Night Sledding

After we woke up this morning (Monday), Elizabeth asked me what was on my schedule. "Not much" was my reply, but it still ended up being a busy and somewhat stressful day for me and for Elizabeth. But in the early evening, around 5:30, after I had finished shoveling the driveway and walkway, I had an urge to go sledding. There wasn't much time for it, but I went inside and asked Sonora (who, on an annoying sugar high, had been pestering Elizabeth all day) if she wanted to go sledding. She said yes excitedly and I helped her suit up.

It's good that Sonora has good snow gear, because it was cold tonight. The sun had set a little after 4:00 and the temperature was now hovering a few degrees above zero. The air burned our faces. The sled crackled each time we sat on it. Where the snow had been mostly plowed or scraped away, it moaned dryly beneath our feet, not wanting to pack together. Instead it shifted into stratified little mounds beside our boots.

But this crispness to the air and snow felt good somehow. It more sharply defined things, brought everything closer together, even the stars. Clouds had hung over us most of the time for the last few weeks, but tonight while Sonora and I were out, the stars were clearly visible behind the puffs of fog created by our breathing: galaxies, constellations, clusters, lone stars. Sonora pointed to a star and said, "Look at that bright star. I wonder if that was the one that shined on baby Jesus." I told her it might have been.

At first, we tried sledding down the long hill behind our house, but, though we had sledded on it just a couple of days ago, there was nearly a foot of new snow on top of the previous track we had used. We just couldn't get up any speed in the deep snow, so we took to the streets. Very few cars were out and I felt confident that we would see any car headlights in enough time to react to avoid a collision. We didn't end up seeing any cars while sledding, so I couldn't test my hypothesis.

There are many hills in our village. We sledded down four of them, the last one, a couple hundred yards long, being the longest ride of the night. The walk up the hill was slow and we had to stop a few times so I could warm Sonora's freezing face by cupping my bare hand around her chin and mouth and cheeks. But the descent was worth it. It was long and fast-paced. We were mostly surrounded by darkness, though I could see well enough to stay between the looming snow banks on either side of the road. Ice crystals knocked loose by the sled pelted our faces like sand. We blinked to keep our eyes clear and to keep them in focus. It was exhilarating, soaring down the snow-coated street, hugging my daughter tightly in front of me, knowing that she was enjoying herself as we skittered and bounced and lurched over the uneven, crunching surface, submitting completely to gravity as it hurled us downward.

When we came to a rest in the middle of a block, underneath towering old leafless trees, Sonora said "Let's keep going Dadda." But we had reached the bottom. We would have to climb another hill in order to sled again, she was getting cold all over, and Elizabeth would have just finished making dinner, so I told Sonora it was time to go. She held onto the rope of the sled and trotted in front of me. She was Rudolph and I was Santa and the sled was our sleigh and we were delivering presents to all of the kids, she told me. So we hurried home while playing at being Saint Nicholas and, upon arrival at our warm home, congratulated ourselves for a job well done; many imaginary children had received many imaginary gifts because or our hard work.

From there, the day continued as before: we ate dinner, Elizabeth and I got the kids ready for bed, put them to bed, and then kept on working on things deep into the night. I'm glad that Sonora and I could go sledding. Those 45 minutes playing outside in the cold night with my daughter changed a stressful day into an enjoyable day.

Holiday Tradition

A few days ago, snow fell for the first time this year. It finally felt like winter. The doors to our cars have been frozen shut every morning since. I have to pound on them with my frozen fist, beating around the outline of the door, trying to break the thin ice seal that holds the weather stripping fast against the metal frame. Tonight, when I arrived home and stepped out of my car, I breathed in deeply through my mouth; my throat caught, protecting itself from the biting cold (it's supposed to get down to -4 degrees Fahrenheit tonight) , and I coughed spasmodically, and my throat burned.

I'll eventually tire of these inconveniences and long for spring, but right now, I am glad for these manifestations of winter. Winter is a time to retreat indoors for the long night; it's a time to savor Saturdays in the snow; it's a time for hot chocolate and soup. It's also when Christmas happens, and Christmas traditions have been on my mind lately.

Having children and watching them experience some of the same traditions I experienced has given these annual acts new meaning for me. Each Christmas ritual Sonora performs reminds me of one that I did, and conversely, it makes me think of my parents, when they were younger, and then my whole sense of childhood returns, if only for a few moments. These traditions seem to collapse time, sort of like a compressed accordion; multiple generations connect. Often many generations of a family do gather and re-connect at Christmas time, but even when I am not with my brothers, sisters, parents, and grandparents at Christmas, I feel linked to them through memory and association.

Here are some of the memories that have presented themselves so far in the build-up this Christmas:

Elizabeth has sewn each of us a stocking. These stockings are clean and cute and personalized. We've never hung them from a mantel piece above a fireplace because we've never lived anywhere that had such a thing. When I was a kid, we only lived for two years in a house with a fireplace and a mantel. Otherwise, we hung our stockings from thumbtacks pushed into the wood-panel walls. Our stockings were not very clean and weren't particularly cute. Mine had my name on the white cuff. It was made out of a fleece-like material. What I remember most about it was the hard candy stuck inside the toe of the stocking. Each year, another piece of candy seemed to attach itself to the mass of hard sugar that had somehow latched onto the material. I would pick at the candy lump, but wouldn't tear it out for fear of ripping the stocking. Besides, I never have really liked hard candy, so I wasn't sad it was going to waste.

Most of our presents are wrapped in reusable cloth gift bags Elizabeth sewed a few years ago, but one of the presents I purchased was too large to fit in any of these bags, so I had to wrap it in wrapping paper. When I was young, we had a family present-wrapping ritual. My mom and dad would hide most of the presents under their bed and, when it was time to start putting gifts under the tree, my parents would call us into their bedroom one by one to wrap gifts for our siblings. My parents had a bedroom at one end of our single-wide trailer-house. Their bedroom was removed from much of the commotion experienced in the rest of the small dwelling. When I would go in there to wrap gifts, it always seemed quiet, still. Part of this sense of peace was due to the act of wrapping. Under my mom's guidance, I had to concentrate on cutting the paper to the right length, wrapping it carefully, so as not to rip it, taping it in the right spots, and finally, creasing the ends in the right places so that the paper neatly hid the contents of the gift. Sitting on my parents' bed in their quiet room, keenly focusing on a task, the experience felt almost sacred. For some reason, I am sure that my mom, when she was a child, sat like that, together with her mom, wrapping gifts.

The Christmas of 2003 was the first one Elizabeth and I spent in Washington. We didn't have a Christmas tree, and we were conflicted about buying a real one, conflicted because they were expensive and because it seemed a waste to support cutting down a 10-30 year-old tree just so we could have a "real" tree in our house. So we decided to buy one. In fact, it was her sister Camille, who was living with us at the time, and I who picked one out from a wide selection at a local thrift store, and hauled it back to the house. Elizabeth and I are still using that same tree; Sonora helped me assemble it this year.

But one thing I do miss about not having a real tree is the pine smell. When I was a kid, the family would drive to the 10-acre lot of land we owned about 5 miles from where we lived. The land was covered with juniper and pinion trees and we would tromp around in the snow, looking for the perfect tree. For us, however, the perfect tree was one with identifiable flaws that my mother insisted on: it couldn't be too big (it pained my mom to think of us killing a mature tree that had struggled as long as she had against the extremes of the high deserts of southwestern Colorado); and it had to be growing very close to a larger tree (her reason for this qualification was that, if the little tree was growing close to a larger one, it was likely to die anyway, so we weren't making too big an impact on the Pygmy forest). Once chosen, each of the kids would take a turn swinging the dull hatchet my dad had brought along and then we would haul off the meager beast and set it up in a corner of the living room. It was always in a corner because we wanted to do our best to hide the limbless side--the side that had been growing against the larger tree--from view. No matter how far we shoved the tree into the corner, though, it still looked a little shabby. But it always smelled as good as the full trees my friends put up in their houses. My grandparents, great grandparents, and great-great-grandparents all spent a lot of time in those high deserts and would have had similar trees. Sometimes I feel guilty when I think about how Elizabeth and I have changed the tradition by using a fake tree, but we live in Washington where there are no pinion or juniper trees of the varieties my ancestors would have known, so a fake tree isn't so bad.

