Catching Fog

There is a song that, I think, was originally played on Dr. Demento called “Squirrels.” As with all songs on Dr. Demento, it is a silly song: “Squirrels, all we really are is squirrels.” And it goes on to talk about how they are soft and furry and shouldn’t be getting shot.

I bring squirrels up because I once again recently found myself in Yosemite National Park. This happened by choice. I didn’t just wake up not knowing where I was or how I got there. I remember the drive. No one kidnapped me. My middle daughter’s boyfriend’s family invited us to go with them to a Thousand Trail’s camp just outside the national park. Thus, it cost us next to nothing to make the trip. This is an important consideration given the cutbacks in my wife’s paycheck thanks to the status of California’s education budget (my wife is a third grade public schoolteacher). This combines in a less than pleasant way with the unfortunate fact that I’m currently between book contracts and the indie publishing thing—while producing more money than the books were bringing me just sitting on my hard drive—is far from bringing me enough to buy a Tesla any time soon.

I enjoy camping out in tents. My wife enjoys camping in tents. My daughters, not so much. My daughter’s boyfriend’s parents have an RV and the children prefer staying in that. Assuming no five star hotels are available. But my wife and I prefer to be in a tent.

My enjoyment of camping goes back to my years of being in Boy Scouts. Thanks to the Boy Scouts I’m very comfortable out in the middle of nowhere. In a tent—or not. In the Order of the Arrow (a special group within the Boy Scouts) I slept under the stars, with no tent at all.

My wife prefers to have at least a tent. And she wants an air mattress. I’d be happy snoozing on the bare ground, even at my age. I have no back problems and I don’t mind bare dirt. Or grass. Preferably with a minimum of ants and other insects. But now I’m on an air mattress. It’s okay, but it seems like cheating.

Which brings me back to the squirrels.

I’ve been to Yosemite a few times now and the squirrels here are odd. Most squirrels are very skittish; they flick their tails; they scamper. They avoid people which they think are big and noisy and not good for their continued existence. The squirrel I saw in the seminary’s library a few years ago (which had eaten the philodendron in my office) ran away from me quite rapidly and had no interest in discussing Kierkegaard. But the squirrels in Yosemite are not like that. Instead, they are inordinately fond of human beings. They look at Yosemite visitors the way Congressmen look at taxpayers: pockets full of goodies. And while they might not discuss Kierkegaard, they’d be more than happy to discuss your willingness to make donations to their wilderness funds.

The first time I visited Yosemite I sat down once for a few moments in the middle of a twenty mile hike. Apparently I was a bit tuckered.

I soon discovered that I was not entirely alone—not that I was hiking alone—but generally, when one sits down on a rock, one is not sitting on top of someone else, and even if one is sharing the rock, the other folk making the trek with you are generally not sticking their hands in your pockets.

In other words, people who are not Congressmen do not behave in any way like the squirrels in Yosemite. Within moments of sitting, I felt something fiddling in my pocket. I turned and looked. A squirrel looked back at me; there was some disappointment in its eyes. It had failed to find anything that it would classify as a goodie in my pocket. It then turned its attention to my backpack and started fiddling with the zippers. It was about then that I decided I was done sitting.

Everywhere I went on the trails, everywhere I went in camp, from then on I saw squirrels. Squirrels looking at me with large brown eyes. Begging. Pawing at me. It would not have shocked me to see them holding small cups or hats out to me.

This year, the squirrels were much the same. I sat down on the top of Sentinel Dome and almost immediately, there was a squirrel sizing me up. It twitched its nose in my direction. It scampered around me. It patted my knee. My wife commented, “The other squirrels have been talking. They’ve told this one all about you.”

It wouldn’t surprise me.

There’s probably a prophecy: “One day the gray-bearded man will return. His pockets will be full.” I did return, but my pockets still do not have goodies in them. Not for squirrels. Not for congress critters.

I wonder. Are congressmen just large squirrels?

