Early December

--We're in a cave now, this time of year, in Corvallis. It's dark on the way to and from work. The rain comes down in sheets and ropes and spray--it doesn't stop. The creek by the high school is swelling to its banks. The last time this happened, four years ago, the freshmen started a rumor that if the water touched the bridge they'd have to close school. Tonight, ordering from the drive-thru window at La Conga, with the window down, my arm soaked completely in the time it took to order the chicken enchilada combo with rice and beans.

--In class today, during a timed-writing activity, a fourteen-year-old girl sneezed so hard that she fell out of her chair. For two full minutes, it was bedlam. I stopped my timer and allowed the class to settle down before we started writing again.

--I go to bed early, sleep well, wake up at a normal time, and am still exhausted by 11 a.m. I'm up to three cups of coffee these days.

--Ben Hamper's memoir "Rivethead" is both hilarious and devastating. His account of working on a General Motors assembly line during the 70's and 80's is an alcohol-fueled story of monotony, poverty, and insanity. My friend Kevin, a shop teacher, recommended it. Reading it, he wonders how any car made in that era runs. Hamper recounts getting drunk at lunch and on the line, firing his rivet gun at company digital reader boards, scamming the timecard, and playing floor hockey on the job. I'm on Chapter Eight right now, and the book's only getting crazier.

--My cats, we recently learned, have fleas. The vet says that they probably contracted them when we moved to our apartment a few months ago. We have to shove pills down their throat every day and streak the back of their neck with goo once a month. When I think about all this, I start to itch, but my med-school-student wife says I don't have fleas, that it's only the cats. She better be right. The last thing I need right now is fleas.

--The fact that the Oregon Ducks are going to the National Championship is bad enough, but then we learned that one of their pompous blowhard fans set fire to Reser Stadium's turf after they beat my Beavers. It's been a rough few months. I threatened to give up on college football altogether and start following NASCAR: it was that kind of season. But things are settling down now. Next year, Beaver Nation. There's always next year.

--I haven't gone on a run since Thanksgiving weekend. I blame the weather, but there are probably other reasons. Today, when school got out, I hurried home and took a nap.

--Last night I had a dream that I was on a boat shuttling across Scotland's Orkney Islands. My brother and the rapper Lil Wayne were also on the boat, of course. The three of us sailed through rising morning mists and yellow sunlight, the boat cutting silently through calm waters. I realize that this was a dream about summer. What is summer, if not travel and family and good music? What better things to dream about, in this dark December?

Sensory Details

Sight:
I'm inspired by Ken Burns' 2009 documentary "National Parks: America's Best Idea." Truly, I am never more proud to be an American than when hearing stories of the early conservationists, idealistic and rugged, that decided to set aside some land (and later, animals) from the wanton destruction of the Industrial Age. It's a beautiful story, told with beautiful images. While it's impossible to capture the magnificence of many of these places with a television screen, Burns makes a good attempt. See the sweeping panoramas of granite and sky in the Yosemite Valley. Behold the early morning stillness at Yellowstone, where the geyser steam melts into the ragged breath of huge bison and it all mixes with morning sunlight. Watch the yellow light gather on faraway pinnacles of the Grand Canyon. I'm seven months away from summer vacation and work has crept into more corners of my life. These heavenly documentary images are good reminders of what's ahead.

Sound:
I've got two CD's in regular rotation in my car each morning: Lil Wayne's "I Am Not a Human Being" and "The Very Best of Violent Femmes." Ostensibly, these two discs span several eras and musical genres. The reality is that Lil Wayne and the Femmes' lead singer and songwriter, Gordon Gano, have a lot in common. Both vocalists are loud, surprising, salacious, and angry. Both experiment with tempo in their songs, either slowing the beat to a crawl or speeding it up at unexpected points. Both slur and holler and spit and cuss. They both waver between honesty and pretense. Importantly, both artists absolutely rock. Every morning, sucking down coffee and blinking through the fogged windshield, I nod my head to violent little beats. After listening to these two, I'm ready for a roomful of teenagers.

Smell:
My sinuses have been screwed up ever since an elbow to the face in a game of water basketball. I can't smell that much. This is good, and bad.

Touch:
Last Saturday I sat under a wet poncho, feeling cold streams of rain slide off my back. If I stood up, the water that had collected in my lap would soak my jeans and boots. I didn't stand up. The team I was watching, the OSU Beaver football team, was losing to the worst team in our conference. There was no reason to explode to my feet and high-five the people behind me, to yell and throw my arms up. Saturday was a symptom of a larger malaise--the horrible reality that 2010 is turning into the worst season in college football history. My Beavers are bad. The hated Ducks are really, really good. Their girlfriend-beating running back might win the Heisman Trophy. They're undefeated. Unless something drastic happens (their coach resigns; Jesus comes back), they'll play for a National Championship. And so, last weekend, I sat in the cold and wet, watching with numb acceptance the sporting world collapse all around me.

Taste:
On Thursdays, La Roca, a taco place on Ninth Street, has "enchiladas verdes" as their daily special. Enchiladas verdes from La Roca are unbelievably good. It's as though Huitzilopochtili, the Aztec sun god, gathered the finest spices and bits of chicken from across the New World, wrapped them in a warm tortilla, and smothered them in cheese and green sauce. The sauce itself is a divine nectar, a rich potion from some ethereal dimension superior to our own. When I eat some enchiladas verdes, especially on a cold afternoon in Corvallis, I give thanks. It doesn't make sense, this ambrosia. We shouldn't be allowed to enter the Garden of Eden, not just by turning down Buchanan and hanging a left on Ninth. To eat enchiladas verdes from La Roca is to know more earthly delights than a man could hope for.

For Brandon

I had Brandon in my freshman lit class, two years ago. He turned in his work and laughed at my jokes. We had our ups and downs, but mostly got along. After he passed the class, I'd run into him in the halls. He'd nod and smirk at me. He was a quiet kid, a good kid.

Brandon killed himself last night. We found out today after A-Block.

I had to read an announcement to my B-Block class. I couldn't really, not word-for-word. The class, a good group of freshmen, were silent for the rest of the period. The whole school was different, as though someone had ripped the life out of the building: we felt gutted. Between classes, the crowded hallways were silent, people passing each other with their eyes down. Teams of counselors from the District Intervention Team set up "care rooms" on both floors. The Gay-Straight Alliance took down their display in the forum and in its place put up a makeshift memorial to Brandon with markers and poster board. My juniors skipped their Advisor class, opting instead to quietly walk around the neighborhoods, returning to school when C-Block started. The JV Soccer Team--Brandon's team--lined up on the field as though it were game day and stood in silence. Little groups of students spilled out of the counseling center, huddled on the floor, hugging their knees and crying softly. To me, those groups were the most arresting image.

My dad killed himself two summers ago. I've also huddled on the floor.

I didn't go to Advisor, either.

After school, I went on a run on that path I like along Walnut Boulevard. It was my longest run yet--I went down to the fairgrounds. It was pretty when the sun went down. The trees and the fields and the hills were all illuminated, in the slanted light, turning proudly to gold.

The Things We Hold Dear

There's a path that makes a big, sweeping turn south-west from my apartment, along Walnut Boulevard in Corvallis. It's pleasantly wide and made of asphalt: perfect for running. I'm thankful to live next to this path, thankful to be able to listen to music and run and watch the hills.

The trail skirts the edge of the Coast Range--I pass open fields, deciduous trees, and Oregon State animal research barns. In the distance, Bald Hill and then Mary's Peak emerge over the treeline, imposing shapes that lift beyond the splotches of yellow and orange and red. Hawks alight on fenceposts; deer vanish in the crepuscular shadows as I trot past. The light shifts and bends along with the clouds on these perfect evenings. "This is all so bucolic," I say to myself. "Bucolic."

Out on that trail, it doesn't matter that I have to finish quarter grades next week. I don't care about the stacks of boxes we still haven't unpacked from our move, last month. I forget, completely, the nagging utility bills and student loans. Best of all, I don't care that the Great Devil (the U of O football team) is ranked # 1 in the nation. On a good, long run, I forget the bad things of this world.