When I was a kid, almost every Christmas, we would make gingerbread houses. For the gingerbread, we would use graham crackers glued together with a powdered sugar/egg/cream of tartar frosting. The trick was to handle the crackers carefully and hold them in place much longer than you would think necessary to allow the frosting to set. But Elizabeth is a purist. She makes the gingerbread from scratch. It's an all-day process of mixing and chilling the dough, rolling it out to a certain thickness, cutting out patterns, baking the pieces, putting them together, and decorating them. A couple of years ago, in addition to a house for herself, Sonora, and me, she planned and made an elaborate gingerbread train.

This year, we just did houses and a small train.At first, I was opposed to all this work. "Let's just use graham crackers." I said. Elizabeth acted as if I'd profaned a sacred institution. We've never used graham crackers. But I've come to appreciate these dark, hand-made, fragrant, thick-walled structures. I've come to understand that they are fleeting works of art similar to Navajo or Tibetan Buddhist sand paintings that are intricately constructed for traditional ceremonies and then swept away. Sometimes the construction of something is what matters, even if the final product is impermanent.

This year, Elizabeth's magnum opus was the Advent calendar. She worked on it at night for many nights after the kids went to bed. This is not a cardstock open-the-box-and-get-a-cheap-piece-of-fake-chocolate Advent calendar. This is one that will last until we die. The first thing Sonora does each morning is to excitedly take an ornament from the appropriate pouch and hang it on the cloth tree.

My family didn't do Advent calendars. I didn't even know what one was when I visited a friend's house in my early adolescence and they had one of the cardstock ones. When he explained it to me, I was excited, but the chocolate for that day had already been eaten, and I then revised my opinion: this now seemed to me a stingy way to approach the build-up to Christmas.

I'm excited to add Elizabeth's calendar to the list of traditions. Even though the memories are only a few weeks old, I already remember with fondness watching her plan out and slowly construct this addition to the Christmas atmosphere. And it is fun to have a tangible countdown to the 25th.

I'm sure that, as is the case with the Advent calendar, every so often we will add a new memory to the list of those we revisit each year. Hopefully, our kids will take these with them, the most lasting of the Christmas gifts we give them, and carry them into their lives to give to their children.

Washing Dishes by Hand

I've always hated washing dishes. When I was a kid and it was my turn to do the dishes, I would often hide a couple of the grimier dishes so I didn't have to wash them. When I was fifteen, I got a job washing dishes at a restaurant. I came home at night feeling greasy, feeling coated in chunks of half-eaten food. I lasted three days as a professional dishwasher, and then I quit.

But one time when I was in my early twenties and was home visiting my parents, I had a sort of breakthrough with dish washing. It was late at night and I was washing the dinner dishes alone in the kitchen while listening to Tracy Chapman; my hands worked mindlessly in the warm, slippery water. And then, suddenly, I felt alive, elated almost. I wanted to sing. It sort of felt spiritual; I wanted to pray. I also got the urge to go wandering. So, when I finished the dishes, I walked outside and wandered in the darkness around the little southwestern Colorado village. I ended up at the small park at the center of town and there, looking up at pinpoint explosions of light in the blackness, I followed my urge and chanted energetically at God. When I returned home, I felt refreshed.

Since then, I have experienced a few other transcendent moments while washing the dishes. Tonight, for example, while I was washing dishes in our silent house, everyone else having gone to bed, I realized again that washing dishes isn't so bad. That was my first realization.

The other realization that came to me as I cleansed plates and cups is one I've had many times before, but it was particularly clear to me tonight: Everyone feels misunderstood. Virtually everyone feels, on a regular basis, left out, overlooked, insecure, victimized, unloved, passed over. And this includes those who seem to be on the inside. They may even envy those who envy them. Or maybe they don't notice the enviers at all. But they don't feel understood. Nobody feels understood, but most people forget this and feel alone in their isolation and wonder Why Me?

Mine was not an original thought--many people have reached this same conclusion--but in that moment it felt an important realization and I was glad to have thought it, glad to have experienced the flow of thought, the thrill of connecting conceptions, the satisfaction of epiphany. Something about doing dishes opened my mind to contemplation, and I thought; the result of this thinking wasn't life-altering, but I was glad for the exercise.

I think part of what can make dish washing an enlightening experience is the process: through simple, cyclical, repetitive motions, I am accomplishing something, cleansing kitchen implements, making attractive that which was moments before unappealing. But more than anything, I think, it is the texture, the feel of things that causes the thoughts, like stones in tilled earth, to rise to the surface. The smooth, rounded handle of the Pyrex measuring cup, slick with suds. The stick-slide-stick-slide-stick chatter of my fingers across the wet glass casserole dish. The sloping descent of the warm red rag over the fork tines. The efficient swoop of the rag over the belly of a cream-colored bowl whose surface, like that of an egg shell, is not quite smooth. The continual re-warming of my air-cooled hands (re-inserting my hands into the water feels each time like a discovery). The almost imperceptible vibrations as my fingernails pass over the thin stainless steel salad bowls, creating a sound that is almost unsettling but at the same time clarion. This sound vibrates up my fingers and settles in the underside of my wrist.



Somehow these textures create a sort of tactile music that mixes with the motions of the task to create a meditative space, and in this space, I can think. It's not that I look forward to doing the dishes now. I don't. But the next time I do them, there will likely come a moment, when I'm about half-way done, during which I will feel enlivened, and my mind will be glad that I've decided to immerse my hands in warm, slippery water.

Books and Year

This past year, I read perhaps more pages than during any other year in my life. It's not that I read all that many books; it's that many of the books I read were long. Most of these books, I'm a little ashamed to admit, weren't very intellectual. In fact, the bulk of my reading consisted of fantasy fiction books: long, drawn out tales of men and women involved in epic struggles in a reality that includes magic and fantastic creatures. These accounted for about 7,000 of the roughly 9,000 pages I read this year, and I'm not going to waste any more words on these fantasy books except to say that it was, for the most part, enjoyable and fun to read them. However, they almost never inspired me, awed me, or caused me to contemplate. But a few other books did.

The Backslider, by Levi Peterson
fascinated me. This novel, set in rural southern Utah in the 1950s, is about a sometimes wayward Mormon boy who struggles with faith and sexuality. The novel has wide emotional undulations--often it is hilariously funny, at other times somber, and other times, it is tragic. This book is not for the Mormon faint of heart. It is no Gerald Lund rip-off. The book is quite irreverent. One of the many humorous scenes described in the book is of the main character, Frank, and his brother, Jeremy, wrestling the reluctant family dog into a creek so they can baptize him. The main character often views God as a pleasure-killing, vengeful master, and the Holy Ghost as an entity best avoided (he might tell you not to do something fun; or he might tell you to do something unpleasant). The book also includes a fair amount of swearing, several descriptions of sexual encounters, and frank discussions about masturbation.

