In the old man’s December 15th issue of the Post, I described my introduction to the Facebook social network and my reaction to it. Since then I have had some surprising results from my presence there. The latest was a short “Hi” communication from the granddaughter of my very accomplished and much admired niece, Eileen Lemna. The girl introduced herself as Kelsi Lemna, saying she had been surprised to see my profile on the network.
When she accepted me as a Facebook “friend” I left a message that I was equally surprised. Then I looked up her network profile. I thought the last time we had met, she had been a babe in arms. Now I found that she was obviously a very happy late teen (I think), a social butterfly, a guitar playing figure skater, and, like, a totally with it young adult of the current era whom I placed within Generation Y, or perhaps even Gen Z, if that has arrived yet. As the old man is a rather backward product of the Roaring Twenties Generation the generational divide in our respective musical tastes becomes obvious. Kelsi listed her favourite music as “heavy metal”. For my profile I had chosen “eclectic, but a day without Mozart is like a day without sunshine”.
That reminded me of a passing thought I recorded in the early nineties about my reaction to the sounds of the rock and roll music that continuously assaulted my eardrums unless I stayed within my own quiet corner of the world. In my opinion the situation has worsened since then and the rap and even worse versions of the genre continue to be mostly meaningless noise to the old man. So I offer the following verses as my critique for Kelsi and other potential readers to consider:
HEAVY METAL
The pounding beat of heavy metal Driving sex into the ground Sending vanity to madness Sending madness into hell.
Nothing left but sounds of engines Crashing sounds to beats of drums Till the madness screams to heaven Senses gone and world undone.
Ever more the madness centres Meaning goes around the curve All there is, is sound and fury Ever closer, closer, here.
Grins of glee as senses leave us Beating sounds of metal grind Into crashing death and splinters All that matters is the beat.
Human sounds of screaming fury Join the drums in crazy race Twisting forms all havoc centred Reaching, searching, heaven bent.
Lost in hells of self creation Pounding on we never stop Beats and screams and madding laughter Is the meaning metal found.
Damning souls to life eternal Of the hell where loudness dwells Never stopping never sleeping Faster always, louder too.
The metal wears, the cells divide The universe goes mad Until the rhythm disappears And sounds disorganize.
Then finally the silence enters And space is all around Where all we find is peace and beauty But we’re not there, we’ve found the sound.
A week or two ago the old man received a rare email from our son, Dave. Its only message invited me to see his photos on Facebook. In an earlier call when we had complained about the rarity of his emails he told us that after his long work hours he had little energy, patience or desire for computer related activity. We were shocked at this sudden willingness to post his pictures!
So I couldn’t resist. Following the prescribed protocol, I found it required me to join the network by providing my own profile outline and also another of the many passwords one is supposed to memorize. That is expecting a lot from the old man. Still, I persisted and found that almost all the next or later generation members of my family could be “friends” of mine on Facebook.
Current mobile communication technology seems to be second nature to the younger ones and I am guessing that is what prompts them to post their latest gripes, achievements, complaints, and thoughts so readily to their “friends” on this and perhaps other social networks. Many of the brief posts seem to have been by way of text messages from mobiles, if the abbreviated language is any criterion, and one can detect evidence of the youngsters’ tendency to multi-task, perhaps indulging in such no-no’s as thumbing text messages while they should be focusing on something else.
Still, I have already had responses from grandsons who very seldom arrive at my Inbox, downloaded some photos from them, and even watched our great-grandson, Alex, starring in a “Happy Birthday, Daddy” video. Son, Dave, whose invitation to see his photos originally enticed me into this new world, has not been so forthcoming. I saw only a recent profile picture of him and a snap of his runabout business pickup truck. His original post was a short complaint that his boys had talked him into joining, and one later one talked about bad weather for driving late in November. Hey, Dave, add at least a picture with a caption once a week or so!
When I first scurried through various “friends’” pages on Facebook I must admit that I felt almost as though I was travelling on a foreign planet inhabited by aliens speaking in strange tongues. The old man has to plead his age, his tendency to be a loner, and the traditions he has dragged with him through the years that will undoubtedly designate him as a stranger to many of the inhabitants of the social network. A few searches of public figures found there proved to me that it takes all kinds to make not only a world, but even a village, as they say. I was somewhat dismayed to learn, for example, that Sarah Palin (Is she one of those aliens I mentioned?) and I actually have something in common, which I would have considered impossible. According to her Facebook profile she was born on my birthday. I wonder what the astrologers would tell me about that!
The network has many possibilities, and a few surprises, some of which I have enjoyed already. But I sense it also has unknown risks. The Internet seems to be so full of predators, one has to believe that almost everything posted to these networks, and possibly everything stored in one’s personal computer makes one subject to identity theft. Furthermore, no matter how careful one may be about posting libellous content in journals such as this there is always a possibility of offending someone somewhere, isn’t there?
Notwithstanding the strangeness, the old man will risk making the attempt to share this and maybe later issues of The Old Man’s Post with “friends” and perhaps others on the Internet, through my tentative Facebook profile page (see my Facebook profile photo above) just to see if a few more readers may be curious enough about this old man’s passing thoughts to take a look now and then and thus justify continuing the effort.
The old man’s good intentions about regular publication of The Post rarely bear fruit. One of my original reasons for this experiment with the strange and wondrous machines of the new technologies was to observe and record for all and sundry a few of the symptoms and effects of the aging process in the old man’s particular situation. One obvious effect is the hiatus between publications and the quality of material in sequential issues.
The old man’s record so far in 2010 is poor. After publishing a total of 12 issues to the end of April, I only managed one each in May, June and July, and then left a complete blank until now. I have complained before of my Rapid Aging Syndrome. Here are some of its elements I note this year:
The effects of nearly forty years of insulin dependent diabetes and general aging upon my physical ability. A weakening in the lower limbs and loss of balance slows walks to a crawl with the aid of a walking stick. Some of Abbotsford’s less patient new generation drivers even swear at me rudely and loudly if I slow their progress making turns around crosswalk protected intersections. In a later Post, if I can manage it without too much complaining, I may outline a typical good day and describe how it is controlled by my insulin, food, and exercise therapy regime;
The long hot rainless summer had its effect. The temperature, humidity and poor air quality kept both my wife and me pretty well confined to our apartment, which we kept within reason with partial air conditioning and fans. Even early morning walks affected my breathing and caused further debilitation;
Shirley and I have had a lot of togetherness since before our marriage more than 60 years ago. As we age and our circle of acquaintance becomes smaller we tend to be loners rather than to seek out group activities. One might think that would provide more time and incentive to pursue this kind of communication; in fact it seems our lack of interaction with others, even in our apartment complex, reduces the selection of topics to talk or write about.
