Harry's choice

Today was the day, 33 years ago, that Mount St. Helens erupted.

Are you old enough to remember? And if so, do you remember who Harry Truman was?

Video courtesy of the Portland Oregonian

No, I'm not talking about the former president. Harry R. Truman was the 83-year-old man and owner of the Mount St. Helens Lodge at Spirit Lake who would not leave his home -- even as the seismic activity of the volcanic mountain ticked over into the red. The mountain had already been evacuated by the time of the eruption, but Harry and his 16 cats simply refused to go, despite numerous pleas from family members, friends, complete strangers and (the day before the eruption) state officials. In several interviews, Harry said he believed the danger was exaggerated and that the mountain would never hurt him, but in any case he loved his home too much to evacuate -- "If the mountain goes, I'm going with it," he once said. And on the morning of May 18, 1980, the mountain buried Harry, his cats, his stockpiled alcohol, his home, and all traces of his life on Mount St. Helens.

Americans born within the last 20 years might find this story hard to believe. After all, scientists were certain the mountain was going to blow. There had already been precursor earthquakes so strong they'd knocked old Harry right out of bed. (He responded by moving his mattress into the basement.) Everyone knew Harry was living in a danger zone. So why didn't some police officer or government official get up there and just force Harry to evacuate? He might have been hale and hearty for his age and plenty feisty, but he was still an old man and he could have been frog-marched out of there by a younger and stronger officer. The cats could have been rounded up and carted off in animal carriers. (They didn't all have to be returned to him, either... I do think at a certain point you've got enough cats.) If Harry resisted, they could have rolled a few tear gas grenades into his place and gone in after him with gas masks. He didn't have to die. It was for his own good, after all.

This is the difference between the America of 1980, in the waning years of the Carter administration, and the America of 2013, in the similarly waning years of the Obama administration. People were just as worried about Harry Truman back in 1980 as we would be if a similar person were in the same situation today. People across the United States and around the world wrote to him, begging him to think about the danger he was putting himself in, to reconsider and evacuate. State officials tried to tell him, in the soberest terms possible, that the mountain was going to explode. But Harry knew -- as most American adults understood in 1980 -- that he and he alone was the captain of his fate. Others were free to persuade him, and they made every effort to change his mind, but they had no right to force him to leave, even "for his own good." Harry Truman was a free man, and he chose to stay in his home and bide the danger. And in 1980, the people of America as a whole believed they had no right to intervene and abrogate his choice.

Of course, things are different now. Our conception of "freedom" has evolved in the last three decades, as intelligent and thoughtful people in positions of power have discovered that certain freedoms in the hands of the masses are simply too dangerous to be allowed. For our own good, they have passed laws and regulations that take out of our hands the right to flush three gallons of water down the toilet at once, the right to get our clothing and dishes really clean, the right to smoke in or near bars and restaurants and public parks and pretty much anywhere else, the right to ride a bicycle without a helmet, the right to make politically incorrect comments in public, the right to buy all sorts of potentially dangerous objects from handguns to 100-watt incandescent lightbulbs. We cannot get aboard airplanes without undergoing a public strip search. We cannot buy fast food without having all those empty calories barked at us from the menu board. And we cannot drink a Big Gulp without having Mayor Bloomberg breathe down our necks about it. We have progressed from a nation that felt it had no right to intervene, to a nation filled with relentless busybodies.

Individual freedom has its responsibilities and its perils. When we say we are a free people, it means we understand individuals have the right to act like complete jackasses if they choose -- and to learn painful lessons from their own mistakes. Free people even have the right to make choices that endanger their own lives. When we take that right away from them for fear they'll misuse it in some way, we do a grave disservice both to individuals and to the society in which they live. Too much of this creates a society of dependent, helpless serfs, incapable of acting or thinking for themselves because they've never been allowed to practice.

In some ways, I'm glad Harry Truman died when and where he did. He'd lived a full, interesting life, and he died on his own terms. Had he been forced off the mountain by people who knew better than he what was good for him -- well, I think his friend John Garrity said it best at Harry's memorial service: "The mountain and the lake were his life. If he'd left it and then saw what the mountain did to his lake, it would have killed him anyway." Evacuating Harry by force would have broken and destroyed him. You see, murder isn't the only way to take a life. You can nibble choice away, slowly, bit by bit, year by year, until the individual's freedom to choose is nothing but a few meager crumbs -- not enough to sustain the life of a free person.

