43. Small is Beautiful

Maybe it was luck that made me stay in a small town; maybe it was the whisper of the Creator. But time and circumstance, the circle of friends, and growing knowledge that the Nez Perce left this place physically but not spiritually, have kept me here in the Wallowa Country—two million acres of canyons, mountains, rivers, wheat and hay fields, and four small towns. There are about 7,000 of us living here most of the year. The place swells in summer with second-homers and tourists. And this year, after the coronavirus shut-down eased up enough for measured travel, a trickle, and then a surge of visitors wanting to take masks off and breathe mountain air. 

They come from Portland and Seattle, but the license plates now show New York, Arizona, and Florida as well. And of course California. Some are retired—a band of RVers met at Wallowa Lake pledged to follow the Trail to Bear’s Paw, Montana, where the non-Treaty Nez Perce finally stopped in their flight towards Canada. Others come with children and grandchildren, looking for some normalcy in an altered world.

Our schools have carefully reopened—with real classes and classrooms. There are masks and adaptations, but it is real enough for a few new students who have grandparents here, or a single mom fleeing a hard work-school situation in the city.

Colby College in Main—1800 students—has reopened too, in much the same way. They made the national news, with a president who said we can do this, must do this to keep educating young men and women. We’ll test and distance, he said, and have smaller classes. The student body president said that partiers who can’t live with the rule of no more than ten in a class or social group just have to leave. In 1973, E.F. Schumacher's wrote Small is Beautiful, denouncing the “economics of giantism and automation.” Wealth does not mean happiness, he said. Work and life should be at a human scale.  Economic systems should provide space for human interaction; no city should have more than 500,000 people. 

Schumacher cautioned about globalization and the depletion of natural resources, wanted economies built on sustainability rather than growth. Cities that grow like fungus, airports that shuttle millions daily, factories that “assemble” parts from many directions to make cars and televisions that scoot along spider networks of international distribution, do not make us happier. 

And all those growth and speed things built for people are good for the growth and transportation of viruses too.

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42. Sick

Thursday Sept. 24. I’d just finished reading Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America. The news about the Kentucky attorney general and grand jury’s failure to charge the three White policemen in the killing of Breonna Taylor was all over the morning news. In a lame retreat, one of the three will be prosecuted for endangering the lives of white residents in a nearby apartment with his wayward shots. Ironically, his bullets didn’t hit Taylor, and the two cops who shot her are not charged at all.

At work, a friend comes in to talk about an upcoming exhibit that will feature people and animal friends. I remember a book I read a long time ago, in the 60s, called White Dog. It was by a French writer married to an American who brings home a German Shepherd pound dog. It’s a wonderful dog—until a Black friend visits. The dog attacks. The dog has been trained to attack Black people. The writer-dog owner tries to reprogram. I can’t remember the ending.

I go online. Romain Gary is the writer’s name. He was married to the actor, Jean Seberg. She played Joan of Arc in St. Joan. I read more. There was a movie, but I didn’t see it. But I remember some of Seberg. I think she shaved her head for St. Joan. She was on magazine covers and became a darling of the French cinema. Girls everywhere copied her short-cut hair. 

In 2016, Iowa Humanities funded a documentary: Movie Star: The Secret Lives of Jean Seberg, Seborg was a noted anti-racist white actor who had joined the NCAA at 14 and took on liberal crusades, including the Black Panthers. She liked their free breakfast program. She gave them $10,500.

The late 60s.  The FBI began to harass her, and spread rumors that a Black Panther fathered her unborn child. Newsweek Magazine published it.  She lost the premature baby, and had an open casket funeral in Iowa to show the world the baby was white.

The rest of her life was clouded—more movies and writing and the marriage failed. When her life ended with an apparent suicide in France, ex-husband Gary said that she never recovered from the FBI harassment and loss of the child. 

Thursday night. Maybe it was cumulative; my stomach churned; I felt sick.

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41. What money can’t buy

This morning, on the day after only one of three policemen involved in the affair that resulted in the death of Breonna Taylor, was charged, and not charged with her death but with endangering other apartment dwellers, people in Louisville and cities across the nation stepped up protests against police brutality. Breonna Taylor’s mother had already been awarded $12 million and the city had agreed to some police reforms. That money did not buy justice—or peace on the streets of Louisville or Portland.

