Thanksgiving in Challis

The snow lay thin and apologetic over the world. That wide grey sweep was the lawn, with the straggling trees of the orchard still dark beyond; the white squares were the roofs of the garage, the old barn, the rabbit hutches, the chicken coops. Further back there were only the flat fields of Dawson's farm, dimly white-striped. All the broad sky was grey, full of more snow that refused to fall. There was no colour anywhere.

--Susan Cooper, The Dark is Rising

I'm writing now from my home in Seattle.  Last  Saturday I also was at home in Seattle.  But in between, I spent five days, including Thanksgiving, at my sister's home near Challis, Idaho, about a five hour drive northeast of Boise.

To those of you from elsewhere, Washington and Idaho are both parts of the Pacific Northwest.  But, please believe me, Washington and Idaho -- certainly, Seattle and Challis -- are two different worlds.  Different obviously scenically and topographically, but it's more than that.  Returning from Challis also feels like a return from a different era of American history.

Each morning, I'd be the first person up, holding a cup of coffee as I stared out the windows.  Kathy's house is actually about nine miles west of Challis, literally on the boundary of Challis National Forest and in the shadow of hills that rise above her pasture land.  Those hills loomed directly above us, but in any other direction there were other  hills, if more distant.  Brown hills, at this time of year, after the leaves had fallen and grass had dried.

Brown until the second day or so of my visit, when the hills no longer were brown, but white.  White with snow.  The ranch property remained accessible by road, although the road became covered with snow, but the snow cuts us off, if only psychologically.  We feel very alone.  Just our family members, a roaring fireplace, two dogs, and five horses.  The dogs hang out in the house, begging to be taken for long walks (walks for us, mad dashes for the dogs).  The horses hang out in the fields, the fields covered with snow.  Never complaining, just asking for daily access to fresh hay and for some occasional affectionate company.

I know I romanticize, but I felt transplanted to the prairies of the nineteenth century, where families homesteaded and farmed and lived isolated from each other.  To Little House on the Prairie, maybe, but with TV and better food.

The loneliness isn't scary, but -- to a city boy -- a bit eerie.  The dark comes early in late November, and the dawn comes late.  I stare out the windows into the dark, knowing that not only our horses are out there, but coyotes and deer and elk and beavers and rabbits.  Wolves, I ask my sister?  Bears?  Probably not.  Extremely doubtful.  But nothing is certain.  Not in late November, in the dark, when the hunger of winter falls across the land.

When not chatting or staring into the fire or studying the dark outside the window, I was re-reading Susan Cooper's five-book series, The Dark is Rising, which I discussed in this blog in March 2012.  A fantasy series set deep in the history and landscape and peoples of England and Wales.

The atmosphere of those books no doubt influenced my vague sense of the uncanny as I spent my days and nights in the snows, in the isolated, hilly land west of Challis.

The snow fell softly but persistently as Friday, the day of my return to Seattle, approached.  A drive of 162 miles loomed ahead of me, taking not the shortest but the least hilly return to the airport at Hailey.  The on-line reports from the Idaho Department of Transportation were a bit unnerving, as they continued to warn of a possibly heavy snowfall on the roads I'd be taking.

I left Challis early and -- not to prolong the drama -- arrived at the Hailey airport with plenty of time to spare.  But the drive south down U.S. 93 through falling snow and hanging mist added to my sense that I was passing through enchanted lands.  The highway was virtually deserted -- I drove for miles without seeing another car.  As I left Challis behind, the road became increasingly covered with snow, with more dry snow falling from the sky and blowing across the roadway, across my windshield.  The highway runs, for the most part, straight and flat through a long valley, as it hugs the base of the Lost River Range to the east.

But the Lost River Range seemed lost indeed, obscured by the mist and steadily falling snow.  At times, however, the highway moved close enough to the hills that they became faintly visible, hanging like ghost mountains over the road.  From past drives in summer, I knew that those hills were reasonably high but hardly Alpine in dimensions.  But on Friday, as they revealed themselves through the mist -- mystical, looming, colorless forms of rock and snow -- they suggested old, grainy photographs of the mighty peaks in Alaska.  And then, as the road moved farther west, the hills disappeared back into the mist, only to reappear minutes later as the road once more approached them.

