January 2006 Archives

On my desk, upside down and half obscured by a stapler, a bold headline tells me the bad news about Amtrak's president. He's been fired. Although I live in a liberal community, I doubt that more than three people in a one-mile radius are thinking about this, today or tomorrow. How does this set me apart? On the surface, it makes me parochial. After all, I have a way of overlooking the issues that burn hot in our suburb. The lack of jogging trails, playing fields, a golf course. People want these things, and our city council wants them too, or doesn't want them, or wants them but doesn't want to fill in the Bay. Concerns for Amtrak have much to do my own consumer preference for trains. And there's the big picture, the choking freeways, the heroin-like dependence on tinpot monarchies for our oil. Yes, there's that. And the Amtrak news, galling though it is, represents only a small part of the nation's decline, a drama unfolding daily. What does one do?

Well, I obsess. How can one fire a man who has brought so much efficiency to an underfunded, chronically squeezed and currently despised rail effort? What will happen if I don't keep some of my mind focused on this outrage? Things are bad enough. The problem is that it gets to be soul-sapping after a while. Which, I suppose, is one of the main offensive techniques in this national struggle. Wear them down, drag it out, wait for them to give up. Meanwhile, my wife is thinking about troubling family matters, my sister is organizing a siblings get together, there's a family reunion due in the northwest this July, I'm supposed to be a member of the social-action committee of a Jewish congregation, my cover crop in those raised beds built at enormous expense is due to be turned under, this is the logical time of year to buy sweaters and there's a sale on, and I have back issues of at least three magazines -- all political -- that are accumulating unread. Better go shopping, too. We're out of butter.

All this, and I'm supposedly semi-retired. This is a time in life when slowing down, reflecting, getting in touch, should be easier than ever. Instead, the list of obligations and distractions seems to grow daily. This is my life. This is the end of my life, if one is honest. This is it. Sitting at my desk makes me borderline hysterical, if truth be told. It is the graveyard of things undone, the refuse pile of attempts and half starts. What am I going to do? My wife has offered to help me clean things up in the office. She does this periodically, and I generally demur. I'm too busy. I haven't the time. Later. Actually, office cleaning puts me through the process of abandoning, releasing, letting go. And that seems to be the bigger problem. What happens when one lets go?

Obsessive thoughts, imaginary conversations, tiny spikes of anxiety, fear of the end. This is my life. It is rolling on and running out every day. And while it continues, there are discoveries. Some are frightening and unpleasant, and that's not exactly what one expects. What does one expect? To find rain spreading over the North Bay. To lead a fulfilled life. To get the library books back in time. To have or not have a brain tumor in my early 60s, like my father and his sister and his brother. I know that the latter is the most useful thought of all, properly applied. Everything about the culture is geared to avoidance of death. Well, not quite everything. This moment isn't. And the next moment won't be about death avoidance, either. There's enough on my desk to make me tired of livin', canned laughter from the typical sitcom will make you scared of dyin', and where is Old Man River?

He's inside me, of course. He's there even if next year is brain-tumor time. He's there as long as he's there. Which is why one needs to be out of doors, in nature, getting a good dose of sky and ocean, as much as possible. Will the nation destroy its rail system, the neocons eat their young, the Alaskan wilderness disappear down an oil pipe? Who is organizing the family reunion? What happens when my car breaks down? It's all rolling along. And I am old, a man, and I need to spend time by the river.

Autumn, 1963. For four years, the upstairs of the white columned old house had served as my father's office and residence. In the first post-divorce year I lived there, eighth grade was literally across the street. In the mornings, I walked out the front door, crossed West Williams at three minutes before 8 a.m. and slid into my desk just as the buzzer rang. After-school hours began just as instantly. By then, my father's office was in full swing, and I walked around the back of the building and climbed the back stairs to our apartment. There wasn't much to do, except homework. Cartoons and old movies wavered on the television, but these were boring. Outside, things were only marginally more interesting. The house and its grounds seemed to belong to another era, and another set of people. The property ended at a high latticework fence. Fat grecian columns made of concrete supported crisscrossed wooden slats, the whole thing peeling. The garage, hailing from the era of model T.'s, had a cracked concrete floor, a leaking roof, and a barn door sliding on a metal rail. The whole property had seemed like a mysterious, possibly haunted mansion when my father had bought it in 1956. But the thrill was gone by 1959, when my father set up his bachelor household with two sons. It was not really a home, just a place to sleep and wait. Waiting is what I did, particularly in the afterschool hours, most often in the vacant half-acre end of the property which abutted the Banning Women's Club. An old stand of bamboo towered over the latticework fence, separating us from the women.

