I Can't Count That High

Alpenglow's Child

Thanksgiving, 2006, and my wife, son & I sit around our dining room table expressing how satiated we are, transparently boasting a little over how much we managed to consume. This, on what is already being called 'Bloody Thursday', in the media: the most deaths owing to sectarian violence in Iraq in any given day since the American invasion. But we are continents and seas removed, detached, and safe. We do not have to concern ourselves. More wine is poured, and we swirl it around in the Riedel glasses, examining its legs. The wine is excellent, a bottle of Paraduxx. A red, like the streets of Baghdad appear in thumbnail photos at Reuters, on the internet. I read about a car gaily decorated for a wedding party, in flames, with dozens of the guests cut to shreds by flying metal and debris. There is a visceral disconnect between my Thanksgiving celebration and the horror flooding the streets and villages of Iraq. Every passing day brings more of these bleak images, until I find myself asking how can there be any normalcy remaining, what can be left intact? How can these people bring themselves to go into the streets? How are they managing to acquire the basic necessities? We are already talking about how soon before we can manage to have some dessert, while we watch a comedy on the entertainment system in our living room. The gas fireplace keeps the room toasty, and we are insulated from the blustery, driving rains outdoors. No one wants to think about the terrible scenes coming from this distant country rife with slaughter, morgues overflowing, atrocities mounting unto the sky. But aren't we responsible? Aren't we? We elected this administration. We failed to take issue with a stolen presidential election. We did not prevent an illegal and criminal occupation and invasion, and the subsequent deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents. Our leaders are representatives of us, and if they carry this out, then it is as if it were done by the hand and by the seal of each of its citizens. Bloody Thursday in Iraq is Thanksgiving in Tacoma, Washington. Hundreds of grotesque deaths, twice as many grievous injuries, and unimaginable mental trauma. We are ultimately responsible. We will pay for this, in some fashion. Call it what you will, but I believe it to be inevitable. We will not get away with turning a blind-eye. We will need to answer. Someone always does.

The Moving Wall

Much like this self-portrait, shot while standing on a hewn footbridge deep in the Brothers Wilderness, the thoughts and reflections of the Bittermonk are scant and insubstantial shadows thrown along one man's path. Projections, reflections, illusions, delusions, all placed into the blender of the Ten Thousand Directions, with a few white clouds tossed in to add bubbles!

I have a friend who posts here regularly, 'SunnyGoddess', and I admired the simple style of this Blog design, and decided to begin again, with a journal/log/blog here. This is not to be mistaken for 'forthcoming wisdom', or even insight, for that matter. This virtual pseudo-personna hitching post will be a place where I may discuss my passion for photography, the camera obscura, and attempt to describe the peaks & valleys of this wanderer's wayward existence. If you feel up to the hike, you are welcome to join me...

NOVEMBER 4th

Rain and high winds keep the bittermonk off the mountain trails. A technological 'shut-in', a hi-tech latch key kid today, with one CPU burning archival disks filled with images from other hikes, the other CPU affixed to this Blog.
"It may not be popular with the public — it doesn't matter in the sense that we have to continue the mission and do what we think is right." These are the scurrilous, scandalous, and arrogant words of V.P. Dick Cheney, interviewed on MSNBC yesterday. What sheer arrogance, dismissing the will of the people. "It doesn't matter"? May these words return to haunt the likes of Darth Cheney, Madman Imperious. We DO have an election coming in just three days. Let us see which way the tide turns, you arrogant imperialist...

The most recent hike the bittermonk enjoyed was on Monday of last week. I took our terrier, Wiley, along, and he proved good company. I often return to places visited before, because I find the occasions are always different, varying with the weather and other seasonal considerations. On this hike, we had to leave our car at the locked gate where FS Road ( North Skokomish region) #23 meets the road to Pine Lake, and walk about a mile and a half to the trailhead. This added extra effort and subtracted from our clock at the same time, but this proved not to be a problem. The hike into Pine Lake follows an old roadbed, and is very easy going, with no appreciable elevation gain. It is also very mundane, with no views from the brushy undergrowth overhanging the trail. It is a little less than 3 miles on the trail, which ends at a point just above the lake itself.

Pine Lake is dying, and well into the process of devolution and eutrophication. There are no more Bull Trout in the lake, only salamanders emitting bubbles and rising up and sinking down in lazy spirals to the cracked mosaic lakebed of mud. Pine Lake once hosted trout, but overuse and E-coli infiltration from human waste led to the die-off of the fish, and resulted in the former roadbed being closed.