My flight back to Seattle was uneventful.  But as the plane rose above the clouds, I saw a very slim crescent moon hanging outside my window, with Venus shining brightly nearer the horizon.  These two lights stayed just outside my window for the entire first half of the flight, a fitting conclusion to a week that was magical -- magical if only in my own imagination.

And if I'd looked at that moon more closely, I now discover that I would also have seen Saturn shining and almost touching the moon's upper horn.  But that would have been one wonder too many. 

Keep on learning

Like ordination to the priesthood, law school leaves an indelible mark on your soul.  At least, it sure feels that way.

I retired from active law practice years ago.  I haven't argued a case in court for even longer.  And yet, I still consider myself a lawyer.  I can't imagine not being a lawyer.  And I can't imagine myself voluntarily going onto "inactive status" in the bar association -- as many attorneys do, upon retirement. 

And that explains why, year after year, I continue paying dues to the bar association.  Keeping my membership "active."  Keeping my powder dry.  Just in case a legal emergency should occur, one that requires me to leap feet first into the courtroom, filing motions, serving subpoenas, arguing precedents, and generally making a pest out of myself.  Or in case the governor pleads with me to accept a judgeship.

But continued membership in the bar requires more than payment of exorbitant annual dues.  It also requires complying with continuing legal education requirements.  In Washington, every attorney on active status must submit to 45 hours of legal education every three years.  To keep himself up to date.  Just in case those long hours representing his clients don't do the trick sufficiently.

These credits are earned, traditionally, by attending seminars -- what are called CLE ("continuing legal education") seminars -- on any subjects that he or she may find interesting or useful.  In recent years, he can also earn a portion of those credits from his home or the office by watching streamed videos of past seminars on the computer.

Until this year, I've always earned all my credits by actually attending seminars in person.  The legal community is still small enough that you're apt to meet and chat with colleagues you haven't seen for a while, and it's interesting to watch the presenters in person.  This year, however, which is the third year of my reporting cycle, meaning that I must report 45 hours of CLE by the end of next month, I have earned some of my credits online.

Why?  Because it dawned on me only in September that I still needed 16 credits by the end of the year.  A certain panic set in.  I quickly watched a three hour presentation on arbitration before leaving for Thailand in October.  That left 13 credits to go.

Somehow, this seemed like an incredible hurdle.  Just sitting for 13 hours in front of a screen, paying attention to lectures?  Hardly the same as studying for a final exam, or writing a term paper, right?  But there I was.  Apparently, my tolerance for being required to do anything associated with a deadline has practically vanished since I retired.

All this leads up to my good news that since Wednesday I have earned 12.75 of the necessary 13 hours.  And the experience was actually a pleasure.  I'd been worried that it would be far more difficult to pay attention to lectures on a screen than to watch them in person.  Actually,the opposite may be true.  I have fewer distractions at home than I do sitting with a crowd in a seminar room.  And I can take a break whenever I want, for as long as I want.  Thus, I watched the first seminar, "Advanced Trial Practice and Insights," in three separate segments over a two day period.  I watched the second, "Insurance Law Update," in four segments over a three day period. 

The ability to pace one's watching however you wish avoids that sinking feeling by noon during the course of a six or seven hour seminar that you'll never make it through the long afternoon.

I was lucky in one respect.  Both seminars were on subjects still of interest to me, and both were given by excellent speakers with years of practice in the fields they were discussing.  Watching was not drudgery. 

Nevertheless, I'm glad it's over.  Of course, I still have to pick up another 15-minute lecture some time before December 31.  I feel I can live with that. 

Going a-viking

I'm one-fourth Norwegian, by way of my paternal grandfather.  It generally doesn't mean much.  My Norwegian genes merely add a hint of flavoring to my otherwise vanilla British ancestry.