And so I press on. I only get a few miles in right now--still getting my legs back after two months away from running--but I am about to add to my normal route. At the stoplight where I turn around to head back home, the corner of Harrison and Walnut, the trail branches in three directions. In a few weeks, I'll have tried each path. One leads to Bald Hill. One heads to campus. One goes into downtown Corvallis. Right now, my life is filled with as much opportunity and direction as my favorite running trail. Living in Corvallis is opportunistic like that: there's easy access to surfing, mountain biking, indoor climbing, and OSU athletics. In this town, careful seekers can find literature, spirits, friends, religion, community, transcendence, and renewal. All we need to do is lace up our shoes, crank up our iPods to a good track, and head out the door.

A Brighter Tomorrow

When I was in middle school, popular music rocked. Grunge rock and gangsta rap were fresh new sounds that totally changed mainstream radio and MTV. I used to sit in my room late at night, recording songs off the radio onto cassette tapes to listen to the next morning with my buddies, through crackly walkmans, on our bus ride to school. I took it for granted that bands like Stone Temple Pilots, Oasis, and Pearl Jam were kings of the industry. I remember hearing Nirvana's "Unplugged in New York" album and thinking that it was the best music I'd ever heard (still is). I remember marveling at The Fugees, Tupac Shakur, Onyx, Snoop Doggy Dogg, Naughty by Nature, Warren G, The Wu-Tang Clan, TLC, and other great nineties hip-hop acts as they lit up music video television.

When I was in high school, though, popular music took a sharp turn for the worse. Boy bands and rap/core acts dominated the radio in the late nineties, and a decade that began with so much promise quickly devolved into whiny "punk" acts and mediocre rap. People talked in serious terms about bands like Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit, as though they were even on the same planet as the Seattle bands five years earlier. In fact, given the swill on the radio, if it wasn't for the Red Hot Chili Peppers' "Californication" album, I don't know if I would have made it though my senior year.

By the time I graduated in 2000, I'd tuned out. Music was dead to me. I entered college listening to music from the sixties and small, local groups. When I did stop to pay attention to the mainstream, some horrible group of whiners like Good Charlotte or Dashboard Confessional would shoo me away. One of the nineties' signature acts, Green Day, a beacon from middle school, transformed into middle-aged, mascara-wearing sissies, and they were bigger than ever! Portland, the largest city in Oregon, became known as a music hotbed, which should be good news, except that Portland indie rock was actually crappier than the MTV bands. Groups like Modest Mouse and The Decemberists somehow convinced people that their brand of pretentiousness was an acceptable alternative, that their jeans were skinnier, that their slouches were deeper. As for hip-hop, it adopted T-Pain's "autotune," a high-pitched computer vocal effect that essentially ruined the genre. Popular music was so incredibly bad through the aughts that I wondered what would become of the generation that I was teaching in high school. Would they ever know a world where the good music on the radio was from their decade?

(Every now and again, through insightful friends, I would get turned on to a good group that flew under the radar. This blog isn't focused on the fantastic smaller acts that will always be with us, too cool for any mainstream, ever. This blog won't worry about the Andrew Birds of the world. These people will always exist, as they did through the aughts. I speak here of the radio, of music television, of billboard charts.)

Happily, at the end of the last decade, things changed. There was a sea change some time in the last two years. Whenever it happened, I missed it: I don't watch TV or listen to music radio. Either way, it was like I woke up this past Summer and popular music was good again.

I think I realized this on the way back from Los Angeles in June, with my brother, who is eight years my junior and totally dialed-in to pop music. We were listening to his iPod and I couldn't get enough of Kid Cudi's "Pursuit of Happiness." There, in the olive orchards of California's Central Valley, it hit me. We were coming out of the darkness.

A few months earlier a student showed me Mumford & Sons. Another had told me about MGMT. A New Yorker article revealed the genius behind this generation's biggest star, Lady Gaga. But it wasn't until that California drive that I put it all together. We are now in a new decade, and music will recover. These acts are from wildly different genres, but they share qualities that I hadn't seen since my youth. The lyrics, for example, were thoughtful, with evasive meanings and subtext rather that surface-level angst or drivel. There is an emphasis on robust, powerful sounds, rather than Portland-area murmuring. Best of all, actual songwriting for the sake of songwriting seems to be foremost in these artists' minds. Say what you will about her as a person, a Lady Gaga jam has more life and energy than any pure-pop act since Michael Jackson. It feels good to live in a better era. Don't misinterpret: I don't think that we're back to a mid-nineties level yet. Katy Perry is still popular. But I think we're moving there. Can we reach the summit again? It's possible.

It's possible.

Hail to Old OSU

The Summer's over, as I spent the day at back-to-school district rallies, professional learning communities (PLC's), and staff meetings. It was a good Summer. Thinking back on it, my ten weeks off were a complex whirlwind. I have vague memories of Class IV whitewater rapids, Kid Cudi, climbing gyms, castles, baseball games, airplanes, fun runs, and the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. Someday, I'll write about those things. Today, we look ahead.

The beginning of work at the end of Summer is jarring, but the effect is dulled by another beginning: the college football season. When I was a freshman at Oregon State, the proud Beaver football team became the first team in state history to win 11 games. Since that impressionable time, I've been a devout college football fan. The season officially begins tomorrow, with USC/Hawaii and Ohio State/Marshall jump-starting an impressive opening weekend. My Beavs travel to Cowboy Stadium to take on the sixth-ranked TCU Horned Frogs on Saturday. I can think of little else. I have dreams about these games, weeks before they're played. I go to practices in Corvallis, read updates on blogs, longingly stare at my fresh sheet of OSU season tickets.

There's something magical about Reser Stadium this time of year. When the leaves turn as orange as the inter-locking "OS" logo and the sun dips over the Coast Range, when the geese fly south and the first cold snap grazes Timberhill, Corvallis is ready. Time has no meaning: I am transported to my college years in a nostalgic wave as I simultaneously look forward to future OSU glory. Corvallis is transformed into an edenic sea of orange, and from the masses, mythic heroes emerge. I ponder Stephen Paea, the enormous defensive tackle, discovered in the jungles of Tonga ripping trees from their roots and smashing boulders to pieces. I consider Jacquizz Rodgers, the running back, who conquered the Texas high school touchdown record, who scores touchdowns every day before he eats breakfast. I think of his brother James, the reciever, so fast that he turns off the light switch at night before bed and is asleep before the room gets dark. I think of past champions and future stars and the merry chorus of onlookers that fill the stadium every angelic football Saturday.

If Oregon State is beatific, our in-state rivals are Dantean. It is appropriate that my humble alma mater has, as its opposite, a school that represents everything wrong and evil in college sports. The pompous blowhards at the University of Oregon, when not copying our colors (black) or sports (baseball), are loudly boasting about their rich single donor and their hideous uniforms. An Oregon Duck fan is a bandwagon jumper, a crowd-follower. They firmly believe they will win the National Championship in football every year (it's never happened). They lack humility or self-awareness. "What's with these people?" my sister-in-law asked recently, making an honest observation about the ugliness of the U of O's campus (a haphazard collection of squatty, seventies-era compounds strewn over downtown Eugene). "The athletic facilities are the only nice buildings there. Have they seen OSU?" No, they haven't. Duck fans are blinded by their own silvery clothing and sense of importance, and to reason with a loudmouth Oregon fan is to knock your head, repeatedly, against one of their concrete buildings.

We lost to these barbarians last year, and the year before. While many of the Duck players that beat us have since been suspended/dismissed for various felonies and misdemeanors, the game score still stands. The proud OSU Beavers, owners of the state's only Heisman Trophy, have been humbled. The orange in Corvallis has lost some of its fiery luster.

In a few days, though, a new season begins.

The forces of good will again take on all challengers, culminating with the hellions from Eugene. My sense is that justice will prevail in the Universe for the first time in two years. But then, all college football fans are optimistic this time of year.

