Immigrant Song

My grandmother came to the US on the Gripsholm.
She was just 18 years old. 

The natives have been complaining about the immigrants for a good 500 years at least.

The first explorers didn't stay long and so they weren't too much of a problem. They would come when the weather was nice, but one winter was about all they could take.

My people first arrived on these shores in 1644. The Gagné brothers had packed up their families and sailed across the Atlantic to New France. They were the early French colonizers of the New World - which, let's face it, was someone else's old world at the time.

Unlike the Coureur des bois, Voyageurs and soldiers that had come to Quebec before them, they were coming to stay, to colonize the King's few acres of snow. They were to be a counterbalance to the growing population of English and Spanish colonizers.

Pierre did not live long after his arrival, but Louis carved out a farm above the St. Lawrence river. Both brothers had sailed from La Rochelle with children and pregnant wives in tow. Louis and his wife Marie leased the land from a corporation, but by 1650 a different corporate land owner --Company of Beaupre -- gave him a land grant provided that he build a house on the property by the following year.

If you go to the town of Sainte Anne de Beaupre in Quebec today, you will find a house built on those stone foundations. This house measured just 24 by 22 feet, but the walls are two feet thick.

The home the Gagne brothers left behind in France
(source Gagnier History Website)

The Gagne bothers were pioneers -- immigrants sent by the King to make a new life in a strange world. They braved a dangerous journey with their young children and pregnant wives in search of a better life with hope of a brighter future than they faced back in Ige.

Some were welcoming in the in the land they found, but not everyone. Louis was one of eight people killed and captured by Mohawks in during the Beaver Wars in 1660.

His widow, Marie, was 41 years old and the mother of eight children at the time of his death.

Despite the passing of Pierre and Louis, the Gagnes were fruitful and multiplied in the new world. One of Louis and Marie's sons -- Ignace Gagne born in 1656 in Quebec -- is the father of a long line of "greats" leading directly to my Pépé.

My grandfather, Joseph Gagné was born in Quebec more than two centuries later in 1911. He grew up, for a time at least, as a migrant worker. Moving back and forth across the northern boarder with his family to the United States to work in the textile mills of New England.  When he was 18, he decided to stay in the United States and found work as a mechanic. Eventually he became a chauffeur for a well-to-do family in -- ironically -- New Rochelle, New York. There he met a recent Swedish immigrant named Edith Marta Palmgren who worked as a cook in the big house.

Edith had left her family behind and boarded a ship to the New World when she was still a teenager. No one was calling it the New World by that time, but America still was a land of hope of a better life. Many people watched their children sail across the seas to find a better life.

They were married, had children. During World War II, Joseph -- still a Canadian citizen -- continued his job for Electric Boat building submarines. On the 4th of July 1943, their daughter Alice was born.

Alice is my mother. My mother tells the story of how they didn't bother getting their US citizenship until much later - until after their children had graduated high school.

Patrick Cooper Hunt fled Ireland in black 1849. Starvation was all he left behind. He had an Uncle in New Jersey, so he sailed for the Port of Philadelphia in search of a better life. He was 19 years old. Ireland at the time was occupied by England. The native Irish were oppressed. The legal system did not recognize their language. Indeed, family lore has it that Hunt was just an anglicized version of the Gaelic -- since his Gaelic surname would have been made illegal .

Patrick Cooper Hunt and his children did well in the US. His great - grandson worked for NASA and military designing things that go into space, and things that go boom. My father John Hunt designed a lot of other things too, of course. He even designed that grocery checkout scanner that you find in every store.

Researching my family history left me with a lot of great stories to tell. Sure, I have roots that go deep on American soil.

Yet the idea that strikes me most is how my story is a story of immigrations. Centuries apart, young fathers and mothers, teenagers often, gambling on the unknown in hopes of improving their lot.

That is what immigrants bring -- the search for something better. They struggle, risk, strive and hope for a better life.  They come to the United States -- often exploited, working long hours at the worst jobs -- sacrificing to create a future for their children. They build businesses, they invent things. In so doing, they help the economy of the entire nation.

Given the short sighted nature of our politics and our nation's failure to invest in the education and infrastructure that will build a better world, a little immigrant thinking is not such a bad thing.

-30-

Further Reading:

Studies have shown that immigration helps the US Economy

Immigrant Entrepreneurs: Vital for American Innovation

Volunteers Like Us

The musty old Grays River Grange Hall had standing room only. 

Yet, I sat with a handful of others at the front of the room, in two rows of old theater seats, staring back at neighbors, family, and friends. Those of us up front were more than a little embarrassed with all the attention. As if we were heroes, I thought, but what had we done? We had joined the Grays River Valley Volunteer Fire Department and completed 140 hours of training to become emergency medical technicians. Two of us had signed up to become volunteer firefighters as well. This community celebration was a way of acknowledging our dedication.

Yet, it was something more, too.

A similar size crowd had gathered in the hall six months before. At that meeting, the news was grim. Without new volunteer firefighters and EMTs to answer calls, we were in danger of losing our ability to maintain these services. For our valley, that would have been dire news indeed. In a community like ours, a volunteer from the fire department is the person who shows up on the scene when you call 911 for an ambulance. After a car accident, volunteer firefighters free you if you are trapped in your car and then provide important emergency care.

We live more than 40 miles from the nearest hospital. Only a few hundred people reside in the Grays River Valley. There is no way we could afford to pay for professional fire and ambulance services. It is cold comfort to know that our community is not alone in struggling to find volunteers. The number of volunteer firefighters has declined nationwide by 15 percent over the past 20 years, while the number of 911 calls they must answer has increased significantly. Some fire departments reported a brief spike in interest after the attacks on Sept. 11, but most still report a shortage of volunteers.

