Decoration Day 2023

My first since retirement, and so freighted with a very odd feeling of ordinariness; when every day is a holiday none are.

Instead of choosing to make the long drive down to Willamette National Cemetery I left the quiet house and crossed the big river into Washington, to the little graveyard outside the old Vancouver Barracks.

The old post cemetery isn't the original burying ground set aside in the 1840s. That space was built over when the post expanded in the 1880s and as many of the bones as could be found were removed to the current location, just north of the busy street that is 4th Plain Drive.

It's a very odd little spot. There's a couple of paved loops but no parking area, giving a weird "drive-through" feel to the place. Like everyone else, I just pulled the little car off the road in as gentle a fashion as possible to spend some time with the dead.

As always in these federal plots, the identical stones testify a wide variety of shades; obviously GIs and their families, but also the legacy of the frontier post - civilians working for the Army, traders and travelers, native (probably) laborers. There's even a handful of POWs from the Second World War, German and Italian prisoners buried far from their homes.

I did the same thing I always do.

Wandered among the gravestones, nodding to the GIs as I passed, pouring out a libation in their memory. Most of those buried around me appeared to be guys who'd died between the big wars, in the 1920s ans 1930s, veterans and timeservers alike only in sharing the Army blue or khaki, or OD green. Or the tree suit I wore at the end of my time.

As so often these latter days, I felt the slow loss of the kinship I once felt with my nation and my service. That We the People had soldiers fighting overseas seemed like another age instead of just two years ago.

At the end of my stroll I found myself next to what remained of 1SG Ewart, who'd been topkick in the 1st Infantry back in the day. It seemed like an old First Shirt would be a good sort of person to entrust a cold beer, so I left mine with him and turned for home, my moment with the dead done and another lazy retired sort of day before me.

I'm no longer certain what this day means, to me and to my nation. We seem more than ever a house divided against ourselves.

Yet.

As always today;

This.

Bull Webbly

I was away from home last evening and had time on my hands, so what else was a fella to do?

I went to a minor league baseball game.

The game was at the Single A ballpark in Everett, Washington where the visiting Salem-Keizer Volcanoes (a San Francisco farm) played the penultimate game against the home side, a Seattle affiliate. The game itself was something of a snoozer; a 7-nothing rout for the visitors capped by a disastrous (for Everett) four-run ninth where the Volcanoes pretty much pasted the Everett closer all over the park.

I learned to score ballgames from my pop, the Master Chief, who told me as a slip of a boy that "it will make you pay attention to the game" and, yes, pop, that it does. I still record the pitch count for each batter, the direction the ball was put in play, and I tend to make my own decisions as to hits and errors regardless of the official scorer. So it was on the Salem-Keizer run in the sixth inning, when, according the the linked story above...

"Salem-Keizer capitalized on a Little League-type mental error in the sixth inning to score a run. With one out in the inning, right fielder Heath Quinn advanced to third base on a fly out to right field. The AquaSox right fielder, Dimas Ojeda, thought there were three outs on the catch and did not throw the ball in. Third base coach and manager Kyle Davis waved Quinn home emphatically and Quinn scored to take a 3-0 lead in the game."

Yeah, well, you make a bonehead play like that, Gehrig, and I'm givin' you a freaking error. That might well have been the highlight of the evening.

The location, though...the Everett ballpark is in some sort of sports complex, with a ginormous empty football field and track to the west. The entrance is down a blacktop ramp and past some sort of play field where the Everett players were taking part in some sort of kid-event in the long summer evening before the game...

The open area south of the ballfield was full of...stuff. Kids, parents...

...bouncy-houses, picnic tables, more kids, more parents, and scattered here and there players, looking ridiculously young and unformed.

But this is Single A Short Season, the lowest form of professional baseball life; there's a reason for that. Most of these players ARE young. They're are the hopefuls, the aren't-yets and the never-weres. The only lived-in faces are on the heads of the handful of the useta-bes and pluggers still hoping for a shot at the Big Casino.

This level is all about "player development" so the game, that actual game on the field, was...if not actually meaningless as near as dammit. Even if I still followed pro baseball I wouldn't have know who these players were nor did I care.

