Tag: family

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Third Beach to Hoh River

We sit on giant driftwood bleachers in the morning sun, peanut butter and rice cakes in hand and the protruding cliff face of Taylor Point rising in the distance a mile in front of us, up from the Pacific Ocean at the south end of Third Beach, space and fog lazily obscuring the sea stacks of Giants Graveyard.  I am on the Pacific Northwest Trail at the western edge of the Olympic National Park at my older sister’s urging, and though she intends a three-day hike from Third Beach to the Hoh River to be bonding for her and her oldest son, it is quiet therapy for me, an opportunity to perhaps accomplish something visceral and palpable after fifteen months of spinning my cubicled professional wheels.

We drove up from Reno the day prior, my sister, oldest niece, and oldest nephew, leaving hours too late but not feeling particularly pressed, as I have embraced my pending retirement.  Or am trying to.  Shifting, on a dime, from twenty years of Army service and a largely feigned laissez faire commitment to schedule to actually living The Attitude of Meh is no simple task.  I’ve started the transition by not shaving, committing (or not. Whatever!) to developing a personal beard style I call “Spanish Moss,” which looks exactly like you think it might.  So we leave a few hours late?  Not to worry.  We turn a ten-hour drive into a twelve-hour one and, still well shy of our start point, are consoled with an extended trip to a Portland-area Wal-Mart to pick up last minute supplies.  We overnight at the Lewis and Clark State Park near Winlock, Washington, hours short of our target but exposed to a view of the indomitable Mount St. Helens to the north.  The volcano looms large both in front of us and in my older sister’s and my memory.  Though it is recently active, it most spectacularly erupted in May of 1980, exactly a month before my sister’s eleventh birthday and a year before our mother’s third divorce and our repatriation to Nevada.  We lived in northwest Washington when the mountain blew, winds carrying volcanic ash the 250 miles north to our small town of Sedro Woolley and depositing it on our family’s cream-colored Ford Galaxy 500.  The car had a big back seat and a wide, gently sloping rear window with an apartment-sized shelf above the seat that served naturally as a bed, fort, or escape pod for any road trip of longer than an hour.

We sit around the campfire, old-growth Douglas Firs towering over us, my sister and my niece and nephew, the latter two now far more adult than child so they can share in the jokes as we talk about our lives as kids.  Wistful and meandering is the conversation chain that flows around family and a campfire; a late morning start and a long drive turning from a discussion on volcanoes and ash to a Galaxy 500 and rear windows and road trips to remember that time a storm blew your bedroom windows out in the middle of the night and there was glass all over your bed and mom and dad couldn’t find you?  Though nature can be powerful, the supernatural is inexplicable and whether through the banality of chance or the magic of fortune, a storm neither sucked me out of second-floor windows nor peppered me with glass shards, as I was snug asleep at the foot of my sister’s bed in the next room, a place I frequently went as a child, driven there by nightmares.

We get up early the next morning and pack like professionals, driving three more hours through the Scrabbler’s-delight towns of Hoquiam and Quinault and Queets; stopping for coffee at one of the Northwest’s ubiquitous drive-thru coffee bars; then north along the 101 and certainly one of the prettiest stretches of road in America.  We just make our pre-arranged pick-up time at the Oil City Road trailhead.  Though most people hike from the Hoh River north, we’re doing it in the reverse, and Seth from Forks has agreed to pick us up here and drop us off an hour north at the Third Beach trailhead.  Seth is a college student in Boise, but lives here in Forks, and though he appears to be about twenty, the interior of his truck, with its coffee mugs and backpacks and work gloves and climbing gear, gives the impression that he’s already living a full life.  He shares his local knowledge, elating my sister with the good news that the coastal black bears are timid (“the inland bears are another story”); titillating her with the insider information that the town of Forks, though the literary locus for Twilight, was simply copied and reproduced en masse in British Columbia for the film because it “was cheaper and Kristen Stewart would have been bored out of her mind if she had to live here for three months” (she would have been); and entertaining all of us by calling Aberdeen, home of Kurt Cobain, may he rest in peace, “Methlaberdeen.”

Parting Shot, Hoh River

Seth drops us at the start of a canopied trail leading a mile and a half from a parking lot down through the Hoh River Rainforest, and after passively-aggressively-unsuccessfully suggesting that my sister, niece, and nephew remove their rain gear (“it’s not raining, and you’ll get hypothermia”), we head for the beach.  Google reviews of this hike promise ankle-deep mud; knee-deep and fast-water river crossings; boulder-scrambling that requires properly timing the tide; and a trail that is “more obstacle course than hike.”  So, after a peanut butter and rice cake fueling, and a second passive-aggressive-unsuccessful rain gear removal suggestion, we begin.  I have nominally prepped for the hike, my only concern with negotiating boulders around a blind corner, so I naturally assume that the first stop – Taylor Point – is where we must cross boulders only during the outgoing tide.  It is not.  It is, rather, the impetus for the first of our two “group discussions.”

