January 18, 2010 by Clair Button.

“Leaves Blown Apart” was read by Baker County Library Director Perry Stokes for the WGEO Second Friday Literary Night event in January 2010.  Though accepted for the Libraries of Eastern Oregon anthology, “A Sense of Place,” it was inadvertently omitted from the first printing of the anthology.  Some of the audience asked if I would publish it elsewhere to make it available, so here it is.

Leaves Blown Apart

by C. F. Button

Empty quiet filled hours between delayed flights in Chicago O’Hare airport. Leaves with faces swept by, rattling, skittering voices caught in droning conveyor winds that failed to stir me. Some were brightly colored, some drab. Some briefly lodged against walls or benches and others raced past to meaningless destinations. They were nothing to me until one bit of color dropped from an eddy of swirling forms and paused tentatively, as though seeking refuge in my quiet, still pocket of space.

I glanced up. “U. S. Marines” was emblazoned in a yellow band across a young man’s tee shirt. Judging by his short-cropped hair and muscular chest and shoulders, I concluded the shirt was probably authentic and belonged to him. There was something in the shy way he glanced at me that faintly tugged on my invisible shroud of isolation. I nodded and silently resumed eating my portable dinner. Without speaking, he settled next to me on the two-seater bench at the side of the hall, folded his arms across his chest, and self-consciously tried to find a balance between somnolent patience and expectant attentiveness to the other travelers busily hustling between flights.

It was the patience that got me thinking, the patience that had to be learned. Memories tumbled like leaves in wind, memories of young men always moving, being transported, and learning to sleep, to rest, to relax, and to tolerate uncertainty. Trucks, planes, helicopters, long marches in single file, it didn’t matter which, you always had to learn to wait, to gather each precious moment of rest and luxuriate in it, never to hoard what could not be saved. Patience does not come quickly or naturally to young men. I, too, had been attentive to each passing figure and feature in my landscapes once. Each bit of motion might lead to adventure, or danger, or nothing at all – it took a while to learn that patience. The young or inexperienced dislike waiting. The old and experienced learn to live with it.

At the beginning of my trip this time, I had met two friends, brothers-in-arms, from a never-ending yesterday 37 years long. Winds of time and fate had blown my friends and me away, each on a separate path, and made us strangers for so many years.  Yet we will always be twenty years old, those brothers and I, no matter what our bodies and faces look like now, no matter if some of the details of yesterday have started to slip from our memories. We learned patience together. We shared a fierce bond of loyalty that endured all those years apart.

Glancing sideways, I thought I could see the light of idealism in the marine’s face, and perhaps anticipation of challenge and glory. Clean-scrubbed innocence, the kind you only see in the young. My friends and I knew the brief exultation of living through the danger this young man could only imagine in his future, wondering how, when the moment came, he would face the challenge. It was such a silly conceit, that self-doubt and concern for living up to a romanticized notion of heroism. I had known it, too.

A single year can teach patience beyond measure, a willingness to wait forever for another adventure like the one this young man anticipated so eagerly now. I thought of my friends’ shared grief, the kind that made the exultation of your own survival so brief. Would this young man feel it someday? Would he and his friends grow old with forty years of never-ending nightmares filled by horror?

I could sense him taking my measure as well. Curiosity showed, and perhaps a desire to speak – yet he hesitated. Could he see the brittle old armor that still separates and protects me from the innocent pain of green, young soldiers like him? I wondered, should I say anything to him?  Is there anything I could say that he wouldn’t take as criticism or as the emotional wandering of an old fool?

An announcement of my impending flight, changed to another gate farther down the hall, broke through my whirlwind of thoughts, brought me to earth and present tense.

I looked at him directly. “Are you active in the Marines now?”

“Yes, Sir. I was just at officer training camp. Headed home to Kansas now.”

The “Sir” provoked me like the buzz of a mosquito. I had once been a sergeant. Sergeants don’t easily accept being addressed as “Sir,” but he meant it politely, as respect due an old man. I repressed an urge to laugh at the irony.

“Is that like ROTC in college?” I asked hopefully.

“No, Sir, no college. The Marines don’t have that program.”