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My middle daughter, who will be a senior in high school this year, had been looking for a job since she turned sixteen. The search, until recently, had not been successful—this despite the fact that she even knows the family that owns three Burger Kings in our area. They’d told her to apply. They told her they’d have a job for her. No such luck. She’d tried various shops at the local mall. She’d applied at restaurants. She’d applied at coffee shops. The results were always the same: nothing. She was becoming very discouraged.

During the school year, her attempts at locating a job lessened, but as summer arrived, she began beating the bushes harder and with more earnestness. But no matter what she tried, she was getting nowhere fast. She was becoming a poster child for the status of the American economy.

But finally, as May became June and spring became summer, success arrived. Not Burger King, not a boutique, and not a coffee shop. It was in a restaurant, and was essentially fast food—but in a unique environment. In Lancaster, California we have a single A minor league baseball team called the JetHawks. They are a farm club for the Houston Astros and, like any baseball stadium, they sell food: burgers, hotdogs, and the like. My daughter applied, and they hired her.

She gets to wear a team shirt and baseball cap. The shirt is about three sizes too big, but that’s all they had left. The hat fits fine, however. Her first day—well, evening—of work, she came home tired and she complained of being bored and a little disappointed. She had hoped that working in the kitchen meant that she’d be cooking food. Instead, she was mostly just microwaving stuff.

However, by her third day she had adapted to the new tasks and discovered that there was more to it than just standing next to a microwave. Now she sometimes cooks, sometimes runs about and delivers the product. Her enthusiasm for her tasks was a relief to me. By the end of her first week she was absolutely thrilled with her job. Her pleasure rose after she received her first paycheck—though she, like most new workers, found she wasn’t overjoyed of FICA and the other acronyms that took bits and pieces of her pay from her.

After working at the baseball stadium for a month, she discovered that as part of her pay she receives eight free tickets to the ball games each month. This made me happy.
A couple of weeks ago, I got to go out to the old ballgame. My wife has zero interest in baseball, but my oldest daughter, my middle daughter, her boyfriend and his parents, joined me there, using up six out of the eight tickets all at once. The leftovers she gave to her boyfriend’s brother, who plans on taking his girlfriend to a game at some later date. Next month, all the tickets will be for me to do with as I please. I look forward to seeing multiple games.

The JetHawks came in first place last year, and they are in first place again this year. JetHawks’ Stadium is notorious for the ease with which players can hit home runs. In fact, it is so unusual that it became the subject of an article in the Wall Street Journal last year.

Lancaster, California is the real “windy city.” Chicago has nothing on us. Our ever blowing breezes add a significant lift to baseballs after they leave the bat. Players who go on to the majors find themselves disappointed that their performance doesn’t match what they had gotten used to with the JetHawks.

The first five innings of the game it looked as if the Jet Hawks were going to have an easy time beating their opponents, the Modesto Nuts. As the JetHawks finished that inning they were ahead 7 to 1. But things began changing for the worst very quickly. By the time the JetHawks came back up to bat, they were still ahead—but the score had changed to 7 to 3.

The seventh and eighth innings were a route. I have rarely seen a team fall apart so quickly and so thoroughly. It was as if the players had switched uniforms. The JetHawks gave four runs in the seventh. In the eighth, they gave up five more. By the time the game ended, they not only had lost, but lost badly, 12 to 7. Talk about a reversal of fortune.

If I were superstitious, I would be leery about using the eight tickets my daughter has for me in August—or the eight more she’s giving me in September. This is starting to remind me of the Dodgers. In all my years of going to Dodger Stadium, I’ve seen them win a game only once. If that pattern holds with the JetHawks, they’ll be in last place in no time.

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My parents have told me that when I was very young I was enamored of balls. They even have photographic evidence of this strange fact. I can’t say that I really recall ever having such an attachment to spheres, but I have no reason to disbelieve them. They tell me I had a fondness for peas because they were, according to me, balls—and I would roll them around on my plate and play with them. I don’t think I much cared for eating them, but rolling them didn’t bother my tongue.