A social Gedankenexperiment

Often, after I pick up Miss V from school, we take short drives around town -- sometimes on specific errands, sometimes just to "go for a drive."  Today we took the offramp from the 520 to Bellevue's Crossroads neighborhood, and as we waited for the light to change, I turned and observed, for a while, a homeless man panhandling by the roadside.

There are many panhandlers scattered around Seattle's Eastside now, significantly more than there were when we moved here seven years ago.  When they first began to appear in the area, it was common for drivers to roll down their windows and offer money or an encouraging word.  But these days I see more and more people keeping their windows rolled up and their doors locked, staring straight ahead at the stoplight, choosing not to make eye contact, pretending they don't see.  To some extent, this is a coping mechanism.  When times are tight and you worry about feeding your own family, or when you see the same panhandler claiming he "just needs change for a bus ride home" for months at a time, the delicate moral instruments of compassion can be blunted or corroded by cynicism.  But still I wonder -- how often do we really see beggars?  How often do we recognize them as people, rather than hindrances?

So here's a little social Gedankenexperiment I'd love to try some time:  I'd like to contact twenty or so A-list Hollywood actors and actresses -- internationally known names and faces -- and quietly invite them to Seattle.  I'd put them up in a nice place for their trouble.  And each morning for several days, I'd make them up to look as scruffy and unkempt as possible, pad some of them out with fat suits, dress them in ill-fitting thrift-store finds, give them handmade signs and scatter them along offramps and street corners all around the Puget Sound to beg for an hour or two.

The point of this exercise wouldn't be to "raise awareness of the homeless," although that might be a nice side effect.  The point would be to see how truly observant drivers are of facial features, once they have mentally categorized people as homeless beggars.  How many people, idling at the red light, would be able to recognize a famous face far outside its usual context in first-run films and supermarket tabloid covers?  Would they glance over and see only some scarred, dissipated old man in a three-day beard with "Anything Helps God Bless" on a ripped section of cardboard, or would their eyes linger long enough to let their brains recognize Harrison Ford?  Is that just a haggard, underfed woman with gaps in her teeth and a stolen shopping cart full of stuff, or is it Anne Hathaway?  And what would people do once they did recognize a famous face begging?

I have neither the money nor the connections to do this properly, so for now it will have to remain a thought experiment -- but I'd love to stage it some day with a selection of game actors and actresses.  Don't you think it would be revealing of human nature?

The ghost of a Chance

In my second grade class, there was a boy named Chance Loving. Since we were both children of the late '60s who lived near the epicenter of the hippie movement, his name may very well have also described the circumstances of his conception.

Chance was small and thin for his age. His eyes held a sweet expression although they often looked tired, and his light brown hair was perpetually uncombed. He was a gentle little boy who loved to draw, and he usually sat alone at the back of the classroom, head down, quietly sketching monsters from the horror movies most kids our age weren't allowed to watch.

One of the reasons he may have sat alone was because he was perpetually dirty. Chance would often come home with me after school, and the first time my mother got a good look at him, she took Chance into the bathroom, soaped up a washcloth and gently washed his grimy face and hands all the way up to the elbows, until he was as clean as she could make him. (If he'd been her kid, she would have put him into a hot bath.) Rather than squirming and complaining the way most second-grade boys would, Chance just smiled and submitted placidly to the cleaning; he seemed to enjoy the attention.

Sometimes Chance wouldn't walk home with me; he'd just randomly show up at our doorstep. At times it would be dark and cold outside. Not once did he call home to let anyone know where he was, and no one ever called us to ask if Chance were there. I have no idea where he lived. On some occasions, particularly as it began to get dark, my mother would offer to drive him home, but Chance would always turn her down. He claimed that it wasn't far and that he preferred to walk.

There was at least one open house night at El Monte Elementary that year, and there were several parent-teacher conferences, but no mom or dad or grandparent ever showed up to admire Chance's monster drawings or to discuss his reading or math scores with Ms. Shore. Some sort of adult relative must have shown up with a birth certificate to register him for school, but for all anyone could tell Chance lived completely alone -- perhaps tucked into a drainage pipe somewhere.

