Road clearing

We camped over the weekend for possibly the last time this year due to the shortening days. As we lay in the van reading on Saturday afternoon, something caught my eye, and I looked out to see a large owl observing Baxter from a nearby tree. This was the third time I’ve saved him from a predator. The first was a bobcat and the second a hawk. The bobcat was clearly on the verge of attacking, but the plans of the hawk and the owl were less clear to me, and maybe to themselves. Baxter is too heavy to fly away with, yet he is so enticingly helpless. A person doesn’t realize how many predators there are in the woods until he goes there in the company of something they would like to eat.

This was our fifth trip to the same abandoned roadbed. On the first, we biked as far as we could, often having to carry our bikes over logs and around brush. We got it into our heads that it would be fun to clear the roadway with the exception of a downed tree at the very beginning that we hoped would discourage ATVers. According to our map, the road went maybe two or three miles (crooked distances are hard to judge) and gained 800 feet before abruptly ending on the side of a nameless mountain. The map also showed a few spur roads and several creeks. None of the creeks were running, although some contained small pools for the dogs.

Some of the spur roads were still marked by plasticized signposts. The forest service really has a winner with these as they look almost new even after three decades. Our best map is supposed to show all the roads, even the abandoned ones, but some of the spurs were simply too old to be included. Yet, these faithful signposts continue to announce their existence.

Weeks later, we returned with a bucksaw and set to work. It was a lousy job for a man with a bad knee, but I enjoy few things better than tidying up the woods. As is often the case with abandoned roadbeds, the first part was easily discernible, but the latter completely covered by leaf litter and fallen trees. On an exploratory trip, Peggy actually became lost and had to follow the dogs out. Although she questioned their choice of direction, she had no ideas of her own, and was pleasantly surprised by how fast they found me.

The woods being shadowy, sword ferns had taken root in the leaf litter. They were huge, but so shallowly anchored that they could be easily peeled from the earth, exposing glimpses of the old roadbed. I hesitantly uprooted enough of them to create a passage. I often ponder ways to reduce the number of creatures that must die so that I might live, but my responsibility is unclear. For example, I’ve no doubt but what I often run over snakes sunning themselves on mountain roads, but what am I to do? I could drive fewer miles or even stay home altogether, yet it would be a terrific loss to me.

In their struggle to reach the light, quite a few big-leaf maples and western red cedars had grown so tall that their trunks couldn’t support them, and many had bent completely across the road creating an arbor effect. Maples can survive several years in this condition, and we let them be except when they were too low to bike under. Cutting cedars conjured memories of sharpening pencils in grade school. I felt guilty about killing even such stunted trees, but I consoled myself with the thought that they were doomed anyway.

Our work consumed a significant part of four days, and we did not expect to reach the end of the road even then, but the last few hundred feet turned out to be less challenging than anticipated, so at four o’clock Sunday we arrived at a spot beyond which no more gravel could be found. Some old growth logs awaited us there in company with a beer can, an oilcan and a Prestone anti-freeze container—all made of steel and requiring an opener. Since I didn’t remember anti-freeze coming in such a container, I assumed it must date from the early sixties if not sooner. A log had protected it from the elements.

Peggy wondered halfway through our work if we were breaking the law. I said that we probably could be charged with something, although I couldn’t imagine that we would be even in the unlikely event that anyone caught us. Then too, I offered, it is only a matter of time before the dozers return to reopen the area for another round of logging, so, in all fairness, we should be paid for our work. Without us, the forest service would have to send in surveyors to find the roadbed. Of course, they will probably send in surveyors anyway—as a matter of course—but those surveyors will be pleasantly surprised to find that someone did their work for them. As for us, our private treasure will be lost. Not just the road but the forest itself.