No, I thought, the Marines would want them young and unpolluted. Another thought came unbidden. Oh, hell! A first lieutenant! He’s going to be a first lieutenant. My platoon had lost two of them in less than a year. He’s going to want to lead the charge into battle or take risks for his men, thinking that is his duty, to risk himself before his men. I thought of booby-traps and body parts flying through the air, images which still wake another of my old friends in his 37^th year of post-traumatic stress syndrome. Suddenly the sense of loss was heavy on my chest and I already feared for this eager young man’s life. Was there was anything I could say that he would understand, anything that would make a difference?

I stood to go. I held out my hand and he shook it.

“Good luck, then. Take care of yourself and your men. It’s an important job.”

“Yes, Sir, I’ll try my best.”

I hauled my bag down the corridor. There are some things which can never be explained or understood unless you have seen the sunlight glance off the wing of a butterfly, or a mote of dust in the air turned to gold, or a drop of ruby-red blood suspended against an ice-blue sky – a moment before fate grasps all life in its rending jaws and leaves consciousness forever marked. No, he couldn’t have understood if I said more. Not then. Give him time. Give him time.

I give special thanks to Perry Stokes for reading in my place, because I had found this piece too difficult to read aloud once it was written, and to my friends from Recon Platoon, 3rd Battalion, 21st Infantry Division, 196th Brigade, who have helped me face those buried memories and become more whole.
Clair Button

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December 24, 2009 by Clair Button.

I read in the news that Americans bought 12 BILLION rounds of ammunition this year, about 38 bullets per man, woman and child in this country. You might be surprised by that figure, but not if you live in my neck of the woods. The surge in bullet and gun purchases actually started during the 2008 elections. My neighbors got swept up in the right wing hysteria of internet rumors intended to get them out to vote.  The Republicans lost the election, but the media campaign generated record profits for gun and bullet manufacturing companies. TARP funds didn’t keep the economy from going to hell, it was us.

I doubt liberal easterners paid much attention.  A lot of them are asleep at the switch, anyway. But here in the west, most of us got weekly reminders – recycled email forwarded umpteen times.  While not exactly asleep at the switch, my friends forget who they mailed the message to the previous week.  Bob was not bright enough to check the list of names that Dave and Bubba used when they both sent the email to him. I was on their lists, too. Also, Mrs. Bob, Mrs. Dave, and Mrs. Bubba included me on their mail lists.  Everybody figured “what the heck, he’ll want to know this anyway, and if he got it before, he can just delete it.” Most of us didn’t even read it. We knew what it was about, anyway, and went right out and bought more bullets – each time.

Those damn Democrats were going to take our guns and make us get a criminal background check just to buy bullets. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do with the bullets after the Democrats had taken my guns, but I figured, what the heck, it can’t hurt to have a few more rounds.  Plus, I sure did not want to have anybody check into my background the next time I ran out of bullets, so I pulled out my wallet and beat them to the punch.

With all the reminders, I went out and bought 3 new pistols, 2 shotguns, an M-60 machine gun (slightly used) and a couple extra grenade launchers, too.  I already had enough automatic rifles and night-vision scopes. Don’t ask how many bullets I bought.  Somebody had to bring the national average up to 38. Those dumb-ass liberals back east didn’t do it.

Well, it looks like the rumors fizzled.  Nobody came to take my guns or ammo. So now, like most of my neighbors, I am sitting on an ammunition dump that will take out two square blocks of homes if we have a fire. The chain reaction that would set off in this town would probably make the Iraq war look like a picnic.

In other words, what we have out here in the west is a glut of stockpiled munitions. When my friends die, the estate sales alone will flood the market with guns, bullets, armored personnel carriers, and grenades.  I might pick up another machine gun or two if my neighbors die first, but eventually, even my guns will get back into the supply chain.

This is the beginning of the third dip in the economy, bigger than the commercial real estate bubble.  We are going to put a lot of national defense contractors out of business when we go. Be smart. Get out of the stock market now.

Disclaimer: Clair Button is not an investment adviser.  If you are dumb enough to take this as investment advice, you ought to check in to buying a burial plot instead of stocks. The odds are you probably don’t have long to live.

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December 10, 2009 by Linda Bergeron.

I saw him twice, bringing donations of books his children had outgrown; the children who were here in the summer but returned to live with their mother in California; his smile, his concern about the book he could not find that was overdue and how much it related to his life overseas.