The Backslider drags out from the closet some Mormon-specific skeletons--polygamy; blood atonement; and varying interpretations of the Word of Wisdom--but many of the conflicts are more broadly defined within the context of Christianity. For example, Frank's view of God seems mostly informed by the images of an angry, frightening Old Testament God, unreconciled with the much more personable Jesus of the New Testament. When Frank touches fossils in rock, he wonders how old the earth really is, and, if the earth is only a few thousand years old, why God would want to trick us with so many misleading clues, such as dinosaur bones and fossils. Frank vacillates between monastic self-denial and indulgences of the flesh. Guilt, repentance, and sin appear throughout the book.

The thing I found most refreshing about the book was its honesty. It asks aloud many of the questions people are afraid to utter. At times, however, the book tips past honesty into absurdity, as with the times when various characters get themselves so tied up in guilt, self-denial, and asceticism that they do things to themselves that seem implausible. Another thing that slightly disappointed me was the conversion to Mormonism that one of the main characters undergoes at the end of the book (converting to the faith has become a cliche that Mormons seem reluctant to leave out of most stories). However, the conversion is handled so artfully, in such a unique series of events, that I quickly forgave the author for turning the book in that direction. In fact, the most important conversion (not to any religion, per se, but to Jesus/God as a loving, empathetic, easy-going guy) , the one that comes to Frank at a vital moment near the end of the novel, is mildly shocking and not at all what a seminary graduate would expect to encounter in a conversion story.

Overall, The Backslider is a well-constructed novel that caused me to reflect upon the human condition, the nature of God, the place of pleasure in life, the necessity of love, and the struggle to make meaning out of chaos.


I'll save for a future post my thougths of the three other books I've recently read: Straight Man; In Cold Blood; and Anna Karinena.

By the way, I just realized that all of the books I've read this year have been written by male authors. I'd like to make the next book I read one written by a woman. Recommendations?

Ferris Bueller's Teacher

I just came across the following quote of Ferris Bueller's economics teacher. It brought back a lot of memories and associations with mid-adolescent emotions. Here is the quote:

"In 1930, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, in an effort to alleviate the effects of the... Anyone? Anyone?... the Great Depression, passed the... Anyone? Anyone? The tariff bill? The Hawley-Smoot Tariff Act? Which, anyone? Raised or lowered?... raised tariffs, in an effort to collect more revenue for the federal government. Did it work? Anyone? Anyone know the effects? It did not work, and the United States sank deeper into the Great Depression. Today we have a similar debate over this. Anyone know what this is? Class? Anyone? Anyone? Anyone seen this before? The Laffer Curve. Anyone know what this says? It says that at this point on the revenue curve, you will get exactly the same amount of revenue as at this point. This is very controversial. Does anyone know what Vice President Bush called this in 1980? Anyone? Something-d-o-o economics. 'Voodoo' economics."

But besides calling up mid-teenage anxieties, it also made me realize with mild horror that I've sort of become that guy. Today in class, I was leading a discussion on George Orwell's essay, "Shooting an Elephant." The essay, published in 1936 takes place in Burma (Myanmar), which was then controlled by the British as part of their extensive empire. I wanted to bring present-day relevance to the essay. The (mostly one-sided) discussion went something like this:

"Does anyone know what Burma calls itself today? (long awkward silence) Myanmar. What news in the last year has been associated with Myanmar? No one? Buddhist monks? Protests? Anyone? Hmmm. (Brief explanation of the protests for civil rights and against human rights violations) What other recent events has Myanmar been in the news for? (long awkward silence) Cyclone? Anyone know what I'm talking about? Tens of thousands of people dead? International help refused? Any of this familiar? U.S. Navy ships just sitting there with unused supplies? An international debate about violating a country's sovereignty to help its citizens? Nobody knows what I'm talking about? Well, let's get back to the essay. Why was Orwell, a British Imperial Police officer, in Burma in the late 1920's? Anyone?"

I wonder if my students were just hearing that Waa, Wa, Wa, Wa, Waa, Waa sound that Charlie Brown hears when adults speak to him. I hope I don't get to the point where, for the whole hour, I just turn my back to them while I write on the board and drone on about some uninteresting subject.

Inheritance Scam Spam

So, the Inheritance Scam E-mail is unlike most other spam in that, when you write it, you don't pressure and guilt your audience into forwarding it to everyone. You want your audience to think that she or he alone has received this rather remarkable offer. Your goal in this E-mail is not to bounce your E-mail around the globe forever; instead the purpose is to get the recipients of the message to give you money, and lots of it.

To get your reader to give you money, you need to convince her or him that you, in fact, want to give him or her a lot of money. Convince your reader that you are linked to an important person, someone she or he may have heard of in the news. Be sure, however, that your own invented identity is not someone she or he would be familiar with. Your scheme for how to actually get the money from the poor sap is up to you (arrange a meeting in Amsterdam; send a fake money order, etc.); the purpose of this communication is to teach you how to hook your readers and convince them to take the next step, whatever that might be.

Here are some tips:
Always originate your story in another country. Americans often assume that their country is the only stable one and will therefore not be surprised when you write that recently, when the Brazilian (or Ugandan, German, Chinese, Australian, etc.) government collapsed, you escaped with millions of dollars.

Come up with any reason why you need this person's help in liquidating the money. It doesn't need to be a rational reason. Make something up.

Instead of just writing $ or "dollars" when discussing the money, always refer to it as U.S. Dollars or USD. This will demonstrate that you are an international, metropolitan person, someone people can trust.

Make lots of grammatical, spelling, and wording errors. This will make your audience connect with you, will make them think, "Gee whiz, this is someone I could go bowling with, someone I could drink a beer with." Americans value feeling this way about people and will believe you if you awaken such emotions in them.

Lastly, address your E-mail so that it sounds as if it was sent specifically to this one recipient so that the recipient thinks he or she has been specially chosen for this important task; also, include as your contact E-mail address one that includes the name of organization you are claiming to represent, but has as its domain name some common E-mail service (example: OfficialDeutcheBankRepresentative@hotmail.com).

So, here is a brief example. As always, feel free to expand on this. Oh, and 12% of all US Dollars made using this method will need to be sent to me.


Dear Sur/Mam,

Allow me introduce myself. I am Honorable Hanz Werner Magnus from Norway, and am need your help. Recently my oder brother, Crown Prince Haakon of the Emaculate Kingdom Norway, tried cheat me out my inheritence. A snivelly thing this was to do to me and so there for I took my inheritence and sneaked out of the country by way of Sweden.

This inheritance is 47 million US Dollars. I can assure you that I have always said money on my person always. As an onorable member of the royal famly I am embarrased to have to ask such a thing of you, but I need help getting said USD into a useable state. You see, I am hiding in barn in Sweden. Luckily, no one has recognized me. No one knew about me because every person talked only on my brother, not me, so I can remain hidden.

I am willing to offer you, kind sir/Madam (and I make this offer to no one else; I have been told you are unique and trustworthy), 25% of my 42 million USD if you will help me get to the U.S.A. where I will be safe from my brother. Here is what you have to do. Send me 10 thousand USD so that I can come by a plain ticket and a fake passport. As a measure of my good will toward you, I will immediately, upone receive your 10 thousand USD, send you a real money order for 12 thousand USD. When I get to the U.SA, I will give you the remainder of promised 25% of my ineritance: 37 million USD.

Please hurry. I need help. My brother soon will discovery my were bouts. You will be richly rewarded. Send me the 10 thousand USD soon before I am caught and you will be rich man/woman.

Contact me very soon at my email address: OfficialPrinceNorway@gmail.com.

Many cind thanks,

The Onorable Prince Werner--Norway.



Remember to be kind yet firm, approachable yet authoritative, vulnerable but not pitiful. But above all, be convincing!

