You’re traveling on the west coast of the Olympic Peninsula, and you see this tourism sign:  “Duncan Memorial Cedar Tree.”

Gasoline is expensive, and the tree is a ways in on a pitted logging road. 

It’s the skeleton of two rather medium-sized cedars that have grown together, with a few patches of scrubby branches at the top.  It is not a truly big, old-growth cedar; it is dry, sick, and has no bark.  It looks more like an ancient juniper than a healthy big cedar.  It’s in the center of a scrubby, sprayed, dried-out tree farm.  The only shiny, pretty things you’ll see around the cedar are the huge, new, blue-and-white ”This is a Managed Forest” signs.

If you’re interested in what 200 years of logging has done to the native forest, it could be of historical note.  If you’re interested in seeing a healthy, magnificent, oxygen-pumping tree and forest, it’s just depressing.   Save your gasoline and offset the carbon footprint that’s been widened by this forest.

If you are determined to see it, pat it on its mutilated wood and apologize for your species.  We did.  And promised it that we’re well on the way to poisoning and diseasing our way back to a remnant population, so the planetary machine may have a chance. 

There’s always hope.

Americans too often teach their children to despise those who hold unpopular opinions. We teach them to regard as traitors, and hold in aversion and contempt, such as do not shout with the crowd, and so here in our democracy we are cheering a thing which of all things is most foreign to it and out of place - the delivery of our political conscience into somebody else’s keeping. This is patriotism on the Russian plan. — Mark Twain

The Olympic Peninsula, especially the rural parts of the area, are not unusual in the presence of racial and religious prejudice and homophobia.  The best people will blurt out antiquated prejudices, from comments on Hemingway’s biography to just who is shooting at a whale.

But help may be on the way!

Twilight, a series of vampire genre novels for young adults, is set in the western peninsula town of Forks.  A movie may be filmed there, using local characters.

Now Forks is no worse in the presence of homophobia than any other rural American town.  All across this country, homosexual kids always need to watch their backs; being called “gay” has been proven in American towns and the military to being the preparation for a death sentence.  There is no evidence it is that bad in any way at Forks — in so many ways, it’s Live and Let Live out here.  But it’s in the atmosphere.

If a movie is made in the area, Hollywood will be in town.  That’s an industry that can’t afford to excercise prejudice toward anyone with any artistic ability, because it takes a lot of people to film, act, choreograph, costume, edit, compose, advertise, and just move stuff around.  

Arts and media are a refuge and a livelyhood for many in the gay community, mostly because the GBLT community honors and appreciates education, the humanities and the arts.  Arts and music are never despised, ignored, or lost because the funding for the local high school went to the football program (the community up here that let this happen knows which one it is; we don’t need to go into personalilties).

If the smart, hard-working members of the gay community who work in film show up, working with local people, dining in local restaurants, relaxing in local bars, it’s going to do a lot of good.  These people can be role models for smart, artistic or musical kids who have never had the support they deserve in the area. 

It’s hard to practice homophobia when the local kids find out what good people gay people are.

Check out:  http://www.glaad.org

Where’s a video camera when you need one?

Buddha is a handsome, friendly black lab/greyhound cross.  He looks like Anubis with floppy ears.  He prefers to catch thrown rocks (his owner requests he not be indulged).

Last week, while strolling along the surf, intent upon looking for agates, I nearly stepped on a dark, speckled baby harbor seal.  He gazed up at me curiously.  Knowing his mother had either left him while she fished, or he was out on his own, I went around him.

Dan and I went our way.  We kept turning back to watch the seal through our Russian military surplus minocular.  The seal remained on the beach, moving up past the surf, unperturbed by humans walking by, even when the Clallam Bay football team boys came down to run in the gravel.

But then came Buddha.  Oh, no!  Dog and baby seal!  We were too far away to prevent an incident, but we should have known Buddha wasn’t a problem.

He carefully straddled the seal, which stared up at his belly.  Then he barked loudly and angrily at the water, obviously protecting the seal from the surf.  This continued for some time.  Once satisfied he’d done his duty, Buddha went trotting on his way, as the seal continued to watch him.

Buddha may not be the brightest bulb in the socket, but there’s no questioning he has a good heart.

(People have asked so heeeeere’s Buddha!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tbU7OXV477Q  )

I just realized why China is going to eat our lunch.

Go get the movie Mad Max — Beyond Thunderdome.  Watch it (It’s fun!).

Then ask what is the real difference between two of the movie’s societies, both founded by females.  They’ve both got light.  They’ve both got the same fuel.  They’ve just got different sources.

