A speculative mind

  It is interesting what children take from a conversation. I remember when my family took a trip to see Crater Lake. I was young, maybe three or four. I did not know what Crater Lake was. It was not that far from where we lived, maybe a three-hour drive. But a three-hour drive to a three-year-old is a near eternity. Not to mention that it is hot in southern Oregon in the summertime and our old Oldsmobile station wagon did not have air conditioning. The car carried my parents and my three siblings and me. Not that I remember much of it, but I imagine the drive must have been tedious for all concerned. In fact, I don’t remember much of the trip at all at this point, but I do remember my father’s explanation of Crater Lake. He explained to me that the mountain had a hole in it and water went in the hole and made a lake. Those weren’t his exact words, but it was something like that. Anyway, what I got out of this explanation was that there was a hole in the mountain. As we drove thr...

  As a writer, I thrive under a deadline. Deadlines keep me motivated and focused. I like participating in NANOWRIMO (National Novel Writing Month), where I have one month to write a 50,000-word novel. It is a good challenge, and it gives me motivation to write every day. There have been other small projects where I have had a deadline, like the recent anthology Rainbows Aren’t Just for Leprechauns . I had a deadline to get the story in, and I made it. Without a deadline, without something pushing me forward, it is just too easy to not write. Procrastination is my nemesis. Give me a deadline. I am happy with a deadline. But there was one project I signed up for where the deadline proved downright terrifying . . . I joined a twenty-four-hour theater project. You can sign up as a writer, or an actor, or a director or tech crew. The idea is that each play goes from conception to performance in front of an audience in the course of 24 hours. I signed up as a writer. The writers com...

  The lodgepole pine is a common pine species in western North America. Native Americans used the tall straight trunk for teepee frames, hence the name lodgepole pine. Its scientific name is Pinus contorta . The genus name “Pinus” means it is a pine as you would expect. But the species name “contorta” might throw you. “Contorta” would indicate that it is contorted, twisted, or distorted. I live on the windy Oregon Coast and our version of Pinus contorta is called “shore pine.” Shore pines, as the name indicates, grow along the coast from northern California to Alaska. They are subject to winds that the more inland trees do not experience. Shore pines are gnarled and twisted, a far cry from the straight-growing lodgepole. Winter storms on the Oregon coast can be extreme with wind gusts sometimes blowing over 100 miles per hour. A visitor to our coast might naturally assume that the trees are twisted because of these strong winds coming off the ocean constantly blowing the trees i...

  Red Rising   by Pierce Brown  is one of those books that I heard mentioned by people, but it never quite made it to my radar. At some point I heard another person talk about it and that must have been critical mass for me to decide I should probably read it. Revolution can be messy, but a little rebellion now and then is a good thing.   In Red Rising , the population is divided into strict classes defined by colors. No one steps outside of their class boundary. Our hero, Darrow and his friends and family are “Reds,” the lowest class. They are little better than slaves working in the mines of Mars. They are lied to. They are horribly oppressed in ways that are at times hard to read. But you need to read about it. You need to see how bad it is, so it will be that much sweeter when he sets himself on a course to right the wrong. He will fight the good fight. Darrow is recruited into a revolutionary group. His body in modified so he can pass for a “Gold,” the elite...

  As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I spent a couple of years working for the US Forest Service doing Spotted owl surveys. I forgot that I kept a journal of some of those days. What follows is one of them:   This bird had been driving us crazy.   Four times we had heard this owl at night and four times we had come back the next day to try and find it, only to come up empty.   On each of the day visits we spent four hours looking.   We hooted and hooted and hooted.   On three of the visits we got a response, one answering hoot.   We would take an azimuth and hurry over to where the response had come from, only to hear silence for the rest of our visit.   So, this was our last chance, the last day of the calling season.   This time we brought an army.   The entire layout crew came with us, five extra people, seven in all.   Monica planned the strategy, like a general designing a plan of attack.   She designated a location wh...

  I have a confession to make. I have racism inside me. Also, sexism, greed, selfishness, lust. All the seven deadly sins and then some. Here is another secret: you have all of that too. It is human nature to look out for number one, to be selfish. It is human nature to be prejudice for your own tribe and against all other tribes. “Tribe” can be race, religion, social class, political party, country, school, etc. What makes a person moral is not the absence of these feelings, since we all have them. What makes a person moral is your ability to set them aside, to choose compassion over prejudice and greed. It is the same with courage. What makes a person brave is not the absence of fear, but doing the right thing in spite of being afraid. In the words of Captain Kirk in the Star Trek episode “A taste of Armageddon” when confronted with someone telling him that they are all killers, he replies, “All right. It’s instinctive, but the instinct can be fought. We’re human beings with th...

  It was one of those book club deals. Buy five books from this list and you can have your choice of one of these enticing prizes. The enticing prize I chose was The Story of Civilization by Will Durant  (The later books in the series were coauthored with his wife Ariel Durant).  This is no small thing. It is eleven volumes, eleven thick volumes. And I am not a fast reader, but I do have an interest in history. I knew about the series because my parents had the set, though at the time they bought them there were only seven or eight volumes in the series. I had seen the books on their bookshelf and not paid too much attention to them. When I briefly moved back in with my parents after college, I borrowed one of the books. I think it was the third book in the set called Caesar and Christ . I had been interested in all things Roman since watching I Claudius years before. The book was an interesting look at the history of the Roman Empire, and the history of Christianity, a...