A Little More About Kleadrap

A Little More About Kleadrap

I suppose I ought to tell you a little more about Kleadrap. As I may have mentioned earlier, it's a small town, perhaps six hundred permanent residents. The main street runs along the Willamette meridian and is called appropriately, Baseline Road. Perhaps five numbered streets intersect Baseline, but at a peculiar angle. The surveyor, Dennis Crumb, who laid out the original grid for the town in 1908 was new to the discipline, and, despite having a bachelors degree in surveying and mapping, civil engineering, and mechanical engineering he was perhaps overwhelmed by the responsibility suddenly thrust upon him because, it seems he simply failed to take into account the magnetic declination for the area, roughly 15 degrees when plotting the embryonic town. Did he ever consider the Agonic Line?

As a result, all of the original North/South cross streets intersect Baseline at something greater or less than 90 degrees. Each platted block thereby became a parallelogram. To compound matters, when the early pioneers constructed their homes they measured from the center line of the nearby cross street to lay out the foundations for their homes rather than employ the 3:4:5 ratio. As a result all the primary buildings in Kleadrap are parallelograms. The one time visitor simply ‘passing through’ may not be aware of this as the difference is slight and as all buildings in ‘downtown’ Kleadrap conform to this aberration it is not particularly noticeable. Visitors may leave with a nagging sense that something didn’t seem quite right but be unable to identify the reason for their unease. Of course the inhabitants are made aware of this aberration every time they lay down tile or wall-to-wall carpeting. None of the walls in any of the early homes meet at a right angle.

Kleadrap has a current population of around 600 people, considerably more during the summer vacation period, and fall, when picking season (beets, rutabagas, and onions) is in full swing. Main street boasts one market, one gasoline station, one tavern, two gift shops, a post office, and two other buildings that are vacant most of the time, or accommodate various transient businesses for a few months. Tax time might see an accountant or two move in and rent an apartment above the tavern, and once in a while a local, or occasionally out-of-town artist sets up shop, but they soon realize there are too few people in the community, either permanent or transient, with too little discretionary income, to make any year round business viable.

This was not always so. Once, an opera house stood at the corner of Third and A street, attracting such luminaries as Paollie Accardi and Melanie Moreau. Historic rumor has it that Oscar Wilde had considered making an appearance. And there was the ‘Roller Dome’, located at the end of Lava Bed Road. There aren’t any photographs from that period but locals say Leo Selzer attended the opening. 

A twelve-grade school house, located next to the now boarded-up grange building, graduated twenty-seven classes over twenty-seven years. Now, only the rare discovery of an agate marble, or the oxidized tip from a spinning top indicates the fervent activity that must have once taken place.

Time rusts and dissolves everything, even memory.

Then came rumors that F. S. Whinkla had moved to Kleadrap. I think that was in the mid seventies.

Nothing has been the same since.

A Gardener Forgets, and Remembers

Reading My Life With Plants, an autobiographical reminiscence by Roy Lancaster, I was taken aback when I read about his first encounter with Gentiana lutea. Seems he had been accompanying a group of fellow botanists, grounds-keepers, gardeners and horticulturists on a visit to one of the too many magnificent English gardens abandoned and neglected for far too many years. Despite the passage of time he could still recall with joy entering what had once been the croquet lawn of an old estate, one of so many in England that went from employing a gardening staff of 100 to perhaps two, after the ‘Great War’.

So, what’s this got to do with me in 2024? Well, over the years I have, among several other demanding interests, actively immersed myself in the botanical/horticultural/gardening/plant propagation/hybridizing world. I’ve passed through many phases over the past sixty plus years, or rather I have spent more time with one genus over another for varying lengths of time. Heathers and Heaths occupied me for a year or two (the heather bed, virtually abandoned now, still grows vigorously, though I doubt I could find or name more than a few of the 100 plus varieties I once tended), then I went on to species roses, and the hybrids. Then the genus Rhododendron seemed to possess me, and occupied much of my time for a few years, only to be replaced by dwarf Conifers. I was spreading myself quite thin and wished there were more of me. I cultivated several penstemon beds and two mini bog gardens and then there was the rock garden, or gardens. I joined most of the societies devoted to promoting interest in these various plant groups. I joined The Heather Society, The Primrose Society, the Conifer Society, The North American Rock Garden Society, The American Hosta Society, The North American Lily Society, and I might have joined The American Avocado Society if one was available. I devoured their journals in a state of bliss, but the main reasons for joining was to have access to their annual seed exchanges. This is where seeds of hundreds of varieties unavailable and virtually unheard of in the commercial market place could be found. Treasures to make even King Midas’s fingers itch. I grew (continue to grow, though not quite as extravagantly) dozens of new plants every year, and despite my best efforts to keep timely and accurate records I loose track of too many seedlings.