Wiley and I chose a bright, cold morning, where night temperatures had dropped to the teens, and hard frost still clung to all the shady areas. There were shoreline stretches of frost so thick it resembled snow at a distance, and thin ice spread out from the lake edge. The water was still, and having been replenished from three or four days of recent, hard rains, looked stunningly clear, pure even, and presented a perfect mirror for the surrounding old growth of Cathedral Mountain. The lake is small, and we were able to completely circumnavigate it within 30 minutes, with my stopping many times to take photos, and Wiley bounding around trying to catch some waterfowl wisely positioned out in the center of the water. The lake, which I've visited either 3 or 4 times, never looked quite so lovely. I took many photos, and crunched around the ice. The 8-10 shortbodied, very fast ducks kept flying by, in a tight group, and when they neared me, they would turn and their wings make a sound, a chord which hung in the air.

On the return hike, I photographed many mushrooms which had erupted since the rain, and arriving back where the trailhead meets the access road, I noticed a chapter of a book which had been torn out, and left by a circle of campfire stones, probably used as firestarter. I bent closely and looked, out of curiousity, at the title of the book, which I could just make out through a thick layer of frost crystals: 'Jewels of the Sun'. It immediately struck me that the ducks which I had enjoyed as they flew back and forth the lake's length, embodied this metaphor. The bittermonk offers this spontaneous poem, penned on that walk:

PINE LAKE, Skokomish Watershed

mushrooms
emerge from light duff
to be frozen stiff,
frost crystals bow the bear grass

ice heaves brilliance
etches the lake's margins
and this handful of birds
which fly like a sewn constellation

turn on instinct
one-cell one-moment
inhabiting the clear surface
of a full-second's length
skimming over the hoary frost
and thin ice

their wings
reverberate and pluck the air
like a single guitar string
lost in Cathedral Mountain's
ability to absorb small things

a single humming bowstring
the air breaking
along the brink of
the boomerang
the bull-roarer awakening
cold forest lions

reading the words
through thick frost crystals
forming a fuzzy overlay
' Jewels of the Sun '
I close my eyes
to let the words sink in


_________________________
Veteran's Day, 2006
The Moving Wall
* a traveling exhibit on display in Auburn, WA

if you're anything like me you probably just assumed 'The Moving Wall' refers to the fact that this facsimile of the famous memorial | monument to fallen Vietnam Veterans in Washington, D.C. is mobile, and tours around the country? After visiting the Moving Wall on Veteran's Day in Auburn, where they had it exhibited in the town park,
I'm here to tell you the 'moving' part is what happens to some who visit it's panels.

You are struck by how there are so many names, and even though there may be several you would like to find, it is clear you could never find them without some guidance. Two pleasant individuals were set up with their laptops and available to provide 'locator' data. I gave them each one name, and after narrowing down the middle-name options to confirm, handed me slips of paper with the panel and line information. It was then very easy to find the names.


Douglas Gene Foster. Doug and I graduated the same year from the same school in the same small town, and we rode the same bus everyday home from school. Doug lived across Highway 101 from the Huling's Shingle Mill. His Dad worked in the mill back in the fifties and sixties when Cedar was plentiful, and this type of mill sprouted around the region. My Dad worked there as well, as one of the guys who packed the shingles into bundles, four bundles equalling a square. They called these guys 'shingleweavers'. They didn't make a lot of money.

I had a few sleepovers at Doug's house, usually in the summer. We would take mats and sleeping bags and 'sleep' outdoors, but actually stay up most of the night running around acting goofy and causing trouble. We liked to ride the chain conveyors where they moved along under the mill. We snuck into the fireroom where one-eyed Frank Amsdill stuck cedar bolt waste wood with his pickeroon, and slid them across the shiney and slippery galvanized metal sheeting which lined the entire area around the steam boiler fireholes. We slipped into the cedar kiln right after it was cracked open and still steaming warm with air like liquid cedar.

Doug and I were kids whose parents were dirt-poor. Doug had curly hair, and was a low-C, D+ student. He was one of those guys who you could see every morning before the bell rang across the street from Forks Quillayute Union High School, standing near Thomas' grocery warehouse, smoking. Doug joined the Marines after he graduated in the Class of '65. I joined the Navy in 1966. We both went to Vietnam, but Doug's name ended up on this wall, and mine did not. This encapsulates the full meaning of the term ' Fate ' . I found Doug's name, I ran my finger along it. I thought of what I had read about how he died. His platoon was on point in an operation to provide relief to another unit that was just being hammered. They got hammered as well.

Doug was killed by small arms fire, but not before he had acted gallantly in the face of heavy combat. He received a Silver Star for his brave actions. This is how Doug Gene Foster went out. Outside of his immediate family, it is sad to think how few people on the face of the Earth would ever even know to think about this death, his death, or so many like it. This is how the Wall begins to move you.

