Scenes from a Marriage

One thing I never wanted this blog to be about was my domestic life; another damn daddy blog.

For one thing, I don't really have the ability to extract pithy or enlightening tales from my family or my marriage; we're just not really all that entertaining, I'm afraid.

For stuff like that you need to go over to Sweet Juniper! or Une Envie de Sel or the Salsa family's blog. They have the gift for making their daily lives seem unique, lively, and interesting to the casual visitor.

As Salieri says in Amadeus, from the ordinary they make tales of timeless magic, while I from gods and heroes can craft only the ordinary.

For another, why the hell would you be interested in the boring doings of a North Portland guy of no particular distinction?

But the thing is, the vast expanse of my days is taken up with the commonplace; sleep, working, kids, wife, home...all the small change of an ordinary life of a middle-class family in this corner of the Pacific Northwest. I try and write about the big things; love, war, death, taxes, soccer. But the actual life I live often contains very little of those matters outside the walls of my own skull. My days as they pass by are actually quite different.

So, for a change, I thought I'd take you through a couple of those days.

Last week the kiddos were on Spring Break, the bizarre anachronism left over from...what? There's no real reason for a week off from school in mid-spring - what would my employers say if I suggested we shut down the firm for a week because...well, just because?

Yeah, you're damn right they would.

But Spring Break it was, and fortunately my spawn are too small to want to swim upstream to Seaside or Fort Lauterdale and attempt to find adventure between mojitos and partial nudity. Instead my bride and I decided to take the famdamily over the Hill to the desert.

The first stop - because long drives and small children are listed as one of the things filed in Dante's Fifth Circle of Hell right next to simony and unnatural relations with breakfast foods - was partway up the Gorge; Bonneville Fish Hatchery.

Now fish hatcheries in general are one of those ideas, like Paul Ryan's budget and privatizing prisons, that sounded better in the concept than in actuality. But this hatchery has one ginormous attraction, and I do mean ginormous - Herman the Sturgeon.This being Oregon, where we understand that there are only two real irreducible elements for Life, sunlight and coffee, Herman has his own barista.The day was already drizzling rain - more about which later - so we paid just a brief visit to the hatchery and Herman the star sturgeon. He was a big 'un, alright. Remind me to tell you about the time Herm got fishnapped.We loaded back into Bob the Subaru station wagon and bored further up the rainy Gorge. I wanted to take the fam on the pretty drive along the old highway, so we got off the interstate in the little town of Mosier......with a bathroom-coffee-and-brownie-stop at the wonderful little 10-Speed Coffee Shop before heading up into the high bench to the east......and the Nature Conservancy's small reserve just west of the Rowena Loops.This gentle plateau was washed over - probably many times - by the great Ice Age floods that ripped through the Gorge throughout the Pleistocene. Dick Waitt has estimated as many as 60 of these "Missoula Floods" crossed the Channeled Scablands of eastern Washington, and many of them must have flowed over the top of the bench at Rowena, stripping the soil off the old Miocene basalt surface.

The rock forms an impervious surface, so in the spring the plateau is strewn with small ponds known as "vernal pools".The cold hillsides were also beginning to show the first wildflowers of spring, a hopeful color of the warmth to come. I walked slowly, as men with failing joints will, as my family ran on ahead of me into the chill showers. If you look carefully you can see them, far in the middle distance.Soon enough I was alone with the textures and sounds of the plateau in spring; the wind off the river, the cold smell of the dark rock, the liquid song of the meadowlark and the bree-donk of the blackbird warning intruders away from his pond below.Reality intruded soon enough, though with my little outrunners returning; the Boy, sullen, because his mother had forbidden him to dance along the edge of the cliff, my Bride, flustered and furious because of her son's defiance, and Little Girl, getting whiny as she grew tired and wet from a tumble. Definitely time for a rest.

So I carried her back to Bob, and we headed East; stopping first at the Dalles and then turning south - through Madras and Bend - to our destination at the cabin in the pretty little state park in La Pine.Up to this point it had been a pleasant enough trip, if one that included more than a hap'orth of driving. But Thursday night the weather closed in.I've spent a fair bit of time over on the dry side of Oregon in twenty years, and I don't scruple to say that the rain that arrived that night and continued on into the following day was as heavy as I've ever seen east of the Cascades.