On my first day of third grade, I looked around Mrs. Epperson's classroom and saw a lot of kids from the previous year, but Chance wasn't one of them. He wasn't in any of the third grade classes. Somewhere, in the summer space between second and third grade, Chance disappeared. His family may have been transients, or they may have relocated to a new job, or something entirely different might have happened, but I never saw him again.

I want to believe that, despite having the deck stacked against him, Chance grew up to be all right. I want to believe that conscientious teachers and other responsible adults who came into his life noticed this quiet boy and did everything they could for him, that he learned to be strong as well as gentle. I hope that his love of drawing saved him. Perhaps he changed his name, attended CalArts on a scholarship, and is even now happily drawing monsters for Pixar in Emeryville. I so want to believe that. But it's also too easy to believe that Chance didn't come back to school for third grade because he died over summer vacation. After all, who would have noticed or cared if the thin, quiet boy with the dirty face and the monster sketches simply never returned to school?

Well, for what it's worth, I did. And I still wonder what really happened to him.

Whenever anyone brings up the subject of "parental neglect," Chance's gentle, pinched face will always come first to my mind. And Chance is the reason I maintain that "neglect" is an insufficient word to describe the plight of unloved children. "Neglect" nicely describes what happens when you accidentally forget to water a plant, or fail to pick up the mail for a day or two, or don't get around to cleaning the litter box. "Neglect" suggests a kind of well-meaning forgetfulness that has little or nothing to do with the utter dereliction of parental duty that Chance, and millions of latchkey children like him, had to suffer. It is closer kin to the cold-blooded ruthlessness of the fairy-tale stepmother who leads her husband's worthless brats into the woods and abandons them there to fend for themselves or be torn apart by wild beasts.

The opposite of love is not hatred. It is indifference. It is utter failure to care for, to nurture, and to protect the helpless who have been entrusted to your care. And indifference is poisonous. I honestly don't know what was going on with Chance's parents -- whether they were alcoholics, workaholics, drug addicts, or if they just jumped ship and left him with an elderly, half-senile grandparent -- but you know what? It doesn't matter. Whatever the circumstances might have been, he deserved better. He deserved a home to go back to where someone would worry about him, feed him, clean him, teach him, defend him, love him.  Every child should have that foundation to build on.

Postcard call!

That's right, since I'm asking y'all for postcards, it seems only fair to return the favor.

So if you comment on this entry with your snailmail address, I'll send you a random postcard from my overflowing stash. (Don't worry, all comments will be privately screened; I don't disclose other people's contact information.) What will you get? Professional? Handmade? Ad card? YOU DON'T KNOW! It's the luck of the draw; that's the fun of it.

¡Fiesta!

Get it together, mis gringos, ¡es Cinco de Mayo!

My latest goofy project

(That's right, I loves me some goofy projects!)

My latest harebrained idea is partially inspired by mail art and Postcrossing, partially by all the books I read and wanted to escape into, and partially by family and friends who create amazing art of various sorts.

It's called Wish I Were Here: Postcards from Imaginary Places, and I cordially invite you to participate. Yes, even if you don't consider yourself an artist. Click for details.

Soup Night 3, and a tribute

Tonight we're hosting another Soup Night at our place. Still only the vaguest idea how many people will show up, but we'll see. Three full-on soups, one bonus leftover offering, and who knows what else. I have great hopes for a good time.

We'll also raise a bowl of soup to absent friends, specifically to Gretel and to Andy Macauley, whose remembrance service was held today in the Shropshire hills.

Through correspondence, blog-reading and package-swapping with Gretel over a few years, Captain Midnight and I also got to know her partner Andy. He was a tall, gentle-natured Northerner with a fondness for crime novels and local pubs, alt-rock and punk bands, and Dove Promises (and a tendency to make them disappear from packages). Gretel's blog revealed him as a backyard gardener, a long-time member of the Eynsham Cricket Club, a game tea-lady for charity, a meanderer through the English countryside, and quite obviously a man who loved her to distraction.

Back in art school.

Tuesday would have been his 42nd birthday.

Tonight we will imagine him here, seated near the window, long legs stretching out under the dining room table, with a bowl of chicken corn soup and a chunk of bread, listening to the babble of conversation and occasionally making wry comments. I think he might have enjoyed that.