That wasn't really the point; it was a lazy evening, the peanuts were salty, the beer was colder than the wind off Puget Sound, and it was a relaxing sort of finger-mantra to tick off the little squares with the symbols of the game unspooling before me.

G 6-3, backwards K (a swinging strikeout - he "went around", got it?), little diagonal line with a black base at the end and an arrow up the middle for a line shot single to center. Idle thoughts; who taught that kid the odd half-sidearm delivery? Why the hell didn't the shortstop make that play?

The entire business was revoltingly wholesome. Unattended kids gamboled thunderously in the metal bleachers, mom and dad doucely sipping their eight-dollar beers.

I thought the young woman at left was a salacious outlier, some sort of baseball annie looking to pick herself up a young stud, but instead she turned out to be another bit of the small-town-America wholesomeness, mommy of one of the kids involved in one of the family-friendly gimmicks; in this case, out on the field with the home team for the anthem.

In fact, it had been so long since I'd been to one of these low-minor games I'd forgotten the cornball carny atmosphere; the idiotic costumed mascot

(the "Webbly" of the title - why the hell an outfit called the "Aquasox" decided that some sort of Amazonian poison tree-frog was what they needed for a mascot I have NO idea, but there he is, hideous bulging eyes and all...)

the Prozac-cheerfulness of the team employees shepherding lucky fans through a variety of silly antics; catching pizza boxes in a dipnet, two schoolkids racing around the bases dressing in hugely oversized team uniforms.

Perhaps the ultimate moment in all this goofiness came between the fifth and sixth innings, when two anonymous fans were handed radio control sets and tasked with guiding toy trucks around the infield from the third base to the first base side.

Predictable chaos ensued, with one racer getting halfway to second before turning completely around while the second circled the bag cluelessly before ramming into second base and flopping over, tires spinning.

All the while the Everett infield was warming up, looking warily about at their feet in case a plastic pickup was about to slam into them at the ankles. Sweetbabyjesus, what a circus.

My sport of choice, as you know, is soccer. I love the game itself, I love learning about it, studying it, the beauties and ugliness of it. I love being part of a culture of deep emotion, of topgallant delights and keelson-deep despair. Of thundering out love and devotion along with thousands of others, part of a thunder of voices over the hammering drums.

Baseball, though...baseball was part of my growing-up. Jack Brickhouse announcing Cubs games on my mother's cheap plastic radio during the summer of 1969, the Year of Tragedy and the Mets. Slow afternoons at the old Civic Stadium, Lois the National Anthem Lady and the Portland Beavers of AAA

(and someday I should really tell you the story of Bernardo Brito, the Beavs slugger...though I notice that the Aquasox have a kid named "Brito"...I wonder if he's a relative..?)

and filling in scorecards with the names of the Minnesota players of the Nineties.

I was a little surprised, and a little pleased, to find that all the old skills returned; recognizing the motion of fastball and curveball and slider. Acknowledging the position of the fielders, knowing where to look on throws, following the quickness of the bat.

It was an evening full of slowness, almost sweetness, like turning time down to a near stop and just being, drifting, afloat on a slow-rolling sea of silly, kitschy Americana.

Sprawled in the chill bleachers south of the gritty Everett downtown jotting down the runs and hits, listening to the hollow sound of the calls from the crowd float out across the ballyard; like finding an old scorecard from a game played long ago, a distant record of a time, and a me, that I'd almost forgotten.

Game Called.

Across the field of play
the dusk has come, the hour is late.
The fight is done and lost or won,
the player files out through the gate.

The tumult dies, the cheer is hushed,
the stands are bare, the park is still.
But through the night there shines the light
of home, beyond the silent hill.

Gem among the dross

I didn't want to make it sound like I was slagging off on everything in Aberdeen, even though I couldn't help noticing that probably something between six and eight out of ten people I saw walking the streets today was obese.

And not just cute-n-cuddly, round-n-roly-poly big but freaking huge; big-ass butts and ginormous legs and big honkin' peniculae lapping down over their hips (what in the service we used to call "Dunlaps' Disease" because your gut done lapped over onto your legs...). I mean...the fuck? Is the county seat of Grays Harbor County some sort of secret repository in the National Strategic Morbidly Obese Caucasian Reserve or something?

