Advent

The guests have gone home, the turkey bones have hit the trash, the last of the pumpkin pie has disappeared from the refrigerator. The Christmas catalogs are stacking up precariously on the dining room table. The season is upon us. The countdown has begun.

For kids, the next 25 days are going to be sheer agony. Maybe you and I never actually begged our parents for a "Red Ryder carbine-action 200-shot Range Model air rifle," but we all begged for something. As we watch the famous Christmas movie, we empathize fully with Ralphie's agonies of uncertainty and anticipation. Whether it was a BB gun or an electric train or a dollhouse or an Xbox or a Wii, most of us, at one time or another, had some Christmas present that we longed for desperately, some dazzling possession without which happiness in this life seemed well nigh impossible.

Sometimes we got it, sometimes we didn't. And even when we got it, we later admitted to ourselves that -- once we got it -- it never quite justified all the hopes and fantasies we had invested in it. Such disappointments, we gradually discovered, make up one of the ironic little tragedies of human life -- a childhood disappointment that was to have plenty of adult counterparts.

But our minds nevertheless seem hard-wired to dream and to anticipate, to look beyond the dreary present to a magically joyful future. At times, such bright dreams may seem the only road of escape from the darkness of our present. Just as primitive man, hunkered down in the cold and dark of winter, looked forward with hope to the solstice, to the date when days would once more start growing longer. Just as we in our own time, hunkered down in the throes of a recession, watch hopefully for signs that the economy is reviving, that good times are returning.

And just as men and women in every century, their own lives mired in poverty and hopelessness, have been able to survive the present by dreaming of better lives for their children, better lives that would give meaning to their own suffering.

So we look forward. We await the light, we await better times. We await a child in whom we can place our hopes. Throughout history, not only individuals have longed for a better world, a more meaningful life, but entire nations. And perhaps even all of humanity.

And so, like a bunch of kids ourselves, we eagerly anticipate the coming of Christmas. But, sadder now (and also wiser) than we were as kids, we long for a sturdier form of happiness, something with a lot more legs than the excitement of getting a BB gun. Or of finding a job, or winning a war.

A Christmas gift that gives us a different kind of joy, a gift that won't disappoint us as soon as we receive it. Twenty-five days to ponder such a gift, to ask Santa for it. Twenty-five days to Christmas!

Climbing the "Savage Mountain"

Most of us admire those strong souls whose internal code demands a certain purity of conduct -- those who strive to satisfy their own ideals, rather than seeking the world's admiration or hoping somehow to sell their accomplishments. We admire, for example, the craftsman who makes violins the way he believes they should be made, even though he knows he could make far more money selling mediocre instruments to purchasers who wouldn't know or care about the difference.

Ed Viesturs, the first American to climb all fourteen mountains higher than 8,000 meters -- climbing all fourteen without supplementary oxygen -- is such a purist. A graduate of the University of Washington and of the veterinarian school at WSU, and a resident of a Seattle suburb across the Sound, he first picked up his mountaineering skills on the slopes of Mount Rainier, where he eventually became a professional climbing guide.

Viesturs has just published K2: Life and Death on the World's Most Dangerous Mountain, co-authored with David Roberts, a professional outdoors writer. In his book, Viesturs tells the story of K2 climbing -- from the first 1902 Crowly attempt, through attempts by Americans and Germans in the 1930s, to the first successful climb by the Italians in 1954, and through later attempts, some successful and many tragic, up until the present. Viesturs examines each climb through the lens of his own experience gained climbing in the Himalayas and Karakorams, especially his own successful climb of K2 with Scott Fischer in 1992.

Although K2, in the Karakoram range on the Pakistan-China border, is second in altitude to Everest, it is second to none in difficulty. Viesturs observes that, over the decades, one person has died for every four who have reached K2's summit. (Eleven died within a 36 hour period in 2008.) Contrast that 1:4 figure with Everest, where the ratio is 1:19¹ and it becomes apparent why experienced climbers consider the climb of K2 a far greater accomplishment than that of Everest.

Statistics aside, simply reading the accounts of climbs over the years makes it obvious that -- even with great physical strength and endurance, psychological perserverance, and a goodly helping of good luck and favorable weather -- only the most technically skillful climbers can venture very far above base camp. Guides using fixed ropes now lead countless numbers of amateurs up Everest. The Everest climb still demands endurance and perserverance, but the fixed ropes eliminate much of the need for technical climbing ability and experience.

There are no permanent fixed ropes on K2.

