Blessings On The Roof

It flat poured all night long, and into the morning. We have a metal roof here at the cabin and it sounded like the saints were throwing a party while God was out of town. Dave agreed to spend the day having me read my novel to him. Six hours in, I was getting hoarse, but carried on, emboldened by the fact he was still conscious. It rained on. We had beers.

But it was getting stuffy in the cabin, and we weren't either of us designed to sit for hours. We went for a walk. Put our rain gear on, of course, but the drips by this time were all coming from the bodacious canopy of drenched fir trees. It got dark. We came back. Rustled up some beer and artichoke dip and found crackers in the cupboard ("Best By 2012"). Mountain food!

And no sooner had we sat down than someone sliced up a fat wedge of weather and slapped us upside the windows with it. 100-foot-tall trees squinted down at us and lined us up in their sights. Things was flying. Miss Gulch and her bicycle, diced to pieces, sailed past in a rapidly disintegrating swarm. Our eyebrows shot up to our hairlines and stayed there. And we both felt it at the same time: the irresistible urge to check the weather app. What was going to happen? Was it going to rain forever? Was there going to be a break? These were all knowable items.

In that somebody, somewhere knew them.

Well, it felt irresistible, but it wasn't. Because there was no weather app. Our phones lay inert on the counter, plugged in to maintain power, because they lose power so fast here: straining and searching for the mothership, a biddable satellite, their little tentacles dangling for a connection. There isn't one. Rain pounded the place, and we had to just let it, and assume it knew what it was doing. We couldn't do a thing about it.

On an ordinary day, when we could get a weather app and see what's coming, we kind of thought we could do something; we could avoid ambush; we could strategize. Aha, we would think. You thought we'd be surprised by this shower coming in nineteen minutes, but we aren't. We saw you coming. You think you're so smart, Weather. Our trouser pockets have radar right in them.

Tell you what else we don't know, here. We don't know if anyone commented on my blog. We don't know if someone's trying to get hold of us. We're not entirely sure what day of the week it is. We've got a social obligation tomorrow, unless it's the day after, or unless we already missed it. Somebody with more power than he earned probably did something massively stupid today, again, and we don't know what it was. We don't know the name of the filmmaker guy who's married to Frances McDormand. We do know we love Frances McDormand. We do know how many beers we have left in the fridge. We do know to wear rain gear when we go out.

It takes a few days to get over not knowing. It takes just that long to go back in time, say, twenty-five years, when we made idle talk and rummaged in our own brains for bits of missing trivia, instead of tipping it out of our phones, where our species' collective memory is now stored. It wouldn't take more than a good gust of unpredicted wind on a loose-footed Douglas fir tree to send us back to the nineteenth century, when, inexplicably, people seemed to navigate life just fine.

Here's what I know. I know that the water here is sweet, and that I can walk a long, long way. I know my baby loves me. I know that if I trip and fall on a long, long walk, someone will probably help me out. I know that if there's no one to help me out and I die in the woods, it's all the same to the woods. And if it's all the same to the woods, it's okay by me.

Calm And Collected

I've always thought it would be cool to collect something. Collectors have fun everywhere they go. They'll pop into junk stores looking for salt cellars, or old toys, or movie posters. Their houses are cluttered with pigs, or frogs, or owls. Sometimes people give you stuff they're sure you're collecting, which is why I have a number of lizards that they mistook for salamanders. I do like salamanders, but I don't collect them.

I don't collect anything. If I could collect something, it would be Birds I Have Seen. I would have my own Life List Of Birds. Unfortunately, I can assemble a Life List about as well as I can build a house with Scotch tape and toilet paper. I don't have what it takes. I can't remember the field marks of a bird for as long as it takes to put down the binoculars and check the field guide. Later I can't remember having seen it at all.

So when I'm out birding with people whose brains are in working condition, sometimes they'll point out some marvelous feathered item and I get all excited, and they say "Is that a life bird for you?"

How the hell should I know? The other day I got my new debit card in the mail and had the opportunity to change the default PIN to one I'd be more likely to remember, so I did. Next time I used the card, I punched in the old number, then my address, my birthday, and my anniversary, and the machine ate my card. It wouldn't give it back until  I described its field marks. I was screwed.

I don't recognize my neighbors if they're not standing under their house numbers. I look up "oligarchy" at least three times a week. I've played piano for 55 years and have no repertoire. I still hold my cell phone up to my ear and wait for the dial tone.

