Thank you so much in advance for your support and interest.
You'll enjoy Claire Dederer's excellent essay very much.
Thank you so much for sharing it with us dear Claire Dederer!
Claire
Dederer, Author of Poser : My Life In Twenty-Three Yoga Poses lives
in Seattle and writes about books and culture for the New York Times,
Vogue, Newsday, and many other publications.
Dear Betty MacDonald Fans,
I knew of the Betty MacDonald Fan Club but didn't know its activities were so extensive.
That's wonderful.
I
checked in with the magazine and they said please feel free to reprint
or repost.
I will keep you updated if I do any more pieces on Betty.
Thanks so much for all you are doing!
All the best,
Claire Dederer
Second Read — January / February 2011 Her Great Depression
Re-reading Betty MacDonald’s Anybody Can Do Anything, on the Northwest’s bust years
By Claire Dederer
From
the time I was nine or ten, I carried a spiral-bound Mead notebook with
me at all times. I wanted to be a writer, felt I probably already was a
writer, and feared I would never be a writer. I was constantly looking
for clues that would tell me that someone like me, someone from Seattle,
someone who was a girl, someone who was no one, might be able to write a
book. A book that got published.
I was always on the lookout for
a message, something that would tell me that this thing could be done. I
realize now that what I was looking for was an influence. Influence is a
message about what is possible, sent by book from one writer to
another. Different writers are looking for different messages. As a
child, the message I sought was simple: This place is worth writing
about.
Just as I was a nobody, Seattle at that time was a
non-place in literature. This was the 1970s. There were few nationally
published authors from Seattle. Whenever I encountered any writing at
all about the Northwest, I fell upon it gratefully. I was happy to read
anything that had blackberries and Puget Sound and Douglas firs and the
names of the streets downtown. I read Richard Brautigan stories; Ken
Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, though I didn’t even pretend to enjoy
it; collections of columns by crabby old Seattle Post-Intelligencer
newspapermen of the 1950s; poems by Carolyn Kizer. I read Tom Robbins
and was embarrassed by the sex. I read Mary McCarthy’s first memoir, but
she seemed to hate the place.
And, eventually, I read Betty
MacDonald. She had been there all along, on my own shelves, in the form
of her familiar, tattered Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle books. Then, browsing my
mother’s shelves one summer afternoon, I came upon a grown-up book by
MacDonald: Anybody Can Do Anything.
I had seen it before but
assumed it belonged to the dreary crop of self-help books that had
mushroomed on my mother’s shelves over the past few years. Bored enough,
I picked it up—and found therein an enchanted world. Enchanted because
it was exactly real. Anybody Can Do Anything is Betty MacDonald’s story
of how she and her family weathered the Depression in an old wood-frame
house (not unlike my family’s) in the University District (just a mile
or two from where I lived). And though my historical circumstances were
very different from hers, our shared geography was enough to make me
feel that I was seeing my life reflected in her pages.
It’s funny
to think of a time when Betty MacDonald’s books were new to me. Over
the years I would come to know them the way I knew houses in my own
neighborhood—with a casual intimacy. MacDonald began writing toward the
end of her short life, in the 1940s, when she had found happiness with
her second husband on their blackberry-ridden acreage on Vashon Island
in Puget Sound. Her first book was The Egg and I, set in the 1920s. This
chronicle of MacDonald’s life on an Olympic Peninsula chicken farm with
her first husband would become her most famous book, make her a
fortune, and form the basis of a wildly successful 1947 film. This,
putting aside her books for children, was followed by The Plague and I, a
surprisingly entertaining account of her stint in a tuberculosis
sanitarium just north of Seattle. How she created a ripping yarn out of
lying in bed for a year is one of life’s mysteries. Next came Anybody
Can Do Anything, which I held in my hands. Finally she wrote Onions in
the Stew, about life on Vashon Island, which came in 1955, just three
years before she succumbed to cancer at the age of forty-nine.
But
it was Anybody Can Do Anything, with its Seattle locale and its
scrappy, cheerful message of survival, which spoke most directly to me.
As
the book opens and the Depression begins, MacDonald has been living on
the chicken farm in damp exile from her real life in Seattle. Married at
twenty, she had followed her husband to the Olympic Peninsula so he
could live his agrarian dream. Now she has reached her breaking point
with the rain, the chickens, the monomaniacal husband, the whole affair.
“Finally in March, 1931, after four years of this,” she recounts, “I
wrote to my family and told them that I hated chickens, I was lonely and
I seemed to have married the wrong man.” She snatches up her little
daughters and makes her long, rainy, difficult way back to the city by
foot, bus, and ferry.
There she and her girls are folded happily
back into her large family’s bosom. Her mother’s “eight-room
brown-shingled house in the University district was just a modest
dwelling in a respectable neighborhood, near good schools and adequate
for an ordinary family. To me that night, and always, that shabby house
with its broad welcoming porch, dark woodwork, cluttered dining-room
plate rail, large fragrant kitchen, easy book-filled firelit living
room, four elastic bedrooms…represents the ultimate in charm, warmth and
luxury.”
The book describes life in that teeming, cozy household
with her mother, her three sisters, her brother, and her two little
girls, plus whoever else might be sleeping over in one of those elastic
bedrooms. It also details the literally dozens of weird and
none-too-wonderful jobs that MacDonald held throughout the Depression:
hapless secretary to businessmen of every stripe, fur-coat model, photo
retoucher, rabbit rancher, firewood stealer, Christmas tree decorator,
baby sitter, receptionist to a gangster.
The author jumps from
job to job, with whole industries blowing up behind her as she leaves,
like Tom Cruise running from an exploding warehouse. She’s hustled along
in the ever-shrinking job market by her sister Mary, who considers
herself an “executive thinker.”
