Deliver Me– a Vignette

There’s a stereotype about Department of Motor Vehicle offices as a sort of hell where people go to rot away.  It’s filled with gigantic lines with unclear destinations, mysterious paperwork that you may or may not have to fill out, sour employees who may or may not help you navigate the system, and often the experience ends in a bad mugshot of yourself that you have to live with and publicly display for many years.

Surely this is an outdated stereotype, I thought to myself as I drove to my local DMV driver’s licensing facility a little before 8:00 yesterday morning.  We now have the internet, which allows people to renew their drivers licenses and submit address changes online.  Questions can be answered on websites, paperwork filled out ahead of time.  The DMV website even listed the best times to come in for business, which is why I had arranged to come in first thing on Wednesday morning.  I didn’t bring a book with me, and I even debated with myself over whether to bring my coffee in.

Okay, I was running a little late, and didn’t arrive until 14 minutes after opening.  Still, 44 people had managed to get there before me!  Yes, that’s right– the tag I pulled out of the automated dispenser had the number 45 on it.  Clearly I have been stuck in a time warp for the past 12 years, since I only ever had to deal with the Grant County DMV in John Day, where one employee does everything and there are almost never any lines.

I wrestled with myself over whether to stick around or come back another time.  With visions of some never-ending cycle of disrupted mornings trying to find a light DMV day, I decided to stick it out.  Their take-a-number system was pretty fancy, with a digital sign on the wall showing who was being served, and a PA system that automatically called out numbers.  I thought it seemed like it might be an efficiently run place.  But about 30 minutes after I sat down, everything got very quiet.  No numbers were being called.  No one was at the counters talking to the employees. Obviously feeling the tension, an employee announced that all the computers were down and we would just have to wait– about 10 or 15 minutes.

This was the moment when I should have made my move and walked out the door.  I could have arrived at work only one hour late.  But for some reason, I stayed in my seat.  I figured with any luck, at least a third of the people ahead of me would quit and I’d be the beneficiary.

About then, I let go of my nervousness about time elapsing and just starting enjoying the people-watching.  I noticed how many nervous teenagers were there with a distracted parents, getting their permits or taking their driver’s tests.  I noticed how awful the examiners seemed to be– sour, cranky, down on life– and I wondered what it must be like to get into several dozen strange cars every day with a nervous teenaged driver at the wheel.  I heard as one of the examiners told a young girl that she had failed her test and did she want to schedule another one right away.  A mother with two highly active young boys under the age of five looked exasperated and tired– but everyone in the room stopped and smiled when she went up to get her photo taken and the two boys horsed around with the background screen hanging from the ceiling, giving mock mug shots and posing on the wrong side.  I noticed how amazingly alike so many of the parents and children looked– daughter with big hair, mother with big hair, daughter with snug t-shirt, mother with tight tank top and tattoo on shoulder blade.

The other major population contingent were the people over the age of 61, who can’t renew their licenses online due to their age.  I felt bad for them, especially the very old people with walkers and hearing impairments, who couldn’t hear the PA system announcing their number, and then when they realized it was their turn, were so slow to get to the counter that they were in danger of losing their place altogether. But then I wondered if I really wanted those people to be out driving their cars around the Denver metro area.

There were a few people like me– not teenaged, not parents, and not over 61, professionals with phones and reading material, looking impatiently at their watches every now and again.  I wondered what their story was– are they all new to the state of Colorado, too?

It turned out that a lot of people did give up and leave during the computer failure, but mostly people within numbers 10-15 spots before mine.  Finally, it was my turn, and I registered myself without a hitch.  Now I’m just waiting for my new license to arrive in the mail within the next 30 days.  The photo will be a complete surprise– I wonder how it turned out?

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Serviceberry

Serviceberry (Amelanchier) bush at White Ranch Open Space Park, Jefferson County, Colorado.

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63rd Street Farm

Yesterday we drove up to Boulder for a spring celebration at a small family-owned farm on the outskirts of town.  The 63rd Street Farm is on the east edge of Boulder Municipal airport, which is how Bo happened to find it one day last month while I was at the university hobnobbing with the engineering librarians.

unplanted fields and reservoir

The whole thing is located on less than 6 acres, but Brian and Amanda have managed to establish many fields of crops, several greenhouses, raised beds, a chicken coop and yard area for several dozen laying hens, a seedling house, composting area, and biodiesel plant.  Brian is a stone mason, so he also keeps his stash of stone and his brick oven shop on the property.  They’ve converted an old chicken house into a really nice retreat/event space– and they have their own house on the property, too.