Since then, I’ve grown to enjoy eating peas—especially if they are split and in a soup—and have little interest in their ability to roll about on my plate.

Nevertheless, as I sit here in front of my computer, I can’t help but notice that I have three balls sitting on my desk: of the sort that used to be called super balls. I recall when super balls first appeared. Back when I was in third grade, a classmate arrived with an odd dark gray ball: it was hard and did not at all feel like any ball I’d ever seen or touched to that point. And when he threw it on the ground, it bounced unlike any ball I’d ever seen, flying up above the school roof.

Later, I noticed television advertisements for them. They were manufactured by the same company that made Frisbees: Wham-O. The rubber compound of which the super ball is made was invented by a chemist named Norman Stingley in 1964. He first offered his rubbery concoction to his employer, the Bettis Rubber company, but they turned him down because his compound was, as yet, not very durable. But the Wham-O toy company recognized its potential and quickly improved its durability. By the end of 1965 the Wham-O company had sold more than six million super balls. As time went by, the balls began appearing in other sizes and colors and the price dropped. Eventually other manufacturers began making similar bouncers.

The first super ball I ever owned was about the size of a large marble. I had quite a bit of fun with it, despite the fact that it was really quite useless for playing jacks. Something that I and my classmates, regardless of gender, had developed quite a fondness for by that time. To play jacks, we used a small ball that was red and rather soft; it didn’t bounce unusually high nor twitch about in the rather uncontrollable fashion of the super ball.

As I recall, I got very good at playing jacks. I was able to scoop them up, first one at a time, then two, and so on until in one scoop, I could snag the whole pile on the last bounce. I managed to get competent at it whether we played with the normal, small metal jacks or with the larger, plastic kind.

Another form of ball that I remember from my childhood was the marble. My father introduced them to me and taught me how to shoot them. He gave me a bunch of that he’d had as a boy and taught me about aggies and steelies and cats eyes. I frequented the five and dime and acquired bags full. I even snagged some from peanut butter. For awhile, jars of Jiff peanut butter came with a clear plastic attachment on the lid filled with cats eye marbles.

Later balls in my life include the baseball or softball that my father and I would throw back and forth in the back yard. My dad was an exceptional fast pitch softball player and pitcher; he played on the Air Force team of whatever base he happened to be stationed at and he earned many, many trophies.

Meanwhile, I went on to play baseball in elementary school on school teams. I also remember multiple games of kickball with those large reddish balls that seemed to be ubiquitous in school. We also used them sometimes to play dodge ball.

Once I hit junior high, my only experience playing ball came in gym classes, and then it was always softball; they were afraid we’d hurt ourselves if we played with real baseballs. Of course, that didn’t keep them from letting us play dodge ball—and even wrestling and boxing. But of course neither of those latter two sports involved using balls at all.

My experience with basketball consists entirely of games of horse and I think I played tennis once in high school. Outside of school, especially when we traveled back to Ohio to visit my grandparents and other assorted relatives often meant games of croquet. I don’t remember much about croquet beyond what it was like to place one’s foot on one ball that was touching another ball, and then swinging my mallet to make that second ball scoot away like a scared rabbit.

Today, I’m left with only the three super balls on top of my desk. The only other balls I see are those being tossed around on professional ball fields. My middle daughter now works in the stadium kitchen of our local minor league baseball team—and she gets eight free tickets a month. That makes me pretty happy even if I don’t get to play with any of the balls myself.

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When we read a book, watch a movie, or enjoy an episode of one of our favorite dramas on television, we expect conflict. Usually it will be a battle between good and evil, whether it is man against nature, philandering husband against faithful wife, a teenager’s dream that her parents don’t recognize, or cops against robbers. Sometimes it will be crusading do-gooders fighting “the man.” In all stories, we find villains raging against the virtuous.

But in real life, it isn’t always so black and white. Sometimes there are no good guys. Instead, we realize that it wouldn’t bother us if both sides lost.

