Brewster

Stories with an atmosphere of gothic horror are usually set in the rural South, not in familiar places like Putnam county, New York.  Brewster, by Mark Slouka, is an exception.

Slouka's Brewster, N.Y., is a working class town existing -- physically only, not socially or economically -- between New York City and Westchester county to the south and Woodstock to the north. The story is set in the late 1960s.   Bands of Woodstock-bound "hippies" hitchhike their way past Brewster on their way north.  The town and its residents are touched neither by the sophistication of the nearby big city, nor by the times in which they live.  They are people still dwelling in the 1940s, living in a cold, incurious world with narrow horizons.

Stop, children, what's that sound?  Even if we'd stopped, we wouldn't have heard a thing.

This frigid -- both physically and emotionally -- environment is the setting for Jon's story, the story of two high school students growing up in Brewster, and of their doomed friendship.  The narrator, Jon, is the son of Jewish survivors of the Nazi death camps.  Jon's older brother had died in an accident when Jon was four, a second calamity in his parents' life that had left them cold and detached.  Jon and his parents go through the motions of living together, walking about the house like unseeing ghosts.

Jon tells his story in terse, self-deprecating sentences.  He says that he does "all right" at school, but  he eventually is accepted at Columbia University.  He's not a "jock," but during the course of the book he is essentially drafted onto his school's track team, where he becomes an outstanding relay runner.

A loner, Jon drifts into an intensely close friendship with Ray, an odd, caustic guy who wanders about the school in a dark coat.  Ray is a fighter, a brawler, really.  He's neither jock nor scholar.  He exists on the fringes of high school society, looked down on by classmates.  We learn that he is beaten routinely by his single father, an ex-cop, an ex-soldier from World War II, a guy whose life has been on one long downhill trajectory. 

Stories about friendship between high school "brains" and "losers" aren't that rare.  I've never found these friendships convincing; nothing in my own high school experiences suggested their likelihood.  But Slouka makes it work.  Jon is a Jewish intellectual, but he's not timid, he's not overly "refined," and he's totally adrift from any security and sense of belonging that his own family might have offered him.  Ray's no scholar, but he's not stupid, and his reputation for brawling is, to a large degree, merely a cover for the obvious injuries he receives from his own father.  Ray's efforts to shield his infant brother from his father's abuse are touching, as is the romantic relationship that he eventually develops with Karen, a classmate who initially attracted Jon until Jon realized that Karen's feelings for him did not go beyond simple (but close) friendship.

Jon, Ray and Karen form a triumvirate of friendship, outside Brewster society, joined by an unlikely (but likeable) devout Christian -- Fred.  Except for Ray, these teenagers participate to some degree in Brewster student life without ever becoming part of it.  Each of them, in his own way, looks forward to the day they escape Brewster.  Jon and Ray dream of restoring an old car and driving off with Karen and maybe Fred to California -- the classical dream of disaffected American youth.

This plot synopsis doesn't do justice to the book, because so much of the book is a presentation of mood.  The loving description of all the markers of American "hip" civilization in the late '60s -- a civilization surrounding the kids but one that never really makes an impression on them.  The sense of Brewster as a a prison: a cold village, isolated from major trends in society, hostile to curiosity, to excitement -- where dreams go to die. 

And over all, the looming sense of danger -- hanging over the other senses of futility, of the impossibility of finding any joy or hope in one's life.  From the first chapter, we sense some menace threatening (not necessarily physically) Jon's life  -- threatening all four friends' lives -- a menace alluded to over and over as the narrative continues.  We gradually gain some idea of the source of the menace, and even of its nature.

But when we ultimately face the menace face to face, we're still shocked.  Shocked by Jon's graphic description of what he witnesses.  Shocked by its effect on each of the four friends' lives.  Shocked by the devastation visited on their friendship.

And shocked by our own appreciation -- an appreciation rarely encouraged by contemporary fiction -- that Evil sometimes actually exists.  Evil not subject to being minimized by our ability to be "understanding"  -- Evil fully worthy of being written with a capital letter.

North Rim

The magic of an outdoors weekend began Thursday night -- indoors, ironically -- at the Grand Canyon Lodge.  Having just arrived at the North Rim after a long day's drive from the Vegas airport, I was milling about with other guests in the sun room as the twilight deepened, enjoying a panoramic view of the canyon.  An historic piano, dating back to the lodge's early years, sat in the room with a "Display Only" sign on it.  Disregarding the sign without batting an eye, a scrawny kid -- very early teens in a ratty t-shirt and shorts, hair in his eyes -- plunked a few notes, and then dragged a chair over.  I was about to move outside to escape the inevitable "Chopsticks." 

But I froze in place as, from memory, the kid lit into the entire final movement from Beethoven's Pathétique Sonata.

The magic ended yesterday with a thud at the Las Vegas airport, where I was forced to hang out for eight hours surrounded by slot machines, as lightning storms delayed all flights.  I arrived home after 1 a.m. last night.

From the sublime to the frustrating.  But in between, happily, almost everything else was sublime.

The North Rim is remote, which is why it gets only ten percent of the park's visitors.  Six hours from Las Vegas, where I rented a car, by way of Zion National Park.  (Coming home, I discovered that the alternative route, by-passing Zion through the Kaibab Paiute Indian Reservation, is about an hour faster.)  Although the North Rim is only about seven miles "as the condor flies" from the South, it's a five hour drive by car or a twenty mile hike by trail.  The North Rim, at well over eight thousand feet, is about a thousand feet higher than the South -- and consequently cooler, greener, and more heavily forested.