Mary has a job ready for Betty
as soon as she gets off the bus from the egg farm, never mind that Betty
is utterly unqualified. Mary won’t hear of such talk. She is quick to
admonish her sister: “There are plenty of jobs but the trouble with most
people, and I know because I’m always getting jobs for my friends, is
that they stay home with the covers pulled up over their heads waiting
for some employer to come creeping in looking for them.”
The
truth of this statement is disproved throughout the book. There were
certainly not plenty of jobs. The portrait of Depression-era Seattle
that emerges is definitively—though quietly—desperate. But on my first
read, I hardly clocked the despair. I just thrilled to the evocation of
my home, captured in such throwaway phrases as, “There was nothing in
sight but wet pavement and wet sky.” MacDonald describes places that
still existed, that I myself knew—the I. Magnin’s at the corner of Sixth
and Pine, the palatial movie theater named the Neptune. Here she is on
the Pike Place Market:
The Public Market, about three blocks
long, crowded and smelling deliciously of baking bread, roasting
peanuts, coffee, fresh fish and bananas, blazed with the orange, reds,
yellows and greens of fresh succulent fruits and vegetables. From the
hundreds of farmer’s stalls that lined both sides of the street and
extended clear through the block on the east side, Italians, Greeks,
Norwegians, Finns, Danes, Japanese and Germans offered their wares. The
Italians were the most voluble but the Japanese had the most beautiful
vegetables.
Such descriptions caused a strange firing in my
brain. I was accustomed to imagining locations from books; there was a
deep pleasure in having that necessity for once removed. Even the food
they ate was the food we ate. For special treats, MacDonald tells of
buying Dungeness crabs and Olympia oysters, just as my family did.
I
saw, illustrated perfectly, and in the cold light of nonfiction, the
possibility that Seattle might be the setting for a book. I would not be
struck so thoroughly by the possibility of a true Northwest literature
until I started reading Raymond Carver in the mid-1980s. My mother
told me that Betty MacDonald had died in the 1950s, but that her niece
lived in our very own neighborhood. I walked by the house, gazing at it
with a true feeling of awe: the niece of an author lived therein! Of
course I knew authors were real people. But Betty MacDonald was more
than real; she was tangible. She was prima facie evidence that the
materials I had at hand—those trees, that rain—were enough.
Other
writers came and went; Betty MacDonald was among those who endured for
me. This was because she was funny. No, that’s not quite right. Though I
didn’t have the language for it when I first read her, Betty MacDonald
was comic. As I became a writer myself, I studied her, trying to figure
out just how she did it.
She wrote long, ridiculous set pieces
about her various jobs. She wrote hilarious portraits of her bosses, who
in her hands become one long parade of human oddity. She wrote fondly
of her family’s eccentricities. But above all, she wrote with unflagging
self-abasement. Her books twanged with the idea that one’s own
ridiculousness was comedy enough. A good example of her rueful tone: Until
I started to night school, my life was one long sweep of mediocrity.
While my family and friends were enjoying the distinction of being
labeled the prettiest, most popular, best dancer, fastest runner,
highest diver, longest breath-holder-under-water, best tennis player,
most fearless, owner of the highest arches, tiniest, wittiest, most
efficient, one with the most allergies or highest salaried, I had to
learn to adjust to remarks such as, “My, Mary has the most beautiful red
hair I’ve ever seen, it’s just like burnished copper and so silky and
curly—oh yes, Betty has hair too, hasn’t she? I guess it’s being so
coarse is what makes it look so thick.”
It almost goes without saying that she distinguishes herself in night school by being the absolute worst student in every class. MacDonald
was master of the comic memoirist’s first art: self-deprecation. Other
types of memoirists value lyricism, or shock tactics. Comic memoirists
are utterly dependent on knowing that they themselves are the silliest
people in any given room. I know whereof I speak—I am this year
publishing a memoir about my own very, very ordinary life. Memoirists
like me are writing what author Lorraine Adams has called “nobody”
memoirs. As she said in a 2002 piece in the Washington Monthly, such
memoirists are “neither generals, statesmen, celebrities, nor their
kin.” How, then, to proceed? You’re nobody. You want to write a
memoir. Your first order of business is to let readers know that you
know that they know you’re a nobody. So you must imply your unimportance
as quickly as possible, and never, ever stop. By means of that simple
dynamic, the memoirist makes a friend rather than an enemy of her
reader.
In Anybody Can Do Anything, MacDonald fails again and
again. It’s an entire book about failure: her own, and the economy’s.
It’s also about persisting in the face of one’s own admitted
shortcomings. What she wants is a job commensurate with her skills,
which she presents as nil: “I wanted some sort of very steady job with a
salary, and duties mediocre enough to be congruent with my mediocre
ability. I had in mind sort of a combination janitress, slow typist and
file clerk.” Finally, she washes up safely on the sandbar of
government work, taking a job at the Seattle branch of the National
Recovery Administration, the New Deal agency started in 1933 and charged
with organizing businesses under new fair-trade codes. There she felt
right at home, surrounded by federal-level incompetence: “There were
thousands of us who didn’t know what we were doing but were all doing it
in ten copies.” MacDonald is rarely remembered for her wry tone.
When she’s remembered at all, she is preceded not by her own reputation,
but that of the big-screen version of The Egg and I, starring Claudette
Colbert and Fred MacMurray, which is pretty nearly unwatchable. In the
film, Ma and Pa Kettle—neighbors who are fondly, if broadly, drawn in
the book—have been turned into tobacco-spitting, raccoon-roasting
caricatures. And the public loved them. On the movie poster, the faces
of these two crackers loom huge; Colbert and MacMurray cower tinily in
the corner. Ma and Pa Kettle proved so popular that nine more films were
made about them and their fictional fifteen children, and Betty
MacDonald lost all hope of being taken seriously as a writer.