It piss-poured.

The Bride and I looked at each other with the grim understanding of what it would mean to lack outdoors entertainment for two under-tens in a rustic cabin with the nearest toilets 200 feet away in the pouring rain.So, for the first time in many, many years, I bailed on a camping trip.

We repacked the car and headed back west. Stopping, mind you, for some adventures along the way; first, at the small "Nature Center" in the freakishly bizarre artificial "community" of Sunriver.Sunriver is hard to explain if you've never been there. It's completely planned. There's nothing organic, spontaneous, unregulared or natural about it. Even the lodgepole pines seem to grow less crooked within its confines.

It's entirely appropriate, to my mind, that it is located on the site of the old Camp Abbot, the WW2 Corps of Engineers combat engineer training post; the thing is an engineering artifact, all right.

The odd thing is that it's very scenic, in its plasticine way. I just wouldn't want to live there; it's all waaaay too much the sort of place that appeals to a litigator from Bend or a real estate broker from Salem. I'd got berserk eventually and do something deranged - drag-race the golf carts out at the Tiger Woods Golfateria, reverse all the signs at the Sunriver Shopping Plaza - just to upset the nice, orderly, well-organized smugness of the place.We left Sunriver and drove north through Bend - I'm always glad to bypass the hectic business of that place because it reminds me of what a pleasant place Bend used to be - to Smith Rocks outside Terrebone.

Mojo loves this twisted hoodoo, and so she and the Boy galloped off in the lessening drizzle as little Miss and I sat in the docent's yurt and talked about arrowheads and wild lands and civilizations vanished long ago.Then the hikers returned, we all took a last look at the wet and chilly desert, and then returned home.So there we were, back in Portland instead of out exploring the wilds; what were we to do?

Well, I'll tell you.

First, after a slow sort of morning - and at home on weekends or holidays most mornings are slow; the Boy and the Bride are late, late risers, so Miss and I usually sit and chat or watch her beloved Little Ponies - I took the kiddos out for an indoorsy sort of adventure so Mojo could exercise, read, and sew.

We went to Guardian Games for Pokeman swag, got some lunch, and then played arcade games at our old standby for rainy days, the "Wunderland" arcade down on Belmont. That afternoon the Boy got to stay home and play his PS2 video game - a rare treat for him - while Mojo, Missy and I went to the kid yoga class at our Kenton library.This was a bit comic because young Miss is cultivating the whiny attitude of an older kid. She fussed and bitched about going to this thing from the moment we told her we were going until the moment we went into the little room at the back of the library.At which point she frolicked like a young lamb. Contrary child.

My bride then returned the favor; she took the kiddos so I could go to the Timbers match against Real Salt Lake.It was a chill, spitty night, and the Boys weren't really on form; after an ugly and pointless first half our young midfielder Darren Nagbe slotted home two lovely goals - the second really was a gorgeous thing, real highlight-show stuffto put the home side up 2-1 with no more than 20 minutes to play. We thought we would take the full three points at home.But we couldn't hold.

The visitors drew level a minute from time, and then a third goal deep in injury time sent them off winners and left the Timbers, and us supporters, gutted. It was a brutally ugly end to a tough match.I've said this before - soccer is a cruel, cruel game. We stood stunned in the rain, still singing, but with the special twist in the heart that comes from watching a win carelessly booted away.

And what made it harder is that we'd seen it before; in fact, we'd seen almost this exact scene before the previous season when the loathsome New York Red Bulls came back from a goal down to win in the dying minutes.That kind of match is the kind that mirrors all the other disappointments, large and small, in life itself; the broken heart, the broken bone, the broken promise. Every damn time life kicks you in the ass, from the trivial to the wrenching.

And, really, you only have two choices; to give up, to carp and whine, or to continue to hold up the emblems of your faith and sing, sing in your faith and in hopes of a brighter day to come.And, of course, the next day does come, and with it, small girls debating frilly dresses with their mommyor kiddos having cart-pulling fun at the bounteous Portland Nursery garden storebringing home their mom's green shoots; curry and basil, flavored with - what else - the rich dark elixir that warms up a rainy Portland day.And we had done all we needed, so we went home.

To spend the closing hours of Sunday reading, to play games together, to plan garden beds (my bride and I), to do laundry, to sweep the floors, to watch television, to cook dinner, and then to read bedtime stories, and tuck in to beds.