After his death I was in a quandary for a few weeks, knowing it was inappropriate to send out the library system notice after his sudden death. I sought the advice of a warm-hearted clerk at the main library after realizing the family could be going through his things and that the library was hoping to get back that brand-new book – so that correspondence was probably timely. She suggested a well-worded gentle letter explaining the situation.

The obituary did not have local addresses for his relatives although the surname has many people here whom I don’t know that well. I wrote a note to the funeral home director, who called me, aghast. “I’ll pay for the book myself! The family is absolutely devastated.”

I felt horrible; she was right. I said the branch library could simply cover it. We ended the conversation with her saying she’d seek permission to get into the house. In a few days I found the book in the book drop. I checked it in, relieved, paid the fines, and took it home to read what he had read.

I was halfway into it, having marveled at the writer’s talents which were those of a remarkable person who had amazing life experiences and discovered rather well into maturity that writing was a venue for him. The stories were wondrous and disturbing. I was soon done. This was, I knew, not a book to simply put on the shelf between the alphabet of other author names. It needed cleansing, and release, and so, at home, I ‘smudged’ the pages with great intent and compassion for this soul who held it at a poignant time.
Judging from his presence with me and the little I knew of the situation I came to believe that with the children gone, he was bereft and floundering. The story in the newspapers was that he had been drinking with a visiting friend in the evening at home, after a day of shooting, and accidentally shot himself.

I can believe all of these possibilities ~ that the book was not lost, but that he may have decided to keep it as meaningful and at hand, and to pay for it [Have I not done this once myself?]; that the accidental shot was truly an accident, or, perhaps it was no accident at all ~ perhaps even the friend could not tell; and that it does not matter to any of us here on earth what happened because it was a fateful moment between him and his Creator; and all who are left behind – whether of flesh, entanglement, embrace or simple acquaintance – are minus his presence and simply given a mystery to come to personal terms with. LWB

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December 10, 2009 by Linda Bergeron.

Taking the flame to the crisp
Dry-green sweetgrass’ end curl;

Keeping the blow of my breath
Captive in my mouth while the feather instead
Takes the task: to fan the barely alive ember
into a purging spirit;

Holding the book of stunning stories aloft,
so every page is arrested in the new air
of sacred smoke;

Preparing for this next change ~
The sudden, unexpected one
That will fit the puzzle someday,
That will come to be understood
As, even pained, perfect.

Linda Bergeron writes from Halfway, Oregon.

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November 15, 2009 by Linda Bergeron.

“Standing at the River, from the Road”

 By Linda Bergeron

Standing at the river, from the road ~

It’s in-con-se-quen-tial if your eyes are closed,

And you’ve opened your senses to the world.

Watching from a place that is afar ~

When you know a river, you can see it anywhere,

Even when the fog is thick you see it still.

            The rocks are always at your feet,

            The skirmish on the bank is small;

            In the great adventure of grav-i-ty

            The long shared feast is best of all.

Being-in-the-world’s the place to be ~

Quieting the self to hear the message in the wind,

When you’re standing at the river,

                                    At the river, from the road.

[under the influence of a bluegrass music festival, and the early morning hour in Denali at Kantishna, “the meeting of the rivers”]

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November 15, 2009 by Linda Bergeron.

I came to understand that, looking at societies and even people in general, there are basically those who are earth-based and those who are not. In simple terms, there are those who appreciate the gifts of survival and living that come directly from the earth and respect them enough to protect them, and to teach their children about them.

And there are those, ‘civilized’ to such a degree, that they live out their days not in the context of the earth, but of buildings, social institutions and packaged realities.

After this insight, I was reading a Jack Weatherford [professor of anthropology] book, which carried the reader from the formation of continents, through the various ages of man and the important division of foragers and farmers. I was struck with the simplicity of this concept of the diversion in the path of men, and where it led.

And then the phone rang and I was talking with a friend of like ponderings. After we parted, I returned to the keyboard, intent on not dropping the thread of thoughts I had earlier. Since I was reading another book on and off, I noted its influence. Oh yes, a little background: I have been re-educating myself on the aboriginal experience on the so-called North American continent since late 2006, taking the time to review what current school textbooks on American history look like these for middle- and high-school students, and digging incessantly deeper into source documents and eye witness accounts while visiting regional sites [northeastern corner of OR counties; western Central Idaho – all Nez Perce homeland].