Lightning flashes

I saw lightning flashes in both eyes last night. The right eye got so bad that I couldn’t see anything on that side of my nose. I was biking with the dogs at the time, and we had to pass through several narrow gates to get home. I couldn’t even tell if a gate was open until I was upon it. When I got home, I found that I couldn’t read. I could recognize individual letters, but I couldn’t make them into words. I thought that, well, okay, I will separate the letters into syllables, but since individual syllables can be pronounced in different ways, I had to go through various combinations in order to figure out each word, and this made sentences impossible.

I hesitated to tell Peggy for fear she would freak out, but I did, and she did. “We’ve got to get you to urgent care,” she insisted. “No, no, no,” I insisted back. “I don’t know what this is, but I don’t think it’s serious. That migraine I had two years ago started with flashing lights, so I think this might be a repeat.” I reminded her of the time I had shingles around my eye, and, at her insistence, went to urgent care at 5:30 in the morning. I said this to convince her that I would be not only willing but eager to go to the hospital if I thought it necessary.

In this situation, I figured that, okay, if I go, they’re probably going to scan my head with some enormous machine. Then they’re going to run all kinds of other tests, and the bill is going to be a thousand dollars after insurance, and nothing will show up on any of the tests, and I will get well on my own after having spent hours lying around on cold gurneys waiting for people to do things.
Two hours later I could read but had a slight headache. Today, I am fine.

Biking with the dogs

We biked in the woods thrice last week, only stopping to water the dogs and to eat salal berries, thimbleberries, blackberries, dewberries, salmon berries, and red huckleberries. We covered ten miles some days, no more because of the dogs.

Baxter has diabetes incipitus, so he must never be without water. He drinks as much as Peggy, Bonnie, and me together, so much water that his pee looks like water. We carry a gallon for a ten-mile trip and, on warm days, stop every ten minutes or so to check him for heat exhaustion. We note whether he collapses in a heap or hunts for game in the bushes. We check his gums to be sure they are pink. We talk to him to gauge his alertness. We give him time to catch his breath.

We are aided in our attentiveness by reminders of how everlastingly guilty we would feel if we ran him to death. I say we, but Peggy leaves Baxter’s care on the road to me, which is a reversal of what we do at home where she looks at the dogs’ piss, pokes at their poop, feels their bodies for growths, observes their eyes; and sometimes works herself into a panic for little reason that I can see. I took Bonnie to the vet last week simply because Peggy was worried about a fleeting pain. The vet didn’t know what to make of it, and suggested x-rays. I demurred at the price, and came away with a bottle of anti-inflammatory pills of which only two were used—and them only because we had them.

Without dogs, we would bike faster, farther, and sometimes on pavement, but dirt and gravel are conducive to slower speeds and are easier on their feet. Their joy is worth our sacrifice. It is even worth having to bathe them when we get home.

Thoughts of investing

There are as many mutual funds as there are stocks on the Wilshire 5000 (which actually contains 7000 stocks). Many mutual funds charge a four to eight percent sales fee, a one to two percent advisory fee, and a 12b1 fee which goes for advertising. This in a market that averages ten percent. Less than half of these actively managed funds earn, after expenses, a return that is equal to the market, and that’s in one year. With every subsequent year, the winning funds have less chance of beating the market average again. By year five, the number is down to one in four, and those investors who own a market-beating fund pay higher taxes (due to the fund’s portfolio turnover) and incur greater risk.

Impartial financial writers often advise investors to not even try to beat the market. Instead, buy a fund that replicates the index. The passively managed Wilshire 5000 index fund that I own has no sales fee, no 12b1 fee, and a 0.1% maintenance fee. Furthermore, the portfolio turnover rate is almost nil (compared to 100% or more for many managed funds), so there are few capital gains. I also own a bond index fund that follows the broad American bond market, and a third fund that tracks the EAFE (Europe, Australasia, and the Far East) stock index. I own 50% American stocks, 5% foreign stocks, and 45% American bonds. If I were younger, I would own more stocks, but since there have been whole decades in which the market lost money, I can’t take the risk.

