BOOK REVIEW—COMMAND AND CONTROL by Eric Schlosser

 A weird confluence of incidents reminded me of a book that I had been meaning to take in, and as luck would have it, the library had the audiobook.  I had a kind of a freakout after Trump’s demented speeches at Davos, realizing that this mentally compromised person was the sole and absolute commander of a few thousand nuclear weapons.  This mad king has also been making noises about resuming atomic weapons testing, which is both illegal and immoral.  Then, my sweetie, who has been catching up on back episodes of the “Welcome to Night Vale” podcast listened to the episode “The Deft Bowman,” which is a riff on a real-life, barely-averted nuclear war in the 1980’s caused by a NATO exercise called “Able Archer.” So I’ve been listening to Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  

The nuclear genie has been out of the bottle for 80 years.  We are not all dead from blast, burns, radiation sickness and nuclear winter.  There has not been a nuke used in war since America bombed Nagasaki.  There has not, as far as can be determined, ever been an accidental nuclear detonation.  After taking in this book, one realizes that those three things are miraculously improbable.  Also, one realizes that the movie “Dr. Strangelove” is damned close to a documentary.  Having grown up in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, and having visited Hiroshima in my teens, I’m probably a little more attuned to the threat of nukes than the average American, and the combination of recent events and this book leaves me very jittery indeed.  

The development of the atomic bomb and the thermonuclear bomb is an amazing story, with human heroes and villains and staggering feats of intellect and organization.  The very early decisions about its construction, use and control are the stuff of movies and opera (literally…as I write I am listening to “Doctor Atomic”).  There is inspiration to be found in that story.  But the first several decades of the our existence with the bomb were improvisatory, shaped by ignorance, heedless urgency, stupidity, paranoia, politics, and other ugly human traits.  

Schlosser highlights the conflicts that determined the early history of atomic weapons.  Presidents Truman and Eisenhower insisted on absolute civilian control of the weapons, but the military hated this.  The United States insisted on absolute sovereignty over these weapons, but NATO allies (at whose bases the weapons were stationed) hated this.  Generals wanted more and more weapons, down to the battalion level, but strategists hated this.  Weapon designers grew increasingly concerned about safety and robustness to accidents—that is, making it less likely for a bomb to go off—and the armed forces hated this, because it increased the likelihood of a dud.  All the while, there was political pressure from presidential candidates agitating about “bomber gaps” and “missile gaps” (perceived shortcomings in the arms race) to field as many bombs and weapons systems as possible, safety be damned.  

By Kennedy’s time the world could very easily have been destroyed by accident.  Hundreds of fragile atomic bombs were distributed throughout NATO countries.  Command of these weapons had been “pre-delegated” to field commanders far below General rank.  American control of these American weapons was nominal at best.  The weapons were often poorly secured, guarded by a single sentry armed with a rifle for an 8-hour shift.  The weapons were excessively delicate and hastily constructed.  There were no “fail-safe” systems, they could be triggered by a single rifle shot or static electricity, and inspections found items such as screwdrivers and Allen wrenches had been accidentally left in the bombs.  The early ballistic missiles had a less than 50% successful launch rate, and the strategic bombers using new technologies such as jets and aerial refueling had a tendency to catch fire, spontaneously release bombs, or crash.

Worse, there was no real strategy for using nukes beyond “use them all, and use them all at once.”  Each branch of the armed forces had its own target list, so that a single target would be hit by several nukes.  The “SIOP” (Single Integrated Operational Plan) was supposed to rationalize this, but it confirmed total commitment and allowed no flexibility, no pause for negotiation, no limited use…and no planning for what comes after.  Presidents from Kennedy to G. W. Bush hated the SIOP, but never did more than tinker with it.  For much of this time, America had a “Launch on Warning” strategy, that would trigger—with very few checks—a massive attack on the warning that enemy missiles had been launched.  

This book focuses on American command and control systems, because that’s where the information is.  The president is still the one person with ultimate launch authority, and the system is designed to obey, but the president’s choice sets off a fairly rigidly-specified chain reaction.  The Soviets (later the Russians)—ironically, because they were totalitarian—had more flexibility, but chose not to use it.  They created a “dead hand” system, like that in “Doctor Strangelove”—if any unknown nuclear explosion were detected in Soviet territory, a massive attack would automatically, autonomously be triggered.  Like in the movie, they did not announce the existence of this system, and whether it is currently in effect is the subject of strategic ambiguity.