“Thoughts brought up by reading (mostly) from Weatherford’s Savages & Civilization, with topical checks into Johnson’s History of the Jews:                      

HISTORY [which enlightens the topic of Christianity]                                     

• School history: does not describe – favorably or extensively - about non-Christian science, art, unbiased politics or literature, etc.
• Suspicion: farmers thought they had to work harder than foragers [Old Testament taught they should toil and suffer] – while foragers played and enjoyed life more; farmers had more stress, required more specialty…..Qs – Did they become angry? Were they coerced to be/remain farmers? If so, by who? What?
• Farmers/Domesticators
  • don’t allow for nomads
  • ‘squeeze out’ nomads and foragers
  • cut up geography with ‘owners’ and ‘conquerors’
• word: colonize (v.) from Fr. colonie; Latin, colonia, colonus meaning husbandsman, from colere, to cultivate…………….[sadly interesting]
• you-are-your-language (p. 132)….modern: other countries want to learn English,  may be a very good language since naturally derived from all other languages….
• An earlier insight: people are earth-based or not-earth based
  • earth-based : loves and appreciates and works with
  • non-earth-based: struggles, holds grudge (afraid to be angry at God when they should be angry at their religion – not the same)

EDUCATION in America

• If teachers are asked, “Why don’t US students’ world history classes include as much about Canada, Africa & S.America (and other nations) as it does western civilization? Some likely answers: “So much history to cover, they’ll get more if they go to college;” ….and all those who do not go on to college, but still vote and raise children?
• What is not said – western civilization history is ruthless, disturbing, in conflict with religion – so ‘we can’t teach the truth’
• Not unrelated: I remember as a high school student who was very familiar with the library shelf, that those Dewey system areas for Medicine and Law in the late 1960s were always empty; I wondered, why?  It didn’t take me long to consider that Doctors and Lawyers had hold of and a monopoly on  the information
• What Oregon education [the only one I’ve studied] provides is a diluted, incomplete and misleading history education; as a library worker who watches the incoming catalogues and constant advertising, a new suspicion: mainstream textbook publishers are as controlling and narrow as the rest of the media  
• “Still worried about Infidels” – mainstream educators and historians continue to present history from the deeply ingrained western viewpoint – even the secular ones don’t realize it; and I am reminded of Professor Jim Craven’s concept - the cloning of ideology.

Excuse me while I get back to burning leaves.

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October 28, 2009 by Clair Button.

Oh, unkind fates! Oh, Evil spirits!
While plotting my own corporate raiding and pilfering strategies the other day, and while reading various and sundry economic predictions and pithy stock market blogs, I stumbled upon this incredible revelation, to wit:
“Apparently in light of recent developments, Cramer has shifted his perspective on Lockheed as of Monday night’s show.  Although Lockheed beat estimates, Cramer referred to it as a bad quarter and said that Lockheed is suffering from a priority shift at the Pentagon.”

That evil spirit, the contentious and either beloved or much reviled James “Jim” Cramer, the “Rill O’Beilly” of the CNBC network stock market show, “Mad Money,” dared to abandon the favored military industrial complex stock of the Ockham “Razor’s Edge” anonymous “staff” who wrote the article to which I had been lead by titillating internet linkages. These all-knowing lords of economic wisdom were quite justifiably outraged by Cramer’s callous abandonment of Lockheed’s military and economic prowess in favor of the less well endowed Northrop Grumman corporation, whose missiles were presumably fully extended already and not capable of further growth such as those of Lockheed. – Scumbag! How dare he? they raged.

“This is a clear reversal from his opinion of just two weeks prior, and it is his purgative to change his opinion as more evidence is made available.  While he may be right about the shifting priorities from the Pentagon, we are sure that Lockheed will not be caught unaware with no alternative course of action.  They will continue to compete for contracts same as they always have, and for now we are not overcome with concern for future sales.  From our perspective, he seems to have written off LMT for dead rather quickly (especially considering his bullishness two weeks ago).”

