Lost Things

During the summer of 1974 I took a thirty day leave from the Army in Germany, deciding to visit the relatives in Ireland, where I had visited briefly the year before. I was weary of the unwelcome I lived with in Germany as part of a foreign occupying military force, and the prospects of a month in the States would be under a similar cloud of unwelcome, things in Vietnam such as they were for those of us who wore a uniform. This was verified from reports from my friends who had gone home. My last trip to Ireland was brief enough just to whet my appetite for a cozy welcome of peat fires, long lost relatives, and soldier friendly pubs. I decided to spend the month there helping out around the small family farm my cousin inherited, that was once worked by my grandfather.

I took the train from Dublin, then hitched a ride from Galway. I was headed for the ragged edges of County Clare where the Atlantic bangs up against the hard cliffs of western Ireland. I found my way through the web of lonesome country lanes and eventually found myself walking the same dirt road my grandfather used to walk. I was headed to a small clutch of cottages, one of them belonging to my cousin who now ran the small agricultural family enterprise. There was a rise in the road before it swept down to the little hollow where my cousin and his mother, my great aunt Mary live. As I walked, I saw the fields were not cut square but seemed to meander through the low brush, unkempt and natural. There was no machinery visible, no tractors or cars. I saw a few cows but they scattered into the brush when they saw me. At the rise there was a large house with whitewashed stucco walls and a tin roof. A woman came down the path from the house to inspect the stranger coming down the road.

She had numerous layers of clothes on: shirts, blouses, and a scarf covered by a sweater and a long dark brown woolen dress, with boots. She introduced herself after hearing my name as my grandfather's cousin. The last time she had seen him was in 1918 on leave from the US expeditionary forces in France. She grabbed me by the arm. "I've been saving something," she says, "Come with me."

We walked up the path into the old house. We went through the kitchen into a small room with a few chairs. She went to a dresser. Pulling out the bottom drawer she brought out what looked like two bottles wrapped in newsprint. Unwrapping the paper she produced two bottles of Guinness stout.

She wanted to hear the news. "From when?" I asked.

"Let's see, your Grandfather was home here on leave from the Army in France. It was 1918 I believe," she said. She was a young girl then. I was thinking 1918? The sweep of history through this century flashes: Prohibition, the Great Depression, World War II, the Korean War, the Kennedy Assasination and between these great events our family, the Honans, once of Cooranclare, were being shaped by all these events. I told her my grandfather married an O'Leary, one uncle had polio, one landed on the beach in Normandy and was decorated, and my own father had fought in the Korean War. War seems to provide convenient punctuations of history and proof of our family investment in this new world. She sat transfixed, I trying desperately to draw out second hand memories, fragments of old stories I thought I had forgotten, to add color to the great gaps in the story I was telling. I recited the genealogy as best I could; we, across the Atlantic were all alive and well. My grandfather had made his mark with a good job as security for the railroad and his heirs were fine and strong.

After I was through she said nothing, leaned back in her chair, probably remembering all those who had walked down to the main road and never came back. It was then I realized how alone she was in that place. We drank those beers like communion wine, remembering this little hollow still full of heartache, a remembrance of loss of those who had left and never returned, from this town, the county, and the nation. I had relegated my Irish relations into a quaint fiction with background music by the Clancy Brothers. There was a great wound there and I never saw it until that day.

My head was swimming as I continued down the road to my 'Cousin's'. It was another five minutes over the hill and down to the hollow. Three houses nestled there at the road's end. Two homes had thatch roofs and yellow stucco walls, the typical Irish farm look. His house was on the right. It was a new home with a tin roof and cinder block walls. There was no finish on the cinder block.

I approached the door and saw a small old woman dart away to the back of the house. I continued to knock. Finally my cousin John appeared. He was surprised to see me. There was no way I could have contacted him but I knew I was welcome. Thankfully, he insisted that I stay with him. I asked about Aunt Mary's behavior.

"Well, I got her watching for the men from the electrics," he said. "You see we're not quite hooked up right." He pointed to the lone jimmied wire coming from the pole down to the house. "My nephew hooked us up and we're trying to be kind of quiet about it. So I tell mother to stay away from the door when strangers come around."

