Dilemma

Ah, the dilemma.

The other afternoon I was walking in town, and I came to some stairs that are a popular shortcut. The stairs are steep and pass through a small spat of woods, so it's a little darkish on the stairs even in broad daylight. I don't think I've ever even met another person on the stairs at the same time as me.

As I started down the stairs I noticed there were two bearded men sitting near the bottom of the flight, both of them on the same step, effectively blocking the stairway. They were drinking beer and talking softly. Battered knapsacks were on the ground nearby.

They let me pass with no problem, but I still felt a little strange. It was one of those "there's something just not right here" things that make your hackles rise a bit. It bothered me enough to remember it.

A few days later, I came down those same steps, this time early in the morning. No one was there, but a flash of movement caught my eye under the stoop of a building close to the bottom of the stairs. I walked by gingerly, trying to look without appearing to look. Someone was under the stoop, sleeping on a wad of plastic bags. I'd seen a flash of whitish T-shirt. If my eye hadn't caught that movement, I would never have noticed him. It's a tight spot, and dark under there.

That alarmed me a bit, but I thought okay, he's just trying to get a night's sleep and he has no home. Forget it.

A few more days passed, and once again, early in the morning, I happened on those stairs. This time there was a 16 oz. beer can sitting right in the middle of one of the steps. Since I had a pretty good idea where to look for the can's owner, I walked by the building near the stairs and glanced under the stoop. There was no movement, but there was definitely someone sleeping under there.

Okay, so here's the dilemma. Leave the situation alone? I'm not convinced that's a good plan. There are a lot of children around the area, and I have no way of knowing if this guy is harmless or not. Sure, he may well be. But then again, he may well not be. And I don't intend to find out first-hand.

Call the owner of the building and tell him he's got a stoop-squatter? That's one possibility.

Or, call the cops and tell them about it? I've been hearing that there has been a mini-onslaught of homeless people in Astoria of late, and the police are often called to deal with them. I don't know if that's a great solution, either. It's a no-win situation all the way around.

Sharks!

Shark Week's 20th anniversary starts July 29, and there are all kinds of programs about sharks planned on the Discovery Channel, including a documentary about what is considered the worst shark attack ever, after the sinking of the USS Indianapolis during World War II. As I recall, that incident is mentioned in one of the best shark movies, ever, "Jaws."

Although I am fascinated by sharks, my own personal experience with them is rather limited. I've seen and caught small sand sharks (dogfish), and marveled at their sandpapery skin and beautiful lines before throwing them back.

I've only seen one fin pop up in the water, and it was a large sand shark that was probably very lost. A totally non-aggressive type of shark, it had probably followed a school of bluefish into the waters where I saw it.

The local fishermen were all out of the immediate area in their boats, so the only person available to "defend the town" was a local gardener, Galliano. He loped down the lawn towards the water, yelling about the "gotta-damma fish," hopped into a dory with his gun, and putt-putted out to the offending fin. Then he took pot-shots at the poor thing, screaming at it in Italian the whole time. Galliano probably scared the bejesus out of the shark, and I hope it made it back into the deeper waters unscathed.

It was certainly the most excitement the gardener had seen since the last time my dog dug up and pissed on his dahlias. I suspect Galliano's dying words words, gasped on his last breath, included "that gotta-damma dog!"

The only other close-up shark experience I had was with a huge dead tiger shark that floated into a small bay. It was completely in the wrong waters, and no one could imagine how it wound up where it did. Although it had decomposed enough to smell totally gawd-awful, it was still in beautiful condition, and its size and teeth were very impressive. I have never heard of another shark of that type or size appearing in that area, alive or dead.

I don't know why I'm so fascinated by sharks. Maybe it's their cold indifference. Or maybe it's their beautiful, functional lines. Or maybe it's because they are a primeval vestige from ages past. Whatever the reason, I know I'll be glued to the Discovery channel next week.

Gratitude

I am really not a perky soft-edged person. Actually, I lean towards dour and cynical.

But this morning, while walking to work, I couldn't help but just feel a big gooshy whooosh of gratefulness, an emotion I do not acknowledge often enough.