Many
years after all of this, I was having dinner with a British writer who
had undertaken to write about the Northwest. “You have to be careful
about using too much humor, otherwise you end up sounding like Betty
MacDonald: housewife humor,” he said, finishing in scathing (if posh)
tones. MacDonald has been trapped in this role of domestic lightweight.
But her writing, with its quiet irreverence, has more in common with,
say, Calvin Trillin or Laurie Colwin, than it does with a mid-century
housewife humorist like Erma Bombeck. (Though, really, what’s so bad
about Erma Bombeck?)
What MacDonald models in her writing is
actually very freeing—self-deprecation as a kind of passport to the
ordinary. With it, you can take your reader into the most mundane
details of your life, and they will often go.
I teach adult
writing students. When we work on memoir, they want to write pieces
about what they’ve achieved. About their good marriages. About their
sterling qualities. “Nobody wants to hear about that except your
mother!” I tell them. Which is never very popular. Even so, I try to
explain the Betty MacDonald principle to them: what people want to see
in the memoir are reflections of their own failures and smallnesses. If
you can show readers that you have those same failures, those same
smallnesses, and make them laugh about it, they will love you. Or at
least like you. Or at least accept you as a fellow nobody.
These
simple things would be enough for me: a story of Seattle; a tale told
with self-deprecating humor. But what MacDonald achieves in Anybody Can
Do Anything is something more than that: a finely observed journalistic
record of her time. The ridiculous set pieces, the fond portraits of
her family, and what New York Times critic Bosley Crowther called the
“earthy tang” of her writing do not seem like indicators of a work of
serious journalism. But MacDonald is getting down on paper what she sees
happening all across Seattle, and ultimately providing us with a rough
draft of history. The details of home and work life accrue, anecdotes
pile up, and suddenly the reader has a real sense of daily existence in
the West during the 1930s. This is a cheerful, unassuming way of
documenting a socially and economically turbulent period. But it’s
documentation nonetheless.
Take, for example, MacDonald’s
account of one of her earliest jobs. This chapter encapsulates the
uneasiness of the early part of the Depression, eerily suggestive of the
economic tenterhooks we’ve been on since 2007. She’s been summarily
fired from her first job as executive secretary to a miner, so the
ever-resourceful Mary has found her a job at her own office, where she
works for a lumber magnate. When Betty protests that she hasn’t any of
the qualifications the lumberman is looking for in a secretary, Mary
tells her not to fret. “‘You thought you couldn’t learn mining,’ Mary
told me when she installed me as her assistant in the office across the
street. ‘There’s nothing to lumber, it’s just a matter of being able to
divide everything by twelve.’?”
As she makes her way to work each
morning, MacDonald is nervous but glad of the work: “Now I grew more
and more conscious of the aimlessness and sadness of the people on the
streets, of the Space for Rent signs, marking the sudden death of
businesses, that had sprung up over the city like white crosses on the
battlefield and I lifted myself up each morning timidly and with dread.”
Her employer’s business is clearly failing, but MacDonald feels she
shouldn’t leave her boss, Mr. Chalmers, in the lurch. She intends to
stay until the end. “And I did,” we read, “in spite of Mr. Chalmers’
telling me many times that the Depression was all my fault, the direct
result of inferior people like me wearing silk stockings and thinking
they were as good as people like him.” Again, this blame-the-victim
language recalls some of the rhetoric of today’s subprime mortgage
crisis. But despite the boss’s efforts to draw a sociological line in
the sand, he too is laid low by the economic downturn, and the chapter
comes to an abrupt end: “Lumber was over.”
The author and her
family soon lose their phone service, their electricity, their heat.
Being Betty MacDonald, she makes it all sound rather jolly. She tells of
endless bowls of vegetable soup eaten by candlelight. And when she
complains about being broke, she does it with typical good humor: “There
is no getting around the fact that being poor takes getting used to.
You have to adjust to the fact that it’s no longer a question of what
you eat but if you eat.” But sometimes the details tell the story
that the tone masks. When the heat and the electricity have been turned
off, the family relies upon old Christmas candles for light and firewood
for heat: “When we ran out of fireplace wood, Mary unearthed a bucksaw
and marched us all down to a city park two blocks away, where we took
turns sawing up fallen logs.” Here, despite the characteristic pluck,
you feel straits getting uncomfortably dire. This isn’t an overlay of
social commentary sitting awkwardly atop a narrative. Instead, such
commentary is tightly knitted to MacDonald’s own experience. When she
notices that “[e]very day found a little better class of people selling
apples on street corners,” she’s not making an idle observation—she’s
wondering if she’s next.
When I came to write my own memoir, I
was telling a small, personal story about being a mom at the turn of the
millennium. I wanted to link the story to larger cultural forces I had
observed, to what I saw as a kind of generational obsession with perfect
parenting. In Betty MacDonald’s writing, I once again found just the
model I needed. It was possible to connect the larger story around me to
my own small story, without pretending to be definitive or historical.
In fact, the more I focused on the details of my own very particular
experience, the more I could give a feeling of the culture that I swam
in.
The message that Betty Macdonald sent me, through this book,
is one of sufficiency: Your small life is enough. Other writers might
be looking for a message that will feed their huge ambitions. From
books, they learn how far they might go with their own writing. For me,
the question has always been: How close to home might I stay? MacDonald’s
qualities as a writer—the focus on the very local, the self-deprecating
humor, the careful and personal observation of social changes—are
modest qualities. They inspire through their very humility. The homely,
says Betty MacDonald, is more than enough. This was the message I needed
to hear. There’s a clue, of course, right there in the title. It’s been
telling me since I was a girl, right up through the time I became a
writer myself: Anybody can do anything. Even this. Even you.