The house is newish construction, a very simple ranch design. The cinder blocks have no sheathing over them. As I walked in the door, where the living room should have been was the tool shed, with rakes, shovels, a scythe, and the various pieces and parts one collects in the small farming business. The bathroom had a toilet, a sink, and a tub, all gathering dust as none of them were hooked up. The kitchen had a fireplace with a peat fire going and all the cooking was done on a two-burner kerosene stove. Water was hauled from a well outside.

We had an early supper of boiled sausages and potatoes, then around seven, we headed down to the pub. Outside he walked around back and produced a bicycle for me. I started to jump on and ride the ancient thing but John cautioned me.

"We're in no rush," and he started walking his bike down the road. Following his lead I pushed on behind him. We walked our bikes to the tarmac where the dirt road ended and we picked up the paved lane into town. Across the road was John's friend Mickey, who was John's age, around 55, and was also single, living with his mother.

The bike was heavy and it was not much fun pushing it along. It also made it difficult to smoke while you were walking the thing down the highway. But a good Irishman can stick a Woodbine in his mouth and rarely take it out. After getting to the paved highway I thought we finally were going to ride them. But no. We pushed on in the dark.

Mickey and I were introduced. "Mickey, this is my cousin from Ameryca." Mickey's handshake was soft and brief. He just nodded. The three of us began the walk to town, John and Mickey talking to each other. It was incomprehensible. Musical mumbling rising and falling away, soft staccato and long silences. I thought the Irish spoke English with a cute accent, but this was more like Gaelic with an English accent.

"So Tim, what do ye think?" asked John inviting me in to the mystery.

About what? My mind raced. I shrugged. They agreed. I had become wise. It was pitch black as we walked along mumbling and staring into the dark ahead of us. I thought 28 more days of this! My ideals of Irish camaraderie were fading fast.

We arrived at the pub. The small place was packed. It was dim and smoky. All the men were dressed in well-worn tweeds. My cousin and I grabbed a table out of the way in the back. A pint of Guinness appeared. I responded appropriately and bought a pint for the gentleman who bought me one. Another beer appeared and then more. I was caught up in the rounds, an unspoken rule of buying drinks that never seemed to end.

All of a sudden there was a hush. An old farmer stepped away from the bar and the other men moved a polite distance away. He began to sing; the words and melodies floated by my ears. The song went on for a few minutes and then another man gently pushed the old man aside and started his own song. And soon enough another took his place. Time passed and it was time to close. There was a very formal "drink up boys" from the bartender but no one seemed to move.

"OK, we're closin' up," he said. Not one person moved. The barkeep locked the door and turned off the lights. With the lights out he lit some candles on the bar and passed them on to the tables. The evening had just begun. It was 11:15 p.m., 15 minutes after the official national law that required all drinking establishments in Ireland to close between 2 and 5 in the afternoon and 11 p.m. in the evening. I was amazed that in a country with such two-fisted drinking going on that such a law could ever be passed.

A man looked out the window. "The Garda is passing, quiet now," he says. I didn't know how many people lived in this tiny town but it seemed that the whole population was in the pub that night pulling a fast one over the police. A game, by the looks of it, that they had been playing for at least a couple of centuries and possibly longer. The culture had been formed around their very existence as a grand illegitimacy during the 800 years the English had occupied Ireland. Not too long ago their songs about freedom were illegal, Catholicism was all but illegal, and also the Gaelic language. Centuries of hard occupation had left them reacting even that night as we all hid from the police to sing the songs in secret. Ireland was free now but most of the hearts there seemed to be still resisting the occupation out of habit.

They moved the tables around in the semidarkness and made a rude half circle of tables and put the candles forward. A man moved to the front of the tables at the center of our makeshift stage. He was a handsome younger man. John leaned over and said his name that I have since forgotten. "He raises the pigs," he said. I didn't know if he was going to sing or tell a story. I waited and he looked around.

"There's strange things done in the midnight sun by the men who moil for gold," he began. It was Robert Service and "Cremation of Dan Mcgee," an epic poem of miners, death and dogsledding in the Yukon. I had read it and heard it read a hundred times. It was standard poetic fare in our family. But never like this, the lines recited by a local dreamer of far away places. Robert Service would have been proud. As for me I was visiting from that dream. I could hear the words, but being in the dream the yearning was alien to me. I felt like a voyeur trespassing in the bittersweet dreams of the hard times of those left behind. The evening went on with more poems, stories and drinking.