Although the government has dished out billions of dollars to drug companies in hopes of getting a quick vaccine against Covid-19, it will take much more than money to make even a good vaccine effective in the world. The problems of manufacture and distribution will climb on the bigger problems of anti-vaxxers to make any kind of “herd immunity” a near-term impossibility. Looking back to the successful campaigns against smallpox and polio, it is broad public confidence and cooperation of national and international partners that made—and are still making in the case of polio—effective. It is also very important to note that Jonas Salk did not patent his polio vaccine. Edward R. Morrow interviewed its Salk and asked who owned the patent. “Well, the people, I would say,” said Salk in light of the millions of charitable donations raised by the March of Dimes that funded the vaccine’s research and field testing. “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”

Billions of dollars are being spent to repair damages from today’s fires and hurricanes, but billions of dollars spent now cannot make up for years of mismanagement and neglect. The wrong-headed policy of stopping all fires has led to a huge buildup of forest fuels; the growth of housing in what is now called a wild and urban interface has put homes and people in fires’ natural paths. And the billions of dollars spent and still being spent in the global promotion of growth built on the use of fossil fuels over decades has helped alter the globe’s natural cycles with extraordinary temperatures, droughts, floods, and rising seas. 

Money cannot buy humility, respect for the world’s creatures, waters, trees, and savannahs, or the justice and fair treatment we owe each other as human beings in an interconnected world.

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40. What we don’t know--“Uncertainty"

I imagine I am not alone in checking the Oregon Health Authority’s daily “Coronavirus Update.” We in Wallowa County have trundled along through this saga with a string of zeros and the occasional “1” in the list of counties and recording of new cases. Once, or twice, we might have had a “2.”

This week it was “6,” and a small pulse scampered up my back: Count the days back to Labor Day; what about that wedding at the foot of the lake—and the pickups with “Just Hitched” and “Just Married” smeared on the rear window in yellow poster paint; and the hordes of people on Main Street in Joseph over last two weekends; Rick Bombaci’s comments on the high numbers in the Lakes Basin, and the full parking lots at trailheads?

We’ve been waiting—and watching, and wondering when Covid-19’s march across Oregon would get to us. We saw the church affair in Union County explode things in Union County for a few days, and watched as numbers in Umatilla County climbed and climbed—the WalMart Distribution Center; meat and vegetable packing plants…

And then the smoke. No fires here, but smoke moved the few hundred miles from Ashland, Medford, Mollala, and Oregon City to rest here, against the mountains. If someone could put red die on Covid-19, we’d know when to put on our masks, go inside, or head for the high lakes. 

But on reflection, what is disturbing is the uncertainty.  And if there is one thing that runs the country, urban to rural, east to west, Blue to Red, it is this uncertainty. Count the reasons: will Covid get here? Will the smoke go away? Will we get our own fire? Will the Post Office deliver the mail—and the ballots? Will one group or another vote—or accept the results? 

It’s draining, and today’s slightly yellow and sweet smelling smoke—just as we see the first clouds and a hint of sky blue in days—makes me wonder what’s in the smoke? Today’s fires are not forest fires, but car, truck, house, carpet, vinyl, metal fires. Everything burns if it gets hot enough. 

The things we do not know.

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39. And now the smoke

A friend and I took a 6-mile bike ride yesterday. We had meant to go longer, but the thick air changed our minds, and we decided on six miles riding slowly so as not to have us huffing and puffing the air’s particles. 

Along a back road we met two women walking, and they were wearing masks. We should have, we said, and they agreed. And for sure, in our town and in cities and towns we see on TV screens, the increase in people wearing masks with fires and smoke is substantial. Covid-19 is not visible like this stuff, and doesn’t sting your eyes and throats.

My son and family drove from Oregon City under an evacuation order on Friday evening, and said the air was thick from there to La Grande. And although their Oregon City home has gone back to level 2, and they are going back today to make sure their home is all right and to try to resume their normal in abnormal times lives, the state’s air now registers mostly “hazardous” from here to Oregon City.

Covid, Portland protests, election trauma, and even fire were somehow not in our back yard. But smoke is. And in this, we are joined by people from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. (In fact, in an ironic twist for our Leader, I think we are now borrowing fire fighters from both countries!)

The Leader is going to California today—not, I imagine, to think that he can gather votes there, but he will certainly be telling voters in swing states that he is doing everything he can for the Left Coast. He might even wear a mask—against the smoke!

Smoke tells us we are all together in this: rural and urban, liberal and conservative, rich and poor, Black, Brown, and White, and, as the winds shift, north, south, east and west. 

Maybe, hopefully, smoke is a lesson in humility that the traumas of 2020 have not yet been able to teach.