“Command and Control” focuses on what can and has gone wrong, both on a policy/strategic level, and in a highly detailed, minute-by-minute account of an accident at an American Titan II missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980.  The tick-tock of the Damascus incident is gripping and suspenseful, and knowing how much could go wrong with hypergolic fuel, oxidizer, and a hydrogen bomb in a contained space, terrifying.  The longer saga of how close calls—not a few, not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of close calls—brought us to the edge of the abyss will keep you awake at night for a long time.  A flock of geese, a weather rocket, a misloaded computer tape, a misplaced foam cushion, a tired pilot, a blown tire, a capricious leader, a paranoid leader, a drunk leader…all of these things and too many more have nearly killed us all hundreds and hundreds of times over.  

Mostly, we’ve learned mistakes, albeit grudgingly and with resistance from various establishments.  Most of America’s ICBMs are solid-fueled, and somewhat safer than the Titan II.  Most of our warheads (shame on the Navy!) have been modified to use stable explosives rather than highly unstable compounds to trigger the atomic reaction.  Most of the computer hardware is relatively up-to-date, and inventory and control systems are improved.  Until Trump, we had moved away from the SIOP and Launch-on-warning.  

But there are still problems.  Complex, massively integrated systems run by humans are inherently sensitive to failures that ramify well beyond a single point.  Our nukes occasionally get sent to the wrong base, or loaded on the wrong system.  There are fewer bombs than at the peak of the Cold War, but more countries—including some worrisome ones like Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea—have them.  With the United States under Trump alienating its allies, other countries are considering getting into the game.  While I was writing this, I learned that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved their famous “doomsday clock” to 85 seconds before midnight: “Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline…” 

We are part of the problem.  Each citizen who can vote elects presidents seemingly without ever considering that we are electing a single individual who can irrevocably, without reason, issue a command to end humanity.  The situation is too much like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” in which, by a combination of whim and accident, a suicidal dictator takes the entire world with him to the grave—only, in America, we choose it.   

Trump himself is uniquely terrifying.  His weird psychology makes him want to use maximum force and bluster, so he wants more nuclear weapons and to restart testing just so he looks strong.  He is also increasingly non compos mentis, but nobody in his political party seems capable of saying no to him.  There is no precedent or plan for this in our command and control systems.  In the last months of Nixon’s administration, he was paranoid and using too much alcohol, but:  his advisors made it clear that generals should check with them before acting on his orders.  It’s not clear that there is such a check on Trump.  Picture him, at 2:00 AM one of those nights where he is just posting and posting on his phone, aggrieved because a Black, female mayor or governor smacked him around politically and publicly embarrassed him, needing to lash out to restore his ego…

Schlosser’s book is definitely worth a read.  Misery loves company, and I would like your company in the misery of better understanding the world we live in.  The account of the Damascus incident is gripping, although the book is occasionally disorienting as it goes back and forth between that and various times and places from 1945 to 2013.  It’s a long-ish book, and it certainly won’t help you to sleep better at night.  However, it will make you appreciate the miracle of your continued existence, help you understand more about some of the forces important in the world, and maybe change your mind about nuclear weapons.   

 Parental Artifact Number 25(a)—Naughty postcards.

In the boxes of postcards that we found in my parents’ closet, there were a fair number that modern sensitivities find problematic. They are fossils, imprints of attitudes that, like dinosaurs, once ruled the earth but are now (thankfully) endangered. They were sent by members of my dad’s lab, away at meetings or on vacation, to the drudges who were stuck behind their benches, mostly in the ‘70’s and early ‘80’s. From the messages, it seems like it was expected, close to an obligation, to send a racy card back to the group, whether from Tahiti or Belgium or Bangalore. 

In fifty years, a lot has changed in academia. I remember very few women in my dad’s group from that time—there was a lab assistant who was there for most of his research career, a professor who was associated with his group, a visiting postdoc and a handful of grad students. I don’t think my dad felt any need to fight against the mores of academia on their account at that time, he probably just took it for granted. Fifty years later, recent cohorts of grad students in the biological sciences have been majority female. Workplace standards of what is acceptable have changed. Complain about “woke” all you want, those changes are uncomplicatedly, unreservedly good. I look at these cards and what is written on them and I have to wonder what I would have felt, were I a 22 year old woman with a serious interest in insulin receptors, looking at those cards taped to the break room ‘fridge. 