Because of the travel time, I had only two full days -- Friday and Saturday -- at the park.  Friday, I spent exploring the lodge and its environs, walking a couple of trails that connected the lodge with a campground and general store a mile and a half away, driving three miles to Point Imperial (highest point on either rim at 8,803 ft.), and in general letting my body acclimate to elevations in the 8,000's.  The big event came the following day -- the descent into the canyon along the North Kaibab trail.

The North Kaibab runs from a point (8,250 ft.) about 1½ miles from the lodge down to the Colorado river at Phantom Ranch, 14 miles away.  Avid followers of my self-puffery will recall that a couple of years ago, I descended from the South Rim to the Colorado (to a point near, but not quite at, Phantom Ranch).  But that was a round trip of only 15 miles, not 28.  And that was in April -- snowy at the top, and maybe 70 at the river.  In August, the temperatures are about 75 at the top and close to 110 at the river.  Let me assure skeptics -- temperature does make a difference.  A big difference.

And so I decided to hike down only as far as Roaring Springs (5,200 ft.), about three thousand feet below the rim, and 9.4 miles round trip by trail.  Ground water percolates through successive layers of water-permeable sandstone and limestone until it reaches the layer of impermeable Bright Angel shale.  Unable to soak in any deeper, it pours out the side of the canyon as a large waterfall (several waterfalls, actually), dropping to Roaring Springs at the base of the Bright Angel shale stratum.  The strength of the falls, in such a dry canyon, is impressive.

The Park Service recommends that anyone doing a day hike to Roaring Springs begin no later than 6 a.m.  I fumbled around, grabbing a fast coffee and danish at the Saloon (opening at 5:30 a.m. as a coffee house), and driving to the parking lot 1.7 miles away.  I'd been told that the parking lot fills early, and I might have to walk from the lodge.  It was virtually empty.  I was on the North Kaibab trail at 6:20 a.m., and had the trail almost to myself all the way down.

The falls were impressive, as I've mentioned, and even more impressive was the hike back up as the sun rose ever higher in the sky.  I met many hikers on their way to Roaring Springs as I climbed back up, sleepy-heads who obviously hadn't hit the trail until near 9 a.m.  I pity them.  Under normal thermal conditions, the hike up would not be difficult, certainly not much more difficult than the Bright Angel trail between the South Rim and Indian Gardens -- but in August, the heat made it a killer.  Especially, that last mile from the top, after the Supai Tunnel.

I found myself resting and sipping water every few hundred yards, and I usually consume less water while hiking than do most.  I felt quite fatigued by the time I dragged myself up to the Rim.  One consolation for anyone planning to repeat my experience in August is that piped spring water is available at both Roaring Springs and the Supai Tunnel (1.7 miles from the top).  I did fine on the two liters of water I was carrying, even without reliance on these sources on the trail.

Total round trip time -- just over five hours.

Good dinners at the lodge, relaxation and reading on the lodge's terrace (where friendly waiters happily refresh your beer glass), people-watching (I could write a separate essay on the varieties of Americans and foreigners who gravitate to the North Rim), and, in general, a long, magical weekend.

The magic enhanced, of course, by my sense of accomplishment -- Roaring Springs in August!  (But I talked to enough fellow hikers, with greater ambitions, to give me a real hankering for what appears to be a very feasible Rim to Rim backpacking trip.  Some day in the future.  Maybe?)

Ender's Game

Yes, I do enjoy writing book reviews.  But I don't review War and Peace, or Gone with the Wind, or Les Misérables.  I don't review them, because everyone who would enjoy those classics has either read them already or already plans to read them at some point in the future.

Similarly, I won't review Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card.  Anyone interested in science fiction or fantasy knows about the book, at least, and probably read it long ago.  A much publicized movie based on the book is scheduled for release in the United States for November 1. 

The book was written in 1985, and it's my own fault that I just got around to reading it this week.  Mr. Card's writing is serviceable and adequate, but not particularly "literary" -- a fact that he acknowledges in a somewhat embarrassingly lengthy apology in the latest edition's preface.  But the story is absorbing, the characterization of the hero is moving, and the "message" is well worth noting. 

So I won't review the book -- its plot or character development -- but I do want to mention the "message" (or one of the messages) I find in that book.

The story, in quick summary, is that mankind, 150 years from now, has been engaged in battle twice by attacks from an alien species of bug-like humanoids that we call the "buggers."  Earth's forces have been sent -- by relativistic means -- across space to the buggers' own realm in the hope of defeating their forces before they regroup for a third attack.  Young Ender, a genius, has been bred and recruited, and is being trained, to direct these forces as supreme commander.

Most of the book is devoted to Ender's rapid development from a six-year-old child to an eleven-year-old conquering hero.  Ender's forces not only defeat the buggers, but totally annihilate their species, opening up their own planets for Terrestial expansion.

But Ender learns, after the celebrations conclude, that the buggers were far more civilized than we had given them credit for.  More civilized than ourselves.  Because of their own physiological functioning, they had believed that Earth was uninhabited by intelligent life, and that humans were simply robots left from an earlier and now departed civilization.  They realized their mistake after the second battle.  They therefore had no intention of ever launching a third attack.  Their "queen," realizing that defeat and annihilation were inevitable, and that Ender had the empathy to appreciate what she would tell him, found a way to leave Ender a message; her message told him that the buggers had never intended harm to an intelligent species.  Nevertheless, they accepted their fate, and she recognized that humans were now the heirs of what the bugger civilization had accomplished.  She wished them well.

Ender, now 12-years-old, and the toast of humanity, realizes that he has unnecessarily caused the death of billions of civilized beings, and an annihilation of their entire civilization.  He is devastated, despite the assurance of adults that man is evolutionarily a killer, that killing is the key to survival, and that survival is the ultimate goal of any species. 

