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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 2018)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, January 13, 2018 East Oregonian Page 5A Holding each other up I f you happened to pass Pendleton Center for the Arts during the short hours of daylight on December 21, you might have seen something startlingly beautiful. Art was emerging from the building, a long white scroll with calligraphy-like black swirls flowing down the steps and out toward the sidewalk. It was an invitation, a welcome. Sam Roxas- Chua had come to town. Abandoned in the fold of a tree branch after his birth in the Philippines, Roxas-Chua was adopted by Chinese-Filipino family who later emigrated to the United States, so it seems only natural that his work illustrates the importance of connections. He didn’t just read that night at the First Draft Writers’ Series. He sang — and painted, too. His poems begin in the body, he explained, showing us how his brush swirls until it finds the image that will become words. Oh, this is a poem about water. Falling. Birds. Words, visual art, and music — for him, there is no separation. We loved him. He’s the perfect writer, I thought, for this night. In all this darkness, he’s helping us tip toward the light. But I kept picturing that infant balanced so precariously in a tree. That small, vulnerable body. How close Sam had come to that darkness. In less than a week I would be facing a death in my own extended family, not of a child but of one barely become a man. The loss of such a young life has brought an especially deep sorrow. How do people bear the unbearable? We hold each other. And somehow, we hold each other up. Rituals help. For this young man, there was the recitation of the rosary and a funeral mass. The dressing, the Washat service, songs and prayers and spoken tributes, memories, tears. A naming. The ritual of his burial beside his mother, another too-young death the family still grieves. Shaking hands in the longhouse, the meal shared at those long tables. Next December, there will be a memorial and stone-setting. Children help, too. We can hold them and pretend it is we who are helping them. And words. Even at a time when my own words felt inadequate, I found myself thanking others for theirs, gifts they found within themselves when they themselves could hardly speak. Help each other, I heard. Ask for help. Acknowledge your pain. Look for kindness. Why does it comfort us to share our sorrow? Earlier, when Sam let his Facebook How do people bear the unbearable? Recycling and international trade B eing a local politician keeps between the fact it was a petroleum a person in touch with the product and the new rules, although constituency. we said we thought there was Whether it is the grocery store, another reason. going out to eat, trying to work out In both cases, while we were all at the gym, social functions, service weighing important international club meetings or church, it’s hard issues surrounding plastic to be there just for the intended exportation, no one recognized us purpose. I guess it comes with the and so we didn’t have to explain George territory. Murdock the role of Umatilla County in this But all of that being said, after matter. In truth, the county has no Comment one particularly interactive day I jurisdiction over international plastic came home thinking that perhaps a trade or relations with China but that trip to Pendleton Sanitary Service’s recycling is never a total sanctuary. center near Fallen Field might be an escape. I admittedly arrived later than some Shortly after arrival, we met a new to the values of recycling for reasons resident who was trying to figure out what I won’t elaborate on at this point. But to do with her plastic. We having emerged from tried to politely inform her the important debate that China had stopped surrounding plastics, taking plastic and so there China, and the president, were problems disposing the experience led to a few of it at the recycling center. other discoveries. Frustrated, she tried • 20,000,000 Hershey to figure out what China kisses are produced every had to do with getting day consuming 113 square rid of her plastic. My miles of tin foil — most of wife explained that it which is recyclable — who would appear China had knew? historically consumed a • It took 500,000 trees lot of America’s plastic to produce last Sunday’s but that was no longer the newspapers. case. The lady wondered • If all newspapers were if it was political and were recycled, we could save they mad at President 250 million trees a year. Trump? We tried to assure her that while • We produce 350,000 aluminum cans per international relations may not be at a high minute. If the can is thrown away, it is still a point in our history, that didn’t include his can 500 years from now. If it is recycled, six desire to deny our plastic to nations that weeks from now it will be part of a new can might find a use for it. and there is no limit to how many times the “Well,” she advised us, “the last she process can be repeated. had heard they were taking it in another I learned a little in the process even if state.” My wife reminded her China hadn’t it wasn’t a total escape and in some ways, specified any particular states and they simply focusing on the subject of plastics probably weren’t exempt from the new rules served as a distraction from the normal visit that we think went into effect the first of the to the recycling center. year. Many times fellow visitors to the center In fact, China has historically consumed a are vigilant with regard to infractions such great deal of the world’s plastic and turned it as slipping cardboard into the newspaper into a variety of products. As the citizenry of bin, putting glass in the tin can container, that country has become more westernized, or simply dumping everything into one they have adopted our recycling habits container or even next to a container and now have enough of their own plastic. believing that just taking it to the recycling Importing more would give them the same center in the first place is a sufficient disposal issues now confronting the United contribution to saving Mother Earth. States. And, with the temperature hovering About this time, a gentleman drove into below 30 degrees, the visit was safer than the recycling lot in a pickup with two dogs in previous occasions like the time a visitor the back. He announced he was training the with a truck load of empty bottles, at least dogs to stay in the truck. It was apparently one of which had been consumed recently, early in the training routine because the dogs parked fifty yards away and began aiming at found the full expanse of the center full of the glass container and throwing the bottles interesting smells and discoveries. in that general direction one at a time. He joined the discussion of “What, no There is some pressure for curbside plastic disposal?” Again, the conversation recycling but