Decoration Day 2026

 

As is my wont this day, I left North Portland early to visit Willamette National Cemetery and spend some time with my Army brothers.

It was...well, you know what it was, because I do this every year, and if you're one of the few people still reading this (and, yes, that "few" is my own fault for being a Bad Blogger and not posting more content. I get it.) you've read these Memorial Day posts and know where I go and what I do.

The big burying ground was its usual serene and manicured self. The visitors were sparse, as always in the early morning, although a bit more numerous in the newer, outer areas, where more of the dead from what I think of as "my generation" of wars are buried.

Still vastly out-buried by the crowd from the mid-Twentieth-Century wars, mind. As the generation born in the 1920s and 30's goes down to the grave in hastening numbers the space for my people, the younger troops from Iraq and Afghanistan (and the other farcical imperial adventures like my own Caribbean vacation of 1983 or Panama in 1989), is grossly over-filled with our parents or grandparents.

So much so that I was almost shocked to find someone who was actually killed in Iraq, a Marine staff sergeant whose luck finally ran out on his third tour in June of 2007. 

I took the time to look him up; when he bought the farm he was working as a bomb-disposal guy, presumably hunting for IEDs. His obit said he'd joined as a 17-year-old kid who had wanted to be a rodeo bull rider and Marine, had volunteered for the 2336 MOS after a bunch of embassy guard tours, and had ended up in Anbar Province where some anonymous muj had built for him a bull he couldn't ride.

As always, I poured out a beer to him and all my brothers; not gone, just marching far away, and explaining that I'd be there soon; sooner than I'd hoped, anyway. 

And, as always, I apologized, for not being a better citizen and keeping them from wasting years or their lives in pointless wars in distant places because I'd let the lies and foolishness and stupidity and evil of my "leaders" go unpunished. 

I mourned for them, and for myself, that the ideals and illusions they and I had been raised on - of our country and our people - had turned out to be nonsense, a tissue of credulous fables spun around promises We the People had never fought and worked hard enough to redeem.

 
And then I left. 

Down the green and shining hill, up onto the freeway that took me back through the busy outlands of southeast then northeast Portland to the patch of grown-over waste ground that is now the Whittaker Pond greenspace, where I took up my binoculars and spent a quiet hour looking and listening.

To the sounds of wind and water. To the hushed noises of business and traffic. To the quiet life of the city around me, doing it's daily business through wars and rumors of wars.

And then I went home.

Don't get me wrong.

I'm still incandescent with rage at the wreckage the parcel of greedy fools led by a bloated moron has done to my nation. I'm still fulminating because of the betrayal of people like me, soldiers and sailors and airmen and marines - and all those we have been and will be sent to kill and maim - who have been and will be carelessly tossed in harm's way for a bump of the Dow or some AI-slop social media shit.

But I'm still here. 

Not dead yet.

And as I promised my brothers; if I can summon the sheer gall and anger to be there to piss on all their graves, every one of the sonsofbitches?

I will.

Until then?

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

------- 

As always on this day; this.

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.

The Law in its Impartial Majesty

Way back in January of this year I wrote:

"I can think of no better response, no better description of the response that is needed and should be applied to the treasonous bastards than those of the man who flayed the last rebellious treason in this country:

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

I had a blissful moment imagining a modern Bill Sherman staring at the gaggle of dirty, hangdog prisoners standing under guard as the old stone building burns behind them, removing the cigar from his mouth to spit;

"Shoot them, major? Shoot them? I think not."

He would pause for a moment before jerking the stogie towards the big trees standing nearby, and growling;

"Rebels taken in arms aren't honorably shot. Rebels, major, are hung like the criminals they are."

"See to it."

It was a good idea at the time that looks even better now.

And I also said at the time:

"I will make two predictions now, and remember them;

These people will pay no price for their treason, and

We, the rest of us, will rue that we did not crush this seditious villainy when it was but small and could be crushed.

The law should have been pressed on the Bundys and was not. The law will not be brought to bear on these swine. Instead they will walk away, boasting, and the poison they bear will spread."

And so it will.

Sometimes I hate it when I'm fucking right.

Dare call it treason

I was genuinely surprised yesterday at the incandescence of my anger when I read about the rebel militia seizing the Malheur NWR headquarters building.

Partly, I suspect, because that lonely stone structure has many fond memories associated with it. It is a "desert oasis", disproportionately attractive to the passerine migrant through the deserts of Malheur County. The notion of a passel of gunlicking Tenther rebels lolling about the place where I whiled many happy hours birding was infuriating, to be sure.

But the most part is the degree to which none seem to dare call these treasonous bastards what they are.

Traitors.

Worse; traitors in arms. They fulfill perfectly the definition of the enemies I swore to defend the Constitution of my nation from, foreign and domestic; defying the laws and regulations of the duly-elected government of the United States and bearing arms against the officers of the same.

For a mad moment I wanted - wanted so badly that it made my throat tighten - to take up my old rifle and rise on my bad leg and hobble down to the federal courthouse in Portland city and volunteer to follow the colors out to the sagebrush wastes south of Burns to shoot down the traitorous enemies of my country. Suddenly I understood how so many other men stood up in 1861 to do the same. The hatred and loathing of these rebel traitors burns within me still, banked but glowing like a balefire in the night.

The news agencies, the current crop of candidates, Oregon politicians...they need to call this what it is. It is black, dirty treason; rebellion in arms against our nation, and I can think of no better response, no better description of the response that is needed and should be applied to the treasonous bastards than those of the man who flayed the last rebellious treason in this country:

"My aim, then, was to whip the rebels, to humble their pride, to follow them to their inmost recesses, and make them fear and dread us. Fear is the beginning of wisdom."

I had a blissful moment imagining a modern Bill Sherman staring at the gaggle of dirty, hangdog prisoners standing under guard as the old stone building burns behind them, removing the cigar from his mouth to spit;

"Shoot them, major? Shoot them? I think not."

He would pause for a moment before jerking the stogie towards the big trees standing nearby, and growling;

"Rebels taken in arms aren't honorably shot. Rebels, major, are hung like the criminals they are."

"See to it."

Illegal Immigrants

...to the Northwest include an Ovenbird (Seiurus aurocapilla) in the Laurelhurst neighborhood of Portland...

...and an even rarer Red-flanked Bluetail (Tarsiger cyanurus) found in New Westminster, BC.

The Ovenbird would be a nice but unshocking Oregon rarity;

"one of the more frequent vagrant “eastern” warblers encountered in the West in both spring and fall (approaching 1,000 records in California and close to 40 in Oregon, where it is no longer on the state review list"

although I understand this bird is a first record for Multnomah County and Portland proper - most of these vagrants end up at the desert oases near Fields or Malheur.

But the bluetail is a genuine North American oddity, only the third North American record outside the western Aleutians for this Eurasian vagrant.

I regret that work holds me here, because while I am no longer a truly devoted birder I remain that lowest of birdwatching life forms, the hardcore "lister" (or "twitcher", the Brits would call me), and if I thought that this little rascal would hang around New West I'd sure as hell chase it.