And that's the sort of thing that the main of my life consists of.

That's it.

Nothing grand, nothing dire, nothing great, or picturesque, or memorable. No deeds of note or acts worthy of record. Just the pattering of the passing days, family life played calmando, sometimes in a minor key, perhaps; sometimes strident, sometimes dull, at times very little, at times overmuch, but always a song that sings of my work, and my home, and my beloveds, and the place on Earth where they all come to rest.So when this place remains unchanged for a day or so...that's where I am - in that other world, singing that other song, passing the quiet days in unexceptional ways behind the white picket fence off of McKenna Avenue, where the streetlight casts it gibbous light on the sleek black night-street outside.

Monday Morning Cat Blogging

The Fire Direction Center's little calico, Miss Lily, is somewhere between 15 and 16 years old. According to our cat medico that's "geriatric but not ancient" in cat-years.

And overall she seems to be doing well for an old moggie; she's fairly sound of wind and limb, her appetite is good and she seems to be compos mentis, which if you've ever had a senile cat is a blessing. Imagine the stereotypical cranky, gooned-out human and add a full set of teeth and claws and a proclivity for random excretion and you've got a real household nightmare.

She has lost a bit off her vertical jump; it's kind of sad watching her claw her way up on the bed to reach her favorite sleeping spot. And perhaps the single thing she feels the most now that she's made old bones is the cold. Which is why I snapped this picture of her sprawled right on top of the heat register; she craves warmth and spends much of the time she isn't eating directly atop these things, dreaming that she is stretched out on a mossy limb deep in the steaming jungles of Central America, awaiting an unwary tapir to pass beneath her so that she might drop on it with ruthless tooth in gory jaw.Yeah, she thinks, that would be cool.

(apologies to Charles Pierce)

A look back from overhead

The photo below is of the neighborhood I live in taken from an Army Air Corps aircraft recording the conditions of the Willamette River channel and Swan Island in 1936.One of the things I get paid for is looking at these old photographs. I'm usually looking for evidence of past landslides, or long-lost grading. But this was pure indulgence, culled from the files of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers files during a long day of researching a nearby site.

Our little house is under the orange circle. Here's the same neighborhood today:Stop for a moment and compare the two images. That's okay, I'll wait a while.

The modern image is just what you'd expect; little brick (or in our case, wood) houses for you and me, right? That's my University Park neighborhood in a sentence, no different from any other urban Portland neighborhood. The big white-roofed building to the east? That's Astor Elementary, where the kiddos go to school. Go, Astor Eagles!

But look at the top image for a bit. Here; I'll give you a little bigger view of a portion of the southwest corner of the same photo:Our house (built only about fourteen years before the photo was flown) is still under the orange circle. We understand that the little building at the corner to the west was some sort of mom-and-pop corner store, selling Coke in bottles, and penny soap to the good working-class folks of Depression-era North Portland. And note a couple of other things; the big pale farm fields down a block to the west, with some sort of long white barn or shed along McKenna Street at the southeast corner. And notice all the little footpaths and tracks that meander through the center of the blocks; in a lot of ways this part of NoPo was still pretty rural in '36 - rural enough for folks to follow the old cowpaths rather than stay on the sidewalks.

OK, now here's an enlargement of the next Corps photo flown, from 1940:One thing I picked out here was the garage - that's inside the orange box. See it? The thing is, Portland City code requires you have a garage. No shit. Seriously. If you park your car on the street more than 48 hours you can be cited for something called "in lieu of garage" and that's a fineable offense.

Really.

So back in the day all Portland houses had garages. Ours did. But at some point prior to the 1960's the thing either burnt or rotted away and fell over. I've found bits of it under the backyard sod. But there it is in 1940, keeping the summer sun off someone's 1938 Ford Twodoor.

Here's the larger 1940 image. One thing - look at the color of the streets. See how dark they are? Now look back at 1936. See the difference?The thing is that the 1936 sidewalks look about the same color as the streets, and the streets themselves look too regular to be unpaved. See that curvy line above the farm field in both 1936 and 1940? That's N. Yale Street between McKenna and Wall, dirt then and dirt now. But the regular street grid looks paved - just not paved with asphalt. Y'know what I think happened?