Endangered Woman Spam

As with all spam you send, when you mail out to hundreds of thousands of people your "Let's Scare Women" spam message, the point is to get as many people as possible to forward it. Your message has to make people afraid, really afraid. It's important to instill fear in women, but it is equally important to instill fear in dads and husbands, because, if these males and females are scared, they might actually drag their lazy mouse hand and click on "Forward," which will fill you (although you will never know the button has been clicked), the author, with a sense of fulfillment bordering upon divine rapture.

Besides personal fulfillment, the purpose of the "Let's Scare Women" spam is to re-balance our messed-up society. By reminding women that they are weak and vulnerable, you are doing a duty by keeping women from crossing a lot of dangerous boundaries they might otherwise cross. And by making the dads and husbands afraid for them, you are providing fodder for the argument that women need a man's protection. And we all know what the sub-text of this argument is (although we don't state this to the fairer sex because they might get offended)--women should be controlled by men.

So, having established two important reasons for the composition of such a communique, let us proceed directly to the outline of how it is produced:

1) Open with a voice of concern that lets the anonymous recipient know that you care about him or her. Remember that this E-mail will be forwarded between acquaintances, so when a person receives it, your thoughtful words will make the receiver feel as if the sender actually cares.

2) Provide some examples that prey on people's natural fears. Include some examples about women being drugged, maimed, and beaten by people who were hiding in wait for the victim. You want your reader to forever wonder if someone is hiding under her car, in the dark van next to her, or in that dark blind spot behind her seat. One of the goals is to unsettle your audience. One way to do this is to make it sound as if such attacks were everyday occurrences.

3) Make an allusion to a credible-sounding source. The source can be real or imagined, but it needs to sound credible. Don't worry, most of your audience will trust that the information really came from the New York Times, or they will believe that there is a small newspaper in Kansas called the Quarterville Post. You can even provide a link to the home page of a newspaper; the reader will assume that the story must have existed and is now simply buried within the archives of the paper you linked to.

4) End the E-mail with a Call to Action. Remember that your purpose is two-fold: to get people to forward this E-mail to everyone they know, and to put women back in their place. So your call to action needs to encompass these two aims.

Below is a short example. Feel free to write much longer spam messages that include many more frightful examples.


"I'm forwarding this to you because I care about women, and I know you do too. Recently, there has been a series of brutal attacks on women that the Liberal News Media are simply ignoring. The Wall Street Journal has reported on several of these attacks, but the trend is much more wide-spread than even they are willing to admit. The Kansas-based Quarterville Post broke the news that throughout the past year, over one hundred women have been attacked in this fashion. Here is what the assailants do: They "hang out" at grocery stores and banks and wait for women to go inside. Then they quickly slip under the car of the woman and wait for her to return. When she gets back, the attacker takes out a knife and cuts the woman's achilles tendons. Now that she is unable to flee, the attacker drags her under the car with him and robs and beats her and sometimes steals her groceries, too.

"Some reports suggest that these attacks are being coordinated by a gang, and that this achilles-slicing gang has a presence in every town with a population over 10,000. The only reason you haven't heard about this is because members of the wussy liberal media think these gang members can be reformed and the members of the press don't want to offend this gang. But make no mistake: these are awful people and they are probably staking out women at your local Safeway as you read this.

"The best way to get a handle on this is to spread the word through grass-roots efforts. It is up to you to send this message on. Send it to everyone you know, even to those you don't know. If you don't forward this message, you might be responsible for the beating, robbery, and slicing up of a woman you care about. And men, don't stop there. Be sure to always escort your women whereever they go. Don't let them out of the house until you return for work. It just isn't safe out there without you there to protect them. The best way to protect a song bird from getting killed by a falcoln is to clip its wings and cage it. The same is true of women.

"Again, if you care about women, you must send this to everyone you know. It only takes .7 seconds. Send it. If you don't, you'll regret it some day. When your sister or friend or wife or daughter crawls home from the grocery store without her groceries, her face battered and her ankles bloodied, and asks you, "Why didn't you warn me?," you will regret not having warned her by simply clicking on the Forward button at the top of this page. Do it. Do it now. Forward this, or you'll be sorry, and so will everyone around you."


Now, after you have composed this message, send it to a whole bank of E-mail addresses. Someone in the group will send it on to people she or he knows, and then it will have a personal touch. You can now sleep peacefully knowing you have acheived something today: you have started a message that will probably be forwarded forever. Never mind that most cars are too low to the ground for an adult to fit underneath. Nevermind that many people would find it weird and report it if they saw a man trying to throw himself underneath someone else's car. When people are scared, they don't think about these things, because you've made it so easy for them to pass on the message. And as the message spreads through the infinite webs of cyberspace, know this: You have acheived immortality!

Low-Quality Junk Mail

I've noticed lately that most of my junk mail is decidedly inferior to what it used to be. It's almost as if junk mail authors are starting to become disheartened and are only sending out second-best work. In an effort to improve the general quality of E-spam, and to help restore it to its previously lofty position (before E-mail services imposed "junk" filters onto everyone) as America's most-read material, I am going to do a series, including examples, on how to write and disseminate good junk. If you have any favorite categories I should cover, let me know, and I'll do my best to give 'em a shoutout.

Listen

The shrill whine that train wheels make when they grate slowly against metal tracks has always appealed to me. I first heard it, and became fond of it, in the mid 1990s in Germany, in the huge train station in Hamburg, on the small platforms near rural villages. It sounds like a deeply-felt song, a series of long, high notes that trail after each other, as if one note, with its hand out, were chasing after the one that came before it, which was in turn longing after the one before, each crying out a sound of un-anxious longing.

In larger train stations, where several trains are always arriving and departing, the shrieks and cries of many large metal bodies blend to make a chorus of sorts. The sounds blend to a hum, almost like a harmonica whose five or six highest notes are being played simultaneously. Here the trains can really show off because they are guided by slanting rails into specific slots, guided sharply at clanking angles that would send them, at higher speeds, cartwheeling free of their constraints. But here, crawling along at this pace, they can bump and shimmy and squeal without worry; these sounds let their charges know that, momentarily, they will safely be deposed onto the platform, where friends wait to embrace them after their long absence. Or these passengers might ignore the hugging crowds and hurry to another train to head in yet another direction; or to home to fall asleep on the velvet couch. The heavy wheels spin one way, stop, and then spin the other way, singing on their way in, singing on their way out.

Another place, besides stations, where this sound arrests me is underneath overpasses. While in grad school in Spokane, I often walked under such an overpass at night on my way back to my car. If a train passed over, I would stop and listen to its conflicted sounds: the heavy, rhythmic crashing that caused the concrete pillars to tremble and the ground to shake, contrasted with the lofty whine of the wheels--the whale song of the tracks. On these nights those high pitches were the sound of contemplation; they embodied emotionally my disembodied thoughts.

I'm not one of those people who love trains; I don't fantasize about being a conductor or an engineer. I've never owned a model train. But I do like how the metal sounds as it grates against itself. It is a high, straining, somewhat hollow, metallic sound that rises and falls slowly. It is the sound of longing, the sound of waiting, the sound of relief, the sound of understanding, the sound of being found, of taking leave, of regret and forgiveness, of lamentations and rejoicings, the sound of coming and of going. It is the sound of gray drizzle on centuries-old roofs, the sound of cracked concrete and soot-covered backs, of luggage wheels clacking over slotted concrete, the sound of pigeons pecking pea-sized chunks of cheese bread from frozen cobblestones, the sound of hog farms and grain bins, of obsolete ingenuity and inter-dependence, of never-coming-back.

