VIEWPOINTS
Saturday, July 7, 2018
East Oregonian
Page 5A
What makes a character
I
n the past month I unfortunately had
particular neighbor bordered on fear.
to attend memorial services for two
My other recently deceased neighbor
neighbors (and friends) who each passed was originally from the East Coast. He was
away at the all too young age of 65.
raised in and around Buffalo, New York,
One was a Umatilla County native who,
and had traveled extensively while in the
following his father’s lead, plied his trade
Air Force (he was stationed in Japan for
as a dryland wheat farmer for more than
a time) and as a long-haul trucker. While
40 years. I had the privilege of being one
not a farmer, he did possess a penchant for
of his neighbors, and admirers, for 25 of
gardening. His father died when he was
those years. He was truly the
barely in high school and it
nonpareil in his field (pun
left him with an indefatigable
I feel fortunate to
intended). His fields were
sense of self-reliance based
have known Dave
always clean, his yields at or
upon his dad’s prophetic
and Ken for as long warning that someday he
near the top of the spectrum
for his area, his roadsides
would be gone and the son
as I did — though
were kept weed-free, his
would need to rely on his
I certainly wish it
equipment was impeccably
own wit and ingenuity.
maintained and the farmstead
I first met my favorite
could have been
was postcard-worthy.
native
New Yorker when
many more years
On numerous occasions I
I bought a dilapidated
for both.
sought his advice on farming
house next door to him
issues and his opinions were
and embarked on a fix-
always offered willingly, whether solicited
it-up project. He was always curious and
or not. I attempted renting tools from him
encouraging and even helped me roof the
but instead borrowed them because he
place only weeks after he had a heart attack.
refused to accept payment.
While these two friends of mine were
In addition to being a successful
ostensibly from different worlds, they did
agrarian, he was also one of the most
share certain similarities. Both had the
well-read and erudite persons I have ever
good sense to “marry up,” as the saying
personally encountered, as evidenced by
goes. And for both, toward the end of
an encounter my family and I had with him their earthly reigns, their wives were
many years ago when we were out for a
incredibly dedicated. Both men were also
summer evening walk. He asked if we were mechanically inclined — a trait I admire
out for a constitutional or a perambulation,
above almost all else.
to which I responded “both”— we were
Another trait they shared was the well-
exercising and simultaneously assessing the earned title of “character.” While this term
yield potential of our wheat crop nearing
could certainly describe their moral fiber
harvest. The level of respect I had for this
and deep sense of decency, in this case
Reducing wildfire risk
in Elkhorn Mountains
Baker City Herald
he best time to reduce the risk of a big wildfire
in Baker City’s watershed was probably several
decades ago.
Which is not to say it’s too late.
Despite the Forest Service’s hands-off approach to
the 10,000 acres in the Elkhorn Mountains through
which the city’s drinking water flows — not that a
heavy-handed approach would be an improvement, to
be sure — the watershed has avoided the fiery disaster
that could leave the city without a safe water supply.
And a bill likely to exceed $15 million or $20
million to fix the problem.
Managing the watershed is a challenge.
It is not a place where conventional commercial
forestry, designed to maximize the production of board-
feet of timber, makes sense. One reason the streams
and springs continue to produce clear water is that the
forests remain intact, able to absorb torrential rains and
the spring runoff without turning into muddy torrents
unfit for drinking or much else.
But those forests, as forests inevitably will, have
aged and, in places, deteriorated, the victims of insects
and disease and drought. A study in the 1990s by
fire experts found that the area probably is overdue,
statistically, for a big blaze.
We can’t eliminate that risk, of course.
But we can reduce it with well-conceived, and
carefully executed, thinning of some of the densest,
least healthy and most fire-prone parts of the watershed.
And in one sense this might be the ideal time to
pursue that strategy.
Congress this spring at long last ended the practice
known as “fire borrowing.” That refers to the Forest
Service and other federal agencies diverting money
earmarked for other work — including the sorts of
thinning projects envisioned for the watershed — to
pay the billion-dollar annual tabs to fight wildfires.
To put it another way, agencies have struggled
to deal with the problems that contribute to massive
blazes because they were trying to put out... massive
blazes.
The bill that passed this year won’t immediately fix
the problem. But by 2020 the federal government will
set aside $2 billion annually, as an emergency fund, to
fight the bigger fires. In theory that should make more
money available for thinning projects.
Nor is that the only way Congress can help in this
endeavor.
Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden and Rep. Greg Walden last
week sent a letter to the Forest Service’s regional office
in Portland advocating for Baker City’s watershed to be
a priority for some of those dollars.
The threat facing the watershed is hardly of recent
origin. In 1993 the Forest Service and city sponsored
a tour of the watershed during which officials cited the
same concerns that their successors talk about today.
We hope the combination of congressional support
— and money — will yield more tangible results in the
future than we’ve seen in the past.
T
I’m referring more to unique qualities, or
perhaps even idiosyncrasies, which set
them apart as truly memorable and in the
case of the first-mentioned farmer neighbor,
even iconic figures. In a recent conversation
with another good friend, he brought
up the subject of exactly what defines a
“character.” He suggested that often a good
deal of life experience, especially adversity
(“learning the hard way”) or longevity, or
unabashed expertise in a certain profession
or job, can lead to one becoming seemingly
obstinate or cantankerous but well-
respected at the same time.
Son Willie has noted that many of our
acquaintances who are particularly skilled
at their professions are, to most folks’
way of thinking, “grumpy” — whether
intentionally or not. I lament that some
folks fail to look beyond the gruff exterior
of such “characters” and realize that
they may have a tremendous amount of
knowledge or wisdom that is not always
fully appreciated or given the respect that it
deserves. “Grumpy” folks have sometimes
just simply grown tired of being surrounded
by a perceived abundance of apathy and/
or incompetence and have likely “lost their
good humor over the deal” (this was an
expression I heard more than once from my
departed farmer neighbor). In a word, they
care. In my preferred profane vernacular
they give a sh--. Too many people do not.
