Walmart to Wolf House: Sonoma County Essays

by Rob Loughran

  This bold and fascinating American became the basis for Rudyard Kipling’s short story (and the subsequent John Huston movie) “The Man Who Would Be King.”

  Fascinating book, but the Epilogue contained a paragraph that made me shiver:

  Harlan had been right: the Afghans fought tirelessly among themselves, but when a foreign invader threatened, they united to drive him out. Even Alexander’s hold had been fleeting. Macedonian, Mogul, Persian, Russian, British, and Soviet armies had all tried, and failed, to control the Afghan tribes. Harlan’s words echoed down the centuries: “To subdue and crush the masses of a nation by military force, when all are unanimous in the determination to be free, is to attempt the imprisonment of a whole people: all such projects must be temporary and transient, and terminate in a catastrophe.”

  And now, apparently, it’s America’s turn to learn this lesson.

  I know (and it’s true) that no other army in history has had such a technological edge over their enemy. We possess the bombs and the planes and the electronics and the drones and the gadgets. Should be easy as playing a video game.

  And we smug little Americans also assume we have a moral edge: to stamp out terrorism and bring Democracy to a benighted world. But if you read some British history, written in the 18th century, we Americans were the dirty little terrorists rebelling against Civilization and Propriety, King and Empire.

  History. Go figure.

  We also have that Twin Tower revenge motive. Revenge: a wonderful and time-honored reason for the invasion of a sovereign nation.

  I’m all for making the world safe, if not for Democracy at least for air travel. And the Twin Towers was a blatant chickenshit attack on defenseless civilians, but we have to look, at least for a moment, at the history of invading (surging) Afghanistan.

  One example will suffice.

  1841, Kabul was ready to explode.

  Broken British promises to various tribes had the entire city seething. The son of the exiled Afghan king was in full revolt against the British-installed puppet ruler. More diplomacy (lies) ensued but the Afghans couldn’t be calmed.

  The situation escalated when the British envoy William Macnaghten decided to cut in half payments to the Ghilazi tribe. Macnaghten was murdered, dismembered, and his body parts dragged gleefully through the streets of Kabul.

  It was time for the British to flee the country, through the Khyber Pass, to the safety of the British fort at Jalalabad, 80 miles due east. On January 6, 1842 15,000 soldiers (along with wives and children) headed up through the Khyber Pass. On January 9, 1842 the snows, and the Afghans, descended. The deadly accurate Afghan snipers fired their jezails—long barreled muskets—killing and wounding their country’s invaders. At night Afghan women would walk among the Brits, robbing the dead and slitting the throats of the wounded. As Rudyard Kipling wrote:

  When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains

  And the women come out to cut up what remains

  Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains

  And go to your God like a soldier.

  On January 13, 1842 Dr. William Brydon, the only survivor of the15,000 who had set out the week before arrived at Jalalabad.

  One of 15,000.

  Do we really know what we’re getting into with this “surge” in Afghanistan?

  It is said that those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. But William Faulkner said, even more aptly, “The past is never dead. It is not even past.”

  * * *

  The Bohemian also ran this piece on WWII:

  SILENT LIVES

  My father and my uncle have both been dead for quite a few years. This is neither a tribute to them nor a remembrance. It is the recollection of an event that has eluded and intrigued me for over two decades.

  Patrick Loughran, the gregarious Irishman from County Tyrone and Chuck Morrison my taciturn uncle from Albany, New York were united by much more than the fact that they’d married sisters. They were members of Tom Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”: my father a SeaBee, my uncle a Marine. Both veterans of WWII they had been beaten and battered by the world in precisely the same way. They’d been through the Depression and then the war and shared in the freedoms and economic booms which followed. They knew what was expected of them. They knew the rules. They knew how to live without doubt or regret.

  Or so I had thought.

  In 1987 I’d been diagnosed with testicular cancer. Following the surgery, after the abdominal incision had somewhat healed, radiation was necessary to zap any remaining possibility of cancer. Even though Redwood Radiology in Santa Rosa was nearer my house my father insisted on driving up from Petaluma to chauffeur me to my appointment. As often as not my uncle Chuck would accompany us.

  It wasn’t only a kindness that they provided for me it was something, for them, to do. They were both retired from busy and active careers and there is a limit to how much weeding, watering and gardening a tract-home-sized piece of earth will endure. And so every Thursday for a few months I sat in a car and, more worried about my health than the banter, listened to stories about things that, mostly, occurred before I was born: The virtues of Studebaker vs. Buick. The wild times they used to have in Monterey with my uncle Mario. How America had gone to hell-in-a-handbasket.

  Then, one day, my father asked Chuck why he never talked about the war.

  Chuck didn’t answer.

  He waved away the question and stared out the window.

  My father had pictures of himself in the Aleutians and South Pacific; I’d seen pictures in uniform of other uncles who had served. But I don’t recall any pictures or memorabilia of Chuck. He had fought with the Marines in WWII and Korea; I couldn’t tell you where or with what battalion, company, or unit. He simply never spoke about it.