Los Angeles Notebook

The great wave of Summer Vacation rolls onward. My brother John and I, determined to reach the crest at just the right moment, paddled our proverbial surfboards headlong into the swell as July arrived. We headed to California last week, with abandon, carrying little more than a few baseball tickets and a relentless, patriotic optimism.

The plan was simple: four baseball games in four days, Dodgers versus Cubs, to experience the last great series before the All-Star Break in person. For these two Oregon boys, it was a chance to become temporary citizens of the second-largest metropolis in America, and to cheer our boys on to victory. We were naive, open-minded, and hopeful.

By now you know that the Dodgers took three out of four of those games. In all three wins, the starting pitcher made it to the 8th inning, shortstop Rafael Furcal continued his month-long hitting resurgence, and the California sun set beautifully over an exuberant ballpark. It was a wonderful time. We had four separate vantage points: up from first base, in the famous "Bleacher Beach," the All-You-Can-Eat Pavilion, and the uppermost frontiers of the top deck. Throughout, we experienced the third-oldest baseball stadium in the majors the way it was meant to be enjoyed. We ate peanuts and hotdogs. We howled and cheered. We shouted taunts at Cubs fans. And at the end of the series, we felt like we were leaving home. When Hong-Chih Kuo got the last out on Sunday, we both stood in our aisle for a few moments, watching the stadium empty in the soft gloaming. It was a brief snapshot of Paradise, and we had trouble descending the stairs to the parking lot.

Of course, the games lasted only a few hours a day. The rest of the time, we ate at "Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles" in Pasadena; or at "My Dung," a great little Vietnamese place down the street from our motel; or at "Larry's Chilidogs" in Burbank. We also sat by the pool, or talked with bass fisherman at the "lake" across Highway 60. We read books and we drove around, just looking. In many ways, it was a perfect trip. With only the ball game on our daily agenda, we did as much or as little as we wanted.

To me, this blissful little sojourn was exactly what Summer Vacation should mean. It was a trip marked with serendipity. I enjoyed being surprised at whatever celebrity would throw out the first pitch: one day it was David Duchovny, the next it was Landon Donovan. American Idol winner Jordin Sparks sang the National Anthem one day. Each time we found the correct exit or onramp in the city's serpentine freeway systems, it felt like a minor victory. Each time we were handed a promotional poster or a free pair of Dodger flip-flops, we felt triumphant. The City of Angels lived up to its beatific name that week, and the golden sun never shone brighter.

The best moment, for me, was after Friday's game. We took the wrong exit from Chavez Ravine and were headed west down Hollywood Boulevard. John was fumbling with the atlas, trying to see if it held clues for us to get back to our motel in Rosemead. The lanes merged into one, and I let in a white car with darkly tinted windows. Soon it became clear that the lanes had merged into a mandatory sobriety test stop, directed by the LAPD. John pointed out that the white car was a Rolls Royce. We were stopped by police; I passed the test. Ahead of me, the car's windows rolled down and I could see the driver in the mirror. My jaw dropped. I had let in Rafael Furcal, he of the .335 batting average who had just been named NL Player of the Week and would be named to the All-Star Team a day later. Like a child, I hollered out the window, ignoring the officer next to me. I pumped a fist in the night air. The other officers took notice, and as I rolled past they asked me who they had just stopped. I shouted the answer, laughing, and wheeled away. It didn't matter then that we were lost in a seedy part of an enormous city on a Friday night, or that I had just been hanging out of my car in front of a dozen LAPD. I'd made room for the Dodger shortstop, and that joy carried me back to the Pomona Highway, and back home.

The Sweetest Release

Many people hate their jobs, and many of them don't get ten weeks off work in the Summer.

Unbelievable.

I actually like my job, but I don't miss it. This week is the first in a glorious series of weeks, stretching into the warmest Oregon months, where I'll forget I even had a job. I'll still get paid. My benefits will be intact, as will my retirement. And yet, there'll be a day sometime in mid-July when I'll wake up, go for a run in blinding morning sunlight, come home to read a book in the park, and try really hard to remember what a workday is like.

Oh, I'll do things with all that time. I'll head to Los Angeles, Scotland, Eastern Oregon, and my ten-year class reunion. I'll run at least two races (one a relay, one a 10K). I'll read books. I'll dust off the old guitar, maybe write a poem or two. I'll be busy. It's only been six days so far and I've already finished a Flannery O'Connor novel; gone bouldering in Leavenworth, Washington; gone wine-tasting; bar-be-cued; and set a PR in the mile at the Wilsonville High School track. There's a lot to do. But the point is, the incredible, unbelievable point is, I don't have to do anything.

There's this weird feeling that comes on, between the last day of school and that point in July when I forget I have a job. I feel like I'm getting away with something, like I've slept in too late and missed the first two classes and nobody noticed. I feel guilty, for no reason. "This can't be right," I subconsciously tell myself. But then I think about it, and it is. I really do get all this time off. Somehow, this is legal, and good.

That last Friday was like a dream. The students got out the day before; the custodians were cleaning lockers, one by one. Sunlight burst through the skylights. We spent the morning finishing grades, clearing stacks of late work off our tables and quickly entering scores. Steadily, the papers cleared off our desks and into the recycle bin. We started to clean our rooms, shoving books and handouts into closets. We straightened things. I turned the Led Zeppelin up in my room as the release point approached. Other teachers popped in, smiling, wishing a happy Summer. My grin widened. Soon, I was blaring Nirvana from my computer speakers; it echoed through the pod outside my room. I grabbed the final checklist, visited the librarian, head counselor, school secretary. I was literally skipping. I high-fived a co-worker, turned in the last of the forms, locked my room. I ran outside, into the white, ethereal, Corvallis day.

Christmas morning.

Freedom.

Tell All the Truth but Tell It Slant--

United States Poet Laureate Kay Ryan writes poems that are short and thin, like needles. She's easy to compare to Emily Dickinson, and I won't veer from that quick analysis--fans of Dickinson will like Ryan's work. Her poems are small and at once incisive and vague, precise and abstract.

It's fitting that Kay Ryan's work was introduced to me in a small window of time: I got word that she was coming to the Corvallis area in May; I read the write-up of her new collection in The New Yorker April 12 issue; I am planning a month-long poetry unit in my senior class. Two weeks ago I didn't know our Poet Laureate and yet today I bought her new book, The Best of It.

The Best of It is a collection of Ryan's strongest work from earlier books as well as some new stuff. I read about a third of it already and had to put it down: the poems were so thought-provoking that I was ignoring my Sunday routines. Ryan, in an alarmingly tiny space, attaches abstract thoughts to concrete images and either makes a statement or asks a question. If words are more powerful when they're simple, direct, and free of clutter (Hemingway knew this), then Ryan's poems are pinnacles of industry, spartan shafts of light that illuminate only the truth, and illuminate it brightly.

The poem "Lighthouse Keeping" is a good example of this minimalism. "Lighthouse Keeping" is only thirteen lines long and, incredibly, no line is longer than three words. And yet, the analogy of life's troubles, as related when "seas pleat/winds keen/fogs deepen," is vivid; it needs no more elaboration. She describes the poet (the lighthouse keeper), who "keeps/a light for/those left out"--the readers. The relationship "is intimate/and remote both/for the keeper/and those afloat." Here, we get the paradox at the heart of personal poetry, the connections and detachments that artists have with those that consume their work.

One of my favorites is the title poem of her 2005 collection, The Niagara River. In the poem, "we" are floating down the Niagara River, and it is glassy and tranquil, compared to a dining room floor. We see scenes changing as we pass. The last lines are killer: "We/do know, we do/know this is the/Niagara River, but/it is hard to remember/what that means." What does that mean? What is it about the Niagara River that would require some attention on our part? The obvious answers are omitted, and we continue to float towards a great, unseen plunge. Ryan holds no assurances about our future.

