow brush in an instant and with him vanished all my hopes of obtaining horses for the present.”

What Captain Lewis could not know, even if he had been of a disposition to suspect it, is that he had just initiated a chain of events that might well have doomed the entire expedition.

(Quoted excerpts taken from “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” by Stephen E. Ambrose)

The Opening

2005-01-31T09:53:00.000-08:00

“When only 8 years of age,” Jefferson wrote of Meriwether Lewis, “he habitually went out in the dead of night alone with his dogs, into the forest to hunt the raccoon and the opossum…” Lewis had made such an impression on Jefferson that eleven days before his inauguration he wrote saying he needed a secretary, “ not only to aid in the private concerns of the household, but also to contribute to the mass of information which it is interesting for the administration to acquire. Your knolege [sic] of the Western country, of the army and of all its interests & relations has rendered it desirable… that you should be engaged in that office.” Initially, Jefferson had it in mind that Lewis’ familiarity with the “Western country, of the army and of all its interests & relations” would help him blunt the power and influence of the Federalists who were his political foes, but it wasn’t too long after—having tutored Lewis in the finer points of natural science, geography, philosophy, literature, history, and teaching him to write—that Jefferson conceived a bigger purpose.

Jefferson wanted to find out what lay west, and whether there was a water route to the Pacific. When it became known that Napoleon might be willing to sell what came to be known as the Louisiana Purchase, this desire became acute. The expedition, The Expedition of Discovery, was entrusted to none other than Meriwether Lewis.

Lewis engaged William Clark, under whom he had served in the Army, to share command of the enterprise. “It was remarkable for Lewis to propose a co-command. He did not even have to add a lieutenant to the party, and most certainly did not have to share the command. Divided command almost never works and is the bane of all military men, to whom the sanctity of the chain of command is basic and the idea of two disagreeing commanders in a critical situation is anathema. But Lewis did it anyway.” Such was his regard for Clark.

One of the important purposes of the expedition was to make contact with and secure the co-operation of the Indians. It was for this purpose that Sacagawea was added to the party. As the expedition entered the land of the Shoshone, it became a matter of survival for the Lewis and Clark expedition to secure horses for the trip over the Rockies. But the Indians were uncooperative, shying from contact. They feared attack by rival Indians, which is how Sacagawea had come to be separated from the Shoshone as a young child, having been abducted by the Hidatsa.

Lewis reasoned the solution was simple. He only needed to announce to the Shoshone that he was not an Indian but a white man. So he asked Sacagawea what name her people might give him. Not realizing Lewis’s intent Sacagawea gave him the word “ta-ba-bone”. The Shoshone had no word for the white man, inasmuch as they had not yet met him. The best Sacagawea could do was to give Lewis the only word that came close to what her people might regard Lewis to be: “ta-ba-bone,” meaning either ‘enemy’ or ‘stranger’.

(Excerpts from “Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West” by Stephen E. Ambrose)

On Torture, Interrogation, and Slitting Throats

2005-01-08T11:52:00.000-08:00

At 8:34 PM in the comments over at wretchard's I made the following assertion: "There are certain things that civilized people don’t do, among them: slitting throats, engaging in rape or sexual abuse, targeting innocent civilians…" Now, I would like to reconsider my statement, having subsequently come upon this quote by the inestimable H.L. Mencken: Every normal man must be tempted at times to spit upon his hands, hoist the flag, and begin slitting throats.

I think I understand where Mencken is coming from. I think we've all felt that temptation to 'just do what needs to be done' and damn the consequences. And I'm not saying it's necessarily a wrong impulse. I just think we need to consider that there are indeed consequences to everything we do.

Of course, there are consequences to not doing as well and that is, after all, the point of wretchard's post. In wartime I understand that it is sometimes necessary to do that which we in other times would find abhorent. A soldier (or anyone) might well need to slit someone's throat in order to preserve the lives of others. And if that is an action necesssary to preserving the greater good, then so be it. I understand. No lecture necessary.

What bothers me, though, is the tone of Mencken's quotation. There is an appeal to righteous anger, the idea that if one only becomes indignant enough then all bets are off. You just spit on your hands, hoist the flag, and start slitting throats.

Well, okay. Perhaps. But it had better be for a damn good cause done against some damn bad people otherwise I'd venture somewhere down the line that course of action is going to come back to bite whomever employs it.

Again, I'm not saying it's necessarily the wrong course to take. We just should be prepared to defend it somewhere down the road because, sure as shootin', we'll need to.

The Day's Adventure

2004-11-18T13:05:00.000-08:00

The dogs are beat. We took a long walk this afternoon, going across the back field and through the woods on our way to town. At first I had intended to take only Beau, but Chance saw us going and started to bark, so I went back and told him, “You’re right. It isn’t fair that you don’t go too,” and let him off the chain to join us.

The first logging trail was rutted and muddy, but once we got beyond it the others were solid and dry. We walked along easily, high up but then gradually descending towards the valley. Though I look out over the valley every day, at a distance the perception of height is muted. Walking through the woods on a ridge top barely wide enough to hold a small vehicle while looking down into ravines that fall away on both sides and bottom four or five hundred feet below, one gets a much more immediate impression of height.

Beau had a great time chasing things and I had to keep calling him back to make sure he didn’t get on a scent trail and lose himself in the chase. Chance stayed beside me the whole time we were in the woods, just happy to be out and not tied up at home.

At one point I stopped and considered my surroundings. The moment felt at once familiar and distant. I was looking level into the upper reaches of trees and remembering a similar afternoon maybe twenty years before when, while deer hunting a ridge just like this one, I came upon a slightly surreal, otherworldly place where leafy squirrel nests—huge nests measuring maybe ten feet across—bulged in the near tops of some very big, very likely ancient trees. I’m guessing I had discovered a bit of virgin forest left over from the beginning of time and I’m further guessing it’s all been cut now—though I wonder whether I could ever find that place again to know for sure.

Nearing the end of the ridge trail, descending to the valley, we came across a pile of sand that had spilled from a hole in the cut bank to my left and lay untouched, pristine and elemental, like so much brown sugar poured from the earth and onto our path. A little farther and we had finished the descent, leaving behind both trees and a brushy periphery that held the unidentifiable remains of rusted machinery discarded at the back edge of a farm.

Two deer stood grazing unperturbedly in a field of luminescent green nearly half a mile distant while the dogs acquired their scent and tracked them, zig-zagging back and forth in the shin-high grass covering the flat ground all around us. In the distance traffic rumbled along the highway, a dull impertinent intrusion. Again and again I called to the dogs, checking their advance while they repeatedly attempted to extend the range of their reconnaissance. Eventually the deer caught on to our approach, flicked their tails, and were gone.

I tied Beau in the yard and let Chance into the back room. Because he hardly ever makes the trip, Mom mistook Chance for Beau and had to apologize. “Oh Chance,” she said, sitting down to pet him. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you.”

I rode my bike back, the dogs running at my side. We stopped briefly twice. Finding water in the ditches, the dogs drank and flopped down panting, wetting their bellies to cool off. And then we continued home where the dogs, entirely beat, lie flopped on the floor beside me. Every now and then one or the other will whimper and run sideways in place, blurring the wet image he lies on, perhaps dreaming of the day’s adventure.