SmokeSound

Portland is gray and green. I have no doubt that Oregonians will not agree with me so, as a desert-dry visitor born in Tacoma-- Who is he to talk?-- let me be quick to say that Portland is, at the same time, a most alluring city. The people of Portland have created bakery-warm neighborhoods, deliberately snuggling people together on small, old streets with short blocks, making a thousand neighborhood corners for small shops and wood-fired ovens where proximity means you necessarily engage the people around you. So I dare to say, at the same time, that the sky is gray, and that even a 21st century visitor can say that the waters above the firmament regularly rain down, and that the waters under the firmament tend to lie about before they ooze down and around and back again. And the green of Portland is not simply the green of its evergreen trees, but as much the green of moss sometimes rooted in concrete, taking nourishment from the juices of the rain g...

While at Elliza and Daniel and Elliot's home, the elder members of the triumvirate prepared a particularly fine meal for all of us who had come to greet Elliot.  It was a Mark Bittman recipe for "West African Peanut Soup with Chicken".  I found the recipe on-line, and have the link here: http://cooking.nytimes.com/recipes/1012581-west-african-peanut-soup-with-chicken The color is mainly provided by the sweet potatoes or yams and the peanuts and peanut butter, I think, together with the tomatoes and greens.  It smells, and tastes, delicious!  It is the kind of recipe that invites you to modify it as you will.  Mark Bittman usually nudges over toward the vegetable side of life, but my guess is that both ingredients and amounts can be adjusted.  I intend, for instance, to make it spicier, and to try various greens.  I do wonder whether I would like sweet potatoes or yams better.  Grocers sometimes add to the confusion by labeling sweet potatoe...

We have an almost brand-new grandchild; a girl, engineered by Elliza and Daniel.   We have just returned from Portland, Oregon, where we were summoned for a First Viewing. Her name is Elliot Chen Hubbard, and she is, quite obviously, the best new thing to happen in 2015.  She joins an impressive number of other grandchildren whom, as Garrison Kiellor might modestly have said, "are all above average". She is a teeny little tad, born six pounds-something, coming early and, if not reluctantly, then with difficulty, into the world.  But Elliza might have to tell you about that:  I was not there. As you can see, both Elliza and Elliot are doing quite well, thank you.  Daniel, on the other hand, is clearly showing signs of the stress of childbirth.  He has managed, by working extra shifts in advance, to be able to spend time at home with his daughter and wife, and will be able to do so for a significant time.  It is not that he has adjusted perfe...

Our backyard renovations have been slowed by our brutal winter weather--it often dropping dangerously into the low thirties--but, step-by-step, Jao has been testing each addition. He calls the rondavel, "his house".  Two of the stepping stones have already been worn thin by his uncertainty that they were adequate, but finally gained approval. I go outside.  Jao comes out to join me, and Mari calls from the back door, "Conrad, are you watching him?"  I always say, "Yes".  I think of it as a kind of antiphonal liturgy which, as you know, consists of Call and Response, not necessarily corresponding to ordinary reality.

Several years ago, we left Tucson and moved to Minneapolis/St. Paul. A few years ago, we returned to Tucson. I have tried ever to keep a smile on my face. Sometimes it is easier than at other times. May the forced smile be with you always!

Bruce Hagen, the Mayor of Superior, Wisconsin, thinks President Obama is a Muslim. First, President Obama is not a Muslim.  He says he isn't.  There is no reason to think the President is lying.  If someone were to ask me--and no one has ever done so--whether I am a Sikh, I would say no.  There is no reason to think I am. But what if President Obama were a Muslim, and what if I were a Sikh?  Would that be the end of the world?  I suspect the Foundations of the Universe would shift and groan a bit--not as much as real Muslims and Sikhs would--but, you know, even the universe must, now and then, have to express painful curiosity. Absurd nonsense!  I know how people like Bruce Hagen became Mayor of a city.  He was elected by people who are not entirely unlike Mr. Hagan.  I do not think Mr. Hagen could be re-elected, but even Superior Wisconsin, which is not necessarily superior to its harbor mate, Duluth, Minnesota, has its fair share...