The poem "Dogleg" has an interesting analogy and ends up being hopeful, kind of. "Things Shouldn't Be So Hard" and "Bitter Pill" are devastating poems about loss. There are two poems in the collection titled "Repetition," which I think is funny.

And on and on. Each poem is a tiny analogy, a mini-lesson. The subject matters are broad--love, death, nature, loss, survival. The poems I normally enjoy are more grounded, filled with bigger images, longer lines and stanzas, clear scenes, stories to tell. I'm thinking of T. R. Hummer, of Allen Ginsberg and Sylvia Plath, of Delmore Schwartz and my old poetry instructor Joseph Millar. These wise little laser-pointer poems are totally different, and make me uncomfortable on some level. Kay Ryan is worth reading for that combination of truth and discomfort. Her poems are needles: sometimes they stab. Sometimes they are acupuncture, a source of healing. Sometimes they draw blood.

The Cruellest Month

Every literary dork, when flipping the calendar to this month, murmurs the opening lines of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. I did; you did. Admit it. The thing is, though, it's true. April is the most mean-spirited month. There isn't really a close runner-up, a month that combines crappy weather with a total lack of state-mandated days off school. Hitler was born. The Titanic sank. Martin Luther King Jr. and Abe Lincoln were assassinated.

Even the start of baseball came with its little infamies, as my Dodgers were pummeled by the Pirates (the Pirates!) and the local high school team watched puddles collect in the outfield. Sports radio is saturated with talk of the PGA Masters and the NFL Draft, two utterly asinine events that make us forget the beauty of March Madness or the anticipation of warm-weather baseball.

Still, we power through. I drive north and south. I go on little runs, listen to good music. To live in Wilsonville is to accept a certain brand of Weltschmerz that aligns exactly with April's cruelty. At least the mercurial weather gives us something to look at. At least my Dodgers play the Pirates again tonight. At least I-5 still points south.

Kelowna, Kelowna, We Stand on Guard for Thee

I sometimes compare Kelowna, British Columbia to Bend, Oregon, but that's unfair to Kelowna. Like Bend, Kelowna is in a semi-arid high desert surrounded by mountains and water features. They're both expensive to live in; they're both tourist destinations.

But last week, when I devoured heaping bowls of poutine and tried to immerse myself in the Canadian experience, I realized something. Kelowna represents a transcendent departure from my American routine. It is a wholly unique and magical place, and the vexations of modern life dissolve when I cross the glassy Okanagan Lake and head into town.

People are just more chipper in Kelowna than anywhere else. They have good reason to be: the Okanagan Valley is rich in wineries, ski resorts, and clear lakes. I knew all that, and had traveled to Kelowna before to enjoy some of those things, but this time it was different. My buddies Jeff and Jamie and I were determined to get under the skin of a place, to leave the hotel room and really rub elbows in the community.

I realized last summer that the best way to quickly learn about a place is to see local sports. Milwaukee and Chicago came alive with the Brewers, Cubs, and White Sox--baseball is an affordable and thoroughly entertaining "welcome" to any good city. In Kelowna, of course, we had to check out the junior hockey team, the Kelowna Rockets. This was an apotheosis. A hockey game in Canada is like a soccer game in Mexico or a baseball game in Chicago. It is the perfect intersection of intense athletic endeavor and spectator support. The two games we caught were both high-stakes playoff games, and I was enthralled from the first face-off. Hockey, minute-by-minute, is more violent than American football, and yet the athletes exhibit tremendous grace and skill, changing directions on skates without effort or catching pucks sailing high above the ice. The team moved as a unit, a swelling and contracting organism that simultaneously looked angelic and malevolent, gliding to and fro on the pale rink. The first game went into double-overtime. The second game was decided by a goal. Both times, the home team won. And as we watched, transfixed, the locals around us stomped and yelled and embodied the collective exhultations of a Canadian hockey contest. The thundering arena became part of the entertainment, and us three naive Americans, for a few special hours, joined the fun.

Jeff and Jamie and I all went to a Tim Horton's and bought Timbits (doughnut holes) to celebrate the end of game six, when the boys fended off elimination and won one for the good people of Kelowna.

We skied for a few days and wandered around the lake shore. The wind blew cold off the water: the Okanagan Valley still hadn't shaken winter. We wandered the streets of Kelowna and checked out the cycling scene. We ate french fries smothered in cheese and gravy, and watched Sportcenter about hockey.

The indelible image of Kelowna, for me, was a moment on Friday at the H2O Adventure & Fitness Centre. This enormous add-on to the local YMCA/YWCA is the largest indoor water park I'd ever been to, by far, and was a thrilling diversion. The H2O Centre, filled with local swim teams, teenagers, young families, and the requisite old loners, had it all. Three water slides hung suspended, four stories up, over much of the wave pool. A lazy river wound under the slides, and high dives towered from the next pool over. A false wave, built for surfing and boogie boarding, raged along a far wall. Sunlight peered in from distant windows on the ceiling.

We stayed several hours at that community pool, and the indelible image came near the end of our stay, in the lazy river, when I happily lay on my back and floated around gentle curves. I was surrounded by Kelownans of all ages and foam-noodle flotsam, and I remember the water was warm and the air was very bright as the afternoon sun angled just right at the river. In that golden place, I was an ingredient in a weloming Canadian soup, and everything in life became ideal.

Sojourns: Volume Three--Cibecue

(Not much going on in March for a schoolteacher in Oregon. So I'll write about other times, the quarter of the year when I don't have to show up to work. This will be a multi-part series.)

The Chiricahua Apache escaped the reservation at Cibecue Creek in 1881, vanishing in dust and bullets and blood, commencing the last real skirmishes of the Indian Wars.

I went to Cibecue, after sophomore year at Oregon State, to work in dirty tents and under smoky skies. I traveled to Cibecue, a nineteen-year-old longhaired seeker, to make sense of the West, to try my hand at the terrific promise of an outdoor summer job, and to reinvent the person I was turning into. Cibecue was, to me, the gateway to the Wild West. That impoverished Apache reservation town triggered a shift in the way I viewed myself, and my direction in life.

I'm glad that Ricarda talked me into that job, that she picked me up in a maintenance truck in Eugene and drove me through stark deserts and glittering cities. I'm thankful that the grass-seed farm didn't have work that year, and that I was able to "light out for the territory" like Huck Finn, unencumbered, unattached. The summer of 2002 was hot and dry across the West, and ultimately, I'm grateful for the Indian arsonist that started the Rodeo-Chedeski Fire in those high Arizona hills. These forces combined in a cyclone of luck and calamity, a cyclone that sucked me in.

Compared to life in Oregon, the routine at Cibicue was alien. I'd pull my dreadlocks under a hairnet, put on the company-issue blue work shirt, huff the brown snot out of my nose, and get to work. I weighed hunks of meat. I cut vegetables. I took smoke breaks and shook many hands and stared out into the desert late at night.

In Cibecue, three-legged mangy dogs walked past our generator lights and tarantulas scuttled under our trailers. Forest fires danced up on the hills that encircled our camp. The workers would get nosebleeds and headaches. We'd miss sleep. Some went to the hospital tent for heatstroke. We'd play basketball against Apaches in the high school gym, and get dominated every time. We were part of a town transformed, a ramshackle spattering of desert buildings converted into a government work camp.

I remember working through the night and past dawn, while Led Zeppelin blared through crackly speakers and the sky turned red through the smoke. I remember colored lizards. I remember the truck driver from Riverside with the "K.S." (Killer Side) gang tattoos along his forearms. I remember our boss, sleeves rolled up and high on coffee, recite long lyric poems in the predawn stillness. I can still see vague red ribbons moving along the hillsides under the gray haze, and hear the roar of the planes and helicoptors dumping esoteric chemicals. I recall the big guy next to me in the assembly line that uttered breathy phrases in an ancient language, far older and richer than English or Spanish. I recall the horror, and embarrassment, of a modern Indian reservation: all dirty and poor and sad. There was dust and sage, heat and sweat. In that Arizona furnace, we cooked, grappled, and rallied.