Those high peals drag their fingernails over the chalky hearts of the hearing near-by, searching, awakening...something, usually. Unless the sounds escaping from steel ring out and meet with no response, become incorporeal, impotent shockwaves diminishing into mute, dampening space


(So, um, in other words, I like that high-pitched sound that train wheels make when they move slowly down the track...and, in the moment of composition, I was also feeling fond of alliteration).

Travel vs. Goats

My friend Laura posted some thoughts on her blog that sort of tapped into a latent dilemma that lately has been pressing on me: the traveling urge. Ever since Elizabeth and I got back eight years ago from spending three months in Europe (we were mostly in Germany, but we also spent time in the Czech Republic, Austria, and France), I have wanted to go back. Two and a half years ago, we geared up to go on a really cool trip; it still pains me to think about it.

Here were the plans: Our group would consist of Elizabeth, Sonora (then 1.5 years old and thus costless on an airlplane), me, and Elizabeth's sister Carrie and her new husband Carson.
We would fly with our bikes, panniers, a child bike trailer, and our camping gear to Munich Germany, where we would set out to the south-east. We would take 4 leisurely weeks biking through southern Germany and most of Austria, finally ending up in Budapest, Hungary. We would either take a train back to Munich, or fly out from Budapest.

We had the whole trek planned out. There are campgrounds, most of which are right on the water at one picturesque mountain lake or another, every ten miles or so along the route. I looked up rules on taking bikes as luggage. We purchased all the gear we needed.

And then we did our budget.

The year before, we had lived on my $22,000 salary, and while my salary had increased since then, we weren't going to be able to muster up, without going into debt, the $3,500 we figured we'd need for the trip. So for the next few months I cringed when a now-irrelevant deadline passed: the date we would need to buy our plane tickets; the date we would board the airplane; the date we would set out peddling at the feet of the Alps.

Since then we've taken one trip--to Alaska for a week--which was a pretty cool trip; it felt as if we had gone somewhere. Besides that, we've just driven to Utah or Colorado or to the other side of Washington. Or we've had stay-cations, which are a poor substitute. Our journeys have been kept short partially because, having purchased a house, we haven't had much extra money, and because we had Rowyn.

But as Rowyn gets old enough to make travel a little easier, and we begin to entertain thoughts of travel again, we've also started making plans that will anchor us to where we are. These plans consist of goats and chickens.

Elizabeth and I are as drawn to the idea of procuring our own food as we are to traveling and, I'm realizing, these are mutually exclusive pursuits. Milk goats have to be milked multiple times a day, every day of every week of the year, or else the milk will dry up. Eggs have to be gathered every day or else eventually the chickens will peck into them and develop a taste for eggs that would ruin the flock for egg-bearing.

We could ask our neighbors to milk our goats and gather the eggs, but to ask someone to do this for a month while we romp about Europe (or South America, or Africa, or Asia, or Australia) would be irresponsible. Besides, few people would have time to do this. Fewer people still would like us enough to do it.

We don't have any animals yet, nor do we have any plans for travel. Over the coming winter, we will make a decision that will of necessity exclude from our lives something we are excited about.

Summer's End

One of the reasons I'm pleased with my job is that I get summers off: almost three months in a row, one-fourth of a year. That is a pretty good deal. I don't get paid for these months, but we've been able to save up enough money to make it through each summer so far. I cherish these months of spending time with Elizabeth and the girls. But one difficulty with this schedule I've noticed particularly acutely this time around is that, when I go back to work, I go through withdrawals. The symptoms are sadness, frustration, and a sense of loss.

Elizabeth feels many of these same feelings when I go back to work. She can't just go outside and leave the baby. She can't just make a quick trip to town or run an errand without packing up the kids. Most days, she sees no other adults and spends her time reviewing the alphabet, wiping up curdled breast milk, making crafts and cleaning up the house. When I get home, we try to talk to each other about our respective days, to re-energize each other with casual, caring conversation, but we can't really talk, because Sonora becomes frustrated at the shift of attention away from herself and yelps "MOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMYMOMMY" until one of us busies ourselves with her.

However, tonight, Sonora said something that led me to believe that she, too, senses that something has changed, that she, too, misses having her other parent around. "Daddy, do you feel okay?" she asked me. I had had a hard day, a long series of non-accomplishments at work. And I had had a couple of hard days before that--working a normal day, coming home for an hour to eat dinner, going to three-hour Scout meetings, and coming home to a dark, silent house. Tomorrow, I get to spend another Saturday doing Scout stuff.

"No, I don't feel that good," I told her.

"I wish we could play together more," was her reply. Since mid-September, I've only taken her to the park once.

"I wish we could, too."

I don't really have a right to complain. I love spending that time, those slow, warm, family months, with them. Few families get to spend that kind of time together. But the transition back out of that life is a shock, even though I knew it is coming. It's a sort of metamorphosis, I guess, like the cycle of a perennial plant that withers with the first frost, hunkers its essence down into its buried bulb and then waits, waits, those long, lonely months, for the sun to warm the earth and beckon it into bloom.

Bike Winning

Two or three months ago, a friend of mine described for me an interesting way to teach a kid to ride a bike. The main idea was that you remove the training wheels and the pedals and let the kid propel herself with her feet. This will teach her or him balance. Once the child can balance somewhat, put the pedals on and the child should be able to learn how to ride without falling over so much.

It wasn't that simple with Sonora. She is only 3.5 years old. In some ways, she is perhaps too young to ride a bike, but I didn't want to have to teach her how to ride with training wheels and then take them off and have to teach her all over again. Better to teach her all at once, I figured. However, she hadn't done much pedaling of anything before, so I had to teach her how to pedal as well as how to balance. We practiced almost every day of the week for about a month and a half before she got it. The video below shows her at various stages in the process. It was a rewarding way to spend time with her.

Slack-lining

Earlier this spring, Elizabeth's sister Carrie came to visit. Her husband Carson brought with them his slack line. He had me try it and I was hooked. So for my birthday, Elizabeth got me a slack line kit. It has been sort of rainy since then, so I've only been able to set it up a few times, but Thursday Elizabeth's sister Vanessa came down and we took the slack line to the park. Everyone tried it out, but it takes a long time to get a feel for balancing on a piece of bouncy one-inch webbing (I practiced on Carson's slack line for a couple of hours before I could take more than one step without falling off). Even though no one was able to walk the line by herself, I think everyone had fun trying.

Re-planting

When we got back from our three-week jaunt to Utah/Colorado/Idaho earlier this summer, the arugula (a nutty-tasting salad green) and spinach plants in our garden had gone to seed. From every plant, a shoot had shot up a couple of feet; leaves, as if surprised by the sudden surge away from the earth, clung desperately, limply, to the sides of the new stalks. I picked a few of these leaves--we added some to salads--but the good taste had gone out of them. They had passed beyond their prime and had set about procreating, had done what all life tries to do: perpetuate itself.

I think what most people do, what I've always done when a plant goes to seed and no longer produces food, is pull up the plant and toss it into the compost pile or dispose of it in some other way. But this time I didn't want to do that. I wanted to see what would happen if I let these plants do what they wanted to do. I asked myself why do we buy packets of seeds every year? Why not let the plants supply their own offspring? I kept watering the plot they were in and observed as more seeds populated the spinach stalks, more seed pods stretched away from the arugula stalks. At first the seeds and seed pods were green, moist, soft. The arugula seeds were tiny in their pods, but they exploded with a peppery, nutty, radishy flavor when I sampled them. Slowly they began to dry out and firm up. But I was worried the seeds might not be any good.