As we work longer hours, commute long distances, we've come to guard our free time jealously - even if it is spent in front of a TV. Meanwhile, training requirements for firefighting and emergency medicine have increased dramatically. More hours of training are required every year.

This valley has long been home of dairy farms, loggers, and fishermen. Yet, as those industries have faded over the past 20 years, it has also become home to people who work outside the area, telecommuters, and early retirees. The EMT class represented the spectrum of people in the valley: two retirees, a dairy farmer, a mother and a grandmother, a worker for the local phone company, a mill worker, and a website editor - three men and five women.

EMT training was four months of classes two nights a week - from 6:30 to 9:30 - and a half-dozen Saturdays for all-day hands-on training sessions. Often I would get home from work, study during dinner, and then be off to class. In the last two weeks before the state certification tests, we were at the fire hall five nights a week - sometimes until 10 or 11. Our need to learn competed with family obligations and postponed vacations.

We gained confidence and inspiration from our instructors' dedication as they, too, put in long evenings and weekends. They, in turn, said that they were inspired by us. In fact, wherever we went in the community people stopped to thank us and to tell us how important all this was.

The veterans have warned that we'll see things that we'll wish we could forget. That too often the call will be to someone's house that we know. That we might often be the best thing on the worst day of someone's life.

So why did I join?

In truth, I guess I was hungry for something. It seems as if there's been a hole inside me for the past two years - dating back to a Tuesday in September 2001. I remember watching the crowds of people lining up to give blood for victims who would never be found. I understood then their need to get out from behind the TV and to do something, to strike against the feeling of uselessness. It took me two years to respond to that inner call. When asked, I joke that I joined the fire department because I realized I'd feel pretty stupid if my house was burning down and no one showed up to put it out.

But joking aside, isn't that exactly why we form communities, cities, states, and nations? We invest a part of ourselves to make something larger than us better - whether it be a volunteer fire department or a nation. Who wants to live in a place where no one comes when you need help? If you don't volunteer - or support those who do - why should you expect others to answer the call? A community isn't a place, it's the sum total of the interactions of group of people. I think that's really what we were celebrating that night in the Grange Hall.

"The thing this tells us about our community, is that we have one," one speaker at the celebration said. "Different people, with different talents coming together when needed, making a commitment to serve each other - that's what a community is. That's what a community does."

-30-

This piece was written for the Christian Science Monitor and first appeared in that publication in September of 2003. 

Don't Forget to Sharpen Your Ax

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace_Denslow

There are always times when we try do too much. We take on too many projects and allow the weight of the world to be placed upon our shoulders.

We think we are strong and can power through anything and we suffer in silence, wrapped in the warm steam of our own stress.

Our ego is often swollen and fed by our labors. We tell ourselves that no one else knows how hard we are working. No one else has their nose to the grindstone like we do. We are martyrs. We look around and everyone is enjoying the sun, laughing while we slave away.

When I was trying to get into nursing school I took a college algebra class with a friend who was trying to get into dental school. It was summer session, so after a long class, we would go to the tutoring center at the college to grind through hours of homework while the world lolled about in the sun. I wanted to be home with my family and my new-born daughter. I hated math, hated that I was in my late 30's and starting from scratch trying to build a new career to support my family.

I would grind away at the homework, never taking a break or allowing myself a moment of daydreaming.

 "I have to get this done," was the mantra that a mouthed with each new problem.

Each day my friend and I would start our homework at the same time and each day we would finish within a few minutes of each other, closing our books and walking out together.

Yet my friend would punctuate his homework with frequent stretches and walks around the building to enjoy the sun. One day while walking out I asked how he manged to get the same work done while finding time to sit on the grass while I was working.

His response to my question is one of my favorite parables - one which my friends and coworkers have often heard me repeat.

Here is what he told me:

Two lumberjacks went into the woods one day. One was young and ambitious, the other was old and wise. The young lumberjack was eager to prove how much stronger and faster he was and so he worked furiously throughout the day, never taking a moment of rest. As the day progressed, he often found the old lumberjack sitting on a stump relaxing while he worked. He felt sure that his dogged efforts would outstrip the old man when the tally was made at the end of the work day. 

Yet when the work was totaled, the old lumberjack had equaled the work of the strong young man. 

How could this be, he asked the old man in frustration. It seemed like every time I looked around you were taking a break. How could you possibly chop as much wood as I did? 

The old man smiled and said: 

"Every time I took a break, I was sharpening my ax."

-30-

Originally posted at my Redtriage.com blog. 

The Huckleberry Haj

The butterflies were all around us.

Wave after wave, spasms of blue flowed in and out of the space between us like a shimmering, levitated river threading through the forest of high, silent pine. The brown dust of the road covered the waist-high berry bushes.

Yet, we couldn’t keep our eyes off the butterflies.

They were migrating through the Cascade mountains and we were there -- in the right place -- to not only see them, but feel them, to be enveloped in their flashing color. It was a surreal, perfect moment that could have easily been missed.  

A perfect place. A perfect moment.

We were there to pick the huckleberries.

The Berry

That first year, we had not gone where the park ranger told us to pick. Instead, we followed my sister Mindy, who led us off the main road, and then up another road. The weathered ruts had tortured the truck’s suspension, but yielded to a flat parking area surrounded by trees. Below the trees were the berry bushes, thriving in the light created by windfalls and clearings.