  On this day, as well, Chuck just shook his head and didn’t answer the question. It was not unusual for Chuck to be quiet. He was the most quietly sociable man I’d ever seen. He never missed a party (they were, for that matter, usually at his house) or a joke. His interjections into conversations were always terse, telling, funny, and conclusive.

  But I’d never before seen him so discomfited as he was by my father’s question, “Why do you never talk about the war?”

  As I said, this is neither a tribute nor a remembrance: it is a furtive tragedy.

  My uncle Chuck was a generous and gracious man. A success in business. A loving father; a respected, substantial and loved cog in a large, extended family. A veteran of, probably, the last popularly supported and undoubtedly necessary war this country will ever wage. And yet even an interloper from another generation could see that he had survived this war successfully, but not unscathed. A portion of his life, years, had been ruined to the point that he refused to recall or speak about them.

  There are KIA, MIA and wounded, but every war also produces a more tense yet restrained casualty. For every reminiscing veteran that Tom Brokaw or Ken Burns interviews there is another survivor, another hero, another victim whose wartime experience is simply unspeakable. They can’t and don’t talk about it.

  There is a generation at war now who will return to have children, attend college, buy houses and live Good American Lives. Examine and explore the reasons for Gulf War II; reasons against Gulf War II. The cost in political clout and world credibility are important and debatable. But do not forget that beyond the obvious expense in dollars and lives, as with every war, there is another toll, a mute and tragic carnage.

  The tragedy of silent lives forever changed.

  * * *

  Another one about my father, from Parentdish:

  BLUE COLLAR

  Before Blue Collar became synonymous with a comedy tour or an adjective for ESPN announcers to describe how pampered millionaires play professional sports it meant something specific. It was the color of the shirt you wore to work.

  To work as a ditch digger, farmhand, or h
od carrier.

  My father was all of the above until he worked his way into the building trades and found a position as a plumber’s apprentice (this was after years of “menial” labor and a hitch in World War Two as a SeaBee) with Local U.A. 38 in San Francisco.

  Paddy Loughran, immigrant from Cookstown, County Tyrone, North Ireland lived to work. He worked for the City and County of San Francisco and was a proud Union Man. On “vacations” as a child we’d drive up to my aunt’s in Placerville where he’d work on plumbing for a new cabin or a septic system for two weeks while we kids fished and swam and frolicked.

  But what I remember most about my father’s blue collar work ethic were his side jobs. Every weekend he’d be at a neighbor’s or a relative’s fixing a pipe or installing a commode. These jobs would be leisurely cash-under-the-table affairs with lots of chat and several seemingly scheduled breaks for “A wee snort of something or other.”

  And I remember them because usually I went with my dad.

  My brothers are nine and ten years older than me and were in high school when I was seven or eight. If they had ventured along on a side job they’d have been put to work. I had the proper lack of stature and experience that made these trips an adventure. So I would watch, and observe and listen; assist with the occasional request for a wrench or a screwdriver.

  I was always amazed that at the end of two hours or a half-day that my dad had done so much. Unhurried but unceasing, puzzling out solutions as problems arose the sinks and faucets and showerheads and toilets would be installed.

  Those side jobs taught me not how to be a plumber, but how to work.

  When I began college in the 1970s the buzz-phrase for writing teachers was Joseph Campbell’s mantra, Follow your bliss and I was immediately suspicious. I saw, thanks to Paddy Loughran, that’s not how work gets done. The job gets done by using the proper tools, the correct materials, and measuring twice before cutting once. Maybe I missed out on a few things but when I wanted to write my first book I didn’t go to Mexico to eat peyote buttons, wander in the desert and find the meaning of life, I went to my typewriter and rolled in a blank sheet of paper.

  Dad never encouraged or discouraged me in anything. When I needed a ride to football practice he’d be there and he didn’t attend every game I played (I didn’t expect him to) but he made it to most of them. The only time this hard-working man (and I’m not idealizing dad’s blue collar life: he had broken toes and fingers and a bad back) said anything to me about any profession was when I was in high school. Dad had arrived home with a load of lumber for one of his projects. (Did I mention that he added on to the house, built a deck, drilled a well during a drought, and had an annual garden that fed the neighborhood?) I was reading at the dining room table and mom told me to go help dad unload. So I did. I walked outside, reached to help, and he asked, “What do you think you're doing out here?”

  “Helping you unload the wood?”

  He smiled, “Go back in and study. The heaviest piece of lumber you’ll ever be liftin’ is a pencil.”

  Thanks, pops.

  * * *

  Traffic on 101 sucks. The folks at The Bohemian agreed:

  NASCAR and the ART OF HUMAN SACRIFICE

  The automobile is the idol of the modern age. The man who owns a motorcar gets for himself, besides the joys of touring, the adulation of the walking crowd, and…is a god to the women.