In recent history, as agribusiness has mostly outgrown local production and become a major industry, people have bred and modified some plants so that they are sterile. They may or may not produce seeds, but they don't produce any offspring. Other plants have been genetically modified significantly enough that their seeds can be patented; it is illegal to collect and re-plant these seeds. Both scenarios--intentionally producing and perpetuating sterile crops, and making it illegal to re-plant a seed--seem to me bizarre and mildly abhorrent. This strong human desire to own, to control, to manipulate, to dictate even to nature is just weird and possibly very destructive. When food corporations completely dictate or shut down the reproductive capacities of edible plants, they reinforce the idea that profit is more important than life.

Scandinavians, by investing in and building Svalbard International Seed Vault in a remote area of Norway, have recently taken an important and decisive step toward preserving plant life, toward ensuring the survival of millions of plant species against natural disasters, wars, and human interference. This seed vault has been called, sometimes derogatorily, the "Dooms-Day Vault" or "Noah's Ark," but I find its presence to be rather comforting, even though it is very, very far away from me. It shows that, somewhere at least, people care enough about the essence of life to drill a huge hole into a frozen mountain and store millions of seeds from all over the world, to be re-distributed at need. All this effort and money to build a vault to store not gold or military weaponry, but seeds, which are at once so banal and so benignant.

When the arugula and spinach seeds were dry and seemed to be ready, I decided to make our own mini seed vault. The seeds came free easily, eagerly. It took a little while to separate the seeds from the organic debris that came with them. I lightly shook the arugula seeds in a bowl and picked out the dried pods. With the spinach seeds came many small pieces of brittle, papery yellowish leaves. These I had to blow away like wheat chaff. Once I had a small pile of each type of seed (I gathered enough to last about 15-20 plantings), I set the seeds aside, dug up the plot, and re-planted two rows of arugula and two rows of spinach to see if the seeds were good. The rest of the seeds I stored in brown paper pouches. In three days, the arugula had sprouted; two days later the spinach started coming up. It took twice that long for the seeds to germinate in the spring. The whole process has been strangely exhilarating.

Now I'm thinking we'll harvest seeds from all the plants in the garden that do well. These seeds will form the foundation of next year's garden. Another idea I had today was that we should buy produce from the local farmers market and get seeds from the plants (tomatoes, cantaloupes, peppers, cucumbers, peaches, cherries, etc.). These plants have been grown locally and should, therefore, do well in the local climate, as opposed to a seed packet sold in Washington filled with seeds produced from a plant in Florida.

I can't help but think that my recent interest in the perpetuation of plants has something to do with my interest in my family. Elizabeth and I tried for four years before we got pregnant with Sonora. We thought we were sterile, but now we have two miraculous daughters, now a sapling and a seedling, both straining upward, plunging their branches toward the sun. My parents are nearing retirement. They went to seed a while ago. They move cautiously and are becoming a little more brittle each year. I have one grandparent left: my mom's mom. We are all of her stock.


About a month ago, while Sonora and I were out for a walk on a Sunday afternoon, we saw the biggest cherry tree I've ever seen. It stood as tall and almost as wide as the two-story Victorian home in whose front yard it was rooted. I lingered, wondering if I couldn't collect some of the ripe deep-burgundy cherries. While I was staring at the tree, a short, thin, jolly old man approached Sonora and me from across the street. His captivating smile was that of a person who thrilled in making other people happy. He asked us if we wanted some of those cherries. I said we did, but we didn't have any way to carry them. He went home and returned with eight empty plastic whipped-cream containers. He used to live in this house, he told me. Now his son lived there, though he was out of town for the weekend. The old man's son had planted that tree for his daughter when she was a little girl. She is now in her forties.

A seedling planted by a father for his daughter. And Sonora and I stood in its shade as it towered over us.

The cherries were sweet and juicy and full. Sonora helped me pick some, but she mostly stained crimson her face and hands and shirt; even though she picked many cherries, her container never filled up. We brought seven full containers home to Elizabeth and we all ate them over the next week.

Even before I had harvested the spinach and arugula seeds, before I knew I was interested in saving seeds, I saved a few of those cherry seeds and pushed them into the moist earth near our home. I saved them because their parent had grown well in this town, had grown well for that man's daughter, for that old man's granddaughter. I hope our small seeds will grow tall and spread their branches wide, wide over us. While we are waiting for that to happen, we will enjoy the cycle of planting, caring, harvesting, eating. To get the whole thing started, we'll have spring greens this autumn.

Summer

I lover summertime, and I love our front yard in the summertime. The three maple trees out front have flung out their leaves like so many sieves sifting the sun, green hands holding up the air. These trees provide shade over the grass until the early afternoon, and after a few hours the house shades the same spot, so it is cool and comfortable there; the grass is soft. The warm weather draws us outside; the shade keeps us there.

This summer has been about as fun a summer as I've had since I was a kid (probably, I'll never again have a summer as enjoyable as those I had between the ages of 4 and 12, because those days of freedom and discovery on the plateau lands in southwestern Colorado have set a very high standard). Part of it has to do with having a house and land and trees. The two summers previous to this one were spend in two different locations, neither with any trees nearby. I felt stifled and dried out. But now we can walk outside, walk barefoot through the grass and weeds, spend time in the shade, lie back on the ground.

Besides the house, the land, and the trees, I savor the summer because I don't work. I wake up with Elizabeth and the kids, we spend most of the day together, we put the kids down for bed, and the Elizabeth and I have a few hours to ourselves; sometimes we do something together, sometimes we do things in isolation, but the evenings provide a nice rejuvenating buffer between one day and the next.

Here are some of the things I've enjoyed most this summer:

teaching Sonora to ride her bike on the basketball court at the nearby park (she still has training wheels on, but at least she can pedal reasonably well)

picking vegetables from our garden with Sonora

walking through the yard while holding Rowyn (she likes being outside and seems to listen intently to all the sounds

watching Sonora walk around with her watering pail and water random plants (she even made a couple of flowers grow and then blossom in a planter we thought had nothing in it)

going on walks as a family

jogging every morning with Elizabeth and the kids

traveling to see family

eating breakfast, lunch, or dinner outside on the porch or the patio or the lawn

Dressing my Baby

When I lay her down on the changing table, she looks contentedly at me. I wonder, and a sense of guilt pervades the question: Do I ever pay as much attention to you as when I change your clothes? Do I ever focus just on you, just on you? She kicks and squeals and slobbers as I pull her arms out of the sleeves of her shirt. After I peel the tight neck of her shirt up over her face, she blinks, looks up at me with squinted eyes as if to ask: "Is it over? Will you be scraping anything else over my face?" Or maybe, "Did something just change?"

She is always excited to have her diaper off. I wipe her legs, her genitals, her back with a soft, warm, damp cloth, and she relaxes. The new diaper I fold in half and wave above her like a fan to dry her off so that for a short while, until she wets herself again, she will be totally dry. She shivers as the wetness evaporates and cools her skin, she pulls her arms, bent like chicken wings, in against her chest, goose bumps raise up across her skin. When I put the diaper under her back and snap it closed around her legs, I am amazed at the size of her thighs, round and fat, a fat-wrinkle roll halfway between her hip and her knee curving in an arc most of the way around. All this mass, all this body, that mind, that head, those legs, those fingers, those eyes, simply from the time she spent in the womb and now spends at her mother's breast.

After I pull her pants on, up her legs, past her clammy, flex-toed feet, I wait to put her shirt on. I run my fingers lightly over her belly, her arms, her back. She relaxes again, coos lightly, drops drool over her chin. Her skin is smooth like well-kneaded, half-risen bread dough. She feels my touch. I hope she knows I love her. When I put her shirt on, I have to pull her arms away from her body again to get them through her sleeves. She resists, so I give her a finger to hold onto and that makes it easier for her. Again, when the neck of the shirt is drawn across her face, she blinks, looks around uncertainly, wonders, perhaps, if the world is new again.