But many of the kids I grew up with were still living their Scandinavian ancestry.  Little Norwegian flags adorned their houses.  Luther League meetings on Wednesday nights were compulsory for the kids.  Girls wore candles in their hair for Lucia celebrations.  Their families may even have eaten lutefisk in the privacy of their homes, but I can't swear to that.  (If so, they didn't brag about it.)

Following law school, I lived for nine years in Ballard, a once independent city of largely Scandinavian residents.  When it was annexed by Seattle in 1907, it was the second largest city in the county.  My living there had nothing to do with its Scandinavian flavor, but that flavor was certainly still discernible.  In recent years, with inward migration from other parts of the country, especially California, Ballard's Scandinavian roots have become somewhat attenuated, perhaps more an historical bragging point than a present day reality. 

Ballard high school, with students of every ethnicity, nevertheless proudly calls its teams the "Vikings."

Despite changing demographics, the neighborhood has been the site of the National Nordic Museum since 1980, a museum that moved into its new permanent building last year.  The museum is a major attraction in Ballard, but one I hadn't visited until today.

It was my friend Pat's suggestion that we meet at the museum this morning, to be followed by lunch.  I'm not sure what I was expecting, but the building is large and very impressive, its strong, clean lines suggestive of Scandinavian design.  The museum is dedicated to the history, culture, and economy of Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, and a number of small autonomous islands.  The history of Scandinavia, from its early occupation by the Sami peoples at the end of the last ice age to the present, is carefully explained and illustrated, stage by stage. 

Beginning with the nineteenth century, considerable space is given to immigration from each of the Scandinavian countries to America, especially to the Mid-West, centered around Minnesota, and later to the Pacific Northwest.  On display are fascinating exhibits of household goods and children's toys brought from the Old World, and of farming and other industrial equipment used and developed once in America.  While immigrants to the Mid-West tended to be farmers, those to the Northwest were most likely either loggers or fishermen.

Also on display are some beautiful, full-wall films showing the natural wonders of the Scandinavian countries.  These films both show why Scandinavian immigrants felt at home in the Pacific Northwest, and force us, their viewers, to wonder why we haven't spent more vacation time back in the "home country."

I was raised without any real sense of ethnic background -- it was stripped away somehow before I came along.  But the Nordic Museum illustrates why so many Scandinavian immigrants remain devoted to their ancestral home, why they keep -- as a Scandinavian-American in one of the films mentions -- one foot in America, but the other in Scandinavia. 

I walked out of the museum feeling a small prickling of pride in my apparently recessive one-fourth Norwegian genes, and the way Ballard continues to embody the Scandinavian immigrant exprience.

Pat and I then had curry for lunch at an Indian restaurant a block from the museum.

Armistice Day

Tell the innocent visitor from another world that two people were killed at Sarajevo, and that the best that Europe could do about it was to kill eleven million more.
--A.A. Milne

One hundred one years ago tomorrow -- on the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month -- the first World War came to an end.  The armistice had been agreed to six hours earlier, but by its terms, the killing continued until 11 a.m., Paris time.

Maybe there was a logistical necessity for the delay, but the idea of senior statesmen prolonging the fighting until an esthetically pleasing hour -- if that's what indeed happened -- seems a proper symbol for everything that caused and prolonged the war.

As we all know, now, World War I ended a particular form of European civilization, brought about a new barbarism, and paved the way to World War II twenty years later.  It was caused by a then-fashionable nationalism, where nations as entities were viewed as more important than the human beings who lived in those nations.  As Eric Maria Remarque wrote in his novel, All Quiet on the Western Front:

Tjaden reappears. He is still quite excited and again joins the conversation, wondering just how a war gets started.

"Mostly by one country badly offending another," answers Albert with a slight air of superiority.

Then Tjaden pretends to be obtuse. "A country? I don't follow. A mountain in Germany cannot offend a mountain in France. Or a river, or a wood, or a field of wheat." 