The tree in our yard As big as the house Blew over, as tall sideways As it had been standing In what should have been The prime of its life Having drunk too easily From what the garden required Not properly rooted Living on the surface of life Old now myself--older far Than the mesquite blown down-- I have been recalling other trees, old trees at the end of their lives, which refused to fall, balanced Root and rock-set as they had lived "Careful!", we were told "Someday it will fall As we all do, but it is standing tall" So we walked with an eye On tall old trees with deep roots That etched themselves into our minds Surely gone now, except As we remember How to stand tall Deep-rooted in rock Conrad Royksund December 2015

It is essential, if you are a politician-- and who is not running for the presidency these days?-- to remember some basic rules.  For instance, Always compare the best of your religion with the worst of other religions! There!  You have one hurdle out of the way! You can ignore the worst of your own religion and the best of others. It is quite likely that none of the candidates for the presidency have ever heard of the Thirty Years War. It was a bloody mess between Christian factions, from 1618-1648. One way to think of it was that, at the time, there were two major factions in the Christian religion: the Shia and the Sunnis. There were smaller sects, too, of course, and it came to this: it seemed best that they kill each other in the name of God, and truth, and pastureland. If you need a comparison, you might think of Protestant and Catholic Muslims. (Before you correct me, let me plead that the names and details are not important, because death and ...

Our friends in Woodland, North Carolina, have rejected plans for a solar farm because they are afraid it will "suck up all the available sunlight", and that there will not be enough left over for plants and things. Here is a date to mark on your calendar:  March 15, 2016.  On that date, North Carolinians will vote for whom they think should be the next President of the United States, thereby sucking up all the intelligence from people in neighboring states, who will probably do something dumb. These things have unintended consequences, these foolish things which remind me of. . . .

There are almost 200 nations in the world, as we count them, right now. The 200 nations in the world have begun to recognize that the way we cut and slash and burn our economies is turning the world into a hothouse, which threatens all of us.  We have almost no idea how to survive in a hothouse. Almost 200 nations have just met in France to try to agree on what to do to about global warming.  In global politics, that is an a capella choral response. The GOP (Grande Olde Partie:  American Republican Party) wants nothing to do with global warming frivolity.  They are too busy stemming the movement of human beings from one place to another.  "Go back to where you came from!"  That sort of thing. Most of the warming seems to be due to our use of fossil fuels:  coal, oil, gas.  Most experts agree that we have to cut our use of those hydrocarbon fuels, and shift as much as we can to other energy sources. Here in southern Arizona, a significa...

Dear Friends and Delightful Visitors to Smokesound: I have tried but I cannot escape the fact that politicians and gunmen are dominating the news at the end of 2015. The former are laughing stock that make us cry, and the latter are tempting us to become as savage as they.   The political buffoons— and have you ever seen such a surplus of them?— want us to select a leader from among them, to lead us in baying at the moon. The six-shooting cowboy fantasies of our childhood  have become para-military executions in our classrooms, tempting us to respond in guerrilla combat. I am trying to find a way to let neither the buffoons nor the savages  shape the way I round the year’s end. I want neither to elect a lout or a fool to office, nor to line up on the other side of the classroom with my own attack weapon, or turn my house into an arsenal:  a potential killing field. Something they have in common: whether you go ...

With the kind of certainty that The Trump shows every time he insults someone--that is to say, whenever he talks--I am sure that you have been following the saga of the mesquite tree that tipped over in our backyard. The tree is gone, now, to its eternal reward, consigned to a monstrous wood chipper at a facility owned by the green-trucked people who own all the trash in the western world.  It will become truckloads of new "soil", tenderly cultivated by road graders and tanker trucks spraying instant decay. Since the fence around our back yard was destroyed, anyway, the yard has been enlarged into the desert, hillside lot, and for want of a purpose in life, I decided to build a rondavel.  A rondavel is a traditional African building with a thatched roof and a dung floor.  I am taking some artistic liberties with the details.  "Ron-DA-vel" is pronounced something like "rendezvous", with the accent on "DA".  It will have a conical roof. Th...