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38. And now the fires…

For months that seem like years we’ve watched the killing of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor and the protests, listened to Dr. Fauci explain and the President deny the rage of the coronavirus, counted the miles from New York City, then Portland, then Hermiston and La Grande as the disease crept closer. And now the fires.

I’ve been reading about 1918 and its influenza, its war (that would “end all wars”) and how writers now are finding that time again and wondering why it has been so little written about. The influenza I mean. It was gobbled up in the War and the Armistice they say, but now they write that President Wilson had it, and that the Peace that was worked out in Versailles suffered from his disease. That maybe the settling of that War—the huge reparations charged Germany and the carving up of the Middle East by the Europeans with their own national selfishness and little of the interests of the people in mind—would have been different without the Influenza. 

The Influenza was maybe carried initially by a duck to a soldier in Kansas and then to camps and ships to Europe and then tangled up with the War. More soldiers died of the flu than of the fighting, and in all over 600,000 Americans died. Germans too, and some say that the flu helped our side; some say it infected all.

The flu jumped like fire, like our coronavirus jumps now, and “compounded” its effects when it touched war. I think the fire is doing that now, while we watch it rage across California, Oregon, and Washington. It’s chasing evacuees into tight spaces, moving with them and firefighters across the West. And if this flu is like 1918, it will, like fire, go out or underground to emerge again in second and third waves. 

We won’t be able to sum the losses of this season’s fires until the snow flies and they are all out. But we’ll know when they are out and start planning for next year. The virus is trickier. Spot outbreaks here and there. Does it travel with heat or with cold? Will it mutate? Will there be a vaccine, and if so when, and will people take?

Today there is smoke hovering over our valley, reminding us that all of it is close by, just a sudden wind or a few small breaths away.

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37. 1950s Redux

The surge in outdoor recreation and people from cities and suburbs looking for a rural home is not just happening in Wallowa County. Oregon parks, trails, and beaches are busy across the state. In our county, people are taking up primary residence in second homes, and real estate sales and construction is booming. 

Megan McArdle writes in the Washington Post, September 5, that we are not alone, and then she warns of a disastrous side effect:

“The housing market tells a story of two Americas. One has the educated and professional classes, most of whom can work from home. They’re breaking leases to move to the suburbs or the country; trading up to bigger places; taking advantage of low interest rates to refinance; building additions for the new home office.

“The other America has the people whose job requires their physical presence. Many are out of work and worried about how to pay their rent or mortgage; those who still have jobs are stuck in place and worried about getting covid-19.”

There are echoes of the post WW 2 housing boom and growth of suburbs. WW 2 vets and the GI bill, which provided government aid for schooling and housing, fueled that boom. It was abetted by the mechanization of agriculture—fewer people needed on the farms—and by the fact that millions of American men had seen Paris and San Diego, and weren’t interested in going back to the farm. Women too—over 300,000 served in the Armed Forces and an estimated six million went to work during the war in factories and other jobs previously held by men.  They too, were ready for something different—and often crushed at having to leave jobs they’d done well and would have liked to have continued.

Come the suburb. Levittown, Pennsylvania, a brand new and completely planned community, was the iconic suburb, but it was followed by usually tract developments—houses in one or a few plans, turned left and right—across the country.

The Federal Government chipped in with new water and sewer money, while it failed to provide funds for rebuilding aging infrastructure in the cities, and lo, the urban ghetto. 

I don’t know which way post-Covid housing and migration will go, but there is an eerie echo here of economic and racial divides—already in place—about to explode. 

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36. Pandemic, fire, hurricane…

Two things I’ve learned in reading about the 1918 Influenza: how scatter-shot it moved across the world; and, as author Laura Spinney says, how it struck people “privately and individually” (Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How it Changed the World). There are no public monuments to it, towns, streets, or buildings named after it, as there are for wars, industrialists, and leaders of armies and countries. And because the flu paid no attention to borders or even oceans, pulling together global information on its origins and spread has been a hundred years in the doing.

Today, although there are calls for national masking and distancing, school and business closures, and the quick discovery of a vaccine, Covid-19 creeps across the nation like a fire, finding fuel here and there, blowing up and settling down in one place and another, mimicking the flu-spread of 1918-19. And like the fires now raging in California and Colorado and the most recent hurricane, the impact of Covid-19 is brutal and capricious in the people it plucks from homes and communities. 

