HOGWARTS

  Recently I bought the box set (8 episodes) of Harry Potter movies. I had seen the first one, The Sorcerer’s Stone twenty years ago when it came out and another one but all I remembered were some of the characters, the flying broomsticks and the deadly chess match. Not surprising that the magical, special effects prevail over the timeless dilemma of good versus evil. I had totally forgotten Professor Quirrell (with his head in a turban)and was caught unawares when the stammering professor emerged as the bad guy in the first episode. He had been possessed by the villain, Lord Voldemort who was under a spell of his own and could only manifest himself by taking over another person’s body. 
Voldemort’s plan to regain his powers was to recruit the young wizard Harry to his cause; shades of Darth Vader and Luke Skywalker from Star Wars. While in Prof. Quirrell’s body, Voldemort revealed himself (two faces on the same head) and informed Harry the fundamental truth of his shameless plot. He said, “There is no good and evil, only power and those too weak to seek it.” 
Wow, I thought; sounds like Donald Trump! From his book The Art Of The Deal, Trump speaks to the reader’s lowest common denominator and affirms that having the balls to break the rules is not only good but that getting caught cheating is the only evil. Cheating is alright just don't get caught You must win at all cost (being seen as a loser is worse than being exposed as a liar and a cheat). I think that departure is where negotiable ambition gives way to the Slippery Slope. That (slippery slope) would be a semi load of dynamite skating on an icy overpass. 
I remember wannabe wisdom from another time; All’s Fair In Love & War. Over the years it seems to have been modified; you throw out love & war as conditions and cast a bigger net; Everything is fair for any reason, anything goes, whatever you can get away with. 
It took two sittings for me to get through The Sorcerer’s Stone. I didn’t want to miss the subtle nuance and with all of the magic, it was too much, went too fast for me. British audiences have a keen taste for the dark side and clamored for more. The up close, evil magic and its peril left American audiences divided between mild shock and religious outrage. Come to Jesus merchants castigated against wizards, spells, sorcerers, potions as if they were real and that all things magical were inspired by Satan.
It is interesting how that preoccupation with good and evil is fixed in every culture. Early western philosophers Epictetus & Marcus Aurelius both concluded that discerning between right and wrong depends on what people decide. Whatever it is that we can agree on, that’s it, the truth! When humans first started drawing drew that line (good & evil) they were guided by ignorance and myth. Greek and the Roman philosophers were in the same room but they were following logic when they reasoned; “There is neither good nor evil.” They reasoned since people make that distinction, it is their call. By simply believing this is right and that is wrong, they make it so; the thinking makes it so. In other words, Truth is not carved in stone. If you can all agree that GOOD is a BAD thing then it is. Correspondingly, BAD must be GOOD. Looking back, Flat Earth people were not wrong, the truth changed. It changes with both new discovery and fast talking bigots but memory is short when it makes us look stupid.
It has been twenty years since I first saw The Sorcerer’s Stone. Over the next decade seven more episodes would follow. I know who prevails in the end but still want to see it unfold with Harry and his friends at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft & Wizardry. I wonder; if I let my beard grow and get a pointy hat they might take on another old professor mumbling and shuffling around Hogwarts? I could be the resident wizard of prophesy, keep telling the same made up stories until they become the truth.  I would be fantastic on a flying broom. 