Such
lack of pretension doesn’t necessarily come with great rewards. There
are no monuments to Betty MacDonald. No endowed chairs, no scholarships,
not even a public library conference room named after her. But in the
shallow green bowl of Chimacum Valley, a two-lane road leads to the
chicken farm where MacDonald lived for four tough years. It’s been
renamed “The Egg and I Road.” It veers west from Route 19, cutting
through farmland before heading up a hill into some evergreens. It’s
nothing special. It’s just ordinary. It’s just a county road.
More info in next Betty MacDonald fan club newsletters. If you'd like to join Betty MacDonald fan club as a
follower you only have to press the join button on Betty MacDonald fan
club blog.
This
very new Betty MacDonald biography includes all the results we got
during a very successful Betty MacDonald fan club research which started
in 1983.
You'll be able to find unique Betty MacDonald treasures in our Betty MacDonald biography.
Betty MacDonald biography includes for example interviews with Betty MacDonald, her family and friends.
We got many letters by Betty MacDonald and other family members even very important original ones.
Our
goal is to publish a Betty MacDonald biography that shows all the
details of Betty MacDonald's life and work but also to present her
fascinating siblings.
Dear Betty MacDonald fan club fans let us know please what you are interested most in a future Betty MacDonald biography.
Our next Betty MacDonald fan club project is a collection of these unique dedications.
If you
share your dedication from your Betty MacDonald - and Mary Bard Jensen
collection you might be the winner of our new Betty MacDonald fan club
items.
Thank you so much in advance for your support.
Thank you so much for sending us your favourite Betty MacDonald quote.
Thank you so much for sharing this witty memories with us.
Wolfgang Hampel's literary event Vita Magica
is very fascinating because he is going to include Betty MacDonald,
other members of the Bard family and Betty MacDonald fan club honor
members.
I agree with Betty in this very witty Betty MacDonald story Betty MacDonald: Nothing more to say by Wolfgang Hampel.
I
can't imagine to live in a country with him as so-called elected
President although there are very good reasons to remain there to fight
against these brainless politics.
The fledgling Trump administration has effectively declared war on environmental protection. On Tuesday, President Trump signed executive orders that took the first steps toward reversing two Obama administration rulings against oil pipeline projects. One of those rulings, by the State Department, rejected the application for the Keystone XL pipeline
that would carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries and
shipping points in the United States. The other ruling, from the Army
Corps of Engineers, told owners of the Dakota Access pipeline to come up with alternative routes that would not endanger the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota.
Trump’s orders, in themselves, did not completely undo the
Obama administration’s pipeline decisions, but they are clear
indicators that such an outcome is in the works. TransCanada, the
Keystone project’s owner, is being asked to resubmit the project
application (with the caveat that Trump wants the pipeline built with
100% American steel). Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is being
ordered to “review and approve in an expedited manner” the North Dakota
pipeline plan of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners.
Don't miss these very interesting articles below, please.
Lately,
it appears Trump has gone back into the field to drag in a whole new
bunch of State contenders.
My favorite is Representative Dana
Rohrabacher of California, a person you have probably never heard of
even though he’s been in Congress since the 1980s and is currently head
of the prestigious Subcommittee on Europe, Eurasia and Emerging Threats.
I think the future dinosaur flatulence will be the behaviour of 'Pussy' and his very strange government.
Poor World! Poor America!
Don't miss these very interesting articles below, please.
The most difficult case in Mrs.Piggle-Wiggle's career
Hello 'Pussy', this is Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.
You
took calls from foreign leaders on unsecured phone lines, without
consultung the State Department. We have to change your silly behaviour
with a new Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle cure. I know you are the most difficult
case in my career - but we have to try everything.......................
Betty MacDonald was sitting on her egg-shaped cloud and listened to a rather strange guy.
He said to his friends: So sorry to keep you waiting. Very complicated business! Very complicated!
Betty said: Obviously much too complicated for you old toupee!
Besides him ( by the way the First Lady's place ) his 10 year old son was bored to death and listened to this 'exciting' victory speech.
The old man could be his great-grandfather.
The
boy was very tired and thought: I don't know what this old guy is
talking about. Come on and finish it, please. I'd like to go to bed. Dear 'great-grandfather' continued and praised the Democratic candidate.
He always called her the most corrupt person ever and repeated it over and over again in the fashion of a Tibetan prayer wheel.
She is so corrupt. She is so corrupt. Do you know how corrupt she is?
Betty MacDonald couldn't believe it when he said: She
has worked very long and very hard over a long period of time, and we
owe her a major debt of gratitude for her service to our country.
Afterwards old toupee praised his parents, wife, children, siblings and friends.
He asked the same question like a parrot all the time: Where are you? Where are you? Where are you? I know you are here!
Betty MacDonald answered: No Pussy they are not! They left the country.
They immigrated to Canada
because they are very much afraid of the future in the U.S.A. with you
as their leader like the majority of all so-called more or less normal
citizens.
This
is incredible! I'll You get what you pay/vote for and Trump is the
epitome of this ideology. America I won't feel bad for you because you
don't need my sympathy for what's coming but I am genuinely scared for
you. 'Forgive them lord for they know not who they do' or maybe they do
but just don't care about their future generations who will suffer for
this long after the culprits have passed away.
Wise guy, North Pole, Svalbard And Jan Mayen, 9 minutes ago
Is the USA like North Korea where you can't trust other politicians?