The old man’s niece, Linda, one of his many fascinating next generation family members, completed her 60th year early this November. She always seems to find some way to encourage me to some sort of mental or physical activity. This time, in thanking me for my birthday greetings she wondered whether, having reached age 60, she would now have to wait until age 61 before beginning her 7th decade. And the answer, I said, was that her 6th decade ended and her seventh decade began at the same moment, which occurred at the moment when those 60 years ended and her 61st year began.
Of course that started me wondering again about the very concept of time and space, about past, present and future, the speed of its arrival and departure and about the nature of the number 0 (zero), or “nothing”.
I checked some of the early classical philosophers and mathematicians on the concept of the number 0 and found an excellent Introduction to Arithmetic written by Nicomachus of Gerasa towards the end of the first century AD. I wished that some of my public school teachers had explained arithmetic to me in that conceptual way when I was a kid. He started out stressing the difference between odd and even numbers between 1 and 9. I found, however, that nowhere did he refer to 0 as a number, though his tables and examples did include the numbers 10 and 100, which end with 0. Incidentally among his first lessons was the fact that any number chosen at random is one-half the sum of the numbers preceding and following it. Say you pick the number 123. You will find that number is equal to 122+124/2. Though I haven’t reasoned out why, I sense that and the rest of the textbook would have made the subject in school much easier to understand and work in practical ways than the methods used in my school days. And if you go into negative numbering, coming later in his material, which I have only scanned, you will find the rule still works and that if you add -1 and +1, you still get nothing, or 0.
Then I checked out some of the contributors to Wikipedia on the history of year numbering systems. One writer makes much of the fact that historians have never included a year zero in the calendar system. That does not surprise me; mathematicians and philosophers would not have been able to multiply 0 by 12 months to make a traditional year, whether based on lunar or solar calculations because they would still end up with nothing. The lack of a year “0” means, the Wikipedia writer said, citing as example, “that between January 1, 500 BC and January 1, AD 500, there are 999 years: 500 years BC, and 499 years AD preceding 500.” To my way of thinking the omission of a year 0 does not do that, for the year cannot be measured from its beginning to the beginning of the next year, but from beginning (the moment it starts) to the moment it ends on December 31. So there is a regular progression forward in the numbering if he said instead “that between January 1, 500 BC and December 31, AD 500 there are 1000 years…..”
No matter how we calculate it, existence will go on in an endless present with no numerical zero or infinity in a great circle of life until that life ends. And so will The Old Man’s Post when his own circle closes and I don’t expect there will be any residuals. The rest is mystery.
The old man has been dilatory in attending to his Post. Let me simply claim that as a privilege of age and the many distractions demanding an old man's more immediate attention.
Furthermore a review of the brief history of this publication indicated that my publication tends to dwell on nostalgia, a less than hopeful future for current and future generations, and criticism of past and current political realities. Given the nature and the variety of the institutions and manifold gods we have created, permanent turmoil seems inevitable. With 2010 half over I was determined to find something about which I could "accentuate the positive" in the words of a popular song of my era. Surely, I thought, the beginning of summer in this my 84th year, will make the old man feel better and I will once more find the bit of vigour I still possessed last year. World and local affairs certainly had to improve, did they not? That would provide the positive commentary for the next contribution to the Post! Events conspired against those good intentions.
Put the case of the national celebration of Canada Day at Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The Queen and her consort were on an official visit to the country for ceremonies marking the Canadian Navy's centenary and would be present for the July 1 celebration with her Canadian prime minister at her side. Queen Elizabeth, a year older than the old man, showed amazing stamina as she was forced through all the traditional folderol of military inspections and march-pasts, left to step onto a small reviewing stand with no one near for support in case she faltered or stumbled. I lived in apprehension, knowing I would not be able to manage. She did.
Somehow she also managed to sit through an hour or more of the caterwauling entertainment supposedly representing today's proud Canadian culture. At least it must have been deemed so by the prime minister and his organizers. I found it a mish-mash of the worst sights and sounds from our subsidized multicultural Canadianism the producers could have found. To the old man's ear even the newly minted Canadian Tenors popularized by the recent Olympic Games in Vancouver, managed to butcher our national anthem.
Furthermore, the old man was disappointed by the absence of our Governor General. I could not understand what political reality or formal protocol required her China visit to be scheduled during the Queen's visit. Her presence at previous Canada Day celebrations was one of their more delightful aspects and I thought the Queen and her Canadian representative, lame duck appointment or not, would have made the occasion special.
In this issue I will put only one more case for consideration that was also highlighted for the old man by my view of the Canada Day schlimazel. Somehow, since I was an American born child of foreign immigrants who moved to Canada and became naturalized here in the thirties, the rules of citizenship in both countries have changed without much serious debate. As a young teenager I was informed by US Immigration that I would need to make a choice of country before I reached age nineteen, that if I served in Canadian forces, voted here or otherwise invoked Canadian citizenship as listed on my father's naturalization I could not again be admitted to the US without formal application for immigration to the States as a Canadian. I could not be both.
Today, multiple citizenships seem rampant. Our liberal multicultural policies seem to encourage it. Many from war-torn, oppressive and often theocratic governments, seek the benefits of Canadian generosity and encouragement of the cultural diversity they bring. Often the hearts of those many, their loyalty, their languages, their religions, remain with the country of origin. And soon they seek to impose old-country ways and even laws in Canada. I'm afraid the most fecund racial, religious or cultural groups so liberally accepted in what we know as Canada now will prevail. The consequences will not likely be the one world hoped for, or even one country that we know, but a new tribalism.
The five editorial leaders of the April 22, 2010 issue of The Economist once again ratified the old man’s long held view that he has indeed lived in the best of places in the best of times in the earth’s history. Of course, the corollary of that title is that those “best of times” are ending with the old man’s tenure here. Much as I would have it otherwise for the sake of our progeny, my cup no longer “runneth over” and as so often in my case, my thoughts again leave me with my cup half empty rather than half full.
Presumably the magazine’s editorial staff decided that Synthetic biology, The euro-zone crisis, Thailand in flames, Water, and Facebook and Google were the most significant news items deserving extended coverage in that week’s issue. Throughout its history the magazine has championed free markets, global free trade and the benefits of human innovation and technology. Following up on the euro-zone leader in that issue, the cover leader of the very next issue warns of “double-dip recession” but the writers still try to reassure us that “the fundamentals [of the market] are reasonably good” and the worst could be avoided if politicians would only use reasonable judgment.