We all wore the badge of OK's Cascade, Mobile Solutions. We made the food that fueled the firefighters.

God bless and keep you, OK's Cascade.

That job, beginning at the squalor of Cibecue, took me across the West over the next two summers. Cibecue was the first chapter in a long novel, a novel filled with triumph, heartbreak, and tedium. The novel would be a western epic, rich with allegory and dirty realism. Though the last chapter ended in 2003, the writer is still searching for material to compose his next epic, another first line to be penned where a dusty desert road threads its way into oblivion.

Reading Rainbow

Three nonfiction books I'm thumbing through now:

The White Album by Joan Didion

For first-timers, this one needs to be read with her other great work, Slouching Towards Bethlehem. These two books are ridiculously good. Didion is an intimidating writer when she writes fiction, and she's on another planet when she writes essays. She's the most honest, incisive, and erudite voice we have in nonfiction American letters, and these two essay collections were written at the high-water mark of her career.

I've read and reread both of these books, and am into The White Album now because it fits so readily into my current teaching curriculum and life's ponderings (the "Sojourns" portion of my blog are a direct rip-off of a section of her book). What amazes me about the book, still, is how easily Didion is able to cut through any crap and immediately land on the truth in all situations. Two of her essays, "On the Morning after the Sixties" and "The Women's Movement" so concisely deconstruct the subject matter that after three pages, as readers, we are simply accepting what Didion tells us. She effectively uses people's words against them, so whenever she quotes something it's a signal of impending doom. Like a literary ninja, she hacks away at pretense and reduces lofty ideas to nothing in a few paragraphs. All the while, she, as a narrator, is quiet and remarkably conservative. It's as though Didion viewed two decades in the American experience with an eyebrow raised, made a few notes in her notebook, then wrote two of the most brilliant books in our history.

Escaping the Delta: Robert Johnson and the Invention of the Blues by Elijah Wald

This book is uncomfortable to me. Elijah Wald, a blues musician, essentially studies the history of blues music in the Mississippi Delta and explains why the prevailing myths are wrong. Robert Johnson, he argues, was probably a different person than we all think he was. He wanted to be rich, and mainstream. He also was minimally influential in his time. The obsession with "authenticity," with the hardscrabble narrative and legends of blues musicians that the rock-and-roll generation devours greedily, is all a sham.

I like the prevailing myths, and I felt better when I believed that Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to play blues, died at twenty-seven (the first in a series of musicians dying at that infamous age), and became the most influential bluesman in history. Still, I like Wald's book. It's honest, and I am enjoying his meticulous research and rare knowledge of music. This book is revisionist history, sure, but Wald loves music and the truth more than the romantic legends of white college students. Serious music fans should pick up this one.

Buying In: The Secret Dialogue between What We Buy and Who We Are by Rob Walker

I'm not actually reading this text: it's a book-on-CD from the Wilsonville Library. I listen to it on my commute. This book is fantastic, a shorter, less-angry No Logo (by Naomi Klein). Rob Walker, a columnist for the New York Times, studies marketing and consumption, and his book analyzes the shifts in advertising from the 2oth to the 21st Century. Like the other two, his book is refreshingly honest. (Walker admits to feeling miffed when Nike bought-out Converse, then wonders why he felt so tied to the Converse brand to begin with.)

Walker examines the paradoxes in modern life. For example,when surveyed, a number of people (about 77%) think that they are more critical of advertising than "most people." In other words, most people are more critical than most people. Another paradox: people want to be individual and special; people want to fit in with their peers. Walker, in his introduction, explains that we are all consumers, and that we all identify with brand names. His goal (and it's a noble one) is to get us to be honest with ourselves and make consumer choices that are ultimately ethical. This book is well written and well researched, and the hour commute rushes by when the CD is playing. There's a lot of psychology, sociology, and economics in this one. And yet, though I'm a humble English major, I'm getting a lot out of it.

--On a side note, whenever Walker discusses people that revere symbols and brands, or whenever he explores "revisionist" memory in consumers, I think of Oregon Duck football fans. Walker talks about "joining" brands as though they're cults, and consumers being dazzled by things that, while not necessarily better, are "novel" and appeal to consumers' sense of "individuality." I look around the Portland Metro Area, see countless Duck fans that never went to the University of Oregon, and realize that these are the people Walker is studying.

Sojourns: Volume Two--The Tetons

(Not much going on in February for a schoolteacher in Oregon. So I'll write about other times, the quarter of the year when I don't have to show up to work. This will be a multi-part series.)

The Teton Range is a jagged spine that juts out from the Wyoming plains like a tablesaw blade. I went there, two summers ago, and hiked through two glacial canyons with my wife and a buddy of mine. We spent three days in those mountains.

I've been to that part of Wyoming a few times before. In Yellowstone, I worked in a fire camp, visited with my family, and went on part of my honeymoon. I'd seen the Tetons, but only from a car on short day trips. This time, I vowed, I would live out of a backpack and see things most tourists don't. I brought my bear spray--a 12-oz. canister that works like mace, only it's designed to fend off grizzly bears. My buddy got the time off work. My wife is resilient, and willing. We penciled in the date, made the reservations through the ranger station, and set off.

It's a long drive through barren parts of Eastern Oregon and Idaho, this passage to Wyoming. My buddy and I once bought white, ten-gallon cowboy hats in Canada, and we wore them the whole way, of course. Stayed a night in Pocatello. Ate food at truckstops. Chased the American Dream.

After passing the horrible, kitschy "western town" of Jackson, WY (think Sisters, OR, but worse), we set up basecamp on the dry, sagebrush flats of the Gros Ventre River Valley. We listened to a ranger campfire talk that night, under wide-open western skies. The ranger said that the seeds chipmunks collect in the mountains impact grizzly bears' eating habits, and that we are all connected in a great wheel of life. Not a quarter-mile away, in the dark, a great herd of buffalo snorted and shuffled and bedded down for the night. Soon, we did too.

The next morning, we stuffed our tents into our backpacks and drove, in the bright sunshine, to the huge mountain range that filled the entire western skyline. The Teton Range, somehow, has no foothills, so the 7,000 foot jump from our our basecamp to the summit of the Grand is jarring, an imposing wall of granite and ice. We picked up our backcountry permits at the Jenny Lake ranger station. The ranger was impressed at our route--a three-day loop through the Paintbrush and Cascade Canyons via Holly Lake, the Paintbrush Divide, and Lake Solitude--and told us to have a good time. We borrowed the bear canisters, those Nalgene-esque plastic containers for our food. I attached the bear spray to my belt, and we were ready to go.

I've always imagined myself staring down a huge grizzly bear on a mountain trail, wife and buddy hiding behind me. I would coolly snap the bear spray out of the holster, pull the pin, and in an acidic fog of pepper and chemicals, let the bear have it. This didn't happen on our trip to the Tetons. We did, however, encounter our share of crazy mountain animals. The first was a bull elk, feeding in a patch of wildflowers high up on a rocky slope, across the canyon from our trail. The next was cow elk, bedded down and surprised at our presence, about twenty feet away. Alarmed, I almost let her have it with the bear spray. Near the top of the Paintbrush Divide, we saw a number of marmots and pikas. That's right, marmots and pikas. On day three, we saw what looked like a pair of skis on someone's shoulder coming at us from behind a bush around a bend in the trail. The "skis" turned out to be antlers from a bull moose. We all did a little dance and scattered while the seven-foot ungulate crashed though the underbrush. An hour later, another bull moose, this time across a small river. The ranger was right: the great wheel of life was intact.

I recommend a trip like this. It's satisfying to hike from dense forest to wildflower meadows to rocks and snow. We camped by a beautiful lake, fed by glaciers, and a clear, cold mountain spring. The top of Paintbrush Divide (elevation 10,700 feet) was a great milestone, like the floor of the Grand Canyon in reverse--it was all downhill after that point. Importantly, the Divide separated two unique glacier valleys, and the hike down was as picturesque and unique as the hike up. We felt alive when we huddled in our tents during a high-elevation thunderstorm. The air, the flowers, the animals, the ice, the rocks, the long traverses over glaciers--the hike was a reconnection with the American West and a reaffirmation of those great passages from Thoreau and Emerson.

