Whooo?

It's suddenly early summer here in North Portland, so I drove up to the north end of North to see if there were any fun new birds showing up to enjoy the weather.

New? No, but I did find these two, a couple of new local residents, along the path to Smith and Bybee Lakes;

Great Horned Owl(lets). This one was a better photo op - the other owlet was tucked in tight next to a nearby tree trunk and screened by branches. So here's the other brother (or sister).

Both were still fairly downy, suggesting that they were no more than a day or two out of the nest. The parents were, or a parent was, probably nearby but were more experienced at hiding. Didn't see 'em.

I'm kind of foolishly pleased with this picture, because I don't have a good "birding camera", i.e. one with a telephoto lens to get up close to birds that, like the owlets, are uninterested in providing good snapshot poses. I have a cheap little phone camera, which when tried captured only a dark blob on a dark tree limb.

So I took my binoculars - and I do have good binos, Swarovski 8x42s, since while I'm not a bird photographer I am a birder and good optics are kind of a basic must-have for that - and held the phone camera up to one of the eyepieces.

It took a good bit of fiddling to get the camera and eyepiece lined up, and that doesn't even count the finger-stretch needed to push the "shutter" button, but the result is...pretty damn good. Particularly given what I had to work with.

 Other than that just the usual suspects. Looks like migration hasn't really reached us yet.

Decoration Day 2025

 As usual this past Monday I spent part of the morning down among the dead men.

This time I sort of bogued on my Army brothers and instead of heading east to the big Willamette National Cemetery on Mt. Scott traveled only as far as the little burying ground at the old Vancouver Barracks, right across the river in Washington state.

It's an odd sort of place befitting the long and patchwork history of the old post along the Big River; frontier fort, trading post, white settlement and Indian agency, river port town, early aerodrome, and in the end neglected, largely forgotten, and finally abandoned.

The burials reflect this, both in style and content.

Unlike the green and shining uniformity of the flat headstones on the Willamette cemetery hill, Vancouver's green lawn is broken by many what I think of as the older "standard" above-ground stone markers you see in Arlington (so difficult to mow around!) as well as even older, non-spec markers like LT Watson's here:

 

The silent community includes not just soldiers but wives and children - so many infants and young kids from what I assume was the garrison of the 19th and early 20th Centuries! - and even a trio of former enemies; two German POWs and an Italian - though if I was SGT Dioguardi I'd have come bolting out of my grave in an undead fury:

"Wassafuck' a matta fo you!? You thinka this a flag Italiano? Tha fuck? You gotta Tedeschi flags for the fuckin' Tedeschi but notta Italiano fo' me? Betta nothing at-a all than this! You thinka Imma fuckin' Russian?!?! Fangool, tu bastardo!"

The sheer heterogeneity of the Vancouver burials kept me surprisingly entertained, so I wandered the little cemetery for a while with my dram of whisky in my pocket, bundled against the late May chill, until I ran across these two:

Army 1SG Carlisle and Marine 1SG Martin; the former possibly a First Shirt from one of the infantry companies posted here before the 1940s, the latter undoubtedly retired locally from his bootneck days.

Both seemed likely to at least tolerate an old platoon sergeant, so I shared out the fine peaty draft, hoping that they'd had a laugh or two and come home sound from their service days. I found my little cars and joined the traffic drifting back across the River of the West to my new home in my old St. Johns.

That afternoon I completed my memorial obligations by finishing the "Murph", the Memorial Day workout dedicated specifically to a Navy SOF-type officer but to the war dead of the 21st Century in general. I did this last year and wrote about it here.

This year I rucked lighter -10kg instead of the EFMB standard 35lbs - but I hit a personal record for repetitions; 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats, so hooah, me.

Last year I came away from the day somewhat bitter and dissatisfied with my country and the way it has memory-holed the wars and the dead of my generation. 

I wrote:

"I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead."

 Oddly, at the end of yesterday I didn't feel quite so angry and bitter.

