Pilgrimage to Parkdale

Last Friday, Robert and I went over to Mount Hood’s eastern side to get a cord of firewood. Bill, whom Kim and I had met a couple weeks earlier, called to say he had just cut up a good supply for the winter. While we loaded the pickup with seasoned and split white fir, I asked Bill if he knew a good place to buy Gala apples near there, Parkdale being apple orchard country.

He spoke of neighbors just down the road who had an organic orchard and offered to take us up there when the truck was loaded. We spent the next couple of hours meeting John, a visionary beyond his means. The guy had more ideas per minute than a whole university think tank. He’s been delving into architectural and artistic designs, remaking the buildings on his farm until a creative wonder.

He takes ancient art forms such as Babylonian or Minoan patterns and mixes them with modern ecological images depicting lost habitats or vanishing species. He combines Mayan structures with Chinese forms to create eclecticism a la Northwest.

What keeps this dreamer fed and housed apparently is his wife who runs the wedding site business offering awesome views of Mount Hood in pastoral settings. She also takes her husband’s attempts at cottages in Russian peasant style and rents them out to tourists looking for a bit of rural peace and tranquility. Good thing. John’s run through the extended family resources already and his organic farm’s been a white elephant in the income department. His apples sure are tasty, though.

It’s an odd mix, this rural neighborhood not far from a crossroad called Parkdale. In between Bill and John is the son of some well-known mega-rich man and nearby is a guy who never amounted to much by anyone’s standards, not even his own.

All this oddity made for a productive day. We returned home with a truckload of relatively inexpensive firewood, a boxful of apples for making into applesauce, and eight delicious looking green peppers ripe for stuffing for supper later this week. The day was relationally and intellectually stimulating. Good time getting to know Bill better. Invigorating conversation with John that spanned the globe and the genres. And a great father-son day discussing the unfolding economic mess and the special vitality of rural America.

As a friend named Jim said last night, the difference between a trip and a pilgrimage is that, with pilgrimage, what you do along the way is as important as your destination. You may not even remember where you were headed or why, but you sure had fun doing it.

On the Campaign Trail

There are numerous ways to spell “manly”. I saw one of the better spellings as Stephen was all spiffed up in coat and tie heading out for his first all-day high school Speech and Debate tournament at 6:30 this past Saturday morning. Robert is well-known for his ability to address issues long, hard and deep. What is not so known is his slightly younger brother’s fine honed skills at giving Robert a run for his money in sibling debates.

Back at Xi’an International School, one of the boys’ teachers said to me, “I know how you will vote.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve been listening to your son.”

“Which one?” I asked.

If you listen to both of them as a barometer of how I vote, you’ll be thoroughly confused. They are guaranteed to find the opposite side on any issue and, likely as not, flip back and forth in a race to see who can come up with the more solid line of reasoning.

Two days before the Saturday tournament, Stephen turned 18. He’s joined the voter registration club at school and is doing his civic minded best to get out the vote this November. Both boys are thrilled at their first opportunity to vote in a Presidential election.

Thursday evening of Stephen’s birthday, we had the usual cake (carrot), ice cream and gifts. And we watched the Vice Presidential candidates debate live on TV. The presidential race has been closely followed and vigorously debated in our house by all six of us over the past many months. In a home full of teenagers, a presidential debate or a convention acceptance speech is guaranteed to gather us all together as a family. You can be sure where we’ll be on the evening of November 4.

Recent weeks have had us glued to the radio, too, as we’ve followed the mercurial changes in the economic picture. At least I can track the kids’ discussions when they are talking about international tensions or Wall Street meltdowns. Better than their arguments over quarks and real atom-splitting. Sometimes I wonder what the neighbors make of our backyard dinner conversations.

How do I spell manly? It is getting hot and bothered about injustice in the world and then finding creative and level-headed ways to do something about it. Look out world, my kids are growing up.

Making Peace with a Brute

My son, Robert, and I have started a project that is either going to make us stronger or kill us. I think it is making a man out of him and an old man out of me.

We’re building a shed on the side of our house. It’s an open sided shed with a saltbox roof (I’m showing off new vocabulary). Yesterday, we rented a jack hammer, cleared away some asphalt and dug down into hard clay to prepare the shed’s foundation.

We’re working against weather (winter rains start shortly) and other work (Robert starts a new part-time job today and I have my writing and other responsibilities). Yesterday the weather was perfect – it only rained a couple minutes when the sun came out. Otherwise it was mostly cloudy and a high around 80.

With any new equipment there is always a learning curve. Such was the case with this jack hammer. It sounds intimidating right from the start.

When we were living in Xi’an, I watched for a whole week outside my office window as a worker stood on narrow columns with his jack hammer – three stories up. He was on the concrete columns he was tearing down, each column about the width of his own body. Day by day he worked his way down to the ground below, drilling the columns one small chunk at a time.

I’ve never liked the sound of a jack hammer. I remember living in Taichung, Taiwan, in a row house. Our next door neighbors went at the place for a week, demolishing everything but the load bearing walls and roof . Kim finally left during the day and took the boys (then toddlers) off to who knows where while I sat at my desk dreaming I was inside the mouth of a dental patient while the dentist was drilling a molar.

So it was with some anxiety on my part that we brought the rented power tool home – all 60 pounds of it. Lugging it around is like hauling a man stone drunk across the ground (not that I do that very often).

As far as power equipment goes, this jack hammer is pretty simple. Plug it in, hold down the button on the handle and let ‘er hammer down. Soon my eyes were swimming and Robert’s breakfast milk had “turned to butter”. But as the day wore on, we made peace with this “Brute” (as it is called) and found that it made a day’s job out of a week’s worth of work. I wouldn’t say the work is any easier, but it sure makes it go faster.

I was thinking that other more experienced hands would call this child’s play until we returned the tool to the rental center. As we were leaving, the clerk told us, “Take the rest of the day off – you deserve it.” And so we did.