That's it.
Put Ivanka in! Put Ivanka in! Put my whole family and friends in! ' What about Putin?
Or the leaders from China and North Korea?
Wouldn't it be a great idea to put them in too?
What about very intelligent and qualified Sarah Palin?
In 2006, Palin obtained a passport[88] and in 2007 traveled for the first time outside of North America on a trip to Kuwait. There she visited the Khabari Alawazem Crossing at the Kuwait–Iraq border and met with members of the Alaska National Guard at several bases.[89] On her return journey she visited injured soldiers in Germany.[90] That's the reason why very intelligent and brilliant Sarah Palin knows the World very well. Sarah and ' Pussygate ' will rule America and the World - what a couple.
Wolfgang
Hampel's Betty MacDonald and Ma and Pa Kettle biography and Betty
MacDonald interviews have fans in 40 countries. I'm one of their many devoted fans.
Many Betty MacDonald - and Wolfgang Hampel fans are very interested in a Wolfgang Hampel CD and DVD with his
very funny poems and stories.
We are going to publish new Betty MacDonald essays on Betty MacDonald's gardens and nature in Washington State. Tell us the names of this mysterious couple please and you can win a very new Betty MacDonald documentary.
The series premiered on September 3,
1951, the same day as "Search for Tomorrow," and ended on August 1,
1952.
Although it did well in the ratings, it had difficulty
attracting a steady sponsor. This episode features Betty Lynn (later
known for her work on "The Andy Griffith Show") as Betty MacDonald, John
Craven as Bob MacDonald, Doris Rich as Ma Kettle, and Frank Twedell as
Pa Kettle.
Betty MacDonald fan club exhibition will be fascinating with the international book editions and letters by Betty MacDonald. I can't wait to see the new Betty MacDonald documentary.
Standing Rock may be the first battle site in Trump’s war on the environment
The fledgling Trump administration has effectively declared war on environmental protection. On Tuesday, President Trump signed executive orders that took the first steps toward reversing two Obama administration rulings against oil pipeline projects. One of those rulings, by the State Department, rejected the application for the Keystone XL pipeline
that would carry oil from the tar sands of Alberta to refineries and
shipping points in the United States. The other ruling, from the Army
Corps of Engineers, told owners of the Dakota Access pipeline to come up with alternative routes that would not endanger the water supply of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe in North Dakota.
Trump’s orders, in themselves, did not completely undo the
Obama administration’s pipeline decisions, but they are clear
indicators that such an outcome is in the works. TransCanada, the
Keystone project’s owner, is being asked to resubmit the project
application (with the caveat that Trump wants the pipeline built with
100% American steel). Meanwhile, the Army Corps of Engineers is being
ordered to “review and approve in an expedited manner” the North Dakota
pipeline plan of Texas-based Energy Transfer Partners. As
those two actions made headlines, more reports surfaced about the
administration’s Putin-like attempts to muzzle anyone in any government
agency who has views on the environment that are out of step with the
new regime.
Even with best-friend-of-the-oil-industry Scott Pruitt not yet confirmed by the Senate as head of the Environmental Protection Agency,
EPA employees are feeling the cold hand of the Trump White House
covering their mouths. Grants and contracts worth $4 billion that
support environmental programs for states, tribes and other entities
have been put on hold. EPA employees, as well as scientists, researchers
and government workers in other departments who deal with environmental
issues — particularly climate change — have been told to make no public
statements, put no new content on websites, stay away from social media
and submit for review any speaking engagements or contacts with the
news media.When an unidentified person at the Badlands
National Park was found to be defiantly tweeting facts about climate
change, the posts were quickly removed by enforcers of the ban.Since
Trump’s election, scientists have been scrambling to copy vital climate
research onto private servers before the climate change deniers who
dominate policy in the new administration can do anything to harm the
data. “Something that seemed a little paranoid to me before all of a
sudden seems potentially realistic, or at least something you’d want to
hedge against,” UC Davis environmental researcher Nick Santos told the
Washington Post. “Doing this can only be a good thing. Hopefully they
leave everything in place. But if not, we’re planning for that.”
Trump has been in office less than a week and he
is already confirming the worst fears of environmentalists. An
overwhelming number of scientific studies indicate that man-made climate
change will be an existential threat to humanity if no action is taken
to sharply reduce reliance on fossil fuels. President Obama believed the
science; Donald Trump and the people he has put in charge of energy and
environmental policies do not. It appears obvious that the Trump
administration will consistently favor oil, gas and coal interests over
citizens who just want clean air and water and a landscape that is not
carpeted with drilling rigs and fracking equipment.Last
weekend’s huge women’s marches in cities across the country pulled
together people with a variety of concerns, but environmental issues got
slight attention. That needs to change because the environment is the
one thing we all have in common.The first place where
the environmental battle lines are drawn will very likely be the
Standing Rock reservation. Through the summer, fall and into the snow
and freezing temperatures of winter, the tribe led anti-pipeline
protests that grew dramatically in size and drew international attention
to what had been an obscure project. Protesters thought they had won,
but now, with a stroke of Trump’s pen, victory has been snatched away.