Not having children is both boon and bane.  I am free to come and go as I please, and am not burdened with the demands of responsibility for a living, breathing, DNA-sharing thing.  I need not exert the inefficiencies of, to be blunt, caring.  This, of course, is theory; in practice I would be perpetually panic-stricken if I were a parent.  A scraped-knee would likely induce in me barely concealable tears and a minor case of hyperventilation.  My niece and nephew are now 17 and 19, but it is hard to look at them in any manner other than as objects to be hurled wide-eyed and giggling into the air or as face-painted children ready for an “Uncle Jay Day”, something I surely looked forward to more than they did.  So as I venture fifty yards or so onto the boulders around Taylor Point, and realize that I cannot see anything but cliffs and more rocks and an incoming tide and that this might cause some problems for my traveling companions, I, as my older sister might say, lose my shit.  I look back at my sister gingerly negotiating the boulders and my niece absorbed in her vain search for tide pool creatures, and say “turn around.” My sister freezes, pauses, looks at me, then asks, “turn around?”

I do not like feeling anything but fully in control, and though I am confident that no wave foreseeable could possibly shake me from my perch, even the potential danger of some harm coming to those I see – even erroneously – as ones in need of protection is uncomfortable.  So when my sister asks, “turn around?”, it triggers in me something instinctual.

“TURN THE FUCK AROUND.”  This is a gross, and, in hindsight, hilarious overreaction, but the self-imposed burdens of leadership are significant and spontaneous, and turnthefuckaround seemed like a pretty good thing to say.  My sister moves, quickly.  My niece is cooly unconcerned, and my nephew chooses this moment to remove his raingear.  But we scramble back across the boulders, our final few steps retracing the original, which were then on dry sand and are now in shin-deep water.  The debrief is fairly quick.  We agree that in return for moving quickly when there is a hint of urgency in my voice, I won’t swear anymore, which is a fairly reasonable concession on their part.  The raingear, however, stays on.

The most dangerous stretches of the Third Beach to Hoh River trail are conspicuously marked by large, black and red circular discs affixed prominently on trees and next to an entry/exit point diverting you away from the beach, and danger, and into the rain forests of the Olympic National Park.  They should not be ignored, at any cost, and heeding their warning, after climbing up or down wooden rung-missing ladders and rope assisted inclines, rewards you with silent marches on trails peppered with Pacific banana slugs, looking unmistakably like giant turds; through permanently damp, waist-high skunk cabbage, deer fern, and pick-your-berry (Salmon? Huckle? Black twin?); under soaring Sitka spruce and Western Hemlock.  There are obstacles to be negotiated at every turn, cooperation required, and like a corporate sponsored team-building event, we are positively lifted by the time we make it to Toleak Point.  Everything seems to converge here.  Sea otters, permanently content on their backs, float with the current; Bald eagles projectile-shit from tree branches like expectorant, a county fair participant readying to launch a watermelon seed in reverse; sea lions cruise the channels between rock outcroppings, hunting fish and barking commands to each other like bloodhounds on a chase.  It is easy to imagine life here hundreds of years ago, single plumes of campfire smoke rising from the tree line, soft-lit Thomas Kinkade landscapes unobstructed by the noise and tools and trappings of electricity and progress.  We find a camping spot, luxuriant, just above the beach and the driftwood piles marking high tide.  We hang rope to dry our gear and quickly make the camp ours, pitching our tents and taking forty-five minutes of collective effort and patience to start a fire.  My niece and nephew are, literally, without complaint, and I am a bit ashamed that I find it moving.  If we can’t start a fire, no biggie, but we did, and that’s pretty cool too.

We’re set up early enough to scour the beach, walking over a thick blanket of dried, shredded paper-like seaweed and finding, among other things, Styrofoam coolers, rope, nets, buoys, bags, and all things plastic.  The ocean is an artist, a driftwood sculptor and a gem polisher, but she occasionally does her best Andres Serrano impression, vomiting on her shores the effluence of man far and near.  My nephew finds a bleached skull, sans the jawbone but a radiator-like screen in the nasal cavity intact, and we spend twenty minutes debating what this belonged to.  Is it a coyote or a wolf? An adolescent saber-toothed cat?  A dog?  Sea Lion seems badass – it’s a lion of the sea, after all – but I realize that Google will settle this debate and then, as quickly as we gained it, the knowledge will be gone.  No need to retain it, the answer is always just a search engine away.  I wonder what Google, for all its power, has done to the imagination of a boy.

Last WalkWe spend the night at Toleak Point and head out early the next morning, traversing beach, then rain forest, then beach again.  We startle a raccoon and trace the solo steps of a deer, joined briefly by a larger, second set, then solo again as one set of tracks disappears in the woods to the left and another in the ocean to the right.  Other than a slight mist the night prior, the weather holds out for three days.  Freshwater creeks are shallow but adequate, and with our water filter we could have safely left all water bottles and Camelbacks at home and survived just fine.  The warnings of mud and a fast river crossing are false, as the drought has reached the coast as well.