Yes, my country is going to Hell (or Republican Christopathic oligarchic MAGAt fascism, which is arguably worse).

Yes, I have lost the home and wife and family I worked for for twenty-five years.

Yes, I'm old, and alone, and dying slowly of Parkinson's Disease.

But I'm still here.

In George McDonald Fraser's memoirs he remembers his uncle toasting himself and his former mates of the 92nd Infantry Regiment, the Gordon Highlanders, with the pledge "Ninety-twa, no' deid yet!"

That always seemed to me an absolutely perfect soldierly sort of toast. Not a boast or a brag of great deeds done, not a promise of noble actions to come, but a simple declaration; I'm still here, still standing; I'm not dead yet.

And so I am. Sixty-seven, not dead yet. 

So here's to you, my brothers, on this Decoration Day 0f 2025.

Let the dead lie in honor and the living fight the good fight, to the end not dead. 

Yet. 

As always today: this.

Decoration Day 2024

Yesterday, as I often do this time of year, I drove down to the southeast, to the big national cemetery up on Mt. Scott  in the Lents neighborhood to spend some time with my Army brothers.

Willamette National Cemetery was its usual peaceful, pretty self. Shining in the morning sun, colorful with rank upon rank of little flags...

(which made me think, as it always does, of the unlucky bastards detailed to work their way along the rows of markers shoving little flag-sticks into the lawn. Given the lack of available privates, tho? Probably contract workers. Shame, that's kind of a perfect distillation of Army tradition; detailed, painstaking, back-achingly wearying, and boring all at the same time)

...which the Coasties had, again, infiltrated with their special Coast Guard flag-planting strike force. What IS it with those guys? Overcompensation? I mean, I like the USCG; they are the only uniformed service with jobs that 1) they get to do 24/7, and 2) don't have to include killing people and breaking shit. They're builders, not destroyers. Isn't that good enough for government work? Why this obsessive need to let everyone who visits, on this one day we set aside to ostensibly remember our dead, those of which wore the Coast Guard blue by being the only dead people with their own little service flags?

I still don't get it.

I drove through the glossy lawns down to the back side of the hill, looking for plots X, Y, and Z, where most of the dead of my generation are buried.

I didn't find them.

Well, there was this one poor joker, an E-Deuce who'd done his time in one of the Gulf Wars and made it home sound only to go toes-up at 44. 

Damn, dude. Sorry.

But as always my contemporaries were lost amid the huge crowd of the Greatest Generation. The WW2 and, to a lesser extent, Korean War people. And, I noticed, many more of the Vietnam era folks who are now running out of time. 

But from the Little Wars of the Oughts and Teens? Hardly anyone, and (because of the crowds on this day, the only day the park sees crowds...) I got caught in the one-way traffic routing that spit me out on the far side, irked and with my can of Pfriem IPA - shit, guys, I tried! And brought the good stuff this time! - unshared.

So fuck it. I drove home.

I putzed around the house, splitting time between chores and helping my soon-to-be-ex with the divorce paperwork (and if you think that military paperwork is grueling, get divorced; it's ridiculous), until finally I couldn't stand it and threw on my gym shoes and went to PDXStrength for the annual Murph.

This is apparently huge for the CrossFit crowd and is named for a Navy SEAL officer who was KIA in one of the many "how the fuck did you even think this would work..?" SEAL operations in Southwest Asia.

But despite the CrossFit/SEAL connections that would normally give iconoclastic Army me the giggy, it's a Memorial Day thing that involves effort, so I shoved a 35-pound plate in my old rucksack and got stuck in.

(The gist of this Murph thing is that it starts with an aerobic event (a mile run, usually) followed by strength events (pullups, pushups, squats) closed out with another mile run.

Well, my replacement parts rule out running, so I rucked a half-mile and quickly recalled how much I hated humping that thing when I had to do it for a living. Christ it sucks, hammering your back and legs no matter how hard you try and glide-step instead of jogging.