A nation that came close to wiping out its own indigenous Indian population, enslaved Africans, attacked Spanish possessions without reasonable provocation, dropped its second atomic bomb on Nagasaki, replaced democratic governments with dictatorships in Chile and other Latin American countries, and accepted devastating "collateral damage" in Southeast Asia and Afghanistan, should have no difficulty in understanding the weight of Enver's self-accusing guilt, and in asking similar questions about its own policies.

The lesson is not that we should never kill.  It's that we must develop the empathy to understand our supposed adversaries before we ever resort, as a final alternative, to killing.

So far, humanity has never totally obliterated an entire intelligent species (unless, perhaps, we count whatever homo sapiens did to the Neanderthals, which I don't).  But we still have 150 years to hone our abilities.

Show your ticket

“The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them.”
― Ernest Hemingway

Trust sometimes proves unjustified.

Sound Transit's light rail line between the airport and downtown has been running for nearly four years.  Fares are enforced by a modified honor system.  You buy a ticket, or click your prepaid card, before boarding the train.  Occasionally, enforcement officers board the train and check to make sure everyone has paid his fare.  The fine for being on the train without proof of payment is -- as I recall -- $144.

I love the airport line, and use it regularly.  During the first year or so, officers frequently boarded the train.  More recently, not so much.  I suspect that most travelers from the airport itself -- many of them visitors from other cities -- pay their fare.  I'm less sure about local residents who board at intermediate stations.

Sometimes I leave a baseball game at Safeco field and take the light rail to downtown -- just four stops away.  I virtuously click my card getting on board. The machine beeps loudly. I don't hear many other beeps. Hoards of basefall fans ignore the fare. 

The system isn't working. 

I note that Los Angeles has had the same problem.  They switched several months ago from an honor system similar to ours to the turnstile system used by most other subway systems.  As the New York Times wrote, back in May:

“A lot of people — if not the majority of people — are not paying their fare,” said Zev Yaroslavsky, a county supervisor and a member of the board of the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority. “There is no reason for them to pay. The odds of them getting a ticket are slim to none.”

My concern does, I admit, concern me.  It's been less than a month since I blogged my lamentation at how easily and irrationally I became irritated at drivers who didn't display current license tabs.  But it's difficult to finance an expanding rapid transit system, and to persuade voters to subsidize it.  If we want to provide free transit to everyone -- one possible approach -- the system should be sold to voters with that understanding.  Instead, voters have understood that a significant proportion of light rail's costs would derive from passenger fares.

And the problem goes beyond lost revenue to the issue of fairness.  As Mr. Yaroslavsky was quoted as saying, in the Times article:

“It’s not fair to those people who pay to have a significant percentage of people who don’t pay,” he said. “The credibility of the enforcement system is undermined. It’s human nature to say, ‘If he’s getting away with it, why should I pay?’ ”

Reconfiguring stations to include turnstiles and ticket readers will not be cheap.  But cost savings in the long run, both in fares and in renewed public confidence, justify the initial investment.

And the transformation should be undertaken before 2016, when the two new stations of the University extension open for business.

Sound Transit has tried trusting transit riders.  We've learned we can't trust them.

Tempus fugit

Just yesterday, I told myself that "we have a whole summer ahead of us."  Now, I find myself entering the second week of August.  Leaves on roadside bushes are beginning to turn yellowish and reddish.  The days are hot -- we've had a magnificent summer in the Northwest Corner -- but the evenings are noticeably cooler.  A few weeks ago, it was broad daylight at 5 a.m. and 9 p.m.

Now it's not.

So the summer is anticipated, it's greeted joyfully, and -- before you know it -- it's on its way out.

'Twas not always thus.  Why, when I was a kid, it took an eternity of yearning for school to be out and summer to be in -- but once here, summer went on forever.  Whatever happened?

Theories abound as to why time seems to go by faster as we get older.  My favorite has always been the proportion theory -- three months is a far greater percentage of your lifetime to date when you're ten than when you're fifty, and so three months seem to last longer when you're younger.  The theory is attractive, but scientists have questioned whether we really consider our life as a totality when judging the passage of time.

Claudia Hammond has come out with a book that discusses this question, together with many other questions related to our perception of time: Time Warped.  I haven't read the book yet, satisfying myself with scanning a number of reviews.  Hammond suggests that time goes by more slowly when we are young because we find ourselves confronted during those years with a large number of new experiences, each of which demands our close attention.  As we grow older, we tend to glide through life on cruise control, half awake while experience passes us by.  

[S]he argues that the real reason for the quickening of time is that a high concentration of strong memories occur in the teens and 20s, making that period a “benchmark for our judgments of retrospective time.” As new memories become sparser, later life seems brief compared with our eventful youth, giving the illusion that time has sped up.¹

This depressing theory has some intuitive appeal, and may explain the frantic desire for new experiences that many of us subconsciously feel as we age and our teen years recede swiftly into the past.

On the other hand, Hammond also notes that time seems to pass more swiftly when we are intently focused on absorbing activities than when we are sitting around being bored.  Apparently, we are faced with a trade-off between time passing quickly while we're actively engaged in interesting activities and time seeming to have passed more slowly in retrospect -- in other words, an active two-week vacation seems to go by quickly but -- when we look back on it -- we feel it lasted much longer than two weeks.