Much later we staggered out of the pub. I was not used to the blackness. No lights anywhere. It was the farthest edge of Europe where the continent leans toward America. I began to push the bike into the darkness. John and Mickey curled over the bar of their bicycles and begin a very slow pedal ahead of me, their cigarettes like two very drunk fireflies leading the way.

Next morning I sat at the small table in the kitchen. The tea was hot, with lots of sugar and milk. I looked out the window and saw John had captured his cow from the underbrush. I watched him milk the cow in the rain. It was almost 10 o'clock. It was an outdoor affair; there were no outbuildings. The tools, rakes, shovels, and hoes were all in the unfinished living room in front of the kitchen. It was barely a farm. There were no chickens or any other animals except a cow, a small mule and a dog.

He finished milking the cow, brought the milk into the kitchen, poured some out of the large milk pail into a small pitcher and put it into a small wooden cooler. We drank our tea in silence. He stirred the fire and threw a few pieces of peat into it. After a little bit he said, "We must be off."

Outside he hitched the small ancient looking mule to a small cart. It was a wooden two wheeled cart with a small bench seat. He put the five gallon aluminum milk pail into the back of the cart and we were off. I had never moved more determinedly or slower in my life. Everything there seemed to have been inoculated with a slowness that defies physics. We lit up our Woodbines and were off. I thought I could almost watch the vegetation beat us to town.

What seemed like hours later, we stopped at the creamery and delivered the milk. John got his few pounds and then we were back where we left off the night before at the pub. The Guinness cut through the fog of the night before gracefully. The barkeep poured me a shot glass of Power's whiskey and one for himself. We toasted with a raise of the glass and a nod. The men started arriving from the night before. I saw few women, to my despair, and no children. It was a man's world. The language was still incomprehensible to me. I thought they were talking about animal prices and farm topics but they could have been talking about anything.

A woman and her husband came into the bar with a couple of buckets full of fish. They were mackerel caught off the coast in the Atlantic two miles from there. They were sold quickly, wrapped in newsprint and put in the cooler with the kegs of beer behind the bar ready to be taken home for dinner. We drank until closing at 2 p.m. and then took the slow ride home.

It was utterly simple living. One day John said, "We're off to pick potatoes today." That afternoon I found myself on a flatbed truck with six or seven other men and we drove to a nearby field. There was another group of men and women there to meet us. We all grabbed a gunny sack and started down the rows of the two-acre field. It didn't get any more Irish than this. I had acquired a cap, professionally ruined. I had a tweed jacket with the required holes in the elbow and this day I had a piece of twine tied around the waist. It was the cameo role of my life. We picked potatoes for two or three hours; the work went fast with many hands. I was beginning to differentiate the words, the fragments of gossip, pieces of jokes and the jagged ends of sad news. Those of us who came on the truck loaded up our portions of potatoes and ourselves and we rambled off.

A few days later we were off to cut turf (peat). I imagined that these people would have died off long ago if it hadn't been for the peat bogs. It's the same flatbed truck. We piled on, rattling and bouncing into the countryside. We were at the edge of a large bog that had the look of a field, with a large precise black gash about a hundred yards long. About 30 men were making brick-size cuts against the wall of earth. It was a well-organized effort. Although I couldn't tell too much, there seemed to be a hierarchy of sorts to the business. There were cutters, those directing the work, those stacking, and there seemed to be a counter as well. This was the heat for next winter. The peat or turf as it is called would be divided up and delivered to those engaged in the work. It would dry in stacks next to the cottages over the summer and be ready to burn next winter.

Mornings we were off to the creamery. Afternoons we rotated between picking potatoes, digging turf, and nursing Guinness at the pub. Then home for a simple evening meal before spending the evenings at the pub. It was a very small world.

Beyond the quaintness, I picked up that much had been lost here. The Ireland that I was raised to know was a different place than the one I was now visiting. It was a place with a large hole in its heart, a country whose greatest resource, its people, had disappeared over the horizon to the west and never returned. Those that remained seemed to live in the separation. My cousin volunteered my battered clothing, I think, so I could blend in better. I represented the victors; in many ways this still seemed to be a country of the vanquished. They were still caught in the struggle to make it. It was their inheritance going back many generations. There was a resistance I felt in saying too much about anything in America. I sensed that most of the people there would have left in a minute if they could have, and were quietly kicking themselves for not leaving when they had the chance. They were people of great dignity and kindness, but the price seemed very high, to live in this lonesome place.