I think the first time I fully grasped this sad possibility was back in the 1980s when Iraq and Iran went to war with one another. Iran, at the time, was notorious for what it had done to Americans during its “Islamic Revolution.” For four hundred forty-four days fifty-two Americans were held hostage. Clearly, the Iranians were “bad guys.”

On the other hand, Iraq was run by Sadaam Hussein, a dictator and thug. Clearly not a good guy, either. Moreover, I was close friends with a recently arrived Iraqi. He was a physicist who had worked in Iraq’s nuclear program before his arrest and expulsion by the Iraqi government. His crime? He had led Bible studies and prayer meetings. Being a Christian in Iraq was not particularly healthy.
So it was impossible to root for either participant in that war. Both sides were awful.

Today, when I look at the so-called “Arab Spring” and witness the downfall of various dictators across the Middle East, ranging from Khadafy in Libya to Mubarak in Egypt, my initial thought is to feel joy at the downfall of brutal thugs. But then, it quickly becomes obvious that those deposing the thugs are no better than the thugs themselves. Mubarak was replaced by the Muslim Brotherhood, a terrorist group who attempted to impose Islamic extremism on the Egyptian population: women were oppressed, the minority Christians were systematically persecuted, and anti-American and anti-Semitic attitudes remained dominant. A year later, the Egyptian military—after the largest protests in world history—deposed the Muslim Brotherhood, establishing a “transition” government. But Egypt remains gripped by dictatorship, oppression, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism. The only change has been some shifting in who gets targeted for oppression. No matter how often you rearrange the deck chairs, it is still the Titanic.

In Syria, there’s a rising opposition against another brutal dictatorship. Unfortunately, those battling the dictator are dominated by Al-Qaida—the same people who brought us Osama Bin-Ladin and 911. And the same people who oppress women, hate Jews and Christians, and think stringing gay people from light poles is a fine idea.

Sometimes it is necessary to choose the “lesser of two evils.” But in these disruptive times in the Middle East, it seems impossible to find much—if any—difference between the evils. This brings to mind another cliché: “a pox on both their houses.”

Our founding fathers, particularly George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, warned us against foreign entanglements. Their words are sometimes used to argue for isolationism and against any and all involvement with foreign nations. But I don’t quite think that was their point. After all, Washington’s administration worked to make a treaty with Morocco in Africa (the first nation to recognize the independence of the United States) in an attempt to solve a problem with international piracy—while Thomas Jefferson waged economic war with Britain and consistently supported French interests against the English. Jefferson happily twisted the law so that the U.S. could make the Louisiana Purchase from a France run by Napoleon, effectively doubling the size of the United States. The Revolutionary war itself would have failed had it not been for Ben Franklin’s success in bringing the French into our conflict with Great Britain, and Jefferson later served as an ambassador in France shoring up our relations with them while the American Constitution was being drafted.

Rather, Washington and Jefferson, when they warned of alliances, were reminding us that there is great danger in getting too involved in conflicts not our own, so make certain it’s really worth it. At the time of their warnings, the United States was not the overwhelmingly dominant military power on the planet that it is today. We were weak and backward. Getting involved in the conflicts engulfing Europe in those days could have destroyed us.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century the various European conflicts burning the continent were clashes between various shades of evil, not between men in white hats and black hats. The French government—which had helped us in our Revolution—was corrupt and oppressive. The French people overthrew it, only to replace it with a dictatorship run by extremists who subsequently murdered tens of thousands with the guillotine. What had replaced King Louis the XVI was not better—any more than what later replaced the head-chopping extremists—the self-proclaimed Emperor and dictator Napoleon—was better.
The real world tends to just replace one scoundrel with another. Most of the time it is best to just sadly shake our heads and walk away, while wishing them all the best. We are the friends of liberty everywhere, but guardians only of our own. As badly as you feel when you hear your neighbors arguing, unless they set fire to the back yard or start shooting at you, it’s just not your problem.

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