I’m not going to condemn my dad as a sexist pig, nor am I going to excuse him as “a man of his time.” I think, if anything, I’ll chide him (or, rather, him as he was in the 1970’s) as perhaps not as thoughtful of the “other” as he could be—not actively bad, he was busy and just couldn’t be bothered to do the extra work to resist being bad or change habits or go against the flow. Honestly, I don’t need these postcards to remind me of several other instances of this lack of deeper thought from him, a laugh at the expense of someone not in the main stream. But these cards are useful to remind me that sometimes doing good—or even more trivially, failing to do bad—just takes a tiny modicum of thinking about others from their point of view, and really doesn’t cost me that much, so I should do it more often.

(There is one of these many cards I’ll single out, a slab of beefcake amidst the cheesecake—to the lab, from Sarah J., who wrote from Honolulu in 1983, “I was looking for a dirty card when THIS “Island Beauty” caught my eye!” I don’t remember Sarah, but I’d like to tell her I’m kind of sorry for my dad’s shortcomings, and I hope you stuck with it. Here’s to you, Sarah, and hopefully we can keep making progress.)

 Parental Artifact #25? A box of postcards (used); a box of postcards (blank); and a nice pen.

The internet is full of rabbit holes that one can fall down into and then emerge from hours later, blinking, mouth dry, wondering why it’s dark out. This box of used postcards that got stashed away in my parents’ closet is much the same thing. Bright pictures, short texts that come out of nowhere and are occasionally very revealing or enlightening, or just enough to keep you scrolling on—it’s all there.

There are postcards here over a hundred years old, postcards less than a decade old, postcards my parents sent and received, postcards to and from my grandparents, my great grandparents, work associates, distant family, people I know and people I have never heard of. They are all in a jumble, and making sense of things is a challenge. A card to somebody I’ve never heard of, from somebody else I’ve never heard of, about spring break in San Diego 75 years ago is next to a card my mom sent to my aunt from a vacation twenty years ago. My ability to parse this jumble, how much interest I have in a card, and how much it ads to a character in my memory, is a linear function of how closely related I am to the sender.

I can read little snippets of the relationship between my parents in the cards my dad sent to my mom when he was a young professor away at a conference and she was at home, pregnant with one of my brothers (“REMEMBER TO TAKE YOUR VITAMINS!”—what a biochemist thing to write!). My parents sent lots of postcards to their siblings and parents while they traveled, and often there was the annotation “please save this card,” so they were able to get the cards back as souvenirs. That’s always nice, because I can read my mom or dad’s account of things—even at a posh tourist lodge in Kenya, sweat and flies were annoying, and the kids were rambunctious to the point of concern (sorry, mom).

My grandparents, particularly on my mom’s side, were prodigious postcarders. After they retired, they traveled widely, favoring ocean travel. There were often daily updates, written after a ship-board dinner, as they worked their way up and down the coast of Mexico and beyond. Nothing especially deep—Grandpa was grouchy about a taxi driver, or the market was interesting. There are a couple of cards to and from a great-grandfather on my mom’s side—Christmas greetings, or the complicated business of arranging a meeting while overseas. There are also cards from uncles, aunts, great-uncles and great-aunts, and so on. I did not know them very well, but it is interesting to see what their cards suggest about relationship between them and my parents.

Outside the family, there are a lot of cards between my dad and his various professional associates. Science has long been an international effort so the correspondence was worldwide—former lab mates from Argentina to New Zealand, reprint requests from countries that no longer exist, and lots of cards from my dad and others, away at meetings in the US and abroad, back to their co-workers. And then there are lots of cards about which I have no idea. Maybe they were sent by friends of my grandparents? Still others, I do not recognize the name of either the sender or the recipient—how did these even end up in my parents’ closet? Aside from bits of gossip that are amusing on their own, these don’t really mean much to me.

(I will just note, as an aside, that these cards give lie to the idea that there was a golden age of cursive penmanship. The cards from 1910 are just as illegible as any I write, eccentric spelling is the rule over the entire collection, and micrographia, while great for sending as much information as possible, makes receiving that information difficult.)

There is a larger interest that these cards trigger, less about what was communicated than about how. As Marshall McLuhan noted, the medium is the message. A postcard is necessarily public, open for anyone to read (the Russian word for postcard is “Otkritka” or “open writing”). A postcard is also, despite the efforts of micrographic correspondents, terse. You are lucky to get one solid thought on a card, so they’re not especially deep. They are also, mostly, biased towards being one-way communication. Written on vacation, they can take days or weeks to reach their destination, by which time the sender has moved on to an unknown address so the tone is declarative and replies are rare. All of this sounds sort of like social media, facebook posts or tweets.

