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The Screaming Silence

  As I have mentioned, I worked for two seasons on the Spotted Owl Survey for the US Forest Service back in the day. This involved setting up stations around areas that were scheduled for timber harvesting to see if there were owls nesting there. We would look at a topographic map and see where we needed to put stations (usually along logging roads) so that we could get complete coverage of the area to be harvested. We would go out during the day and mark these stations with ribbons, then at night we would go to each station and “hoot” for ten minutes. If we did not get a response, we would move on to the next station and so on until we could be sure there were no spotted owls in the vicinity. This meant we were working at night in the woods. There is a lot of wildlife activity at night in the woods. It is not just owls, a fair number of wildlife are nocturnal. We saw coyotes, bobcats, cougars, bats, frogs, deer, elk, among other things. But it was not just seeing the wildlife, ...
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Aurora

  I have been much disappointed by Aurora Borealis performances over my life. Each time they predict one might be visible in our latitudes, I waited up and saw nothing. To be fair, auroras (aurorae?) are kind of fickle. They are created by solar storms that send charged particle into Earth’s upper atmosphere where they interact the atoms there. The timing has to be right. The direction of the charged particles has to be right. That can all be a bit hard to predict. Also, I live close to the 45 th parallel. Not a great spot to watch auroras from. We rarely get any this far south. Still, sometimes they predict when it is possible, and I go out and look to no avail. Last year there was a great aurora that lots of people who live where I do, saw. I didn’t, not for want of trying. My wife and I drove around to places where there was not a lot of light pollution, but no dice. The next morning we saw lots of posts from people who had seen it, even from places I would not think would be...
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Putting One Word in Front of the Other

  My wife is the poet, not me. I do wish sometimes that I was a bit more poetical. It would make my writing better, more artistic. Art is about evoking emotion, and nothing evokes emotion like poetry (except music, which is itself a kind of poetry). Through metaphor and symbology, poetry reaches not just the brain, but the heart, the soul. That being said, I must confess that poetry sometimes loses me. I get lost in the words and the imagery befuddles me. If I am really going to get it, I have to read it multiple times. I don’t think I am alone in this. “Getting” poetry requires an effort. But so does “getting” a painting or a sculpture. You have to let the work, work on you. The reason some people have trouble with Shakespeare is not just that he uses archaic language or refers to events that were only known in his day. The main reason people have problems with it is that his language is poetical, symbolic. It is meant to take the listener on an artistic journey, not just convey...
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My Buddy Richard

  In The Body by Stephen King (which became the movie Stand by Me ), King writes “I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12 . . . did you?” I first met my friend Richard when I heard a knock on our door. I was 8 years old. We had moved to Salem, Oregon a month or so before, and I had made a friend named Dick. Dick had told me about his other friend, Richard, but I had not yet met him. When I answered the door, Dick was there along with some other kid with strawberry jam stain on his sweatshirt (gross). This other kid was Richard. Dick asked if I wanted to go out and do something with them. I was in the middle of watching a Twilight Zone rerun and I declined. Richard and I were not impressed with each other. He was a jock (as much of a jock as you can be at 8 years old) and I was a nerd. Over the next few weeks, the three of us would occasionally do things together. Richard and I barely tolerated each other. We were just so different, and on top of that...
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The Road Not Taken

  For twenty years I was engaged in a project to remap our county. I redrew all 1200 Assessor’s maps from scratch, every lot, and every street. While there were many challenges in this project, probably the biggest one was the mapping of roads. Many of the county roads were created over a hundred years ago. This poses two challenges: 1. Roads tend to move over time. Drivers cut corners eventually moving the roadbed. Also, things like floods and landslides make the road as it existed impassable, so drivers cut new routes around the obstacle, often without any formal action to change the road. 2. Surveying techniques and equipment were not as sophisticated a hundred years ago as they are today. The original survey and formal order that went with it, established the legal location of the road, but it is not uncommon to find errors in the original surveys. In fact, some of the original legal descriptions of the roads are so poorly written that there is no way of determining the locatio...
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The Blessings of Being My Age

  I am finding myself on the older side of life, and it occurs to me that there are benefits to being this old: I got to grow up with the Beatles, the Doors, Joni Mitchell, The Rolling Stones, The Kinks, The Mamas and the Papas, Steppenwolf, Heart, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Chuck Mangione, Janice Joplin, Led Zeppelin, Boston, Cat Stevens, Jefferson Airplane/Starship, Herb Alpert, Carole King, The Eagles, and hundreds more. And no Autotune! The soundtrack of my childhood and early life was amazing. I witnessed the civil rights movement, the recognition that we need to treat all people like people. I witnessed the environmental movement, the recognition that we need to take care of our planet. I, along with every other person on the Earth with access to a television, watched men walk on the moon. Live. We watched it collectively in a brief moment of worldwide unity. There was also something communal about regularly scheduled TV broadcasts. Everyone could discuss what the...
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Cell Phones Ruin Everything

  The other day I was watching someone on YouTube react to the movie Die Hard . As John McLain was running around the building trying to get communication with the outside world. The reactor commented, “oh, this was before cell phones. I guess there wouldn’t be a movie if they had cell phones.” As a writer, there is something I have known for a while now. Cell phones ruin everything. If Romeo and Juliette had cell phones, neither of them would have died, but it would have been a much less moving story. I write fiction and sometimes write plays. If I have a plot device that is set on a communication or lack of communication issue, I must think about how to deal with that. Do I want to set it prior to 1990? Do I want to set it in a place that has no cell service? Or do I just change the story? Because cell phones ruin everything! This is generally not a problem when I am writing a science fiction story because hey, I can do whatever I want with technology in science fiction. It bec...
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