I had read somewhere about compost and decided that our property needed a compost heap. I wasn't sure how to make one, but I got the general idea and had a go at it. I gathered broken sections of wooden lattice discarded from from fence repairs, arranged them in a circle, and threw a pile of pine needles inside. Mr. Weston, who mowed the lawns once a week, got the idea and tossed his clippings in too. I gathered the droppings of stray dogs with a shovel. I watched the pile each day, expecting something to happen. Nothing did, at least nothing very much. The desert was a virtually antiseptic environment where hot winds dried and sterilized everything. A few sprays from the garden hose would've gotten the compost going, but I didn't know this.

My brother and I seemed like virtual enemies much of the time. He was younger, cuter and had learned to stay out of my father's way. I envied my brother's ability to duck trouble. I resented any affection my father gave him. In retrospect, there wasn't a lot to go around. My father had a way of sending me off to Hal's Drugstore for frequent refills of Desoxyn, a methamphetamine prescribed in the 1950s for dieting. I suppose the stuff must have lifted my father from his depression, but it let him down just as hard. He was short tempered and flew into accusatory rages, often at me. I raged back as best I could. The years dragged on.

In the autumn of 1963, my father announced that we were moving. He had taken a job with Kaiser Permanente, a precursor of today's HMOs. We would live in Riverside. We would be moving to a town, not living above his office, going to big schools, driving crowded roads. I thought about the new life throughout the autumn in afternoons in the vacant lot. The compost wasn't happening, I could see that. My brother had a new puppy, though, and that interested me more than anything had in a long time. Someone had given the tiny dog to him, and the two of us fed it, watching it learn to walk in the prickly, dried autumn weeds behind the old garage. Perhaps it was the prospect of moving, or the puppy, but my brother and I were fighting less and spending more time together after school. One day my brother ran upstairs, crying. The puppy had escaped. It had wandered into the bamboo thicket and not come out. We walked downstairs, wandered about the vacant lot, then up and down the adjoining alley. The puppy had disappeared. After awhile, my brother disappeared too, going inside. I stood in the lot, staring at the bamboo, hoping that the puppy might wander out, while knowing that it would not. Something in me was hardening, growing resigned. I wasn't going to cry, let alone feel the poignancy of this puppy, a lost, defenseless thing adrift in bamboo.

In December, my father slammed in and out of the house one Saturday, stashing a few final things in his car. This was it, our last day in Banning. I'd been born here. This was supposedly home. I took a last look at the compost pile. Perhaps in a few years something would come of it, aside from the tomato seedling that had worked its way out of the clippings and dog dung. I had shaken its roots free and planted the lone tomato in the back lot, dutifully running a hose on it now and then. I hadn't dug up the rocky desert soil around the tomato, let alone fertilized it. Still, it seemed to me that the tomato should grow. It hadn't. Over a few months, the plant had only risen a few inches. Stunted, and somehow not the right shade of green, it took on the dimensions of a bonsai. Now, the nights were growing cold. In Banning, high enough for a few flakes of snow every few years, the winters had their share of frosty nights. I thought of the orange trees around Riverside, how they weathered the freezes with the help of old aircraft engines whirring propellers and smudge pots belching sooty smoke. I had my own smudge pot, it seemed, a small, wrought iron hibachi someone had given me. It was the right size for a single hamburger, a toy really. I could hear my father pounding down the wooden stairs. I would find some charcoal, light the hibachi, and keep the tomato plant alive through the cold winter.

At 16 years of age, I knew the thought was foolish. I wouldn't be there, and no one would light the hibachi and keep it going, night after night. I didn't care. I placed the hibachi beside the tomato plant and trusted that some person would find the potential source of tomatoes, the potential source of heat and put the two things together. My father was yelling for us to get in the car. I knew the tomato plant didn't have much of a chance. I tried not to think about it all the way to Riverside.

During one of the bleaker periods in my life, an epoch marked by divorce, worsening paralysis and eventual bankruptcy, each morning I rolled my wheelchair out of my office and up the street to sit by the railroad tracks and gaze north. If I was lucky, an Amtrak train rumbled by. It looked like nothing in particular, except silver and big. The industrial suburbs of Oakland where I worked had a way of rubbing the sheen off everything, and the train which might have appeared sleek and curvilinear in another setting, only seemed clunky and rather slow. Still, I was determined to ride it. And since the thing went to Seattle, that was the logical destination.