WHO COOKS FOR YOU

  Last night in that moment when you realize, it will soon be bedtime, a Barred Owl nearby began to call. I was in the kitchen wiping down the sink and countertop. Both of the windows were open and it sounded so closeI thought it must be perched on top of my patio umbrella. It called out again, several times without a pause. I got a fix on where I thought it must be, up high in the Ash tree at my back fence. The goofy feeling caught me unawares, the one you get when you catch yourself grinning without warning or conscious thought. It was just there on my face, the best kind of self indulgence. 
Every self respecting naturalist learns how to call in Barred Owls. Around dusk on nature walks with students or adults for that matter, everyone sits down at the edge of a clearing in the woods. The goal of the evening is to engage a Barred Owl and absolute silence is the rule. After a 10 minute walk, the leader gives a hand signal and everyone sits down. The naturalist cups hands around their mouth and delivers a well practiced greeting. The call is paraphrased into human English with phrasing that corresponds to the owl’s timing and tune. “Whooo, Whooo, Who-cooks for Youuuuu.” He raises the pitch to match the bird’s and we wait. 
The bird will vary its song so the well practiced expert does so as well. “Whooo, Whooo, Whooo”. After a short pause, “Who-cooks” pause, “Who-cooks” and a long pause. You have to be patient. Owls can hear from far off and they often move cautiously to investigate another bird (sounds like a bird). They fly so quiet you simply cannot hear them approach or land in the same tree you are sitting under. 
After several minutes of wannabe hooting and silence, people need to be reminded (with hand signals) to sit still and keep quiet. If they get lucky the wait isn’t too long. From nearby they hear it clear as you please. OMG, it really does sound like, “Whoo, whoo, whoo cooks for you.” If the caller is skilled, they may exchange calls for several minutes. You are never too old to take pleasure in that moment. “I engaged with an awesome owl last night.” 
It occurred to me in the kitchen that I might try to answer the owl’s call. But I was just sucking up the moment and the grin was still pulled back against my teeth. Identification by song or call is just as credible, just as rewarding as visual confirmation. Brushing my teeth I thought about feral cats in the neighborhood. They keep the mouse population in check. Owls exercise major control over wild mice populations but they are happy with lizards and birds, other small mammals, even insects. So I offered up some good karma for the owl’s sake. 
Today, and every other morning this summer I hear another bird calling out its unmistakable song; “Cock A Doodle Do”. Someone up the hill, maybe on the next street has a rooster. Keeping urban chickens is a popular trend now. Most towns have rules about how many, odor control and containment but think about the eggs. But keeping a rooster; it must be a pet. I remember in Todos Santos, Mexico they had feral chickens everywhere. The roosters crowed all night and you just get used to it. But I don’t remember any Barred Owls there. My local rooster up the street would be no match for the owl and not that I really care, but he need be advised to keep inside from before dusk to well after dawn or all his master might find is a crime scene with feathers and picked over bones. 

AN UNSETTLED CLIMATE

  I wrote a couple of pages yesterday and left it to cook overnight. Sometimes it turns out well done and other times my ideas can still have some salt but the words miss their mark. I get caught up in clumsy, compound, run on sentences that lose their way. They feel good in the moment but the second time around, I know gibberish when I see it. Nonsense gets a cursory second thought before I hit the delete trigger. I keep telling myself that any time is a good time to begin again. 
I had been chewing on an old bone when something digestible would have been the better call. In the last half century I have come to grips with an uncomfortable, unavoidable observation; emotions and feelings are unreliable. Joy, anger, sadness, pleasure, fear; you get what you get. They are not decisions. But many people use those feelings as their compass, following that energy as if it was their fate or destiny. I choose to think those emotions are just momentary weather updates in an unsettled climate; and I don’t trust them. Feeling good or feeling not so good, I don't want to be on the wrong end of a leash. If I take the time to weigh and measure, to check my numbers before I take comfort too soon or lash out ill advised, everyone is better served. 
I feel better, not that feeling better is actually better but I said something in a simple paragraph that I wrestled with earlier and lost. I might lament the time lost as a failed effort or I can rationalize (think about) the value of processing ideas and words before throwing them at the page. Then what I do is a choice, as much as possible. I don’t think we make near as many choices as we believe we do. Google, FB and Amazon together have enough data on most of us to predict with accuracy, how we will decide on any circumstance. If they can do that for 80% of us with 80% accuracy, what does that say about free will decision making? In a few years with a better algorithm it will be 90% & 90%. But free will and decision making is another can of worms, best left for another day. 