I had to buy a new camera because last week I put it on a little patch of moss for a second and thought "Don't forget you left this here" and that was that, and then it rained.

We got a dozen gulls on this coast and they're peas in a pod. I'm not going to be sure I've seen a life bird unless it's threatening me and looks like a Victorian lady's hat.

That's why it was so cool that I just saw a life bird all by myself, and I knew it. I didn't know what it WAS; I had to look it up. But I knew I'd never seen it. It was a woodpecker. But not a hairy, or a downy, or a pileated, or a red-bellied (because it has a red head: yeah, screw you, new birder), or a black-backed, or an acorn. Them I has seed. This one was different. I was crowing, as it were, about my life bird later.

"What was it?" my friends asked.

Well, shit, you had to go and ask. I'd just looked it up, and now I can't remember what it was called. Let's see. I know it had a white head.

So I looked it up again.

It was a White-Headed Woodpecker. And possibly an Oligarch.

Paul Bunyan Moves In

It happens all the time. I'm bopping along the sidewalk when I come upon some gigantic building that I could swear was not there a day earlier. In reality it had probably been three or four weeks since the last time I was on that street, but it doesn't take long to put up a building these days. And there's a lot of building going on.

It's startling, though. It's like walking into your kitchen in the morning and Paul Bunyan is sitting at the counter eating a plate of Eggs Benedict. He wipes his mouth and apologizes briefly for getting a grease spot on the ceiling and then tucks in again. "Where did you come from?" I'll ask, and he'll politely finish chewing while holding up a finger, swallow, and say "I live here." Well then.

A lot of people are moving into Portland. There's a rumor we still have water. And we've got pretty good planning here so there's an urban growth boundary and an emphasis on infill. We don't want to sprawl out into the countryside; we want to jam in together and live side by each like a basket of puppies. I approve of this in general, but in my neighborhood, it isn't working that way. What's happening is a little old house is bought, torn down, and replaced by a big new house. There might be even fewer people living in the new house than lived in the old. They pay way more taxes, but that's about the only social benefit.

The thing that troubles me a little is I can never remember what the big house replaced. Even if I walked down that street once a week. Was  it the little blue house with the narrow porch and the tortoiseshell kitty? No, that's one street over. Was it the white job with the red shutters and the Trans-Am out front? No?

The other day I was a little farther afield and came upon a four-story mixed-use retail and residential building that took up an entire block. There was a huge grocery store in the next block. Both brand-new. I was disoriented and confused. Where was I? I finally located the street signs and remembered it had been a vacant lot with a cyclone fence around it for, like, four years, and before that there was a donut shop there. Unless that was a few blocks down.

I was once researching the old D.C. jail for a novel, and found that although it took up at least a block in Washington, D.C., and was red brick, and had a rotunda, and was generally a remarkable edifice, historians were no longer sure exactly where it was. Even though it had only been torn down in the 1980s. No one could remember.

This is what happens to us. We think the world began when we were born, and we bury the past as fast as we can. People think whatever smattering of birds they see now is probably birds enough, with no notion that their parents grew up under a riot of wings and birdsong, and their great-grandparents saw the sky darken with a billion passenger pigeons. We don't miss the passenger pigeons. We never saw one to miss. Joni Mitchell sang you don't know what you've got till it's gone, but it's worse than that. Once it's gone we forget all about it.

In a few years, children will grow up filing "rhinoceros" in a mental cabinet with "stegosaurus" and not feel any loss at all.

It's The Annual Begathon! I Mean Birdathon!

Hazel lives at Portland Audubon.

If anyone loiters at this site for long enough, they might begin to think they know me. They might, for instance, assert with confidence that I am a birder, because I write affectionately about birds. Who wouldn't want to look at birds? Given the knowledge that there are little fluffy dinosaurs flapping around outside in colored suits, who the heck would rather stay inside and watch TV? Well. Not me. So does that make me a birder? Do you actually think I am one of those people wearing a dopey nylon hat with my pants tucked into my socks driving thirty miles per hour under the speed limit with my head cranked out the window?

You bet I am.

That doesn't make me a good birder. Those people are freaky. They can reel off the names of any dot in the sky you care to point at and a bunch you can't even see, too. I, on the other hand, have spent the last six months looking at finches at a feeder six feet away and trying to decide if they're House Finches or Purple Finches. I've consulted guides. I've looked it up on the internet. I still don't know.