By the time I actually bought a ticket, the job had disappeared, my hip had broken and I was in the midst of a period of unemployment, blissfully buoyed by one of those gems of the corporate world, a layoff package. OK, so the money was running out, and I was starting to panic. There was still time, there was still hope, and there I was at the Emeryville Amtrak station, bags packed and prepared for the 9 p.m. departure of the Coast Starlight to Seattle. I certainly had an optimistic anticipation of the journey. I could no longer drive very far and looked forward to seeing the sights and eating in the dining car and sleeping in my own compartment...all luxurious sounding and a pleasant change from my suburban bachelor's routine. Still, one could only expect to have such fond hopes dashed and desiccated by 3 a.m., when the train, always hopelessly late, finally appeared down the tracks. Yes, I'd seen the train before, but the whole thing seemed different. For one thing, its approach was unaccountably quiet. The modern station at Emeryville, where the rails seemed to be set into a landscaped concrete patio, somehow softened the approach of the two-story Starlight, its engine purring, cars gliding silently. Doors opened, light spilled from inside, and uniformed attendants stepped into the 3 a.m. chill and chatted like aliens.

Inside, the compartment seemed to roar with warm, over-lit, miniaturized pleasures. A tiny sink. A toilet. A bed with sheets and blankets. Two windows, one more than I expected, but on the train's lower level sleeping cars deadened in handicapped compartments like this one. Passengers walked from one car to the next on the second level above me. I hadn't slept the night before, for job worries were starting to overtake me. And now it was 3 a.m., and a sleep-deprived quadriplegic should pass into a comatose state fairly easily. But, no, I lay in the bed awake for hours, it seemed. The whole thing was too exciting. Brushing my teeth with Berkeley, then Richmond, then the dark bay sliding by, all of that had been captivating. Even in the morning, with the hours-late train bouncing through orchards north of Chico, the view mesmerized me.

My wife has joined me for a few of the 10 journeys are so I've made on the Coast Starlight. But most I've made alone. The thrill of boarding, of riding, of arriving has hardly abated. The very thought of boarding the train exhilarates me to this day. Late, underfunded, desperately clinging to life, the train still runs. Who knows how much longer? Meanwhile, the thrill of it remains a mystery. There's something about the steely wheeled environment, all sealed windows, muffled sound and almost nautical pitching and rollings that enlivens me. Even the delays, and the average 40 mph the train manages at the best of times, seems adventure-filled. The whole thing is an ordeal, of course, a 24-hour fight to stay upright and not fall, a night with poor sleep, and a feeling of movement fatigue that generally sets in around Portland, in the last hours of the trip. In fact, by the end of the whole thing, Seattle seems like something of a surprise. The skyscrapers drift into view, and I remember that I've come to visit someone. My brother, his wife, my nephews. The truth is that I can't say why I make these trips, why they excite my cells. But they remain in addition, an obsession, and a mystery that compels me onward. Generally, throughout the year, there's always one question in the back of my mind. What is Amtrak charging these days for that handicapped sleeper?

The Bahia Motor Hotel looked pretty cool to a nine-year-old from Banning, California. Not that San Diego didn't look pretty cool in its own right. The entire city had wisely situated itself beside the ocean. And it was a city. Just look at the Cortez Hotel, climbing as high as 10 stories, and right beside an airport, where huge airplanes landed with pistons coughing, propellers blurring. In Banning, the hot winds blowing off the desert sucked everything dry. Weeds crackled, fences splintered, and my parents fell to arguing before the summer moon rose. I do not recall a single word they said, though I must have struggled mightily to hear at night in my bed. Everything came to me around the edges of words, the sharp edges where things bled and came apart.

Such a miracle and a relief to be out of the desert. Not only did San Diego have seagulls, sand crabs, kelp and the ever lapping and mysteriously luminescent ocean, but it had this, the Bahía Hotel. In search of our room, my father drove up one drive and down the other. Always the wrong drive, but all were the right drives from my perspective. A fascinating maze of rooms where teams of maids did the vacuuming and porters with golf carts did the schlepping. The war had only been over for 10 years, and someone must have sensed the resort potential in all those swiftly dredged harbors, reinforced reefs and instant sand bars from which our soldiers leapfrogged across the Pacific. In the Bahia, fast bulldozing and dredging had produced authentic looking mini-peninsulas and inlets dotted with hotel rooms and restaurants.