Another lunatic with rage and guns went to work in San Bernardino, California. Congress went to work, too.  It offered prayers and condolences for the victims.  Nothing else.  More lunatics. Does Congress, do the American people, have any idea why there is a Congress, or what it should do? Do they really think that prayers will make it rain, or stop raining, or provide health care for people?  Do they really think that all we need to do is send troops to Syria or San Bernardino?  They can't even say that plainly and directly:  they talk about "boots on the ground". Has anyone ever seen a wackier lineup of presidential wannabes than we are witnessing this year?  The pyramids are full of grain!  We should build a big, beautiful wall and Mexico will pay for it!  Round up the immigrants and send them back to Norway and Ireland and Italy and Germany and England and China and Japan and Guatemala:  let them walk across the land bridge ...

Apocalypse.   Ah-POCK-ah-lips.  From "to uncover".   To take the lid off.  To reveal what is there. Apocalyptic thinking is a significant part of Judeo-Christian-Islamic thought.  Jesus was apocalyptic:  he thought of himself as a prophet of the end times, when the lid would be blown off and a great struggle of the end times would happen.  No such luck. The book of Revelation is apocalyptic.  It is a hymn to the great battle between good and evil, soon to come.  No such luck. Islam is apocalyptic; not entirely, as Judaism and Christianity, also, are not entirely apocalyptic, but a significant strain of apocalytic thinking infests all three of the Semitic religions.  The Islamic State is apocalyptic.  The Messianic strain of Judaism was apocalyptic.  Christian Bible study groups love to ponder the Book of Revelation:  Armageddon, the Great Satan; all that. They are cousins, those religions!  They share gene...

Our grandson, Jao, has a plastic John Deere tractor, large enough to sit on, and powered by a pint-sized battery.  It can be driven, if driving can be understood to be, On/Off, Forward/Back, and Sidewinder if you have learned what steering is.  Jao hasn't. His dad brought the John Deere to our house because the walls of his house weren't actually designed for crash testing, and because the block walls around his yard have inadequate re-rod, and the neighbors have said something about concrete avalanches and their kids playing in their yards when the walls come down. Our yard is under construction, partly due to the mesquite tree that came crashing down during what Midwesterners like to call, "straight-line winds", which is something tornadic unwound and aimed at your mesquite tree. And I am building a rondavel up in the extended yard, so there were 2X4s, and saw horses, tarps and plywood scraps, and most enticingly, a sand pile left over from the masons who p...

"In our family, there was no clear line between religion and fly fishing.  We lived at the junction of great trout rivers in western Montana, and our father was a Presbyterian minister and a fly fisherman who tied his own flies and taught others.  He told us about Christ's disciples being fishermen, and we were left to assume, as my brother and I did, that all first-class fishermen on the Sea of Galilee were fly fishermen and that John, the favorite, was a dry-fly fisherman."                   --Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories As a callow youth, I spent five seasons as a halibut fisherman in Alaska. People assumed that I knew something about fishing. I didn't; not if that meant a wimpy, little pole with a reel and a monofilament nylon line with a calculated sinking rate. I spent secular hours one summer trying to learn to fly fish.  I bought good equipment, although the pole was too l...

Climate change is brutal, sparing none of us. Every plant, beast and beauty is huddling, cuddling, and scrunching. Maybe Greenland is warm.

I have been doing what everybody knows we should not do:  climbing up (even) a short A-frame ladder and standing on the top of it.  Of course it is stupid, but that is an argument that requires a certain amount of intelligence to be convincing. I am building a garden shed, or a house for Jao, or a shrine to Nefertiti, or a silo to store grain in during Ben Carson's Years of Plenty, or maybe just something to look at in the back yard. When the big mesquite tree blew down just behind our house, it took out the back fence. It tore up the edge of the flagstones. Our very generous landlord, who has a penchant for thinking large and acting decisively, said this was a chance to rethink what the backyard should be. The house stands on an acre lot-- that is .4 decare for some of you-- so the yard is just the fenced-in area. The fence is to keep out javelinas-- that is peccaries for some of you-- and perhaps a snake or two. Thus,  a garden shed is t...