However, the resemblance is superficial, the differences bedrock fundamental. Despite being open, postcards are sent to one person (or for my dad’s lab postcards, to a group), and mostly, they are the only ones who see it. While they may not be deep, they do convey meaningful relationship—they are more expensive and time consuming to produce than texts. And while they can be hard to respond to directly, they are more permanent. In my dad’s lab, and in my house, they would get taped to a refrigerator or other surface and stay for years. While I look at these cards sent a hundred years ago, I doubt that any descendent of mine or yours will look at our texts a hundred years from now.

My grandparents had no way to post a photo on facebook, telling a hundred of their friends that they were having a great time in Ensenada but the entertainment was a bit risqué. They would tell the handful of postcard recipients; if they wanted to be more public, they would invite a bunch of folks over for a slide show after returning home. In the next generation, to communicate more broadly, my parents might also include something in their xeroxed end-of-the-year letter. The opportunity provided by social media is truly wonderful, and I try to imagine how my parents would have worked with it, if they could comprehend it. But it is a qualitatively different form of communication. I know that I write differently when I am writing to an individual or small group than when I am writing “publicly.”

So there is the trade—permanence, and a building a more direct personal relationship, in exchange for easily reaching a hundred people to say that the view from the hotel is nice but the food is expensive and made so-and-so sick.

Which brings me to box #2–a lot of blank postcards, and a nice pen. A lot of these cards are souvenirs. Despite writing a lot of postcards, my parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents bought more postcards than they sent, a practice I continue. They are good, cheap, easy-to-carry mementos, especially when cameras were clunky, film was troublesome, and you want a well-produced image of a place. Some of these cards were given away—airlines used to put them in the seat pouches along with the barf bags, and hotels would use them for advertising, and I have a lot of those. Another sizable bunch are of Los Angeles, from when our hometown pharmacy/stationer closed down and they were getting rid of stock. I also have a Parker 51 fountain pen that may have been a graduation gift for my mom, and writing with this pen is a sensuous experience, like getting exactly the right wax on your skis or wearing silk. It seems to me that it would be wrong not to put the cards and pen to use, like leaving a violin unplayed.

So, if I have your address, or if you send me your address, or send me a postcard, I’ll send you a random card (Ok, not totally random—I won’t send the ones my great-grandfather got in the Dutch East Indies, or their like). It will be a postcard, so don’t expect profundity (or legibility), but it will convey my regards, and you can keep it, if you will; the picture will at least be nice or amusing. Maybe you’ll send one back? Maybe in this age of tweets and texts and IM’s, can we resurrect the postcard and the distinctive connection it makes? I’m not going to abandon social media. I mean, this musing IS on social media, I’m not going to print out dozens of copies of it and send them individually to all my friends. But, it is so nice to get something in the mail that isn’t an advertisement or a bill. Why not greetings from a far-flung friend?

 Parental Artifact #24–tilework

This is not much to look at—some pleasing but not especially flashy tile work, in what was my mom’s bathroom. While it’s not much to look at, it’s something I think about often, sometimes every week.

My parents’ house underwent two major phases of remodeling and renovation. One was when I was extremely young—I can barely remember scattered details of how it was before. It made sense: my parents had just recently moved in, my dad had just started tenure, and it was clearly time for them to put their stamp on their own house and better meet the needs of their young family. The second big overhaul was at the other end of family life—my brothers were either in college or on their way, and I was in high school. It made sense: my parents, successful and in the ripeness of their careers, wanted to revise the house to suit their matured desires. This would have been over a period of a few years in the early 1980’s, When I was in high school.

The early ‘80’s were a period of change not just for my family, but for entire nations. About this time, my native city started getting the nickname “Teherangeles”. A repressive regime in Iran had led to the development of a substantial Persian émigré community, and when that repressive regime was overthrown by another even more repressive regime, that community grew considerably. I was a dumbass, self-centered high schooler. I had a couple of Persian classmates, but didn’t think much about them beyond the present tense, in which one was a really nice guy with a strange name and the other was an entitled prick with a strange name. Maybe I thought about the hostages in the US embassy a little, but I certainly did not think about oppression, torture, fundamentalism, theocracy, displacement, being a refugee, being a stranger, losing everything, and having to find everything again when you had already lived most of your life.

My mom wanted some changes to the bathroom we always thought of as “hers”. Since small children no longer needed bathing, a bath was no longer necessary. A bidet would be nice. And, just a small amount of decorative niceness would be nice, a step up from plainly functional, so some tile to replace linoleum. I don’t recall how decisions were made about fixtures and woodwork and tiling and contractors and so forth, being much more concerned about high school.