And, since pullups aren't my friend (and they're more of a sailor and marine thing, anyway), I substituted situps, and knocked out my sets of ten until I reached my age in reps; 66 pushups and situps are kind of my limit these days, anyway, then rucked up again and set off into Cathedral Park.

Where I couldn't help thinking that this young woman was enjoying her holiday much more than I was:

But that's the weird thing about this "holiday"; it's not supposed to be about fun. 

It's supposed to be a reflective, sorrowful remembrance of people who died. Many of them in great suffering, and all of them because of choices We the People made, or refused to make.

But We the People kinda suck at reflective. And sorrow. So Memorial Day is what it is; barbecues, mattress sales, lolling in the grass on a sunny summer day.

Okay, then.

Finally I returned to the gym. Shook some hands, ate a deviled egg (or four. Or six; fuck, they we fine), yarded the plate out of the damned ruck, and returned home to cook dinner.

In all? It was yet another in the string of semi-dissatisfying Memorial Days I've been having. 

My connection with my service days is waning, my irritation with my nation increasing. Now that, as the old jingle runs, the "...danger is passed and all things righted/God is forgotten and the soldier slighted" it seems even more futile to pretend to mourn or revere the war dead of our recent wars.

There are so few; no wonder the silent crowd of the wars of midcentury shoves them into silence.

I can't help but worry that my generation of soldiers will always be forgotten. I will keep them in my heart, but I'm old and soon enough will join them, perhaps up on that green and shining hill, my last home festooned with tiny flags every last weekend in May, to remembrance wars and deaths my country would just as soon forget.

Still.

I promise. I will remember.

Here's to us.
Who's like us?
Damn few
And they're all dead.

As always today: this.

Success and Failure

The Girl was a star at the soundboard of last night's production of Failure: A Love Story, running something like 30 wireless mikes and a complex recorded musical score like a pro.

So...the show for which she so flawlessly put the sound together?

 

First, it's a very odd little bit of work. Here's what the playwright says about it:

"A magical, musical fable where, in the end, the power of love is far greater than any individual's successes or failures."

That's a pretty roundabout way of describing the plot. Bottom line: it's a Twenties period piece (and there's a LOT of "Twenties" music and other stage business to remind you) in which the main actor shows up after about a quarter hour of exposition and proceeds to meet and fall in love with three sisters, all of whom die in some sort of bizarre way before the lovers do more than steal a kiss or three.

There's a lot more. Music. Dancing. Talking clocks and animals (and the actress who played the snake kicked ass, I have to say). The Chicago River. Johnny Weismuller.

It's one of those sort of "magical realism" things, and there was a lot of fun dialog and clever bits of stagecraft and let's say that it tried hard. 

 

But the construction of the play was fundamentally flawed. 

 

Unless the lead actor is utterly brilliant, the requirement for the character to meet, love, and lose to a series of bizarre deaths three sisters in 145 minutes is just too impossible to make work as genuine drama.

 

If you were playing it for complete farce? 

 

Fine. 

 

But the playwright wanted to make it a Deep Statement about Love, Life and Death and a high school cast just couldn't make that work. 

 

Shit, John Malkovich in his prime probably couldn't have. Maybe. But it'd be a hell of a hard pull. The playwright made it damn deadly difficult.

 

The real problem wasn't that the author made a Deep Statement about Love, Life and Death. The real problem was that the author wanted to be both glib and clever and deep. The progression of meet-love-die was just too scrambled, too hasty, and too inhuman. People don't love, or lose, the way the stage people were written.

 

In particular the sisters' deaths were 1) too repetitious and 2) too quickly succeeded by the next dead sister. Sure, there was some facile discussion about how knowing our death was inevitable didn't make the life that preceded it a failure, about loving while knowing the looming Hand of Fate.

 

But the need to move the plot along to the next bit of clever stage business meant that there was no real reflection, no real thinking or pondering about death and it's inevitable end of love and life, of loss, of grief and grieving.

The lead actor had no time to do any of that, even if he'd been a Broadway-grade star instead of a nice kid in high school; he had to move right along to falling in love with the next doomed sister.