The huckleberry is similar to a wild blueberry, but with more tartness and flavor.  It grows wild in the Indian Haven and the forests on Mount Adams near Trout Lake, Ice Caves and Natural Bridges parks

In fact, if you drive along these roads in the Gifford Pinchot National Forest, there is a good chance that the underbrush flashing by your windows holds this natural treasure. Juice, purple and blue. In places you need only stop and walk 10 yards into the waist-high brush to see the dark spheres of sweetness.

So many pass this way without knowing what glory lies at their fingertips. If you only look. If you only stop and take the time to look, to pick, to savor.

The year of the butterflies was the first. Grace was still in diapers. Mindy showed us where to find the berries. Each year we returned. The Huckleberry Haj became the MUST moment of our year.

The butterflies painted this one place with magic blue only once, but they cemented in us a spiritual connection to the forest around us, to this time and this place. Like the annual Haj to the spiritual center of the Muslim world, this became an annual pilgrimage for my family. Each year we return to this place the pay homage to summer by gathering its fruits. This is the holy place of summer. The Huckleberry Haj is how we honor and remember.

My sister Mindy, my wife Amy, my mom, Alice, me and my daughters -- all of us out in the woods for hours on summer days. High on the mountain, it was cooler, quiet, save for the the wind swaying the lodgepole pine, the chatter of a jay, the scurrying of chipmunk or squirrel.

My mom has picked berries since she was a child. Her Swedish-born mother would send her into the New England woods with a pail and tell her not to return until is was full of blueberries.

When we moved west, we would go berry picking too -- to make jams and jellies.

Amy and Mindy were the most ardent berriers. Amy doesn’t like to return until we fill a Coleman cooler with berries. The two of them would pick and talk the hours away, following the berry deep into the forest.

The girls are better now, but in the early years would just fill their stomachs rather than the little plastic buckets tied on ropes around our waists or hung about their necks. Suspending the buckets allows you to pick with two hands. Yet for every plunk in the bucket, three more berries always went into Grace’s mouth.

When the girls got bored, it was my job to corral them and keep them occupied. To stay close so that Amy and Mindy and Mom could stay on the trail of the berry. Mom’s yellow Lab Wendy ran relay between the pickers and the dilettantes who meandered back to the truck for sandwiches and juice.

The Huckleberry Haj is our summer constant. Our annual rite taking us from Summer to Fall.

After the Wahkiakum County Fair and before school starts again, we come up here to capture the last fruit of summer. We store it away in little tupperware containers in the cooler. When we get them home, we freeze them. You can use them in muffins or other baking if you like, but best of all is to just pop them still frozen in your mouth. Summer candy, on the darkest, rainiest winter day.

We make this pilgrimage every year to pay homage to the sun and the good slow days before they slip away.

In the last few years, first Mom, and then Mindy, haven’t always made it up to pick with us.

Mom was diagnosed with lung cancer five years ago - it was in the Fall, when the days were growing shorter. It was Stage 1 - caught early on an x-ray looking for something else. She had a surgery to remove one lobe of her lung, then chemotherapy to eradicate any remaining cancer cells. The chemo was hard on Mom, but Mindy lived just a few blocks away. It was Mindy who was there to help her through the rough days.

It was Mindy who was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer almost exactly one year later. Even with chemotherapy, they told her she only had six months to live.

By Christmas - she was so sick and frail and in pain -- I did not think she would make it to the new year.

Miracles, sometimes, are just doctors and nurses just doing their job. Paying attention, making the right change at the right time, taking chances.. Chemotherapy is a science of trial and error. It takes a stubborn and determined patient. Mindy would not give up so easily. At times her husband drained a liter of fluid a day out of her lungs through a valve sewn into her side.

In early summer when her oldest son got married. Mindy was standing there in a gold dress, with long black hair, walking through the cherry blossoms, dancing in the sun.

We thought we had dodged another bullet. That, she, like Mom would now be OK.

We picked berries that summer -- something I thought would be impossible six months before.

Yet doesn’t the summer seem impossible in the dark days of winter. Hope is a dream of a path through the winter to the spring.

My mom’s cancer was caught early -- just a tiny shadow in a single lobe of one lung.

Mindy’s cancer was caught late -- spread throughout her body. Metastasis is a word that holds the appropriate malevolence. It is a diagnosis still whispered.

The cancer that both Mom and Mindy had was adenocarcinoma. It is the most common lung cancer contracted by people who never smoke. My aunt and cousin were also diagnosed with adenocarcinoma -- on the far side of the country -- about the same time.

Mindy’s was the most aggressive, it seemed.

So it seems there is some sort of genetic predisposition, but as far as I can tell, it is little understood. Mindy had never smoked, was young and otherwise healthy and active. Perhaps that is what helped Mindy get accepted into clinical trials at Oregon Health Science University for oral medications genetically matched to her tumors.  

Four days after she started taking the pills, she called me.

“I think this medicine is working,” she told me. “I’ve stopped coughing.”

The spasmodic cough was so agonizing it could silence a room. It was a hallmark of her malady.

“It can’t be,” I told her. “Nothing works that quickly.”

Yet, a few weeks later she was scheduled for a CT guided biopsy of the tumor in her lung. She lay on the table in the room waiting for the radiologist. There was activity in the control room, but no word to her. Finally, they told her - the tumors had shrunk so much, there was not enough there to take a sample. The tumors had shrunk by 85 percent.

She saw her youngest son graduate from high school that year.