The tribe will take the fight to the courts, but it seems inevitable
that there will be another physical confrontation as well. Thousands of
people will gather to resist, this time with the weather on their side,
the federal government against them and the future in their hands. The war is on. David.Horsey@latimes.com Follow me at @davidhorsey on Twitter MORE FROM TOP OF THE TICKET Trump’s 'America first' policy has a big fan in the Kremlin Surviving four years of Trump's huge ego and incurious mind Barack Obama built a new kind of Camelot for a new generation
Trump claims torture works but experts warn of its 'potentially existential' costs
Trump gives first presidential TV interview as draft executive order points to return to practices such as waterboarding
Donald Trump
has used his first TV interview as president to say he believes torture
“absolutely” works and that the US should “fight fire with fire.” Speaking to ABC News, Trump said he would defer to the defence
secretary, James Mattis, and CIA director, Mike Pompeo, to determine
what can and cannot be done legally to combat the spread of terrorism. But asked about the efficacy of tactics such as waterboarding, Trump said: “absolutely I feel it works.”
“When Isis is doing things that nobody has ever heard of since
medieval times. Would I feel strongly about waterboarding. As far as I’m
concerned we have to fight fire with fire.”Trump said he asked intelligence chiefs earlier this week whether torture works. “The answer was yes, absolutely,” he said.
He added that terrorist groups “chop off the citizens’ or anybody’s
heads in the Middle East, because they’re Christian or Muslim or
anything else ... we have that and we’re not allowed to do anything.
We’re not playing on an even field.”The interviews come after reports that Trump is preparing to sign an
executive order that would reinstate the detention of terrorism suspects
at facilities known as “black sites”. This would remove limitations on coercive interrogation techniques
set by a longstanding army field manual intended to ensure humane
military interrogations, which is mostly compliant with the Geneva
Conventions. Mattis and Pompeo were “blindsided” by reports of the draft
order, Politico said citing sources.However, Trump faces resistance to the prospect of the reintroduction of torture. On Wednesday, Steve Kleinman, a retired air force colonel and senior
adviser to the FBI-led team that interrogates terrorist suspects warned
that weakening US prohibitions against torture was dangerous and
ignorant. “A lot of these people who weigh in heavily on interrogation have no
idea how little they know, [and do so] because of what they see on
television,” said Kleinman, chairman of the research advisory committee
to the High Value Detainee Interrogation Group (HIG). “There is, at best, anecdotal evidence to support torture,” said Kleinman, who emphasized that he was not speaking for the HIG.
“There is, on the other hand, a robust body of scientific
literature and field testing that demonstrates the efficacy of a
relationship-based, rapport-based, cognitive-based approach to
interrogation, as well as a robust literature that would suggest torture
immediately undermines a source’s ability to be a reliable reporter of
information: memory is undermined, judgment is undermined,
decision-making is undermined, time-references are undermined. And this
is only from a purely operational perspective; we can’t take the
morality out of strategy.”“If the US was to make it once again the policy of the country to
coerce, and to detain at length in an extrajudicial fashion, the costs
would be beyond substantial – they’d be potentially existential,”
Kleinman said.Senator John McCain, a torture survivor and co-author of a 2015 law
barring the US security agencies from using interrogation techniques
that surpass the prohibitions beyond those set out in the US army field
manual, signalled his defiance.“The president can sign whatever executive orders he likes. But the
law is the law. We are not bringing back torture in the United States of
America,” said McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Senate
armed services committee. McCain referenced explicit guarantees from Pompeo and Mattis during their Senate confirmation proceedings to
follow the interrogations law and the army field manual. “I am
confident these leaders will be true to their word,” McCain said. The former CIA head Leon Panetta, who gave the orders to close the
agency’s black sites told the BBC that it would be a “mistake” to
reintroduce enhanced interrogation techniques and “damaging” to the
reputation of the US. Panetta said torture was violation of the US values and the constitution.
Mark Fallon, who was the deputy chief of Guantánamo’s Bush-era
investigative taskforce for military tribunals, said: “It does appear
like a subterfuge to enact more brutal methods because that was what
candidate Trump campaigned on during the election.”Fallon warned that the field manual’s appendix M, which allows
extended “separation” of a detainee from other captives, represented a
“slippery slope that could bring back torture”.Britain’s prime minister, Theresa May, has been urged to by her own MPs to make Britain’s opposition to torture clear to Trump when she visits him on Friday.At prime minister’s questions Andrew Tyrie, a senior Tory MP, said:
“President Trump has repeatedly said he will bring back torture as an
instrument of policy. When she sees him on Friday, will the prime
minister make it clear that in no circumstances will she permit Britain
to be dragged into facilitating that torture, as we were after 11
September?”
Since you’re here…
…we
have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than
ever but far fewer are paying for it. And advertising revenues across
the media are falling fast. So you can see why we need to ask for your
help. The Guardian's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot
of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe
our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective,
too.
If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to pay for it, our future would be much more secure.
A new president, a new predator and a liberal island is worried about its way of life
William Yardley
Shortly after Donald Trump
accepted the Republican nomination for president last summer, a cougar
swam across a salt-water channel to this island oasis amid Seattle and
its suburbs. At the time, many people here viewed the
candidate and the big cat as interlopers, soon to be exposed and
expelled. But both are still around — and one is clearly causing more
concern than the other on this increasingly anxious island. “If we could have the cougar or Trump for the next four
years, I’d take the cougar,” said Tristan Dornall, 27, who has not
ventured alone into the woods near his house since he had a startlingly
close encounter with the animal there in November. “I mean, definitely.” If
Seattle is the predictably Democratic capital of the Pacific Northwest,
Vashon, just 20 minutes away by ferry, is one of the region’s
experimental laboratories, a place where new strains of environmentalism
and progressivism flourish, unencumbered by mainland reality. It
presents an increasingly rare constituency: rural but not red.
