Optimistic Pessimism

Today, I expect the worst from the covid-19 pandemic and look for the best. Nearly a million and a half confirmed cases and ninety thousand dead, fourteen thousand dead in the United States, twenty dead in our own rural county. And more to come.

For whatever reason, our wealthy and sophisticated country is not responding well. We don’t seem to be able to organize ourselves. Shortages and gaps in medical supplies are appearing in the country that invented supply-chain management. Testing is faltering at the source of testing technology.

As a world leader, we are stumbling. What else can be said? The number of cases in the U. S. is more than double that of the country with the second highest count.

The only way we have to stop the deaths is to shut the country down, and we struggle to do it. Americans cherish their freedom and do not take kindly to interference. Some insist on their right to assembly when not assembling is to avoid the death for themselves, their loved ones, their neighbors, their countrymen. In the country that is of the people, by the people and for the people, the people cannot save themselves.

What do I see that is good in this? Yes, healthcare staff, nurses, and doctors are valiantly giving their lives to save the victims of the virus, but sacrifice is not bright hope. Volunteers distribute food to the distressed and help in many ways, and philanthropists donate billions, but this is only more sacrifice. The necessity of sacrifice drives me to despair, not hope.

Then what good do I see? Change. Change for the better paid for with staggering suffering and cost. Hundreds of thousands of good people forced to die alone with a tube jammed down their throat. Myriads of others who will survive with lame spirits and weakened bodies.

You may lament the shattering of the economy, but I see an economy that was already broken with unseen cracks. We were living in a condition that we now know humans cannot survive. The death toll from the virus testifies to this. If we lived differently, flew around in airplanes less, did not live in cities stacked in layers, looked out for our neighbors instead of competed with them, used computer networks, the mark of the new century, to protect ourselves from pestilence and bring us together instead letting them divide us, the emergence of the virus would have been a minor event. A temporary statistical variation that only epidemiologists and public health specialists would notice.

But the pandemic isn’t minor. It is a catastrophe because we have been doing it all wrong.

Now we know.

Will we have a better world when this is over? I think so. World War II was a horrible event, more destructive than the pandemic. After the war, many people were dead like today, but cities were also flattened, industrial facilities devastated, and resources destroyed.

Yet, the world that emerged from the war was more prosperous, more pleasant, more humane than ever existed before on the planet.

After the pandemic, we will have the dead to bury and grieve, but our resources and infrastructure will be intact, and we will have learned much about the weaknesses in our old ways. We will know new ways to work, to live, to cooperate.

Already, the network has been strengthened in just two months to support the new loads and will continue to get stronger. We’ve learned to get together electronically in ways that the virus can’t disrupt. And we will learn more. New ways to work and distribute goods. Our communities will be stronger and more resistant to stress.

Rebuilding will be rapid because we will have so much to rebuild with, and like the aftermath of the war, the world will improve in ways we do not yet comprehend.

Uses of Vine Maple

The day of a fish fry begins with a trip to the woods to cut green vine maple for the fire. My grandpa was not much of a cook. His contribution to a fish fry was a wheelbarrow load of vine maple cut early in the morning while the dew was still on the grass. He also built a fire in the pit where the salmon would roast. Grandpa cut lengths of vine maple two to two and a half feet long, thickness ranging from five inch logs to finger size twigs. vinemapleHe would split the larger logs. In my memory, Grandpa used an ax and a Swedish bow saw to cut fuel for fish fries. He had a bright yellow McCullough chain saw, but I don’t recall him ever using it. After cutting the fuel, Grandpa would start the fire with newspaper, a little kindling, and dry stove wood from the wood shed and later throw on the fresh cut green vine maple. When the fire was going well, sweet and pungent smoke billowing, snow white ashes juxtaposed to black charcoal, flames barely visible in the bright sunlight, responsibility went to the cook, usually my uncle. Grandpa died when I was eight, taking with him, I believe, more secrets about vine maple than I can tell.

Vine maple is harder, denser, and closer grained than big leaf maple, but its trunk does not grow large or straight. There is not much lumber in a vine maple tree. I have seen vine maple grow to a foot in diameter and straight logs ten or twelve feet long but logs like that are exceptions. A typical vine maple trunk is less than six inches in diameter and curves sinuously. Trunks that soar upward twenty feet before branching are common, but they are typically so twisted that you would be lucky to cut straight four foot boards from one of those logs.

I once overheard John Schaefer, who survived treatment in an army hospital ward for pneumonia contracted in the flu pandemic of 1918 and knew something about life in the shadow of Mount Baker, suggest to Dad that he find two curved vine maple logs to replace the worn out runners of a stone boat Dad used for spreading barrels of aged cattle urine over the fields, a nasty job, still nasty but now replaced by more elaborate technology. Dad and John talked it over. Yes, vine maple was the right wood for stone boat runners. It would last forever. But finding two logs with the same curve was too difficult. If I knew what I know now, and had the resources currently at my disposal, I would have proposed that we find one log and rip it down the middle with a chain saw. I could do that. It would have been a perfect solution. But that was fifty years ago and I could not have said that then. Ten years ago, I could have split a vine maple log with a chainsaw, but today, perhaps not.

Vine maple wood is tough, not brittle. When I was a kid, John Schaefer taught us to make bows from vine maple. They were easy to make, find a a nice length of vine maple; a four foot length and three quarter inch diameter would be about right. Cut it green and whittle notches for the string at each end. We used cotton sack tyeing string for bow strings– they wore out quickly, but when we were sacking potatoes to sell in Bellingham every week, replacement strings were always close at hand. For arrows, we used fine-grained first growth cedar. Most were not fletched and had no arrowhead, just a notch for the bow string, although during a period when I was obsessed with Robin Hood, I made a few arrows with chicken feather fletches and arrow heads made from fragments of copper water pipe. The Indians made usually made their bows from yew, like English long bows, but they used vine maple for the bent wood frames of fish and bird nets.

The Indians also wove long thin and tough vine maple wands into baskets for carrying heavy loads like camas roots and clams. My great grandfather wove baskets which he sold in Bellingham in the early days before we had much cleared land and he had to rely on ingenuity instead of farming to buy coffee and pay the property tax. We still have one of his baskets and I think the frame work is made from vine maple wands, although my grandmother said the basket was woven from willow.

Vine maple sap is sweet. One spring, I tried to make maple syrup. I had no luck with big leaf maples, but I gathered a half cup, probably less, of sweet sap from a vine maple by cutting a half dozen vee-shaped gashes in the bark, driving a nail at base of the vee, putting a little wire bail on a tin can and hanging the can on the nail. The sap collected at the base of the vee, ran down the nail and dripped into the can. The sap was clear and colorless as water and tasted distinctly sweet. The sap stopped running before I got more than that half cup, and I did not try to boil the sap down to syrup. My mother was more impressed by the bugs and dirt that collected in the tin can than with the sap, but I drank it and thought it was pretty good, yet I never tried to gather sap again. Still, in the spring, when I think of it, I cut off a vine maple twig with my jack knife and chew on it, sucking out the the sweetness like a farmer chewing on a stalk of sweet grass.