Last year she was there with us, picking huckleberries, but Mom was worried.

The experimental drugs were miraculous, but not enduring. Her cancer was so aggressive that it mutated around the drugs. So her oncologists got her into another trial -- this one with no significant effect -- and then another trial with better results. She lost her glorious black hair. Rather than wear a wig in the hot summer of Eastern Oregon, she got a henna tattoo to decorate her bald head. Each drug that worked, worked a little less than the one before. She had good days and bad days. She had radiation for tumors in her brain and in her breast. There were complications of the medications, complications of the cancer.

Her days got shorter. She woke late and took time to get going, for the spasmodic cough to subside enough for her to eat. At night she was tired but stayed up late, unable to shut off a racing mind.

After four years, we were out of options. She went on hospice. The same week the decision was made, we went ziplining through the forest and rode my motorcycle -- all with her oxygen tank strapped to her back.

She had her 49th birthday.

She would be strong and bright as friends and family visited, but increasingly she was tired and and disoriented.She became confused, and frustrated at her confusion.

I brought her frozen huckleberries for her to eat. The tart memory of our adventures came back, and we talked as we ate them. We recalled the secret hollow that Amy and Mindy had found a few years ago, where the berry bushes were thick and lush when the others were all picked over.

She turned to her son Zach.

“I want there to be huckleberries in the house this year,” she said to him. “If I can’t make it, promise me you’ll go, so there will be huckleberries.”

“I promise,” he said.

“The berries were the best last year,” she said.”There weren’t as many as you’d like, but the ones we had were so, so sweet.”

I started writing this four years ago when the dust from the rutted road was still on the dashboard of my truck.

I started writing this when the smell of the summer pine was still fresh in my mind.

I started writing this in a darkened hospital room alone with my sister, with snow falling outside and Christmas lights shining through her window.

The years since have been both cruel and kind, filled with torture, hard work and medical miracles. She fought for these years. She found the strength and joy each August to meet us on Mount Adams. To chat and laugh with Amy in the berry. Not far from Indian Heaven.

The days of summer are deceptive and cruel.

The sun greets you in the morning and lingers late and warm into the evenings. It tricks you into believing in forever.

The days are long, but summer itself is short.

Each year our scheduled lives more crowded with clutter. Once the kids were in school and 4H, we had to make sure we scheduled the haj around fair and the onset of the new school year.

In the berry we lose sight of each other in the brush and wood. We call to each other: “Marco!” and listen for the answer. “Polo!”

We lose sight of our troubles.

We lose sight of winter and dark days.

Summer is short.

We take time out for the Huckleberry Haj each year to capture a little piece of blue flying by, a piece of summer that we will never get back.

The days we have are not as many as you would like, but the memories we have are so, so sweet.

-30-

My Sister Was a Badass

See all the pictures HERE

I picked Mindy up from her house on a Tuesday morning.

The night before I had traveled down to do some work in the backyard for mom - building planter beds and hauling in garden soil.

I wanted to bring Mindy down to visit with the girls. I wanted her to get a change of scenery for a few days and to spend as much time with her as I could.

That Monday Mindy and Eric had gone down to Portland to talk with her doctor and to ask what was next.

"I asked him if he was trying to tell us that we were running out of options," Mindy told me after we had started down the gorge toward my house. "He said we'd run out of options awhile ago."

In other words, when the latest medication she was on stopped working, the only course of action left would be hospice.

Hospice is a different kind of medical care from chemotherapy. In many ways hospice is a reaction to our modern medical system's focus on attacking a disease regardless of the pain and suffering the body in which it resides.

Traditional chemotherapy is a prime example of torture for your own good. The side effects are legion as we attempt to kill off the very last cancer cell, while leaving the patient alive. Advances have been made in recent years. New cancer drugs are targeted and much better tolerated. There are pills rather than infusions and medications much better suited to treating and preventing many of the side effects.

That said, most cancer treatments can leave you miserable, exhausted and depressed. It takes a strong person to get through a year of it.

Off and on, Mindy had been through four years. A roller coaster of good days and bad. When she was first diagnosed, she had been given just 6 months to live. Four years later her doctors were done pulling rabbits out of their hats.

Modern hospice care originated with British Registered Nurse Cicely Saunders, who created a philosophy of medicine which focused on the patient's needs rather than the disease. The goals are directed at the physical comfort and spiritual needs of the patient and the patient's family during the last days of life. It is the course of care when curing the disease is no longer an option or a choice.

Simply put hospice seeks to keep the patient comfortable and see to their needs rather than make them well. Comfort, quality of life and living fully until the end are the goals.

It is difficult in our culture to talk about death and dying, let alone enter into a system where dying is the end result -- even if the goal is to make that transition as easy and life affirming as possible. It is a hard conversation to have. Battling through chemotherapy and its side effects is all about fighting. After years of it, it is hard to change our thinking. It feels like giving up, like quitting.

It is not.

Mindy and I talked about these things on our drive through the Columbia Gorge. By the time we reached  Stevenson, she changed the subject.

"Did you know they have zip lines now at Skamania Lodge?" she asked.
"We have them down on the coast, near Astoria, too," I said.
"I want to do that," she said. "Do you?"

After that, the plan was set. I called just after we got to my house and set up a tour for Friday morning. Meanwhile, we took a motorcycle ride around the valley -- with her oxygen tank strapped to luggage rack of my bike. We visited Mary and said hi to the donkeys. We sat and watched the storms blow across the fields. The girls made her giggle and cuddled with her while we watched Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and Despicable Me. We ate at a Bosnian restaurant, enjoyed the strange food and laughed at the ranting waiter.