So not only were these people walking around looking all poor and beat down, but they were...well, huge.

I know the connection between poverty and bad diet and obesity, but...damn. Like heart attacks walking around in bad clothes.

That was pretty depressing.

Anyway, I wanted to say that I did find something of value here; the 8th Street Alehouse.

The pub fries were crisp and savory and hot and with the spicy remoulade were a perfect match to the malty house ale, and the steamed clams were resonant with brine and sweet with butter and were a boon companion to the grapefruit IPA (and I don't say that lightly - I am typically not a fruit-beer fan!)

What turned out to be amusing was the couple at the next table turned out to be in the consulting business as well; she a hydrologist and fisheries specialist, he an air and water contaminant analyst. He couldn't remember the name of the old Chicago Cub's broadcaster (Jack Brickhouse was the man's name, by the way, a memory from my mother's summers listening to the Cub on the radio...)and that led us to talking about this and that and eventually found out what we did for livings. So we spent a bunch of time talking about funny consulting things.

(BTW - In case you don't know GFT conventions, if I show pictures of people who either haven't explicitly given me permission to show their faces or I haven't been in a position to ask, I only show their legs and/or feet. It seems like a compromise that lets me preserve their privacy but show something of them on a medium that is as visual as literary...)

Anyway, the 8th Street Alehouse was a good place to be after a long day in the hot sun wrangling samplers full of goo.

(Aberdeen, as you can imagine, is built on tens of feet of sloppy Chehalis River alluvium. For a day's drilling that's fine. For a week? Christ, it's like punching the clock. How many samplers full of gray duck shit can you stare at, pocket-pen, torvane, and worm-roll before shoving the goop in a baggie and moving on to the next sampler full of gray duck shit? Before getting bored out of your fucking skull, I mean..?)

And it's probably worth a look back in after tomorrow's day-full-of-duck-shit; I haven't tried the fish and chips yet.

There's only one teesny little problem...

The 8th Street Ale House is in Hoquiam.

So I guess Aberdeen still pretty much just sucks pipe.

Down and out in Aberdeen

I had never been to Aberdeen, Washington, before.

I'm not sure if any of you are familiar with this place. It's on the inside of the long Willapa Bay embayment that forms the far southwest part of Washington State, where the Chehalis River empties into the big estuary.

Aberdeen clings to the south edge of the Olympic Mountains massif and appears to be a very typical sort of Northwest coastal town; wedged between the mountains and the sea, shoved into the shelf of flatlands that are entirely too likely to disappear when the inevitable tidal inundation rises up from the dark Pacific beyond.

I wasn't sure why the sign at the end of Washington Highway 12 read "Come As you Are" until I turned into 2nd Street looking for one of my drilling locations and came across "Kurt Cobain Landing", the truly bizarre and tacky little park at the end of a dead-end street in the Felony Flats neighborhood.

The effect on a passing stranger is unsettling. The Flats have not materially changed since Cobain's time; the little houses and cheap apartments are dingy and rundown, the streets weave drunkenly as the shoddy paving crumbles away. The "park" itself is nothing more than a stand of trees behind the crash barrier at the end of the street, a sign with a picture of Cobain, a fugly cement guitar standing strangely erect from a dark block, priapic fretboard pointed skyward.

The Young Street Bridge further on is supposed to have a thicket of Cobain-inspired graffitti underneath, but I was busy and couldn't take the time to wander over and peek at others' necrophilia.

I spent the better part of a sunny afternoon driving around Aberdeen and neighboring Hoquiam and marveling at the sheer unattractive poverty of the place. The place is, for lack of a better word, a dump.

Don't mistake me; I've lived in the Northwest a long time now and I understand what most of these coastal towns are. These are the land's end, the far edge of the wealthy nation that sprawls across the continent behind them. This is hardscrabble land, Trump country. There was never much here. Timber and fish, for the most part, the land too steep and stony to farm, the great cities behind the wall of mountains too distant for commerce.

The fishing was never easy; the salmon runs hammered flat by fishwheels and gillnets, the ocean cold and cruel as the storms of winter claw down out of the Gulf of Alaska, and the timber...the locals will tell you that the hippies and the tree-huggers locked up the timber.