that would eliminate the led to the fact China was no longer accepting opportunity for us to join with our neighbors plastic and were they mad at President in a social and political setting on behalf of Trump? He said “You know, it’s a petroleum improving our environment. product,” as he simultaneously tried to ■ control the dogs that were circling through George Murdock is a Umatilla County our legs. He never explained the relationship Commissioner. China has historically consumed a great deal of the world’s plastic and turned it into a variety of products. friends know how difficult he was finding the days following the loss of his dog, I sent him a poem, one the former poet laureate Ted Kooser had shared with readers of his weekly newspaper column American Life in Poetry — in the hope, he said, that we would join him in wishing his yellow lab Harold well on his “journey to the stars.” “The next morning, I felt that our house / had been lifted away from its foundation / during the night, and was now adrift … taking my wife and me with it … for fifteen years / our dog had held down what we had / by pressing his belly to the floors, / his front paws, too, and with him gone / the house had begun to float out onto / emptiness, no solid ground in sight.” Can we find words for the loss of the people we love? We search for them, because the images that flow out the doorway of the isolated self can help us recognize that though each of us carries our own anguish in our own heart, our grief is connected to the grief of others. And when we reach out, acknowledging our pain, we hold each other up. Last week at St. Andrew’s and at the longhouse I felt people doing just that. Laughter can bear us up, too, and during these dark days it is good to remember that. January’s First Draft writer will be Steve Chrisman, who came to Pendleton for serious positions in economic development and airport management but whose real passion, he says, is making people laugh, “or B ette H usted FROM HERE TO ANYWHERE trying to, anyway.” I hope you can join us at Pendleton Center for the Arts at 7 p.m. on January 18. I’m betting he succeeds. ■ Bette Husted is a writer and a student of T’ai Chi and the natural world. She lives in Pendleton. ‘Desert Solitaire’ turns 50 F ifty years ago, Edward from development, beginning with Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” precisely those areas of southern was published to decent Utah attacked by Trump and Zinke. reviews but little fanfare. “Another “Desert Solitaire” was published book dropped down the bottomless four years after the Wilderness Act well. Into oblivion,” wrote a was signed into law. Even as the disheartened Abbey in his journal United States’ economy boomed, Feb. 6, 1968. in 1964 Congress sanctified areas Yet it has remained in print for a where “the earth and its community John half-century and created a devoted Buckley of life are untrammeled by man, following. After President Donald where man himself is a visitor who Comment Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan does not remain.” Abbey fought to Zinke carved 2 million acres out of preserve such land for the rest of Bears Ears and Grand-Staircase-Escalante his life. national monuments, both in the heart of “Wilderness complements and Abbey Country, “Desert Solitaire” remains completes civilization,” he wrote in the more relevant today than ever. 1980s. “I might say that the existence of An account of Abbey’s time as a wilderness is a compliment to civilization. ranger in what is now Any society that feels Arches National Park, itself too poor to “Desert Solitaire” is afford the preservation both memoir and a of wilderness is not passionate defense of our worthy of the name of nation’s last unspoiled civilization.” land. In spirit, though, As Trump and Zinke his book resembles a reclaim for extractive 1960s nonfiction novel. industry much of the Sometimes howlingly land that had been funny, it compresses the protected through the two postwar decades Antiquities Act by Abbey spent in Utah Presidents Bill Clinton and Arizona into a and Barack Obama, single “season in the Abbey’s spirit infuses wilderness.” the opposition. More “Do not jump in your than a few dog-eared automobile next June and and well-thumbed rush out to the canyon paperback copies of his country hoping to see book were probably in some of that which I have attempted to the backpacks of the thousands protesting evoke in these pages,” he famously wrote. Trump on Dec. 4, when he arrived in Salt “In the first place, you can’t see anything Lake City to announce his land grab. from a car; you’ve got to get out of the But Abbey, who died in 1989, wouldn’t goddamned contraption and walk, better be surprised by Trump and Zinke’s attitudes. yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the He’d instantly spot them as more of the sandstone and through the thornbush and know-nothing exploiters he’d always railed cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark against. It also wouldn’t surprise him that your trail, you’ll see something, maybe. drilling in the Alaska National Wilderness Probably not. In the second place most of Refuge was the price the GOP paid to what I write about in this book is already secure Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s vote gone or going under fast. This is not a for tax reform. Having called the cattlemen travel guide but an elegy.” whose herds graze on public land “welfare By the time Abbey wrote that, his queens,” he’d appreciate being vindicated by Cliven Bundy, whose trial in Nevada for beloved Glen Canyon was “going under crimes that began with his refusal to pay for fast,” gurgling beneath Lake Powell as the federal grazing fees ended in a mistrial Glen Canyon Dam plugged the Colorado Jan. 8. River’s flow. The fact that Arches and He’d probably also say, “What else Canyonlands national monuments would did you expect?” after learning that so later become national parks was of many tourists in cars are entering Arches, little comfort to Abbey, who in “Desert Grand Teton, Bryce and Zion national Solitaire” bemoans what he termed the parks that buses and reservation systems “industrial tourism” that revolves around have begun or are in the works. And I the automobile. think he’d be saddened that, 50 years after Compared to Abbey’s fierce opposition the publication of “Desert Solitaire,” the to modern capitalism, Bernie Sanders assault on public lands — our lands — comes off as comparatively milquetoast. remains such a fact of American life. Above all, Abbey was an opponent of ■ “that cloud on my horizon” he defined as John Buckley is a contributor to High progress. This wasn’t Luddism so much as Country News. He is a Washington novelist a deep need to preserve a small portion of and CEO of a creative advocacy firm. America as wilderness, kept forever free The account of Abbey’s time in what is now Arches National Park is both memoir and a passionate defense of our nation’s last unspoiled land.