My month spun by. It was one of my last nights at the pub. "Do you have a song for us?" The question drifted across the crowded pub. They were looking at me. I had become comfortable in my spot at the end of the bar, my preferred place to watch the action. I was an observer, but now they wanted me to participate. My mind was swirling with fear and shame. I felt I had nothing that could touch what I had experienced during those many nights where suffering souls were laid open so beautifully in songs and stories. Did I have a song like the gift I had received from these kind folks? I couldn't think of anything but embarrassingly silly ditties like "Happy Birthday," "God Bless America," and tiny fragments of old rock and roll songs. Nothing to match what I had been exposed to for the past weeks. This was not required in our drinking rituals in the States. What could I sing to this authentic gathering of the Men of the West? I felt very small. They had invited me into their world. The price of admission was singing my own song. I had just been confronted with something new. They wanted me to participate. My time as an observer was over. Staring across the bar I could see a powerful intimacy in their faces, the kind that hold people together in great struggles over generations. Their stories and songs were as much a part of them as their arms and legs. It was the glue that held them together in many ways. I was surprised to learn I had no such artful appendage. I felt crippled. I deferred. I could see the disappointment in their eyes, a kind of pity that one reserves for the blind or the infirmed. I was not whole yet.

This hard-bitten place had been in a struggle for cultural survival for centuries but it had not lost its heart or its great communion with itself. So much had been taken away, but through it all they had maintained the important things of life, their sense of themselves that was marked by these great intimate moments where honor was measured in a song. There was a great relational river that ran through this place and most probably the thousands of other hamlets and to be part of it, all you had to do was sing a song.

It was the first time I sensed something bigger spiritually than being Catholic or religious. I felt the song-sized hole inside. I was adrift. This is not to romanticize the Irish culture or overlook the real and pressing problems there. But you touch something every once in a while, a real void of a thing that was lost. Those nights at the pub were like going to high mass for me. There was communion and remembrance in those authentic moments, where ancient echoes are set loose in the crowd from a man or woman. I had been cut off from those echoes. We were no longer a tribe. We were part of a new society, secure and powerful, well-organized and managed. But we had lost something in the transition. And that loss had just become very personal. It wasn't just a song that I was missing, it was a whole spiritual dimension. The place where the song came from was the seat of the soul, the essence of my spiritual self, that place where the creative bubbles up. Meaning. I came from a place that needed no songs to survive. I was from a land of a free people; we were the envy of the world and yet I had never experienced any community intimacy like this. I could see what we had lost and all that we had gained. And I could see what they had lost in the struggle. I had spent a month with the vanquished. Most of the songs were about the struggle, songs of revolt and dead patriots, songs that poked fun of their oppressors. The oppression was over officially but the population seemed still bound to the shadow of the old rule. The men I worked and drank too much with seemed to be still bound to the past in many ways, because the future hadn't shown up yet. Four hundred years of hard oppression had left its mark. Economic hopelessness was evident, their posters plastered everywhere stating a ten thousand pound reward for starting a successful business. What could you do in the west of Ireland on the little plots of farms that were left? What could be done they were doing, hanging together working out their dignity as best they could, singing dirges about their loss, and when the occasion presented, asking a stranger if he had a song, to join in.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

After Ireland and my commitment to the US Army finished, I was back in the States wandering around seeing and feeling the effect of the grand national malaise the country was in. It was a time of lost things. We were losing a war to a small country. That war had divided us hard and cleaved our notions of our national identity. Those who had found a lightning rod opposing the war were now on the backside of their energies. The war over, those attentions were turning to the environment to see what had really happened in the pell-mell development of the last two hundred years. For the Columbia River, the idea of restoration was creeping in. But in order to restore the river there had to be an accounting of what had been lost. The national mindset was going through a dramatic change; the sons of those who had tamed the river were now responsible for the collateral damage done. They had to be about the difficult business of restoring the river without actually changing it. Their new world was protection, mitigation and enhancement between the hard boundaries of dams, machinery and vested interests.