An interesting quandary.  But maybe only in theory.  I've had a fairly active and interesting summer, and yet -- here we are -- with those leaves already starting to turn.  It was still too fast a summer.  I guess the only real solution would be to wake up and find myself a 15-year-old again.  But like all too many "solutions," that too would have its own unintended (because thankfully forgotten) consequences.      
-----------------------------------
¹Jascha Hoffman, New York Times (August 5, 2013).              

Skyline Trail

The Skyline Trail Loop starts out at Paradise Lodge in Mt. Rainier National Park, circles about a canyon to the east, reaches a high point of 6,800 feet at Panorama Point, and gradually descends back to the lodge.  A six-mile walk, with a 1,400 foot elevation gain, the hike has been given a difficulty rating of "4" by a guidebook that I use, compared with a "5" for the climb to Camp Muir (which I discussed two years ago).

If the Skyline Loop is a "4," I'd be required to rate Camp Muir a "fifteen"!  But although the hike was not that difficult, it certainly had its small challenges as well as offering the hiker exposure to magnificent scenery.

Even on a Monday, Paradise in August is crammed with tourists, with the only parking some distance from the lodge.  There's an old hikers' joke:

The density of hikers on the trail is inversely proportional to the square of the distance from the trailhead and the cube of the elevation above the trailhead.

Nevertheless, I found a considerable number of hikers on the trail, all the way up to Panorama Point -- from small kids to elderly folks who wouldn't have surprised me if they had needed help just to get from their car to the lodge. 

Visitors to Paradise were putting forth their best efforts today, determined to get beyond the gift shop and climb as high as they were able.

The day was mostly clear, and the mountain was majestic (see photo above).  The wild flowers are reaching their peak.  Much of the upper trail, as you approach Panorama Point from the east, is still covered with snow, and the final climb involved a steep traverse of a steep snow field, requiring constant effort to ensure that your boot soles were cutting firmly into the snow.  A high route exists, however, taking the hiker over the top of the snow field, at the cost of another half mile in distance, and many hikers were electing to follow that route.  (Most of the less able hikers were both climbing and descending the western portion of the loop, which is a shorter distance to Panorama Point than the eastern route, and is also largely free of snow.)

So the climb was exhilarating, if less taxing than expected.  I do need to complete one or two more difficult climbs, however, as conditioning before my trek in September.

Subjective admissions

How do you win admission to the college of your choice?  Bookstores are full of advice, and an entire industry has evolved devoted to helping kids take standardized examinations, get high grades, and prepare winning applications.

In yesterday's New York Times, Ruth Starkman talks about it from the Admission Office's point of view.  A couple of years ago, Starkman became an "outside reader" of applications for admission to Berkeley, one of seventy persons not otherwise affiliated with the university who handled one early phase in establishing rankings of Berkeley's 53,000 applications. 

Berkeley, like many schools, uses a "holistic" approach to admissions, meaning that admissions aren't based simply on a mathematical calculation of GPA and SAT numbers.  The university seeks to achieve "diversity" -- which now must be diversity of socio-economic background, rather than race -- as well as to achieve a balance among various student interests, personalities, and talents.  Berkeley, and the UC schools in general, thus attempt to apply the same subjective approach to admissions that has long been used by most upper tier private schools.

Starkman found the process confusing and not only subjective, but uncomfortably subjective.

My job as an application reader — evaluating the potential success of so many hopeful students — had been one of the most serious endeavors of my academic career. But the opaque and secretive nature of the process had made me queasy. Wouldn’t better disclosure of how decisions are made help families better position their children?

She didn't volunteer for a second year.

Long ago, I was the beneficiary of such a holistic approach by the university of my choice.  I had extremely high SAT scores.  I had a good -- but, certainly by today's inflated numbers, not spectacular  -- GPA.  I was rather active in the sort of student activities (the nerdy sort, like writing and drama) in which I was active.  I would have scored no points whatsoever for athletic prowess.  I had no obvious musical or artistic talents.  If we had ever heard of start-up companies, I wasn't the sort of high school geek who might have started one up.  I came from a small town, outside the state of California, and from a high school that was decent, but with no pretensions of excellence.

I never took a course to help me write an application essay.  Indeed, I reached the post office with my application in hand, realized that I still hadn't filled in the essay portion of the form, and dashed one off with a post office pen. 

Somehow, in balance, something about my application appealed to someone who counted, and my particular combination of qualities filled some sort of niche -- facts for which I've been forever grateful.  Would I have been admitted on strictly quantifiable data?  Maybe. Who knows?  I recently read an article by a fellow graduate of my university, now a prominent writer, who recalled spending four years as an undergraduate praying that whatever error had led to her admission would not be discovered until after she had graduated.

I knew the feeling.  And I know I wasn't alone.

But I digress into reminiscence.  Starkman's primary concern, I think, is that the subjectivity of Cal's admissions process leads to "unfairness" in admissions.  For a private school, this is less a concern.  Harvard and Yale can decide what kind of student body they want, and admit whomever might help them achieve that goal.  If that means admitting an excellent oboeist whose grades are lower than many unsuccessful applicants -- well, that's their prerogative.  No one has a right to be a Harvard grad.

For public universities, funded by the public and subject to suspicious observation by the legislature, the situation is a bit dicier.  The cry -- expressed by some comments to the Starkman essay -- is for a return to a mathematical cut-off, with no subjectivity.  If schools were to rely solely on SAT scores, uniform across the nation, this might be feasible, but no one wants to admit students based solely on their arguably innate abilities.  The best indication of whether an applicant will successfully complete his degree is what he has done with those "abilities" throughout four years of high school.

