A languid late-summer evening...

...and stepping out to let the cat in, I look up. The Summer Triangle is at its glorious zenith. Straight up. Can't get any straighter upper. At least to us in the absolute midlatitudes. (I mean, here in Stumptown we're almost exactly midway between the equator and the North Pole.)

Everything, all day, has been excruciatingly vivid and clear. When the humidity drops around here, you can really, really tell. As in feeling like I could discern the very needles in the doug firs across the river in Forest Park. On a typical, moisture-laden late-summer day, the snow-free shoulders of Mt. Hood blend into the blue sky. But not today—everything stood out, starkly, as if I were wearing polarizing shades.

And with darkness came Vega and Deneb and Altair—three high summer stars that are bright even with Swan Island's blazing dock lights, a half-mile away below the bluff, washing out my sky. The Summer Triangle, an asterism of stars in three separate constellations, each with a story. As luscious as the rising moon has been during the last several evenings, it's nice to stand under a dark sky now.

And much of this points somehow to Jessi's' pregnancy. My youngest is with child. Due April. Rich with newborn twins, rich with a man-child due to Christina in November, and now here to Jessi, within arm's reach. Wow.

mystery

I am looking at a mystery in my backyard. Actually, I suppose, there are many mysteries there, a recent one being a sinkhole that sank while we were out of state visiting family. Came home to find a gaping, perfectly circular maw of a sinkhole five feet in diameter and nine feet deep. Ridiculous. Surreal. Took nearly six and a half cubic yards of dirt and gravel (scavenged from various sources) to fill, scores of tedious wheelbarrow trips from the pile of fill in the driveway through the garage to the backyard. The sinkhole captured the imagination of my wife, who considered it a gift with limitless possibilities. That the Universe sent it to us was obvious—the only question was, what are we to do with it? An effortlessly acquired rainwater cistern? A root cellar for potatoes that we should now cultivate? The beginnings of a hot tub? As I started emptying wheelbarrow loads of fill into the hole, my wife bit her lip and rose above the death of a vision.

The mystery I am looking at now is nothing so exotic. Our back fence is a ramshackle affair of veneer-thin strips of wood woven, basket-like, among vertical one-by-twos spaced two feet apart. Most winters a strong east wind blows down a section, and a repair is tricky because there is scarcely any portion of the fence that is not punky and squishy. It is rotten to the core. I have a plan to replace the fence—I’ve even prepped my supply of 218 boards for sealing. Then I’ll think about actually using the sealed boards to create a new fence. Until then, the issue is Keep The Existing Fence Together At All Costs Until I’m Ready To Replace It. So over the last several years the fence has acquired the look of a hillbilly’s overalls. Patches galore, at all angles, plywood patches with which I desperately try to tie a decrepit section of fence with a (rare) sound length of post or stringer.

A two-by-six-foot section along the bottom of the fence, however, refused to be so patched. So a year ago I simply leaned a half sheet of plywood over it. The current tenants of the adjoining property have no dog, so my fix hardly had to be hound-proof.

Yet every morning the plywood is tipped back into my yard, stopped only by a pole of a raspberry vine that runs parallel to the fence, a foot or two away from it. And every day I tip the plywood back over the hole, and the next morning—well, you know.

Hence the mystery. Well, I suppose the who isn’t a mystery. It’s got to be the urban raccoons or possums I’ve seen on occasion, nocturnally foraging in our compost pile, or merely using our yard or trees as their interstate freeway to a better feeding destination Beyond The Fence. The mystery, maybe, lies closer to this: what does it look like when our continent’s only native marsupial, night after night, undoes what I do? Or if a raccoon (another American native), what grasping, pawish intelligence systematically dismantles my barrier?

I read that a hundred years ago, a scientist recorded that raccoons were able to unlock nearly all of 13 complex locks in less than 10 tries, “and had no problems repeating the action when the locks were rearranged or turned upside down.” Fenwick Ave. raccoons scoff at the Plywood Leaned On Fence ploy. Among raccoon youth, my fence constitutes Introduction to Barrier Removal, nothing more.

Still, until I sit up late in the backyard with a flashlight and actually see the beasties at it, each morning the back-tilted plywood mocks me, and renews the mystery.

Overheard...

Inuit: If I did not know about God and sin, would I go to hell?
Priest: No, not if you did not know.
Inuit: Then why did you tell me?

Can't have it both ways

It intrigues me that, in 2000 when Dubya was elected, evangelicals tended to speak in terms of a godly man of convictions and biblical morality whose election God had a hand in.

And in the recent election, these same evangelicals concede that an American majority has spoken, democracy works, we may not like it, but they'll observe the law of the land and pray for our leaders, including president-elect Obama.

Why aren't evangelicals as enthusiastic about associating Obama with the will of God as they were Bush 2? Bush was God's man of the hour, but Obama is merely the sorry choice of a misled American electorate.

Okay, this is not entirely accurate, for American evangelicals have splintered deeply during the last four years, many of them having disagreed with the Bush-was-God's-choice theory, gradually realizing the need to clean up the eight-year frat party that has been Dubya's presidency and legacy.

Orion rising

When I lived in San Diego County, the starry seasons rolled overhead in scarcely perceptible increments. Nights were generally clear, and I could usually see a very early appearance of Capella or Lyra or whatever, then follow it for a few months as the star or constellation inched westward across the night sky until finally sinking below the horizon.

Not so in the northern Willamette Valley. Visual silence for weeks, then a stunning glimpse (Where'd THAT come from?!), then gone again. At least during the nine months surrounding summer. Clouds, overcast, fog, more clouds...I see no sky for a week or two or more of nights. Then bang—I walk out tonight and see Orion's shoulder thrusting up in the east. Rising. That hoary hero is waking once again. I mean, it's nearly 10 pm, been plenty dark for four hours for the last week or so since the resumption of Standard Time. But only tonight did the clouds break so that I, flipping off the front porch light and stepping outside for a last look around, actually saw Betelgeuse and Bellatrix and the Belt.

Whoa. It's been nearly a year since I saw (in C. S. Lewis's phrase) "that earnest constellation." It's always like a reunion, when a star pushes up into my view again after a half-year absence. Good to have you back.

Then back inside to scrape out the buttercup squash I baked this afternoon, then out a half hour later to lock up things—and I look up, and the sky is gone behind the quilt of clouds.

Hey, at least I saw it, know Orion is there. And will be, the next time my nighttime glance upwards coincides with a break in the weather.

The trouble with the high road

John McCain divorced his wife of 15 years who saw him through prison and recovery, for a 25-year-old he was seeing before his divorce. In the early 1980s he worked in public relations for the beer-distribution business belonging to the family of his new wife. Only public claim to faith is prison cross-in-the-sand anecdote, with only the vaguest of church connections. Running mate’s 17-year-old daughter pregnant by boyfriend.

None of this makes McCain unfit for office. (His running mate is ludicrously unfit for office by any measure.) But it does make the GOP’s attempt to monopolize what they call “family values” laughable. Don’t take the high road if you keep falling off it.

Yet when skeptics point out this lapse between what the GOP says it stands for and the facts of their nominees’ lives, “family-values” Republicans tell us to stop savaging people and invading their privacy. Wish same-sex couples and pregnant women and Americans under unprecedented government surveillance could have a slice of that privacy.

Veni, vedi, velcro...

I came, I saw, I stuck around. Could well be this administration's motto for its imperial invasion of Iraq.