We are newcomers to the river, strangers, western rationalists for the most part whose view of the river is a system of identifiable components. So any discussion of loss will be on those terms--a loss of things. And living in a consumer economy, the acceptance of the loss of things is a built-in value of our economic system. We put no spiritual quotient in natural elements. In our collective religious cant, nature was to be put under dominion and any losses incurred in this taking were seen as the cost of civilizing the west. Harnessing nature was a good thing. That mindset had built an empire the likes of which the world had never seen. We have been expert at acquiring power most often at the expense of life. Given our take on things, the benefits to society outweighed the costs. Of course this is all hindsight but what was in the minds of our forefathers is still in us. We live in the society they built. We view life the way they instructed us. On the whole, our spiritual relationship to natural elements is thin. Collectively we really don't understand it. Almost everything about who we are and how we normally conduct our lives wars against nature itself. So it is against our religious heritage to elementally understand life in a larger natural sense. Nature is not really included in the way we approach meaning in life. So to truly understand loss on the Columbia River it should be reflected by those who lost the most

In 1855 a treaty was signed between the US government and the Nez Perce Tribe, the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, the Confederated Tribes of the Warm Springs Reservation of Oregon, and the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakima Indian Reservation. The treaty gave the tribes reservation land to live on, continued fishing rights on the Columbia River, and the legal protection of the US government. They became, in time, citizens of a new rational order.

Up until that time those tribes had lived vitally in what is now known as Oregon, Washington and Idaho. The tribes that fished the Columbia and its tributaries had a shared economy with each other. They all held the sacredness of the salmon runs as a central spiritual core of their beliefs. As part of that belief no one group dominated the taking of salmon at the expense of the other. They saw everything connected to the river and knew that if the river was healthy, everything around it would be bountiful. After the treaty they gave up 35,000,000 acres of pristine wilderness and settled on reservation land set aside by the government.

Prior to the treaty, between 1805 and the treaty signing, their populations had been decimated by smallpox and, to a lesser degree, war. Some of the disease contagion was of natural occurrence. Many times it was planned, seen as a more expedient way to remove the occupiers of good farmland. The whites were seen as armed with superior firepower, great numbers and deadly diseases.

At the time of the signing there were still great numbers of salmon moving up the Columbia as they had for centuries. Estimates put the runs at that time at between five and ten million. By the early 1900s there was great pressure on the salmon runs put on by the canneries and the fishermen of the lower Columbia. Overfishing was a real problem.

But overfishing was nothing compared with what the dams would do. The dams would take away the river. Wholeness, something the natives intrinsically understood, would vanish. Great natural order would be substituted by narrow, demanding, confines of western rational order.

As with most treaties, that one signaled the beginning of a more than century of court battles to have the intent of the treaty enforced. By 1979 fewer than 150,000 salmon would be caught by the native fishermen, down from millions a century before. Although the voices for life in the river have grown louder, the tribes spent the first 100 years in a lonely losing battle against the culture that saw the river in terms of power, not life. Their treaties had little force when the dams were built and any accommodation for the salmon such as hatcheries were built primarily below the traditional fishing grounds of the native tribes. Those hatcheries favored the new constituency of fishermen and canneries. From the signing of the treaty until 1969, when the Oregon courts gave the native fishermen one half of the year's allotted quota of salmon, was a time of their treaty rights being continually ignored and worse, the disappearance of their river. With their yearly quota the native fishermen would have, in the years to come, their vested interests along with those of the aluminum companies, the barge operators, the farmers and a host of other interests of those who lived downstream in this river of money. Once the native fishermen's legitimacy was defined by life and their natural relationship to the river and its bounty. Now their legitimacy was defined by power. And sadly their portion was sustained by massive government subsidies which funded hatcheries and fish ladders, without which the salmon would surely disappear. So they had to fight for their portion and the attending funding in the political arena. What was once seen as a miracle, a gift from God, was now a small entitlement from the government. It consisted of a tiny fraction of what had once been the greatest salmon run in the world, where each year 16,000,000 fish charged up the Columbia and into the tributaries of that vast watershed.