A DÉJÀ VU VIBE

  In the (1991) movie Fried Green Tomatoes  Kathy Bates plays a middle age woman (Evelyn) whose husband has lost interest in her. She is struggling to find purpose in her life and a sense of identity. By chance she encounters the eighty-something (Ninny) Jessica Tandy in a nursing home and the two of them join forces with a wonderful story. It is a powerful, feel good movie that speaks to something important; not the same message for everyone but it will touch you none the less. If you have seen it already, see it again.
There is a scene where Evelyn has been grocery shopping and is in the market parking lot. Reacting to one of many disappointments, she can’t shake her frustration with having no control over her life. Just when it seems things cannot get worse, the bag tears, her groceries spill out on the ground and she stands there not knowing what to do. I got a déjà vu vibe. 
Starting a written piece is much like Evelyn going to pick up bread and eggs at the A&P. As I start browsing thru characters and plot, framing story has a lot in common with  her shopping list, simple and short. But along the way she notices things that should have been on the list and adds them to her cart. By the time she gets out to her car her arms are full and any slip or distraction would bring on a collapse that cannot be undone. If I could keep to my short, simple story it wouldn’t be such a task. But at this point in my life I am drawn to the big, complicated stories. The Human Condition; why do we do like we do? That seems simple enough but if you look close enough, nothing is simple. John Muir (one of my heroes) said; “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”  
When I want to examine a narrow aspect of the human experience it is a short reach from me to Evelyn in the parking lot. By the time I get a thousand words into my work it overloads and starts coming down like a house of cards. My shopping bags get so full of backstory and cause-effect other-story that I can’t keep it together all the way to the parking lot. I find myself elbow to elbow with a frustrated lady and her groceries in a heap on the ground.
Without going down that Rabbit Hole I’m not afraid to dance around it. I do not soft-pedal or fantasize either my beliefs and convictions or how I got to be this way. I don’t really know how I got to be who I am but here I am just the same. My growing up was so 20th century, blue collar, White, Protestant, Male stereotype that there were not many weighty decisions for me to consider. One’s culture is incredibly difficult to resist and I was a passively compliant youngster. Even though I stumbled with school work and my academic skills were severely limited, I must have had a streak of native curiosity. Never bored, I always managed with what I had and it never dampened my imagination.
So when I did challenge my culture I was too old and independent to be intimidated or dissuaded. Rejecting traditional myth (religion & politics) was not traumatic, only a series of profound disappointments. What I had trusted for so long was nor more real than an episode on a TV sitcom. I’ve had plenty of time to learn about how Homo sapiens have maintained and expanded their niche here on Earth. I have confidence in qualified, secular experts who make it their life’s work. A large part of that open ended endeavor has been their collective willingness to be proven wrong, to reexamine, correct and update the current knowledge base. The underlying principle is that progress is punctuated with human error and dead ends. When we know better we update our findings and communicate the results. 
A glitch in human protocol is that for millennia, civilization has been seduced by wannabe wisdom and persuasive propaganda. Even now, people still prefer what is perceived to be indisputable, universal truths. (“We want to know what will be true forever and we want to know right now.”) Nobody questioned myth based metaphors in a time when the naked eye and sense of touch were all you had to separate truth from fiction. The gap between reliable scientific enlightenment and the comfort of faith based tradition has expanded faster than the human animal has been able to accommodate it. Humans still struggle with the brain’s internal duality. We still act instinctively on emotional impulse long before the logical part of the brain can do the math. The old system was sufficient for hunter gatherer clans and the dangers they faced but that was then and this is now (spears close up vs far away nuclear weapons). 
There I’ve done it. Here we are, Evelyn and I are standing in the parking lot with our arms full and no place to turn.  Kathy Bates got paid and moved on to her next movie. My story is like a loop film, fluttering in the projector like a WW2 news reel. But I know how it began and where it lost its legs. So if I want to keep shaking this tree I best delete the whole thing and start over. 

LESS THAN A MINUTE

Nine years; is that a short time or a long time? At my age time is hard to put a collar on. In the dog days of summer 2013, 9 years ago, I was driving home from Alaska. The drive up had been awesome. Eight days alone on the AlCan Highway gives words like Remote, Wilderness & Lonesome a feeling you can’t experience vicariously. After nearly two months in Alaska the road home was no less an adventure. One might think that one repetition would be sufficient but Planet Earth is full of surprises. The 2,300 mile journey from Anchorage to the border crossing at Sweet Grass, Montana is anything but (Ho-Hum). The farther north, the more challenging the roads. Frost heave and erosion make travel risky if not dangerous. Feelings come and they pass but once on the highway the only sensation is to keep moving. 