At Jackson Beach we climb down the vertical face using fifty feet of rope ladder, eat the remainder of our dehydrated food (Jamaican Jerk Chicken and Pad Thai) and have our second group discussion.  This one concerns whether we stay our last night here, risking setting up camp at what may or may not be the high-water mark, or wait for the tide to go out and skirt the point, crossing what turns out to be the much-anticipated boulder field.  The latter wins, and my sister and I kill time talking about life after the Army.  I watch my niece and nephew walking in the sun and think about how one experiences life and risk and adversity and beauty relevant to our age.  This trip as a twenty-year-old, in possession of a healthy ego and an unearned sense of optimism, would have been a significantly different experience than that of a forty-four-year-old in transition.  Articulating the risk of hypothermia from wearing raingear when it’s not raining, for example, is such a pedantic thing to say, but life is easier when someone is there to protect you, no?

The tide starts to go out, so we pack up and start our trip around the last corner, hesitant, not knowing what is on the other side or how far we have to go.  But it opens up after a few hundred yards, the beach covered in giant driftwood logs like dropped matchsticks and the flats reflecting the setting sun and the most extraordinary view.

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The Church Invisible (4 of 4)

A spring day in Tucson: the sun beats down, already, the heat magnified or diminished by the absence of humidity, I can never figure out which. On a mid-morning  run with a friend and the air hangs heavy, with heat, with smells of a morning-after detoxification, with my own history.  Biennial trips to this town are conducive to foolish sentimentalism, particularly if one already tends that direction, and much of me is here in Tucson.  Almost all of me is of the desert.[1]  Here for, some would say, an overdue wedding (though nothing good in the desert happens quickly), we run on a Mesquite and Willow Acacia-lined path along the Rillito, a sanded wash that lately, due to groundwater pumping and population and a depleted Tucson Basin aquifer, only very occasionally answers to River; scattering in front of us Harris’s Antelope squirrels and Lesser Earless lizards, brave until we are right on top them and then sprinting away, blindingly quick and beautiful in a devilish sort of way.  The desert, it seems to me, despite its desolation and acerbity and extortive leanings, is accommodative and prone to potential.

Example: the wash.  Heavily vegetated and waiting for liquid fulfillment, patiently, it bides its time as a temporary reprieve for anything with legs, or wings, non-discriminatory; and there, on the banks, the presently vacant City of Fun, Inc. carnival, octopus arms and mallet-ended fulcrums and tea-cupped turntables dormant but for one man hosing down a tractor-trailer; fleeting, precarious joy in abeyance only until the sun goes down when it will then come to life, iridescent with light, and the momentary absence of worry; with the sparkled pubescent longing to steal a moment alone, if for only a flash, at the top of the Ferris wheel or in the darkened back corner of the House of Horrors; here, continuing on the path, the Cactus Wrens and Vireos and Abert’s Towhees calling safely from the spiked confines of the ocotillo and acacia.  They can leave – they do have wings – but they do not.  Something keeps them here, something in this non-judgmental desert that lets you, if you can stand it, be who you are and stay as long as you want; it is addictive, it becomes home in a way that is either incapable of or beyond description – that somethingness Edward Abbey reduced to, well, “something”: there is something there which the mountains, no matter how grand and how beautiful, lack; which the sea, no matter how shining and vast and old, does not have.[2]

The desert, though it can be a trap, an inert ambush lying passively in wait, where it will, if you let it, consume you, leaving you parched and cracked-lipped if you are lucky, starched-white boned if you are not; is also a preservative, sanguinity and resilience rewarded by people or things (a fifty-year old truck) from the past, the discovery striking in you a flint of something, nostalgia or love or a rumination on destiny, if such a thing exists.  Surely this truck doesn’t have one, it has neither destiny nor free will, it has no choice in its fate but there is something, a sum of parts or energy or personality or history.  The arid, high desert has preserved the truck, and memory may preserve emotions, but there is always something more, something frequently both frustratingly and gloriously invisible and unexplainable in its potential.

This church invisible has converted me, and I have self-imposed a deadline of the first week of July to finish the truck.  I work relentlessly.  I have done all I can do with it in my own garage, and for the last several weeks it has occupied a spot in Anthony’s workshop, where I can use both his tools and his expertise.  I go there on weekends, a coffee in one hand and an offering in the other, a twelve-pack of lemonade or a bottle of Fast Orange hand cleaner, something to karmically defray both the kindness Anthony has shown me and the experience I am taking.  Today we remove the bed, crisscrossing nylon webbing from alternate corners of the truck and then raising it using Anthony’s homemade hydraulic lift, setting it back down on a wheeled-cart where Anthony will tend to it later. We set to work, Anthony surgeon to my lumberjack, he cuts, removes, copies, welds, grinds and paints the multiple rusted-out spots on the truck, leaving not a trace of his graft and simultaneously allowing me to keep my grandfather’s truck almost entirely in the original.[3]

I, alternatively, am the antithesis, methodically breaking rusty bolts, crudely spray painting smaller parts, oafishly grinding away at the frame with a steel wire wheel.  It is here, I decide, my grandfather’s truck becomes mine, decades of Nevada dirt and rust and mouse turds and Cottonwood leaves falling from places that haven’t seen the light of day in almost fifty years, my grandfather no doubt wondering what in the world it is I am doing expending so much time and energy scrubbing half-century old leaf springs.  He was a man who spent a life time making something, using his hands, concluding each day with a visual confirmation that his toil had amounted to something identifiable, even if it were grading a stretch of road or irrigating an alfalfa field or shoeing a horse or front-end loading buckets of dirt from one place to another, and I wonder if perhaps he, over his lifetime, had become desensitized to the emphatic corporeal nature of what I feel only after working on my truck; this thing I encounter after seeing my reflection in a hand-shined stainless steel grill, or in grinding away the rust from the frame to reveal a stamped FORD emblem, unchanged over the lifetime of the company; or in hearing the basso, diaphragmatic WHUMP of the laden door closing soundly against the metal cab.