Again...an actor with tremendous skills and a genuinely manic edge might have made that work as a sort of deeply cynical and fatalistic comment on the folly of our pretensions to eternal love and the Meaning of Life. A sort of "live for today" kind of spurning of The Vale of Shadow.

 

Or someone with the gift to portray a deep, unlighted sorrow might have shed some sort of dark light on how we're born owing God a death, and have no hope to defend ourselves when He comes calling to collect, and how that makes our lives a lingering grief, a deferred appointment with sorrow.

I've been in love with live theater for forty years. When it's good - and I've seen some stunningly good theater - it has an immediacy and an impact no film or book or music has.

But when it's not - and for all that this show tried honorably and hard, and the young cast did as well as they could (and my kiddo was a soundboard star!) - it's no more than facile and easily forgotten words on an empty stage.

Kind of too bad, because the cast and crew worked hard and well.

 

Sometimes, though, all of our best efforts and intentions wither in the bud, never to flower.

And that might be a better summary of the play that anything the playwright intended.

Mamma Mia!

At the end of a very long day - which involved driving some 150 miles and spending the day pestering people playing with dirt - it was "sing-along night" at my daughter's high school production of Mamma Mia!

Surely you at least know that this ABBA-fueled jukebox musical is a thing, right?

Well, the kiddo's school theater group has been staging it all this past week, and mileage be damned, last night is was my parental duty to go see it.

I've confessed my love for the art form in general, but this particular example is...well...not one of my favorites.

I'm not a huge ABBA fan, for one. Which isn't to say that I don't and can't enjoy bop-along silly helium dance pop - the reaction that Scissor Sisters I Don't Feel Like Dancing provokes in me is embarrassing in it's total lack of decorum -  but outside of the title song I've always been pretty immune to the charm of the Swedish quartet.

And the book is frankly idiotic beyond the "usual idiotic" level of musical books.

But being a good parent I dragged my filthy ass into the big theater to see what the Girl and her dramat pals had come up with.

And came away pleasantly surprised.

It was a damn good production, for one thing, especially held up against my memories of wooden high school versions of Oklahoma! and Bye Bye Birdie and the other typical school-musical chestnuts. The set, sound, and lighting were damn near professional-grade, the choreography and blocking were smooth and both integral to and advanced the plot (such as it is - it's still a deeply stupid book...).

The ABBA songs weren't nearly as irritating as I remembered, except for the second-opening number; having the daugher Sophie sing Honey, Honey to her absent dad? Ummm....creepy much? Yyyokay.

The piece that made it really not just tolerable but enjoyable, though, were the two female leads; Lily Russell as Donna, the mother, and Rosa Workman as Sophie, the daughter.

They were both solid actors doing good work in their parts. But what their performances really reminded me was of the difficulty that an actor in musical theater has that they don't share with either their straight-theater or concert/gig singer counterparts.

A musical actor has to act with their singing voice.

That's goddamn hard. That's what makes the art so much fun for people like me who enjoy it; seeing people who are good at that difficult skill execute it well, and Lily and Rosa did that last night. They made their otherwise-ridiculous characters into real people for two hours on the stage, and invested you in them by the power of their singing voices.

Obviously opera presents the same challenge, but there you have the help of having your songs written by people like Verdi or Mozart or Wagner and not Björn fucking Ulvaeus.

(And that's why, incidentally, I have such contempt for the current slew of "singing shows" like The Voice and American Idol; they force the idea of singing into a power-pop ballad mold to the point where many listeners assume that "good singing" is "belting a ballad at the top of your emotional range".

Well, Mamma Mia! does have one of those - Donna gets the star turn with The Winner Takes It All - and Russell belted it nicely and got the expected roof-raising ovation.

One thing I should add here; the Girl herself.

She’s a musical fan and totally gets how lame a jukebox musical like MM is (we both love good productions like Wicked or Sweeney Todd) so she’d been positively cackling with schadenfreude at leaning on the whole “support the kid’s efforts” parental guilt to make us sit thru it. It’s actually worse for my Bride because she loathes the whole musical genre, good, bad, or indifferent.