And Viesturs shows little respect for those climbers who rely on temporary fixed ropes anchored by Sherpa or Hunza staff -- locals who, climbing largely without protection, risk their own lives by struggling up ahead of the "sahibs" in order to ease their way to the top. He has little patience with grandstanding and bragging, and even less with leaders who let others take the risks and do the work while they collect the glory. He dislikes the use of bottled oxygen. He is suspicious of climbers who take imprudent chances, knowing that they can rely on radios or cell phones to summon help when they find themselves in a jam. And he throws up his hands at the increasingly common reliance on helicopters to rescue climbers whose dreams of glory outstrip their skill and experience.

A mountain can be considered climbed only when the climber reaches the summit and returns safely to base camp. The climb down is as critical, and often more dangerous, than the climb up. To Viesturs, it is self-evident that the climber must rely on his own abilities to complete the climb in both directions. Among the climber's requisite set of skills is good judgment. The climber must sacrifice the summit and turn around, Viesturs insists, once he determines that weather conditions or his own physical condition and abilities will make continuing the climb an unreasonable risk to his own safety and that of his companions. Viesturs frankly admits he ignored his own rule and, despite the lateness of the day, failed to turn back during his successful climb of K2 in 1992. He nearly lost his life as a result. He vowed never to take foolish chances again, and stuck with that vow while bagging his 13 remaining over-8000 meter summits.

Ed Viesturs is opinionated, but his opinions demand nothing of other climbers that he doesn't demand of himself. His own accomplishments entitle him to his strong opinions.

Viesturs's ideals demand of climbers more preparation and experience than some climbers may care to demand of themselves. His judgments may, at times, seem harsh. But these same ideals also permit him to see a climb as more than just a physical challenge. He notes how climbers frequently trek the 40 miles to K2's base camp almost heedless of the scenic beauty through which they walk. By focusing only on the physical challenge that lies ahead, he feels, they miss a significant part of the overall climbing experience. He marvels at -- and to some degree envies --the hardy pioneers who made the earliest attempts on K2. Those parties trekked not 40 miles, but hundreds of miles, through roadless countryside. Their members saw themselves as explorers as well as climbers. On their way, they carried art supplies and painted landscapes, did surveying, studied fauna, and collected geological samples.

Readers of Viesturs's book are given exciting and humbling glimpses of what a human being is capable of doing -- the physical and mental extremes that a disciplined person can force himself to endure. Even if your idea of tough physical activity is a five-mile hike on a Forest Service trail, you will finish the book happy that people like Viesturs still exist -- climbers possessing not only physical skill and endurance, but also the education and sensitivity to convey to us lesser mortals some idea of the beauty and the challenge presented by high altitude mountaineering.

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¹K2's death/success ratio is second only to that of Annapurna, which has an incredible 2:3 ratio.

Dying small towns

Heading south on I-5, I can reach the Columbia river in about two hours. Once I reach the Columbia, I've also reached the town where I was born, grew up, and graduated from high school.

To a kid, it was a wonderful town. I assumed all towns of its size -- then, around 25,000 -- were pretty much the same. Looking back now, I realize that in many ways it more closely resembled a mill town in Ohio, Michigan or Pennsylvania than it did small towns in California or suburbs in other states.

In fact, it was a mill town. The economy was based on the two largest (reputedly) lumber mills in the world, a locally owned paper mill, an aluminum reduction plant, and a large port . The local mill workers were 100 percent unionized. Most boys went to work for the mills right out of high school, at the age of 18. Wages were great -- so great that you had to really want to go to college before you'd break free of the town and do so -- and employment was steady.

The town was prosperous. Workers' income supported a large commercial downtown, consisting almost entirely of locally owned and managed businesses. The daily newspaper, although biased toward local business interests, was well written and competed successfully with Portland and Seattle dailies. Unlike most mill towns in the Midwest, moreover, the town was (and still is, for that matter) attractive, with nicely maintained houses on tree-lined streets and excellent parks. The schools were also physically attractive, and I always assumed that they were providing me an excellent education -- a belief that I never seriously questioned until I went away to college and competed with students from Eastern prep schools and large suburban high schools.

I tell you all of this only incidentally out of nostalgia for my childhood. Primarily, it's my response to an article that I encountered this week in the on-line version of my hometown's newspaper -- a paper no longer locally-owned, but still apparently well written and well edited. The article described the desperate straits in which the city now finds itself.

One of the two large lumber mills is closed, and the other has drastically reduced its employment. Easily accessible timber is harder to come by, and the cost of union labor makes local lumber less competitive with that from other areas. The aluminum plant, dependent on cheap hydroelectric power, is shut down. The power is no longer so cheap -- or at least apparently not cheap enough to justify the transport of bauxite ore from far off sources such as Jamaica -- and the market for aluminum has weakened. The paper mill has cut its employment. Other smaller manufacturers have closed down, for one reason or another.