Just leaving the house, and in the action of locking the door, I thought about how lucky I am to have a house. It isn't in the greatest shape, but it's mine (and the bank's).

My dogs and "inside cats" are delighted to see me each morning no matter how frightening I look. The "outside cats" who have adopted me lounge around waiting for a morning scratch, and I'm not sure who's luckier to have whom. I look forward to seeing them around, and have come to depend on their greetings.

As I started walking, I noticed a few morning glory flowers out of the corner of my eye. They were very bright white, and happily trumpeting in the raspberry bushes. I know, I know, it's an invasive weed. In that moment, though, the plant lived up to the glory part of its name.

I thought about all the yummy raspberries, which will be ripe soon, and are so close to home and easy to pick.

And who wouldn't be totally knocked out by rounding a corner and seeing the majestic Columbia River. I've never been a river person, but this one is impressive. And those hills across the river in Washington are another imposing, yet soothing sight.

I love looking at the houses as I walk along, seeing all the details that you can't see when driving ... like the front of a house that looks so grand, but the sides, not easily visible, peeling and unpainted. All the interesting little things people put in their windows catch the eye on foot, too.

And, I was grateful to have a job to walk to. It's not a high-paying job, but it's one of the few I've had in my life that I actually enjoy, and look forward to going to.

It's been a long, hard journey to get to this place and time, and I'm glad I made it.

No Smokin'

I gave up smoking a while ago. Again. And it is a misery.

I try to tell myself how noble I am, and how good it is for me, but it doesn't seem to help much. I don't know why it's such a terrible addiction, or how it gets hold of you so badly, but it's certainly hard to shake.

No hypnotism, no tranquilizers, no nicotine gum or patches; I just stopped one day. I figured the worst part is getting up in the morning and having that first cigarette - it sets a pattern for the day. So one day I got up and didn't have that first cigarette. Later, I started chewing gum before I started gnawing on a table or shredding curtains.

The minutes and hours that crawled by turned into days, weeks, months. And I still have odd moments when, for no particular reason, just out of the blue, I absolutely crave a cigarette. Those moments are hard to resist, but so far, so good. Believe it or not, it helps to keep some upstairs in a freezer just in case; not that I intend to smoke them - they are my safety net, as it were.

Now I have such vivid dreams about smoking at least I'm enjoying a few nice cigs in the dead of night deep in my head.

Maybe someday I'll stop eating everything in sight. But it doesn't look promising. Guess it's true, you get rid of one addiction, and you replace it with another.

At least, as far as I know, popcorn doesn't cause lung cancer, although the medical community is bound find something lethal there, too, sooner or later.

But I'm not giving up popcorn, hell or high water.

Over the Bounding Main

After reading The Guy Who Writes This' blog about sailing today on Astoria Rust I had an extreme nostalgia attack about the summers of my mis-spent youth.

My parents were sailors. I mean, they were insane, obsessed, and lived and died for sailing. Personally, I never saw the joy in zig-zagging to get somewhere, much less being at the mercy of winds and tides, when you could sensibly putt-putt somewhere in a straight line.

However, despite my objections, sailing instructions began at the age of 7 in a small boat with a squared-off bow. It was bigger than a dory at 12 feet, but a hell of a lot heavier and less useful. The sails were canvas, and a pain in the ass. After every sail, they had to be hauled out of the boat and onto the lawn, hosed off, and left to dry in the sun.

I spent ruthless, and seeming endless, hours learning to trim the one sail to the wind, raise and lower the centerboard as needed, tack, learn the currents and tides, and land smoothly at the dock with a "ready about" instead of crashing head-on into said dock.

Then there were the hours spent in the water, in my bathing suit, scrubbing seaweed and barnacles off the bottom of the boat. Learning to tie bowlines (no, I never did get it right), and other knots (no, I don't remember them now).

If friends invited me over, and they happened to live on an island, I had to figure out how the hell to get there even if the wind and tide were against me. Sometimes it meant rowing. And then, how the hell to get home, although sometimes I could get a tow, or was lucky enough to be able to sail down wind right home.

I also spent many hours crewing on sailboats in the Sunday morning races (at my parents' insistence), always as mate to some friend's brother, who was always some adolescent hyper-testosteroned Captain Bligh-in-the-making who knew less about sailing than I did.