And like fire—or hurricane—Covid-19 has not directly distressed a majority of Americans. Inconvenienced and scared, yes, but the 185,000 dead and 5 million infected are still a small minority. Even the 30 million Americans out of work are a minority, and social nets and government spending have kept most—not all—of them afloat. Most Americans are adapting to a more restricted world—airlines and foreign travel is down; camping, RV sales, and the stock market are up. 

In our town, the inconveniences and even disasters that threatened in March have given way to a robust tourism season with most—though not all—businesses thriving. The license plates read Arizona, Florida and Texas as well the more familiar Idaho and Washington. No Chief Joseph Days Rodeo, but the Eagle Cap Wilderness is full of hikers, and they are standing in line for outdoor seating at La Laguna.

Our TV screens, like those in Hoboken or Lincoln, go from Covid to fire to hurricane to Black Lives Matters. One part of America watches another part burn, run from hurricanes, protest, or die with Covin-19 in another part of America, as we wait for the rains to come, hurricane season to pass, and something bigger—a Salk vaccine or an election, to calm our waters. 

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35. BLM, the NBA, and White fear

With the shooting of Jacob Blake by a Kenosha, Wisconsin cop, Covid-19 and BLM are now shining their light on professional sports. The Milwaukee Bucks cancelled a playoff game with an elegant plea that the state they play in and for “take up meaningful measures to address issues of police accountability, brutality and criminal justice reform.” 

Other NBA teams and the league followed. Coach Doc Rivers of the LA Clippers was elegant: “We’re the ones getting killed. We’re the ones getting shot. We’re the ones that were denied to live in certain communities. We’ve been hung. We’ve been shot. And all you do is keep hearing about fear.” He—a successful, rich, Black athlete and coach whose father was a cop—ridicules White fear while acknowledging the legitimacy of continuing Black fears.  

Rivers nailed it. The scene today is one of White fear: the fear of statistics—that in ten or twenty years Whites in the country will be outnumbered by Black and Brown people; the fear, stoked by some in politics and media, that Black thugs will loot stores and harm the police that have been harming them.

And the fear that African Americans are in fact superior athletes, and now, having conquered professional sports and established themselves strongly in music and entertainment, White fear that their children have been infected with adoration for Black prowess. 

I’ve watched professional sports go from all-white to majority black in one lifetime—Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in baseball; Wilt Chamberlain, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Michael Jordan and Stephan Curry dominating basketball; and Arthur Ashe and the Williams sisters wedging Black into elite tennis.

But what must most gall the middle-aged White men and a growing chorus of younger White males is the students in small rural schools like ours in Wallowa County—or, I imagine, rural Wisconsin—where basketball players high five and chest bump, wear long shorts and blast rap music during warm-ups. 

Despite Colin Kaepernick’s taking a knee on the football field, Whites couldn’t stay away, drawn like moths to a flame they fear. And White Milwaukee, now less than half the population in a racially divided city, worship and fear the Black players on their Milwaukee Bucks. 

At least, as Covid-19 makes clear, Whites are still way ahead in wealth and health.

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34. James Baldwin 2: Raising Brown Children

When we adopted a boy from India and brought him to small town Oregon, we thought all we needed were the skills we had learned from our own families and living in another (Turkish) culture, and love, to set him on the road to a “normal” American life. When his life began to unravel in adolescence we coped as best we could with understanding and all the support we could muster from doctors, teachers, and social workers.

What we did not do was teach him the rudiments of living colored in a white world. And, when I was blessed to have his two children with me for almost a dozen years—they were 7 and 9 when they arrived—I made the same mistake again.

I’m now 77 years old, and it has taken Black Lives Matter, Covid-19, years of learning Nez Perce and American Indian history, reading many books and articles about race, and, especially, rereading James Baldwin’s Fire Next Time, to show me my error.

Our son was a cute little brown boy until he entered puberty, a coming strong, handsome, brown man. At that point some classmates noticed the color difference and tied it to stereotypes they picked up at home and from each other on the playground and playing fields. He got the “N” word; he and we learned that some adults subtly and openly expressed white superiority. 

Baldwin started to notice the complicated and racist world around him in Harlem at 14. He saw boys and girls turn to alcohol and drugs; some became pimps and whores. He chose the other open road, became a child preacher. 

Reading Baldwin I was reminded of books about southern Black maids wet nursing and caring for white children, and about the maids’ children playing with the masters’ children—until a certain age.

Baldwin writes a letter to his nephew, Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates a book to his son, explaining the rules of race in America, counseling them that they will hear “N” and more, how they must comply with authority, and how they can maintain dignity and their own sense of self in a world that makes color a measure of human worth.

I should have done the same.

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