At the end of the trip, after 19 miles of hiking and almost 4,000 feet of elevation change, it felt good to get in the car and drive up to Yellowstone. We had some local microbrews, walked on a boardwalk, looked at geothermal features. Though we were only there for a day, we could tell that Yellowstone is another great adventure--some 98 percent of visitors stay close to their cars and yet the backpacking trails extend for miles. I hear Glacier National Park is pretty good, too. Same with Kings Canyon and Sequoia. And Zion. And Big Bend, down in Texas. I heard the Sawtooths in Idaho are nice. Banff is supposed to be the real deal. And Bryce Canyon. And North Cascades. And Moab. And Yosemite. There's a trail around Tahoe, I heard.

I'm endlessly happy that my job has a summer vacation.

Sojourns: Volume One--RAGBRAI

(Not much going on in February for a schoolteacher in Oregon. So I'll write about other times, the quarter of the year when I don't have to show up to work. This will be a multi-part series.)

Last Summer, from July 19th to the 25th, I pedaled a road bike across the State of Iowa in the world's largest group bike ride. The Register Annual Group Bike Ride Across Iowa, or RAGBRAI, is such an enormous and complex event--especially for non-midwesterners--that it becomes difficult to relate without hyperbole. RAGBRAI is a challenge, a party, a journey, a pilgrimmage, a community fundraiser, an examination of soul, a race, a vacation, a threshold crossing. RAGBRAI asks important questions of us; it demands our focus and attention, for it has stories to tell.

For many, especially Iowans in their twenties, RAGBRAI is a week-long binge during the high point of summer. Roving mobs of young people, in matching inappropriate bike jerseys, guzzle huge amounts of Busch Light at every stop as they drink their way from town to town. These teams have painted school buses parked at each end-of-day party, they holler and carouse into the night, and they pedal in close, drunken groups down the road. Small Iowa villages will transform into MTV's Spring Break (in bike shorts), thanks to these people.

Older midwesterners treat RAGBRAI as a chance to re-affirm their grasp on life. To them, RAGBRAI is an annual gut-check. These people leave early in the morning, travel at a safe pace, and arrive at the host towns with more than enough time to shower and eat a healthy meal. They're doing it, year after year, to separate themselves from the slog of a career. They're doing it to push themselves one more time. They're doing it to be young again--and good for them.

Of course, thousands of other people, from all over the world, descend on Iowa for thousands of other reasons. RAGBRAI is a traveling circus, the most exciting thing in the state all summer. It makes the local news every night, blaring from the televisions in Hivee Supermarket produce sections. Towns petition to get the enormous economic stimulus of hosting a RAGBRAI for the night, or just for having RAGBRAI pass through. Gas stations stock up on Busch Light.

I never filled out an entrance form for RAGBRAI (thousands don't) and never felt part of it, even though I pedaled every mile. I was an unregistered pirate who didn't leave early in the morning, didn't let anyone else haul my stuff, didn't quaff cheap beer, and didn't understand the common decency of the Midwest. I viewed the whole deal with an outsider's eyes, and I had my own reasons to be there. I went to Iowa to see if I could ride that far, and to escape the reality of my dad's death in Oregon a few weeks before.

RAGBRAI had things in store. I finished, on the proud shores of the Mississippi in Burlington, a much different person that when I left Council Bluffs a week before. It is hard to quickly describe that week and its Dante-inspired journeys from the depths of Hell up through Purgatory and finally into Paradise. (That description is apt: about two-thirds of the ride, if not Hell, wasn't much better.) I know I ate a lot of pork chops and slices of pie. I weathered two apocalyptic Midwest thunderstorms. I endured the curious metamorphosis of my buttocks from "normal human" to "baboon." I pedaled past inebriated hordes and over hundreds of hills. I relieved myself in cornfields, avoided naked slip-and-slides, camped in supermarket parking lots, vomited from dehydration, consoled tired bikers, was consoled by tired bikers, had a stranger write the word "virgin" on my calf. I saw lightning bugs for the first time. I saw real-life Amish people and had serious talks with locals about NASCAR. Throughout, thousands and thousands of people in tight black bike shorts, churning and speeding and dancing and laughing and shouting.

When I finished RAGBRAI I kept going. The people I was with were from Wisconsin, and we had another two-and-a-half days' ride. Very quickly, as we crossed the great muddy river and headed into Illinois, the complexion changed. It was quieter. The roads, blocked off to traffic before, were now filled with cars. And one unexpected thing started to happen: passing farm houses, we'd get chased by huge, protective family dogs. Were dogs less friendly in Illinois? No, I soon realized. In Iowa, the dogs were totally worn-out by the time I passed. They couldn't fend off the great migration east.

When the Devil's Loose

The musician A. A. Bondy looks and sounds like he just wandered into your town after falling out of a boxcar five miles down the line. He's gaunt and wears a checkered shirt; he plays guitar and harmonica. I'm digging his two albums, American Hearts and When the Devil's Loose. They're the musical equivalent of Southern Gothic literature: metaphorical, vaguely religious, and authentically hardscrabble. A. A. Bondy (his birth name is Auguste Arthur Bondy) writes songs about war, peace, addiction, traveling, working, small-town life, Jesus, and the devil. Happily, he rarely sings about love. (And when he does, it's with a wink. One lyric goes: And love, it don't die, it just goes from girl to girl.)

A. A. Bondy, the person, reminds me of a guy I knew once, who was also in a band. This guy was real skinny, from a rough part of town, and smoked cigarettes but had "quit drinkin'" a few years back. He was kind and genuine, and quiet, but when he did speak, we all listened. He had that faraway look in his eyes. He'd seen things. He'd worked too hard; he looked broken down. That guy, if you've ever met him or anyone like him, is A. A. Bondy.

Of course, I heartily recommend a listen to his albums. They're the real deal: honest, haunting, musically sound. Great voice, great lyrics. Play the albums at night, after a really long day at work or school, and stare out the window. That kind of music.

Climbing the Mountain

"What are we doing with our lives?"--Jerry Seinfeld, Episode One,"The Engagement," Season Seven

I remember once, in my high school Health class, when a kid asked the teacher if high school was the best time in one's life. It was an honest, desperate question. Surely, the kid wondered, this couldn't be the high point, could it?

No, the teacher said, after thinking about it. College is the best time in one's life.


That was good news at the time. I sat back in my chair and smiled. My suspicions were confirmed: things will get better.

I graduated from college five years ago, and I look back on that answer from that teacher. What a sad, sad man. I still have that hope; he's living in the past. College was a hoot, but I was mostly a lazy knucklehead for those five years. I missed out on the biggest collegiate rock-climbing wall in America (OSU's behemoth at Dixon). I was out-of-shape. I watched too many movies, left too many books unread. I had tons of free time, but I can't really list a lot of accomplishments from those years.


Now, with a full-time job, hour commute, wife, and pets--actual responsibilites--I'm making things happen. In March, I plan on heading to Banff, the crown jewel of Canada's National Parks, to tear up Lake Louise Ski Resort. In May, I'll try to kill myself in the Eugene Half-Marathon. In June, I'll deliver an address to thousands of people at Gill Coliseum. In July, I'll head to Scotland. Sometime this summer, I'll ride a bicycle to San Francisco. I'll read some good books, maybe write a thing or two. This is a pretty good time of my life, much more exciting than high school and certainly on par with college. It would be sad if these years were the downhill slope, if the summit had already been reached.

Happily, many of my peers haven't given up, either. The guy that teaches two doors down from me is trying to qualify for the Boston Marathon. My brother-in-law, tired of his job, applied for and was accepted to law school in Chicago. My brilliant wife is forging ahead in graduate school, dominating tests about arcane body parts and esoteric diseases. We're all elbowing our way up a little higher, raising our profiles.