greenhouse with salvaged door

The farm is meant to be a demonstration of permaculture, which as far as I can tell is a rather contested yet idealistic concept that developed in the 1970s to describe the idea that human food production and other survival activities should be practiced in such a way as to perpetuate as closed a system as possible.  So, for example, Brian and Amanda were using their sunflower stalks from last year’s crop to build trellises for beans this year (I actually found this quite clever: the sunflowers had been planted in straight rows, and the stalks had not been pulled, so they served as uprights.  Other stalks were woven in horizontally, and the rigidity of the vertical stalks held them together so that no string or wire was needed).The two dozen hens lay eggs and help clean up fields that need it– and 75 more chicks were inside the chicken house, waiting to be old enough to come out with the others.  Brian admitted that the two pygmy goats, TC and Petunia, don’t contribute much except entertainment value.

I forgot to take any photos until more than halfway through the tour, so if you are interested in seeing some good pictures of the property, you should visit the farm’s website, which is linked above.  After an hour-long tour of the property and a look-see at the interior of the nice retreat & event center, we ate some pizza baked in their portable brick oven.  We won’t be joining the CSA this year because the farm is too far for us to drive every week to pick up our share.  But we’ll be by regularly to get eggs and produce from their farm stand.

As a footnote– we drove into Boulder proper afterward to buy some groceries at a place called Sunflower market, which specializes in reasonably priced organic and natural food.  The feel couldn’t have been more different.   We almost got run over when trying to walk across the small street from the store’s parking lot, and had to dodge speedy shopping cart pushers while inside.  Luckily, we made it out of the store, and out of Boulder, alive and well– in time to enjoy the sunset over the Flatirons on our way home to (relatively) quiet Golden.  Happy Spring, everyone!

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The past is everywhere

…Or at least it seems that way lately.  First it was watching the movie Thunderheart, which I seem to get a hankering to see every few years: all that footage of the South Dakota badlands reminds me so sharply of my days there as a seasonal park ranger in my early 20′s.

Badlands NP, 1993

Then there was the NY Times interview with Beverly Cleary that took me back even further, to 4th grade visits to the school library, where our librarian, Mrs. B. (I can’t remember her full name, but she was probably about 26 years old at the time), read us stories of Henry and Beezus and Ramona.  The Times book review staffer who did the interview reminisced about Cleary’s books as well as those of Judy Blume, saying that she could still remember exactly where they were located in her school library.  Amazing! those two authors are tightly associated with my 4th-5th-6th grade years– and with Mrs. B., who probably introduced them both to us.

a few years and a few series before Beverly Cleary

Finally, while driving around on Saturday morning, I caught this story on NPR, about Nirvana and the 20th anniversary of the beginnings of grunge music.  I didn’t live in the Pacific Northwest until the end of the 1990s, but I can still remember hearing “Smells Like Teen Spirit” pounding through the walls of my seasonal apartment in the Badlands during the summer of 1993.  I had never paid much attention to grunge before, but I walked next door and asked my neighbor for a grunge mix tape.

Seattle 2007, UW Arboretum

Of course, by the time I lived in Seattle in 2007, the era of grunge was long over.  This was a main point of the NPR story, which pointed out the irony that it was in part the fame and notoriety of bands like Nirvana that brought attention to Seattle and environs, and that this contributed to its renewed popularity, stronger economy, higher rents, and the end of cheap nightlife venues… thereby eliminating grunge’s natural habitat.

Nostalgia has been defined as “sadness without an object”.  It’s also associated with the Greek words for pain (algia) and with the idea of home (nostos).  In my case, it probably just means that I’ve been away from my comfort zone in Oregon long enough that my unconscious is panicking a bit at my apparently unmoored state.  Suddenly I am in the mindset to reminisce, to long for the past, to feel utterly clearly how I felt on that day I first drove into the Badlands, the thrill of that distorted guitar sound through the apartment wall, the eagerness of my friends and me as we waited for Mrs. B to read the next installment of the kids on Klickitat Street to us.

When almost every experience and every setting is suddenly new, I seem to develop the need to grasp at something familiar, a known quantity.  What is more familiar than my memories, especially the ones I’ve gone over many times?  So yes, the past is always there.  It’s just waiting for the moment when I need to summon it up, and it comes flooding back.

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Kitchen Garden

With all the gardening activity going on around here (both at home and in the area), I started thinking about how nice it would be to have a kitchen garden with herbs in it.  So, Bo built a small box at the edge of the deck near the back door and we planted rosemary, cilantro, tarragon, and parsley.My friend Jennie, who blogs from her home in France, posted a recipe for tarragon chicken that I can’t wait to try out with homegrown tarragon!  Soon, we’ll add basil and dill, which are still a little too small to entrust to our moody Colorado weather, which hasn’t decided yet whether it’s still winter, or if it’s now spring.