It seemed out of character for such a place to sink under fog. For I awoke each morning full of a sense of the possibilities of the place, the San Diego Zoo, the rattling roller coaster, the mysterious things that bubbled in sand at the ocean's edge. Admittedly, I was thrown off my vacation stride that summer, for my parents who usually found something like concord in the sparkling seaside distractions, weren't doing so this time. From our first night at the Bahía, they argued late, each accusing the other of waking the sleeping guests. Cars honked, my brother cried, the voices battered. I was very sleepy the next morning, but it didn't matter terribly much, because I was sitting with my father and brother in the Bahía coffee shop. The butter was wrapped in small squares of gold foil. My father told me not to unwrap them. My brother and I had pancakes. Neither of us asked where our mother was, or our sister. They would have breakfast later, my father said. He drank his coffee and stared beyond the plateglass at the sea.

After breakfast, my brother and I played outside our room. Neither of us wanted to go inside. Outside there was a curb and pavement, and a strip of grass, a setting hardly rich with recreational opportunities, even for kids with big imaginations. Water from lawn sprinklers ran down the gutter. Surrounded by desert chaparral, our house had no gutters, let alone sidewalks. My brother and I splashed and tried to dam the novel rivulet with stones. Even outside, golf carts whirring, tires crunching, we could hear our parents' voices, shrill and sharp from the room. A silence. Something had changed. My brother and I found some grass clippings and stuffed them between the stones of our gutter dam. We were stretching this to the limit, the joys of water diversion. Well, I said, let's go inside. Pretty soon. Maybe in a few minutes. A car stopped beside us, a two-tone Pontiac station wagon. My mother rolled down the window. Her eyes were bloodshot and teary. She asked if we wanted to get in. I didn't understand, for there was usually no doubt about cars. You got in or out. I got in the front seat, my brother in the back. We drove silently around the resort maze, then up the coast highway. My mother stopped at a motel, took her bag inside, then stared at her two sons. She would buy us some clothes, she said.

No one said anything about our father or our sister. The fog hung over La Jolla until the last hours of the day, lifting while we ate fish and chips on some restaurant deck. We saw a movie with Bob Hope. The theater was big and empty and had a balcony. Our motel room seemed cold, even with the heat on. I was tired again the next day. My brother and I wanted to go to the zoo. My mother tapped her spoon on the edge of her coffee saucer and said that wouldn't be a good idea. You might run into the wrong people at the zoo. Everyone went to the zoo.

My father began yelling as soon as we pulled into the driveway of our desert home. I really didn't understand what had upset him. He seemed angry at all of us. Well, I thought, at least we had all been to the ocean. I said something about finding shells and a giant dead sand crab. He asked me if I had any idea what he had been through. Without a car, and with the baggage for five people, he and my sister had made their way back home on trains and buses. Did I have any idea? No, I said. But I lied. I already had an idea. I'd liked the ocean and the curbs, sidewalks and cars. I didn't like the desert.

Drivers are terribly polite in Menlo Park, California. And at a particularly blind intersection, where an angling curb ramp and parked cars make the crossing dangerous, motorists and I get into a frequent battle of politesse. They stop and motion me on. While I at wheelchair height see what they cannot see, which is that I cannot see beyond their stopped car, see? See man in wheelchair crossing street in front of polite motorist, only to be creamed by unseen car. So, when cars stop for me, this game ensues. You go. No, you go. And to short-circuit this dance, I recently made an elaborate show of backing up the curb ramp with a sweeping gesture of "onward" to the driver. Sweeping myself a little too far off the sidewalk and into a recently dug out flower bed. Actually, one wheel just hung off the sidewalk over the flower bed. Spinning in space. And trust me, campers, there's no traction in space.

I know the language of cripples in distress. No white flag necessary. Just stand up. Standing says it all. This man is not in his chair, not in his element, and he might as well not be in his body. I pushed myself forward toward the edge of the wheelchair cushion and stood. Once up on my feet, I gingerly gripped the armrest and walked to the side of the chair. Without my weight, the right wheel might just get enough purchase on the sidewalk edge to climb back on the pavement. It's not every day that I stand and walk to the side of my wheelchair. Certainly, it's rare that I do this outside. Whatever the circumstance, the act of standing sent aches up and down my back, through my hip and along my sides. When did this happen? When did I become a mass of aches and pains? This subtle reality must linger in the background all the time. Old and defeated.