The attractive and prosperous town I grew up in now has over 16 percent of its households living below the poverty level. The typical level of education attained by residents makes it difficult for them to find employment in the new economy, and the sort of businesses that now thrive (at least in normal economic times) are not interested in locating in such an environment. The local high schools -- which probably were at least average for Washington when I attended, with virtually all entering students graduating -- are now rated mediocre at best. And only 55 percent of entering freshman graduate.

The downtown commercial area is dead. It was killed first by construction of a shopping mall outside the city, a fate suffered by many Main Streets in small towns across the nation. Now that mall itself is apparently in dire straits.

More depressing to me than the article itself was the tone of the on-line comments written by local residents. They display no optimism that the town will ever recover its former level of relative prosperity. The commentators see the town's work force, and their children, as undereducated and lacking the skills now sought by industry. The town does still contain a significant number of middle to upper middle class families (11 percent of households earn over $100,000); the children of these families will receive good college educations, but few of them will return after graduation.

The comment writers note (and statistics in the article substantiate) that the town is becoming increasingly polarized between a small affluent elite and a large majority of residents who are unemployed or just barely scraping by. The working middle class that formerly dominated the town and drove the local economy is gone.

Most of all, those commenting on the article see a lack of competence both in the local business community and in city government -- a lack of both the ability and the initiative to somehow lead the city into the 21st century. Whether justified or not, this perception itself is demoralizing to local residents. One commentator, writing on Monday, states:

We need to make this a place where people want to be. I have friends who come up from Oregon to go fishing here, but they stay in other cities, they don't even want to get a room here to fish! If this town is going to survive, it needs to be a destination, not just a gas stop along the way to something better.

Everyone sees the problems, but no one suggests plausible solutions. Maybe there are none.

I now realize that when I read about the desperation of citizens in Flint MI or Youngstown OH, I'm not just reading about remote economic disasters, 3,000 miles away. The same problems are endemic in small cities and towns throughout the country -- and not only in my own state, but in the very town where I spent a happy childhood.

We have a national problem, affecting significant parts of our nation, and we don't really know what to do about it.

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Photo above: My high school

None dare call it treason

BEIJING -- President Obama is again receiving harsh criticism from American conservatives, this time for shaking hands with Hu Jintao, President of the People's Republic of China (or "Red China," as these critics refer to it). These latest criticisms follow the recent uproar in response to photographs of the American president extending the courtesy of a bow to the Japanese emperor.

Photographs of the American and Chinese heads of state shaking hands are being posted on Fox News and other conservative journals, accompanied by comments deploring President Obama's gesture.

"The handshake is historically a gesture from one warrior to another, proof that he is bearing no arms. Frankly, I don't believe that is the sort of message we should be sending the murderous cabal in Beijing, bloated as they are with outsourced American jobs and fistfuls of underpriced yuan," exclaimed one Republican source, speaking not for attribution. "I literally vomited. I never thought I'd live to see an American president -- even one possibly not American-born --stand before some foreign potentate so openly confessing that he and his nation are disarmed."

Sailing the Salish Sea

The feds have announced that Washington's "inland marine waterways" will henceforth be known as the "Salish Sea." Huh? What's that again? ("Salish" refers to a group of American Indian --"Native American" -- peoples and languages found along the coastal areas of Washington, Oregon and British Columbia.)

Well, I've lived around these here parts virtually all of my life, and I've never heard anyone mention a Salish Sea. It's apparently to be a generic name for waters now known as Puget Sound, the Georgia Strait, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and connected waterways. We are assured that the present names will continue in use, describing specific portions of the newly hatched Salish Sea. Until today, Northwesterners have usually called the entire body of water "Puget Sound," although geographers who keep track of such things assure us that this term applies properly only to the inlet south of Whidbey Island.

Well, cool. I haven't been so excited since they renamed the Gulf of California the "Sea of Cortez." And of course life's been better for us all since Bombay became Mumbai, Madras became Chennai, Constantinople became Istanbul, and St. Petersburg became Leningrad. Oh, wait -- it's St. Petersburg again, right? -- it all happens so fast, I can't keep track. And whatever happened to the Pillars of Hercules?

Just don't even get me started on what happened to the Stanford "Indians" ... Bah, humbug!

Still plugging away

If you want to quit smoking, tell everyone you're quitting. The humiliation of breaking such a public resolution may be just the incentive you need to stick with it.
--Rainier96 (11-18-08)

Well, so much for that theory!