I have no wish to be known as a Luddite opposed to all scientific innovation. The gods know that the wonders of technology have made it possible for me to enjoy in old age the challenges of continued learning, frustrations and all. I well remember that during my college years in the mid forties, then UBC’s Physics Department head among other things, Dr. Gordon Shrum, speaking to a gathering of students, described in his inimitable enthusiasm the marvels of the transistor and all the wonders of the future that would come to pass as its many uses unfolded in the lifetime of the students then at college. Shrum was possibly the most positive doer and ultimate mover and shaker in public life that I have known. He saw nothing but good resulting from scientific discoveries and innovations and what he considered progress in community growth. I have no doubt that the amazing scientific achievements in the near quarter century since he left for other spheres will only increase his optimism, fully assured that his successors will deal efficiently with whatever little problems those innovations may cause.
And yet I continue to believe that every “improvement”, each new tool or gadget to make our lives easier, more interesting, faster or better, carries with it the seeds of our own destruction. When I heard Shrum’s address, the atom bomb was new history. Though I don’t recall his reference to it, I am almost certain that like the scientists who developed the bomb, Dr. Shrum thought primarily of its positive potential as energy source and not as the most fearful agent of mass destruction that still dominates international politics today. Every time we take a bite from Eden’s tree of the knowledge of good and evil, humanity seems to look only at the “good” part without considering the “evil” consequences that will likely follow. The point may be illustrated by a reading of the five editorial leaders mentioned above. I would comment particularly on the two I consider most fundamental:
And man made life. This opening leader refers to the Venter Institutes’ success in making a bacterium that has an artificial genome—creating a living creature with no ancestor. The editorial writer says, “It is now possible to conceive of a world in which new bacteria (and eventually new animals and plants) are designed on a computer and then grown to order. That ability would prove mankind’s mastery over nature in a way more profound than even the detonation of the first atomic bomb.” The writer points out some of the marvellous possibilities for the infant process of creation. Creditably he also points out the potential horrible consequences of what someone’s designer creation may cause, referring to the release of “malicious biological inventions”. He mentions the possibilities of terrorists and even hackers causing havoc. My feeling is that whether malicious or benevolent, a biological invention released by its maker can breed by itself, go through some sort of evolutionary process, mutate into other forms of life and so on. Once perfected one can imagine all sorts of strange consequences. No doubt computer technology will be completely changed. Economies will rise and fall with great uncertainty. Entertainment and even the criminal justice system will be turned upside down. Identification of criminals through unique DNA sequences, so popular with the CSI television series, will become as passé as eyewitness evidence, for presumably it could now be duplicated or inserted into the evidentiary process. The editorial writer’s concluding recommendation is to Regulate, Monitor, Encourage the good to outwit the bad and with luck keep the Nemesis at bay. Our record of doing that in the societies we know today is rather dismal.
Water. This editorial report on “The world’s most valuable stuff” reinforces even further my “cup is half empty” syndrome. The writer lays it on the line. There is only so much water. “Nature”, he says “has decreed that the supply of water is fixed.” With one billion people now without access to decent water, he depicts scenarios of water wars, starvation, mass migration and fighting all over the world. Though we cannot increase the supply of water, The Economist predictably offers better management, genetic development of less thirsty crops, technology and the market mechanism as ways of limiting over usage. In this case, however, the magazine’s usual rosy outlook does not prevail. Even now in the old man’s rain forest valley on the west coast, lawn watering is banned for two months this summer because of low reservoirs. How long will it be before local crops wither on the vine and we too will be at each other’s throats to obtain decent water to drink, let alone grow crops?
"And the Lord God commanded the man, 'You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat of it you will surely die."
Thus it seems that God already knew his wilful creation would undoubtedly eat of it for he said "when", not "if you eat of it" and so it has been. Man (and woman) has taken bite after bite ever since, until now the fruit of the garden is nearly exhausted, leaving little alternative to the promise of the biblical myth that we "will surely die".
A similar lesson is produced in Greek mythology when Prometheus is warned by Zeus about the dangers of stealing the fire of the gods. In a recent interview on the last broadcast of Bill Moyers' Journal author-ecologist, Barry Lopez, translated the myth to mean that technology can be your undoing if you do not deal justly and with reverence for all things to make it work.
Yet in spite of all the efforts of the thinkers, writers, activists and revolutionaries scattered among its still increasing numbers, our species continues to ignore those ancient lessons. In spite of the now obvious damage we continue to inflict on the flora and fauna that supports us, we insist on succumbing to the demands of the post-industrial money machine to consume every fleeting and untested experimental new technology touted in the now global market place, possible dangers to ourselves notwithstanding.
The risks known and unknown are legion; our responses to the few generally covered by our media only when they have saleable news or entertainment value, are sorry and indifferent. What can we do, after all? Witness community and government responses to a few of them:
Rapid polar climate change. The response seems to be, "We must take advantage of the opportunity to claim national ownership of the newly accessible land and water and exploit its natural resources for our benefit;
The recent offshore oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico that is turning that entire body of water into a toxic and potentially lifeless sump. A well intentioned president can do little but order a drilling moratorium bvut indications are that the old barons will persuade authorities to expand offshor drilling with promises of doing better and abiding by regulations more strictly enforced.
The recent speech of U.S. President Obama to college graduates warning of the dangers of new technology, while at the same time he has and continues to advocate the rapid and unregulated spread of broadband Internet channels so every person, especially children, across America has access to it, likely by the spread of wireless towers all over every city and village in the place. Furthermore the president uses his personal Blackberry constantly with no apparent thought of its health risks.
The recent release in Canada of a report on the cancer risks of cell phone use, four years after obviously incomplete and tainted information was collected, according to critics of the report, which is nothing more than a down-playing of the dangers, particularly to children.
We are all guilty of indifference and apathy, cheering on the "green" industries seen by business as new sources of capital. Many such ventures turn out upon further examination to do more harm than good and are mere costly experiments. A group called Citizens For Safe Technology has collected a great deal of information and collated many online resources on the dangers of radio frequency microwave radiation and related matters and I urge all readers to check out their website at http://www.citizensforsafetechnology.org/ .
The dire warnings of the gods of those early myths may already be beyond remedy. In time there is no doubt we and our progeny "will surely die", though some of them "may ultimately prevail and procreate new and dominant species" as Darwin thought possible in his Origin of Species.In the same paragraph he did warn, however, that "of the s;pecies now living veery few will transmit progeny of any kind to a distant futurity; .... the manner in which all beings are grouped shows that the greater number of species in each genera, and all the species in many genera, have left no descendants, but have become utterl extinct." May we all rest in peace.
Perhaps the old man just needed a change of pace. Perhaps the attraction of mystery novels was beginning to abate after keeping me entertained endlessly for years. Or maybe it was just the recent re-immersion in the Mennonite story of the village theocracy of my youth that made me seek slightly more challenging reading material recently.