I don't understand people that don't have goals, or watch a lot of TV, or don't get outside, or don't read. For them, there was a brief period--about four or five years--when they didn't live with their parents and, simultaneously, they didn't have a full-time job. College, and its absence of responsibilty, was their Mecca. Then they gave up. Life flared up for a few years, then burned out.

The mythical "best time in life" is an amorphous thing, almost solely determined by our will. For me, I think 57 will be a good year. That's my summit. After that, my health will probably start to go--the Kammerzelts have a history of colon cancer and high blood pressure--and I'll fade a bit. But the best time certainly isn't behind me. And, dear blog reader, it shouldn't be behind you.

J. D. Salinger, 1919-2010

On June 6, 1944, J. D. Salinger landed on Utah Beach with the rest of the 4th Infantry Division and fought his way into France. He would later see action in the Hurtgen Forest and at the Battle of the Bulge--incredibly bloody battles--before suffering a nervous breakdown and checking himself into an Army hospital in Nuremberg as the Allies advanced on Berlin. There, he began writing stories. During the next twenty years he would produce a slender body of work that would appear in The New Yorker magazine and high school classrooms. And of course, in 1965, Salinger vanished from public life permanently.

Salinger died sometime yesterday, of natural causes. He was 91.

It's fitting that I heard of his death at a high school, from many sources: I got two separate e-mails, one teacher popping in to tell me, and one student yelling up from the library as I walked past the railing. I paused my American Lit classes later, and said a few words. We finished reading "The Catcher in the Rye" not three weeks earlier.

J. D. Salinger is still a provocative figure. People have opinions about his work, probably because most of them read him in high school, and conclusions formed when we are young are hard to shake. Conservatives still rail against the profanity and "debauchery" in his books, and try to get them banned in schools. Many people consider Holden Caulfield, his most famous character, an aimless whiner, or worse, an "emo." On the other hand, those of a more alternative bent quickly identify with Holden (and Salinger) and consider "The Catcher in the Rye" the best text in school. Salinger's stories still crawl under our skin; they still make us uncomfortable.

I went to a Catholic high school that didn't teach "Catcher." I first read it in my twenties, when I began teaching it, and at first was underwhelmed. Nothing seemed to happen; Holden seemed "emo." But, unlike most people, I thought about the book after I initially judged it. I realized the fantastically subtle shift in tone, and the starkly moral world that Salinger presented. I considered that the book was about grieving (Holden's younger brother died before the events in the story), not about "phoniness." Even now, I think about the book in the larger context of Postwar America and Salinger's life, and it resonates further. People don't usually pick up on that, especially the conservative book-banners, and so "Catcher" remains thought of, generally, as a book about an angry teen.

Reading Salinger's other works is even more rewarding. "Franny and Zooey" (two novellas, each a funny name) is one of the most thought-provoking and uplifting books I've ever read. The title characters are siblings in the Glass family that appears several times in Salnger's works. There is a clear messianic message in the "Zooey" portion that unravels skillfully and honestly, and I haven't talked to anyone who wasn't moved by the ending. "Nine Stories," his short story collection, is heartbreakingly close to his own postwar experience, especially the terrifying "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

The huge Salinger fan in me wonders, now that he's dead, if the mythical "other" works that Salinger was rumored to write will surface. I mean, he had to do some writing in the 45 years of seclusion, right? I'd love to read more. Salinger the person, though, is clearly is as brilliant and misanthropic as his characters. There must have been a reason that he didn't want to publish any more. Maybe he's like John Cheever, who wanted his "Journals" published posthumously. Or maybe he's like Kurt Cobain, whose handwritten journals were published without his consent.

I felt good about getting Cheever's (extremely personal) "Journals." I didn't even thumb through Cobain's. I have some respect for dead geniuses, so I'll wait to see if I'll read any new stuff, see Salinger's intent about all this. After school, though, I did head on over to Borders and pick up the last Salinger book that I didn't have, "Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour an Introduction." I'm excited to start reading it.

Today in class, in front of a bunch of apathetic youth with their own problems (a room of Holden Caulfields), I held up an imaginary glass.

Here's to old J. D. Salinger, who taught us that profanity can betray tenderness, that the good things in life change too soon, and that baseball mitts can be poetic. We never understood you, but we were glad to have had you in our lives.

I smashed the imaginary glass against the floor.

Dirty Realism

We all go on little kicks. Right now I'm into this little college band from Ohio State (go Buckeyes!) called "Saintseneca." I'm also listening to Au Revoir Simone, The Avett Brothers, and Nipsey Hussle. These are all new groups to me; the world seems fresh and young.

I'm on a Raymond Carver kick right now, too. His short stories are some of the best I've ever read. Each word is in the right place. He's one of the few writers that can use an exclamation point effectively, and even make that ostentatious punctuation mark seem sad. If only I could! His characters are fully rendered. His dialogue is surprising and incisive. Importantly, his stories, about four or five pages long each, are perfect for that eight minutes or so before I go to sleep.

Raymond Carver, before drifting in and out of marriages and bouts with alcoholism, lived in Yakima, Washington. This makes sense. I've been to Yakima way more than I've ever wanted too (a good buddy moved there after college), and it's exactly like a Carver story. The people there mean well, but they have it rough. They work a lot. They hunt and fish. They shop at stores called "Yakimart" and "Yakimex." While he's not really considered a provincial writer, Carver, like Annie Proulx or Flannery O'Connor, absolutely recalls the spirit of his place in his work.

Here's a beginning to a Carver story, "Gazebo," told without irony:

That morning she pours Teacher's over my belly and licks it off. That afternoon she tries to jump out the window.

I go, "Holly, this can't continue. This has got to stop."

Somehow, Carver turns this scene into a mournful account of a marriage ending, with a thoughtful side note about the title symbol. He makes us sympathize with the drunken couple; he's kind to his characters, despite their initial flaws. Carver describes the type of people that live somewhere in our town, the people that stay up too late and maybe don't have enough self-control. Most of us are related to these people. Carver was one of these people, and his voice isn't hip or angry or proud. It's honest.

Heart of the Valley

I'm haunted by the last two sentences of my last blog post. I was trying to compare my commute to a river, and went with the analogy, and the river spilled back to Corvallis. I wrote that, wondered where it came from, then left it. Do we all return to Corvallis?

Now, a week later, I reflect on the last few days. I've run into former students, three of them, and they're all on different points on the same cycle. One wants to leave Corvallis, one is going to school back East, and one is back in Corvallis, having left an eastern school. They all find their way home, like salmon. I also have this anadromous impulse.

This was a good Friday. Leaving class as the final bell rang, the students filed out merrily, with the typical high-fives and laughter. They asked me if I was going to the boys basketball game. I said no. They asked me if I was going to the OSU gymnastics meet. I said no, I lived in Wilsonville. They wondered what I was doing.

I blinked. I thought of strip malls, traffic, and parking garages. I don't know, I told them. Where I live isn't like Corvallis.

Tomorrow, Saturday, I'm heading back down I-5 to the Heart of the Valley.

The Commute--An Idyll

It's cold in northwest Oregon at six thirty in the morning. At that time, before the first glow over the Cascades, I'm guzzling coffee, adjusting the radio stations out of the static, and barreling down I-5 past Woodburn. It's a dark, wet crossing, this trip south. I pass the 45th Parallel. I click my wipers up, then down, fiddle with the defrost. I emerge from the spray behind an eighteen-wheeler. I yawn, then sing, then am quiet. There's an amnesic plane we enter, on this road, in the pre-dawn rain. It's a murky fugue, spanning 50 miles or so between the outlet malls at Exit 271 and Highway 34. It's where we all lose our grips. Once, I was in south Salem before I realized that I hadn't turned on my headlights. I've lost track of the speed limit, of my peripheral vision, and of my thermos, buried under my lunchpail and backpack in the passenger seat. The Cavalier continues its noble passage; time blurs as the trees, broken lane lines, threads of rain on my windshield, and glimmering red tail lights melt together. For when I turn off Wilsonville Road and onto the interstate, I join a great river, and the current pulls me to Corvallis. We can never leave Corvallis, not really anyway. Her siren song draws us back.