There is a shameless self-satisfaction I find at the end of these days, a mute self-aggrandizing I proudly display in the grease and paint on my one pair of Carhartts; the dirt in my fingernails an unmistakable sign that I worked, the progress on the truck visible to anyone who looked at it in the morning and then again in the late afternoon.  I become obsessive, my need for organization and aggregation and order manifesting in the urge to remove one more bolt, or clean one more part, or paint one more piece, and I find myself unable to distinguish between a need to finish the truck or to extend my time restoring it.  The truck, the desert, the end of my time in Tennessee, the preparation for yet another move, this reconnection, albeit temporary, have all made me pensive and introspective.

But now the truck is finished, and it is beautiful.  The oxidized powder-blue has been replaced by the original, Baffin Blue, contrasted by a two-tone of Corinthian white on the hood, a band along the top of the bed, and in the interior.  All the rubber is new, the clouded stainless steel burnished, the bench seat reupholstered, gearshifts and heater box painted.  Anthony has patched the floor pans and corrected all the imperfections accumulated over a lifetime of camping, deer hunting, and pulling horse trailers through creosoted, dusty roads at the whims of a transplanted New Jersey Irishman and his brood.

Anthony assures me there is no other truck in existence like this one, and my instinct is to respond of course there isn’t, but then I realize he is speaking about its appearance, the fact it is four-wheel drive and has the original tailgate and an aftermarket diamond plate rear bumper and brush guard attached to the frame through a customized grill.  Because this thinly veiled posit that a 1962 Ford F100 is somehow metaphorical, well.  That’s just silly.

 

[1]Sand gets everywhere, even in veins.  Another blood line: Nicola Hage, a blue-eyed five foot ten inch Syrian, left modern-day Lebanon sometime in the early 1900’s with fifty dollars in his pocket, in search of a brother and the idea of America on his brain.  He made his way first to Turkey and then to Le Havre, France, where on November 12th 1910 the twenty-one year old paid second-class stowage on the S.S. Chicago to New York City, watched his name entered into the Ellis Island registry ten days later, and then headed west, eventually finding himself in el Triunfo, Baja California Sur, a silver mining boomtown 3,500 miles from New York and 9,000 from his home. What drives a man to go to such trouble, such great lengths, passing by so much opportunity and wonder and novelty existing between there and here? What continued to push him west? Was it a condemnation; a serial reminder of repeated failures, of loves lost or stabbing epithets or miscommunications? Was it simply a thirst for adventure? A woman? Or was it a collective; the potential only men like him could see in the precious metal nimbus setting daily behind mountains that seemed to only get bigger as he headed west, a beckoning Tantalus drawing in a man who chose only to follow the sun. I want my great-grandfather to have found his brother and whatever else he was looking for. I want to picture him in el Triunfo with silver in his pockets, a Mexican woman on his arm so achingly beautiful it made his heart clench, the grainy dirt under his leather boots familiar, assuaging whatever homesickness he had for the deserts of his middle-east, a nirvanic look on his face when he learned enough Spanish to translate the name of his new town, his face turning up to the warming sun as the word slipped quietly from his lips: “Triumph. Goddam right.”

[2] Or, “what is this life if full of care we have no time to stand and stare? Eh? Take off your shoes for a while, unzip your fly, piss hearty, dig your toes in the hot sand, feel that raw and rugged earth, split a couple of big toenails, draw blood! Why not?” Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire (1968)

[3] Though I purchased a used hood and two fenders from a tooth-deficient man in southern Tennessee, Anthony used them only to patch the original parts, and the truck remains essentially 100% in the original.

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The Ninth Life

My grandfather spent the first months of his life as a widower sleeping above the covers of his decades-old queen size bed. Changing the sheets required the initiative of his daughters; my grandfather felt that if he washed anything he would lose, forever, the pillow-case smell of his wife. He and my grandmother had been married some fifty years when she died over twelve years ago, and in some sense, I think, he has simply been waiting around to die.

Over the last few days, it seemed increasingly likely that day had come.  My grandfather isn’t supposed to have aspirin, but had unknowingly been swallowing 325 mg of the stuff each time he followed up his vanilla ice cream with an Alka Seltzer tablet.  The aspirin ate a hole in something, he started leaking blood internally, then throwing it up.

We have been down this road before.  Several times in the last few years, and a few isolated events over his lifetime, have prompted his five children to make the one- to seven-hour trek from the nether regions of Nevada to his hospital bedside, muscling past the hovering priest and fawning nurses (even in the throes of death, he’s a bit of a charming fellow).