I will add, with more than a dash of unseemly malice, that I was delighted one Sunday morning when I was not forced to crew (thereby forestalling a mutiny) because the mini-Bligh of the week had poured an entire cup of boiling coffee on his nether regions.

The most pleasant times I had sailing were with a couple who had absolutely no idea how to sail, and who didn't care in the least. They had an old wooden Lightening sailboat, and they would pack up their 3 kids, and me (the babysitter), and we would go out for a sailing picnic. There would be paper-thin sliced Genoa salami, crispy crusty French bread, Brie and Camembert cheese (ripened to perfection), red wine for us, and juice for the kids.

Winters were spent stripping the boat, sanding, caulking, repainting the boat and its duck-boards, and varnishing, varnishing , varnishing while the boat stood on saw-horses in the basement. Rolling it back out in the spring, with the help of several neighbors, getting it into the water at a good high tide, stepping the heavy wooden mast - all the spring rituals.

I haven't sailed for more than 30 years, although I sometimes dream about it. My parents sailed until they just couldn't any more. My mother quit in her mid-70s when it was too hard to navigate the rocks on the dock to get to the boat. My father quit in his mid-80s when he got lost one day sailing behind the house, and got so befouled he wound up in the drink, utterly confused. Some islanders rescued him, brought him home, and towed the boat back to our dock.

The boat was put up that winter, pushed on rollers up to the cubby-hole under the house, and was never put in the water again.

Diggin' It

Astoria's underground is something that totally intrigues me. I would love to get in there and have a look around, but every obvious and visible entry has been blocked with gates and padlocks. The stores that had trap-doors to the underground have covered them to protect themselves from burglary. Seems like the new owners of the buildings don't know where the entries are or are totally and blithely unaware there even is an Astoria underground.

On the way to the public bathrooms on Exchange Street, I keep peeking down while at the corner of Exchange and 12th Street just before the Clark Gable plaque. At ground level, there are locked gates at the southwest corner of the hospice. They cover what was clearly an entryway to the underground. I went around and down to ground level by the hospice, and there are gates at the northwest end of the building, too. I only wish I had a flashlight with me so I could have peeked in and seen more.

From there, I walked across the lot over to the ramp off 13th Street that goes down into that lot. If you go way up under the ramp, it looks like it might still be an entryway there. There are boards over it, and it would be a crawlway, but I did not get close enough to check the boards out to see how loose they are. I'm inclined to think it's an entrance, though, because I saw a backpack tucked out of plain sight under the ramp, and several beer bottles.

I heard a rumor in a local tavern that runaway kids are hiding out under Astoria. When I questioned the lady who was talking, she said her son knows the way in, and goes in there regularly just for the hell of it. I went where she told me, and yup, a person could definitely get in there, but not easily.

At that point, my common sense got the better of me, and I didn't go in. And I don't think I would, by myself, anyway. It's probably pretty dangerous under there, but that only adds to the allure. Maybe I just have an unhealthy fascination for worlds lost, underground, or out of use.

There's a fascinating web site about people who take this obsession to the extreme, i.e. breaking in to abandoned places/tunnels and photographing them as a record that they've been there. They call themselves "urban explorers," or "urban spelunkers," and one of their more skin-crawly sites is Dark Passage, which has a plethora of sub-sites and links.

Wonder if they'd be interested in checking out Astoria ...

Whining in the Rain

I like rain as much as the next person. Okay, I'll even go as far as to say I like it better than the next person, and the one after that, too.

But one of the things that makes me appreciate it so much is the lack of it (normally) during the summer. I start whining in May, and spend all of June, July, August and September kvetching about the sun and the brightness and skin cancer. It's my summer hobby, if you will.

Since we haven't had summer yet, except for a few days here and there, I have nothing to complain about, sun-wise. Looks like summer is going to go right into winter, and as much as I love winter, I also love the changing of the seasons. So I'm a little bummed out.

Maybe it's getting to me more this year as I sometimes sell at the Sunday Market. And it has rained damn near every Sunday, which is terrible for business.