I do remember talking, briefly, with the contractor doing the tile work. He was an older guy—which is to say, he was probably about as old as I am now, thinning hair tending towards grey. His English was good, not great, but far better than my mastery of any second language. I enjoyed the diversion of watching him work, patiently and evenly setting tiles on the adhesive, carefully mixing and adding the grout. I don’t know why I asked him about how he came to do tile work; such a question was pretty uncharacteristic, given how self-centered I was as a teen. But he explained that he wasn’t always a tile-setter; he had been a medical doctor, a G.P., in Iran. He was doing well under the Shah, but…a lot of narrative was elided, and he said simply that he was here now, and getting a medical license was not possible for him. He knew how to do tile work, so that’s what he did.

His narrative didn’t make that much impact on me at the time. Somehow, though, it stuck. The older I’ve gotten—the closer I’ve gotten to his age—the more I learn about the tragic story of Persia, the more I learn about displaced persons, the more I learn about refugees, the more I learn about my grandfather’s emigration, the more I learn about loss, longing, alienation…the more I think about this man, once a successful doctor, now in a strange country on the far side of the world, speaking a strange language, doing hard, physical, and not especially prestigious labor. He seemed to be OK with it, but the calm waters must have been very, very deep.

I think one of the most universal human feelings is alienation. Even among the completely settled, once in a while there is a pang of “this just isn’t my real home.” If that feeling weren’t so widespread, I don’t think there would be any need for religion. If I ever get even the slightest feeling of that separation from my true home—and being human, that happens pretty regularly—the memory of the guy setting tile in my mom’s bathroom, kneeling over his work and getting pestered by an unthinking teenager, comes to mind unbidden, to admonish me. I don’t necessarily feel better, but I can at least take stock of my blessings.

 Parental Artifact #23–Anza-Borrego State Park

OK, so this is a little bit more nebulous than an artifact. I can’t hold it in the palm of my hand, and I can’t properly say that it is something I own (especially since I no longer pay taxes in the State of California). But, all the same, it is something that my parents gave to me and my brothers.

Anza-Borrego State Park can be readily defined. It has boundaries, it contains geographical and geological and cultural features that can be enumerated. The topological map seems to encompass all of it, flattened into two dimensions and given coordinates. Most geographies will note its features, and as I stand on its sandy soil or varied rocks, I can experience it in two dimensions, like an ant crawling across the surface of a wrinkly map. Some knowledge of geology adds a third dimension, as alluvial fans fill deep basins and faults plunge far into the earth. A little more knowledge of geology brings a fourth dimension, time, and the landscape becomes a snapshot of a vast opera of orogeny, metamorphosis, erosion, deposition, uplift and earthquakes.

The geographies of many indigenous peoples have an additional dimension, one that is like the deep time of western geologists, but thick in the air and as real as—or, on a personal level, more real—than the forces that turn mountains into sand dunes. It is a slurry of history, memory, experience, and lore that is every bit as real as rocks. This dimension is evidenced by place names. Western place names are about people, animals, or features—the park has Font’s Point, Palm Canyon, Coyote Creek, and so on. In contrast, in the indigenous geography, places are named after what happened that one time at that place. The past becomes a permanent part of the present, and time and geography get mixed into a chunky stew at places like “That wash where the VW bottomed out and we had to dig it out” or “The place where we filled bags with sand for mom’s cactus garden.”

That geography of memory is the Anza-Borrego State Park that my parents gave us. We started going there almost every winter for a few days’ vacation sometime in the 1970’s. There were things we could count on. Fried bread from the Coleman stove for breakfast, a hike up a wash or canyon or drive to see some unusual plant during the day, a lunch break of crackers and cheese and fruit and precisely divvied up chocolate, a return to camp for dinner, then reading in the light of the Coleman lantern, with planning what the next day’s adventure would be. We had a few guide books but Lindsay’s “The Anza Borrego Desert Region” was the go-to.

The trip I just took there, with my brothers and a group of friends, is quite similar. Some of the hardware is different (I have the old Coleman stove, but we used my middle brother’s newer stove; the light at night was provided by LED’s), but the rhythm is the same. We were only there for one full day on this trip. In the light of the lantern on Monday night, we consulted Lindsay (now in its sixth edition, though we still had the first), and we decided to try Hellhole Canyon for our walk the following day.

The map and the guidebook say Hellhole Canyon; in the geography of memory, it’s the one where mom tore her jacket on the tangle of catclaw that filled canyon, the one where we hiked down from the top that one time, the one where dad dropped us off and we walked all the way down the California Riding and Hiking trail, and much more. The memories were thick enough that they stepped on each others’ toes, and our memories argued amongst themselves about whether we could go down the canyon from the top to the bottom, or whether we ever actually did such a hike. We were pretty sure about tearing garments on the catclaw trees though.