  —John B. Rae

  NASCAR sucks.

  I’m not against racing, I run the occasional 10K and half-marathon and I realize competition is a genetic imperative for the human species and we will (and do) race chariots, bathtubs, airplanes, dogs, and frogs.

  But the popularity of NASCAR offends, mystifies and intrigues me. Last Monday I read the newspaper and section-after-section of this daily installment (ironically printed on our dwindling paper resources and tossed into ever bigger landfills that leak poisons into our groundwater…) warned, exhorted, and downright accused me of being immoral because I’m not GREEN enough.

  I don’t drive a hybrid, I eat New Zealand lamb, I refuse to throw away perfectly good lightbulbs so I can save the earth by retrofitting those costly-yet-somehow-money-saving incandescent corkscrews. And I’m certainly not going to buy new appliances until the old ones DON’T FREAKING WORK ANYMORE!

  Nearly every item on every page of the newspaper chided me about Global Warming and that I need to be greener than Kermit the Frog.

  After being cajoled and pressured by lifestyle, garden, home, and environmental experts to change my wasteful, slothful, unenlightened, Environmental-Armageddon-Instigating ways I opened the Sports Page.

  Festooned and emblazoned across the front was the coiffed and manicured and incredibly fresh-looking winner of this week’s NASCAR race. I’ve never been a racecar fan, but I remember the winners of the Indy 500 and the Daytona 500 and the Baja 1000 that I saw as a child on The Wide World of Sports looked dirty and grimy and oily and fatigued in the winner’s circle. These new guys are simply Salon Fresh. You can almost smell their manicured mint&avocado vivacity.

  The Sports Page featured NASCAR pictures and NASCAR race coverage and NASCAR season standings and prognostications and the usual overblown polysyllabic and hyperbolic blather that sportswriters (well, all writers) love.

  But there was no mention of the fact that 30 or so high performance 10 mpg (if that) NASCAR racecars just burned an ocean of gasoline to go around an oval for four hours.

  Definitely un-Green.

  Where are all the Greennecks, all the Holier-than-Thou assholistic prophets-of-doom when it comes to NASCAR?

  Why does NASCAR receive absolution (actually they gather praise, adoration, ESPN coverage, and cash) for burning up several tons of fuel—in a sanctioned and celebrated manner—to drive precisely, specifically and intentionally back to where they started?

  Think of the fuel (and tires and belts and oil and lubricants and filters and antifreeze and steel and plastic—and occasional human fatality) that are burned through in testing, qualifying, and racing. Think of the greenhouse gases that could be eliminated by outlawing these beastly and indulgent mechanical hedonists. Each of these races attracts a sea of humanity that motor-in from hundreds of miles away driving Winnebagos and cars and vans and trucks.

  If you want to reduce dependence on foreign oil wouldn’t eliminating NASCAR (and all the subsidiary “Minor League” racing circuits that exist to prepare drivers and crews) be an immediate and definite and substantial savings of oil that American soldiers are, right now, dying to procure and/or protect?

  Rather than, say, replacing my energy gobbling incandescent

  Curious George nightlight?

  Think for a moment: If the engineering acumen and cash backing that goes into making these cars go fasterfasterfaster were dedicated into seeing how far and fast we could go on ONE tank of gas we’d have a car capable of 100 MPH and 100 MPG within two years.

  Wanna bet?

  Give each existing NASCAR raceteam subsidies and sponsors and just ten gallons of gas every Sunday with the last car running declared the winner. Keep the financial incentives the same and this new LASTCAR racing series would be more popular than American Idol if they actually shot the losers.

  But alas, LASTCAR will never happen.

  You can’t replace NASCAR; you can’t even effectively boycott NASCAR. You can boycott the races by not attending or watching them on t.v. but to really hit them where it hurts we should boycott the sponsors. Don’t buy a Big Three car—or a Toyota: these are the actual companies that make the cars that go endlessly round-and-round-and- round.

  After this it gets tricky because if we want to boycott NASCAR we must proscribe the sponsors and stop eating M&M’s, Kellogg’s cereal, Burger King, Domino’s pizza, and Cheerios. We must stop drinking Budweiser, Crown Royal, Miller Lite, Red Bull, Jack Daniels and Jim Beam. We can’t use FedEX or UPS for our shipping needs. Shopping at Lowes, Of
fice Depot, Home Depot, Best Buy, and Target would be forbidden. The next time we invade a country that had the audacity to build their Pissant Culture on top of our Precious Oil we can’t use, because of our NASCAR boycott, the National Guard or the U.S. Army. And worst of all Little Debbie (you pandering slut!) Snack Cakes are off limits: She sponsors a car in the Sprint Cup.

  As much sense as it makes to outlaw NASCAR, reap immediate environmental benefits and retool the industry to the research and development of an Internal Combustion Wonder Car, it will, again, never happen.