So.

Late last summer as I was working/enjoying myself in what I call the 'Tea-house Garden' I noticed two tall, bright yellow flowers in a nearby bed. At first I thought they were perhaps Verbascum thapsus, a mullein, or even Phlomis fruticosa, the Jerusalem Sage, of which we have several, but there was something different about these plants. I sheathed my Hori and investigated. Clearing the area around their base I discovered an old ‘Venetian blind’ aluminum plant tag. Gentiana lutea is what I had scratched on it, but no planting date.

They very well could have bloomed in previous years without my taking notice, though unlikely.  Anyway, with the tag I was able to go to my records and notebooks and eventually find a brief history of the plants. I received the seeds, #1050, in the fall of 2017 from NARGS (North American Rock Garden Society). They were planted in a small pot on February 2nd and put in the refrigerator. They were taken out on May 3rd and only five days later six seeds germinated. They were eventually transplanted to a large six-cell plant tray. Three survived and were eventually planted out on May 5, 2018.

I find it hard to believe they took six years to bloom, but I find it equally difficult to think they had been blooming for a few years without my noticing. And now I realize I didn’t take any photographs! One person can only do or see so much I suppose. Still. . .

I Hold in my Hand

I hold in my hand a Dixon Ticonderoga HB #2 soft pencil.

I roll it slowly with my fingers, turn it end to end, and am awestruck.

A cursory examination shows it to be 37 picas long, sharpened at one end to a point, exposing a black material that I will assume, for now, to be a form of carbon/graphite. The opposite end is capped with a small tubular section of a pink, flexible artificial substance the same diameter as the pencil and attached by a tubular piece of crimped metal - aluminum I suppose. The eraser is said to be able to erase any thoughts or ideas unwittingly or accidentally committed to paper by the pencil. A useful feature, at times

The slender wooden shaft, milled from a billet of clear, rosy-tinted incense cedar, is flawless in its integrity. The shape and balance, the feel and heft, are perfection personified.

I’ve been led to understand that it is the only implement or device Santa will use when compiling his ‘lists’.

Not being a 100% Luddite I have elected to use a keyboard and computer to compose this note but will continue to use a Dixon Ticonderoga HB #2 soft pencil for all important ruminations.

A Tale of Two Trees

 A Tale of Two Trees

Many year ago I planted a dozen or so trees in a small area to the southeast of our house where they could enjoy the morning sun and eventually provide shade. The majority were Douglas Fir, Pseudotsuga menziesii, but, as I had them available, I added three or four Larch, probably Larix occidentalis). The years come and go, come and go, with predictable regularity and living things grow, generally getting larger. I continue to find it amazing that a seedling planted when it was perhaps ten inches high could in a dozen years reach 15 - 20 feet. Now, thirty or more years later they are magnificent, perhaps too much so. Various utility lines are buried beneath them and there is no comfortable place to fall them that would not result in substantial damage to the landscape, if not the house.

But that is not what I wanted to write about. The Larch were raised from the same seed lot and initially they all seemed to be growing at the same rate. Eventually one died, or else I cut it down because of crowding, and the other two continued to fulfill their destiny. After only a few years it was obvious they were growing at very different speeds. I began referring to one of them as my living flagpole and intended (still intend) to make such use of it very soon. Environmental conditions and management have been identical all these years. I can only conclude the difference is in they genetic makeup.

One has only to glance at these two trees to realize the unpredictability of genetics. Hybridizers often plant hundreds of seeds from the same seed pod, spend years raising them to maturity, hoping to get one or two offspring that are different enough, in a positive manner, to justify their continued propagation.

Maybe I’ll turn the tree into a maypole.

The two trees referred to are the second and fourth from the left.

Where are the bees?

Finally disclosed:

The real reason for the decline in bee populations is the savage white spider. Not being an Arachnologist I have no idea as to the identity of this particular eight-legged predator but I suspect it, and its ilk, are the real reason for the decline in bee populations worldwide. It’s so much easier for the people watching CBS. ABC, NBC, FOX, etc., or some other pre-pablum site to sit back in their easy-chairs and blame the chemical companies, and their toxic biological and mechanical output, or the land developers taking millions of acres of native, natural land out of the biosphere every year. Hogwash! It’s the spiders!

Baking Bread and John Keats

Baking Bread and John Keats 

I have been baking bread for fifty years yet still, rarely, ‘get-it-right’. That’s not to say I bake every week. Sometimes a month or more will pass with only commercial, or semi-commercial loaves from the local market gracing our table.