It’s not oil.  It’s not corn.  It’s not electricity.  Victor Hugo jumped up in the middle of Les Misererables to demand why society was being so incredibly wasteful of this home-grown product.  And he was only ranting about farming. 

The Chinese aleady know how to use and process this fertilizer/fuel.  Farms all across China are producing it for independent use on farms and in villages. 

We, instead, are using billions of gallons of precious drinking water to literally flush it away.  We are idiots.

And it’s why Josh Whedon’s Firefly  got it right about everybody in the future speaking Chinese.  The Chinese are going to kick our butts. 

Or the shit out of us — either reference in pertinent.

Folks want to put in a bio-fuel plant up here.  It will run on wood waste from logging.  They say it will attract tourists who will see it as a green-friendly move.

But how will those tourists come up here if they have to drive by the clear-cuts that provide the wood waste?

Anybody who thinks that green dollars will be spent on logging museums has not been doing their homework.  The kind of tourists who come out to see forests do not view them as a monoculture “crop.”  They view them as ecosystems. 

Ecosystems are far too complicated for humans to deal with over long term, at least in monocultural terms.  Cropping sees alders as competative “weeds” and poisons them out.  Ecosystems require the alders as the nitrogen pump that will support the future wood crop.  Ecosystems pump oxygen back into the massive planetary air system — a system far too vast and complicated for us to control or provide for.

Cropping = short term.  Ecosystem = long term.

Or, to put it in generational terms:

“I only care about my own livlihood.” vs. “Where are my grandkids going to live?”

Ecosystem tourism no more wants to visit a museum of frontier logging than they want to see the history of the buffalo hunts — except as a planetary mistake.  If people want those green dollars they’re just going to have to accept that those are histories that will not attract a living. 

Because the people who don’t care about the green are the people who can live with nothing but concrete.

Sequim, anyone?

(While I’m at it, I’ll note that, as the child of a paper-mill town, fermenting wood stinks to high heaven, and the massive chemical influx sends out fumes that peel paint off the walls.  Fermentation-mill towns are not tourism towns.  They stink, they need masses of water — which we’re already short of — and they will knock health costs through the roof.  THINK.  RESEARCH. FIND OUT FIRST.

Oh, and as a artist and publisher:  wood paper is the crappiest paper on the planet.  And not just for the high acid count.  It’s only useful for toilet paper.  That’s right — we’re flushing our oxygen-production system down the crapper, along with our water.)

“Values at home, facts at school.”   A throw-away line in a political email received this morning.

This should be THE rallying cry of ALL campaigns to make families take responsibility for their own children. Religion in school, no sex education, control of the sex lives or book or movie content by or for consenting adults — it’s ALL about families refusing to act like the parents and forcing the rest of society to take over the role of parents.

These parents should realize that if they insist on treating their children as wards of society — then society may very well decide that the parents themselves have given away their own rights to raise their own children.  The parents themselves are abrogating their rights as parents. 

“It takes a village” has become an excuse by parents who don’t want to be in charge of their own kids.  The rest of us are supposed to watch their kids’ morals, religious choices, even what they read or whom they fall in love with.  Since when is that our business?  If the parents had been doing their job properly, the teachers could be teaching math and science and art and civics (remember those?) instead of worrying about whether or not Little Johnny is drooling over the latest Kill-Count video game.   All we ever hear is “A child may see this,” “A child may do that.”  Where the hell are the parents of these children?  Who paid for that computer or library or bookstore?  The kids?  Why do the rest of us have to put up with laws that control us as though we’re children — when the parents don’t seem to want to be there for their kids in the first place?  What kind of parents are these?

We’re all getting sick and tired of parenting kids we never chose to bear ourselves, and parenting them by proxy according to rules that the parents who ignored them in the first place insist on our following.  Talk about an issue of Choice.  If we have to do it, we may be forced to get tough — and the parents don’t have to worry their little pointed heads about taking care of their own kids any more.

“It takes a village” could well become “The village takes OVER.”

And since the village really doesn’t want to, that may not be a pretty picture.

D

Yesterday we placed a stunned surf scoter next to the hollow end of a log on the beach.

Today, near the same place, we disturbed an ancient gull sleeping on the sun-warmed pebbles of the beach.  He was weak, hunched, ragged of feather and sunken of eye, obviously at the end of his days.  He limped further up the beach, and settled in almost in the same spot where the scoter had rested.