Real birders have something called a Life List. They maintain a list of all the birds they've ever identified and they get super excited when they get a new one, called a Life Bird, or Lifer, for short.

I've seen the exact same Life Bird dozens of times.

So does Aristophanes.

This is the problem. I have a memory in the same sense that I have a penis. That is, I don't have one. It's a serious issue. If I've met you before, I don't remember you. I don't care if we spent hours talking to each other at a party. I've never seen you before. If I do remember your face, I'll ask you how your family's doing, even if we'd spent hours talking about how their deaths in a tragic tightrope accident had left you with a fear of both heights and string and no sense of closure, and it was in the newspaper for weeks. I've learned five thousand classical pieces on the piano and I can't conjure up a single one to play for you.

I do have a gift for metaphor and hyperbole that serves me well as a writer. Both require a very loose rein on the brain cells so they can wander around and bump into each other in a serendipitous fashion, and my brain cells are whizzing all over the place because there are absolutely no facts or faces or useful data in there to impede them.

So when Sarah Swanson and Max Smith (who co-wrote the wonderful book "Must-See Birds Of The Pacific Northwest") invite me every year to join their Birdathon Team (The Murre The Merrier), it is not because I have birding skills. Best I can manage is to spot movement in the trees and point and go eee eee eee hoo hoo hoo and hope a knowledgeable person can home in on it before I get propositioned by a chimpanzee.

Really, the only reason to invite me into a birding van is for my entertainment value, my homemade

Boo Boo lives at our house.

cookies, and the number of people I can badger to chip in a few bucks to sponsor me. The money goes to the Portland Audubon Society to further their conservation work, right here under the watchful eyes, churning wings, and trailing legs of the Pacific Flyway.

Nobody will poop on you if you don't contribute, but you might get winked at by a sandhill crane. Can't beat that, loves.

If you're badgerable, you can sponsor me by chipping in a few bucks right here. If you like to live dangerously, you could pledge a certain amount of money per bird found. Last year, we scored 120!

The Diaryer

This is the first day of my blog, unless you count the ones I spent procrastinating. I did a little reconnaissance on the web, and it turns out the web had room for one more blog, so I thought: might as well be this one. There's really only one downside to this venture, and that is the fact that I will have to use the word "blogger" from time to time, which, as has been pointed out previously by others, is an unhandsome word. I scouted about for a replacement, but all I could come up with was "diaryer", which has problems of its own.

Another potential drawback is that this might take some time. But I thought I could reallocate some of the time I devote to staring into space, and stare at an empty screen instead, and it might be just as satisfying. We just had ourselves an unusual white Christmas here, and I had nowhere I needed to go, so I spent some of it gazing at the snow. There were little birdie feetprints in it--that never fails to charm--and there were also a few mystery holes, with steam wafting out, left by the guest dogs we hosted for the last few days. I'm hoping, as I stare at the empty screen, I can produce more feetprints than steaming holes.

I plan to do a little observing, and a little poking around in my memory, which I can count on to be unreliable. It'll be interesting to see what-all is in there, since I suspect any resemblance to reality is likely to be thin. I always find life interesting, but then again--as people tell me when they're feeling charitable--I'm easily amused. Just the other day, a sunbeam came in and illuminated a particularly valiant dust bunny charging out from under my bed, and when I went to fetch it, I noticed: huh. There's enough material here to make an actual bunny. So I spent the next ten minutes trying to prod lint into little ears and tails. The results didn't really meet my artistic standards, but at least I wasn't wasting time. At any rate, if my life isn't interesting, I have no compunction about making stuff up. That's already what I do with my past. I don't know if my memories correspond to actual events, or if I've slabbed them together out of bits of photographs and fancies and stories from the grownups. But as I recall it, my childhood, fictional though it may be, was pretty grand. The present is fogging over as fast as it rolls out. I can get two or three readings out of a mystery novel before I begin to suspect whodunit. I won't remember what you just told me, and I'm not all that sure how to navigate to the end of my own sentences. Sometimes, when I finally beach myself on my own point, I'm as surprised as anyone. What won't I think of next? So inasmuch as I've gotten myself this far without an operating memory, I think the odds are good that I can make up my future too. Maybe that's what I'm doing here.