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Ramblings From the Ragged Crumbling Edge Of The Reality-Based Community

Friday, January 22, 2010

On Not Being Sad To See This Day End 

...a number of years ago (that number being in the double digits and, no, I don't want to talk about it), I was leading a group of people working on data collection in a burned-over area from a late-summer forest fire. It was January, we were working on exposed upper slopes of the Western Orygun Cascades, and the gusting winds from the winter storm wrapped around us made the sloppy wet falling snow actually blow uphill across the steep exposed slopes on which we toiled. The normal good-natured bitching about the weather in the earlier hours of the day began to take on a more desperate, keening tone after a cold, miserable, and extremely short lunch break spent hunkering down on the leeward side of the least dangerous-looking dead trees surrounding us...

Except for this one guy. He was one of those truly elemental creatures you run into occasionally in my line of work, the kind who loves every aspect of being Out There, regardless of the conditions or circumstances. He was the sort who just might bare his chest to the howling worst that Mother Nature could offer and shout "Bring It On, Baby", were it not for the socially norming understanding that those around him who didn't share his absolute love for Mother Nature's raw challenges just might grab the largest piece of woody material they could lay hands on and beat him senseless just to shut him up...

...and he was simply devouring the day. "It can't get too bad for me", he kept saying as other conversations increasing drifted toward the idea of going back to college and getting that accounting degree that Momma always talked about. As the afternoon blew on, however, his celebration of living an uncompromised Life In The Heart Of Nature became more muted, even as others contemplated the directions their lives might take if the first thing they did on getting back to the office was to resign. At the end of the day, we trudged, stumbled, and dragged ourselves down the side of the mountain through the mud and wind and gloppy wet snowfall back to the crew rig, wet and cold in a way that the manufacturers of our rain gear and "miracle" wicking undergarments apparently couldn't imagine possible. We loaded our equipment into the back of the truck in grim silence and crawled into the cab to begin the delicate heater system balancing act between providing warmth and managing window steam sufficiently to be able to see where we were going...

From somewhere behind me, I heard the subdued voice of Nature Man breaking the unusual - in fact remarkably atypical - end of the day crew cab silence: "Y'know. I have to say...I'm not really sad to see this day end."

That's the way I feel tonight, even though the pure physical reality of this moment is so far removed from that miserable afternoon a couple of decades ago. I'm sitting comfortably in my warm home dressed in shorts and a tee shirt instead of behind the damp cold steering wheel of a smelly wet government-marked Chevy Suburban out in the middle of some wind-swept snow-raked hillside, but my mind is in almost the same place it was all those years ago. Today marks the end of the week, in a working sense, and this has been a week that simply no longer deserves to live...

From Monday on, I had the opportunity to see the disturbing reaffirmation of a very real possibility that my Type 1 diabetic teenager will enter adult life having virtually no chance of finding affordable health care insurance because of his 'preexisting condition', courtesy of the election of a wingnut Republican to the seat once held by Teddy Kennedy in the US Senate. My disgust with that particular repudiation of all that it means to be a person - or the parent of a person - branded with the Devil's Mark of "Preexisting Condition" was reinforced, in the aftermath of Brown's Massachusetts victory, by Congressional Democrats displaying the kind of timorous waffling that makes Dunkirk look like an absolute unalloyed victory in retrospect. All of this was followed on Thursday by stark proof of the George W. Bush version of the statement "Elections Have Consequences", when the conservative, judicially activist SCOTUS team manufactured from the spare conservative Senatorial majority that he enjoyed created, out of whole cloth, the idea that Corporations are people, too...

In the course of just a few remarkable days, my son's hopes of being able to find affordable health insurance to cover the breath-taking expenses of the tools needed to keep his disease from controlling both his life and his life expectancy took a severe beating. That beat-down came both from the direct likelihood of the Republican "just say no" strategy finally bearing its ugly fruit with the addition of a 41st Senator and from the predictable coming campaign by certain big-money corporate and special interests targeted directly against the reelection of those Members of Congress who might actually care - if even in an abstract way - about what kind of life my son can live...

After over 30 years of eyebrow-deep involvement in the emotionally-freighted world of natural resource management, I have learned - if nothing else - that the weekend matters. It's a time to step away: watch sports, read novels, get to the high country, or do whatever else that might transport the mind away from the stress of that 'real life' that otherwise calls for obsessive attention to detail and patient consideration of aggressively opposing viewpoints. It will be harder this weekend to step away from all the noise and smoke, however, because so much of what went on this week has huge implications for my family and my own emotional self. I suppose that all of what went on this week is what makes me reflect back on a particular memory from a couple of decades ago and say that I'm not sad to see this day, and this week, end...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:05 PM 0 comments

Monday, January 18, 2010

For Sale: High Mileage; One Owner 

...I have to confess that, once in a while, you see a deal come by that is just too good pass up, if only you hadn't made the mistake of making fun of that geeky Gates kid back in middle school in Seattle. If you had decided to hang with him and Paul Allen and their other two friends instead of slamming them inside their lockers, you could probably be first in line today to be the first person on your block to own a space shuttle...

I don't know about you but - to me - having space shuttle Atlantis sitting in the front yard is way cooler than controlling a foundation or owning the Seahawks (especially the latter, especially over the last couple of years). On the other hand, if you had befriended those little nerds and been their protector from the cruelty of your friends and maybe got in on the ground floor of what would become Microsoft with them, you would be living in some sort of gated community now with the kind of monster CCR's that would prevent you from parking it on the front yard anyway, so maybe it doesn't matter. I mean, who's going to buy a space shuttle to put out in the backyard by the pool and the guest house?

But still...I'd write a check for that baby right this minute, if only I had been afforded the chance to make that smart choice all those years ago back at the Lakeside School, which I didn't...

Because I grew up in Idaho. Another opportunity lost, I'm afraid...
Posted by: Jack K. / 7:57 PM 0 comments

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