My weekly issue of the Economist is an almost endless source of book reviews on a great variety of subjects. Most I requested and was able to get through my public library were rewarding, though some new fiction I have found disagreeable. Most writing, most art in fact, is created, I feel, as a singular, personal and often autobiographical conceit. Whether it be history, painting, fiction, current politics or the drawings done by cave dwellers, the work came from the energy, drive, imagination, experience and personality of the individual who created it. I have said before that there seems to be nothing new to be said about almost any subject and yet uncounted numbers of individuals keep saying it as they have since human understanding and expression began.
Although I have experimented with verse since my mid-teens and enjoyed the music and rhythm of many of the poems covered in early school English classes, I have rarely turned to the works of the great poets and playwrights for absorbing reading. Memorization assigned for class was always difficult for me, and once memorized only scraps stay with me until the next reading. Some people, including my wife, can still recite some of the favourite verses memorized as a child, a feat I always envy.
Back in the sixties we acquired among other works, an English translation of the Iliadand the Odyssey attributed to Homer, the ancient Greek blind poet, who was perhaps a composite of many story tellers over many centuries. Many years ago I tried to work my way through both books, even making notes of some of the characters. They are the English translation by Samuel Butler and although the way the written version ended up was fairly orderly in its linear chronology, I found the multitude of gods and the variations in their names totally confusing. Zeus, known as Jupiter by the Romans, is apparently referred to as Jove. Furthermore, the interaction of the gods with humans, as the goddess Calypso wanting to marry Ulysses, and the idea of the various gods opposing each other and taking opposing sides in human confrontations, made it difficult for me find any order in the chaos of the tales.
The old man has not been one to focus his attention on old literary works or historical events that may be real or mythical; nor could I make a life’s work out of studying such things as the existence or nature of angels or the works of one author or deceased king, as is the case with certain learned Egyptologists. For myself, I have experimented mostly with short verse, read other poets for diversion and generally avoided long poems of epic proportions.
Recently, however, The Economist reviewed a book length poem by Derek Walcott just published. It was praised by the reviewer as once again up to the standard of Walcott’s greatest work, the poem Omeros, published in 1990 that led to Walcott receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1992. Though my library did not have the new book listed yet, I was able to get Omeros and have now reached Book 5 of the story on page 189 of a total of 325 pages.
Although poetic license allows Walcott to hop around at will among four or five different story threads, the central theme always comes back to the island of St. Lucia in the Caribbean. One of the story threads covers Walcott himself and he can suddenly be in conversation with his dead father, who seems to be of mixed African slave and European slave owner origin and do so either in the Caribbean home town or perhaps inBoston. Equally he can tell the story of Achille, one of his black fisherman with a name from Greek mythology, as his canoe is taken right across the Atlantic to his native village in Africa to chat with his father and his village and relive their capture for the slave trade 300 years earlier, all in one night before returning to the island. The name Omeros is rarely used in the poem itself and I resorted to a Google search to look for its meaning, but the only thing I came up with was that it could be an alternative pronunciation for the name “Homer”, perhaps as a reference to the author himself.
The plot, if it can be called one, the images, the ideas, and the rhythm of Walcott’s language makes the book a page turner for me and I have renewed my loan so I will not fail to complete the read. In some ways I was able to identify with the author in the descriptions he uses in his verse. I have referred a number of times in previous issues to “My early morning dreamscape, that strange mittelgeist period approaching wakefulness when this old man is never sure what unique creatures or sensations may populate his unconsciousness and leave a stream of its unreality with him when fully awake.” Walcott must have experienced similar phenomena, if such they be, for early in the story about Achille and Hector vying for the love of Helen, Walcott comes up with these lines describing a similar experience:
And now I would wake up, troubled and inexact,
from that shallow sleep in which dreams precede sunrise,
as the vague mind cautiously acknowledges the fact
of another’s outline, ….
So far, so good I say, for Walcott’s “near epic” poetry. It is timely for my generation and therefore less confusing than Homer and his characters. I still find the story confusing as it jumps from one thread to another because I tend to be very linear in my thinking. Yet I am much taken with the language of the poem, Omeros, and its indication of the author’s world view about the history of conquest, slavery and the failures of our kind.
After my last issue, titled Vigilance and Vigilantes, I did get some reaction from a few people who are still active in preserving the Yarrow Mennonite story. I thank them now for communicating with the old man. There comments and recollections brought home the fact that my family was not the only one with community relationship problems then.
From the late twenties through the forties and into the fifties in what I have icalled the Village Theocracy of my youth the strains and conflicts between the generations that are always in evidence seemed even more extreme in that place.
They were more difficult because of the congregational effort to remain separate, apart, different and unworldly—a really tough job for first generation kids like the old man, always exposed to the surrounding community culture, if only through the public school. They were further exacerbated by the approach and start of World War II.
I was still with my family in the hop harvest, living in one of the Golding Farm cabins at Sardis when Hitler invaded Poland at the beginning of September 1939. Later that month I started bussing to Chilliwack Central School with all the other Yarrow kids. There we suffered the slings and arrows of being squareheads. Many of my bus mates still reverted to their Low German on the way to and from home and Sardis kids picked up on the way from Yarrow complained about that to the teachers. I can still visualize my classmate, Peter Ewert (later an eminent horticulturist), and me waiting for our bus after school, when Ivan Wells, a particularly aggressive logger’s son from Sardis, came up to Pete, saying, “Well, squarehead, wanna fight?” Pete answered, true to his non-violent heritage, “No thank you, not today”. Well, we were only twelve years old!
A visit to the Elmer Wiens yarrow.ca web pages also reminded the old man that he is not kidding when he calls this website The Old Man’s Post. It took me a whole evening to go through that site’s list of deaths to read the short biographies of just those whose names I thought I remembered from my Yarrow days in the thirties and early forties. I found that far too many of the kids I associated with in grades 1 to 6 in Carl Wilson’s elementary school at Yarrow until 1939 are listed among those obituaries, though I remembered them as stronger, more athletic, more popular and more aggressive than I ever managed to be.
After reading the Johannes and Tina Harder story and reading the current views of those who responded to my review, I was particularly struck by the fact that the young children of MB Church members who were shunned at congregational meetings, were also shunned by other children at school. If that instruction went out to my school acquaintances, I never became aware of it. Perhaps that was because I was basically a loner by nature and had simply refused to attend most church functions by the mid thirties.