Not that it matters ... the market is a fiasco, anyway. There are way too many vendors, and the aisles are full of non-shoppers coming out to show off their kids and dogs. Every year the dogs get smaller, the kids get bigger and more obnoxious, and they both get louder and more annoying.

Looks like rain yet again this Sunday, and I reserved tomorrow's spot at the market a couple of weeks ago. I can't think of anything I'd rather do less. Hell, I remember when the market used to be fun, rain or shine.

And I am in the unlikely, actually unheard of position of wanting some sun.

D.A. Follies

I am intrigued by the vain antics of the district attorney of Clatsop County, Josh Marquis.

He already makes close to $80K a year, but apparently he really, really needs that extra $13K Clatsop County used to cough up to supplement his pay.

Since most of the county residents make less than $40K annually, I can't figure out why he thinks he needs more when he already makes twice as much as the majority of his constituents. If it's a pissing contest, hey, he already won.

Actually, I have no clue why the taxpayers of the county were coughing up anything for this position at all, since it's not a county slot to begin with.

What's even stranger, and a little scary, is the all-out media campaign he's waging to get those extra bucks. I can't help but think all this time and energy he's spending whining over the $13K would be better spent actually doing his job.

He's even gone from a free blogger account to his own domain, http://www.coastda.com/

Which makes me wonder ... is his specialty self-promotion or fighting crime? Or maybe he's just practicing his moves while looking for a larger stage to strut on?

You be the judge.

Beware the Geezer

Astoria is turning into a mini-Miami. Pedestrians beware, and I'll tell you why.

The other day I was walking my rather large dog, and we came to a crosswalk at an intersection. A car stopped for us to cross, and I was about to step out into the street when I noticed that an old relic of a car was pulling up behind the first car, and the second car was edging more and more towards the center line, to the point where the driver's side of the car was blocked from view.

By then I was getting more than a little nervous, so I stepped out hesitantly, pulling the dog in close. Good thing I was hesitant.

The second car pulled out across the center line, passed the stopped car, and blew right through the crosswalk. If I hadn't been leery, and proceded slowly, he would have wiped me and my dog all over 16th Street. And probably kept right on going.

I got a glance at the driver as he passed a few feet in front of me. Yup, it was an old geezer, chin jutting over the top of the steering wheel, gripping the wheel with his hands at 10 and 2, staring grimly ahead, rushing to his denture adjustment or bingo fiesta. He looked a tad huffy that the first driver had stopped at the crosswalk and gotten in his way.

He didn't even see us, and that was an accomplishment. I'm no bitty little thang, and I have a very large dog. I would have reported him, but of course, I was too busy trying to stay out of his way to think about taking down license plate numbers.

Not that I think it would do any good to report such a thing in Astoria, which has become the Giza for Geezers. They merrily drive around running stop signs and ignoring cross-walks, blithely going about their business without a thought in the world.

I suppose it's going to take one of these geriatric lethal weapons plowing through a herd of school children to wake up the DMV to check them yearly for vision, reflexes and lucidity.

In the meantime, folks, be very, very careful at crosswalks. One of those geezer missiles might have your name on it.

The Commish

Okay, boys and girls, it's all in the lap of the Clatsop County Planning Commission. After two hearings, and more in the works and the anti-LNG folks FINALLY getting a nice loud, coherent voice, will they listen?

I'm sorry, but I can't even imagine how the hell it's gotten this far.

Has anyone been down Clifton Road lately? It's like traveling back 100 years. There can't possibly be any reason to desecrate that area, much less with 17 story high LNG terminals. I mean, what the hell even brought this on?

Well, now that I think about it, it doesn't require a brain surgeon to figure that one out. Just because the area is so pristine, the LNG big-wig corportate types immediately thought, "Oh shit, Lord, that prime piece of real estate is right smack in the middle of Clatsop County hickdom! It will be a snap to get by their dumbasses, and it'll only cost a coupla million to buy 'em off and shut 'em up. Promise 'em jobs they'll never be able to qualify for, and they'll bend right over."

And some are bending over so far they may never walk upright again.

Come on commissioners, you can save us from this travesty of false hopes. Deny those variances. Save the river, and our way of life.