But she's also a kiddo so, like all kiddos, wants loving attention and approval for her efforts.

So we went, and, surprise, it was fun, and the Girl danced in the aisles during the encores, and everyone went home happily humming "Waterloo".

And if there's no better purpose for the silly thing?

The Mamma Mia! did just what it was supposed to do.

Cool Things No Longer In North Portland: The Janzen Beach Carousel

Six years ago I wrote about a trip to North Portland's mall and the classic carousel therein.

The carousel was an oddity, a remnant of the pre-WW2 era when the island in the Columbia was an old-school amusement park instead of a Seventies style shopping mall;

"The carousel remains, last of the amusement rides, remnant of the old mall, a whirling delight of grandiloquent carved horses and antique showmanship of an earlier time."

Well, not any more.

The last bits of the Seventies mall were demolished a couple of years back. The new owners have converted the site into a 21st Century big-box retail outlet for a couple of the remaining tenants such as Burlington. But the carousel disappeared during the renovation and for a while even the location where the pieces were stored could not be found.

A bit of classic Portland panic ensued until eventually a City councilman got involved and chivvied the hiding place out of the out-of-state owner.

(The little article about this adventure at the Restore Oregon website is kind of adorable, complete with a treasure map to the storage building and Nick "Indiana" Fish in adventurer garb...)

But, as the linked article notes, the carousel is still in pieces and the owners show little or no urgency in building a new home for it. Were my kiddos still carousel fans I would be more harassed about that, but as it is it's simply a rather sad little note, the passing of another piece of rather pleasant Portland history.

The Hooters across the freeway, on the other hand, is still going strong serving up dry oversalted chicken wings and domestic corn beer to gullible rubes overly impressed by tits.

De gustibus, I suppose...

I lathered him with me shillelagh

...for he trod on the tails o' me coat.

Normally it's just the walking stick I use to take the weight off my bad leg. But last Sunday it was me shillelagh as I went walkin' in honor of two men I hold (or held) dear; my own father, and the former Timbers great Jimmy Conway of Dublin.

Conway is dying of the disease that killed my father, robbed of his life by the death inside his own head. He lives on in the hearts of his friends Mick Hoban and "Timber" Jim Serrill and through them to those of us who know them. When Mick sent out a call for the Timbers soccer community to join in the Alzheimer's Walk the past Sunday I was proud to join. I hobbled alongside my Bride as far down the track - the event was held out at North Portland's motor racetrack - as I could before we headed back home. I wish I could do more, but I'm not a physician or a neurologist. All I can do is walk and damn little of that. But walk I can, and did.

To the immortal memory, pop. I hope you and Jimmy raise a glass to yourselves wherever it is that the souls of the living dead are gone.

Cock o' the North (Portland)...

Driving out of the 'hood today (finally) I caught a reminder that, yes, I do live in a college town:

Kinda makes the ordinary snowman and his little carrot look like brine shrimp, no?

Seems like a thousand years ago I would have taken the time and effort to construct this sort of magnificent snow-herm. But I would have, sadly, because college guys do shit like this.

Today the thaw has begun. In drips and runnels, the mighty Shaft of Snow melts away like every other symbol of male pride, beaten down by time and the hard light of day. Tomorrow the Pride - or is it the Shame - of North Portland will be just another wet spot.

La Dolce Vita

The past week it just seems like the road to Gilded Age Hell is ever broader and easier.

But Sunday morning was sunny and cool, the roads of North Portland were quiet, my hip was silent as my battered old Kona bicycle was spinning like a top, and the cheese danish at Madrona Hill Bakery was sweet as a lover's midnight kiss.

So the hell with my country's search for the miserable times we thought had gone for good after 1929. Sufficient unto tomorrow is the Evil thereof, and I am just going to leave you with the image of a deliciously languid Sunday.

For Whom the Excavator Tolls...

Once upon a time, away back in 2007, I wrote a post about the sidewalk corners here in North Portland and how cool they are.

The coolness, what there is, comes from the metal curb covers, artifacts of the horse-drawn wagon days when a sensible municipality provided some protection from the hard wear of the metal wagon-wheel rims at the most likely place for those rims to run up over the softer concrete curbs.

But in these gentler days the need for protection from steel wheels is much less than the need for people who can't walk to get up and down from the sidewalk to cross the street. Hence the gradual replacement of the old steel-rim corners with ADA-standard ramp corners.

The City of Portland has been working its way northwest over the past several months, and just last week we saw the first indication that our old corners are not long for this world.

My kiddos, slaves to the wheel that they are, are very excited about this change for the ease it will provide for cycling and scootering.

I'm resigned but still a trifle saddened. I understand why the change is a good idea but will miss the steel guards, a piece of the physical reality that was Portland in the Teens and 1920's, a steel-and-concrete artifact that have seen almost a century of the people and their passage that make up the city I love.

The Revolution Will Have Cool Mittens

My pal Lee - who is an all-around awesome person and a walking example of how smart Italian-American girls grow up to be smart and beautiful Italian-American women - loves to knit.

And she is also a huge Linkin Park fan and just a kick-ass gal, so she doesn't knit little lace doilys, she knits fingerless combat mittens in black and red anarchist colors perfect for getting a good grip on that tear-gas canister to hurl back at the riot squad during the next Occupy Portland protest.

Because revolution isn't about just smashing the State.

There must also be cool mittens.

Un dimanche après-midi à l'Parc des Donnezsur

Hmmm. I think I wanted to take a moment from all the angst and provide a post with no meaning beyond the sensual;

That, and every so often I take a genuinely good picture; I just love this snapshot of our Overlook Park on a sunny Sunday.

For all our troubles and toil, the world is often a lovely place. It is unfortunate that we are often to harried and busy to stop and notice that. I hope you have a moment today to do so.

A look back from overhead

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

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

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

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

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

Really.

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

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

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

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

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

The Twelve Beers of Christmas: Days 1 through 4

I'm not humble. We can fucking solid brew up here in the Pacific Northwest.

I don't know about the rest of the country. I've heard some idle talk about the quality of the beers in California, but I put that down to the natural arrogance of the Golden State; they think they do EVERYthing better in California. But they're wrong, oh, so, tragically, criminally wrong.

"California Pizza Kitchen".

I rest my case.

So this year I've tried to get myself into a little more Christmassy mood. And, to me, nothing says "Christmas" like "drinking".

Well, that and sex under the Christmas Tree, but if you think I'm blogging about that you're effing nuts. Beyond the tasteless factor Mojo would toast my organs of generation over the Yule log. I like the magic in my marriage the way it is, thanks.

So this year I've decided to test-drink twelve of our local "seasonal" brews.

Seasonal brew?

Yeah, I forget that a hell of a lot of you live in places where Budweiser is consider a boutique beer.

(Oh, and for the record, I'm not sure what Bud Light (or is it officially "Bud Lite"? Gawd.) being the "favorite beer of NFL fans" says, but I suspect that it slanders either beer, football, or the people who consume both)Every year's end our local breweries produce some version of a "winter seasonal" beer. The tradition usually extends to spring (when the brewers come up with a märzen-style), summer (which usually means a light, crisp brew - a pilsner or very hoppy ale such as an India Pale Ale) and autumn (which is usually greeted with an "oktoberfest"-style product). But seeing as how I like my beer like I like my women; strong, dark, and a bit of fun effort to wrestle down, the "winter warmers" are my hands-down favorites.