But once we start looking at the more reliable numbers of GPA, we re-enter the world of subjectivity.  A 4.0 average from a big city school with some selectivity (or self-selectivity) -- like Garfield in Seattle -- is not necessarily the same as a 4.0 from a small rural school in northern Idaho.  And the fact that many GPAs are today adjusted to recognize good work in AP classes -- so that a 4.40 average is now quite possible -- may increase the fairness of comparisons between students from different schools in some respects, but also prejudices kids applying from smaller schools unable to offer AP classwork.

I suspect "fair admissions" is an illusory goal, and the term is more useful as PR, a term designed to placate the tax-paying public.  Like private schools, public schools are forced to decide the kind of student body they seek, and to admit students who help achieve that goal.  That doesn't mean that the Cal student body would ideally be the same as the Stanford student body.  Being a public university system does force the UC schools -- politically -- to work harder in seeking representation from diverse factions of the state. 

 But the "disclosure" that Starkman believes the university should make to parents and their children should be an honest disclosure that admission is not a reward for doing everything right, or evidence that the admittees are "better," "smarter" or "more worthy" than those denied admission.  Admission from that large pool of students who are all obviously capable of university level study should be viewed as a lottery, an act of grace, one that serves the needs and goals of the university rather than rewards the unquantifiable merits of the applicants.

Such a disclosure would be honest and it would be transparent.  But it probably wouldn't be acceptable to a public that firmly believes in a hypothetical system capable of judging one 18-year-old as being more or less worthy than another for college admission.  And it might not, in the long run, be advantageous to a university that holds itself out as not only being diverse and representative, but also being highly meritocratic, the crown jewel of the California system of universities.

Continued reliance on a certain degree of hokum and bunkum in discussing college admissions, in other words, may be to everyone's advantage.

Sibling rivalry

Nurek dam

You know how it is.  You've never heard of a word -- like desuetude, for example -- until you read it somewhere and look it up.  Then you seem to run into it on a daily basis.

I suppose I'd heard of Tajikistan.  Usually as part of a list of the "stans" in Central Asia that had broken off from the Soviet Union.  But, taken alone, I knew nothing about it.  I had no idea who Tajikistan's neighbors were, or how large it was relative to its neighbors (answer: small).  We were never taught in fifth grade its capital, climate, and "principal products."

Then I signed up for a September trek in Tajikistan.  Suddenly, I see references to the little nation everywhere.  Well, not everywhere.  It's not a household word, like "France" or "Japan."  But the name occasionally pops out at me.

As in this week's Economist -- an article entitled Folie de grandeur.  The writer describes Tajikistan as "dirt-poor but water-rich," and its president, Emomali Rakhmon, as an autocrat with a slush fund in the British Virgin Islands.  Rakhmon wants to build a second dam (upstream from the existing Nurek dam) on the Vakhsh river, a tributary of the Amu Darya (Alexander the Great's "Oxus," the river that separates Uzbekistan and Afghanistan).  Rakhmon's fellow autocrat across the western border in Uzbekistan is opposed.  The dam, he fears, will deprive his country of irrigation water.

During the more placid days of Soviet hegemony, Tajikistan sold hydroelectric power (and released needed water) to Uzbekistan in the summer, and Ubekistan sold Tajikistan natural gas in winter.  Now the two neighbors are at each other's throats. 

These things sometimes happen, once siblings grow up and leave the nest.

After our Tajikistan trek, we motor across the border into Uzbekistan.  I can only hope that they haven't closed the border -- or entered into active hostilities -- by that time.  Of course, being caught in the center of a Central Asian war would make for good blogging material. 

But, no.  Mutual irritation between Uzbekistan and Tajikistan seems destined to remain a "cold war."  Especially cold in winter, when each country could use its antagonist's energy products for heat and light.

Spray Park

Spray Falls

My hike yesterday to Spray Park, in the northwest corner of Rainier National Park, was perhaps premature -- by just two or three weeks.

The first couple of miles were beautiful, and easy hiking, through dense old-growth timber.  The definite high point was a short side trip to the bottom of Spray Falls -- an unexpectedly high spill of water over rock, kicking up billowing clouds of the eponymous spray.

After Spray Falls, the trail begins a series of steep switchbacks, leading to the lower meadows of Spray Park -- the "park" being a series of alpine meadows that climb higher and higher to a ridge separating Spray Park from Seattle Park to the east, or, as my guide puts it, "a vast corridor of open meadows interspersed among rocky moraines, lingering snow patches, whistling marmots, and sun-basking hikers."

The snow has been melting rapidly in our unaccustomedly sunny weather, but still covers much of the path once the hiker has ventured into open meadows.  The lower portion of Spray Park, where I ended my hike and had lunch, is slightly more than half free of snow cover, but the snow was obviously more extensive as the path rose higher.  I had done enough hiking (and postholing) in soft snow a couple of weeks ago at Mt. Pilchuck. 


Rainier and avalanche lilies

The views of Mt. Rainier and surrounding hills and ridges were impressive, and themselves worth the hike.  And it was interesting to see the bare meadows at this point, shortly after the snow cover had melted.  The grass was still gray and bedraggled, but the eager avalanche lilies were already emerging and covering the ground in places. 

No "whistling marmots" to entertain me, but I did encounter "camp robbers" (these appeared to be gray jays), who carried on prolonged negotiations with me for bits of my sandwich.  (I know, don't feed the animals -- but this was just a little convivial breaking of bread together).

Camp robbers

No marmots and -- in response to nervous queries from hikers I met coming up as I was returning -- no bears.  Or cougars.  

Nor many "sun-basking hikers" -- a bit early in the season, even in mid-July, and the early sunshine had changed to a cloud cover by the time I reached Spray Park.