Country roads curve through art galleries, alpaca
farms and sustainable distilleries. A nonprofit’s popular “rewilding”
program teaches families “our renowned approach to deep nature
connection and the bundle of teachings we call Coyote Mentoring.”Of the 7,701 people here who cast ballots for president in November, fewer than 13% voted for Trump, and nearly 78% backed Hillary Clinton.Now,
as the Trump era unfolds, Vashon is confronting what many parts of
liberal America feel, an uncomfortable blend of realization,
determination and fear. And this being an island — a bubble, yes,
islanders know that — there is also a temptation to retrench, to shrink
the world to the immediate shoreline.“I tend to be very
globally minded, and I think my processing right now is to think more
locally,” said April Sherman, whose great-great-grandfather homesteaded
here in the 1870s. “I feel a little out of control, like I can’t do
much.”Some Vashon residents say they want to reach out,
to bridge the cultural and economic divisions Trump’s campaign helped
reveal. Many also express resolve to fight harder than ever to protect
the planet and their unique piece of it.“Since the
advent of environmental laws, I think there is more gravely at risk now
than ever before,” said Amy Carey, whose fight to stop a gravel mine
from being dug here more than a decade ago led her to found Sound
Action, an assertive nonprofit that works to protect nearshore areas all
over Puget Sound. “And we have no gimme room for error.”A
couple of years ago, stories shot across the Internet declaring Vashon
the most liberal place in the United States based on an analysis of
political donations. Not long after, that analysis was debunked by an
island newspaper, which concluded that, using the same measure, Vashon
was merely more liberal than Seattle. Other skeptics have questioned
what liberalism really looks like in a wealthy enclave where more
than 90% of its 10,600 residents are white. Islanders,
ever self-aware, are trying to answer the question themselves. They have
been working to finalize a new zoning plan that aspires to a
challenging progressive balance — increase the amount of affordable
housing without compromising their rural way of life or giving too much
freedom to developers they do not trust. One idea is to
create a nonprofit that would build only as much housing as island
workers need and in a way that puts the environment first. “I
know we are grieving with the results of the national election,” Martin
Baker, a longtime resident and environmental activist, wrote to
concerned residents last fall. “I suggest this is a place to take
action. It is, after all, our home.” That word, “home,”
resonates deeply here. Cashiers in the grocery store pick up
conversations with customers from the last time they came in. Baristas
anticipate orders. Not only do people leave their cars unlocked, some
leave the keys on the seat. The novelist Michael Chabon
once lived on Vashon and has said it helped inspire the setting of his
2002 book, “Summerland.” In the book, the fictional Clam Island was
connected to the mainland until a bridge collapsed. It did not take long
for islanders to view their new isolation as a good thing. Vashon never
had a bridge, but its residents, like those in the book, are content to
come and go by ferries, which run frequently from two terminals on the
island. “You could not get a cup of coffee or clam
chowder, or hear all about your neighbor’s sick cousin or chicken, on
the Clam Narrows Bridge,” Chabon wrote, adding, “Islands have always
been strange and magical places. Crossing the water to reach them ought
to be, even in a small way, an adventure.”
As
for Trump, some here are trying to take a long view — hoping that
his election is an aberration, a difficult but not insurmountable
hurdle in the march toward a more progressive era.Many
residents note that the West Coast voted overwhelmingly Democratic (some
big cities and counties voted more decisively for Clinton than Vashon
did). They emphasize that Clinton won nearly 3 million more votes nationwide (suggesting
they may not be in such a bubble after all), and they point out that
Trump is viewed with suspicion even among many in his own party (another
reason, they hope, he might not win a second term).“You
have to empathize with and understand those people,” Derek Churchill,
who teaches sustainable forestry practices on Vashon but also
in conservative timber towns, said of Trump voters in rural areas. “A
lot of these folks are so desperate.“They live in places
where schools are closing, where there are meth addiction problems,
these communities that are slowly spiraling downward. That is something
we need to figure out how to address. That’s got to be a wake-up call.”Bianca
Perla, who grew up on the island, earned a doctorate in ecology at the
University of Washington and now runs the Vashon Nature Center, said
that, although she fears a Trump administration, it may not be a bad
thing that his election pierced what she called Vashon’s “bubble
mentality.” “Now we see more widely,” Perla said. “Our
island, the nice thing about it is we can be sort of insular and have
this beauty all around us. But the cold reality is that it’s affected by
larger systems. It’s all connected.” That dynamic, in fact, is what prompted the cougar to make his big swim last summer.
Sergeant Kim Chandler of the Washington Department of Fish
and Wildlife said the cougar likely was seeking a bubble of its own — a
place with lush forests and abundant prey, a refuge from the
increasingly developed region beyond Vashon. Now, however, after the
cougar has been linked to at least four alpaca deaths, the state is
trying to trap it. If the state succeeds, the animal may be outfitted
with a GPS collar and released in the Cascade Range. “If
you picked that island up and plopped it down somewhere near the
mountains,” Chandler said, “it’d be exactly the same habitat.”
The Senate Democrats' sound and fury over
President Donald Trump's cabinet picks and his political agenda is
apparently signifying nothing – at least on defense policy. The fact
that the Senate quickly confirmed General James "Mad Dog" Mattis by a
vote of 98-1
late Friday afternoon in the wake of inauguration activities shows that
even progressive Democrats, such as Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth
Warren, don't have the stomach for a foreign policy fight with Trump's
new Pentagon. That's how effectively Trump and perhaps even Mattis'
defense industry connections are already bullying Washington into submission.
Sanders justified his vote by saying
that while Mattis wasn't the nominee he preferred, "in a Trump cabinet
likely to be loaded up with right-wing extremists, all of whom I will
oppose, I hope General Mattis will have a moderating influence on some
of the racist and xenophobic views that President Trump advocated
throughout the campaign." This is incredibly wishful and relativistic
thinking. Mattis will never be a moderating influence, and he's already
exhibited racist and xenophobic thinking by the ways in which he views
the adversary.