It happened without intention that I came to live in Minnesota for ten years.  After three decades in Iowa--the Hawkeye State, or better, Baja Minnesota-- it was, winter weather aside, a delightful experience to live in the Twin Cities. Now we are back in Tucson, again and, truth be told, I really miss Michele Bachmann. I know that nearly everything she says can be accessed on-line, but that is like saying that Mt. Vesuvius has erupted again: it is not next door!  It is half a world away. Our Belle, Michele, lives in some other world, you know. The people who have been trying to contact alien intelligence have been looking in the wrong place:  it is in Minnesota. I am almost sorry to say it that way. Minnesota is, for the most part, an eminently sensible place, but they did elect Michele to office, and they should have to admit it. Our Belle has been pondering the violence in the Middle East, and she knows the wars, and rumors of wars, and outb...

I want to tell you how close our family came to electing one of us to the Presidency or, at least, to becoming a Republican nominee. It is necessary to begin the sad story of our near-greatness long after we began to show first signs of near-sightedness. Recently, the Honorable Surgeon Dr. Ben Carson, in what might have been a sub-conscious--or, at least, sub-historical--attempt to establish his street cred, told how near he came to stabbing one of his buddies when they were just kids fooling around with murderous impulses. Dr. Carson was no wimpy, nerdy, goody-goody kid, you know! He came from the streets, and by virtue of his own commanding urge to become President of the United States, did not allow his murderous impulses to get loose. Somebody in the newspaper business--you know, those rotten purveyors of occasional fact and high drama, looked into the matter of Dr. Carson's story. Unfortunately, it appears that only Dr. Carson remembers anything about...

Maybe Leo Durocher did not exactly say that "Nice guys finish last!"  Maybe he only said that nice guys finish seventh.  He did not believe that being a nice guy necessarily won pennants. Ben Carson is a nice guy.  Everybody says so.  He doesn't get ruffled.  Excited.  Bothered.  And he is leading the race for the GOP nomination from Iowa. Dr. Carson, a surgeon, does have some unusual ideas.  For instance, he thinks that, compared to being a brain surgeon, being President of the United States is something easy to do.  An amateur at the job--that is to say, someone with no political experience--could be President, but not a brain surgeon.  He is at least half-right about that.  And he is at least half-wrong about that. Almost all Presidents have had significant political experience.   Grover Cleveland might be the best example of one who did not, although he was the Mayor of Buffalo, New York, for less than a year. ...

"Hallo, Olav!  Is that you? Are you here in town, too?"      [Some discourse is entirely rhetorical;        not intended to convey information.] I can take off my shirt and tear it, and so make a ripping razzly noise, and the people will say, "Look at him tear his shirt."                               --Carl Sandburg      [We, the people, in order to form       a more pedestrian union.] "Is ever'body in Akron bein'-hayve theirse'f this mornin'?"        [Waitress to a Policeman       who stopped in for coffee.]

"What do you do?", people ask, meaning, "What can old turkeys like you do?". We forage for food, of course. Teresa's Mosaic Cafe is a favorite spot, as is Wildflower Café. Personally, I love Mariscos Chihuahua, and Mari likes The Wretched Onion because they have large pancakes, but I refuse to go there:  principles, you know. Mari likes to sew, and takes classes. She especially like to make quilted things, and I do not like to boast, but I am something of a specialist in thinking about things I really ought to do. Jao--that is not Jao: even a three-year-old deserves his modesty, although he continues to misplace it--is learning to . . . to. . . .   He is being potty trained. I have given a lot of thought to what grandparents can do to help a three-year-old become a decent human being when he grows up; you know, what I really ought to do. I would like for Jao to remember, someday, that we were the ones who taught him how...

The earth formed about four-and-a-half billion years ago.   That is to say, about ten billion years after the Big Bang, and about four-and-a-half billion years before The Creation. At first, earth was a very cold place, ducking its head to avoid a hailstorm of meteorites, to no avail, and later on earth became so hot, under the bombardment, that it might have been molten. Even so, life formed not long after, as the age of the universe is measured.  Life seems to be something the universe does rather easily.  That we don't know exactly how it happened does not mean that the universe is not good at doing it. * * *  Yesterday, some dear friends visited us.  Gene and I went to college together, and then to a theological seminary.  When our families were new, we lived in the Bay area of California, and saw each other regularly.  With rare exception, we have not seen each other for about half a century. Gene said, when he first phoned, that he ha...