I will say, emphatically, the selection and quality of baked goods available today at the market is infinitely better than what the industry convinced us to eat back in the fifties/sixties. I still recall advertisements on many of the television western serials for Langendorf, Weber’s, Bond, and Wonder bread, and who knows how many other related brands urging us to fill up on their tasteless white product in order to become a healthier, smarter etc. young man/woman. Things don’t seem to have changed much, only the product.

I don’t have a mixer with a dough hook to mix my ingredients, (but neither did those early Middle Eastern people 8,000 years ago) but I often use a bread making machine for the initial blending and kneading. Many times, especially if I am consciously mired in some esoteric/philosophical internal discourse, or wondering just how many varieties of tomato seed I should plant, I dispense with the machine entirely, and do it all by hand. I’ve always done a lot of things by hand.

Simple breads are easy, and I don’t understand why more people don’t make their own bread, at least part of the time. With only four or five ingredients what could possibly go wrong? Or be easier? I just baked a loaf of Italian Sandwich Bread from a recipe I found in one of several dozen bread baking books on the shelf and it is, for a simple, basic, white flour bread, delicious, especially toasted.

So what was it I intended to say? I think I wanted to say a few words regarding John Keats, but like wind-dispersed pollen those thoughts have escaped their capsule and are miles away.

Grass Widows and Okra

 The Grass Widows are blooming on the basalt plateaus along the Columbia River. Little shards of fragmented blue sky floating and swirling in snow-melt rivulets. A something to fill any vacant spots in anyones heart. But, standing in awe of the tableau before me I wondered just how necessary, or important, are any of us in this sad, and often desolate world. Humans seem to be the okra in the stew.

Let me explain the ‘okra’ reference.

After my escape from the Air Force in 1964 I shared an apartment (Cedar Crest) in South El Monte with a good friend who had also recently been released from the Air Farce. A party time ensued as we attempted to distance ourselves from, and erase any dark atmospheric aura the military might have stained us with. And we were poor, like most of the other dwellers of the complex.

Well, trying to reduce our daily expenses we took to going around to other apartments (after their assumed dinner time) and asking for any leftover food they might have. Whatever they offered we added to our pot. As a result, every dinner became an unknown surprise, but something we, and many other apartment dwellers looked forward to. We kept the ‘Hobo’ stew happily simmering for several days/weeks(?).

But it all came to an abrupt end one evening. Something was amiss, something in the bubbling pot felt slimy, and was not particularly palatable. It had crawled across our collective tongues and found wanting. Our evolutionary and revolutionary dinner stew was brought to a sudden and final end. Nothing could redeem us.

We examined, analyzed, and finally decided the ‘Trojan Horse’ that had brought down our nightly communal dinners was the okra!

I eat just about everything but still can’t bring myself to eat okra.

The Magic and Promise of Cervantes

 The Magic and Promise of Cervantes, with apologies.

Who among us has not, at one time or another, entertained the dream, the idea, of a life dedicated to overcoming even one of the many injustices inflicted on the human race in this fractured and tortured world? To try, despite uncountable odds, to right even one unbearable wrong? To fight fiercely and fairly for a just and noble cause? To dedicate ones heart and soul and body to the challenge. To… to, but wait, I hear the orchestra tuning their instruments.

But there are other worthy challenges, some within the grasp and capabilities of mortals.

I have spent most of my life in, and with books - blame that, if cause be needed, on my father. (If only every child was so afflicted). And, occasionally, out of the tens of thousand books that have passed through my hands and eyes, the words of some of the authors have resonated with a frequency approaching the hum of gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos. It is the sound of no hand clapping, but of harmony. But the desire to read more of their works, and to know more about their lives and times, is for some of us overwhelming.

Thus are we disposed to accept the challenge.

May I set the stage? I shall become a knight errant and impersonate a lonely man of books. Come, enter into my imagination and see him! His name... Lorenzo Hawkins, a country bibliophile, no longer young ... bony, hollow-faced... eyes that burn with the fire of inner vision. Being retired, he has much time for wine and books. He reads and studies books from morn to night, and often through the night as well. And all he reads excites him, yet oppresses him... fills him with indignation at man's murderous ways toward literature and books. And he conceives the strangest project ever imagined... to become a knight-errant and sally forth into the world and search out all publications extant written by, or in some way connected to the authors of his dreams. No longer shall he be plain Lorenzo Hawkins… but a dauntless book sleuth known as… Lorenzo cercatore di libri.