Fickle bullishness indeed! Scoundrel, I say!
Yet, despite being a stock market hobbyist and enthusiast, I find my literary leanings difficult to overcome when reading this kind of stuff.  I found myself compelled to sign in to the blog commentary with a short riposte:

“While it may be Cramer’s prerogative to take a purgative, it is a crappy choice. I just thought I would share that.”

Those scoundrels! Without even acknowledging or allowing my spontaneous quip to post, edited their own words. Oh, to be deprived of my one glorious moment of fame in the economic world. My visions of being cited and revered as a great sage like Warren Buffet were dashed once again.

As Monsieur Poirot was noted to say (on the famously literate Public Broadcasting show) “They have not the humbility.”

Clair Button occasionally posts a bit of questionable humor here.  Hope you have fun with it.

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August 8, 2009 by Clair Button.

East-side Oregonians have many traditions. Last week, we went out to participate in a local tradition, picking huckleberries. The following Tuesday, we intended to set off for the Oregon coast to escape the hundred degree heat of early August. This is also a tradition among the town-folk of eastern Oregon.

It did occur to me that it was my civic duty to wash the dust off of my eastern Oregon pickup truck before heading west. Huckleberry picking necessarily means going long distances on dusty gravel roads through the forest. No need to make those big city tourists think we east-siders are all slovenly low-lifers. So, I went to the local car wash, which luckily, happened to have a 50 gallon drum of “pre-wash” detergent and long-handled brushes to loosen up the dried bugs and what not before entering the high-tech automated spraying barn.

It was the “what not” part of the dried material on my east-side truck that turned out to be more of a problem than I had anticipated. You see, my east-side Oregon neighbors have other traditions. Like, at the end of July, the lowland range pastures are totally dried out, and it is time to either take the cattle to higher elevations, or put them on irrigated pasture for the rest of the summer. Over time, this has created the tradition of the “cattle drive.” For you non-east-siders, this does not mean you put old Bossy in the back seat of your car and take her out for a Sunday drive. Actually it means you do a round-up of four hundred or so nameless cows and push them out onto the highway on foot, or on hooves. You then trail behind them down the highway on horses (or more likely 4-wheelers now) for several miles with the help of a few border collie cowdogs while bewildered town-folk and smiling, pointing tourists try to figure out how to get through the whole mess and resume their high speed adventures into the forest without bumping number 432 in the butt or running over her frightened calf who witlessly dodges in front of their bumper every two minutes.

A cattle drive, while appearing somewhat haphazard and disorganized, is really not a mess. Given the difficulty of convincing the cows not to climb into the cars passing through their midst, it is a fairly well organized process. The mess is what the townfolk and tourists drive on, other than the actual pavement or gravel. It has a tendency to be semi-liquid at the time, loathsome olive-green in color, and fulsome in fresh, organic odor, if you know what I mean.

So, bring the tradition of huckleberry picking and cattle drives back to the car wash. I find that one long handled brush is insufficient to remove the dust and the mess, which together, have dried to an indistinguishable splattering of lumps on the side and underframe of my pickup truck. I take a second brush, and using both at once, discover that the lumpy dust on the side of my pickup becomes a slimy, green-brown mud that no amount of brushing will ever remove. The frame beneath the doors of the truck had significantly larger lumps of stuff, which when knocked apart, turn out to be only partially dried. The wheel-wells of my truck turn out to be indescribable – lucky for you.

Another customer pulls up behind me, waiting patiently for me to finish. Returning to the drum of ice-blue detergent pre-wash for the sixth time, I find it has turned a dark, muddy, green-brown, and smells more like a barn than detergent. Rinsing the brushes, I make one more attempt to wipe the smears of green from the side of my truck, but notice the detergent water now leaves an equally dubious film on the door panel, and it smells, well, rather bad.

Returning the brushes to the drum, I wave at the lady behind me and pray that she does not get out to use one of the brushes on her own car. I drive in to the automatic wash, thinking it was very smart of me to have paid extra for the “ultimate” wash. I knew it was going to take some serious spraying on the underbody to get my truck clean.