But again my grandfather has defied the cumulative effects of age, odds, loneliness and preservatives; again his children have packed up and went back home, heads shaking in equal parts admiration and disbelief.  To be fair, for a man who subsists almost entirely on bear claws and Hot Pockets, every day he gets up is a spit in the face of the devil himself.

A funeral is an ablution for the life of man.  Tragic and cheerless for those who die young; a maudlin celebration for those whose lives have been full and satisfying, but an ablution regardless.  It is also, unfortunately, a chit you can use just once.  But why?  Why are there no eulogies for the living?

My grandfather has always been, with the exception of his brief hospital stays, in full control of his faculties.  He continues to hunt and ride horses even in his 87th year, walks daily, and possesses a wit that seems to only get more lascivious as he ages (he recently told his nurses he didn’t want an X-Ray because he was worried it would make him sterile).  He takes my grandmother with him just about everywhere he goes, she the permanent resident of the left side of a small oak box, he the would-be tenant of the right. He buys her flowers regularly. When he comes into town on cold-day errands he leaves grandma at his youngest child’s house so she won’t get cold, and if he wants to stay only briefly grandma provides a ready-made excuse: can’t stay long, I’ve got your grandmother in the car.

My grandfather is simple.  My gut tells me that definition means something different to you than it does to me, but I don’t know a better single word to convey my admiration for the man.  Dictionary-dot-com lists twenty-nine different uses, and of those I think the one coming closest is free of deceit or guile; sincere; unconditional.

A high-school graduate, in his lifetime he has been a first-generation American, a hair-tonic hocker, a newspaper boy, a retriever of moonshine for the drunks under Bayonne’s bridges, a sailor, a World War II veteran, a pipe-fitter, a miner, construction worker, heavy-machine operator and a member of the Greatest Generation.  He is a pioneer, part of the post-World War II westward migration; a cowboy, a hunter, an amateur rancher, artist, and leather-worker; a husband, father of five, grandfather to eighteen and great grandfather to sixteen (with number seventeen on the way).

He is also, for me, an unfalteringly good example of what it means to be a man.  He wishes ill-will to no one, and is the least judgmental person I know.  I have never heard him raise his voice and never heard him swear in anger.  He deflects praise, takes responsibility for his actions and expects others to do the same. His most prized possession – he told me once – is his family.  No contest.  I know every man sins, but I wager we could use both hands, less thumbs, to accurately account for the times in his life he has lied, cheated, or stolen (and make fists if you want to count the times he failed to correct it). He used to drink, daily, but when he realized he was an alcoholic he just quit.  No twelve-step program, no intervention, no relapse – he just quit.  Simple.

He uses words sparingly.  I once read Ernest Hemingway won a bet by writing a story with just six words (For sale: baby shoes.  Never worn); I think grandpa could give him a run for his money.   If something doesn’t sit well with him, he might say “that’s not right.”  Only later, after I began to develop my own moral compass, did I realize he didn’t mean “that’s incorrect,” but something much, much closer to

life is but a series of decisions, of interwoven threads not only keeping you tethered to the ground but keeping your friends and families close, close where they can pull you back down, if need be, or even give you yards of slack to make your own way.  If you are lucky, you can pull them right along with you, or let them lead you back on course.  But if you make that choice, or tolerate those who choose to make such decisions, even in passing, you might take those first steps down a path that ends someplace you just don’t want to be.

He grew up in Bayonne, New Jersey, one of the most densely populated cities in America, but home is, and has been, a double-wide trailer at the end of a quarter-mile long dusty road in the high deserts of Nevada.  And though his blood is Irish, and his heart belongs to a dead German, his soul is unmistakably and firmly set in the salty dirt of the sagebrushed American West.  Here was – is – his dream: to own a horse, to be a cowboy, to raise a family and work the dirt and hunt and fish and never take more than you need and respect others and have your own space.  And he did it, he has it all – maybe not much to you and I, but it is everything he ever wanted.  Simple.

Josey Wales is one of my favorite fictional characters, and I have only recently put a fine point on the reasons why: but for the six-shooters and the inclination towards serial killing, he is a man who reminds me of my grandfather.  I think he and Josey would get along right well.  Neither say much, but say what they’re going to do and do what they say.  Both kind to animals and lovers of the earth, they have understated senses of humor, respect other people and above all else love their families.

Appropriate, then, to borrow Josey’s simple words for a fallen companion and put them to my living grandfather: I rode with him, and I got no complaints.

 

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Curtains for the Zen Dog

I killed my dog on Monday.  To be more precise, I suppose, I told a vet to kill him.  I wasn’t the trigger puller, or in this case the plunger-pusher, but it felt like it.

Late Sunday night Mojo pissed himself, on his bed, and then couldn’t stand up to move out of the mess.  For almost 18 hours his pulse rate was at a drug-influenced 170-200 beats per minute, but uninhibited it raced to 300.  It should have been a steady 110.  On the way back to the clinic Monday evening, the cardiologist told me he had collapsed once again, and though when his heart was pulsating in the lower range of that 170-300 frame he was literally pulling the vet techs around the hospital floor, they had to give him drugs more and more frequently and his lows were causing him more and more distress.  Three of the four valves of his heart were paper thin.  “It is not a bad thing,” she said, “to put down an 11 ½ year old Great Dane.”