He will seek out the hidden, the blatant and obscure. Thrift shops, garages, barns. junk stores, abandoned cars, storage units, boats moored at marinas, bedrooms, igloos, foot lockers, yard sales, the tents of the homeless, and anywhere else a book might hide.

Somewhere he feels certain he will find his Dulcinea del Taboso.

Remembering the ‘Teddy Boys’

 Remembering the ‘Teddy Boys’

It was around 1951, and I was a young lad of nine or so living in Stourport-on-Severn in England. I’m not sure, even now, how I ever became aware of the term “Teddy Boys”, or how I understood what the word represented. I do recall that I was told, in some way or other, that they were a group of young people that dressed in rather fancy Edwardian clothes and would beat you up and steal your candy, or take the penny or two your mother might have given you for a ‘lady finger’, without provocation. Avoid them at all costs, I think I was told, even if you might one day become one of them.

One day I decided to go downtown for some reason, perhaps to visit my grandmother’s confectionery, but to get there I would have to run the gauntlet of what I thought were the “Teddy Boys” who hung out at the amusement park. Yes, I do recall passing a few rather specious and intimidating ‘Clockwork Orange’ type young lads leaning against whatever they could find to support themselves, but other than what I considered a definite scowl, I passed unhindered.

What can I say?

The Young Man and the Lake

 

The Young Man and the Lake

A Story of Redemption

He was a young man who fished from a rental rowboat on a small lake fed by the effluent from a sewer plant and he had gone eight minutes without taking a fish. In the first four minutes a boa constrictor had been with him, but after four minutes, without catching a fish, the boa constrictor told the young man he was as unlucky as Saul, which is the worst form of unlucky, and left. The boat continued to bob up and down with every flush of a toilet. The young man continued to fish, too embarrassed to return to the marina without a catch. The sun glared down from a cloudless sky. The young man dipped his hat in the water and sighed. He looked across the lagoon and into the trees, but he could think only of the fish that might be swimming beneath his boat.

His name was Lorenzo, and he

How to Recognize an Old Logger

 How to Recognize an Old Logger

They have a splintered view of things

and walk with a wooden gait.

Their tongues are know to burn

under the heat of words and

they love kindling

always carry a knife

to whittle away at things,

and people.

They smell of sawdust, fir sap,

tobacco, gasoline, and oil.

Their limbs are knotted.

There are burls

at each knee and elbow.

They worship Paul Bunyan.

Their children receive

wooden toys for Christmas.

If in doubt,

look for Spanish moss on the

north side of their faces,

or listen for termites

in their teeth.

Watch their eyes outgrow their faces

at any mention of the spotted owl.

Few are known to reach the age

of old growth -

they prefer it that way.

from The Whinkla Chronicles

The Whinkla Chronicles

Yesterday, many of my most recent fears were regretfully realized when I stumbled across a cache of partially burned papers buried in one of the fire pits Whinkla uses on Thomas Hardy night. l had been taking his dog Alexis for a walk along the irrigation ditch that runs across the rear of his property, and having no though at all about anything whatsoever except noting the clarity of the evening sky something below the bank caught my attention. Calling the dog to heel I scampered down the muddy incline to investigate. It was a bundle of tightly rolled pages of yellow paper, and although the pages were matted from soaking in water the text was still quite legible. I glanced at the topmost page:

Notes on the Synthanation of Crhontium Silate

and Pltaferonic Acid

(extrapolated from the analysis of results

obtained from experiments conducted

between March 27 and July 15 2007)

NOT FOR GENERAL DISTRIBUTION

and thought immediately of rekindling the fire of Guy Fawkes.

After reading the cover sheet I decided not to read any further but to take the bundle of musty paper home to dry, and if possible retrieve from the soggy wad what information I could, but for what purpose I had no idea. Should I discover something untoward about my friend Whinkla would this mark me as a potential betrayer? Why did I think this handful of fool scrap might be of any importance? And were these pages really in Whinkla’s hand? Why didn't I simply raise my eyes to the top of the nearby Douglas firs, and the timeless firmament, which was my wont, and go home?

There were stars enough in the sky on any night to satisfy anyone's curiosity, but, on this night my interest in the papers was piqued beyond any stellar wonderings. I wrapped the manuscript in my jacket and tucked it carefully beneath a thatch of heather, and whistled my way back to Whinkla's cabin. After a glass of a remarkable Cabernet and a potpourri of casual literary talk I made my anxious way back to retrieve the manuscript. It pained me to decline Whinkla's kind and very rare offer to walk me to the edge of the dry lake and see me safely on my way home. He had never done this before.

I pressed my hand against my stomach where I had hidden the papers and . . .