So we parked some cars at the bottom of the canyon, then drove in others up to the top and started hiking down. After a couple of miles, the canyon grew steeper. And steeper. And steeper still; to keep going meant a lot of scrambling over huge boulders and the occasional short slide down a dry waterfall. Eventually I was sent on ahead to scout, and after a couple hundred meters I concluded that it might be doable but given the composition of our party, it should definitely not be attempted. So, we enjoyed the vista and declared lunch (crackers, cheese, an orange, and some chocolate). Sated, we turned back, and after a few hundred meters of scrambling over and around and under boulders, the canyon mellowed out and we had a pleasant walk back to the cars.

Brother Mig and I still had itchy feet, and there was about an hour and a half of sunlight left; so, from the cars at the bottom of the canyon, we decided we would try to reach at least as far as the palm oasis. It was some VERY brisk hiking, and some scrambling over boulders, but we got there and it was lovely. There was no surface water but the palm grove was thick and lush, and the palms shared the damp sandy soil with sycamores and willows. The oasis is such a surprise, a place of peace and fullness in the desert landscape, that it was tempting to linger too long there. Our return pace was even more up-tempo, with pauses to take in the fiery colors of the sunset as we zipped across the wash.

Nothing stays the same forever. The USGS topo map for Hellhole Canyon is pretty far out of date, not showing the highway or a couple of the trails. The first edition of Lindsay’s book is mostly up to date, but floods and fires rearrange things. The terrain of boulders differed from that in our memories, perhaps due to flash floods, and we encountered almost none of the catclaw that was so thick in previous visits, possibly owing to a fire of which we saw evidence.

But, walking through the landscape, I have changed it in my memory. I can now name new places—the place where we talked about gardens, the place where we had to squeeze under a boulder, and the dry pool where we had a delightful lunch. The geography of memory in Anza-Borrego is an especially rich inheritance from my parents, and dozens of its canyons and washes are full of things I can see that are not on any map; and with every visit I burnish and refresh and remodel this geography, and will hopefully continually to do so every chance I can.

 Parental artifact #22 (I think, it’s been a while) : a “Western” shirt

Given that it’s styled as “western” or “ranch” wear, I suppose it’s appropriate that I wear this on my farm in the West. It is one of a bunch of similar shirts that I inherited from my dad—very light weight cotton/synthetic blend, mother-of-pearl snap buttons, western-styled details such as the pocket flaps and collar. They cry out for a bolo tie or kerchief, and I often wear a bandana when I wear them. They are ideal for my work, providing protection against the sun and hay dust on a hot day without being too warm. They’ve gotten a lot of use, and are slowly succumbing to the indignities of farm life—mysterious stains, gruesome tears from getting caught on fences and the like, and a bit of fraying from being chewed on by goats.

These shirts date from the second-to-last chapter of my dad’s life—after retirement, after driving became kind of dicey, but before the fog of Alzheimer’s Disease grew so thick that he was permanently lost.

In a much earlier chapter in my parents’ shared life, when they were in college in the 1950’s, they enriched their lives by joining a couple of clubs. They were members of the UC Hiking Club, and hiking and the outdoors stayed a part of their life until almost the last chapter. Their time in this club produced hundreds of photos, dozens of lifelong friends, their marriage and three sons. They also did a lot of international folk dancing. I don’t recall them ever talking about a folk dance club, or friends from such a club. But, they knew lots of folk dances (I have fond memories of my mom trying and failing to teach me the Hambo), and I grew up listening to their LPs of international folk music (I still listen to some of these regularly—“Kolo Party” and “Bikel and Guill Sing Songs from Just About Everywhere” have been providing pleasure for going on five decades). Obviously folk dance was important to them as a social outlet, but I just don’t know how.

When I went off to college, my parents were pretty hands-off. Unlike some of my classmates, they didn’t place many regulations on what I could do, nor did they push me to do many specific things. The only injunction I remember was that I must not, under any circumstances, play bridge. The only things that they pushed on me were a weekly admonishment to “STUDY HARD,” the suggestion that I should meet and marry a [rich] doctor, and I should look into taking up folk dancing. In those four years, I never played bridge, I studied hard but never hard enough, I took up a hobby that helped me meet and marry a doctor…but I never took up folk dancing. During this time, they themselves did not dance, though they still were hiking and camping regularly with their club friends.