With her shirt on, she is mostly dressed, but I hesitate to put on her socks and instead I take each ankle between my forefinger and middle finger and begin tapping with my thumbs on the bare soles of her feet--left, right, left, right, left, right, left, right--while I quietly sing her a song to the rhythm of the tapping. I do not sing well, but I hope that, as her mind grows, this triangulation of left-sound-right will help her understand things, will later help her process the difficult things, the awful truths, the deep frustrations, that will come her way in the future when she reaches adulthood and realizes the confusion doesn't leave with adolescence. Maybe I can help her develop a strong corpus collosum. Maybe I can give her some advantage in life. Maybe something I do will make a difference.

Is this a father's blessing?

And then I push her feet into the socks, straighten the stretchy fabric into place, and give her to her mom. As I watch her cuddle the side of her cheek into that comfortable space between shoulder and neck, I know I have just experienced life.

Salami Picnic

Sonora enjoys processed meats--lunch meat, hot dogs, pepperoni, jerky, etc.--so when she expressed reluctance at the idea of riding in the trailer behind me when I went for a bike ride today, I knew how to make her excited about the trip. "We can stop for a picnic on the way and eat some salami," I said, and then she was interested. I really should have prepared a better lunch, but I was in a hurry, so I just grabbed the herb-coated salami and some nectarines and we hit the road.
The route we took wound out of our little town, followed a creek for a few miles, wound through wheat fields for a few miles, then through a small pine forest, then through more wheat fields and then back home. All of the roads are gravel, which made for a pretty slow pace (the trailer felt like an anchor at times).

Along the way, Sonora would point things out to me, and I to her. She thought the town's sewage lagoons were little lakes and I didn't have the heart to correct her. She has developed a fascination with grain silos and wanted me to look at each one we passed. I called her attention to the red-tailed hawk that was screaming at us shrilly from above as she circled the tree her nesting chicks were in. I also pointed out the small grove of trees that stood out like an island in the swaying sea of almost-ripe wheat. In the grove is a picnic table. That's where we stopped for lunch.

Sonora had brought the salami (she wanted to carry it in her purse), but I had left the nectarines in the garage, along with the knife that was supposed to cut the fruit and the chub of salted meat. So we had a lunch of salami and water. Sans any utensils, we just took turns biting into the thing. It was kind of fun, but sort of gross, too; it is awful-looking stuff. After our meal, I picked a head of wheat and dug out a few kernels. They were soft and green. When I bit into one, it was juicy and sweet with a hint milkiness somewhere between coconut and soy milk. As I dug more out, Sonora ate them faster than I could get them to her. "I like sweet wheat," she said.

The rest of the ride went more slowly and was kind of hot. It was still mostly enjoyable for me, but Sonora was bored and tired of bouncing around on the washboard (when we reached a short stretch of pavement, she said, "Dad, let's stay on this road, okay?"). When we got home, we tore into the nectarines; the salami hadn't been particularly refreshing.


About a week ago, just after some random fellow resident slowed down her car to briefly chat with us while Elizabeth and I were jogging, I told Elizabeth I think we are small-town people. She immediately agreed. We jogged over a small bridge that spans a gap through which the stream meanders that Sonora and I followed on our ride. That ride confirmed what I told Elizabeth: I like the country. It's not that cities don't have a lot to offer (I told Elizabeth yesterday that I wouldn't mind living in New York City for a couple of years), but they don't have wheat fields and hawk nests and old silos and gravel roads, and sweet, almost-ripe wheat. Perhaps I'll feel differently tomorrow, but today I liked what I saw.

The Ethics of Hunting

I had an epiphany the other day, and this is how I arrived at it: We are growing a garden, which is an excellent, environmentally sound way to procure food. But, even though it is rewarding--Sonora and I poke around the garden every day and take note of the most minor of changes--it still has a minor negative impact because we use city water to water it. City water takes electricity to refine and to pump; electricity is generated using coal or radioactive material, both of which have unhealthy side effects, and so forth and so on. Wild plants, however, grow from rainwater and require no electrically-powered pump to water and no fossil fuels to run a tractor to plant their seeds. So, I realized, if we could live from wild plants that we collected on foot within walking distance of our house, we could live without much of a negative impact environmentally. This is unrealistic, of course, for many reasons, but I liked the idea and pursued it further.

What about meat? was my next thought.

For a brief moment following this question, I had an image of plucking chunks of meat from raspberry bushes, which is also unrealistic, but then it hit me: hunting is harvesting wild meat. This elementary realization shocked me because I had long ago written off hunting.

I used to go deer hunting in Colorado with my brothers and my dad when I was a kid. We weren't one of those die-hard hunting families with 50 different rifles and extra chest freezers just to hold the three elk we'd "bagged;" if they were lucky (and a deer unlucky), one of the males in the family would kill and bring home one deer a year. They would gut it out and bring the carcass home and hang it up-side-down in a tree to age for a few days in the cold October air. They would slit the skin around its ankles and pull down, as if trying to pull a blanket away from a reluctant child, carving with a knife the white membranes that held the skin to the muscle; the sound it would make was similar to the sound of pulling plastic wrap off a bowl. Then we would bring large chunks of meat and bone, sawed from the main body, into the house, where this animal flesh would bleed onto the kitchen table as it was chopped into steaks and roasts and jerky strips.

It was all pretty gruesome and the house smelled gamy for weeks. I didn't ever like the process very much, nor did the sagebrush-fed meat taste very good to me (I did like the jerky). When I went hunting with my dad or my brothers, I never shot a deer; I don't even remember pointing a rifle at one, but I observed because I thought the knowledge might be important some day. That is, until the last hunting experience I had with my dad.

He shot a doe. It was an easy shot across an open field and she went down. But when we got to her, she wasn't dead and my dad had to finish her off. He took out his knife and approached her, and she stared at him calmly as he approached. Her dark, round, moist eyes peered at him, perhaps at his soul. He straddled the does neck and then plunged the knife through her throat, severing her arteries and opening her esophagus. As she bled out, she stared at him until her eyes went dull.

My dad was silent and when I approached him, he turned his head away. He was crying. I could tell this, though I think he was ashamed. "I hate this part," he mumbled in explanation.

After that, I decided hunting was too painful, for the animal and for the hunter. I figured hunting must cause the hunter to become jaded, insensitive to death, insensitive to his or her own humanity.

The thing is, however, that every time we eat meat, we participate in the death and killing of an animal, of some cow or chicken or pig somewhere in the world that also has searching eyes. The difference is, we don't have to look at them. We get the plastic-wrapped bundle without having to hear the plastic-wrap sound of the skin being torn off. But isn't that jaded? Isn't that insensitive?

And there is the environmental factor to consider. Most meat sold in a grocery store (some co-ops excepting) has been grain-fed--highly inefficient--and given a steady regimen of antibiotics and hormones on a feedlot in the U.S. or New Zealand or somewhere else, shipped to a slaughterhouse, cut up, shipped to a packing plant, packaged, shipped to a grocery store, purchased, and shipped home to a refrigerator. A lot of energy has been wasted on this roast.

A deer or elk feeds on wild, organically-grown plants (unless the animal gets into a farmer's fertilized, insecticized, herbicized crops), lives a relatively fulfilling life, and then it is shot by a hunter; she or he will have to see the animal whose life has just seeped out of it. Unless this hunter is a trophy hunter (a despicable thing, trophy hunting), the hunter will know what she or he is eating and that it cost a life; this person can not hide behind the ignorant screen of cellophane and Styrofoam that suggests that meat costs only money.