I know this, I told her.  Most Great Danes live 8-10 years, frequently have hip and heart problems, and lug around significantly less than 180 pounds.  But this was my friend, a dog who has been, with the exception of his several brief stays with the Jenks’ and two long ones with my mom, my roommate and companion for the last eleven years.  That’s almost 30% of my life.  It’s 73% of the time I have been in the army.  It would be 15% of my entire time on earth should I live to my 74th birthday, the average age of an American male.  Euthanizing an 11 1/2 year old Great Dane might not be a bad thing, but it is certainly not a good one.

In his younger years Mojo was, in the most emphatic sense of the word, a beast.  He would pull me on my mountain bike, on a dead-on sprint, for almost two miles.  More than once he pulled me off of it.  He inadvertently broke my mother’s forearm in a game of tag.  He could play touch rugby for hours, was a decent hiker but a terrible swimmer (distances were limited to however far he had to go to drape himself over me floating on my pool chair).  He was in a few fist-fights and liked being around fringe characters.  He possessed a pair of the biggest testicles you ever saw, and didn’t mind me showing them off.  He was a great roommate. Though he didn’t bark much, and would never bite anyone, if he was home I never needed to close (let alone lock) a back door when I was at work for the day.  He was house-trained so quickly and so well that I once mistakenly blamed one of my friends for drunkenly wetting my bed when I was out of town for a weekend.  And if he did make a mistake, he always told me so, usually as soon as I walked in the door. He could be rough around the edges, I will grant you.  His breath was atrocious. He sometimes picked on smaller dogs, leaving me feeling like the guy who shows up at parties with the belligerent frat boy no one really likes but pretends to.  He was never accused of being brilliant; his sheer dumbness, in fact, may have been his most endearing quality.  But his drawbacks became nothing but background noise when he leaned against you or dropped his enormous head into your lap and stared at you with his slightly crossed eyes.

Mojo had taken well to our Capital Hill neighborhood, and no one had perfected pretentiousness better than he.  I would leave him in the front yard while I sat on the porch, reading and smoking a cigar, my view of Mojo obstructed by a hedge row but knowing exactly how he was sitting: front legs stretched out, head up and nose elevated slightly above parallel, hind quarters off to his left.  Sphinx-like, were the Sphinx dressed in business casual.  One could not walk by without noticing Mojo, sitting in the sun, a Zen dog in an ambitious city.  People would, more often than not, talk to him.

“You are huge.”

“You are a horse.”

“Oh. My. God.  You are beautiful.”

 Not once in two years did Mojo rise from his position to meet a dog-less person (and those with dogs usually moved along quickly).  He rarely bothered to even make eye contact, and would frequently shift his gaze further away from whomever was standing in front of him, his answer to all compliments uniform: “I know this.  Now please move along so I can ignore someone else.”

But now here we sit, facing one another, him on a lowered stainless steel cart, me on the floor with my legs under him, one arm around his neck and the other scratching his belly.  He looks sad, but I don’t know if it’s because he is, in fact, sad, or if it’s a product of me bawling childishly.  I know we can’t sit here all night long, but I’m not sure what else to do. I impulsively take a picture of him with my cell phone and immediately regret it. The picture is stygian, his face long and skinny and cartoonish like a Pat Oliphant sculpture.  A few friends are here with me, and I ask them to step outside so I can I tell my dog, in private, how much I love him and how thankful I am to have had him as a friend for so long.  I hug him once for my mom and once for me.  He barely raises his head.  And then death knocks on the door.

Death, oddly, looks an awful lot like a thirty-something Connie Chung. She carries in her hand three syringes: one large filled with a milky fluid, one large filled with something appearing to be watered-down Pepto Bismol, and one small.  The first shot, death/Connie Chung tells me, is anesthesia, which will put Mojo to sleep so he feels no pain or discomfort.  The second, and I think the third – I’m not really listening at this point and so I don’t know what she said – induce cardiac arrest.  What I do know is that there is asleep and there is dead.  Asleep feels like Mojo asleep.  I can see his chest heaving, still feel his heart racing.  My own heart races; I want to stop this.

“Hey!  Ha Ha!  Just kidding!  Sometimes Mojo and I like to play jokes on each other!  He licks my face when I’m asleep, I pretend I’m going to euthanize him!”

But Connie Chung is quick, and the second syringe is emptied and then the third.  And though I am familiar with my dog asleep, dead is another matter.  I feel the full weight of his anvil-sized head, see and hear his last breath, feel the cart move as his 180 pound body, for the first and only time muscleless, fully relents to gravity.  A forearm slips off the table.

I am, probably, Godless.  But I love life, and karma, and symmetry, and existentialism is a pretty cool concept and maybe just maybe Elysium is a real place.  I like to think so.  And sometimes life gives us those little reminders that we all come and go, and good often replaces bad, and trees grow in dirt, and being with is usually a better thing than being without.  If you’re lucky, the timing of these reminders is such that it’s harder to write it off as mere happenstance when it is so obviously and joyously karma or symmetry or, if you prefer, God.  Such is my Mojo-less ride home, when I call my good friend Patrick, waking him because he’s been up all night with his wife Andrea helping her to deliver their new daughter.  I had previously suggested they name her Patandrea, but they’ve gone instead with Fiona.  I jokingly tell Pat that Fiona’s and Mojo’s spirits have passed one another in the other-world, and we should hope Mojo’s spirit hasn’t inserted itself into Fiona’s body.