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Up the creek

Don’t worry, this entry has a happy ending.  The body of water in question is named Clear Creek, and it empties melted snow from the foothills, channeling it through Golden and several western suburbs before dumping it into the Platte River in downtown Denver.  As we discovered today, it also hosts quite a bit of activity, past and present, in its canyons.

Joda and I are standing in a flume, left from historic mining.  At first, I worried about walking on old planks that might have rotted through in spots, but the numerous bicycle tracks in the dirt, as well as the appearance of a small herd of volunteer trash pickers, reassured me that we were indeed on a maintained trail.  Along the route, we passed a group of rock climbers on belay, ascending and descending the steep granite walls of the canyon.  Across the way, on the sunny side of the creek, which is accessed from Highway 6 before it dives into a tunnel beneath the foothills, were other outdoor folks fishing and swimming.  Twice along our route, we stopped and looked at old decaying automobile carcasses; this made me wonder if our walkway was actually an old roadbed, rather than a mining flume.

What goes up must come down.  So, after walking two or three miles upstream, we turned back and came down along the east face of the hill, descending back to the level of Clear Creek, where the hottest member of our party had a nice swim.Then it was home for lunch and drinking water, and naps for all of us!

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Two by two by… one

One of the greatest minor frustrations in my life is losing half of a pair of something.  Surely you know what I’m talking about?  Suddenly you can’t find a sock, and there you are with a perfectly good sock with no mate that you hold on to for months or years because the other one might turn up some day.

For me it’s earrings that are the biggest problem.  I can no longer count on one hand the number of times that an earring has gone missing, never to be found again.  I do have a couple isolated stories of an earring that went missing, only to turn up again quite a bit of time later– the most amazing example might be the earring I lost in the clothesline yard at seasonal employee housing at Badlands National Park during the summer of 1994, only to find it waiting for me in the dirt at the base of the clothesline stand– in the summer of 1995.

When I studied Homeric Greek in college, one of its most fascinating aspects was a noun form called the dual case.  Some nouns in that language had not only singular and plural forms, but also dual forms.  Mostly this applied to certain kinds of nouns, like oxen (which were typically used as a team of two), or a kind of shin armor called greaves.  How interesting, my college-aged brain thought.  A whole culture could only think about certain things in the context of their twinning, their separateness and togetherness at once.

Now that I’ve read some more in sociolinguistics, I’m not so convinced that there is any great meaning in the existence of the dual case for nouns– that the Greeks would be unable to see a lone ox wandering the fields or a single sock blowing up against a briar bush.  Did the Greeks of Homer’s time even wear socks?

I don’t know if socks existed during Homer’s time.  Meanwhile, I’m just going to wear two completely different earrings every now and then.  Just to see if people notice.  And because I like those earrings, even if they are now singly one by one.

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A short break from our regularly scheduled program

I don’t normally pontificate on matters political here, but I’ve been following recent developments in Wisconsin with great interest, and even a bit of hope.

Why?  I have a soft spot for Wisconsin?  Maybe– after all, I interviewed for a couple jobs there last year.  It’s right next door to Minnesota, where I have family and history.  The main reason, though, is that the events in Wisconsin have shown me that what I perceive to be American intelligence, values, and spirit still exist.  Workers protesting a threatened outlawing of their ability to collective bargaining?  A university professor writing for the public about controversial political events and defending his right to do so?  Yes!  To me, that is what this country is about.  It’s not just the right to feel a certain way about an issue– it’s the right to carry on an intelligent argument about the issue in public.

Two weeks ago, UW-Madison professor of history William Cronon published an opinion piece in the NY Times that draws comparisons between the tactics of governor Scott Walker and Senator Joseph McCarthy.  At about the same time, he started a blog that poses questions about interference in state politics by clandestine conservative groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC).

These publications resulted in a FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) request from the Wisconsin Republican Party for Cronon’s emails.  Professor Cronon continued to blog about this turn of events, including a plea to university officials to resist what he argues is an attempt to intimidate or discredit him.

Cronon’s blog posts are followed by hundreds of comments, which means that thousands of people are reading them.  I find this very heartening!  In an age of sound-bite blips and words taken out of context to make public figures look bad, here is someone who is taking the time to write careful, well-reasoned, engaging narratives about important political events– and large numbers of people are being engaged by it.

So, three cheers for Professor Cronon!  I hope he continues to write to inform and involve the public in these crucial decisions whose outcomes will likely affect us all eventually.

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