There is the economic benefit of hunting as well: $50 or so will buy a license. An adult deer would yield somewhere between 50 and 120 pounds of meat, an elk a lot more. Of course, to have the full savings, instead of taking the carcass to a meat packing plant, you've got to skin it and butcher it yourself, which is messy and time consuming but valuable in that the family knows they are eating an animal that is dead and bleeding on their table because of them.

The thing is, though, that hunting is highly unappealing to me. I hate killing things, even insects. I've forgotten most of what I learned as a boy about gutting and skinning and butchering and packaging. But the more I think about it, the more convinced I become that hunting is more morally correct than consuming meat purchased at the grocery store. I am becoming convinced that I have two choices: hunting or becoming vegetarian. Elizabeth and I were vegetarians before for a few years and it was difficult to give up meat, but it might be easier than buying and using a rifle.

What do you think? Is hunting more ethical, more moral than just buying meat at a store, or is this recent mode of thought misguided?

Death of the Family Vacation?

So a few weeks ago, while we were on vacation in Utah, Elizabeth and I heard a blurb about an upcoming story on NPR about the passing of the "Golden Age of the family vacation," as if family vacations are now dead or at least past their prime. We were going to meet a friend at a park in Salt Lake City, so we didn't get to hear the story, but here is what I think they were going to say: Disneyland, airplanes, in-car DVD players, and high gas prices have killed the great American family roadtrip. Maybe they said nothing of the sort, but I'm going to proceed on the assumption that this was the premise of their story.

Of course, I'm not sure I know what a great American family vacation looks like. Here is my image: the family, packed into a car with stuff strapped to the roof, driving to some National Park, or along a historic route, or to see family members who live far away; along the way, the parents lead the children in all manner of time-consuming games to keep the kids from fighting and whining: playing I spy; singing show tunes and children's songs; passing out books and puzzles and yarn; etc. Most of these activities work only for a short while and then the kids are fighting and Dad is yelling and threatening to turn the car around and go home--a stupid threat, even he knows this, but it is tradition and an easy thing to say when he is angry. Through the road trip, the kids get to know their country more fully, bond with their family, and receive mental bookmarks to place in their memories as they become self-actualized.

I am certainly glad for some of the trips we went on when I was a kid. Mind you, we were poor and my experiences reflect this. Some of the experiences I remember were not necessarily pleasant, but I'm still glad for them. Here are a few that stand out in my mind right now:

I don't remember where we were going or how old I was (young), but I remember mountains of snow on either side of the car. We stopped and got out. The road was at the bottom of a seven-foot deep white canyon. The day was fairly warm and the snow was densely packed and taller than both my parents. My dad lifted each of us kids individually up onto the towering snow. Somehow this unexpected snowy encounter became a main attraction in the trip, something we talked about as much as whatever it was we were originally going to see.

On another trip, the family was driving during the summer to some desert location. We traveled in my dad's beat up 1965 baby blue Ford truck. My parents and the baby sat up in the front bench seat. The rest of us rode in the bed of the truck, protected from the wind by a camper shell. On this trip, my parents had left us a case of Shasta soda to quench our thirst, but we worked our way quickly through it and we were beginning to get thirsty again. I also needed to pee. We banged on the window to let my parents know they needed to stop, but they had had enough stopping on behalf of whiny kids (with seven kids, it must have seemed as though every twenty minutes one or the other of the children needed to stop). When I got no response from my parents, my older brother, Clinton, suggested I just pee in one of the empty soda cans, which I did with great relief. When I was finished, I decided to dump my urine out the window. But Dumoan, my oldest brother, grabbed the can from me. He was thirsty and didn't want me wasting the remainder of a soda; apparently he hadn't seen me quietly relieving myself in the corner. I started to tell him that that warm fluid in there was not soda pop, but Clinton shook his head as if to say: "Let's just see what happens." Dumoan took a deep draft of the warm, salty hint-of-ammonia Shasta and then spit it out in horror. Clinton was laughing heartily while I chuckled in disbelief. Dumoan punished us both that day; he failed to see the humor that kept us laughing even while being pounded with fists.

In that same blue truck, we took a trip to a couple of the National Parks in southern Utah. Zion NP stands out in my mind, mostly because it seemed somehow otherworldly, exotic, pre-historic. I remember water falls and trees and weird rock formations. I also remember a shirtless man whose entire torso and arms were covered in tattoos. He was a hairy, tan, big-bellied man and I hiked close behind him, trying to untangle all those images from each other. I had seen tattoos before, but never in this quantity; they were like cave paintings: stories that couldn't begin to tell themselves to me but held some meaning anyway, overlapping stories, some grotesque, some beautiful, some scary, others comforting. All kinds of human emotions wrapped up in ink impregnated in a fat man's skin.

When I was eleven or so, we took a trip to Vegas and stayed in a hotel, an unusual treat for us. My parents, being frugal, chose the cheapest hotel they could find. The whole family slept in a single room with one queen-sized bed. Most of us were strewn out on the dirty carpet, using a pair of pants or a couple of shirts for pillows. Our poor sleep that night, however, was not due to physical discomfort, but rather to the rhythmic knocking of our fellow patrons next door. My parents are fairly sure our neighbor was a prostitute with a customer. They were annoyed and embarrassed to have all their kids hear that display. I can't say for sure what the profession was of the person next door, but I do know I was intrigued by the whole thing.

In southeastern New Mexico, I saw my first cockroach; it was crawling up the shower wall in another inexpensive hotel the whole family slept in. We were on our way from Colorado to Texas. Somehow seeing the cockroach was validating. I had seen thousands of commercials for cockroach killing chemicals and contraptions, but never seen the actual creature that caused Americans to spend millions of dollars to control them. On that trip, I knew we had gone somewhere.

For spring break when I was fourteen, we went to St. George, Utah to visit my maternal grandma. We didn't know that St. George was a spring break Mecca for college and high school students. We went to "the narrows" above the town to shimmy our way up a long crack in the sandstone. It was fun, but what I enjoyed most were the hundreds of physically mature girls sunning themselves in swimsuits on the rocks. I had never seen anything like it.

When I was eighteen, I took a trip with my dad. Since it was just the two of us, I don't know if it qualifies as a family vacation, but it had the feeling of one. This time, however, I did most of the driving while he sat in the passenger's seat. We didn't sing songs or play games. We talked, like we had never talked before. We talked about relationships and love and sex and religion and sorrow and life. When we spoke, I noticed he did not hold back in the discussion; his words and ideas were not sanitized and carefully chosen. They were honest. Our relationship was not like the father and son relationship I had become used to; we were now peers. I was now an adult, and that was the first time I had felt like one.


On this most recent family trip Elizabeth, Sonora, Rowyn and I took, we visited friends in Boise, spent time with Elizabeth's family in Utah, I went backpacking with Clinton, we went camping, to the Lagoon amusement park and to family reunions in Blanding and Logan, Utah. It felt like a family vacation: I snapped at Sonora a couple of times; we stopped occasionally to feed Rowyn or change her diaper. Sonora helped entertain Rowyn, sang songs with us, started learning to play "I spy," and spent lots of time playing with her cousins. She also participated in paper boat races, rode a horse, rode a roller coaster, picked peas and raspberries, learned to fly a kite, went to the dinosaur museum, and saw all of her grandparents. I wonder what, in 30 years, she will remember from this trip.



I certainly hope the family vacation is not dead; if it were, I think we as a nation would be poorer for it. Family vacations provide rare moments in time by which we can gauge the progression of our lives, our development as individuals and as part of a family unit.