Yesterday, I heard over NPR that the stock market might crash this very week due to the domino effect of mortgage loan defaults. The brokerage houses are in a panic. The hedge fund managers can’t slow down long enough for their in-house shoeshine boys to polish their shoes. Some fund managers have even stopped honoring redemptions.

Maybe the sky is about to fall, but then again stocks are never more popular than at the end of a bull market or more shunned than at the end of a bear market. This is why I mostly ignore the prognosticators. I say mostly, because I understand only too well the twin emotions of greed and fear that drive the market.

Still, I’ve seen the market drop 38% without being tempted to bail. I’m not brave; I just think in terms of shares instead of dollars. If I own 100 shares of a mutual fund, I will still own those 100 shares whether they are worth a lot or a little unless I sell them. This means that I have reason to hope. If I owned 100 shares of stock, it would be a different matter because a person can ride a stock all the way to the ground. By contrast, a mutual fund is spread across many stocks, and my investments are spread further than any actively managed mutual fund. If big company stocks are rising, I rise with them. If small company stocks or Japanese stocks are having their day in the sun, I get in on some of that. If no stocks are going up, I have bonds to fall back on. And no matter what, I won’t pay high fees and taxes.

My only indulgence is 350 shares of a fund that invests solely in oil and gas exploration. It’s breathtaking to watch its movements on a given day, and, over the course of a year, it can go up or down by 80%. I tell myself that I should sell it while it’s flying high, but I love that fund. It’s like having a poisonous snake for a pet. The snake kills your rats, but then you can never trust the snake not to kill you too, and there’s something attractive about that.

Scandi Festival

I helped my Masonic Lodge staff a food booth at the Scandinavian Festival last week. When I arrived, I was handed a fake-embroidery vest and a pointed hat that looked like a limp dunce cap. Our specialty was meatballs on a stick. I assumed they were called meatballs-on-a-stick, so when a customer asked me for a frickadeller, I asked her what she was talking about. She pointed to our big sign (which I hadn’t read), and looked at me as if I had pretty much ruined the exoticism of her gustatory experience.

Another customer asked what kind of food we had. I knew what kind of food we had. We had Costco precooked sausages and Don Juan tortillas, but I didn’t know what kind of food we were supposed to have. I called Donald over since Donald was the only one of us who actually knew what he was doing. “It’s Swedish,” he said. Of course, Swedish meatballs, why didn’t I think of that? Maybe for the same reason that I don’t know what countries constitute Scandinavia. Sweden and Norway, I suppose. Denmark, perhaps? Finland possibly? Do I care? A little.

I neither hated my shift nor loved it. Mostly I watched women, felt mildly annoyed when we had customer, and wondered if everyone else who was serving food (eating appeared to be the point of the festival) was as fake as we were.

The sad story of American Home Mortgage

Last week, I lost $14,000 in the stock market. I didn’t do anything wrong—it was just a bad few days. Still, $14,000…. I pick up pennies from the sidewalk. If someone gave me $14,000 to actually spend, I would be stumped.

I gain and lose money all the time in the stock market (I surely lost several thousand more today), but I don’t normally track my investments. I simply look at my monthly statements, groan or smile, and file them away.

My investment style is a combination of whatever looks good at a particular time (I buy but seldom sell), and my desire to protect Peggy from volatility. When we got into the market, she worried about how I would react to losing money, but I soon realized that she was more grieved by it than I. She interpreted every up as a fluke and every down as the start of Great Depression II. I accepted both as normal, and held to the belief that, over time, the market would go up more than it went down. The worst down we saw was 40%, and that was okay. It wasn’t something to sneeze at, but it wasn’t tragic either.

My first thought upon investing in stocks was to buy low and sell high. Everyone thinks that, only it’s harder than it looks—a bit liking throwing rocks at darting night birds. That’s why I mostly stopped selling, that and the tax liability.