... "Then I haven't any business here at all ... I don't feel myself offended."

It all sounds so obvious.  And seemed so even when Remarque published his novel in 1929. And so after World War II, we vowed never to allow nationalism to overcome common sense, to allow national leaders to treat their nations as individuals who could be insulted, whose pride needed defending.  We helped set up NATO to unify by alliance the military forces of Europe, together with Canada and the USA.  And we encouraged the integration of Europe in the European Community.

Now we have a leader who, apparently, hates alliances, except insofar as an alliance is a facade behind which one nation (ours) can control the actions of others.  A man with no personal friends, only sycophants who come and go according to his whim, he finds friendships and alliances among nations incomprehensible.  He appears determined to return the world to 1914, with the United States perhaps standing in for the then dominant British Empire. 

Such a return to 1914 would be to court disaster.  But it won't happen.  The world, especially Europe, is a different place today, and globalization is too far advanced to be reversed by any one nation's president.  

And that president may have only one more year to work his "magic." 

And so, as we remember the end of World War I, let's renew the vows our fathers made in the past:  "Never again."

The History of Living Forever

Conrad lives in a small town in Maine. He is a brilliantly precocious science student who has skipped two grades as he worked his way through the public school system. He lost his mother in an auto accident when he was ten, and his distraught father took to drinking and showed little further interest in him.  Conrad now lives with an aunt. 

The summer he turns 16, he falls desperately in love with -- has an affair with -- Mr. Tampari ("Sammy" to Conrad), a brilliant biochemist who, strangely enough, has ended up teaching chemistry to high school students.

Jake Wolff's novel, The History of Living Forever, is a complex, frustrating, and yet somehow inspiring study of scientific obsession, adolescent and adult loneliness, and human insecurity, peppered with enough biochemical scientific studies (real or fictional) and data to persuade you that you've attended a series of college lectures. 

The first day of class, as Conrad begins his junior year after a summer of romantic intoxication, the school announces that Mr.Tampari has been discovered dead, apparently from a drug overdose.  The death is considered accidental.  But Conrad finds that Sammy has left him a gift -- a box containing all his diaries, one for each year since he was eight years old, and a handwritten book of "recipes," entitled "The Elixir of Life."  Did he in fact commit suicide?

Sammy has also given indications that he wants Conrad to carry on his research, whatever that research may have been.  Conrad is devastated by Sammy's death, and by a suspicion that Conrad's love for his teacher was in fact reciprocated by nothing much beyond mild affection.  Otherwise, how could he have left Sammy behind, alone?

Conrad, now in his 40s, is the narrator, but the real story is Sammy's.  This is no conventional gay love story -- nor, alternatively viewed, a story of a teacher's sexual abuse of a student.  (Conrad concedes that, even 25 or so years later, he still remembers his relationship with Sammy as an intense "romance.")  Their relationship is a plot device that explains a strong bond between two highly intelligent people, both almost fanatically immersed in bio-scientific studies.

Sammy's diaries begin when he was eight years old.  He was painfully brilliant even then.

At school, he is so much smarter than his classmates that he feels the weight of their stupidity on his chest -- even after the bell rings, like waking up from a nightmare to find yourself suffocating, still, under the heart-crushing burden of your fear.

Sammy has no friends.  He is convinced his parents don't love him.  He believes that, somehow, he is "broken."  "Broken," in the sense that he is incapable of feeling love, feeling emotion, feeling joy, feeling sadness, feeling excitement.  He is numb.

But he soldiers on.  He has no real enthusiasms, not even reading.

In bed each night, he cries from 10:00 to 10:15 (he sets the timer on his bedside clock).  It's almost a relief, this crying, though he can't explain from what.

Years later, Sammy concludes that he is and always has been, in some sense, mentally ill.

As a child, his psychiatrist told him that he needed a hobby.  He learned, from a club to which his father belonged, of the ancient quest for an elixir -- not an elixir that necessarily allowed one to live forever, but that served as a panacea for any diseases that the taker might have.  Sammy's single-minded quest for such an elixir provides him the structure, the direction, the focus that his life needed.