The reality is that the first lumbermen felled all the huge trees with careless greed and never restored the mountains. The forests, when they were replanted, were steep and costly to log, and the timber companies found it more profitable to ship the logs they did fell directly to Asia. The big mills closed, one by one, and never reopened.

The jobs are gone, the wealth - what little there was of it - is gone, it seems like even the hope is gone. The people are gone; Aberdeen has never regained the people it lost after the Depression. About sixteen thousand grim, grungy looking people still live here but even in the cheerful July sunshine Aberdeen looks depressing.

No wonder Cobain killed himself.

At least there's work for me here, and beginning tomorrow we will do it, our drill roaring and grinding through the dumpy streets of Felony Flats.

As Cobain might have said; nevermind.

Deep Denial

You have probably at this point seen something about the immense landslide that buried portions of the small western Washington town of Oso.

I should say here that while I didn't know this specific locality or the geology of the particular hillside involved that the news didn't really surprise me. And that, frankly, it shouldn't have surprised anyone else, including the people in the little town that woke up last week to find themselves very much dead.

Tim Egan has a good summary of the geology and the politics behind the deaths here. I can't really do much better at describing why these people were buried than he does:

"...who wants to listen to warnings by pesky scientists, to pay heed to predictions by environmental nags, or allow an intrusive government to limit private property rights? That’s how these issues get cast. And that’s why reports like the ones done on the Stillaguamish get shelved. The people living near Oso say nobody ever informed them of the past predictions."

As Egan points out the "problem" is not the science. We knew what happened, why it happened, and why it was damn likely to happen. The geology is pretty straightforward; western Washington (and parts of western Oregon but the Puget glaciation makes things an order of magnitude or three worse in WA...) combines steep terrain, lots of water, and weak substrate into a deck full of pretty deadly cards.

Throw in clearcut logging and you have a real wildcard in the deck.

No. The "problem" was and is really the suite of massive problems surrounding the politics of this region and of a hell of a lot of the way we Americans think in general.

First, a whole lot of rural western WA is pretty much logging and nothing else. If you close, or limit, the logging in the steep timberlands around these little towns then little towns like this Oso just flat-out die anyway. Only without the, you know, actual dying.

And then there's the question of "private property rights". A hell of a lot of the sorts of people who live in this little town, including the ones now buried under a shit-ton of hardening landslide debris, believed that they had the absolute right, and that the timber companies had the absolute right, to do absolutely whatever they wanted to do on "their" lands. And that to do anything to change, or stop, those people and companies doing those things was wrong.

So that while a whole hell of a lot of people knew that this hillside was unstable, and that logging around it was problematic at best, and that the possibility for the whole goddamn thing to move downhill on top of these people's houses was not so much a question of "if" as "when"...nobody actually pushed someone to do anything about that.

In this case the nobodies and someones involved would have had to accept that 1) there are limits, and deadly sharp, critical, limits on our human ability to fuck about with natural systems, and 2) that it is in humans' best interests to have an overall authority - let's call it "government" because, really, what the hell - to define and enforce restrictions on that human activity before it crosses those limits.

And rural western WA and a hell of a lot of today's United States is full of people who accept neither 1) nor 2).

So this one falls under the general heading of, what's the quote, something like "The willingness of someone not to believe something is directly related to how critical it is to their perceived self-interest not to believe it."?

They saw their self-interest as "private property rights" and "limited government" and not "natural hazards" or "regulation".

In order to believe that they had to deny that this could happen.

And then one morning their denial rose up and buried them deep.

Empty

Drove up I-5 today to a work site outside the vanished town of Dryad and the fading one of Doty, Washington.

I've visited this site now perhaps ten or fifteen times. to the point where the drive up the highway and then west down the valley of the Chehalis River is hardwired into my head like a map.

North along the east margin of the great river to where it bends west at Longview, then the easy slalom through the low hills that make the rumpled skirt of the Cascades to the outskirts of Centralia, where the shades of Wesley Everett and Warren Grimm seem to roil the gray fog that hangs in the valley like an uneasy conscience.

Uncle Sam's billboard grin seems more sickly than usual, grimacing at the idiocy of touting the government "shutdown" as a great idea for balancing the federal budget.