What does surprise me, however, is that none of the church elders or preachers or Sunday school or German school teachers, including Preacher Harder, ever followed up on my spiritual welfare or lack of it. Many of the boys I knew experienced conversions, temporary or otherwise, though I never observed much change in their behaviour after the event. That reminds me of a comment from my older brother when he was manager of the Haas Hop Company at Sardis in the fifties and sixties. As foreman and manager he had hired many Yarrow employees for various seasonal field work jobs in which they used company tools and supplies. A percentage of that seemed to disappear as workers borrowed the stuff for personal use at their homes. Not infrequently, when MB members were converted, they approached him in his office to beg forgiveness for taking things that didn’t belong to them. They got the forgiveness but he didn’t recall once that any of them offered to make restitution.
So much for nostalgia! It is altogether too much with us old men, when our association with the current world and community events becomes almost non-existent. I am hoping that with this issue, I can leave those Yarrow days behind, and concentrate more on what is going on around me rather than re-live those long ago days, both the good ones and the not so good ones.
Preacher Harder fought a more than thirty year battle after arriving in Canada with the Russian Mennonite immigration wave of the twenties to preserve an old communal way of life. The principal fortress for his battle was the MennoniteBrethrenChurch at Yarrow in British Columbia’s FraserValley. There he found his niche and became not only the “High Priest” of his family as this book indicates but the High Priest and Chief Enforcer of the laws of the village theocracy his church created during my time there. Directly or indirectly he also sanctioned certain brawnier church members as vigilantes to mete out appropriate discipline in the church basement and elsewhere to backsliders among children of church families they sought out in late evening hours. Some of my village friends of the early forties described them to me as the Gestapo.
In spite of all those efforts, even in that seemingly isolated village of the 1930’s and 1940’s when I grew up, Yarrow became the graveyard of that way of life. In retrospect it seems to me that Preacher Harder in his search for a congenial congregation after arrival in Canada ought to have associated himself with the Holdeman Mennonites, a sect founded by John Holdeman in the State of Ohio in the mid-nineteenth century, about at the same time as our Mennonite Brethren sect separated from the mainstream Mennonite Church in Russia. When I visited my Holdeman cousins in Kansas in 1985 they continued to be more successful at keeping the strict culture of their church than any of the MB churches I have known in recent years in Canada.
The book is A Generation of Vigilance, the biography of Johannes Harder and his wife Tina, written by retired SaskatchewanUniversity history professor and author, T. D. Regehr and published by the CMU Press of Winnipeg at the behest of the Yarrow Research Committee and the editor of its Yarrow history, Leonard Neufeldt. After advised of the book’s publication I picked up my copy of the book, glanced at it briefly and found it somewhat hard to revisit those Depression days again.
The reason for that ambivalence lies in the differences between my family’s personal and church relationships and those of so many others who have written generally positive histories and memoirs about those early Yarrow days and the heyday of the Mennonite Brethren Church there under Harder’s leadership. I grew up and went to school with the two oldest of Harder’s sons and experienced his invasive influence on our family. I remember him as a stern but approachable gentleman of the old school. I was not one of his fans. Still, any resentment I may have had about the treatment of my parents by the church in the Harder days has never stayed with me. Harder and his fellows in the church were no more able then to accept the changing culture, than I am able to accept much of today’s overly permissive culture.
Those differences went back many years. Firstly, my father’s family still had German citizenship after several generations in Russia. Being of military service age Dad was interned as an enemy alien from 1914 to 1918 and our family patriated to Germany as Red Cross refugees in 1919/20 with 4 Russian born children. Later, after correspondence with my mother’s Holdeman Mennonite cousins in Kansas they emigrated to Halstead in that state with travel assistance arranged by the cousins (thus their later dispute with the Yarrow Church about its levy for a share of the CPR reiseschuld), arriving in that community in December 1922. After four upwardly mobile years there but with differences between my parents continuing as it had almost since their marriage in 1910, my family again became what I have called “Footloose and Rootless in America”, eventually arriving at Yarrow by car on December 7, 1928, some 14 months before the younger Harder family arrived there in January 1930.
Until my reading of Vigilance I had never made myself familiar with the detailed and restrictive rules and regulations insisted on by Harder and the closed committee he led for those who wished to maintain YarrowMB Church membership. It explains much about the trauma experienced by our so frequently non-conforming family members with the incompatibility between my parents and the already Americanized ways of my three surviving Russian born brother and sisters, in their late teens in those years. The following excerpts from the first edition of my memoirs as I tried to write them more than 20 years ago, will illustrate the differences.
We moved into our new 14’x20’ shack on the 4 acre Yarrow farm at the dyke in 1934, starting bare bones scrambling for food and shelter in the depths of the Great Depression. The advantages of our “great American dream” experience, already lost in five short years, left us as “poor white trash” among our contemporaries of the closed religious society of Depression Yarrow. Many of the more recent CPR and MCC sponsored immigrants who found their way to Yarrow during this period were hungrier, in the sense that they were more anxious to recover the lost glories of their pre-revolutionary villages in Russia. Many were more aggressive, harder working, more cohesive and less sensitive to the express or implied criticism of the larger English speaking community all around.
Most Yarrow adults in that time had no wish to be absorbed in the surrounding English-Canadian culture. Even Yarrow’s geography conspired to isolate its closed society from the surrounding community. The closed triangle created by the Sumas prairie, the BC Electric Railway tracks and the VedderCanal, allowed the church centred immigrants to drop their spoor around the village like a badger around its hole. Those few of the original “Canadian” settlers who stayed on, whose homes and farms hugged the old Road along the lower slopes of Vedder Mountain, like the Siddals, the Eckerts, the Belroses, and the Knoxes, (Mr. Knox, not a fan of the Mennonites or their settlement, had been heard to prophesy, “they’ll all drown down there, and I hope they do!”) were tolerated as outside functionaries or adopted as resource people. Most had well established homes and orchards, and were a source of free fruit, tree and shrub cuttings, berry plants, employment and credit for the new settlers.
Some of the new settlers had natural advantages, though I never heard any of our family concede even at their lowest ebb, that some of their neighbours might be their “betters” with both physical and intellectual advantages that Mom and Dad had never acquired. Some had been proud owners of large estates in Russia. They were not simply run-of-the-mill villagers who had a house and barn on a small village holding with a “destine” or two of grain outside the village. There were those whose private holdings had rivalled those of the lesser Russian aristocracy, and some lived in Yarrow. Others were better educated in the old country than any of the Nickels. Most were prepared to use any available means to rebuild what they had lost because of the Godless red tide that swept away their riches and their independence.
Above all, though, almost all the villagers had an advantage the Nickels by now could not aspire to. That was the advantage of being unified in their families and in their church relationships. There was a great deal of hypocrisy, though no greater than that found in other social groupings, but publicly the large majority of the villagers accepted the sanctions of the church without question and the church took them to its bosom. Such was not the case with the Nickels. Though women could be dominant in the privacy of the home, they were “untertan” ruled by their husbands, in public. Families worked as units and children of large families most often put all their work and earnings in the family pot. Such togetherness did not work for us even though my oldest brother and sister helped Mom and Dad keep bread on the table.