I think the streets were paved in the late Teens and Twenties (when this portion of U-Park was first really developed) with concrete.That's surprisingly common for Portland; in many of the older neighborhoods in the inner East side you can still find some of those old concrete pavements exposed. But they're brittle, and usually end up covered with asphalt before too long. I think by 1940 the City had decided that they weren't going to pay for any more concrete and laid down the macadam on top.The funny thing is that when I started doing this sort of overhead window-peeping in the early Nineties there really wasn't any other way to do it; the information was either in the files at places like the Corps or proprietary to private aerial photo companies. But Google Earth and similar applications have changed all that dramatically. The image above is a larger-scale view of my home from GE, circa 1952.

Note that you can barely see Astor School, the larger H-shaped dark block east of the circle that marks our house, but the long arc of Mock's (or Waud's) Bluff, the steep cut bank of the old meander of the Willamette River that encloses Swan Island is easily seen.In the old photo you can see the "island" - the rectangular peninsula that projects up to the northwest. This had been used as Portland's airport in the earlies, and was just then beginning to be developed as the industrial area it is today - here it is in 1925, probably not long after Lindbergh visited.Note that in the aerial photo the Union Pacific line running towards the long tunnel under North Portland is still an embankment surrounded by wetlands. And here is the same view today;A little busier, isn't it?

The wetlands are gone, the swans are gone, the concrete streets are gone, the old farm fields, the cowpaths, the garages...all gone but where they remain crystallized forever in silver salts and black.

I Am a Camera: Sunny Black Friday

Nothing profound. Just had some nice snapshots of this past week.

We had our first frost last Saturday morning. I wanted to capture some of the images.
Love the delicate frost tracery on the grass. But this sort of thing is terribly ephemeral here - by ten o'clock it was raining again and all the fragile beauty was gone.
Last bit of frost-art, this one from "Lake Amherst", the low spot in the curb where the rainwater pools up.
The Peep took this on the way down Hawthorne from Grand Central Bakery. That's the "Bluebird of Death" hanging from the mirror, by the way.
a very Portland sort of November - stone and rain and fallen leaves.
Missy loves her some ginkoes. "They come from China, like me!" she enthuses;
This is another of Missy's snaps, and a good one to close with; our shadows toddling companionably along the street towards a sunny day together...
Hope you and yours are also enjoying this time together.

Why constructing artificial flowers is work

"Tom appeared on the sidewalk with a bucket of whitewash and a long-handled brush. He surveyed the fence, and all gladness left him and a deep melancholy settled down upon his spirit. Thirty yards of board fence nine feet high. Life to him seemed hollow, and existence but a burden."When Mojo bought the Little House (or the "Fire Direction Center" as it's known hereabouts) it was a perfect piece of North Portland. Drab (the current or one of the former occupants had painted the trim a gloriously ugly combination of dark red and gray) and ungraceful (the same or another occupant had bolted one of those ginormous metal security doors on the front) its "curb appeal" was...muted. Mojo wanted a home, and needed a small home to match her budget, and had only a large dog and a small bird to find space for.



The dog needed a fence to keep him from a rendezvous with that served as automotive Death at some disputed streetcorner, so a friend helped her barricade the rear of the house, and that fence served as our barrier long after the child arrived and the dog departed.



But it really was an ugly fence, and when we had the opportunity we tore it up and replaced it with a delightfully suburban white picket fence along the retaining wall in front, right along the sidewalk.The new fence is now the old fence, and we've repainted it several times. It's not a difficult job, but it is a bit time-consuming, and no one in the family really enjoys repainting it. But Mojo and I explain that its an important job, and that without the biannual painting the fence will fall down and someone will get hurt falling off the wall.



No one in the family likes repainting it.But it gets repainted, with a little bribery and a little threat and a little cajolery. None of our offspring, I'm either proud or ashamed to say, is as gullible as Tom's friends. They KNOW that painting the fence is work and, as you can see from the pictures, either avoids it (in Missy's case) or sulks while required to assist in it (in the Peep's case) or rubs her face in it (as you can see from the white smudge on Fat Nitty's upper left lip - dopey cat!).



But a couple of hours' work in the summer sun, and the whitewash is completed for another year."Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it – namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign."(The quotes, as I'm sure you know, are from The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain)