Frontiers 1914: Intermission

Still working on the "Frontiers 1914" piece(s), so that's ongoing. The issue right now is that the next section needs to be about the French war plans. We've looked at Germany and the evolution of what became the "Schlieffen Plan". The bookend for that needs to be France and the evolution of "Plan XVII".

That's...being kind of a pain in the ass.

There's a shit-ton of scholarship (popular and otherwise) about the seventeenth of the French war plans.

The lead-up to it, though?

Not so much.

We'll get there when I finally post it, but the tl:dr is that from about 1870 to about 1911 the French planning was centered around 1) the fortress belt of the "Sere de Rivieres" system in NE France as a 2) defense-first-and-counterattack overall scheme.

But in the second decade of the 20th Century the French military hierarchy - led by the then Chief of the General Staff Joseph Joffre - changed this focus to a more aggressive offensive-first plan.

Supposedly this began with the revision of Plan XVI in September 1911, and came in force in full with the adoption of Plan XVII in the winter and spring of 1914.

There seems to be some major politico-military stuff associated with the changes that came before that, though, beginning with Plan XII in 1888 and especially involving Plan XV in 1904-06. I want details of this period, but all I can find on the Internet is pretty generic. I may have to run down some sort of dead-tree sources, and that takes time and more hand-work. I'm pushing it along.

(Update: Turns out there's a pretty important secondary source - the 1985 "War Plans of the Great Powers 1880-1914" - in the Portland State Library that is...wait for it...fucking closed because the fucking Gaza protests got out of hand and then the fucking Portland coppers swarmed in and completed the fucking destruction. So...not fucking good.)

The other "pushing-along" thing is divorce.

My soon-to-be-ex and I met with our financial planner. That went well, and she's working on the asset division the mediator recommended. We need to regroup with the mediator to move towards a settlement and, eventually, a final decree.

That's...saddening.

It's the final defeat for me, the admission of failure. The end of twenty-two years of marriage, and in that the loss of my lover, wife, and best friend. I grieve for that, and her. I wish I'd had the chance to repair the faults that resulted in the failure. I always will.

Meanwhile I'm hootched up in a mother-in-law apartment in the far edge of Northeast Portland. It's a very weird little mid-Century Ozzie-and-Harriet middle-class neighborhood in one of the most fucked-up parts of the sprawling blight that is East Portland. At some point I'll have to do a tour of this area. It's very much NOT "Portlandia". 

The surrounding area is poor and I'd say "rundown" but in all likelihood it wasn't ever very far up from where it is today. It probably went from farm fields to suburban slum to semi-urban slum. 

We probably don't have more skeevy homeless people than I did in North Portland. But here they feel more visible and frankly scarier; there seems to be more visibly-crazy and dangerous-looking gomers out here.

I'll have to post some photos from the truly bizarre NE 122nd Avenue Motorboat Graveyard, too. THAT's a real NE Portland oddity.

The hardest part of this move?

It's lonely.

I'm alone in a small apartment, with ex-best-friend, kids, even the fuckin' cat back in the Little House. I miss them all, even the cat waking me at oh-dark-thirty. I miss all the little interactions, the little kindnesses and gentleness of daily meetings and crossings. Waiting alongside the coffee brewing for a frowsy and sleep-soft woman to emerge from the bathroom. Passing snark from a busy daughter on her way, monosyllabic grunts from a son taking a gaming break.

It is what it is, I suppose.

I've signed up to volunteer at the local humane society to get my pet fix (lease says; no pets...). I've signed up for some sort of Post-60 political action organization ("Third Act"), though they don't seem to be doing much acting lately.

I’d do more political stuff if I wasn’t in Deep Blue Portland. We don’t really have a need to get out the Democratic vote; the Oregon GOP is so fucking looney – they were MAGAts before there were MAGAts – that they don’t have an electoral chance outside the yik-a-hoo parts of rural Oregon. And our four Electoral votes are likewise solid.

So I don’t feel like I can do much in the national races. I’ve got time but not money, and they can’t use my time.

I’m still pretty chapped that the race is as close as it is. Tubby is what we know he is, a gross, bloated, lying, psychopathic crook. He’s no better than he was eight years ago, and that he gets as much love from the wingnuts says more about them than him. But his new siderunner?

Jesus wept, could you have invented a more creepy, loathsome, spineless weirdo than Couchfucker Vance? What the hell does he offer that Tubby doesn’t? His weird breeding fetish that the press tries to sell as “caring for families”? The fuck..? He doesn’t give a shit about “families” any more than the rest of his Party of Personal Enrichment.

But I don’t expect the press to call him or any of them on that.

It's really worth pursuing how, as the current Harris campaign messaging points out, how deeply weird, creepy, and radical these "conservative" fucksticks are.

From their obsessive panty-sniffing of all kinds (from female reproduction to transgender bathroom business) to their bizarre fixation on "masculinity" to the intensity of their drive to shackle sex with breeding the wingnut politics of genitalia is, well...weird. Deeply, madly, truly strange.

I expect these fuckers to be politically and economically pro-Gilded-Age. They've always wanted to party like it's 1929.

But the culture war stuff?

It's borderline insane. And that it's not constantly derided as such is a massive failure on the part of the press (and any and everyone else who doesn't point it out). It should make everyone associated with it as popular as genital herpes.

I'm glad it's finally being at least marginally recognized and pointed to.

I guess I’m trying to be hopeful…but prepared to be disappointed. If the US public is willing to let these scum get away with their little Plutocracy Project 2025? Well…maybe I end up my post-divorce days in prison for rebellion.

I sure as hell hope not; I’m too creaky to make a good rebel.

Hope this finds you and yours busy and well enough. I had to laugh; on the way out of the grocery today the rent-a-cop asked me how it was going and without thinking I replied: “So far so good. But it’s early yet – lots of time for things to go wrong.”

That’s kind of my standard reply to that question and has been for years, which says a LOT about my outlook on life.

Maybe it’s an old sergeant thing.

I'll be back with more war plans in a bit.

Merry Leafmas!

Once a year the good people at the City of Portland Bureau of Transportation (i.e. the Streets people) come around and hoover up the leaves that fall in the streets and on the "city strip", the string of land between the outside of the sidewalk and the curb.

This is called "Leaf Day" because that's what it is; a single day (which varies depending on where you live) where this process takes place.

Ours here in the "97203" was yesterday, 12/18.

Note that the idea here is that the City is removing the "City's" leaves; the ones that fall on City property but are a more general mess and potential catchbasin plug.

So of course every Portlander worth their "Keep Portland Weird" bumper sticker cheats like a motherfucker; front yard, side yard, back yard...if a rake can reach it, the leaf falling in those private properties goes into the gutter for the City to haul off. Everyone politely pretends this doesn't happen.

So, like any good holiday, the key is in the anticipation and preparation; raking, sweeping, and blowing the leaves out into the street. Waking up early (or staying up late) to move cars and trucks out of the street out front to invite the City crew in.

And then the magic begins!

First the front-end loader shows up. The basket thing piles up the leaves and bundles them down to the street corner. There another loader with a standard bucket loads them into one of the City dump trucks cab-ranked nearby.

This, as you can imagine, is not really surgical. A lot of gunk and leaf debris remains behind:

That's why the water truck comes along and sprays down the street, washing this junk into the gutter.

Finally the sweep/vacc truck hoovers up this stuff, leaving the street sparkling clean for, well, at least the rest of the day.

And the wonder of :Leafmas is done for another year.

What's kind of sad is that I realized that "Leafmas" is as much or more of a genuine holiday for me than the big conventional holiday it's always adjacent to. Christmas is kind of "meh" for me. I have not a shred of religiousity, and the current American commercially bloated "Christmas" is an embarrassing  travesty.

But Leafmas?

It's both practical and satisfying, a sort of community ritual that pushes all my civic buttons. Like the ideals of religion, it brings us together in a common cause to make our world a bit better.

So a merry and peaceful Leafmas to all who celebrate!

H&I Mission

One of the now-long-forgotten Army things is the "harassment and interdiction" mission. This Texas A&M site sums up this artillery technique as it was used in Vietnam; "(unobserved fire which) engaged suspected targets with no more than a few rounds fired at random intervals throughout the night, and sometimes during the day."

My understanding is that a typical H&I target would have been a crossroads, or some similar linear intersection (bridge, paddy dikes, treelines), where the local S-2 thought that Charlie would be using to move around.

As the A&M site points out, while this sort of shooting could have been at least plausibly effective in a war where you had "enemy" roads, or crossroads, or bridges, doing this in a notional ally's house? NOT a very good idea. Your chance of blowing away some random villager was so high as to be nearly unavoidable compared to the likelihood of catching the NVA 309C Division in the middle of an admin move. 

Anyway, I don't have anything momentous to discuss. I'm threading my way through the Yarmouk references with the idea of getting something out before the end of September. What I really want to do is travel back in time and grab Abdallāh al-Azdī al-Baṣrī by the stacking swivel and choke him until he got a fucking editor! Dude! Seriously! I get that early Arabic writers were mostly in it for the poetry (that's the c.w. on a lot of early Islamic "historians" all the way up to Ottoman times, as I kept encountering writing up Constantinople 1453 and Vienna), but this is ridiculous.

In the meantime I didn't want to leave this joint untenanted, so...

First a quick personal note.

Had kind of a scare the other week. Sight went out temporarily in one eye. No more than three or four minutes, but the doc checked my blood pressure and things there were not good, so off to E.R. I went for the full meal; CT scan, EKG, blood work, all of it.

The end result was:
1) No idea about the vision, even after numerous pokes and peeks at the eye clinic. The term "ocular migrane" was tossed about but in truth nobody really knows.
2) I'm now on BP meds. So far, better, but not perfect. Need to drop weight, too. That'll be fun.

Other than that, the second creature to find itself in trouble was the big fig tree out by the back sideyard...

This thing was a cute little sapling when Mojo bought the house more than twenty years ago. Nobody here really likes figs, so it was just kind of an unminded but seasonally-messy nuisance for much of the ensuing couple of decades...until it got freaking huge. It shaded out the whole back yard, dropped fruit (which was now too high to pick) all through the autumn that drew crowds of aggressive yellowjackets, and we generally a nuisance.

So we lopped the bulk of the thing down:

But there we were stuck.

A handsaw worked well enough for the upper parts of the trunks. But the lower? Yike. That meant power.

Chainsaw power, to be precise.

So off to the local rental store and back with a nifty little electric saw that proceeded to take the bulk of the damn thing down to the ground...

...where I then applied the 21st Century version of the Roman Plow; a full bottle of Round-Up poured directly over the remains.

That will probably have to be repeated several more times this year - the sonofabitch is full of vitality and has already shrugged off a soaking with this poison.

But who's higher on the evolutionary scale, goddamnit. Two of us enter, one's gonna leave, and it ain't you, tree.

Let's see...what else should I send a round out at..?

Oh, yeah; this thing turned up in the World's Worst Newspaper the other day:

Tl:dr, the minor league ballclub that plays out on Portland's western 'burbs is being held up by the big leagues' ploy to extort more money out of the little communities where they play. The bigs are forcing their minor league slaves to force their local governments to pay for ballfields or lose their teams.

Some guy named Knudsen has a nice little takedown of this extortion racket. Keep in mind that, as he mentions, 1) the current minor league ballpark is only ten years old, that it 2) has the capacity for over 4,000 fans, and 3) typical crowds at these Hillsboro team games runs about half that, at best.

So Oram is all in on getting tax dollars for this gimmick.

Which is insane, given that supposedly we can't afford to get our hoboes into apartments or keep our junkies from scaring the normies, but which is also business as usual for the whole sports-owners-and-politicians-frolic-through-the-public-trough tradition.

I'm hoping that the gang over at Field of Schemes will have more on this disgrace before the City Fathers out in Hillsboro can start backing up the dump truck full of cash to the loading dock at Tonking Field.

And speaking of politicians and cash...

Oregon's governor has muscled into the homeless "crisis", shaking out a "task force" that's supposed to provide recommendations on how to rid the parks and streets frequented by the Good People of Portland of smelly poor people.

The whole business is secret, run as a private meeting because it's working under the local business alliance. Many of the usual non-profit and non-commercial suspects (i.e. organizations that work with or advocate for homeless people) are shut out.

My guess is that the business people will recommend the usual - more sweeps, more laws, more jails, more shelters - instead of the simple and practical solution: "tax rich people and businesses, fund jobs programs and cheap housing". That's how these characters usually roll; it's never worked before. That's never stopped them. I trust that the latest round of political circle-jerking will produce nothing practical.

I've seldom been disappointed.

And speaking of politicians living down to their expectations...

Dahlia Lithwick has a good piece at Slate (paywalled, I think, but if you don't go there often I think you can get it free...) that points out how fucked we are because Mittens is as "good" as it gets in the GQP and he's exactly the sniveling piece of pond scum you'd think if you remember his presidential run.

Bottom line? He wants a tongue bath for saying mean things about Tubby...while doing nothing substantial to interfere with all the shit Tubby and his cult are doing. Tax cuts for richies? Sure! Privatize? He's all in! Fuck the poor and the sick? Anytime! 

Oh, and speaking of shitheels...

Here's the thing about this.

First, Boebert is an asshole. Not because of who she is but because of what she does in Congress. This idiocy doesn't change that.

Second, though, is that this says something truly sad about her intelligence.

Because I love Broadway. I've been to two big touring musicals in the past several years; Wicked, back in 2021, and Hadestown this past year. Both wonderful, both memorable, both parts of my life I'll treasure.

Both expensive as a sonofabitch.

I took the Girl, and for both shows we had orchestra side-aisle seats, and for both the seats ran something like $150-$200 each. IIRC orchestra center seats ran $200-300 and up, first balcony and boxes even more - $400-500? Anyway...a LOT of money.

Point is, this isn't 1984, when I could drop into the TKTS booth in Times Square and nick a Sweeney Todd seat for thirty bucks. Musical theater is a big-money event, and tickets are hard to get.

To go to a big Broadway show to vape and grab ass? To be obnoxious to the point where you geet kicked out?

That's just fucking bone stupid. You might as well just set fire to a pile of twenties.

I mean...copping feels in a dark theater is a great tradition...for the matinee of Weekend at Bernie's.

I'm not blaming the woman for being an idiot.

I blame her voters for electing the dumb fuck.

And here we all are.

Jesus wept.

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.

Ice

We had our annual December ice storm last week. Predictably Portlanders panicked, abandoned their vehicles on the freeways, and huddled around the gas heater when the limbs came down and the power went out.

We did none of those, spending the day Friday and Saturday sitting indoors waiting out the cold.

When we did emerge the damage was pretty photogenic.

The Girl's comment?

"Yeah. I can see how that might not have fit inside the green compost bin."

It's raining now, by the way. It's winter, but it's still Oregon.

Home for the Holidays

The contract work I was doing crashed last week, so I've had a genuinely "retired" sort of holiday all last week.

It's been nice.

I've continued to wake early because, well, I like waking early. I make a pot of coffee and hang out at the dinner table, reading the news or just reading, sipping the good brew and watching the day slowly begin.

This week the leaves finally began to fall.

That's not a good thing.

The neighbor's yard features a ginormous bigleaf maple. She gets most of the fallout, but we get enough to make the backyard a mess of sopping maple leaves. The Boy - who has no job outside his gaming - got roped into the collection of these damn things. Since he's nineteen and has never really had to work to standard his leaf-raking is...sketchy. So Drachma Kitty and I had to come out and pitch in.

We've done this twice now. The rains that came in last night look like they've finally knocked the last of the leaves down. So there's another day of this ahead of us.

That's not exactly a thrill to look forward to.

But the alternative is a yard full of bottomless mud.

Oh, there was one "work" sort of thing last week, but it was really just sad.

A project that I'd worked on before I retired went to fieldwork. The PM had wanted me to drill the thing, and without me to sit the rig he'd gotten a cherry staff person from one of the Puget Sound offices. He did get me to review her logs and they were...not great.

Should I come in and look at the soil samples? I asked. I might be able to work out some sort of actual stratigraphy; I know the site and the soils. Sure, he replied, so Tuesday morning early I went into my old lab and looked for them.

Nothing.

I asked around; turns out the staff person had never been in the Portland shop. Maybe the samples were in the Salem office? So off I went in one of the company trucks, down I-5 to the little rental office in downtown Salem where this PM holes up. Went in, looked around.

Nothing.

An hour after I got back to Portland the PM send me an e-mail. Oh, I just got this, he says. 

It was a forwarded copy of a message from the staff person saying that she had reviewed the samples and logs and wanted lab assignments. I guess she took the samples back to Tacoma, said the PM.

Yeah, the empty spaces in Portland and Salem kinda clued me in about an hour ago, I replied.

You bet your ass I charged that job every second of my wasted morning.

But that's a big reason I retired when I did. This guy is the chief engineer of the Portland office, and it's perfectly in his "management" style that he had no fucking idea where the samples of the drilling for this sensitive and potentially-hazardous investigation even were and wasted four hours of project time for something he should have never authorized.

Oh, well. His circus, his monkeys now.

Got up Thursday and watched the Macy's Parade. I didn't have the marching mariachi band on my bingo card, but they were pretty goddamn awesome.

And at least the CBS broadcast showed the actual parade. Fuck you, NBC, you worthless gits.

This year I did an actual turkey, as opposed to a breast-only. The Girl has finally developed a liking for the actual tasty parts of the critter (the dark meat...) so I got the smallest one of these monsters I could find and cooked it the way my mother taught me; sealing in the juices with a hot oven and then basting like a madman.

It turned out good as turkey can get.

That, in turn, meant the return of a long-dormant Lawes family tradition; the boiling of the carcass.

My mother, child of the Depression and the Big War that she was, refused to waste a scrap of food go to waste, would use the turkey carcass to make broth and from that some sort of soup, usually a turkey-vegetable-barley sort of thing.

My sister and I, children of the plump Sixties that we were, made merciless mockery of this housewifery. We called the broth and the resulting soup "turkey bone gruel", gruel being the word we thought best symbolized the penny-pinching poverty and misery that the gruel represented

Mind you, it was good soup. Kids, they're just little fuckers sometimes.

Speaking of which...

I went into the Boy's room last night to shut down the gaming and asked about his application to the Portland police cadet program. He replied that he was no longer pursuing that program, but intended to go to college.

......

I'll believe it when I see it. He needs to do the work to find out how much he needs to do, how much it'll cost, and where he needs to go. Will he? I have no fucking idea.

The afternoon of Thanksgiving Day was bright and calm, and I went out into the yard to enjoy the temporarily-leafless vistas.

I sat in the old rope swing, idle since my progeny got too old to swing in it, and just took in the sunny afternoon, quiet and at peace. But also at a place I'd never been before in that familiar backyard.

What lies ahead for me? For us?

I don't know. Perhaps the most fraught part of this whole "retirement" thing is that I don't know how it goes.

I've been a wage slave for thirty years, ever since I left the Army.

I don't know any other life.

But now I'm going to find out.

Christmas Day, 2021

"A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and the weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melting snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:

A hard time we had of it.

~ T.S. Eliot, Journey of the Magi

There was a time when I would struggle out of sleep on Christmas morning, desperate for caffeine amid jittering children impatient for loot.

Today? Nah. Just me and Little Cat, coffee and tuna pate' and soccer re-runs in the silent morning house. Why the hell was Qatar playing in the CONCACAF Cup semifinal? Fucker was in Eurasia last I checked. Fucking FIFA cash-grab, I suspect.

Finally the crew staggered in and the presents were distributed and everyone got down to the hard business of Christmas Day - napping (parents), gaming (The Boy), and something artistic (The Girl). The cats begged for food, prowled randomly, or napped, although Drachma did have a moment with his new catnip toy:

.

He had to sleep it off under the tree...

Late in the afternoon my Bride concluded that we needed a brisk walk, so we headed out into the gray, rainy, high-thirties evening, down to the little woodlot waste ground along the fringes of St. Johns to walk off excess Christmas Spirit.

And proceeded to immediately come across a dump of cut-up commercial weed.

"Oh Christmas weed, oh Christmas weed, how lovely are your branches..!"

Frankly it was miserable; cold, wet, with a nasty east wind that was just enough to chill any part of you that wasn't covered.

The Girl and I turned back just past the treeline in the distance of the photo above. The Bride kept on going just long enough to show us what weenies we were being, and I'm totally okay with that. That was a rotten ramble.

But we got home to the warmth and the glow of the lights, and the promise of the quiet evening to come.

Trail of Tears

Just to the west of the Little House there's a City park, the Peninsula Crossing Trail, that runs along the east bank of what we call "The Cut", the immense railroad cut that runs through North Portland from the Willamette River side - where the vast Albina freight yards are located - to the Columbia.

The Bride and I discovered it soon after it was opened in 1996. Back then I could still ride a bike and we did, enjoying the quiet wooded trail between the busy and largely-bike-lane-free-at-the-time North Portland arterial streets.

That's actually a pretty good picture of how the trail would have looked for, oh, about a decade or so.

Then Portland's "homeless problem" metastasized. 

Today the trail looks more like this:

 

Most housed North Portlanders won't stray onto the trail anymore; it's not worth the debris and the random whacko and the ride is no longer peaceful and pretty.

Like most Portlanders, I'm frustrated and angry. Almost every public space is now inhabited, and nearly all the habitations are a sour sprawl of...well, everything; filthy clothes, bags of trash, broken bicycles and cars...they're trashpits. There's a reason nobody ever went for a walk in the city dump.

But, like most Portlanders, I'm also baffled by what to do about these camps.

I mean...I know the real answer. It means building a mass of cheap, low-cost rental and housing units. It means staffing organizations that will provide support and structure for the people moved out of the camps and into the housing - both in the form of "support" like addiction programs and medical and/or psychiatric care - and "structure", like nannying them to take their meds and go to the job training programs.

But...here's a good example of why even with all this - and I should note that "all this" is a fever dream; nobody in Portland will vote the taxation it would take to do all that - I despair of figuring out a way to deal with this homeless mess.

The link above takes you to the tale of one "Gary O'Connor", who lived and died - violently - along a similar trail in Southeast Portland. 

The article tries hard to make O'Connor into a sympathetic character, but can't avoid noting that:

"O’Connor couldn’t read or write and resorted to stealing...(h)e struggled with addiction...Court records show O’Connor had burglary convictions in Multnomah County and at the time of his death had a warrant out for his arrest in Clackamas County, where he was accused of giving police a false name and criminal trespassing."

So let's assume you get this guy into a subsidized house. You get him a into a drug addiction program. You get him back in school - at 45 years old, mind - to learn to freaking read and write and do simple math.

What then? Who's going to hire this guy? A former crook and tweaker who lived half his life illiterate? Frankly, I'm guessing you'd have to assign a sort of parole officer/social worker/nanny to the dude full time to keep him from deciding that stealing bikes was less difficult and demanding than his job stocking shelves at Kroger.

Multiply that by thousands or even tens of thousands; people with health issues who need medical help, people with drug issues, people with emotional issues or mental health issues. People who, honestly, prefer to steal rather than punch a clock.

I mean...to be brutal, if this guy was a pet you'd take him to the vet and have him put down. He'd just be too much trouble.

But he's not a pet, he's a person. A troubling, troublesome person, but a person. So you kind of have a moral dilemma on your hands. He's a huge sink of time, money, and trouble, and one who is very like to reward all that investment with...very little. 

But if you don't make that investment, there he is, with his tent and his trash and his stolen bikes and his encroaching on your public space with all of that and his personal problems. You drive him away and he just becomes some other Portlander's problem and the people those Portlanders drove away come to camp in your patch.

So I still don't have a good answer to the "homeless problem"; the solution will take time, money, and interest we aren't willing to invest, and without the solution we're stuck with these filthy camps in every public space.

The Big Heat

2020 was kind of suck-ass here in Portland.

First antifa and BLM ran riot in the streets and burned the whole goddamn town down.

And then we had massive forest fires that burned the whole goddamn woods down.

And then we had goddamn MAGAts that came around trying to sweep the goddamn ashes into Idaho's goddamn trash bin.

Jesus wept!

And then - just this past weekend - we had a giant, creepy iron high-pressure dome or something come oozing in off the Pacific and hunker down over us for three days or so bringing the big heat.

As in, 115 degree heat.

Cliff Mass at his Weather Blog has some terrific posts discussing what happened and why. Here was his warning Sunday afternoon:

Tomorrow: The Day of Unimaginable Extremes

But tomorrow, it all goes horribly wrong.  The thermal trough moves northward and westward, pushing the strong easterly, downslope flow northward to over the central Cascades (see map for 11 AM Monday).  The sinking air will compress/warm as it sinks.

The burst of downslope, compressional heating will cause temperatures to warm beyond the experience of any living inhabitant of the region (see forecast temperatures at 5 PM Monday).  

Temperatures will rise above 112F on the eastside of Puget Sound and above 100F for everyone more than a few miles from the water.  Portland will be similarly warm.  And so will the lower elevations of the Columbia Basin. 

The first and most obvious question is; "is this due to a warming climate"?

And Mass' answer (and mine, since his data appears quite sound) is; sorta;

"...a number of people have asked about the role of global warming on this event.   

Is global warming contributing to this heatwave?  The answer is certainly yes.  

Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming.  The answer is yes as well. 

Our region has warmed by up to 1-2F during the past fifty years and that will enhance the heatwave. Increasing CO2 is probably the biggest contributor to the warming. 

But consider that the temperature anomalies (differences from normal) during this event will reach 30-35F. The proximate cause of this event is a huge/persistent ridge of high pressure, part of a highly anomalous amplification of the upper-level wave pattern. 

There is no evidence that such a wave pattern is anything other than natural variability (I have done research on this issue and published in the peer-reviewed literature on this exact topic). 

So without global warming, a location that was 104F would have been 102F. Still a severe heat wave, just slightly less intense."

I do wonder if the intensity of the tropical storm that helped create this immense high pressure ridge might have been heightened by the warming climate...but, I defer to the subject matter experts.

So how did we do here in the Fire Direction Center?

Pretty much just fine.

I hid inside all weekend, pretty much, other than taking my Bride and the Larvae to the airport Sunday morning for their pilgrimage to the Gramma Shrine.

It was pretty damn hot when I dropped them off at 11:00am...by Monday morning it was insane:

By Monday afternoon it had gone waaaayyyy past insane...

The Little House is one of the fortunate older ones here in the Portland region to have had central air installed. So I cranked that baby and kept it cranked all through until the heat broke Monday night.

Mind you, when the outside of the house is 112 degrees even the butch-est air conditioner struggles. On Monday afternoon the thermostat was set to 72 but the interior temperature was 83. That was the best the poor bastard could do; fight a delaying action against the heat.

It worked well enough.

With the family off tickling grandparental fancies just the cats shared the Big Heat with me.

Mostly they were smart enough to stay indoors to do their eat-and-sleep-repeat cat thing. But, being cats, they couldn't STAY indoors, so every hour or so they'd swagger out into the heat in a manner entirely inappropriate for an animal wearing a fur coat.

Once there, mind, they'd flop over and just lie there, like, maybe it was too hot to do anything, like, move. No shit, cats.  No wonder you aren't the top of the food chain, never mind the whole opposable-thumbs thing.

The residents that suffered the most were the vegetables.

My daughter has recently developed a huge taste for gardening. So the Little Yard is now verdant with plants of all kinds, mostly flowers. We have random sunflowers along edges and by fences, potted plants on benches and tables, raised beds full of goodies...they're all over the place, and the Girl is besotted with her flowers.

And it is flowers. The Bride and I are raising tomatoes and squash and peas. The Girl is raising dahlias and zinnias and passionflowers.

(The Boy is raising nothing but digital hell in the HALO universe, so he's not really in the frame...)

Well, most of the in-ground plants came through the big heat okay...

...a little wilted by Monday night when I went out to water again (I'd watered in the morning, as well) but still living. But the potted ones..?

...not so much. Three of the Girl's beloved dahlias look pretty fried. I'm still watering when I do the rest of the garden, but I'm not hopeful.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the fire direction crew are unimpressed by the historical (and historically awful) event they just lived through, as the Senior Enlisted remarked when we woke up Tuesday and walked out into a cool morning;

Little Cat: My butt cold. Why my butt cold? Where hot?
Me: It's gone, the heat wave is over. We're back to normal-ish.
LC: My butt cold. No like!
M: Yeah, well, it is what it is. Have some cat food.
LC: No! Where hot? No like! You fix!
M: I can't fix the weather, doof. Look, there's some nice kibbles.
LC: Meh. You fix.
M:
LC:
M: Fuckit, Imma drink my coffee. You do whatever.
LC: ...the fuck? The goddamn service around this place has completely gone to hell. I'm going over here until I can speak to your manager.

K. Good luck with that.

Christmas Day 2020

 

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly

the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forgot what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,

a black letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.

---”Holly”, from "Station Island" by Seamus Heaney.

 (h/t to Lance Mannion, who has been posting these evocative Heaney poems...)

Christmas Eve, 4:00 am

 The Little House is dark. 

 Well, almost dark; the IKEA light under the shelves in the kitchen corner is on - because I made a pot of coffee about half and hour ago - and the phosphor glow of the laptop screen picks out one end of the table that makes the east half of the front room the "dining room".

Have I ever talked about this house?

It's almost a century old. Ninety-nine years old in just over a week; built in 1922, when this part of what's called the "Peninsula" - the triangle that narrows to the northwest as the Willamette and Columbia Rivers converge - had been Portland for barely seven years.

(Before that it hadn't been much of anything, lightly-built-over farmland between the little city of St. Johns to the northwest and Albina to the south - to the east was pretty much actual farmland all the way out east to the mouth of the Gorge. But that was then.)

The area was slowly filling in, but slowly. Here's the Corps of Engineers aerial photo from 1936. Nearly thirty years after incorporation, and over a decade after the Little House was built, and much of this section of what is now the "Portsmouth" neighborhood was open fields, including actual FARM fields.

This house and the house just to the east were built on the same plan, presumably by the same builder, and because of that probably on "spec"; that is, not to a waiting homeowner but by a developer who hoped to sell the new houses to random buyers.

It's...well, my Bride likes to describe our house as having "ugly bones", and it's true. The two houses were thrown up cheap and quick and small. The original design had a pair of rooms facing the street; a "parlor" and a "dining room" separated by a structural wall from the back of the house. The dining room opened onto the kitchen, the kitchen onto a hallway that ran the length of the house. In the back were two bedrooms on one side and a bathroom on the other. A detached garage sat out in the back facing the alley.

It looked like this:

Both this and the sister house next door have been extensively modified since they were built. Interestingly, the house to the east still retains the original separate parlor-and-dining-room arrangement, but at some point (probably after the fire that damaged the front of our house in the 1980s) the owners tore out the wall between the two front rooms to make a single large one.

They also punched a hole in the load-bearing wall that runs across the house, opening the hall to the front.

At some point they enclosed the back porch, making the weird "room of closets" we ripped apart fo make Missy's now-filthy-trashpile of a bedroom.

Here's the current floorplan:

The best part of the house are the wood floors. They're not hardwood - remember; cheap, quick, and small - but they're a clear, straight-grain fir. 

They were also painted, for some reason, and were repainted numerous times. The earliest coat was the most peculiar; when I stripped the floors in both the bedrooms the bulk of the paint came up in strips. Y'know, the way paint does when you strip it.

The bottom layer, a deep red color, turned into a sort of vile jelly. I suspect it probably had a crap-ton of lead in it, too, but the consistency was the worst part. You had to scrape it with a blade and then wipe the blade to clear it. It also stained hell out of anything it touched. I have no idea what it was, but it was truly nasty.

After all the paint a former owner laid down a then-standard cheap, nasty Seventies or early Eighties short-nap carpet. Pulling THAT shit out was pure pleasure.

Anyway...that's the house. The roof is getting there; it's easily twenty years old and small parts tend to turn up in the yard after a big storm, so that's on the list. The boards of the deck we had built outside the east wall ten years are getting a little shifty, as well, so those need to be replaced soon.

And...well, this seems mean when I just say it out loud, but...the house is getting smaller as I get older, and I'm ready for the kids to move out on their own so we can have it to ourselves.

I'm tired of the mess, and tired of the clutter, tired of having little or no privacy or quiet when everyone's home. They're good kids and I love them, but...I'm ready to start loving them from a bit more distance.

I suspect that makes me a bit of a bastard.

But as I think I've mentioned. I am a bit of a bastard. I've got some sort of deep-seated survival thing that makes me more than a little callous. I'd be the guy who walks out of the airplane-crash-in-the-Andes-where-the-survivors-resort-to-cannibalism having gained three pounds. It's not that I don't feel the griefs and regrets. It's just that I do, and then I go about my business.

So I don't want my kids out of my life; I just want them in it a bit further away.

And I want my life back.

I realize that things would have been difficult during a global pandemic regardless, but I'm quietly furious at Tubby Twatmite and his merry band of incompetent GOP grifters and stooges for fucking it up so badly that I have to sneak around like a weasel in a minefield. 

I miss all the little pleasures; the evenings out, the casual times with friends, the little small change of life.

And it's worse because that time is running out. I don't have thirty or forty years to make up for this lost time. I've got, if I'm lucky, another fifteen or twenty good years and then it's going to go to hell in a hurry. I'm not looking forward to my eighties, assuming I make it that far. 

So I rage at every day we're immured behind the high walls we need to keep the Mongols out, and that makes me resent even more every moment I'm losing to this fucking Plague, and that makes me even more pissed off at the goddamn nitwit and his slobbering cult.

And I'm tired of watching my country and my countrymen become smaller and meaner and stupider and angrier. 

I'm tired of the past four years where everything is transactional, all about the Art of the Deal, contingent on What's In It For Me. I want us to be better, and kinder, and smarter. 

I want a brighter day.

I want what Charlie Pierce wants and said sooner and better than I:

"...may you all have the rest and peace of this mid-winter holiday season. May all your whiskey be mellow and may all your lights shine. And may there always be a candle in the window, calling you home, calling you out of the storm, calling all of us home, together, and home."

The Fire This Time

So I promised (warned? threatened?) to have something to say about the Oregon story that's in y'all's news feeds this week; the wildfires (and attendant smoke-clouds crouching over Portland) that are still tearing up our Northwest forests.

As with everything in the United States today, the fires have several competing narratives. Viewed from the Left, it's all about climate change. From the Right, it's spotted owls and ecofreaks preventing Good Loggers from cleaning and raking Oregon forests.

The reality, as reality tends to do, has a definite liberal bias. But it's more complex than either side wants to admit, meaning that changing the reality we're facing today is complex and difficult and, as you probably know, humans aren't good at "complex and difficult".

But let's begin with the climate.

Baby, It's Warm Outside

Yes, the warming climate is a big part of the problem.

Oregon and the rest of us here in the Northwest have a rep as a misty hinterland of coffee and beer and Sasquatch and flannel shirts set amid the rainy forests. But in fact the north part of the Pacific Coast - from about Mendocino, California to the tip of Vancouver Island - has what's called a "xeric" climate. You might have heard it called "Mediterranean". 

It means cool, wet winters and warm, dry summers.

And our summers are dry. It's common to have little or no rain between the end of June and mid-October. Temperatures can run up into the nineties for weeks, with nasty days in the hundreds, and everything dries and bakes under the summer sun.

But we've been getting less rain (and, critically, less snow - because many of our rivers depend on Cascades snowmelt by late summer and early autumn) and that's definitely been a factor in the frequency and size of forest fires, including this year's.

But that's not all, or, in my opinion, even the biggest factor, in the Fire Story

Tall Timber

You probably know we throw a lot of timber. Still do. Aside from the plow, the axe and saw did more to make Oregon "Oregon" than perhaps anything else outside the fishwheel and gillnet. The earliest fortunes made here were made in timber - not that the people who were actually touching the trees - the toppers, fellers, yarders, choker-setters, the guys running the steam-donkeys or goading the ox-teams, poling the log rafts, the mill hands and sawyers, the cooks in the camp kitchen - were making bank, mind. 

Nah. Those poor bastards were just, y'know, "people", and who gave a shit about them? They weren't organized - the I.W.W. ran into lots of trouble trying to unionize the lumber camps back in the Nineteen-Oughts and Teens - they were usually those damn dirty immigrants (although more often Swedish and Finnish and Norwegian than the current browner versions doing the dirty, dangerous, low-paying work us nice people don't want to do...) and probably radicals and anarchists, anyway.

Nope. The money was made by the "timber barons" and their companies; the plutocrats who fronted the cash and reaped the big harvests of money from the harvesting of timber.

And, it should be said, gave about a micron of a picoshit about the timberlands they reaped.

Very, very few timber magnates, or timber companies, spent anything on trying to restore the lands they cut. They logged them flat and walked away. If the hillsides slid, if the rivers and streams choked with mud? Who cared? That just fucked over those "people", and there were lots more hills and streams and trees to cut and people to cut them.

Well...the free land did finally run out, and the timber outfits began to realize that there was nowhere left to log. And they'd pretty much logged out the rest of the nation already, so there was nowhere to run, either.

(If you want to read a sickening tale of corporate logging, read about Michigan. The logging companies moved in during the 1860s and started cutting. They cut like sonsofbitches until by 1900 the state was literally logged out. Not a single marketable stand of big trees remained. 

So the timber outfits ran like little bitches to the Northwest, and left the Michigan loggers to hit the road begging for work and the timber towns to die.)

So reluctantly Weyerhaeuser and Cavenham and Simpson began to "replant" their Oregon timberlands.

But these plantations weren't "forests". A mature Northwest forest looks like this:

The big trees screen out most of the light, so the forest floor is pretty open. There's some swordfern and maybe Oregon grape, a vinemaple or three...but not a lot of undergrowth. It's dotted with openings where a tree has died or fallen, but it's mostly just tall timber and a sparse understory.

(In fact, the local tribes used fire to open the canopy to get browse for the elk and deer they hunted; there just wasn't much huntable meat inside the big trees.)

Now...this is a plantation - what the #Timberunity people like to call a "working forest". This is what happens when a timber outfit "replants" a "forest":

This is a bit exaggerated; this stand has never been thinned, but it's still pretty close to typical for a 10-year old stand. We call it "twig" or "doghair" timber, and it's nasty to work in - close, hot in the summer, and full of things that poke and tear the shit out of you when you try and push through it - and as explosive as a match-head when it dries out in the summer.

The big trees and the wet forest floor tend to hold water, even in the driest months. This stuff? Dries like flashpaper. Even relatively mature second-growth stands, like this one - 

are much drier and the flammable load is much higher. 

An old forest burn tends to smoulder. The undergrowth burns, but the fires tend to be lower and cooler; most of the trees themselves may char but don't burn. In an old stand you often see big redcedars or douglas-firs with blackened bark telling how they've lived through (presumably) several fires.

Those second-growth, "plantation" trees?

They candle.

So you have thousands of acres of these matchbox stands of second-growth, and when you throw in generations of fire suppression that has removed the natural regime of regular fires that remove the forest floor litter and combustible brush with these unnatural "forests"?

And you've got perfect tinder for big fires.

Hell is Other People

And, then, of course, you add fucking people.

Forests have always burned. Before people, it was just a thing that happened. Dry lightning, usually, and the woods would burn. Some of the creatures in it would die, the rest would have to run for it, and then the reforestation would begin.

Add low-tech humans and, as I've noted, you get human-caused fires; untended campfires, deliberate clearing, but pretty much the same effect. Most native tribes here in the Northwest would have been smart enough not to set fires where they were camped or their houses were built.

And - barring the occasional freakish windstorm, say, that spun the longhouse fire out into the trees - their limited means of firemaking meant that those fires almost had to be deliberately set.

But now?

Christ, what don't we industrial civilization-types have that causes things to light up?

Powerlines, obviously, are the big offenders. Many of the current fires were lit off by the big windstorm that blew through here at the end of the first week of September; falling limbs and trees hit or knocked down powerlines, and the dry East wind whipped up the sparks into a firestorm.

But you got your exhaust pipes, your brush- and trash-burning, your cigarette butts, your fireworks, your gender reveal parties...fuck, as my old drill sergeant used to say; "People, enh? They could fuck up a wet dream."

And, of course, you have your woods dwellers.

Here in Oregon we have two main varieties.

Our well-to-do love to live in the woodlands. They plant their communities thick with trees, they push their homes deep into the forests, because...well, it's Oregon, and we're timber people, right? Never mind the Tesla in the driveway, we're just flannel-shirted loggers at heart.

And there's also a bunch of genuine flannel-shirted poor people who hang on in the woods at the fringes of the cities, out in the scabby second-growth, because they need to live cheap and a shotgun shack in Clackamas County is goddamn cheap.

Both sorts usually don't bother to clear the undergrowth far enough away from the walls. Hell, the richies have lot of lovely flammable landscaping planted to make the place pretty. 

The houses of both the scraggly poor and the manicured rich burn like sonsofbitches, though, when the fire rips through the place, forcing people to run, sometimes killing the ones who don't, or who can't, and forcing the firefighting teams to try and dig in and defend these damn firetraps to let the people inside escape.

So here we are.

Climate + Logging + People?

And there you have it. Years of fucking up the woods and then moving into them set the table, then the changes in the climate cooked the hell-feast, and we're here, huddling indoors because the smoke from the Santiam Fire...

...spread across our state in a choking blanket of eye-searing, throat-tightening misery for which we have only ourselves to blame.

And the notion that we will do anything sensible to change this?

That We the People will rein in industrial logging? That we will stop people from building in harm's way? That we will do any damn thing to reverse the inevitable slide back into the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum?

Ha.

Thanks. I needed a laugh right now. 

Because otherwise my throat is full of nothing but rage and smoke.