A passing guy on a bicycle asked if I needed any help. Midway into my own remedy, I suggested he pull the chair while I hit the joystick. Instead, he just lifted the 200 pound thing on the pavement. I thanked him, and he pedaled off. Over and done. As I expected. So why do my brief setbacks have such resonance these days?

Because loss is hard work, and there's no shirking. Kick the little fuckers in the teeth, that is my response to the attackers, the young men who shot me 40 years ago. Teeth kicking being only the start, a prelude to the eye-for-an-eye remedy that has lingered at my mind. Capturing the little disadvantaged, racially oppressed band and trucking them into the hills -- which, owing to the era of my attack, are the Berkeley Hills -- bound and gagged, of course. Until late at night, on some roadside, beneath the eucalyptus, each one of them shall be injected, high in the neck, with just enough phenol to put their spinal cords permanently to sleep. Oh, yes, I'd load them back in the truck, drive back to Berkeley and unload in a back street near one of the hospitals. I want them to have treatment. They are all going to be quadriplegics and deserve the finest care. Such as my fantasy. That's where I'm coming from. That and the remembrance of life with my parents, which I'd written off in youthful expectation of something better. In short, I'm bitter.

No, I don't seem bitter. Not with all this generous waving off of motorists who stop for me at crosswalks. My engaging interactions with the staff of local grocery stores. My self-deprecating humor. I fit in so splendidly, being so mature, well-adjusted and all. Now it's all catching up with me. I resent people with able bodies and full lives. I don't want to hear about how much I've learned, grown and evolved with my burden. Fuck my burden. I want to walk down the street looking at the birds. In London of the 1970s, the birds were the women, of course. I don't know what made them avian. The expression came from God knows where. But I was living there, going about my life in a remarkably vigorous, neuromuscularly robust way. In the mornings, I would hobble five blocks to the Holland Park Tube Station and hit the commute road. At first, this involved four tube trains, such was the trip to Mayfair and on to St. James Park. That meant schlepping through a succession of stations, up the stairs and down the corridors. All to get from the bedsit, to the psychoanalyst's, to the part-time job. My life. My life on public transit.

In the final year of my stay, seated on one of the old London buses, Ichatted with an American woman. It was fun to hook up with those from home. What were we doing in London? Well, her husband was on sabbatical, working on some academic project. And me? Oh, I told her some bullshit about working terribly hard at something terribly important. Anything to cover up my daily attempts at self-cure and trainee part-time employment in a London nonprofit. I may have told her I was "covering" the London Film Festival, for I did talk myself into a press pass one year and even sent off some reviews here and there. What I recall, aside from the inflated account of what I was doing, was my omission of anything physically challenging in my life. I was doing this, I was doing that, and never mind that I was riding a London bus with half a body. Actually, I must have cut quite a quadriplegic figure, climbing on and off bus platforms with the crutch hooked into the crook of my right paralyzed arm, my functioning left hand gripping the railings and hauling me up and in. The conductors, who were plentiful in those days, usually shooed someone out of the seat closest to the rear. Arduous, but I carried on as though no one noticed. Including me. I wonder what the American woman on the bus thought of her compatriot who sat there with the crutch in his elbow, fighting to hold his torso upright with a half-paralyzed abdomen, fishing on his pocket with numbed fingers to count out his fare for the conductor. All the time chatting about his terribly interesting "work." While the real work was there on full display.

What did she think? She probably thought something human. That what I was doing was hard, that it required courage. That not everyone would bother. Even today, it is hard for me to absorb this knowledge. I had trouble seeing myself sympathetically. My life seemed to be failure. Never mind the triumph over adversity, for the adversity was all a mistake. My mistake. I should have been more alert the night of my shooting. I'd taken the wrong way home. I shouldn't have stepped away from the gun, just quietly handed over my wallet, instead of my spinal cord. And so all this neuromuscular nonsense with the bus and crutch and the one hand that couldn't feel what it kept dropping, all of this shouldn't have happened. And therefore it wasn't happening. I was fine. I had some work. Never mind that I was riding buses in the middle of the afternoon. Let me tell you about my job.

Now the job is gone, the body is going fast, and the end is nigh, more or less. Give a decade or two. Probably. Though not certainly. I have put off a lot of what can't be put off. I'm discovering the angry cripple within. Stay tuned.