I returned to the car happy, but not quite satisfied.  If I'd waited about three more weeks, Spray Park probably would have been stunning -- snow-free trails and carpets of wild flowers.  A good incentive to return, only slightly negated by the need to negotiate a dusty  17-mile gravel road leading to the trailhead.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

I'm constantly amazed by the number of cars I see on the road bearing expired license tabs.  Now, this reveals a couple of things -- first, that I'm so interested in license plates that I study them, as opposed to passing scenery, while driving; and, second, the I am so obsessive that I check the month and year of these licenses for expiration.

Let's forget about all that.  What's interesting is the degree of my irritation when I see a car with June 2013 tags on the road in July.  I'm irritated even though I know the owner probably has paid his fee and just hasn't got around to sticking the new tabs on the plate.  And when I see a car with 2012 (or a year or so older) tabs, my head is ready to explode.  Not only at the scofflaw who is pulling a fast one on those of us who religiously pay our fees and attach our tabs, but at the civil authorities who have not impounded this car and hauled its owner off to jail.  What the hell are the police doing, nowadays?  Mediating dog fights?

In calmer moments, realization of how ridiculous my outrage really is -- the tabs will get affixed, the taxes will get paid -- causes me some reflection.  While my anger at this particular "outrage" may be atypical, the nature of the anger itself seems to be a typical human reaction -- typical, if not of all humanity, at least of the middle class subset to which I belong.

Back in our nation's capital, even as I write, Congressmen are working themselves into a dither over whether to allow illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.  A large number of House members -- whether expressing their own private views or only those of their constitutents -- have adopted the mantra of "No Amnesty."  Illegal immigrants are in the country in violation of the law.  They should not -- must not -- will not -- be rewarded for their willful illegal entry. 

Taken to its logical extreme -- as, in fact, it usually is -- they argue that these immigrants not only should be refused a path to citizenship, but should be deported en masse.  Not only those who themselves crept across our Sacred Borders, defiling our Holy Motherland with their presence, but also their babes in arms who have since grown up speaking English, leading American teenage lives,  graduating with honors from college, and finding themselves now launched into respectable American careers.  "If they're so smart, let 'em go back to their 'own country'," I've read in comments. "They can be smart there, and help 'their countrymen'."

I'm appalled by these reactions, so lacking in compassion, so unreasonably callous as to the interests of immigrant families and so hostile to our own national interests.  But their emotional response is basically the same gut reaction I experience on the highway -- the law's the law!  Illegal immigrants violated the law; let them suffer the consequences.  In fact, let the consequences of the "iniquity of the fathers [be visited] on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations."

The proper answer both to me ("seize their cars and throw them in the slammer") and to the Republicans ("cast them hence, together with their mewling, snot-nosed brats") is pretty much the same:  Yes, the law is the law.  But a civilized society enforces its laws in a manner both reasonable and compassionate.

As we legal history buffs remember well, English courts of law in the early Middle Ages enforced the common law "by the book." The law was the law, by God, and appeals to fairness or reason were unavailing.  Over a period of time, however, England evolved a parallel set of courts -- courts of equity -- that applied the King's ultimate power to grant mercy in such a manner as to mitigate the rigors of the common law.

Congress is being asked, analogously, to apply equity in the enforcement of its own earlier immigration laws.  It is being asked, simply, to see the same need for flexibility and compassion that our English forebears had already discerned by the fourteenth century -- the need to temper justice with mercy.

But mercy is above this sceptered sway;
It is enthroned in the heart of kings;
It is an attribute to God himself;
And earthly power doth then show likest God's
When mercy seasons justice.

--Merchant of Venice.

And I, on my own part, will try to practice what I preach, the next time I find myself sitting in traffic behind a car with expired tabs.  "He's probably paid for the tabs, and they're sitting in an envelope on his dining room table," I'll tell myself, taking deep breaths.  "And even if he hasn't, he'll get the fee paid soon.  Not everyone has the luxury of focusing for long periods of time on their own and other people's license tabs."

And I'll certainly have a point.

Permission to enter

In his book of travel essays, Abroad, Paul Fussell observes dryly that passports were a nuisance first imposed on the British traveler in 1915.

The passport was the novel instrument by which England restricted travel during the war and by which, like all other countries, it has interfered in it ever since. Novel because before 1915 His Majesty's Government did not require a passport for departure, nor did any European state require one for admittance except the two notoriously backward and neurotic countries of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

In America, the requirement was lifted in 1921 and not reimposed until 1941 -- and we've never looked back.

Since "9-11," Americans have needed some sort of passport to visit even Canada and Mexico. Visas, on the other hand -- issued by the country to be visited, not the traveler's own government -- aren't generally required for visits to the most commonly touristed nations.

And so -- when I do need to obtain visas for a trip, I'm at the same time irritated by the inconvenience (and expense), and thrilled that I'm somehow wandering off the most beaten paths and into regions that are (by Yankee standards, at least) obscure and mysterious.

As mentioned in an earlier post, I'm going mountain trekking in Tajikistan in September, followed by a few days of tourist travel in Uzbekistan. Both countries require visas (and charge plenty for the privilege of entering). Both countries require recent photos, typed application forms, bogus "letters of invitation" from a local tourist agency, and full itineraries (no wandering around the Steppes of Central Asia on your own, getting yourselves into trouble, if you please!). Both countries -- as I now know -- take their own sweet time as they mull over the advisability of granting you their precious permission to enter. To be sure, I wasn't holding my breath to the extent I did a couple of years ago, awaiting my Iranian visa. But, even so, the delay before this year's visas were granted -- about three weeks for each -- did make me somewhat nervous.