Pat says she could do a lot worse.

 

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Albert Pujols, the Poverty Line, and Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

Being excited about Major League Baseball in the first week of May is equivalent to being excited about your one boring friend’s New Year’s resolution to “really spice things up this year.”  But what if he really meant it?  What if he did something to prove it?  What if he jumped out of an airplane, or decided to walk across Utah, or invented heelies for adults and then cruised around the mall?  Forget the creepy factor – would you stay and watch?  Would you congratulate him for his bravery?

You would if you were Kansas City and your boring friend was the Royals.  For game one – a Monday night in KC (a school night!) – 22,000 fans not only stayed the duration to watch Zach Grienke pitch a 6 hit, 10 strikeout, complete-game shutout against the White Sox, but gave him a standing ovation both after the 8th inning and before the ninth and didn’t sit down until he finished getting hugs and high-fives from his teammates after the game.  Grienke threw his second-to-last pitch 95 miles an hour, prompting the crowd to erupt once again and putting a smile on my face that didn’t leave until I headed for my car.

This is baseball.  I can admit that it might not be a sport (if you can smoke and play it, it’s probably a recreation.  Plus it’s a haven for professional athletes possessing that rare combination of fat and weak – google Bartolo Colon, Matt Stairs, Sidney Ponson, David Wells, Antonio Alfonseca, John Kruk), but watching the game being played correctly – seeing a diving grab up the middle, a back handed flip for a double play, a hitter absolutely baffled by a change up, a ball hit so hard you know, you just know, it’s gone as soon as it comes off the bat, well that’s a beautiful thing.  A thing so beautiful it brings me together with Emo teens sporting awful forward swept hair dos and wearing spandex-laced denim jeans and converse All Stars; young couples wearing matching Royals jerseys, “Soria” scrawled across the back; old women using walkers with punctured tennis balls cushioning the supports; that girl wearing the “shuck me, suck me, eat me raw” t-shirt; and kids, kids everywhere – that is a beautiful thing.  A necessary thing.

On the way out of town, driving I-70 East on a straight shot towards St. Louis I listened to a man call in to the Kansas City am radio sports station and share how he listened to the game with his son, them sitting in his truck outside his house because his “line of work keeps us right above the poverty line” and am radio was the only way he could experience a game; sharing that moment with his son and explaining to him what it meant for Zach Grienke to pitch a complete game shut-out, what it meant for 22,000 fans to not leave their seats on a Monday night – a school night! – in the first week of May, what it meant to him to have that moment of serendipity, bliss, and nostalgia because that’s what he did with his own dad, sit on the tool box in the back of his dad’s truck on his boyhood farm and listen to George Brett or Hal McRae hit bombs, listen to a crowd roar when Dan Quisenberry came in to finish the game.  This is baseball.

There is a man in St. Louis named Albert Pujols, and aside from the unfortunate pronunciation of his last name, he is revered by Cardinals fans as, perhaps, the second coming.  There are not many like him in the sport – Derek Jeter in New York probably; Barry Bonds a few years ago in San Francisco maybe – who command the respect and adoration of an entire city.  Albert Pujols, because of what he can do to a baseball, because he can spot the rotation of the threads on a ball less than three inches in diameter coming at him from 60 feet away at 90 miles an hour and can not only tell exactly where that ball is going to cross the plate but can hit it, absolutely murder it, sending it over the outfield fence and causing thousands upon thousands of people to leap from their seats in synonymous joy.  What is this?  What void does Albert Pujols fill in those lives, what is this thing he possesses that brings together people, old and young, bad clothes and good?  What is this thing that causes Bob from St. Louis to give me, unsolicited, $90 tickets along the third base line so I too can hang around for three and a half hours in order to share in this thing, watching Albert Pujols crush a baseball 370 feet in the bottom of the ninth inning, game out of reach but no one leaving just so they – we – can talk about him on the way back to our cars or busses or trains?

In the early 1940’s Abraham Maslow posed a theory that human beings have stratified needs, psychological needs causing you to first meet the necessities of life, air and food and water and sex and sleep, and not until these were met could you move onward and upward to things like security and health and friendship and intimacy, confidence and self-esteem, and not until you met these needs could you move to the top, to spiritualization and religion and morality.  But I disagree.  I don’t think it’s a pyramid, I don’t think it’s a scale.  There is something to Albert Pujols, to baseball, to watching Zach Grienke pitch a complete game shutout the first week of May, to sharing the roar of a crowd and the success of your home team as you sit in your old truck on your dirt farm with your son at your side, school night be damned, there is something fundamental to this feeling, this necessity, on par with the very necessities of life.  This is baseball.