The soak-down cycle with more pre-wash detergent was understandably dingy as it dripped down the outside of my windows. The flashing light sign let me know the regular high-power wash cycle was going to help, and it did. But the rinse cycle still had a distinct olive tinge to it as it drained down off the roof. When the “clear protective coating” light came on, I had second thoughts about spending the extra money. I was thinking that might mean something like a coat of shellac that would permanently attach any remaining green residue to my nice truck. Not a happy thought at all.  However, the final rinse cycle did not obscure the outdoor sunlight with a fog of green, so I figured everything was going to be OK.

The blow-dry cycle did about as much good as a short popcorn fart. I hardly know why they bother. When I got out to use the old chamois skin to dry the truck, I was pleasantly surprised to see that it did not come away stained green, and the truck did have a nice burgundy gleam to it, fairly similar to the original paint-job. However, I did notice the seams around the wheel wells still had some dark green material packed into them. I avoided those.

It was on the trip over the Cascades when we finally found some real rain. I mean, it rained hard for a little while, nothing like that 20 percent chance rain that they keep promising us out in the eastern hinterlands. We happened to stop at a little rest area on the west side of the mountains as we headed down toward the coast, and walking back to the truck, I noticed some very distinct dark olive green racing stripes on the side of my truck. All that west-side rain had loosened up some of that indescribable stuff from the inside of my wheel wells.

Oddly, the olive color didn’t look that bad against the burgundy paint, as long as you didn’t look close enough to see the fibrous nature of the basic material, now welded to the side of my truck with green slime infused with shellac. “Wow, that is a cool paint job with those dark racing stripes,” an escapee from a Salem nuthouse said.

“Yeah,” I replied. “I paid extra for that.”  Funny how those old traditional things are still so popular that even the city folk like them.

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December 26, 2008 by Clair Button.

I left alone at quarter to nine, the road dusted with icy crystals over black frozen dew from the night before. Fog from the river filled the valley below low-hanging clouds, and black Angus cattle drifted through shrouded pastures, their backs striped with white, looking like giant skunks. The smell of sodden leaves, hay, and fresh manure hung in the valley like fog, to reassure me that it was just my imagination.

The sun, only a pale imitation of the moon, briefly tried to lift the clouds, before giving in to gravity and the weight of snow-laden masses descending from the mountains where I headed. Wet snow began to stick to the windshield. As the road lifted above the valley fog, every living thing wore a top-dressing of white, black alders dripping cones even before the snow could begin to melt, red dogwood, yellow willows, and conifers painted with shades of blue and green over stark black trunks, all limned in white as though the artist had first painted in oils, then cut through edges of white on scratchboard. Mysterious realm, where even the rocks could be seen to have form and life. And there above the fog, the sun tricked the wind into complicity, revealing more here, less over there, shadows and light, magic of artist’s skill.

Hissing splash of melting snow beneath my tires gave way to muted crunch and whisper of dry powder settling deeper. Alone on the road for so long, it was easy to let reality slip and imagine myself a pioneer tracking through wilderness, but the blowing white had not completely obscured the evidence of some other brave soul who had gone before me into the mountain stronghold. I longed to see his tracks turn off and leave me to my wilderness alone, and when a truck passed going the other way, fleeing down to the valley, I hoped it was him.

White curtains swept across the landscape, and pulling close, confused my path, forcing me to slow and guide the wheels only by the distance to the nearest obscure dark shapes that lined the trail. Deeper still, I floated in silence broken only by gusting winds that pushed me toward the edge of … I knew not what, perhaps a flight into the void where only white winds ruled.

Wind stopped and dark trees reappeared, marching back to the edge of the trail, looming and drooping over, forlornly observing my passage.  A gray ghost of an owl turned the round disk of its face toward me as though it resented my presence in her silent realm, as I had resented the fool driver who had gone before me earlier.

Sun emerged, and patches of bright blue sky, putting an end to the rule of monochrome. Revived, trees shook off clouds of snow that drifted gently in my passage.

Then over the crest, emerging into another universe, where the next range of mountains and forests can be seen swathed in white, lit in gold, and surrounded by wild platinum and silver clouds, and in between, golden valleys streaked with green and black rivers and dotted with white farmstead homes, whose chimneys hint of warmth and life within. Beauty to fill the darkest soul that revels in isolation. We are never truly alone, for the artist has been there before us.

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