This year I've worked my way through four:

Deschutes Brewing's "Jubelale"
Full Sail's "Wreck The Halls"
Old Lompoc's "C-Sons Greetings", and
Ninkasi's "Sleigh'r"

So let me quickly catch you up to where I am in the Solstice Suds Sampling:

Day 1: Jubelale (Deschutes Brewing Co., Bend, Oregon)

Jubel is an Oregon classic; perhaps the single most thought-of brew when a webfoot thinks of the word "winter seasonal" or "winter warmer".It's an English "strong ale"; dark in color, malty rather than hoppy, with a powerful ale flavor over a very rounded, crisp finish. It does, in fact, "warm" you. I accompanied mine with a Kansas City-style T-bone, garlic-mashed, and winter vegetables, and it was nearly perfect. Jubel hits the tongue with a rabbit-punch of malt, teases the uvula with a tingle of hops, and swirls through the mouth with little hints of pepper and fruity goodness. It's a hell of a damn fine brew, and though this year's model is a little less...well, "perfect" than I expect - the brewmaster at Deschutes talks about how the formulation was changed back to the early versions this year and I noted a little more "sting"; less smoothness, more pepper than in years past.

But, still, the Jubelale is the King of Winter Beers, and the first day set a tough standard for the rest to follow.

Day 2: "Wreck The Halls" (Full Sail Brewing, Hood River, Oregon)

Last Tuesday I was working all day in the field and didn't really have much time to make a decent meal to accompany this brew. It didn't really need it; even with Stouffer's Lasasgna with Meat Sauce this tidy little IPA was tasty, hoppy, clean, and delicious.I liked that WTH was truly hoppy in the Northwest fashion but avoided the lip-puckering bitterness of some of the "brewmaster's reserve" creations that NW brewers seem to like to challenge their drinkers with. Darkish and full enough to make a mouthful satisfying the Full Sail boys did a nice job keeping their "winter warmer" free of the more commonly encountered sorts of holiday-busyness; no spices, no fruitiness, no citrus, just a lovely, rounded malt with a crispy hops tang and a lingering hit of alcohol - a tallboy had me pleasantly fuzzed. Damn fine.

Day 3: "C-Sons Greetings" (Lompoc Brewing, Portland, Oregon)This Imperial/Double India Pale Ale went with takeaway; haddock-and-chips from "The Fish And Chip Shop" on N. Killingsworth (one of the hidden treasures of North Portland - no-bullshit Brit workingman's food for a decent price) and was the polar opposite of the simple heartiness of the flaky fish and rich 'taties.This is one complex brew; spicy, hopped-up, malty, fruity...and at 8% alcohol it hits like Donder's spinning backkick.

I liked C-Sons in a very odd sort of way. One tallboy was outstanding, a truly interesting, challenging beer. But I can imagine that another might have been less welcome. And more then that? Just too much; too busy, too spicy, too...too.

So. I've polished off the fourth of our local winter brews sitting here with Mojo sewing and the two kiddos playing an exciting game with their "hex bugs"; everyone is having a heck of a good evening.

Day 4: "Sleigh'r" (Ninkasi Brewing, Eugene, Oregon)

Let me start by saying that I normally enjoy the product of the Ninkasi stable; they tend to make very classic Northwest beers.

But I found their seasonal to be...well, less than something to celebrate.It was drinkable, but just that. Supposedly a "dark double alt" it had very little altbier character being, instead, a fairly conventional Northwest dark ale. Surprisingly underhopped for a Ninkasi release, it was rather "flat" and malty, with a "muddled" impression that did little to enhance the ginger-garlic chicken stir-fry I made tonight. Indeed, the combination of our CSA kale with baby bok choy and Chinese sausage from Anzen was more interesting than anything in the bottle.

Not terrible, not even bad, but not particularly memorable or tasty. Not a keeper, in my opinion.

So there we are - another day tomorrow, another treasure from the Pacific Northwest. As good a way to pass the Yuletide season as I can imagine.

I'm almost surprised; at a time of year when I'm usually overwhelmed with curdled loathing for the masturbatory commercial splurgegasm that is the commercial Christmas season I have actually managed to get some pleasure out of this December.

It helps that the kiddos are not overcome with insane greed. They're excited about the upcoming loot but not utterly deranged about it. And we don't have any relatives visiting and infecting us with craziness, and without any real need to tote any out-of-towners around to Portland Christmasness we have managed to miss the most horrific of our local Wenceslausy glurge as well.