Over the years, I felt like I should study investing more, but the subject didn’t interest me so I kept putting it off in favor of work that I could stand back and look at. Things like remodeling projects. In the last month, I’ve been making up for lost time. The main thing I’ve learned is that even knowledgeable investors have trouble making a significant amount of money in the market (although losing a significant amount is easy enough). Finding a way to beat the market is like finding a cure for the common cold. If scientists can cure a rare cancer, surely they can cure a common cold, or so it would seem, but after decades of work and millions of dollars, colds remain defiant. This gives my market studies a dismal air because, there being no one to tell me what will work, I might do really well, or….

The impetus to today’s sell-off was the fall of American Home Mortgage Corporation. This evening, I saw a graph of its demise that was updated every five minutes throughout the day. A year ago, AHM was selling for $36 a share. Today, it opened at $10.47. At 2:00, it was still at $10.47. By 3:00, it was $1.14. Picture that graph. First, a long horizontal line. Then a sharply descending vertical line. Then a slightly wobbly horizontal line. Then nothing. Like a heart monitor on a dying man.

Imagine that you woke up this morning in Houston or Milwaukee, and went to your job at AHM expecting an ordinary day, and then top management announced to Wall Street that bankruptcy was looming. Bang! By mid-afternoon you’re out of your job and possibly your savings. That’s drama. I once heard about an economist who was so moved by graphs that he sometimes cried. I can see that now, and it makes studying the market a lot more interesting.

The whys of organizing

I’ve spent the week organizing, or rather reorganizing, our finances and file cabinets. One of the traits Peggy and I share is that we are born organizers. The difference is that I organize everything—socks, tools, pantry shelves, even the kitchen junk drawer, whereas she is a selective organizer. She’s content to let things overflow in her purse, desk, and closet; but her checkbook is an accountant’s envy, and her button collection is displayed so symmetrically that a flea couldn’t crawl through the margin of error. I stop short of such perfection, though I still qualify as neurotic by most standards, my garage being tidier than other people’s living rooms.

Well, anyway, I organized this week. It was such fun that I had to force myself to go to bed at night. Organizing is, of course, an attempt to control reality—to make it safer, tidier, more predictable. The problem is that reality is inherently dangerous, messy, and unknowable. The harder I try to tame it, the more aware I become of its dangers, and the greater my need to eliminate those dangers.

The most frightened man I ever knew carried a .45 everywhere, even into the shower (he put it in a baggie). I visited him once. He had a yard alarm, and every time a squirrel walked by, that alarm would go off, and my friend would run to the window with his .45. So it is that prudent watchfulness can grow into full-blown paranoia. On the other hand, the world really is a dangerous place, and it makes sense to try to avoid the most likely dangers.

The trick here, as in all things I suppose, is balance. But where is the fulcrum? I don’t see it. Do you see it?

The whys of organizing

I’ve spent the week organizing, or rather reorganizing, our finances and file cabinets. One of the traits Peggy and I share is that we are born organizers. The difference is that I organize everything—socks, tools, pantry shelves, even the kitchen junk drawer, whereas she is a selective organizer. She’s content to let things overflow in her purse, desk, and closet; but her checkbook is an accountant’s envy, and her button collection is displayed so symmetrically that a flea couldn’t crawl through the margin of error. I stop short of such perfection, though I still qualify as neurotic by most standards, my garage being tidier than other people’s living rooms.

Well, anyway, I organized this week. It was such fun that I had to force myself to go to bed at night. Organizing is, of course, an attempt to control reality—to make it safer, tidier, more predictable. The problem is that reality is inherently dangerous, messy, and unknowable. The harder I try to tame it, the more aware I become of its dangers, and the greater my need to eliminate those dangers.