The book, in chapters throughout, provides case histories of alchemists, scientists, and deluded amateurs who had hoped to develop such an elixir, case histories that Sammy carefully studied. 

A recurring ingredient in past recipes had been the element mercury.  The "blue mass" that Abraham Lincoln took to fight depression contained such mercury.  At age 13, Sammy reconstructed this "blue mass," and consumed a large dosage himself, writing up his experiment as his first entry in his "recipe book."  The result?  "Almost died," he wrote, laconically. . 

His brush with death did not deter him.  He continued, obsessively, throughout life to find a "recipe" for the elixir that would cure all ills, and that would cure his own self-diagnosed "mental illness."  The novel strikes the reader as a source book on the history of various misguided attempts to develop such a panacea, and a treasury of human biochemistry.  Unfortunately, the book is an untrustworthy biochemistry resource, with carefully documented science combined with ideas and hopes by the ancients, by Sammy, and finally by Conrad that amount to scientific quackery.  As the author firmly warns in his introduction

You will find within its pages a number of recipes, all of which seem to promise great benefits to your health and well-being.  To repeat:  this is a work of fiction.  Every recipe in this book, if ingested, will kill you.  Every single one.

From a scientific point of view, certain substances found in nature have the beneficial ability to remove free radicals from the human body, free radicals that may contribute to the aging and degenerative process.  These substances cannot, in any significant amount, however,  cross the brain-blood barrier.  But mercury can cross that barrier.  Sammy's recipes, in effect, used mercury to drag the drugs with it across the barrier.  But mercury is a poison, and will kill if it remains in the brain for any length of time, and the body quickly attacks its ability to cross the barrier once it's detected in the brain.  This attack by the body is counterproductive, because it leaves the mercury trapped on the brain side of the barrier. 

Thus, many early experiments with mercury, used in sufficient amounts, resulted in death.  In Wolff's novel, Conrad comes eventually to believe that he can overcome this hazard by concluding the experiment with electroshock, such as used in fighting depression, which temporarily reopens the brain-blood barrier, allowing the mercury to escape.

Conrad's apparent understanding -- still at the age of 16 --of the scientific basis for the use of various substances, including mercury, in the course of the many attempts to concoct the "elixir of life" -- and his discovery of the use of electroshock therapy to avoid mercury poisoning -- is a central theme of the novel.  If science bores or confuses you -- and there is much about this book that's confusing -- you may want to read a different book.

Conrad's scientific quest to continue Sammy's research, and to apply it to his own dying, alcoholic father, is complicated by a subplot involving competing interests and individuals who are themselves trying to develop the same "elixir of life" for purposes of commercial exploitation.  I'm not sure that this subplot and its villains, which occupies a major portion of the book's central chapters, adds much to the story.  It certainly adds complexity to what is already a complex narrative.

At the end, the father's life is saved, as Conrad uses the last of the drugs that Sammy had left for him.  Whether it has been saved by Conrad's "elixir of life," or by subsequent more conventional diagnosis and treatment, remains an open question -- maybe a bit of both.

As his father recovers in the hospital, Conrad is re-united with his loving aunt who had grown understandably alarmed at Conrad's many absences from home.   And his father expresses his love for him. 

In the final chapter, Conrad -- now in his 40s -- waits fretfully in a hospital to learn whether cancer surgery on his partner has been successful.  He watches a five-year-old boy who is anxiously waiting with his mother for news of his own.  Each time someone comes into the room the boy tenses up, then sighs with disappointment when the news is for someone else.

[M]y God, it's a beautiful thing -- a five-year-old boy, learning his limits, surprising himself and his mother with his first act of patience.  Watching him, I remember all of those feelings:  the fear, the frustration, the hope for the future.  I remember being young, when there was nothing worse than waiting.