Mindy's 02 bottle was in the black bag on the back. 

We both grew nervous as the day approached. I was worried about her. I called High Life Adventures to make sure they could have a cart to take her from one place to another so she wouldn't have to walk, and that it would be okay for her to ride the zipline with her oxygen tank. We watched the wind blow and the rain fall and wondered if they wouldn't cancel our tour.

We got up early and dressed in rain gear and warm clothes. We were just two out of a group of 12 people on the tour that morning. The rain stopped just as we started.

The first run is easy - close to the ground and you can see the end. The next one is higher. After a few shorter runs, you climb a tower and open a gate high above a lake and step off -- riding a line that travels hundreds of feet over water and through trees. You cannot see the end, which somehow makes it scarier.

One of the women we were on the tour with was afraid of heights. Mindy -- always taking care of other people -- reassured and encouraged her.

The woman was there with her two teenage daughters. She told Mindy that she used to be more adventurous. Then a few years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer. She survived and was cancer free, now, but had been more timid ever since.

Mindy understood.

 "You had to face up to what you might loose," Mindy told the woman. "Now you worry about losing all those things if anything goes wrong. You know what's at stake."

"I worry all the time," the woman said. "I never used to be like that."

"I'm terminal," Mindy said with smile and a little laugh. "I have nothing to lose."

As the woman stepped through the gate and zipped off across the lake, one of her daughters said in a tone of admiration: "my mom is such a badass."

In the four years since her diagnosis, Mindy got to do a lot of things. She saw her eldest son get married, her youngest son graduate and do well in college and a new job. She saw her middle son enter the Army and thrive. She flew across the country to watch him graduate from basic training. She swam with dolphins. She always worried about her boys, but she lived to see them grow in the world.

And when she couldn't travel anymore, there came a parade of family and friends and wishes from all the lives she touched, for she was a light in every room. She was a gift in every life she encountered.

By the end of the Zipline tour she was tired and her second 02 bottle was almost empty, but her eyes were bright and she smiled and giggled as we stepped off the top of the highest tower and raced 1200 feet across the lake.

My big sister was such a badass.

-30-

Getting a henna tattoo to replace lost hair. 

More photos from our adventure online here. 

Driving Lessons

My sister Mindy taught me to drive.

My brother Chuck used to send me out to warm up the old truck while he was getting ready for school and he would even let me shift gears -- left handed from the passenger seat -- in his Mercury Bobcat while his hands were full with a milk shake and burger.

Yet it was Mindy that actually taught me to drive.  She taught me the trick to driving is to keep your eyes far down the road.

Then she took me car shopping and helped me buy my first car.

It happened like this. Mindy had just bought a Ford EXP -- which was Ford's attempt in the 1980s to build a sporty two-seater out of the Ford Escort econobox.

 It is a car justifiably forgotten today. Beige on brown with a tan mouse-fur interior. At the time, however, it my sister's pride and joy.  A new off-the-lot car that was all hers.

It says a lot about Mindy that she would allow her 15 year old brother to drive it at all, let alone teach him how to drive on it. Mindy was like that, she was an instigator -- but in the best way. She was a "C'mon, it will be fun." She was "lets race the horses up from the hidden fields." She was a creator of experiences.

Her experience teaching me to drive was fraught, at first,  since her car was a stick shift, and we lived on back roads full of hill starts and two lane curves. She was as patient and calm with me as with the horses she trained -- even when I almost let her car roll into the guardrail while trying to work the clutch from a stop on a hill.

Maybe she was having second thoughts about using her new car for such duty, because one day she said "let's go car shopping."

Mindy. Always with the smile and the "C'mon, let's go."

AMC Matador: Mine was Maroon 

I had some money saved up working the hay and in my mom's restaurant. So we set off for town one afternoon, visiting the various used car lots, looking at old pickup trucks and thrashed Pintos. Finally we happened upon a 1971 AMC Matador. It was bone-stock with some melted plastic trim inside from sitting in the hot Eastern Oregon sun. It was big, slow and comfortable. She helped me negotiate the deal and arrange to get it home -- since I was still more than a year away from getting my license.

It was not cool. This was the 1980s and irony had yet to be discovered, but it was a good fit for me.

That car was a freedom machine for me during my teenage years. Before I got my license we practiced on the back roads, piloting the big boat around the curves and along the old highway to horse arena, or to my friend Danny's house.

After I got my license, the Matador was the favorite in school for hauling way too many kids down to the store during lunch our, or over to The Dalles on a Friday night. I got in trouble in that car -- it had a habit of backing into things -- parked cars, a restaurant on my first date -- but I had many more good memories.

It was in that car that I discovered a love of driving. Something I thought about often these past few weeks driving up and down the gorge to be at her bedside. Driving is where I did my thinking, my crying and my grieving. Driving through the beautiful hills and stark vistas, through white capped river and broiling clouds, through shafts of light and heart-stopping sunsets.

My sister Mindy taught me to drive, and so much more.

-30-

Good Fences

My last wood screw went into the last board as the rain began to fall.

There had been a steady drizzle, but now the dark ceiling opened up to a torrential downpour. 

I scrambled to put my tools away, slipping in the mud.  It took me a few moments to realize that it was the very last screw in my pouch - the last 3.25 inch construction screw I had.   It took still longer for me to get inside  the warm house and out of my wet clothes, to stand at the window looking at the green gray fields and admire what I had accomplished.