On my second night out I splurged on a bed at a hostel in White Horse, Yukon Territory. Day 3 would be would be the ‘Either-Or’ day. Either go back the way I came or take a less traveled, even more remote route. I was on Canada #1 but just west of Watson Lake, route #37 heads south across the border into remote, northern British Columbia. It seems Parliament wanted to help the economy in those logging camps and fuel depots so they connected several existing roads and bridged a few gaps with new blacktop and called it The Cassiar Highway. Everyone I talked to said it was a glorious ride and baring mechanical problems, I couldn’t go wrong; just remember to top off the tank at every petro pump I come across. That was good advice. The route eventually dumps you out at Prince George, BC with a nearly straight shot into Jasper National Park, Lake Louise and Banff. 

My 2nd day on The Cassiar the forest had open spaces and I could see both out to the side and up ahead. The road had comfortable, rolling, up and down rise and fall for as far as I could see. As I topped one rise, up ahead on the 3rd or 4th crest I saw a large animal on the road. Easing over the next crest I could tell it was a moose and her calf. Not wanting to startle them I slowed down but the thought of getting close enough to have an encounter overcame my concern for their convenience. They were still there in the middle of the road at my next glimpse and I turned the motor off, coasting up the last slope before we merged on the same stretch. Mom was in my lane and baby was lopping along the shoulder on the left. I rolled quietly to within maybe 200 feet before she noticed and started running. 

There was a steep bank on the right of maybe 20 feet with a gully full of water at the roadside. Everything happened too fast for much thinking. I was gaining ground and had eased over into the middle of the road. She plunged down into standing water up to her shoulders and struggled to get up onto the steep bank. Baby wanted to follow but that would require crossing in front of me and I was still closing the gap between us. I eased on the brake, slowed down almost to a stop. She moose was keeping up but separated from us above and the other side of the water hazard. Baby saw its chance and bolted across in front of the truck, down the gully and sank immediately in the water. 

I kept my camera ready, wedged between the seat and the pull-down arm rest. As I let myself out and around the door, Mama was down close, coaxing Baby upward and out of the water. I started taking photos over the hood. Moose calf thrashed and failed, thrashed again but I sensed the little calf would eventually make it up onto dry ground. I kept taking pictures. In the pressure of the moment I did tap into the danger. Moose are the most dangerous animal in the north woods. Bears would rather avoid you but moose are aggressive, territorial and protect their young with deadly effect. I sensed that she wanted to kill me then and there but she had too many irons in the fire with the truck between us and her baby still struggling. Once up on level ground and me content behind the truck, she must have figured I was too much trouble to go back for. I got in, closed the door and watched as they moved off into the trees. The whole thing from my sneaky roll-up to the walk-away took less than a minute. 

I am preparing a show of my photographs at the end of this month, roughly 20-22 pieces. Choosing the first dozen is easy. Then you get into all of the really good shots that are too good to leave out but leave some out is what you need to do, #22 gets to go to the party and #23 stays home. One of those, too good to leave out that made the cut is a mother moose and her calf walking off into the woods. The photo is a split second summary of a story that might have ended another way, any number of ways. That story was born nine years ago: seems like a long time but the details haven’t faded at all. Maybe it wasn’t all that long ago. Some stories are so good you don’t have to make up anything. 

Today is my 83rd birthday. I have surpassed the 2022 life expectancy for American males by five years. I’m not sure about life expectancy for moose in the wild. I read somewhere that moose can live to be 20 but the average is more like 8 or 9 years. There it is again; 9 years. I still have the photograph. It is clear and crisp; you can imagine the story without the photo, good enough but all you have are the words. Next year will be 10 years, I’ll be 84 if I’m lucky. The story will not have aged a day and together with the photo it will still be good as gold.