Yesterday I sat through one of those interminable safety classes and enjoyed one of those death-on-the-highway sort of scare videos about driving. Among the more ridiculous claims this treasure made was about driving as a demanding and attention-absorbing task.

As I turned off the highway I was reminded that, instead, driving combines perhaps the two worst elements of any human task; relentlessly grinding boredom with sudden, completely random, occasional hazard.

Unless you're a complete idiot or some sort of driving-geek driving a car on the open highway requires almost no conscious thought. Speed and direction are managed by autonomic reflexes of hand and foot, and the awareness of the surrounding vehicles is almost completely negated by the lack of relative motion. You sail along at over a mile a minute with little or no actual attention to the physical act of driving.

Its only at that moment when the unimaginable happens, when the lazy routine of pedal and wheel suddenly freezes, when the scream of tires begins and ends in the sudden collision of metal and plastic like an immense door slamming down the end of a distant hallway, that you are violently recalled to the great inertia of a thousand pounds of mass propelled at tens of miles per hour.

By then its usually too late.

But, still; when the fog parts and the sun shines golden through the maple leaves, when the wheels hum and the dappled shadows pass like flickering fingers over the glass it's hard to remember that the danger is there but not there - not gone, just busy somewhere else.

The east side of this to-be bridge is called "Dryad" but is not nearly so much a place as an idea, the remnants of a place, the scattered tag-end of busy lives and workday worlds. The little white church sits, hands folded, in the autumn sun, patiently waiting for a congregation that will never return.

The schoolhouse, on the other hand, has chosen undignified life over graceful unlife in the form of tacky Halloween decorations by the door and two beater cars in the drive. The paint is weathered and the lawn is ragged; the overall impression is "lived-in" but in a hard, grinding sort of way.

The old building crouches under its sparse tree canopy with a sort of sullen and smouldering vitality that rejects the vanished town that has already disappeared from around it, denies the children now elderly that have deserted it.

In the brushy streamside forest a single male picoides woodpecker forages for the last of the season's insects among the devil's club and the hawthorn, his bright crown just another red spot among the turning leaves.

West of the work site is the living town of Doty, said to be home to some several hundred people.

This seems frankly excessive unless all the people living in the small outposts and farms outside the town are counted in. The small general store that serves as post office and town center balances at the edge of hardscrabble and twee, between dusty cans of spam and ranked beers behind the cold glass doors, the faded paper books of hunting and fishing regulations, and the precious postcards and storybooks of the Olde Dayes.

The black safe in the back corner recalls the the real old days, the first decade of the old century when the Doty and Stoddard Company ran the town and the town stank of raw lumber and coal smoke.

But the great days ended in the Depression and the company folded in 1929.

In the late autumn afternoon the town looks placid instead of moribund, drowsing in the golden drifts of fallen maple and the lingering greens of fir and cedar. It seems to dream not of today but of a yesterday freed of uncertainty and fear, from the reality of hard work and poor pay, of mean company stores and shoddy company houses.

A yesterday, then, that is no more real than the future, as the empty streets of Doty now fill only with the scratching brawl of fallen leaves of a long evening drawing on towards the night.

Another strand of seaweed alongside the road

Looks like I'm not the only one feeling sort of hung-down and aimless.

That was in the glory years, when the "Uncle Sam" billboard was a roadside attraction on par with South of the Border and the world's largest ball of yarn. I blogged a while back about this strange highway "attraction" off the I-5 freeway just south of Chehalis (it's at the link, trust me, you just have to scroll down a little).

This goofy contraption was the work of one guy, Alfred Hamilton, wingnut, entrepreneur, and ex-farmer. The story I've heard is that he was pissed off about government because of the seizure of part of his farmland to build I-5 and so he put up the billboard to tell the world about it.

"His two-sided "Uncle Sam" billboard dates back to 1971. Over the years, it has carried a litany of messages aimed at politicians Hamilton didn't like as well as homosexuals, Russia, abortion, communism, big government, the United Nations and gun control, to name a few."

The ghost blog Meet The Stress has a nice snarky little obit for Al, who, it turns out, actually threw up this sign because his wife found out that "...the state was spending more money on welfare than on schools".