The river loss was slow, by degrees. Its discovery took the river out of natural bounds into a political sphere. It now belonged to someone. It became owned. Those who had fished the river for centuries were not considered in this taking. First the trappers came and took the beaver. Then fishermen and processors almost decimated the populations of salmon. And last we took the water itself and hoarded it behind great dams. But these were all components taken over time. The greatest loss however, was the intrinsic value of the river. We no longer needed salmon. We needed power. We valued the power of the river over the life of the river.

When the Grand Coulee and the Bonneville dams were complete, a taking of a resource was accomplished on a scale that was unimaginable. The Grand Coulee was the largest structure on earth for many years. Its scale was only dwarfed by the great loss of the river it held back. We were jaded by the power it produced and it took many years to examine what had been truly lost in the Columbia. By degrees the river management tried to make things right. But because the river they managed was a river of components, all they could offer were small parts of the river that were still alive.

When the dams locked up the river, the potential, the generosity of the river was locked up with it. The river officially ends at the mouth of the river located near Astoria, Oregon. But before the dams were in place, the river pushed itself 900 miles into the Pacific Ocean, nutrifying the deep ocean. The Columbia and its tributaries brought life to over 250,000 square miles of a diverse topography. The dynamic interchange of the salmon in this river system was greatly diminished, a marvelous fidelity of the fish with the river system almost disappeared. Nutrients in the form of silt and organic matter no longer move to the floodplains and deep ocean. And the ocean in the form of large healthy salmon no longer nutrify the high mountain streams. At the time Lewis and Clark first saw the Columbia they were awestruck by the river and by the great harvest of salmon, evidenced by the hundreds of drying racks and bundles of dried salmon. The native tribes two hundred miles up river were able to catch salmon because there was an honor system among the tribes so that no one along the Columbia or its tributaries would go without salmon. The natives saw how generous the river was and made sure that the virtue would be among them also.

The natural structure of the river has been altered and consequently the function of the river is greatly diminished. The introduction of power turned the virtue of the river upside down. The managers now hoard the river's flow and measure everything. Generosity is not a word you hear often in river politics. There is an independent reality of a free-flowing river that cannot be understood by its parts. Its grand wholeness is gone. It has lost its essential meaning as a river, that kind of meaning that eludes the intellect and can only be understood in the heart as wonder. We discovered we knew a lot about building dams but very little about what it takes to make a river. And when we did build a dam we really had no idea what it truly did to the river and the great loss that ensued.

Since the government gave back to the native tribes a very small portion of what had been taken, there has been a steady stream of legislative efforts that all address what has been lost in the transition from river of life to river of power. Because the river and its tributaries flow through two countries and five states, it is more difficult to address loss in the form of a whole river; however there are valiant attempts to do just that. But wholeness is the archenemy of those who hold title to the river in the form of irrigation, transportation and power rights. This fractured river has made many of them very wealthy. And that wealth has trickled down into regular jobs that depend on a managed system.

Some of the difficulty with restoring wholeness to the river is that in many ways the faithful witness of the river has been lost. Most of those who knew the river best are dead or nearly so. The river they knew is gone. That river has been relegated to myth. The great harvests of salmon are legends. The more mythic the river becomes, the easier it is to dismiss testimony of what has been lost. It enters the realm of the absurd for many. It is almost as if the effort to retrieve what has been lost has passed its statute of limitations. The river of life also seems defined by the brackets of power that surround it. And taken together this new river with its combination of dams, hatcheries, locks, irrigation canals and its sophisticated management, along with its supporting vested interests does a very good job maintaining the legitimacy of the river system.

Being the consummate layman, I entrusted the management of the river of faith to the experts, as did my ancestors before me and theirs before them. I was in awe of this grand structure and consequently knew nothing about it. I only knew what most folks knew about it. Somehow it contained within its dominion, keys to salvation, connection to God and eternal life. Those that ran these great institutions somehow had a special relationship with God and that connection enabled their administration a legitimacy for the spiritual governance of men.

So the native tribes on the Columbia and the Irishmen I had met in the west of Ireland were still mourning the past. The river and the country that had been returned to them was divided and robbed of much of its life. The songs I heard in the pub at night were part of the secret soul of the country and didn't have much to do the current state of affairs. Likewise I am sure that the rituals still practiced by the native tribes are connected to a river that doesn't exist anymore.

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