I'm not sure why it's called Princeville, nor does the question even occur to me while sitting on the terrace of the Princeville Resort enjoying a stunning omelet. The omelet is vying with the view for my attention and wins by a slight margin, for it will soon turn cold and the view will not. Such is my reasoning. It is all the reasoning I can manage at this moment on the Amniotic Coast. We will face the next moment if and when we come to it.

Whatever the origins of the Princeville Resort, sitting on its terrace having breakfast makes me feel like a prince. For wasn't this a princely idea, getting up early and driving to the northern end of Kauai to take one's morning meal in inexpensive luxury? The omelet proves to be so rich and savory, sporting both bacon and avocado, that I'm forced to take my gastrointestinal time. Between forkfuls, I gaze down from the cliffside hotel at the sweeping bay where waves obediently mass half a mile from shore, gently lifting surfers as they crest. The waves roll in at an endless diagonal, showing off the curve of the coast, the white of the distant sand, the volcanic black of the sheer Polynesian mountains. The magnificence of the scene is truly cinematic, and this is not a turn of phrase but a fact of film history. "South Pacific" was filmed on the beach below me.

So why is it that from the warm and liquid depths of the day, in this moment of high pampering and indulgence, of tropical scenery and cholesterol, I am beginning to feel uncomfortable about the Princeville Resort? Maybe the decor. Someone not terribly in tune with things Polynesian has fancied up the place. The restaurant furniture, tubular-steel Louis XVI, doesn't fit. The lobby's crystal chandeliers are so outsparkled by the glinting Pacific as to seem silly. As for the Italianate statuary, one plaster cherub hangs off the terrace railing just to my right, slightly obscuring my view of the promontory used as South Pacific's "Bali Hi." But, okay, so the hotel decorators didn't get it, so what? The decor is there to raise the tone, or at least the room rates. Because in the real world, Polynesian splendor probably isn't worth $400 a night without a touch of Caesars Palace. The real world as defined by business, that is. Which defines everything these days, particularly in America. Where the real world has never been more unreal.

It was too much to expect human beings to receive the gift of Hawaii as a gift. Even as the Polynesians waded ashore from their Thor Heyderhal rafts around 1000 A.D., the first of man's environmental depredations sauntered in behind them. The pigs, real ones with curlicue tales, occupied the rafts, and soon the barbecue pits. Of course, within minutes they were bounding through the Hawaiian jungles, digging up roots and munching bird eggs. These remote islands were so protected by thousands of miles of open ocean that even mosquitoes hadn't arrived. Until something, probably bilge water expelled from an anchoring ship, introduced mosquitoes to the Hawaiian Islands in the early 1800s. With disastrous results for species unused to having their blood sucked and sullied. In such an idyllic, utterly isolated land, where magnificent birds nest on the ground like sitting ducks, literally and metaphorically, it didn't take much to start losing whole species. Today, on top of feral pigs, the islands have feral cats, and feral chickens, along with the occasional mongoose and rat. Altogether man has despoiled Hawaii. Not because he meant to, but because he usually can't help it.

On the other hand, there are the taro fields. Marlou wandered about them just a couple of days before. No one can tell me exactly what taro is, or why the Hawaiians cultivate it so enthusiastically, but there it is, growing in flooded fields, much like rice. I've seen rice farmed in equally boggy acreage north of Sacramento. The difference is that in parched California, flooding fields raises eyebrows, particularly when you're pouring tax-supported water over your crop. In rainy Hawaii no one worries about the water, but developers certainly eye the land, and setting aside hotel-ready property to raise taro root raises an entirely different set of eyebrows. The miracle is that in both places, California and Hawaii, human restraint has prevailed and nature has, in a small way, prevailed too. In California's arid central valley, flooded fields may attract attention, but they also attract birds. The rice fields double as bird sanctuary. Hawaii's taro fields do the same, and Hawaiian fish and game people keep an eye on the preserve.

Sharing with the animals, pulling back, making room. This isn't our natural tendency. But it's close to our highest achievement. It represents lessons learned, or taught, in man's oldest myths. That God or nature or whatever one wants to call that which is so much greater than ourselves and allows us to live and die and drink coffee and watch HBO, that force is worthy of respect. If not worship. America's most vocally religious decry the rise of things secular, but they seem to overlook things imperial. What could be more imperious than trying to upstage a volcano with a plaster cherub? Especially if you believe that the cherub will outlast the volcano. Trust me, it won't.