The second name I held in my hand before the moving wall: Gregory J. Welch. Greg was also a Marine. When I first met him, I was a 3rd Class Petty Officer in charge of the Resuscitation & Debridement Team for Surgical Team Alfa, a group embarked aboard the LPH class of helicopter aircraft carriers. These ships also carried a contingent of around 2,000 Marines, and they would launch missions from the ship with 20 or 30 CH-46 twin-rotor helicopters
going in waves, carrying up to 40 grunts each. Then, Huey's would return with the medevaced wounded or K.I.A.'s.

When we weren't receiving medevacs, we were operating a Hospital Ward, and Marine's Sick Call everyday of the week. My area was also the Sick Call center, and I did a lot of what might equate to today's 'Physician Assistant' type of work, in close harmony with the Doctor to whom I answered. In this case, I was most fortunate to know a Dr. Robert Battmer, whom I shall never forget.

In any event, this is how I first met Greg. Greg had decubitus ulcers, or 'jungle rot', from infected insect bites covering his arms and legs. He required cleanings with hydrogen peroxide and constant debridement of necrotic tissue three times a day, and during these treatments we got to know one another. We figured out quickly that we both had something in common: we hated the war in Vietnam, and were adamantly opposed to American intervention there. We believed it was the wrong choice.

When I got to know Greg a little, he began to open up and talk to me, and he told me how he had been a Staff Sgt., but had been reduced in rank to E-1, the same rank as a private coming out of basic training. The Marine Corps was unhappy with Greg, because here late in his second tour of 'Nam ( he volunteered ) , he realized he could not continue to kill the Vietnamese. He stopped killing, and he refused to kill. The Corps was preparing to send him back to the states to face a major court martial for refusing direct orders, insubordination, dereliction of duty, and you name it. However, ' Fate ' intervened again, and this time I bore complicity in the outcome.

Because Greg and I became friends, I was providing him the very best in treatment for his tropical ulcers, and even increased the number of treatments to hasten the process along. Subsequently, his 'unit' was sent out on another operation, and Greg was considered healed enough to return to combat.

I happened to be working down in the morgue on the fantail of the ship that day, and so it was I unzipped a body bag to perform graves registration work, and I went into a near catatonic shock when I saw my friend Greg's face staring up at me. I had seen a lot of K.I.A.'s and other cadavers, but I didn't know any of them really, and none had been my close friend. But this one was, and I pretty much achieved 'snap status'. I wandered out of the morgue, unable to continue. I wandered around the ship, which was big enough to get lost in, lost, for several days. I had keys to some hospital storage compartments way down below the waterline. The air was musty, smelled like molded linen, and stacked ceiling to floor with outdated medical supplies, stuff left over from WWII. I sat in these spaces for days, leaving only to go past the canteen, grab a can of beans or some crackers. I listened to the palpable surface of the water caress the metal hull and press against the bulkheads of the ship. Everyone knew what had happened, and just left me alone.

A few days later I overheard the 'grapevine' account of how he had died. He was intentionally set-up by his own
squad, who basically had received instructions to kill him. The feeling was, any Marine who would no longer kill was betraying his fellow Marines; he could not be expected to "have their backs", thus posed a threat to their own survival. This is how they rationalized it. Greg was alone in a foxhole, and from what I was told, one of these squad members crawled to the hole and as he came over the berm simply shot Greg at close quarters. Greg Welch was one of many murders that take place where justice has been overtaken and perverted by the horrors of war.

So here I am, a blurry reflection behind Greg's highlighted inscription. And I am left to think, what if my name were on this wall? My son Jesse, who is now 23, would never have been born. My wife in all likelihood would not have settled here, where we are, and operated her cafe and bakery these past 20 years. So many things would have changed, slightly, by excerpting me from the short-term future. And so, multiply...no, amplify the 58,000+ names on this memorial, the fifty-eight thousand futures which were changed, and the outcome is staggering. The ripples through this pond, the waves, more like tsunami upon tsunami. It is incomprehensible. It is the basis of what, in P.T.S.D., is termed 'survivor's guilt'.

I have it. I contracted this serving my country who, poorly led and represented, became engaged in an undeclared conflict, an illegal invasion and attempt at occupation. Currently I am embroiled with the V.A., who have denied my claim for benefits. They want me to 'prove' I experienced something traumatic during my two tours in Vietnam. I submit to you, the moment I unzipped that body bag and saw my friend, I think that counts. What about you?

So all kinds of people come to the Moving Wall. Kids go there, and touch the names. Elderly people come, and it seems especially poignant to observe. I saw three teenaged boys putting currency in a donation box for the exhibit. I saw couples distributing roses. I watched everyone stop and put a hand on the wall in unison. I saw a lot of reverence and respect for these missing souls. I saw the Moving Wall come to life.