Al's gone to the Free Republic In The Sky but his successors (kids? grandkids? who the hell knows) have kept up the great curmudgeonly tradition, proudly expressing Al's full range of thought, from "Right-Wing Nut" to "Thinks Mussolini Was A Pussy Who Didn't Have The Balls To Really Bring The Fascism".

But even Al's Freeper spawn seem to be losing their edge these days. Here's what they had up on the southbound side of the billboard when I drove by today:

Ummm...the Final Jeopardy answer is: "The Egyptian army and airforce"?

WTF, guys? That's IT? An entire wingnutoverse out there to help you with finding subjects for your forty-foot-high outrage over Those Damn Libtards And Their Dhimmitude and this is the best you got?

This is your 90-mile-an-hour-fastball?

(And I noted that the northbound side was even lamer; something about how "those Damn Eurocommies are coming for their people's pensions and was yours next?", like Al's GOP pals had left any of us with an actual "pension" instead of riding the fucking 401K bus to the Poorhouse.)

Suddenly I don't feel so bereft of inspiration. If this is the best the wingnuts in Chehalis can do, Jesus wept, people, this is just sad and I feel like Enid fucking Blyton by comparison.

Rockets' Red Glare

I meant to post these some time ago but...well, you know how it is.

Anyway, while we might not have many family traditions the ones we have are appropriately weird. No, not "rum, sodomy, and the lash" weird, but...well, let me tell you about the 4th of July.

Oregon is one of those lame, namby-pamby, nanny states where fireworks are concerned. Pyro that can fly, or explode, is illegal in Oregon. We're limited to sparklers, fountains, and smoke. "Oregon law forbids possession, use or sale of fireworks that fly, explode or travel more than six feet on the ground or 12 inches in the air. Bottle rockets, Roman candles, and firecrackers are ILLEGAL in Oregon."

See?

Lame.

But the great State of Washington? Boy fucking howdy, you can blow the living shit out of yourself in the Evergreen State. Mortars, Roman candles, parachute flares, white phosphorus...you name it, you can fire it off north of the river.

So, like 99.6% of Oregonians, every July 4th we cross the river to buy a bagful of illegal fireworks.

This year it was no exception. A big part of the reason is that we enjoy the hell out of the brutal free-market in fireworks that reigns in Vancouver. The fireworks vendors are wild, at each others' throats like mad kebab sellers in an Iraqi souq. They don't try and convince you that you want to buy their stuff (probably sensible, since they all buy this pyro wholesale from the same Chinese makers); they try and convince you that the other guy is a big dirty cheating theving bastard who is screwing you like a ten-dollar-a-go-Yokohama-waterfront-hooker.

Like this:

There's no subtlety here. No meeching "You might not find our competitor's product suits your needs" bullshit. It's right out there, man; we rule, they suck, neener, neener. It's the sort of thing I'll bet like hell the Walton kids would love to do to Target but their lawyers talk them out of. Here it's right in your face.

For a change we went to BOTH the TNT tent and the Blackjack "Pirate" store. Both were utter madness, and we ended up spending way too much for shoddy Chinese pyrotechnics. I did appreciate the attempt at topical political comment by some nameless Asian entrepreneur:

We avoided the bouncy houses and the snow cones and the other touristy crap, paid for our illegal fireworks, and left. And when I say we paid too much, well...at least we stayed within budget. This gomer's poor family is probably STILL eating ramen noodles to pay for his ridiculous pallet full of demo:

That evening we proceeded to go out to our little Astor playground and shoot off all the pyrotechnics. It was loud and shiny, it had absolutely no connection with the United States, liberty, independence, or anything else patriotic. It was pure ur-male-dom; making things go fast, make loud noises, and blow up. The Boy commented as he shot Roman candles down the street: "This is just like Gandalf fighting the Balrog!!"

Just what Tom Jefferson would have said about that, I honestly haven't the slightest idea.

Cold rain

The recent dearth of posting is because I've been up in the foothills of the Olympic mountains on a job...

It's a pretty spot, and the project - building a footbridge for the Park Service - is a trifle less grubby than the usual sort of "7-Eleven" and "filling station" projects that make up the working week of a private geotech, but sadly the part we're involved in hasn't gone well and is likely to end up in litigation. Well, shit.