Obtaining visas for countries like Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Iran -- and even India, to a lesser extent -- requires a certain amount of preparation and patience. Quite different is securing a Turkish visa -- a visa requirement imposed only relatively recently. (I'll be spending a couple of nights in Istanbul, before flying on to Central Asia.) The Turkish visa is obtained on-line, the main objective apparently being to charge twenty dollars to your credit card as quickly and painlessly as possible.

But I now have them all. My "papers are all in order," as officials in the old black and white movies used to say. I leave Seattle in 53 days (but, hey, who's counting), needing only to get my trekking equipment (and my lungs and leg muscles) in order before that date!

Henry in the Park

On St. Crispin's Day (October 25), 1415, English forces routed the French in the Battle of Agincourt.  Shakespeare, in his play Henry V, puts the French losses at 10,000 men; the English at 25.  A near miracle, an awestruck King Henry declaims:

Was ever known so great and little loss
On one part and on the other? Take it, God,
For it is none but thine!

More cautious estimates, both English and French, are less incredible, but by all accounts it was a dazzling victory for "King Harry's" forces.

Agincourt, this afternoon, was not a bloodsoaked field near Calais, but a lush amphitheater lawn in Seattle's Volunteer Park, surrounded by dense trees, with a blue sky overhead.  It was a beautiful day to sit on the lawn (or in chairs, for those clever enough to have brought them), surrounded by hordes of kids and the usual Seattle complement of urban dogs.

Seattle Shakespeare Company presented Henry V -- a well-received, free performance -- one of a series of summer performances in public parks throughout King County.  The Company will present The Tempest in Volunteer Park tomorrow night.

My youthful experiences with free public performances in public parks led me to expect (and fear) a campy, revised version of the Shakespearean text, lots of slapstick physical comedy, and a not-at-all subtle message opposing war in Afghanistan or Syria, or wherever.  Instead, although apparently condensed in places, the text was straight from Shakespeare.  The English and French forces did seem to be dressed like combatants in World War II, carrying automatic weapons not yet in general use in 1415.  Although the English competency with the longbow is generally accepted as a major factor in the scale of their triumph, not a longbow (or a short bow, for that matter) was to be seen in Volunteer Park.

There were a number of satisfying explosions, however.  (Cannon were in use by the fifteenth century, after all.)  Also, a somewhat anachronistic execution of a looter by a pistol shot to the head.  Hey, gotta keep the young'uns interested, too.

But the acting was fine, several of the actors, including the one playing King Harry, being members of Actors' Equity.  The sound system was quite good, overcoming the usual problem of muddled lines arising in outdoor productions.  And Shakespeare was glorious Shakespeare.

Which of us doesn't hope to live forever in the minds of our progeny?  The words of King Henry's "St. Crispin Day" speech  resonate today as emotionally as they did in Shakespeare's time:

Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot
But he'll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day: then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the king, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remember'd.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne'er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember'd;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;...

Even those of us with anti-military biases couldn't help glowing as we left the amphitheater, walking in the soft afternoon air, with those stirring words ringing in our minds.

Inspector Javert (USA)

China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, North Korea, Somalia, Sudan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, South Sudan, Taiwan, Singapore, Palestine Authority, Afghanistan, Belarus, Egypt, UAE, Malaysia, and Syria.

And the United States of America.

Those are the countries that made use of the death penalty in 2011.  Gives you sort of a warm and fuzzy feeling doesn't it?  To find ourselves in such enlightened company?  According to Wikipedia, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea are the only other developed countries, aside from the U.S.A., to have the death penalty on their books, regardless of whether they ever make use of it. 

In New York, the federal government is trying to persuade a federal jury to find that an unsavory murderer named Ronell Wilson should be put to death.  On federal racketeering charges, since murder is generally considered a state offense. 

It seems that New York's death penalty was held unconstitutional under state law after Wilson did his deed.  Therefore, Wilson could receive "only" the maximum penalty of life in prison without parole.  So the feds took over the case, convicted Wilson in 2007, and secured a verdict of death.  But the federal attorney got a little too excited and vigorous during closing arguments, and the death penalty -- but not the conviction -- was reversed on appeal.  Wilson has been serving his life sentence in a federal prison, while waiting for the Justice Department to decide whether to retry the penalty portion of the case. 

Wilson's life sentence apparently wasn't enough to satisfy federal prosecutors.

Although most prisoners sentenced to death languish in prison for years or decades while their appeals wend their way through the courts, someone up there feels that it's important to put yet another guy on death row.  Since 1988, according to the New York Times, the federal government has obtained 280 death sentences against convicted criminals, and executed a total of three of them.  It ain't just me who wonders what this is all about -- especially with Wilson already serving a life sentence.  According to the Times, United States Judge Nicholas G. Garaufis

insisted in open court that they [federal prosecutors] get approval from the new attorney general, Mr. Holder.  "If I'm going to spend four months of my career and millions of dollars of taxpayers' money trying another one of these penalty cases, I need to know that this attorney general wants to try it," Judge Garaufis said.

He summoned four thousand prospective jurors, from which 12 jurors were ultimately selected.

If  Attorney General Holder and the Assistant Attorney General for the Eastern District of New York have a lot of spare time and money on their hands, then instead of pursuing Ronell Wilson further, they might better have devoted their attention to deciding how to balance the civil liberties of American citizens against the rather frightening surveillance techniques now in the hands of the federal government.

Opening arguments in Wilson's trial started Wednesday in Brooklyn.