A young eagle flying over startled the old gull into skittering into the scoter hollow.   Protected, warm in the sun, he drifted off to sleep.  He was still soundly asleep (but for the occasional head twitch) when we walked quietly by an hour later.

If the only thing we can hope for in common — the only thing that can happen to us all — is a good death, that bird could do worse.

Well, I’m probably the only person you know who’s picked up and carried a live surf scoter.

Yesterday it was brilliantly sunny.  We gave up trying to think or work inside and headed out for a long walk on the Clallam Bay beach. 

Dan spotted a black thing rolling around in surf.  It was a fat, healthy-looking sleek black male surf-scoter, in full breeding plumage, but very limp.

Alive or dead, we pick up floating animals and get them away from the surf.  If they’re dying, at least they won’t have drowning to deal with.  Then we go away, because nobody wants a predator hanging over them as they die.  If they’re dead, it’s just a dignity thing.  If we do it for animals, maybe somebody will do it for us.  What goes around comes around; the only heaven we’ve got (and the only hell — make nice to get nice).

I reached down and closed my fingers around the bird — and it startled awake.  Now I had a live surf-scoter in my hands, but still very limp, head dangling.

Heavy, sleek, soft, warm — reminded me more of a mammal than a bird.  I turned him over and carried him up the beach, and settled him under the end of a log, in the sun.  The wind was cold, but any sun would quickly heat up those black feathers.

As we walked away, we looked back with binoculars and saw the bird woozily raising his head.  When we’d walked a little farther, we saw that he’d settled his feet more comfortably under him, and was more in control of his neck.

We were gone for about an hour, but when we came back, he was gone.  No blood, no feathers, no sign of a struggle.  No bird floating in the water.

Scoters feed on shellfish by diving hard and swimming in the roughest water.  We think he’d stunned himself on one of the old piling butts in the surf.  When I put my long gripping claw-like split paws around him, we think I set off a response to a predator, and it was like a shot of adrenalin to his heart, waking him up.  At least that’s what it looked like. 

And it was neat, picking up a wild wet bird.

 This is the young buck deer who got his not watching the traffic right outside the west end of town. The local kids hang out right on that turn. I figure it’s just a matter of time before one of the two-legged youngsters get it the same way the four-legged one did. Their little legs are gonna snap just like that; probably hold together inside their blue jeans, though.  Those logging trucks hit hard and don’t slow down.

This guy was hanging half in the road so I stopped quick — the blue Toyota, Miz Blue, is small enough to squeeze onto the border of the road — and hauled him into the grass. Those little rib bones wouldn’t be good for somebody’s tires.

I thought about throwing him into the back of the truck, but his eyes were looking a little too green.

He’s the first dead deer I’ve seen up here. Realized why, too — usually when somebody smacks a deer, they must hop out and throw it into the back of the truck.  Well, it seems reasonable.  Meat is meat.

Next dead deer I see up here — if ever — there’s venison on the menu. His eyes weren’t that green.

Recently the Forks Forum reported a contest about which town was warmer:  Sequim or Forks.

Forks was all excited about being warmer.

Well, d’uh.  Both of ‘em have got about as many trees as Los Angeles, and Sequim has the sea breeze.

And exactly why would any town hope it’s hotter than someplace else, in these days of global warming?  Trying to chase away possible home buyers?  Or just attract old people, who are too old to care about skin cancer or water shortages any more?

Clallam Bay is kind of stuck in the middle.

Neah Bay — the Makah nation — has been making some real interesting moves, lately.  I’ve heard the Sheriff complain that their police aren’t cooperating as closely with the Clallam County police.  They’re thinning their forests instead of clear-cutting.  They’re looking at Austin-style rainwater collection.  They’re working to generate electricity from wave action.  They’re teaching their kids to respect the culture, speak the Makah language, and eat the original native foods.  The parents and teachers are quietly asking for a greater role for native values, based on native stories, in the school curriculum.

I dunno about you, but to me that looks like the Makah are getting ready for the day the white folks screw everything up.  They’ll be set.

Now you can ask yourself — which way do we want to go?  Do we want to get hot and possibly Wal-marted like Forks (and you know how that usually ends, once the big W has bribed a community with a few paltry jobs and shipped out all the local money) — or do we want to develop tourism based on beauty and health for the future, that is,  the next generation and beyond? 

Clallam Bay and Neah Bay have always been close. Everybody’s related.  They all go to each other’s ceremonies and parties and funerals and celebrations.

Think about it.  Which way is better — up the coast to a windswept healthy future based on a surviveable past — or inland to concrete and heat?