Some five years after completing that memoir I wasted my time on a series of short stories about a fictional town, most of which turned out as poorly disguised autobiographical experiences. One I called A Tale About Differences: A story about PoplarVillage. The following short excerpt may further explain my ambivalence about revisiting my Depression Era upbringing at Yarrow.
Years of attempted mediation by the preacher and other elders soon followed. The episodes of argument and prayer in that Depression shack when I was ten or eleven did more to turn me against religion than the rational influences of college training. The preacher rarely came alone. With one or two of the senior elders he often arrived at our small spread after we completed our evening chores. They invariably greeted me as fond uncles and talked to my parents most congenially; a neighbourly call to pass the time of day. They were never in a hurry in those days but we all knew why they were there.
During those visits, Mother sent me up the ladder to my attic bed as soon as she could and told me to go to sleep. When my rattling around stopped, what amounted to an attempted exorcism began. I never slept and the walls and attic floor were thin shiplap. The exact words, which by then had switched to the more formal High German of their Bible, were not all understandable but I knew exactly what was going on from scraping chairs and voice modulations. The preacher gently work his way around to Bible readings at the table and meditations. He always ended by relating those readings to the problem between my parents. Invariably a dialogue with my mother followed. Mother lacked formal education except for a few elementary grades of the church school in the old country. In spite of that handicap years of reading and thinking made her what I consider an exceptional Bible scholar for the times.
“Listen to the words of the Apostle,” Brother Martel intoned in his best pulpit manner. He was particularly fond of quoting from the fourteenth chapter of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. In his best High German and all the sonorous majesty he could muster, Martel read, “Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience, as also saith the law. And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.”
The story of the Harders, their backgrounds and their troubles and migrations after the Russian Revolution is by now a familiar one. Except for their generational connection to the Mennonite preaching ministry, their story is not unique. Nor is the story of their poverty stricken beginnings in Yarrow. It was common to many through the whole of the Depression era, except for the demands of Harder’s devotion to preaching and church leadership. Nevertheless, for those efforts the Harders were often rewarded when “God provided” in the form of gifts from grateful church members. Regehr also describes such hardships as cycling to the hop fields and the need to work away from home. That was true of many of the villagers. For many years my own father started out early in the morning after farm chores to ride his two-wheeler along the gravel mountain road to Vedder Crossing and on to the foot of Promontory Hill to work a full day at Bowman’s Sawmill, then back home for more chores, all the while suffering from a debilitating asthma condition. All able hands got as much year-round work as they could at the hop yards either on Sumas Prairie or at Sardis and everyone picked rhubarb when that crop was for a time in vogue, berries, tobacco and hops in season. At age 12 I biked five miles to the tobacco fields on rough gravel roads and often worked 12 hours for twenty cents an hour before biking home.
The religious governance instituted by Preacher Harder was another matter. From my very first memory of Sunday school experiences at the MB Church I had difficulty accepting the biblical mythology as presented in the church basement by Petrus Martens, one of the many preachers in residence who taught there when I was around seven. Except for a long period of rationalized association with the UnitedChurch, which I again relinquished many years ago, my conscience has not permitted me to speak a faith I can no longer even rationalize. Preacher Harder’s insistence on his interpretation of scripture requiring such MB Church rites as baptism by immersion strikes me as picayune and unreasonable rather than a reason for him to wish that he was young enough to start his own church after he failed to persuade senior conference councils to accept his urging in the matter as mentioned on page 193 of the book.
Generally speaking, I found the Harder story sad. In the end the preacher turned out to be more adaptable than his wife to the integration of his church and his people into the mainstream Canadian culture. Preacher Harder died too young and I cannot help but think that the emotional effect of his failure to stop the Canadianization of his church and his children had something to do with his deteriorating health. The absence of any contribution to his parents’ story from my one-time elementary school classmate, Siegfried Harder, called Fred in the book, is especially noticeable. Of the older boys when I knew them so long ago, I thought him the most like, and the most likely to emulate his father in his evangelical zeal.
What is the old man to do? The Quick Aging Syndrome (QuA) will have its way. Ever more rapidly this spring the wear and tear of the years exert their influence. March, I thought at the end of February, would be a productive month. The early onset of spring would return the spring to my step, enhance my observations of nature, people and affairs, and brighten my outlook on tomorrow.
Now the Equinox has been and gone, the month nearly done. Week after week I lag behind, caught up in this and that, starting new and frustrating computer projects, getting caught up in crossword puzzles and always more puzzling reports on the television news. The old man’s legs get weaker, stairs become pitfalls and the body refuses to follow his orders. He must choose. Will he laugh or will he cry? He elects to succumb to a chortle, mixed perhaps with a tinge of resentment, as the only way forward, accepting the inevitable and enjoying his general freedom from pain and sorrow in the independence of a comfortable home with his wife of sixty years.
All the projects are still there. The computer still responds. Current dreamscapes have become less notable, and the old man resorts to the occasional scribble from old journals. Here is one from January 4, 1991, now nearly 20 years ago.
We met quite by accident. Both of us were late for the movie and we dashed for the ticket centre at the same time. We bumped into each other but she immediately turned to me, beamed her slightly lop-sided smile, insisting, “You first, sir, you were ahead of me.”
She had me. This had to be the most appealing Julie Andrews of my movie-going experience. Neither of us was that young but she had obviously taken good care of herself. She was wearing a rich looking fur and wore her darkish blonde hair in a soft sensibly curled short style and moved so vivaciously she could be none other than the movie star.
I could not believe my luck. “Why don’t we settle it be letting me invite you as my guest?” I said, hoping she wouldn’t misinterpret my offer as an unwanted affront. To my surprise she accepted. I bought the tickets, she took my arm and we had the doorman show us an unoccupied back row so as not to disturb the other patrons.
She inspected me carefully with smiling sidelong glances for a while, then relaxed to enjoy the show after I helped her drape her fur coat around her shoulders so she could be more comfortable.
It was a new movie being previewed in one of the theatres participating in Vancouver’s now well-established International Film Festival. She appeared to take a professional interest in the production but soon lost some of her initial interest as though she found it not up to standard. Could this really be Julie Andrews?