Mason Lake

 Two teens, one from Mukilteo and the other from Edmonds, are missing after a day hike Sunday to the Mason Lake area in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness, according to the King County Sheriff’s Office.
[The two teens, ages 18 and 19]... left at 7 a.m. yesterday for a hike and swim. When they didn’t return last night, their parents reported them missing.
King County Search and Rescue and the sheriff’s office are looking for the hikers, who are described as inexperienced.
--Seattle Times (7-1-13)

Gosh, a mysterious disappearance in the Washington wilderness.  I'd been looking for a hiking destination this weekend, so why not Mason Lake?  Like Sherlock Holmes, charging off to Baskerville Hall?  "The game is afoot!"

(Spoiler: The boys were found, lost but well, the following day.  But, I'd made my decision. Mason Lake it would be. The show must go on!)

Mason Lake is about six miles west of Snoqualmie Pass, north of (and high above) I-90.  It lies about a half mile within the Alpine Lakes Wilderness Area, which necessitates filling out an additional form at the trailhead.  The trailhead parking area was jammed; the trail itself was busy, but not uncomfortably so.  

The trail follows the grade of an old logging road for the first couple of miles -- steep, but smooth hiking through beautiful forest.  At times, the trail seems less like a trail than an old lane in rural England, winding its way through overarching trees, leading to an unseen country estate.  Then a narrower and even steeper trail takes off for the final mile to the lake.  

The three-mile hike up took me an hour and a half -- a short hike, but a good workout.  Getting lost on this trail would be like getting lost driving from Seattle to Tacoma on Interstate 5.  But apparently, the two "inexperienced" young hikers decided to go beyond Mason Lake to explore another nearby lake.  A decision easy enough to understand -- Mason Lake is surrounded by numerous other small lakes. Two of them -- in opposite directions -- lie within a mile's distance from Mason.  Good trails appeared to lead on to these lakes, as well.  Even if you got off the main trail, it would seem easy enough to return to it, especially with the crowds in the area.

Detective Jason Stanley said there are a lot of hikers in the area where the two went missing. This made the search more difficult.
“There are so many hikers up there, which may work against us,” Stanley said. “We haven’t found anything.”

I guess that out in the woods, anything can happen.  But all's well that ends well.  The two friends will have a story to tell on themselves in future years -- "Dude, like Search and Rescue was out all day looking for us, and then they helicoptered us out when they found us!  It was soooo cool!"

As for me, I only wished I had a skateboard -- and knew how to use it. The lower two miles of trail was so smooth I could almost have skated all the way back down.

To kill a mocking bird

But Mr. Snowden's profile will now be carefully studied by intelligence officials for clues about how to hire skilled young hackers without endangering the agency's secrets.
--New York Times

The National Security Agency, exposed with its hand wedged tightly into the cookie jar, is struggling to figure out how this could have happened.  Not how its hand got into the jar, as we might hope, but how someone managed to take a photo of it.

The New York Times carries a front page story today describing "Civil Libertarian Hero" and/or "Despicable Traitor" Edward J. Snowden's professional and personal background.  In large part, the article discusses how Snowden was able to circumvent whatever security protocols the Agency had in place to prevent theft and revelation of its domestic and foreign surveillance activities.  A former N.S.A. official states that the Agency's background investigation of Snowden was "clearly flawed."

"For years, N.S.A. and now the Cyber Command have struggled with how to relate to the hacker community," he added.  "It's obvious that some sort of arrangement to allow hackers to work for N.S.A. and the intelligence community in a systematic way is needed."

Lots of luck.

The N.S.A probably has no problem in obtaining reliable employees, graduates with good grades from good schools, who can handle most of its routine computer network activities.  But for its most critical work -- both defensive and offensive -- the Agency needs "hackers" who are highly creative, whose every instinct is to think "outside the box."  These hackers are the very experts least likely to follow orders blindly and ignore their own, personal sense of right and wrong.

Hackers -- young people in general, but hackers in particular -- have little sympathy with secrets or, for that  matter, with government.  They are willing to work for government because of the interesting challenges and the access to complex network security issues that such work provides.  They are valuable to government so long as their interests and the interests of government coincide. Hackers are essentially mercenary soldiers.  They'll accept pay to fight loyally -- until a compelling reason to stop doing so comes along.

Scan the social media.  The sympathy for Snowden among people under 40 or so is overwhelming.  Even those who question Snowden's motives, integrity and judgment feel that he has helped the country by shining light into dangerously dark corners of American government.  Snowden has the sympathy of the libertarians, the anti-government enthusiasts, the civil liberties advocates, those supporting a free and unregulated internet, and perhaps most liberals in general.  Not many young people who are interested in computer technology and programming fall outside all of those categories.

The government has always found a conflict between security and loyalty on the one hand and creativity on the other.  I'm reminded of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb, who probably did more than any other single person to save America from the need for a horrendously costly invasion of Japan.  But once we had the bomb, once we had the fruit of his creative and unorthodox mind, his sort was no longer needed.

After the war came the legendary security hearings — what a government lawyer reviewing the case later called “a punitive, personal abuse of the judicial system.” No evidence came out that he had engaged in espionage. An Atomic Energy Commission personnel board concluded he was a loyal citizen. But he was not above suspicion. That was enough for them to strip him of his security clearance.
--George Johnson, NY Times (June 28, 2013)

Dr. Oppenheimer did what he was asked to do, despite his moral qualms.  ("Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.")   But young Snowden didn't just express qualms, as did Oppenheimer -- he acted on them.  The American government merely destroyed the remainder of Oppenheimer's career as a physicist.  I'm nervous about what's in store for Snowden.

But our government should be concerned as well.  What wildly creative young hacker -- the prime target of the N.S.A.'s recruitment efforts -- will want to work for a government so willing, as he or she will view it, to crush dissent and conscience?