Now if my legs would just stop fucking with me. And we could catch and savagely beat the sonsofbitches that jacked Mojo's credit card and bought the airline tickets to Manila.

But those are stories for another day...

Candy

For the third year in a row my children worked the University of Portland dorms for Halloween.First, let me say that I'm not sure why, as much as I get more surly and less festive every December as my kiddos rocket about in an advertising-fueled orgy of greedy anticipation, I get more happiness over watching them get equally greedy for sweets and all things spooky every October. But by Thanksgiving I'm already snarling at the latest repetition of "I hope Santa brings me that Mega-thruster Barbie with the Bolt-on Wings!" whilst I practically melted when my daughter cuddled up to me Sunday mornings and sighed "I can't WAIT for Halloween!"I'm not consistent, okay? But there's something about the Night Before The Day of The Dead that works for me. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.One part of it, I think, is that the kids are active participants in the holiday at the end of October. Christmas is all about passive greed; Halloween is all about doing things; making the house "scary", choosing and re-choosing the right costume.This year in keeping with his obsession with All Things Warlike the little man was a soldier. I didn't have the heart to tell him he looked like a post-Mission-Accomplished Iraqi child-conscript in his little five-color desert cammies and coverless Kevlar. He felt himself very martial, and raced about with his toy M-4 (minus the muzzle-end of the barrel, which somehow our friend's son had managed to snap off before he lent it to us...) blazing away at the Enemy Hordes.Little Miss went with the traditional; a fairy princess. The delightful thing about these small people is that unlike us putative grown-ups they are unwilling to endure the ridiculous to keep up appearances. So when the little silver slippers hurt her feet I suggested that sometimes fairies went for comfort over style and she changed over to her little tennie-runners without demur.

Sadly, however, the cruel predation of childhood has not changed, either. She left her garish fairy wings at home after "some big kids laughed at me". It's probably fortunate for our conceit of childhood that as adults we tend to forget the deliberate hurts that we inflict on each other as children.So it was with sparkly crowns and small arms we went over to the University to hunt for loot; Daddy (limping on his bad hip, which was playing up abominably), Sergeant Stryker and his companion, the Ammunition Fairy.The dorm halls brought back assorted memories of my own college residence halls, although many of the young men and women of the Catholic college on the Bluff had gone to far greater lengths than I and my contemporaries would have to entertain the minor children of townie neighbors. Many of the girls were in costume as well, although here Missy is thoroughly unimpressed at getting a photo-op with Ariel the Little Mermaid herself; I was impressed that the co-ed Ariel's attention to detail that extended to matching-mermaid-tail-aquamarine toenail polish. Either a future attorney general or the first female archbishop of Portland.We passed through the crowded halls following the Boy's nose for sugar. He was like a human sugar-hound, and we seldom missed a rich vein of loot. The students were very patient with all this hoo-raw, and, of course, the young women all cooed over the little girls.

I wondered as I listened to the happy glurge; is this feminine sentiment (the young men seemed as immune to sentiment in general as young men usually pretend to be) a fond memory of girlhood passing, or an eager anticipation of motherhood yet to come?Whatever the reason, Missy's amour-propre was restored by the number of compliments she received for her little costume. She WAS adorable, and even the callow youth of North Portland could see that.Eventually she tired of her pilgrimage - her brother, tireless Diogenes of Candy that he is, continued on with his friends - and I led her home. She went up to one doorway ("I don't want to go to any more houses where I don't know anyone", she declared after that) and then handed me her treat-bag and skipped alongside my uneven stride, chattering artlessly as all around us little groups of spectres, heroes, athletes, and household appliances scrambled shouting through the darkened streets.Portland Halloween is often a sodden business, but Monday was clear and chill. The drifts of yellow and orange stirred in the night wind whose cold kiss promised the end of autumn and the coming of winter. But the lights of our house were warm, and the scampering footsteps of my daughter's homecoming were in perfect time with the contentment in my heart.