I feel fortunate to have known Dave
and Ken for as long as I did — though
I certainly wish it could have been
many more years for both. I hope I can
frequently emulate their generosity, and
M att W ood
FROM THE TRACTOR
occasionally approach the lofty heights of
near perfection they exhibited in their work.
Most of all, I hope everyone who knew
them will remember their contributions to
their respective communities and appreciate
what characters they both were.
■
Matt Wood is his son’s hired man and his
daughter’s biggest fan. He lives on a farm
near Helix, where he collects antiques and
friends.
Fred Rogers and the loveliness of the little good
O
ften people are moved to tears
by sadness, but occasionally
people are moved to tears by
goodness. That’s what’s happens to
the audiences of “Won’t You Be My
Neighbor?” the new documentary
about Fred Rogers.
The documentary demonstrates
how Rogers’ children’s show got
started and how he used it over 30
years to teach
and accompany
children. It
describes the
famous opening
sequence — Mister
Rogers going to
the closet, putting
on the sweater,
David
changing his shoes.
Brooks
It describes how
Comment
he gently gave
children obvious
and nonobvious advice: You are
special just the way you are; no,
children can’t fall down the drains in
the bathtub.
Sometimes he would slow down
time, be silent for long periods as he
fed his fish. Occasionally “Mister
Rogers’ Neighborhood” touched
politics. During the civil rights era,
when black kids were being thrown
out of swimming pools, Rogers
and a black character bathed their
feet together in a tub. After Bobby
Kennedy was killed, Rogers gently
explained what an assassination was.
There’s nothing obviously moving
here, and yet the audience is moved:
sniffling, wiping the moisture from
their cheeks. The power is in Rogers’
radical kindness at a time when
public kindness is scarce. It’s as if
the pressure of living in a time such
as ours gets released in that theater
as we’re reminded that, oh yes, that’s
how people can be.
Moral elevation gains strength
when it is scarce.
But there’s also something more
radical going on. Mister Rogers was a
lifelong Republican and an ordained
Presbyterian minister. His show
was an expression of the mainline
Protestantism that was once the
dominating morality in American life.
Once, as Tom Junod described in
a profile for Esquire, Rogers met a
14-year-old boy whose cerebral palsy
left him sometimes unable to walk
or talk. Rogers asked the boy to pray
for him.
AP Photo/Gene J. Puskar
Fred Rogers rehearses the open-
ing of his PBS show “Mister Rog-
ers’ Neighborhood” during a June
28, 1989 taping in Pittsburgh.
The boy was thunderstruck. He
had been the object of prayers many
times, but nobody had asked him to
pray for another. He said he would try
since Mister Rogers must be close to
God and if Mister Rogers liked him
he must be OK.
Junod complimented Rogers on
cleverly boosting the boy’s self-
esteem, but Rogers didn’t look at
the situation that way at all: “Oh,
heavens no, Tom! I didn’t ask him
for his prayers for him; I asked for
me. I asked him because I think
that anyone who has gone through
challenges like that must be very
close to God. I asked him because I
wanted his intercession.”
And here is the radicalism that
infused that show: that the child is
closer to God than the adult; that
the sick are closer than the healthy;
that the poor are closer than the rich
and the marginalized closer than the
celebrated.
Rogers often comforted children
on the show and taught them in
simple terms, but the documentary
shows how he did so with a profound
respect for the dignity of each child
that almost rises to veneration. You
see his visceral disgust for shows
that don’t show respect — that dump
slime on children, that try to entertain
them with manic violence.
In the gospel of Fred Rogers,
children are our superiors in the way
they trust each person they meet, the
way they lack guile, the way a child
can admit simple vulnerability.
At one point in the series, the
tiger puppet who stood in for Rogers’
inner child sang, “Sometimes I
wonder if I’m a mistake,” meaning,
I am so different, am I a mistake?
An adult character sang along and
tried to reassure him that he was not
a mistake, but he was not reassured.
As Alice Lloyd reminds us in The
Weekly Standard, “deep and simple
is far more essential than shallow and
complex” was a favorite maxim of
Rogers.
Children are superior for
their instinctive small acts of
neighborliness, the small hug,
sharing a toy. In 1997 a teenage
boy in Kentucky warned classmates
that “something big” was going to
happen. The next day he took a gun
to school and shot eight classmates,
killing three. Mister Rogers’ response
was, “Oh, wouldn’t the world be a
different place if he had said, ‘I’m
going to do something really little
tomorrow.” Rogers dedicated a
week’s worth of shows to the theme
of “Little and Big” on how little
things can be done with great care.
Rogers was drawing on a long
moral tradition, that the last shall be
first. It wasn’t just Donald Trump
who reversed that morality, though he
does represent a cartoonish version
of the idea that winners are better
than losers, the successful are better
than the weak. That morality got
reversed long before Trump came
on the scene, by an achievement-
oriented success culture, by a culture
that swung too far from humble and
earnest caritas.
Rogers was singing from a song
sheet now lost, a song sheet that once
joined conservative evangelicals
and secular progressives. The song
sheet may be stacked somewhere in a
drawer in the national attic, ready for
reuse once again.
■
David Brooks became a New York
Times Op-Ed columnist in September
2003. He has been a senior editor at
The Weekly Standard, a contributing
editor at Newsweek and the
Atlantic Monthly, and is currently a
commentator on PBS.