As she continued to relax she became drowsy and even apologized with a smile that left me weak when she leaned her head against my shoulder. I was her unresisting slave. After closing her eyes for a few minutes she turned those great big eyes up at me. They were widely set apart in that perfectly shaped face and when she spoke the generosity of her mouth came into my focus. “Do you like it?” she asked. I turned sideways to answer. She was so close. Her slightly parted lips were so inviting. I simply couldn’t resist. I gently leaned further and kissed her softly. She didn’t resist. She smiled at me again when I leaned back. Not a word was said but she took my hand from the seat beside her and placed it around her shoulder. I pulled her gently closer and she reached for my other hand …
What brought about the presence of the lady in my dreamscape that long ago morning was a mystery then, as she had been farthest from my thoughts and I had not seen any of her movies for some time. Perhaps she was just an early symptom of my already developing QuA Syndrome some 19 years ago now. Anyway, it will give Post readers, if any, an opportunity to amuse themselves at the old man’s expense as he offers it as what is likely to be the only issue for the month of March 2010.
Each day that is left is a bonus for the old man. I treasure it and my amazing fortune in sharing that day with my chosen spouse. I sing this song in a personal card for her collection as she begins her 84th year in a week.
At the same time I want to make it public in my last issue for February as a token of my appreciation to her for sharing 60 plus generally peaceful years with me through thick and thin.
A day to remember that stays and then grows, When a boy meets a girl and all at once knows his life has new roots for a budding tree, To plant by a stream that roars wild and free.
We hang on its branches a shining new dream, And watch it grow strong By the watering stream. As dreams load the tree and life moves along; We are free as can be with the memory strong.
And now we are old, but the tree is still strong; I remember that day, and I was not wrong. We still have room to hang up more dreams And the memory will live even should I change streams.
With apologies to the presiding appeal justice hopefully showing up at left, the old man’s title today, once again courtesy of Dickens, came to mind when I re-read portions of The Unnamed reviewed in my last issue.
In that story one “funny” episode during his compulsive walking spell involved his inability to conduct the defence of one of his wealthiest commercial clients on a charge of murdering his wife. One of his senior partners, with other associates, was three weeks into the trial when Tim, who had prepared for the trial for months, decided to surprise his colleagues by appearing in the courtroom ready to participate.
He was wearing a bicycle helmet specially designed to monitor his brain waves to detect changes before and during the walking attacks, head shaved for proper sensor contact. The judge noted Tim’s presence when court was called to order, informing him that he had indeed arrived and should remove his helmet if he intended to stay. Tim immediately stood and stated his intention to participate with the judge’s permission. Then in the midst of the statement he suddenly turned and walked out without turning back, saying, “On the other hand I think I’ll leave.” His walking attacks often started the same way, no matter what he was doing or where he was.
That episode reminded me of the awesome power judges have over the lives of barristers who appear before them. Experienced lawyers sometimes go to great lengths to avoid certain judges whose displeasure they may have incurred in previous appearances as they well should do for the sake of their clients.
Soon after admission to the bar I was briefly partnered with a more senior member of our local legal fraternity, which then held but ten or so members. He was widely known in the community for wicked and acid comments and sometimes sharply rude wit about his legal colleagues, the court and the community in general. Yet he always appeared as counsel properly robed when called for and bowed to the bench as required, all in the “best traditions of the Bar” as they say. One afternoon as he argued a case on a sunny, drowsy spring afternoon before one of the touchier and more irascible members of the county bench, he noticed the judge looking dreamily at the sunshine through the windows drifting off. My friend lowered his voice and gently dropped a case book on the table. That startled the judge to attention, demanding to know what had been said. Our witty member muttered to himself, “I don’t think you heard a word I’ve said for ten minutes, you old fart.” Well, the jurist’s hearing apparently had sharpened for he immediately pounded his gavel and ordered opposing counsel to attend his private chambers. My friend tried to put a different twist on his muttered comment but nevertheless apologized profusely for any lapses he may have been responsible for thereby avoiding further penalty.
I had a few experiences with disgruntled judges as well. Once I had a chamber application for which I had to appear in a larger centre, where I faced a whole courtroom full of lawyers making a variety of applications in cases they were handling. The fearsome jurist assigned to hear them all seemed in a foul mood from the beginning and as I knew I was likely the most junior of the lot I expected to be the last to be called. Even with senior counsel appearing early he was picky, surly and embarrassingly demanding for every particular, even asking one chap to point out in his own mouth where the lawyer’s infant client’s dental problem was located. After the usual lengthy lunch adjournment, I sat waiting to be called for most of the afternoon. When I came to the front I hesitantly stated my credentials, then made a point of expressing my thanks to His Lordship for his patience through a long and difficult day, presented my application as filed in the material he was given. Whether he took pity on my obvious inexperience or whether he was too worn out to be difficult any longer I don’t know. Still, he appeared to accept my thanks as if it was intended just that way, dealt with my matter quickly, and everyone went home happy.
Some years later I had a rare success in a personal injury case, but the insurance company lawyer filed an appeal, to which I was forced to respond. It was heard in Victoria before a panel of three appeal judges. Only the judges, the clerks, and the two lawyers were in the courtroom. At one point during the appellant’s presentation standing at the podium on the counsel table he was scrabbling around his appeal book and other files for a particular reference, which I knew I had right at my finger tip. I sort of half rose from my chair and offered their Lordship’s the citation. Instead of thanks I heard a rap of the gavel and a stern reminder from the judge in charge that “Counsel is expected to stand when addressing the Bench!” Of course I rose immediately and offered sincere apologies to the court for my errors and omissions.
I must say that particular judge, whose name I do not recall, ever after reminded me of that 1925 cartoon above. My learned friend already had some 15 years of experience with one of the prominent Vancouver law firms by then and many years later became British Columbia’s Chief Justice as well. As I never appeared before him I have no idea whether he became as stuffy and pompous as the chap we appeared before those many years ago.
May all our learned jurists receive their just rewards!
The Old Man did not find the answer to the title question in the novel I want to review here. Nor did the character in the book, whose story it is. I will not call him the hero or the protagonist because basically I do not find him a sympathetic individual. Furthermore I find many of the people in the society depicted by the story equally unsympathetic and that is sad as it is very really the society in which we North Americans are living today.
The book is The Unnamed, by Joshua Ferris, published in January 2010 by Little, Brown and Company of New York. The copyright particulars list the book under 5 fiction categories including lawyers and psychology. The author is a young appearing man who, in his jacket publicity photo, looks something like one of those boyish computer nerds who became overnight millionaires in the 1990s.
He seems too young to have the experience or depth of understanding I found in his writing but in an interview about his first novel found on his personal website some explanation can be found. He cites his youth in the Florida Keys, college in Iowa, a stint working for an advertising agency (a subject of his first novel), a MFA degree in California during which he started that first novel, scrapped it, thought about it for some three years and finished it in fourteen weeks. It won numerous awards.