Over the years, Conrad has learned that -- for all their common brilliance -- he was not like Sammy.  He was not broken.  When he was 16, he had volunteered the words "I love you" to Sammy, a declaration that Sammy was unable to return.  After Sammy's death, Conrad continued Sammy's research -- partly because of its intrinsic interest, but primarily out of respect for Sammy's wishes.  At the end, he returns his aunt's love and that of his father.  His temporary estrangement from home had been proof that he was a teenager, not that he was broken.

He loves his partner as an adult, and he shows empathy for a small boy, a tiny bird first spreading his wings. 

Wolff says that it took him ten years to write The History of Living Forever, and I can believe it.  It is well-written, beautifully written at times.  It is intelligent, both with respect to science and with respect to human emotion.  It required a second reading for me to write about it in this blog, and I'm sure it still contains enough puzzles to justify, someday, a third.

Chiang Mai 2019

Protective deity

Returning from Chiang Mai, Thailand, Halloween night, I climbed aboard the light rail from the airport at 9:30 p.m., and was confronted by ghoulish riders of all ages.  If I hadn't just returned from three weeks of viewing "protective deities" in and about Thai wats (temples), I might have been intimidated.  (And actually, many Thais nowadays celebrate Halloween -- minus the trick or treating -- in much the same way as we do.  Or maybe it is just the Western expats, of whom there are many in the Chiang Mai area.)

My sister had rented the same home in the Hang Dong area, southwest of the Old Town, that she had rented last year, and I stayed with her.  The rental contains two separate buildings facing a small, jungle-like courtyard, with Kathy's bedroom and the kitchen and living room in the main building.  It's an attractive residence, at the end of a long driveway, surrounded by pasture and farm land, as well as other residential units.

My visit was uneventful, perhaps, compared with my one-week visit to Italy in August, but it was intended as a family gathering and a time for relaxation and contemplation.  Kathy's rental is in an area networked with small roads -- some only theoretically two-laned -- which are lightly traveled and excellent for bicycling.

We biked to nearby restaurants for meals, we biked to my great niece's school, we biked to Denny's new rental home -- in a gated community that could easily be mistaken for California -- not far beyond the school.  I biked out occasionally for a morning coffee.  Denny has a motor scooter and Jessie, his fiancée,  has a car.  But mostly we relied on our bikes or, for longer trips into the city, on the local, and very inexpensive equivalent of Uber.

For a little variety, Kathy, Clinton and I did spend two nights at a hotel just outside the wall of the Old Town mid-way though my visit, and at a small, ten-room boutique hotel inside the walls the night before I flew home.   And my entire family (insofar as in Thailand) spent a night at a resort in Chiang Dao, about fifty miles north of Chiang Mai.  A beautiful rural area, dominated by the mountain, Doi Chiang Dao.  We did a hike to a wat part way up the mountain, and explored some famous limestone caves -- many Buddhist shrines and precarious limestone footing!

Finally, I should mention that one night, Kathy and I biked to a small outdoor restaurant a mile or so from her house.  The meal was good, but what was most memorable was the Vietnamese pale ale I was served.  The restaurant owner, a Thai graduate of William & Mary who spoke with the assurance of a native American, assured us that the brewery was owned by a friend of his.  The label was "Heart of Darkness," and was accompanied by appropriate graphics.  Their website assures us:

Heart of Darkness is all about duality. Good and evil. Sane and insane. Big, bold, crafted brews that will challenge the way you think about beer. Thirst quenching, session beers that will have you bouncing off the walls. Hop bombs that will give you a kick-to-the-teeth, while still being still balanced and smashable. Whatever your taste, we’ve got it….

Their beers, under the Heart of Darkness label, include Kurtz's Insane IPA, Futile Purpose Cucumber Pilsner, Dream Alone Pale Ale, and Pitiless Folly Pale Ale.

Panyaden School
Secondary school campus

Well, you get the picture.  Take that, LBJ!

This is Denny's third year teaching at the Panyaden School (6th, 7th, and 8th grades this year), and our third autumn visit with him.  I anticipate another, perhaps longer, visit a year from now.