There is a kind of shadow reality in Santa Fe, New Mexico. There is what one sees, if not really on the surface, then what we have been trained to see, something like the building here:  "Pueblo architecture!", we say.  "New Mexico!  I recognize it!" But it is not even half what we see:  it is what is shadowed.  And what is shadowed is . . . yeah . . . how deep are those shadows? Santa Fe is a kind of Fritz Scholder Indian.  It is what we see, and what is shadowed.  It is like saying that Santa Fe was founded in 1610.  "La Villa Real de las Santa Fe de San Franciso de Asis":  (the Royal Town of the Holy Faith of St. Francis of Assisi).  Except that there had been people living there-- right there! --perhaps already for seven hundred years.  You can see them clearly in the shadows. Mari and I had lunch in The Alley Cantina--formerly, El Patio, in nearby Taos, and were told that one of the kitchen walls entitled it to be ...

Let us now tell Tales of the Pioneers, and Trudging to School Through Snowdrifts; maybe even How the Nuns Used to Rap our Nuckles as a Way to Gain a Respect for Education and the Catechism and Celibacy. I cannot do those things.  Born in western Washington State, I can remember a winter when it snowed nearly a foot, and I never met a nun until I was old enough to be a grown man, although not that. I do remember that--our family being larger than our house and our resources--a number of us slept in what was a hen house; clean, with a single-board wall, and a miserably ineffective wood-burning stove for the most brittle winter nights.  Or only for bedtime.  Long before morning, the stove was cold, too. But all of that is just background scenery for saying that there was a stack of Zane Grey books in the chicken coop.  Zane Grey by flashlight.  Zane Grey and the Riders of the Purple Sage.  Under the Tonto Rim.  Valley of Wild Horses.  Tall, ta...

Republican and Democrats DO agree and disagree together about something! Donald Trump insists that the Republican debates should not be more than two hours long.  And Hillary Clinton does not want more than six debates. See?   The frontrunners in both parties are not in favor of giving their competitors time to catch up. (I do not call him, "The Donald") so I shall say The Trump wants all the debates to begin with, and to end with, canned statements from the candidates:  questions and answers can be inserted in the middle, when people get tired of listening, anyway.  (I do not call her, "The Hillary") so I shall say that The Other Clinton knows that if there are a lot of debates, people will get tired of hearing about just about everything, so don't debate too much.  Given too much time, even Lincoln Chafee might begin to look better:  Why take the chance? If you are leading halfway through the half-marathon, why agree to extend the race to mara...

You know how hard it is for me to be partisan (you may take that as monumental unawareness), but please let me be partisan for a moment! We listened to the Democratic debate last night, and even though Joe Biden was not there-- which would have made it a lot more fun-- it was almost like listening to grown-ups. At least three of the debaters displayed thoughtfulness and knowledge of the issues. There were, to be sure, a couple of guys who seriously thought they were ready for the big time, but who are never going to make it. Anderson Cooper did his best to irritate them where it really hurt, but they were all sensible. It is about jobs, education, health care, wars and rumors of wars, inevitable wars and hopeless wars, and immigration and racism and gender equality, our energy use and abuse, and an equitable economic system for sharing the wealth we have as a nation. And that is what they talked about. We may have a chance.

Two score and seven years ago-- you may take that to be 47 years ago-- I sat in a library carrel in the middle of the night, parceling and piecing my dissertation together, when I read something sane to keep my head while all those about me were losing theirs. I memorized it without even intending to: And I will take off my shirt and tear it, and make a razzly-dazzly noise, and the people will look at me and say, that man is tearing his shirt. It had been cautiously attributed to Carl Sandburg, and three things seemed to make that plausible: "the people", "razzly-dazzly", and the pedestrian response to an impetuous thing to do. I might have written more than one chapter to an undying dissertation while I tried to track down the source of that quote.  In addition to reading enough Carl Sandburg to raise me well above the academic trough in which I had been wallowing, I thumbed a hundred volumes in which the people tore their pedestrian shir...