The most frightened man I ever knew carried a .45 everywhere, even into the shower (he put it in a baggie). I visited him once. He had a yard alarm, and every time a squirrel walked by, that alarm would go off, and my friend would run to the window with his .45. So it is that prudent watchfulness can grow into full-blown paranoia. On the other hand, the world really is a dangerous place, and it makes sense to try to avoid the most likely dangers.

The trick here, as in all things I suppose, is balance. But where is the fulcrum? I don’t see it. Do you see it?

Alan Wheelis and the absence of meaning

On June 16th, I checked out a library book by the psychoanalyst Allen Wheelis. I had never heard of him, but I always peruse the new book section, and The Way We Are intrigued me. I finished my second reading this morning, and looked the author up on the net. He died the day I got his book.

“There are two essential categories: that unchanging backdrop, the raw nature of existence, unadorned, unmediated, overwhelming us with dread, the way things are; and that changing succession of stage sets we put in front of that backdrop, blocking it from view, the schemes of things, the systems of meanings within which we live. The backdrop is a constant, too awful and too fearful to be endured; the sets change over the course of history, though they may seem fixed over the course of a lifetime.”

But what of those who can no longer believe in the sets?

“Do you know? Do you feel it, this losing of grip? The received interpretations no longer work, don’t fit, don’t take hold…

“Some people don’t hear the screaming; the old fictions still work. Some hear it keenly: The chalk has worn down, the fingernail drags across an endless blackboard, the sky is empty.”

What is there for the latter?

“When the ruling scheme of things comes to seem untrue or unimportant, one’s efforts within it become meaningless. One’s whole life becomes meaningless…. One seeks distraction…”

He sought distraction through women.

“…I remind myself that my papier-mâché angel will turn into a witch or a drab. Yet this passion for a falsified other may be the only thing in life really worthwhile.”

But why not improvise a meaning?

“Free to choose how to live, the way we choose is meaningless; living in the certainty of meaning, we live a life that is imposed.”

An improvised purpose is just that—improvised, shot on the fly, made with limited—and possibly inaccurate—knowledge. The shooter can neither see his target nor know the nature of his target. I very much doubt that we are even able to think outside of the scheme of things, because we are the products of that scheme; we are contained within it. Even when we reject it, we reject it from within, using its terminology, its images.

When people explain to me their core beliefs, the thoughts that keep them going, that make their lives worthwhile, I can scarcely take them seriously. Still others have nothing to explain because they don’t feel compelled to look for an explanation. I am likewise challenged to take them seriously. I can flatter myself about why I am different (“I am more intellectually courageous,” or “I possess greater depth”), yet I would trade places if I could. I neither take comfort in religion, nor acknowledge human authority. The most I can ever know is but a guess. I am limited by my senses, my intelligence, and my culture.

I think of my species as I think of my dogs. Bonnie is smart, Baxter not so smart; yet even Bonnie couldn’t master long division. The most brilliant dog that ever lived—the Einstein of dogs—could not have mastered long division. My race is likewise limited. Some of us know things that astound the rest, but all of us together know very little in proportion to the totality of knowledge, and we probably lack the capacity to understand many things. Like dogs, our intellectual ceiling is not only low, we are too unintelligent to know how low it is. Or so I suspect.

Murderous nurse

I hate to admit I watched them, but I did. Two true crime shows at the same time (I switched during commercials), one about a college student who chopped up his parents with an axe; the other about a woman who shot her husband. Alas, the announcer on the second show said, “A trained nurse, she dismembered the body and packed it into three suitcases…”

“A trained nurse!” I thought. “I’m married to a trained nurse—and she owns three suitcases!”

“Peggy,” I asked when Peggy got home, “when you were in nursing school did any of your courses include body dismemberment?” She looked at me strangely, and, having just seen what a pissed-off nurse could do, I let the matter drop. I consoled myself with the thought that the nurse on TV had used a reciprocating saw, and I knew that, nurse or not, Peggy would never use a reciprocating saw. In fact, the one time she used a circular saw, she cut the cord in two.