This week the normal outdoors adventure was enhanced by about two to three feet of old snow on the trail into the site. This stuff was the worst of Northwest snow; wet, slushy on top when it wasn't glazed with ice, heavy, and dirty with needle- and bark litter. In several places it had corniced over the narrow trail and there was a certain...thrill of uncertainty...whether one was walking on two feet of old, rotten melting snow over the trail or two feet of old, rotten melting snow over...nothing.

And the weather, too, managed to be the worst of the Pacific climate; cold but not cold enough for snow. So you got a steady misting rain but never warmed up above the forties. The wet raingear and the chill air combined to suck the heat out of you; I had no less than five layers on, including a heavy snow parka, on Monday and found myself shivering like a vibrating string all afternoon. Brrrr.

This week's work went as planned. But that well is poisoned already, and all factions are whetting their legal knives. It made the slippery walk to and fro each day seem a little longer and colder.

And I'm due to return next week to test the anchors installed in this one.

I hope the weather turns either warmer or colder by then. The feeling of hunching miserably under a cold rain is all too reminiscent of too many bad days I spent in the field in my youth.

Down Among the Dead Men

The past couple of weeks I've been working on a project just inside one of the Olympic National Park areas. It's located on the southeastern edge of the great wilderness, just at the toes of the mountains and close to the inland waterway of Hood Canal.

It's a terrible project, really; the contractor was chosen (as usual) based on their willingness to low-bid the job, and (as usual) this means that everything is cheap and on the down-low.

The work I'm involved in requires this contractor to perform a rather difficult technical task and because said contractor was chosen not on their ability to perform said task speedily and well but (as usual) because they were the cheapest fucker willing to actually bid on the work - several people in their line of work looked at the job and walked away saying that they did not think it was technically possible.

Anyway, the reason I wanted to write this wasn't because of that.

Or because the place we're working is of a monumental and almost frightening beauty, a bit of the old wild lands that has only been superficially tamed; domiciled, not domesticated.

The fierce unwelcomingness of the untamed land is not far from the edge of the works of Man, not far beyond the edge of the trail or outside the light-circle of the camp cabins. The woods are dark, and deep, and they seem to remember the times before the firstcomers ventured up from the strand line eyes wide with the fear of the forests; panic fear, the terror of the gods of the twilight under the boughs.

But this is an illusion.

The land was settled, and logged, generations ago. All along the road north from the central valley, in the little hollows along the great water to the east are the remnants of the little logging towns still lingering on after the great days of the caulks and the timber fellers have passed away.

I have been staying in the little town of Hoodsport, which was so small as to never have even had such days. But not far south is the seat of Mason County, Shelton, which is one of many such here in Washington and Oregon.

If you stay on Railroad Avenue you might mistake the place for a solid little rural community. But venture too far off the main street and you come across the sad remains of what once was; the shuttered shops and sagging little houses long past the day they should have been painted and roofed. The plain brick woodworker's union hall is empty and stares out on the broken street with its glass eyes hollow and haunted at the way of life that has passed away in the last of its lifetime.

The people, too, look a little lost and a little sad; tough men with the slightly dazed look of a defeated fighter who cannot hear the bell, women wary and tired, looking faded and slightly irked as though they have half-heard something that has displeased them mightily.

The pickups are getting old and haven't been replaced with newer models. The clothes are looking slightly dingy and frayed. The only things shiny and new are, viciously, the "Mitt Romney" campaign signs, as if the plutocratic candidate would be caught dead in the dying mill town except to drum up votes and hoo-raw the rubes for pocket change. The locals don't seem to get the irony; they are sincere and rough-edged in their belief that the man with the overseas bank account will be their champion.

Here is unemployment, and disability, social security and Medicare and Medicaid, aid to families with dependent children and food stamps; here is the 47% and they are all voting, it seems, for the man who would ensure that their lives will continue to be pinched by the reality that a man can fell and dismember trees far faster than they can grow tall enough to log.

The nights are growing colder now, and the days clear with the hard crispness of late autumn. Yesterday the first rains of winter fell, and soon the fogs of November will creep up from the cold waters of the Sound and wrap up the dead leaves of October and the summer will have ended, dead as the leaves, faded and brown as the raveled edges of the little towns dying dreaming of a yesterday that never was and a tomorrow that will never return.