Many of the book reviews for this second novel call it a comedy, acidly funny, and Stephen King found it “Hilarious in a Catch 22 way, but with an undercurrent of sadness that works counterpoint to all the absurdity.” Personally I found nothing really funny about the story except perhaps in the way that satire can sometimes by funny. We can certainly laugh at some of the ridiculous things that happen in the character’s love story, in the story of his absurd compulsion to walk till he falls asleep, and in his lawyer’s story.
The story begins with the short sentence, “It was the cruelest winter.” It then plunges the reader into the first episode of compulsive walking that forces him to leave his office. It is the physical or mental condition that dominates the story. In this case he left his law office only lightly dressed and continued until he finally managed to get into a cab to take him home before falling asleep on the back seat. There we meet these main characters as Tim Farnsworth and his wife, Jane, as well as their only daughter, Becka, in what becomes a strange but touching love story. Money appears to be no problem for this family and even when he is found sleeping in an alley or in a park flower bed, he always seems to have enough cash and access to his investments when he needs to prove his independence. Threading through the whole is Tim’s high intelligence and his twenty years as a successful attorney, making partner in one of New York’s largest and most prestigious law firms. He brings in millions of dollars in fees every year. His attempts to keep his affliction from his partners could be considered one of the comedic aspects of the story.
I found Tim’s mental process during the progress of the condition (one of the many doctors he had consulted had dubbed it benign idiopathic perambulation) quite fascinating and my need to continue from one page to the next of this novel almost as compelling as Tim’s inability to stop walking and hypnotic in its effect.
Being somewhat inclined to rely on chronological and geographical markers in my thoughts and scribbling, I was somewhat challenged to follow times and places as the tale proceeds, with somewhat sudden flashbacks appearing from time to time and never being completely sure where Tim is in his current walking exercise or how long the story takes to the end, in terms of Tim’s life. I was never sure whether the things and people he saw or talked about were real or part of his hallucinations.
It all ends sadly of course. Still, as you read you will find meaningful discussions about the American Dream and its consequences, about nature itself and our place in it, about the nature of God, about the existence of body and soul as separate entities and about the amazing abuse the body can take before it destroys itself.
Tim’s walking compulsion ends in a tent, during his last sleep, in a bedroll in an unnamed northern American mountain pass in the midst of a roaring blizzard, and I found the ending recounted on the last page strangely comforting:
He thought he might open his eyes to see if the silhouette of the falling snow continued to dapple the skin of the tent, but he decided not to exert himself unnecessarily. Instead he chose to do as he had done the night before: settle deep inside himself and listen to the strange, subtle operations going on inside his body. He listened for his heart to whisper its soft word. He listened for the breathing that lifted him up and down inside the bag. But listen … listen … listen was gone. His quiescent nerves gave no signals and received none. He detected nothing but an enormous, gentle stillness from the things he could name and those he couldn’t inside him, the organs and muscles, the cells and tissues. He never had to rise again, the silence informed him. never had to walk, never had to seek out food, never had to carry around the heavy and the weary weight, and in a measure of time that may have been the smallest natural unit known to man, or that may have been and may still remain all of eternity, he realized that he was still thinking, his mind was still afire, that he had just scored if not won the whole damn thing, and that the exquisite thought of his eternal rest was how delicious that cup of water was going to taste the instant it touched his lips.
If you are not easily put off by a modicum of sex and the occasional f… word and are otherwise intrigued, I think you should give the book a try.
Since my last issue I have been thinking a good deal about a project I had started then, dealing with our trip to Kansas City in 1985. My intention is to copy into my computer a selection of slides and prints of the pictures I took during our trip and prepare a series of some 5 narrated slide shows with a Photo Story program from Microsoft.
That means I have been avoiding current events more than usual partly because here so near Vancouver, everything including newscasts has centred totally on the Winter Olympics, for which the opening ceremonies are to begin this weekend. I have discussed in a previous issue my lack of enthusiasm for the whole idea of the Olympic movement and though I hope for a good outcome, it is impossible for me to adopt the enthusiasm for it now evident all around me. It also means I will try one more issue on the subject of that 1985 trip across the great western plains and mountains of the United States.
The daily papers I picked up at some of our stopovers for a flavour of opinion in the local areas stayed in storage for lo these many years and now become a reminder of those times. Ronald Reagan was just five or six months into his second term after a resounding victory in 1984. By June Reagan was having trouble getting his budget through Congress, reports were abroad about a White House connection to both overt and covert support for the Nicaraguan contra rebels, columnist George Wills, who 25 years later is still a talking head on television, was writing about trouble with the liquidity of some of America’s Savings and Loan institutions. He pointed out the complexities of the banking system requiring the populace to trust the bank system mostly on faith and surprisingly for one on the right side of the political spectrum, he said “modern society requires government that looks over the shoulder of, and occasionally nags, the makers of the many networks of institutions on which we depend.”
Weather was hot during the whole of four weeks on the road. Our car, a diesel, was not air conditioned and most of our driving days were long. On May 22nd we drove some ten hours from Yakima, Washington to Boise in Idaho, much of it following the path of the old pioneer Oregon Trail. In my journal that evening in Boise I remarked,
“Another thing that impressed us was the mile after mile of arid, semi-desert country so well connected up with super highways. The few places that are tamed for human use are really only oases in a vast desert.
It strikes me too, in driving those many desolate miles today, how narrow is the margin between life sustaining growth and extinction of our kind. Amazing as it is to see what wealth has been wrought by our technological exploitation of available resources, we are always near the brink. There seems no security to our existence. In this arid country fantastic quantities of food are produced in the few tamed oases where water from the rivers and deep basins can be used for irrigation. But imagine how quickly this would all turn to dust if the taps were turned off. All it would take is one serious interruption of power sources to stop the pumps and the flow of water. That is only one example. ”
It took us three more days across the emptiness of Wyoming and Nebraska to reach Kansas City and our reservations for the Rotary International Convention. Vice president, George H. W. Bush, was scheduled to speak for ten minutes to the last plenary session, and though we had arranged an alternative tour to follow that afternoon, I was totally astounded with the vast amount of security abroad all that morning in preparation for his short attendance. It irritated me to be stopped and checked repeatedly to get into the hall and by the obvious cost of all the staff and equipment to enable him to make what I suspect was nothing more than a political gesture on behalf of then Senate Majority leader, Robert Dole, of Kansas.
We left the convention on the morning of May 31 and took another couple of weeks to get back home via visits in Kansas, several days in Salt Lake City and stops across Nevada and California along the coast through the redwoods to Portland and home. It was a memorable journey for us in many ways but we soon settled back into our stay-at-home ways.