When I went to graduate school, my social situation was considerably different. I lived off campus, and while I met a few people as an avid bicyclist, I didn’t socialize much. When the weather was pleasant, there was a recreational folk dance club that I would do its thing out in one of the plazas, and some of the tunes were very familiar to me from my parents’ LPs. A friend, one of my fellow grad students, was there dancing with them, so after a few times watching them I figured, heck, I’ll give it a try.

Well, I liked it. I really, really liked it. After a few weeks, my friend commented that I danced like someone who really NEEDED to dance, and I suppose I did. During my time in grad school, I danced with the recreational club, and started dancing with the associated performing group. It just felt good. I loved the music, the motion, the rhythm, and most important, the society. There is something very essentially human about getting together in a circle or snaking line and moving in synchrony with a drumbeat—whether 2/4, 3/4, 5/4, or some exotic Bulgarian rhythm like 13/16. For ten years I was dancing twice a week or more.

My parents still hiked and camped a lot—though to be sure, they didn’t hike quite as far, and their camping got cushier. They had annual reunions with dozens of friends from their days in the Hiking Club, and went on hiking expeditions in Tasmania and New Zealand and other places. However, it was getting more difficult. My dad’s joints started crapping out on him, the unfortunate sequel to a back surgery that hadn’t worked well twenty years earlier. He developed a definite list to port, and would tend to want to hike uphill and to the left rather than downhill or to the right. My parents’ friends were aging too, and the Hiking Club reunions started tending more towards hanging out at a cabin with a smaller group of people and some mild walking rather than dozens of folks camping in tents and ten mile hikes.

I think my parents realized that, having retired, they needed to do something sociable. I don’t remember when they joined the square dance club that met at a nearby church (“Heels and Souls”), but it became a weekly event and a major social outlet for them. They formed new friendships and got a regular night out and some good exercise. As my dad’s joints got worse and his cognition started to decline, he still participated, looking after coffee and such. And, as members of the group, my mom got a square dance skirt and my dad got these shirts.

When I left grad school, first for a teaching gig and then for a postdoc, followed by another teaching gig, I completely stopped folk dancing. My social circle atrophied, as my work took over an increasing fraction of my life. As a postdoc, one mainly sees the four walls of the lab and the inside of the library. As a lecturer, one can socialize some with students—but definitely not too much. I rode my bike and skied a lot with my sweetie, and occasionally with a club, but the number of people I socialized with outside of work just plummeted.

A decade later I departed from academia and moved to this farm, and my parents’ condition deteriorated markedly. My dad mostly disappeared into the obscuring fog of dementia. My mom attended one more Hiking Club reunion, and it was a bit of a disaster as she was unsure of where she was and why her husband wasn’t there. They became more homebound, and stayed that way until their deaths, most of a decade later. Their last regular visitors were a couple they had known from the Hiking Club for over sixty years, and some newer friends from the Heels and Souls.

Here I am now, living and working on a goat farm in Oregon. In a typical week I will get off the farm once or twice, to go to town for feed and groceries, and maybe do some special errands as needed or go to the dump. Plenty of weeks I don’t talk to any other humans except my sweetie and the couple that works here. The farmer’s life can be extremely isolating. From March to July the farm is all-consuming, and for most of the rest of the year, dairying and farm work will keep one busy all the hours of the day. The isolation can play havoc with your psyche, and honestly, it has at times.

During the summer months, I wear these shirts that my dad got for square dancing. As did he, I trace out patterns of squares and lines and circles, but unlike him I am doing so in a tractor, mowing the pastures. As I drive around and milk and shovel manure and fix fences, I think about how he wore this shirt as part of a conscious, deliberate effort at socializing. I know it was difficult, but he knew that it was necessary.

Now that the pace of the year has slowed somewhat, and I can go to shows and fairs, I can socialize a little—but this is an odd sort of socialization, meeting with friends that live far away and that I see but a few times a year, at events that are dominated by the work of showing our animals. I communicate with a bunch of friends by email and various social networks. But it’s not really adequate. This shirt is telling me I should make an effort—maybe return, as my mom and dad did, to folk dance, or maybe join a music group. It’s ridiculously difficult to do this as a dairy farmer, but it was difficult for my dad, late in life with bad knees and hips and a fear of dementia, to meet new folks and learn to square dance.

I still haven’t played bridge. I still study hard, and it’s still never hard enough. I met, and married, a doctor, and we just celebrated our 25th anniversary. And, I think there is a contra dance group that meets every month around here.