Enormous Animals

" . . . and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago." --Herman Melville

I just finished reading "American Buffalo," the fantastic memoir and study by Steven Rinella. In the book, the narrator draws a tag to go on an Alaskan hunting trip to hunt buffalo, to his knowledge the only hunt in North America of its kind. These are among the last wild buffalo in the country, and the only that people can hunt. Through his recollection of the trip (a fascinating adventure), Rinella provides information on the animal and explores centuries of the complex relationship between buffalo and man in North America. It's a wonderful read.

Rinella is an inspiring character. In my American Lit classes, we're discussing the Postmodern movement and one of its characteristics, "New Journalism." One of the tenets of this style is that the character of the journalist is as important as the subject they're exploring. Indeed, the newspaper quotations on the back of the book compare Rinella to another New Journalist, Hunter S. Thompson. This comparison is weak, but Rinella is like a literary character: part Hank Stamper from "Sometimes a Great Notion," part Ishmael from "Moby Dick," and part cowboy (any of them) from Annie Proulx's three Wyoming collections.

After finishing a book as good as that one, I often think about it for a few days. How does my biography, and curiosity, measure up to Rinella's? Do I have the life experience to write a great memoir that not only traces my stories but compares them to our larger relationship with the natural world? The short answer: no. Not at all, really. Not a full-book length. Maybe a short story . . .

Once, in California, I surfed with dolphins. It was Christmas, and the sun was setting, and dolphins were riding the same wave I was.

Once, in Yellowtone National Park, I pointed a can of bear-spray at a black bear that passed by our cooking fire.

Once, in the hills around Eugene, I shot a deer in the lungs, packed it out, ate it. I was about fourteen, and my dad took me.

Once, in Grand Teton National Park, my buddy and my wife and I spooked a cow elk, fifteen feet away. Two days later we surprised a bull moose on the trail.

Once, in the trails outside Corvallis, my wife and I found a porcupine.

That's about it. Oh, I've seen elk and buffalo, moose and deer, bears and coyotes--all from my car window. I'm probably more outdoorsy than most Americans, as if that means anything. But, importantly, I've never been attacked by an animal. I've only killed one. I have two cats, but there's a huge lack of primal human-animal contact in my life. This needs to change. If reading "American Buffalo" did anything, it challenged me to continue the delicate dance of humans and enormous wild animals that has existed since the dawn of time. I need to live the circle of life, to keep that great wheel turning. I need to stare down wild grizzly bears (like my hero, Timothy Treadwell) and shoot and eat buffalo like Steven Rinella. It's been too long, people. I know that we're already in the second decade of the 21st century, but our connection with our ancestry needs to go beyond "Big Buck Hunter" video games in truck stops. Let's all get a little crazy in 2010.

Why "Magenta Surrender"?

Like Eric Clapton or Neil Young, I've been a part of many music groups over the years. Unlike those two, most of my groups never actually played or recorded music--they were simply ideas, or brief practice sessions. Notably, some were real, even recorded in film or audio format. Here is a humble list, as far back as I remember. Genre is in parenthesis; name of group is italicized.

Skankin' Dank and the Hot Tub Monkeys (Ska) Mid-nineties. Not real.

The Bon Marche Muslims (Thrash Punk) Mid-nineties. One practice session.

The Ottos (Neo-Suburban Acid New Wave) Late nineties. Real band, several practice sessions, one concert, subject of a documentary.

The Chair-Van Man Band (Acoustic Reggae-Influenced Jam Band) Early aughts. Very real, four practice sessions, one show--in Wyoming, of all places.

The Andy Freeman (Acoustic Shock Rock) Early aughts. Two huge shows, several practice sessions, one ruined relationship based on song lyrics. Notable tracks include "Andy", "Speedo Rhymes with Burrito", and "Eugene vs. Gresham." Band motto: "Three guys, two chords, one band."

The VH Vigilantes (Hip-hop Group). Early aughts. For a brief period, this group was the best all-white religious rap group in the Corvallis area. Recorded one album, "The Coconut Bangers' Ball". Five or six shows. Recordings survive to this day.

Dankstyle Reckless (Solo Hip-hop) Early aughts. Solo project after Vigilante break-up. Appearances on two Proof tracks. Two concerts.

Thunderwolf (Hair Metal) Early aughts. Mostly real. One practice session.

Dakota (Arena Rock) Mid-aughts. Not real.

Steel Duchess (Speed Metal) Mid-aughts. Not real.

Sassy Lads (Boy Band) Mid-aughts. Several practice sessions. Always harmonized and crooned in English accents.

Magenta Surrender (Emo) Mid-aughts. Several practice sessions. Work on first album ("Puddles of Melancholy November") halted due to to emotional inablity to work together, drama. Still rumored to achieve reunion tour.

Clearly, I tried my hand at a lot of music throughout high school and college. I've turned the volume down in the years since, but there's still a song out there that needs to be sung, and some old friends that need a late-night phone call. Some day, we might get the band back together. And on that day . . .

New Money

The Oregon Ducks lost the Rose Bowl yesterday. Across the state, it is being treated like a tragedy, as though Kennedy was shot again or someone canceled Christmas. The Oregonian is morose, its cover a picture of dejected fans wearing dark green, silver, black, light green, gray, very bright yellow, a more faded yellow, and forest green.

I'm happy. Actually, many people are happy, though we're scolded for rooting against our state, or against our conference. When Jim Tressel and his Buckeyes beat the Ducks, a warm feeling spread throughout many pockets of Oregon and greater Northwest. Justice was served yesterday, and the team that represents everything wrong with college football, and indeed the bad direction of all college athletics, lost.

I haven't liked the Ducks for about ten years now, or when they first put up a billboard in New York's Times Square to advertise Joey Harrington's Heisman campaign. I couldn't explain my nauseau then (it was just a vague dislike) but it grew to the point where I can now safely say that the Oregon Ducks, if given success, will ruin everything we love about college sports.

When I think of college sports, I think of tradition. Pageantry. History. I think of institutions a hundred years old that, sometime in the nineteen-teens, had a vote among their student bodies to decide mascots, colors, songs, and cheers that would last for generations. That's why, in college sports, we have great mascots like the Hokies, Buckeyes, Sooners, Golden Gophers, and Crimson Tide. That's why Texas A + M has their "midnight yell" and my Oregon State Beavers revere the Trysting Tree. I think that going to school and cheering on my team links me to the past, present, and future, and that I am but one drop in a rolling river of Beaver Believers and I will carry my school's storied history as proudly as the orange (it hasn't changed) shirt on my back.

The University of Oregon eschews history. They shun it. They don't care about their traditions, colors, or souls. Rather, through some gaudy marketing and corporate help (a Disney logo, a Nike uniform), they loudly scream for attention through the worst ways possible. Indeed, if what people dislike about the BCS (it is a beauty contest more than a demonstration of ability) is true, than Oregon is playing the system they best way they know how. They are known for their looks and potential, not their actual talent or success. Worse, they got this money through the donations of one man. While yesterday's opponent, Ohio State, built an empire on the collected efforts of their success and alumni contributions, the Ducks won the lottery. And like most lottery winners, they tried to quickly buy success with flashy toys and a new wardrobe. Rather than focus on the impressive play or discipline of their football team, ESPN spent much of the Rose Bowl hype on what the Ducks do even better than that--sell sparkly jerseys to their hungry fans and advance the Oregon "brand." If I wanted to watch money thrown around, I'd watch the NFL.

In every other aspect of my life, I prefer cool old traditions to bubblegum new gaudiness. It's why I like classic rock more than the Jonas Brothers, or read literature over the Twilight series. So why, fellow Oregonian, would I cheer on the ostentatious Ducks when I could appreciate the salt-of-the-earth values of the Buckeyes as they beat them? Go Beavers, world, and down with the Ducks on all fronts. Let's appreciate our state, but more importantly, let's not sell our souls.