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Liberty

The United States is hamstrung over liberty. It’s hard to sort out. New covid-19 regulations every week: masking, quarantines, contact tracing, banned gatherings, bars and restaurants closed. The legitimacy of the presidential election is in question.

Tethered border collie in flood
Albert, the border collie, contemplating troubled times for liberty

Joseph Biden is set to win the popular vote by a 4% margin and the electoral vote by 306 to 232. Historically, this is not an especially close election. Not a landslide, but not exceptionally close either.

In the 2016 election the electoral vote went one way, the popular vote the other. The famed supreme court decision in 2000 was pronounced over a 547-vote margin. The closest margin this year is over 10,000. Associated Press has set the standard for calling election since the 1960s. Their summary is here.

Yet people are upset, arguing, misunderstanding, and talking past each other. I sense, for the first time in my life, that some people seriously question the legitimacy of majority rule. And I sense that feelings would be the same no matter which way the election went. This has sent me on a mission to examine my own feelings.

Two Years Before the Mast

With that mental backdrop, last week I read Two Years Before the Mast by a Richard Henry Dana Jr., a book I’ve known of since I was a teenager captured by the idea of going to sea, but never got around to reading. You can get it from the library.

In 1834, Dana was a student at Harvard College. He contracted measles, which damaged his eyes. He couldn’t study. He was told that a long ocean voyage might restore his sight.

His family could have sent him on a grand tour, but instead, in 1836, he signed articles as a common seaman on a merchant voyage to California on the sailing brig Pilgrim.

Two Years Before the Mast is a non-fiction account of the voyage and Dana’s experiences loading cowhides on the Pacific coast for shipment back to Boston. On his return to Harvard, he finished college and went on to a law degree and a successful career as a lawyer and politician.

A day of liberty

I highly recommend the book. Dana is an exceptionally clear and moving writer.

I shall never forget the delightful sensation of being in the open air, with the birds singing around me, and escaped from the confinement, labor, and strict rule of a vessel, —of being once more in my life, though only for a day, my own master. A sailor’s liberty is but for a day; yet while it lasts it is entire. He is under no one’s eye, and can do whatever, and go wherever, he pleases. This day, for the first time, I may truly say, in my whole life, I felt the meaning of a term which I had often heard, —the sweets of liberty.

Dana’s day of liberty was spent with his friend and shipmate, Stimson. How many of us today seek escape from the strict rule of covid-19? To be our own masters, maskless, gathering with our families and friends, singing, laughing, and sharing a holiday? Ah, for a day of liberty.

The dark side of liberty

Dana and Stimson’s day of liberty was granted by Frank Thompson, captain of the Pilgrim. A 19th century sea captain ruled the ship, its officers and crew. At sea, the captain had complete liberty; he answered to no one, could do whatever pleased him, direct the ship wherever he wished.

Well into the voyage, John, a Swede and the best seaman on the crew, stood up for an injured shipmate who was about to be flogged for complaining about his injury. As Dana watched, Captain Thompson had John tied to the rigging and began to swing a rope on the man’s bare back:

As he [Captain Thompson] went on, his passion increased, and he danced about the deck, calling out, as he swung the rope: “If you want to know what I flog you for, I’ll tell you. It’s because I like to do it! —because I like to do it!— It suits me! That’s what I do it for!”

The man writhed under the pain until he could endure it no longer, when he called out, with an exclamation more common among foreigners than with us: “O Jesus Christ! O Jesus Christ!”

“Don’t call on Jesus Christ,” shouted the captain; “he can’t help you. Call on Frank Thompson! He’s the man! He can help you! Jesus Christ can’t help you now!”

At these words, which I never shall forget, my blood ran cold. I could look on no longer. Disgusted, sick, I turned away, and leaned over the rail, and looked down into the water. A few rapid thoughts, I don’t know what,—our situation, a resolution to see the captain punished when we got home,—crossed my mind; but the falling of the blows and the cries of the man called me back once more.

Dana did not have a chance to see the captain punished, although he did stand up for seaman’s rights and started important reforms. On Thompson’s next voyage, before Dana could accuse him of wrongdoing, Thompson contracted a fever in Sumatra, died in misery, and was buried at sea.

Liberty in 2020

In 2020, how are we to treat liberty? Is the desire for liberty, a force that has unleashed the death and destruction of covid-19, like the uncontrolled brutality of Captain Thompson? Or is liberty only Dana and Stimson’s delight that we are temporarily denied by the pandemic?

John Stuart Mill

To answer these questions for myself, I turned to Dana’s contemporary, John Stuart Mill, whom I recollected from first-year college humanities class as the formulator of a balanced and measured definition of liberty. Get his writings from the library.

From John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty:

That principle is, that the sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number, is self-protection. That the only purpose for which power can be rightfully exercised over any member of a civilised community, against his will, is to prevent harm to others. His own good, either physical or moral, is not a sufficient warrant.

Mill is clear. Enforced wearing of masks is legitimate curtailment of liberty because it protects mankind from the virus. Enforcing masks for the protection of the wearer is illegitimate. I guess this means it is okay to remove your mask as you inhale, but you must put it on while you exhale.

This is an argument that might convince some anti-maskers.

John Stuart Mill was onto something.