A year ago, you may recall, I offered you my "public resolution" that I'd teach myself to play the Adagio movement to Beethoven's Pathétique sonata -- an uncommonly beautiful middle movement preceded and followed by movements that are louder, much faster, and significantly beyond my present puny abilities. I'd tried teaching myself to play that movement once before -- as I confessed to you last year -- and hadn't gotten very far, but I was now determined to master it, mechanically at least, by sheer force of determination.

Once I accomplished this goal, proving to myself that I was serious in my endeavor and capable of sustained effort, I would once more place myself under the guidance of a piano instructor.

Those of you who know me, or have even followed this blog from its inception, will hardly be surprised when I tell you that I failed to achieve my goal in the "three or four months" that I contemplated. Travels, movie-making, a fall on my head -- well, gosh, sometimes life just conspires against you, doesn't it?

However, I'm happy to say that I've recently made progress. I can now struggle through the movement without too many embarrassing stops, stumbles, scowls, and swearing. It doesn't flow like it should, I admit. My phrasing is poor. The movement has a number of trills, trills that still don't trip lightly off my fingers without loss of tempo. I'm often unsure of which notes to emphasize. I suspect that I'm not simultaneously presenting both the treble and bass melodies, as Herr Beethoven intended.

But these are all questions of musicality, exactly the sort of questions for which you turn to a teacher for guidance. I'm at least getting close to the point where I hit the correct keys -- more or less reliably. And once I reach that point, as I promised a year ago, I plan to sign up for lessons.

The winter "term" at the music school I've used before starts in January. I think I'll be ready by then. Wish me luck.

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The second movement to Beethoven's Sonata No. 8 in A flat major ("Pathétique"), when played as I'd like some day to play it, is well worth hearing. Here's a nice interpretation, performed by a young pianist on YouTube.

Enough's enough

Last night, the Democratic majority in the House passed its version of health care reform legislation. It now goes to the Senate. "Independent" Senator Joe Lieberman immediately announced that "as a matter of conscience, I will not allow this bill to come to a final vote."

It's an odd legislative system where the junior senator from the small state of Connecticut can unilaterally bring the majority party's legislative program to a standstill by threatening a filibuster. Until recently, filibusters and threats of filibusers were reserved for true "matters of conscience," although the "conscience" was usually that of Southerners defending their region's peculiar racial policies. At least, in those cases, an entire geographical region was protecting itself against what it believed to be a tyrannical Northern majority.

Now, it seems, even proposed legislative changes to the nation's system of health care insurance serves as an affront to the conscience of the junior senator from Connecticut.

Joe Lieberman, as we recall, was elected to the Senate as a Democrat, with the support of the Democratic party, in 1988 and 1994. He ran for vice president as Al Gore's running mate in 2000, hedging his bet by, at the same time, also running successfully for relection to the Senate.

In 2006, Democratic voters defeated his bid to run once more for re-election. Refusing to accept the decision of his party's voters, he ran as an Independent, announcing that "For the sake of our state, our country and my party, I cannot and will not let that result stand." (He failed to add that it was for the sake of his own political ambitions.) He went on to defeat the Democratic nominee. In 2008, he campaigned actively for Republican presidential nominee John McCain. McCain reportedly nearly selected Lieberman as his running mate and was considering naming him Secretary of State if he won.

When the Democrats took the presidency and won control of both houses of Congress, Lieberman hesitated whether to accept an invitation to join the Republican caucus, dithering in his decision until satisfied that the Democrats would allow him to retain his chairmanship of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee.

Senator Lieberman's position on many political issues has been commendable. But he won election as -- and called himself -- a Democrat. We have the right to expect commendable positions from a Democratic New England senator. Unfortunately, he often seems to confuse his political self-interest with the demands of his conscience. And he is reported to have received nearly $1 million in contributions from the health insurance industry.

There has always been room in the Democratic party for mavericks. Unlike the Republicans, Democrats do not demand slavish loyalty to the party platform. But when a Democratic U.S. Senator supports the presidential campaign of the Republican nominee, he has gone beyond the realm of being a maverick. Whether Joe Lieberman's present threats to filibuster health insurance reform are based on the imperatives of his conscience, the generous contributions received from opponents of the litigation, or simply his best guess as to what best serves his long term political advantage -- enough is enough.

Lieberman has shown no compunction about using the Democratic party to further his own interests. Just as soon as his now-doubtful vote is of no further use to the Democrats, they should likewise have no qualms about stripping him of his committee chairmanships and any other prerogatives that he now enjoys as a quasi-Democrat.

Let Sen. Lieberman become a Republican. Let's see how well Joe's conscience accepts the unsmiling authority of the Republican whips. And how long the Republicans themselves can tolerate his unpredictable presence in their own caucus.