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The Little Sister Interlude

Chicago, Illinois/August 9, 2001

My fourteen year-old sister occupies the passenger seat next to me. My traveling companion for the next nine days, she is five feet eight inches of legs and eyeballs, one hundred per cent self-assuredness. My plan is to mold her, to show her parts of the country she has never seen, to show her the things she can have if she continues to do the things she is doing. I will show her cities, art, monuments, untamed wilderness. I will show her baseball. I will show her things that come with an education, with sophistication, with worldliness. I will impress her with my knowledge of all things not small-town Nevada. I will prepare her for life.

We drive out of Denver, and I am already a little cautious. A college friend has spoken of strippers and Amsterdam hash bars. I want her to be worldly, but this is too much! Does she know what a stripper is? Does she know they are all “working their way through college,” but that none have actually ever graduated? Does she know many have suffered abuse of some sort during their childhood, and that their own children are also likely to be affected? I want to tell her these things, but then I wonder if she’ll ask me how much money they make. She has been asking me this question with regards to my friends and their professions. If she asks, I must answer honestly. She is mature, going into high school, and she deserves the truth.

“A good Las Vegas stripper,” I would answer, “can make six figures, and working just half the year. However, benefits are pretty much non-existent. Unless, of course, you’re looking for good coke.” Six figures for a half year’s work, and free drugs? This sounds pretty good to me. I opt not to broach the stripper and Amsterdam issue. I instead worry about her becoming a stripper. I worry about her going to college and having a bad sexual experience. I worry about her getting accidentally pregnant and ruining her young life. This is a valid concern. My family breeds like it’s free sex at a polygamy festival. I want to ensure my little sister is aware of the breeding process. I want her to know that contraception is spelled with a “tra” in the middle of it. I want her to be prepared.“So Erin,” I ask, “whadda ya hear about the fallopian tube?” She shrieks. She brings her legs up to her chest, leans away from me, curls into a fetal position. Her hands cover her ears. “LA LA LA LA LA LA LA LA” she says. I suspect she doesn’t want to talk about this. “I DON’T WANT TO TALK ABOUT THIS,” she says. She is fourteen. We drive on.

At Mt. Rushmore, we take a gondola ride to an elevated view of the monument. From our perspective, only three presidents are visible. “I thought there were four,” she says. I tell her they take one down every other month to give it a good cleaning. She eyes me suspiciously. At the foot of the monument itself, she sees that there actually are four. “Ha!” She says. “I told you. What are their names?” I can see she doesn’t know. “The left one,” I say, “is Samuel L. Jackson. Then John Elway, Will Ferrell, and George W. Bush.” She does not believe me. “You’re such a liar!” she says. “The one with the beard is Abraham Lincoln.” She is fourteen.

We drive through the great expanse that is South Dakota. I want her to look around, to absorb the Great Plains and all of its history. I want her to know the misfortune of the millions of Native Americans at the hands of white settlers and the United States Army. I want her to know about the great bison herds. I continue to point things out to her. Laura Ingall Wilder’s childhood home. The Badlands. The acres and acres of wheat and corn. At each of my observations, she gives me a token “uh-huh,” barely looking up from her Nintendo Game-boy. I am exasperated. “Erin,” I finally say. “I want to know what you think about all of this. Look around you! This is America! What do you say?” She stares at me, inquisitively. Reflectively. “I think,” she says, “you pick your nose almost as much as Kimberley.” She is, I remind myself, fourteen.

In a restaurant in South Dakota, a young male takes our order. After he leaves, Erin states that she believes he is gay. “Erin!” I furrow my brow and drop my voice an octave. “Why do you think that?” “Because,” she says, “he has a lisp. And his finger nails are long and polished.” I begin: “Do you know anyone who is gay? Have you ever met a gay man?” She admits she has not. “Then you are basing your opinion on stereotypes acquired from television and movies,” I state. “You are basing your opinion on misperception, and your generalization perpetuates the incorrect and unfair portrayal of gay men. Until you have solid knowledge based on first-hand experiences acquired over time, you are only showing your ignorance by making such a statement.” She is sufficiently embarrassed. I have shown her the path to open-mindedness.

In Chicago, we go to a party given for a friend and her peers, graduates of a PhD program for clinical psychology. The host of the party is also my friend’s mentor and supervisor. My friend tells us her mentor is sort of peculiar, but very nice and entertaining. He is also, she says, gay. He greets us at the door. Erin stands behind me, obviously curious to meet her first gay man. Bernie is slender, with slightly balding hair slicked down on top of his head. He has a pencil-thin mustache, and wears a gray polo tucked into his belted black slacks. His shoes are highly polished. His partner is an Austrian named Hans. Bernie’s fingernails are long and polished, and Bernie has, of course, a lisp. It is all Erin can do to contain herself. She is throwing me kidney shots, each one a connecting “I told you so!” She does not punch like a fourteen year-old.

Our trip together is over. Erin begins high school on Monday. She is on the dance team, she is in Honors English Composition, she is her freshman class president. Still, I find myself worrying about her. We drive together to the airport, silently. I hope that she has had a good time, that she has learned something new, that she has seen what can be hers if she keeps doing the things she is doing. In the end, however, it is I that am taught. It is I that am impressed. It is I that worry that I annoyed her too much, that I embarrassed her. I think she is a superstar, and I tell her so. She looks me in the eye, pauses, and says “thank you.” Clearly, confidently, appreciatively.

I miss her already.