The fence was finished.

It still needed a coat of white stain on the last section, but that would come on a sunny day. My daughters love painting the white stain.

 I love good fences.

I never thought much about fences until we moved out West in 1978. I was Grace's age then and the forest hills and hidden fields seemed vast open wonderlands to me compared to the crowded suburbs of New Jersey. To be sure, we rambled through the wooded swamplands that backed up to our home there, but it nothing like 82 acres of field and forest. 

There was a great hill overlooking the whole property that we would climb in the last hours of a summer day with the night hawks already diving for prey. It was a grand thing to me then, to stand in an open field on the crest of a high hill, counting the white capped mountains as the pink fire of sunset painted the sky. 

The fences were barbed wire, which tears your shirt if you slide under it, and is too unsteady to climb over. Best to have a friend hold the wire for you,  if you want to climb through. Still they seemed few and far between.  We could ride our horses for miles without touching a road by simply finding the gates between properties, and making sure that we closed each gate we opened behind us. 

I never liked barbed wire. It rips the flesh of spooked horses and his hard to see in the trees. 

The fences I loved were at Crosby Stables. White painted rails around the whole property including the arena where Jim Crosby trained his Tennessee Walkers. I remember the mint green barns and the ink-black Schipperke dogs that Jim and Eunice used to keep. Little Tasmania devil dogs that would run and hop up to land on the rump a moving horse that never lost its stride. Jim was an Iowa man who landed out West with the railroad. We would ride over the hill to his place for 4H sometimes and he gave our family invaluable advice on horses when we were just starting out. Crosby Stables was like a microcosm of a Kentucky estate, four rail white fences cutting serenely through rolling hills. 

It is the fences of his idyll that I have tried to recreate here on my little patch of land. 

When we moved in, 22 years ago. The house was in need of attention more than the property so it became our priority. 

 The borders of the land were blackberry bushes with barbed wire buried somewhere underneath. 

When we had time and energy from our busy low-paying just out of college jobs, I hacked at the blackberries with a machete. Year by year cutting away at the invasive plant's empire of thorns. It was cathartic, but my desk job left me too weak to counter it's ever encroaching vines. It took years -- and eventually Hank's excavator -- to clear the last of it. It opened our property up so we could see the open fields beyond. We put in posts -- some dug with auger on the back of the tractor, other's dug by hand -- until finally the bright white-stained rails emerged. 

Just in time for little girls to clamber over them for walks out in the field. 

You see a good fence does more than just keep livestock in. It keeps animals -- and children -- safe. Lindsay and Grace love climbing the fences, or sitting on them and waving to grandpa as he goes by on the tractor. The white brings bright beauty in the dark gray of winter. 

I ripped out the last of the barbed wire a few weeks ago. 

Dug the post holes by hand. A good post hole digger will beat a week at the gym for building upper body muscles. There was a layer of gravel to go through too and some concrete from the old dairy barn that used to be nearby. At times, I was hands and knees pulling up rocks from the holes. 

Of course I never count right when it comes to how many boards I need, and that means another trip into town. No matter. There was a time when we could only afford to do a few sections of the fence at a time.  

Now I can even afford to buy a store-bought gate and latch. Much better than the home made gates that now want for replacing. 

The girls are helping me paint now that the weather has turned. Lindsay is dreaming of horses that will one day lean their heads over the top rail trying to see if there is a treat in her pocket.

As Lindsay and I paint, I tell her to take a step back every now and then and look at her work.

"Why?" she asks.

"So you can look at how far you've come," I tell her.

 "So you can see how much better you've made it by your hard work."

-30-

Life is Not Fair

Life is not fair.

If you haven't noticed that by now, either you haven't been paying attention or you don't have enough birthdays under your belt.

Life was never fair, and never meant to be.

While whole religions have erupted from the minds of men to address this one issue, the fact remains, there is no divine justice wrought here upon the Earth.

I learned this lesson while I was very young, but had it reinforced by a decade as a newspaper reporter.  I saw cold-blooded killers set free, saw liars triumph and the honest punished for their honesty. Mendacity rules at all levels of power. Inhumanity and incompetence are promoted. Debased actions and bullying are rewarded. Being a reporter is to strive for truth in the face of lies. Journalists comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

In journalism, fairness is a watchword and justice is what every young wide-eyed new reporter seeks. Yet, the pay is barely minimum wage and you are disposable to your employer and community. After seven years at one paper -- winning awards and working 60 hour weeks, I was told to move on because the corporation didn't want to start paying reporters more than $18,000 a year.

"You've had too many raises," the executive told me from the hollow of his tailored suit. "You've reached the pay ceiling."

Everyone hates you when you tell them the truth anyway.

I had few illusions when I went into nursing.

Sure, there are golden moments when all is right. When your patients are healed by your actions and grateful for your kindness. Those moments must carry your for six months to a year before you might encounter them again. In the interim, the kind nurses will be cursed at and shat upon, denigrated and abused. They will work long hours and then be mandatoried over to work more -- punished for showing up to work.

They will cast themselves upon the rocks of the suffering and pestilent, the addicted and debauched, to be broken, yet to stand again.

At least the pay is better.

Moreover, as emergency room nurses we see the inequality of life's whims on full display. Children suffer, criminals get out of jail by malingering. The drunk driver murders children, then staggers away without a scratch. The kind die in pain and suffering while the cruel survive again and again. Sickness is not tied to sin.  The good die and suffer for no good reason. The gift of survival falls heedless of whether the recipient deserves another breath.