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The Dread Effanem Crusher: Pioneer Fashion Accessory

Ah, the Effanem (pronounced “F & M”) crusher. On the farms and hills of Whatcom County, baseball caps are de rigueur these days. Men, women, and children all wear them, but sixty years ago, county men and boys favored Effanem crushers, Maine hunting hats they are sometimes called, but I don’t see that Maine has any special claim to them.

Ball caps vs. the Effanem crusher

I used to wear a ball cap, but I’ve gone back to wearing an Effanem crusher most of the time. Rebecca, my wife, who I finagled into giving one to me for my birthday, doesn’t like it, and I imagine I get a few odd glances, but I don’t mind.

The Dread Effanem Crusher
The dread Effanem crusher hunting hat

To swing the deal, I had to compromise with Rebecca. The traditional color for a hunting hat is red. During the last flash of crusher popularity, blaze orange was common. The one I wear now is black, a compromise choice.

Red hats

The red hat was to ensure that hunters did not mistake your head for a deer, pheasant, or duck and blast away. Blaze orange was the same idea, raised a notch.

I was never much of a hunter, but I like a red hat. In the late 1960s, I hiked all over the North Cascades with my cousin Ed. He was a photographer and wannabe prospector who said mountain pictures always came out better when somebody wore red. I went along with him and wore a red hat.

In the 50s and 60s, you could buy a hunting hat at any sporting goods store in the county. I got my first from Ira Yeager’s store, which started in downtown Bellingham near the YMCA.

Angling for a crusher

Last fall, angling for a crusher as a birthday present from Rebecca, I checked out the availability at Yeager’s new store on the Northwest, which can’t have been located there much more than fifty years now. The girl in the clothing section was polite when I asked where I could find an Effanem crusher, but I could tell that she thought old geezers would be better off if they stayed home more.

Since this is 2020, I went online and found three sources for genuine Effanem crushers in red, blaze orange, hunter green, and black. One was a place in Maine that sells aged coyote urine with a Maine hunting hat sideline. I know Rebecca will never order anything from a place called Predator Pee Store, so I passed on it.

Johnson Woolen Mills sells the hats, but nobody owns up to manufacturing them. The obvious candidate, F & M Hat Co., looks genteel and probably shares Rebecca’s attitude toward the Predator Pee Store. Amazon sells them too. I took the easy way and put a red Effanem crusher on my Amazon wish list.

That’s how I got a black one.

Opening day

Now days, there’s not so much hunting in lowland Whatcom County. When I was a kid, the first day of hunting season was an occasion. Mom made me stay close to the yard and Dad avoided going into the woods more than he had to.

Dad always said the first couple days of hunting season were dangerous—early on, game was not as wary as they became after a few days of random gunfire. The easy hunting attracted less experienced and excitable hunters who didn’t know how to handle guns like the steady old hands. Getting a gun permit and hunting license sixty years ago was easier and cheaper than it is now. In the country, it seemed as if almost everyone had a gun of some sort around for shooting pests.

And, as I once overheard someone say, the first day of hunting season was as good a reason as any to get drunk. News of relatives and neighbors killed or wounded in hunting accidents was common.

Pothunters

You don’t hear the word pothunter often, but that is exactly what my grandparents and many of our neighbors were. They hunted for food, not sport. And they did not hunt like sportsmen, who, as their name implies, generally prefer to give game a sporting chance. To my practical grandpa, giving game any chance at all was a waste of time and ammunition.

According to my dad, Grandpa would watch deer carefully during the summer to get to know their habits and quirks, passing out samples from his garden to get them used to him. Toward fall, he would go out early in the morning, just before dawn, where he knew his nearly tame deer would pass, set out a spread of vegetable to get their attention, and wait. He had his rifle ready, a measly little twenty-two because the ammunition was cheap.

When a deer sampled the bait, he would shoot it in the head from close range with a single shot, no messing around. He could make one box of cartridges last several years. Dad said Grandpa took pride in quickly hanging and bleeding out the deer he shot to avoid the off taste of typical sportsman’s venison.

Dad also told me Grandpa didn’t pay much attention to hunting season. In those days, before my time, shooting a deer out of season for the smokehouse on your own farm was your business, nothing for the game warden or the sheriff to fret over. Whether it was the law or not, the season did not affect pothunters on their own land. You might as well try to tell them to thrash their grain or slaughter their hogs by the calendar instead of the weather. For a pioneer farmer, hunting season was nothing more than an annoyance that egged strangers on to trespass.

Times change

By the time I was around, that had all changed.

Throughout hunting season, we often heard shots in the distance and saw hunters wandering through the fields and woods. Today in pandemic 2020, we are in the midst of deer, upland game, and small game seasons. With the exception of regular booms from the trap shooters at the gun club down on the Larson Road, I have not heard shots or seen hunters this year.

I can’t say exactly when the hunters disappeared. I imagine there must still be a few around and there are deer all over, but with houses so close together now, shooting that was merely dangerous sixty years ago is now reckless.

The hunters I know today, cross the Cascades to eastern Washington, Idaho, and beyond to hunt. They hunt to fill their freezers, but with the cost of travel and all, venison is an expensive cut of meat. And, if you ask me, some of these sportsmen could take a lesson in butchering from my grandpa.