 Parental Artifact #21–a darkroom lab notebook

I will probably be running into boxes labeled “Parents/Misc/???” for the next ten years. I was cleaning off my desk and ran into such a box containing some postcards, a proof coin set, printed emails (because my parents wanted to save them but couldn’t figure out how), a few receipts, and this lab notebook. It dates from 1981, when we were in Canberra, Australia, as my dad was spending a sabbatical year at the Australian National University.

At this time, my brothers and I were old enough that we didn’t require as much attention as when we were young, and my mom didn’t have a garden she could fuss over. Maybe she was bored, or felt a bit isolated, but after six months, she sought employment at the ANU. She found a position with a professor who was documenting the indigenous shipbuilding practices of Indonesia. She developed the film the professor had exposed, and made ink drawings for publications to support his descriptions. Illustration made good use of her talents, but darkroom work was foreign her. She didn’t much like it, and she didn’t much like the professor, who was bossy and not very appreciative.

This notebook is completely mundane. It has her notes on how to work in a darkroom, how to load exposed film into a developer tank, what precautions to take with chemicals. Beyond her neat handwriting and occasionally idiosyncratic spelling, there is little that makes this notebook speak of my mom. I was honestly surprised to see absolutely no doodles of flowers or weird faces, but then I remembered that her boss was unpleasant and probably didn’t tolerate such foolishness. It is as personally significant and meaningful as a Kodak a darkroom guide. Having been consulted daily for some months, then having been hauled halfway across the world, then having been stored safely for four decades, then having somehow eluded the purge boxes of so many similarly inconsequential papers, and having been moved to a farm in Oregon, it will end its existence as kindling for the fire that keeps my house warm this winter.

It is not a meaningful object. I’ve disposed of dozens of boxes of similar artifacts over the last few years. Why should I pause on this notebook?

If I am here with my beloved, I can look at her and see her, as a whole. I can move closer, and see a part in greater detail. I can get a loupe, and while I’d lose context, I’d see even more detail. Were she patient, I could examine her with a microscope. The microscopic examination of a square millimeter of skin would be meaningless, though. It wouldn’t tell me anything about her, it wouldn’t help me understand or love her more, and all I might see would be insignificant detail. But, I can, in principle, reach across the breakfast table on a Saturday morning and look as deeply as I want at any part of her. There is a sense of real-ness that this gives to me; she is tangible, visible, and detailed at every scale I wish to examine.

This notebook allows me to do this with my mom, in a way. I can zoom in, down to the pixel level, on the random date of March 3, 1981. Never mind that what I am seeing has less significance than a single dot in a Seurat painting or a square millimeter of my sweetheart’s skin. If I have that ability to zoom in at that specific point, maybe I can do that anywhere, for any date? Maybe I can have that same sense of real-ness and infinite detail that I can have about the living? And If I burn this notebook, don’t I lose that sense?

Of course this is illusory. Accepting the death of a person I have been close to is, partly, relinquishing their physical actuality, and replacing it with a story or a painting composed from memory. This composition is no more static than a painting that keeps getting touched up as long as the artist keeps it in the studio. The mere act of remembering changes memories, the phrasing of a sentence gets tweaked, a line in a picture gets refined every time they are considered. It’s rare—to the point of being upsetting—that something can emerge and change the overall composition.

A good portrait is more than pixels of pigment or dots of paint. A good portrait is also categorically different from a living person. It is not infinitely detailed, nor should it be. You can’t zoom in, arbitrarily deeply, on any point. A good portrait maybe doesn’t even look exactly like the living person. However, it should capture what is important about that person to the artist. So, in making a mental portrait of my mom to carry with me, now that she is deceased for some years, this notebook isn’t needed or desirable. A single pixel such as this notebook isn’t nearly as meaningful as a strong brushstroke such as “she had an artistic bent, could get bored, but was methodical, and bridled under bossy and inconsiderate people.”

The years-long decline of dementia and the passage of some years since her death have given me ample time to compose and refine the picture I carry of my mom. It is a pleasing composition, a good story. It’s not finished, nor will ever be. As I grow old and my memory fills—or, as I fear, it evaporates in the siege of Alzheimers—the portrait will probably become simpler, or perhaps more pure and symbolic. For now, it is fairly rich, though there are places without detail: the relationship she had with her brother, whether she was frustrated or satisfied with the role she played as the wife of a professor, the mother of a family.

I have yet a few boxes of letters and juvenilia to go through. I hope they will provide a few of those missing details, though I doubt the composition will change much. If they do add to the story, it’s likely that I will preserve some of these scraps. I will also, as I go through all her papers and belongings, keep running into things like this notebook, stray pixels and footnotes that do nothing to advance character, action, or atmosphere. Like a good editor or an artist at the easel, I will discard them.