It is a hard lesson for a nurse to learn. The zen of nursing is learning to heal without judging, without a care about justice. Your job is to make the sick better, not to make the world fair.

No, there is no fairness in this business nor in life.

Yet in our larger lives, we must still strive for justice -- for justice is a thing wholly created by humanity. It is our humane reaction to the unfairness of life. Justice is the perfection we seek but may never attain. Striving for justice, fairness and equality are the only tools we have to battle back against the empire of fates that seek to pound us into submission.

The world is not fair.

It never will be.

Unless by our hands we make it so.

-30-

When Should I Start My Midlife Crisis?

I'm not dead yet.

In fact, I'm half 90 this week -- better known as 45 years old.

I think I'm doing pretty good, all things considered.

I have a home, a wife, great kids, a job and motorcycle.

Yet, I'm starting to worry that I'm getting a late start on my mid-life crisis.

Not that I'm planning a whole lot. I already have a motorcycle. I don't drink, smoke or fool around. I got my big career change out of the way a decade ago and I am pretty happy with it.

Maybe I already had it, and just didn't notice.

This birthday has got me wondering what we should consider mid-life these days.

While overall US life expectancy is 78 in this country I am in a position to know that how we live is a major variable. Previous generations have embraced smoking, drugs and alcohol in such a way as to skew the curve such that I often see 90 year olds healthier and stronger than 65 year olds.

That said, according to this calculator from the University of Penn- I'm predicted to live 85 years -- 95 if I'm really, really good and 76 if I take up the habit of driving drunk while not wearing a condom.

However, there is more to life expectancy than risk factors. The Death Clock, which uses a lot fewer factors figures I'll live to 95, but Amy will live to 103! That's the gender penalty. On the other hand, the Social Security Administration is only planning on me living to 81. While another calculator says I'll live to 95.

Or we could all be hit by a bus tomorrow (not all of us by the same bus, of course), making these actuary tables moot - at least on an individual level.

Moreover, we are always underestimating human ingenuity. We are on the verge of some major medical breakthroughs in terms of life expectancy. As aging baby boomers and Google founders pour their riches into ways of living and functioning longer, my guess is that we are going to see a continued increase in the lives of people with few risk factors who take care to lead active, growing lives.

Which brings up the question of the crisis itself. What is a midlife crisis? More than anything it seems to me to be a crisis of expectations - where we come to terms with the fact that we are unlikely to become pro football players or rock stars now that we've reached our 40s.

It is similar to the bad birth experience some mothers find themselves facing after they create elaborate birth plans for the delivery of their baby -- only to discover that baby had different plans about where and how he or she was going to enter the world.

In mid-life, as in birth, it seems we are overwhelmed by what could have, or should have been rather than what we have.

Many of us create ambitious fantasies about our dream life or dream career tangentially tethered -- if at all -- to our real abilities. That "what do you want to be when you grow up" game sticks with us.

Sometimes it becomes the "what do you want to do when you retire" game after a while.

My guess is retirement is likely to be a thing of the past in another 20 years -- so I don't even play that game much anymore.

As Moltke the elder once almost said, "No plan survives first contact with the enemy." If you want to make God laugh, make long range plans. Life intervenes.

Rarely does life go according to our childhood aspirations. Yet these aspirations get integrated into our identity, our dreams - however unrealized - are woven into the fabric of how we think of ourselves. It is that dissonance that causes the crisis in our identity.

I have, at various times had serious plans on being:

• an astronaut
• a music producer
• an engineer/inventor
• an airline pilot
• a novelist 
• a professional football player
• an Olympic athlete 

Obviously, a couple of those dreams have fallen off the list.

On the other hand, I never had any aspiration to become a journalist - yet I did that for more than a dozen years with mild success. It is a career that I fell into, and it would not let me go.  Nursing was more of a calling than a career choice and the first 10 years dedicated to helping others heal has flown by.

Of course, looking at what we have accomplished and what we have seems to be the psychological salve to sooth this crisis of expectations. We are what we do. When bad things happen, looking at what we learned, or how we grew changes our perception of those events. 

The fact that we have reached the midway point of our existence -- without being hit by a bus -- should be an opportunity to take stock of what we have done, as well as what we have the gumption, ambition and means to still achieve with whatever time is left. 

Unlike our 12 year old selves, we understand now that hard work, dedication, money, talent and dumb luck are all ingredients to achieving anything we set our minds to.

Mostly, dumb luck.

That life hasn't turned out like we planned is often due to the absence of one or multiple ingredients -- or that you were planning on silly things in the first place.

Looking back at my list, I would have missed out on many of the most wonderful things of my life if I had pursued some other course. In his book 59 Seconds, Richard Wiseman talks about creating an attitude of gratitude for what we have -- but ignore -- in our everyday lives. (see the video above)

This exercise is a great for when you are mourning the death of your rock and roll dreams.

Or, whenever you have a birthday.

National Institute on Aging
Calico, Google's Anti-Aging Initiative
Wharton School at University of Penn
59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute by Richard Wiseman

Mango in the Melba Toast

I just woke up from a weird dream.

I was working in my mom's old restaurant, The Pancake House. I'm not sure if I was just waiting tables or running the place, when Diedrich Bader came to me with a pained expression on his face. He was obviously some middle manager of some sort and he had a bottle in his hand.

DB: "Did you just talk to a customer about our Melba toast?"

ME "Yeah, somebody asked me about that earlier today."

DB: Did you tell him that we have mango in our melba toast?

ME: I certainly did not. We have mango in the melba toast?

DB:Well, it is mango flavoring and it is what makes our melba toast special and you failed to point this out when the customer asked about it.

ME: I certainly did. I had no idea that there was mango in the melba toast. I've worked here 22 years and this is the first time anyone has even come close to ordering it. In fact, i wonder if that bottle of mango flavoring is 22 years old, I doubt we've ever needed it. Of course, no one put Mango in anything 22 years ago, so it can't possibly be that old.

DB:This is why we are not selling more melba toast.

ME: That and the fact that everything else on the menu tastes an order of magnitude better.

DB:You don't seem to be taking this seriously.

ME: No, I can't possibly take this seriously. But you are for some strange reason. That's kind of troubling to me. You've also taken up an large amount of my time on this discussion. Therefore, I shall have to tender my resignation. Let's consider this my two weeks.

DB:Your resignation?

ME: Yes, clearly I am failing in the melba toast department. By the way, when you call down to payroll for my check, be sure to tell them that I have 16 weeks of vacation piled up, and I'll need to cash that out too. By the end of the day should be fine.

This was a strange dream, but I woke up from it bemused at strangely satisfied. For the record, mom's restaurant never did serve Melba toast -- and we never had middle managers. Moreover, we got along just fine without mango melba toast or middle managers.

The Landing

For the past 22 years, there has always been a room in our house where junk goes to live.

This is an after photo, obviously

It started with our first apartment. The second bedroom holding wedding presents that were far more generous than our poverty-wage accommodations.

When we moved into Dun Elsie, the house was so big, it appeared empty. There were rooms we hardly ever used. But as our family grew and we grew together we expanded to fit the house. Our stuff accumulated and it needed a place to go when it was not being used.

Think of it as a purgatory for items that aren't quite ready for the garage sale, thrift store, basement or dump. 

Many of the rooms in the house have taken their turn - particularly in the early remodeling days when we would move everything out of one room to refinish it. After all that remodeling work, not all the clutter would return, some inevitably would get left behind in one of the out-of-sight rooms.

Over the years, we have come to live in the more of the house, so there are fewer out-of-sight rooms.

Lately, the room in question has been the landing - a square room between the three bedrooms upstairs. The heirloom settee got put up there at Christmas to make room for the Christmas tree and never came back down. We decided we liked having our chairs next to each other by the fire, Amy and I, so we can rock and read books on rainy days. 

Grace's old dresser got put out on the landing there when it was no longer needed. It had been filled with dress-up clothes and princess crowns. She has out-grown these things, it seems. 

Hidden in a corner was our old bed. Bought before the girls came along from guy in Oregon who used to run around England buying up antiques at estate sales, shipping family heirlooms to the states for young childless couples to furnish their homes with. We'd replaced it with a new bed long ago, but its carved legs and hand carved trim was too nice to put down in the basement. 

Yet it was the books that needed the most work. There were three bookshelves overflowing with books. Books sent to me by publishers for review when I was editing Tidepool.org. Books brought home from church. Handyman and how-to books that I culled from thrift stores. I used these old books to teach myself home repair and remodeling. These books marked both our ambitions and our achievements, our dreams and mythology. Gardening books, remodeling books; books purchased at the local library book sale and books lent and given by friends and family. So many books that still want for reading. 

Then there are the other books, well worn and piled in stacks on the corner shelves. These books, kids books, learn to read books. Books, alas, the girls have grown out of. 

Lindsay will be a teenager next week. How is that possible? Here is the Bernstein Bears "Spooky Old Tree" the book we had to read to keep her on the toilet long enough to toilet train her. Here is Danny the Dinosaur -- a book that I read so many times to Grace that I have it memorized. It was the childhood book of my friend Kevin, with his name still in the front. 

WE found my clip books with articles and columns from my years in the newspaper business, as well as a business card from when Amy worked writing for the Cascade Cattleman down in Klamath Falls. 

There were scrapbooks stowed away on a corner shelf. Most are only partly filled with pictures. 

We found old photos of the run-down house we encountered 22 years ago, cold rooms with apartment furniture and broken windows. There were pictures of where I lived and worked in Carlingford, Ireland, and a picture of Amy and I - still just college sweethearts the day before graduation. 

Lindsay has three baby books started, Grace had only a page or two filled out in hers -- not much time for scrapbooking when you have a three year old to chase. I was full time in nursing school when Grace came along, I was gone more often than home back then and Amy had to manage both girls on her own. 

We are sentimental about the books that will never again be read. We sort a pile of Christmas books and save them, for those we turn to year after year. We set aside the ancient books - the children's books passed down from Amy's dad and aunt. Children's books from the 1940s that our children now have grown to love. Tuffy the Tugboat, Uncle Wiggily and my favorite, the surreal masterpiece Mister Dog. There are the books from Amy's childhood - Amy's Long Night and the Little House on the Prairie books. She loved the Laura Ingalls Wilder books so much that she read them aloud to me when we were first married. 

So too, do we set aside those special children's books of our generation that we can't bear to let go. In each of these, between the pages, lies a memory of a moment in Lindsay and Grace's life - a memory we hope they will pass along to their children.  

WE are making a pile for the library book sale, and I have a few nursing textbooks to give away. I've found a friend who wants the old bed that we just don't any place to put. 

Our house was empty once, now it is filled and cozy. The settee, which has been handed down from Amy's grandma, is now cleaned and has a prime position on the landing next to a full -- but neatly organized -- bookshelf.

It is the perfect place to sit, and read a book.