The Pentagon's new secretary of defense believes, and is on record
saying, that we should "have a plan to kill everybody you meet," that
"if you f*ck with me, I'll kill you all," and that "there are some
assholes in the world that just need to be shot".
Bombastic braggadocios aren't helpful at the
Pentagon helm. This language may serve a purpose within the defense
industry, as it props up their for-profit modus operandi. But in terms
of aiding international affairs, it's caustic and antagonistic and will
only get us into more wars, not fewer.
Mattis, moreover, thinks that shooting people is
"just business" and that it's "a hell of a lot of fun to shoot them."
This is exactly the kind of attitude that leads to U.S. Marines
urinating on dead Afghan bodies. When our new defense secretary says
that killing is "a hell of a hoot," and that "It's fun to shoot some
people," we are inculcating a culture of indiscriminate violence. This
is not level-headed and will undoubtedly lead to more trickle-down
killing and callousness.
This is also not emblematic of cooler heads
capable of prevailing amid the myriad precipitous, conflict-ridden
cliffs that we will invariably face in a Trump foreign policy agenda.
Yet, every single Democrat in the Senate – with the exception of New
York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand – voted to send that message to the world.
What a lost opportunity to send a different message.
What's most frustrating here, however, is that
this problem – of progressives rolling over to more militaristic foreign
policy players in Washington – is prevalent within the progressive
policy community. It's also what plagued Sanders' presidential campaign.
Many progressive policymakers don't have sufficient foreign policy
experience to competently push back when questioned about a violent
conflict overseas. They've largely not spent time in conflict zones
without military escort, which is part of the problem, of course, as
Pentagon protection offers an extremely selective and ultimately biased
perspective. Nor have they prioritized meetings with community-based
organizations in Somalia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Yemen, Libya, Syria or
Pakistan, that are cleaning up after the death and destruction from our
drone strikes, airstrikes, ground raids and weapons trafficking.
General James Mattis will have the chance to practice what he preaches on nuclear weapons.
This is a serious and serial problem.
Progressive Democrats often get elected to Congress after years of local
and state service on legislatures, county and school boards, and
commissions, but arrive in Washington with little foreign service or
foreign policy expertise of any kind. They haven't seen for themselves –
and our mainstream media are rarely showing – the disastrous wake left
behind by our military invasions. And they often can't properly
pronounce a foreign or adversary's town, tribe, territory or tactic in a
debate, getting trounced by more militarily minded opponents.
This happens over and over and over again. And
it was very visible in debates between Sanders and Hillary Clinton. She
was clearly perceived as the security expert, even if it came with email
blunders, because she had exposure while at the State Department to the
language, the lexicon and the litany of defense apparatuses that are
useful to presidential debate.
It's high time progressives in Congress –
elected officials and their senior staff – get over to places like Bayda
province in Yemen, where the Trump administration's first drone strikes occurred over the weekend, Somalia's Galmudug region, where the U.S. killed
nearly two dozen government soldiers in September, and anywhere in
Afghanistan, where the U.S. under the Obama administration increased air
strikes by 40 percent
in 2016. And insist to see it with the assistance and collaboration of
local actors and international aid and relief organizations.
Then, progressive members of Congress might be
able to go toe-to-toe with the Mattises of this world. Until then,
progressives have no fighting chance on the foreign policy front.
Michael Shank teaches sustainable development at New York
University’s Center for Global Affairs and served as a senior policy
adviser to U.S. Rep. Michael Honda between 2009-2013.
Donald Trump has echoed North Korea’s leader, Kim Jong-un,
after declaring that the day of his inauguration should be a “national
day of patriotic devotion” – a rallying cry that would not be out of
place in the secretive state’s propaganda. Trump’s proclamation, which was made official on Monday,
has been uttered by Kim in speeches to his 1.2 million-strong military
and members of the ruling Korean Workers’ party in recent years.
In an address to a military parade in Pyongyang
on 10 October 2015 – the party’s 70th anniversary – Kim thanked the
“heroic men and women” of the army and security services who, “in hearty
response to the party’s appeal, have worked with patriotic devotion and
created one heroic miracle after another” in their quest to build a
“thriving socialist nation”.The phrase also crops up in North Korean propaganda.On 19 December last year, the fifth anniversary of the death of Kim’s father, Kim Jong-il,
the Rodong Sinmun, the ruling party’s official newspaper, said of the
late leader: “The noble image and patriotic devotion of the peerless
patriot, who reliably defended socialism centred on the popular masses
and turned [North Korea] into an invincible politico-ideological power
and a world military power.”In an article just after Kim’s death,
the official KCNA news agency cited meteorologists as saying “the
spring of prosperity under socialism will surely come … thanks to the
patriotic devotion of Kim Jong-il, who blocked the howling wind of
history till the last moments of his life”.And last January, the Rodong Sinmun cited a speech in which Kim
Jong-un had congratulated a socialist youth league formed in the name of
his grandfather and North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, on its 70th anniversary.Kim, according to the paper, said the league had enjoyed “a history
of brilliant victories of the great leaders’ original idea of
prioritising the youth and their wise leadership and a history of ardent
loyalty and patriotic devotion, with which the young people of Korea
have supported the party and the leader, the country and the people”. Trump’s use of the term, and its provenance, was noted on Twitter.
In his inaugural speech, Trump declared that he would put “America
first” and argued that patriotic zeal could heal the nation’s divisions.On Monday, paperwork was filed with the federal government declaring that the day of his inauguration, 20 January 2017, would be officially known as the “National Day of Patriotic Devotion”.Trump’s executive order said the proclamation would “strengthen our
bonds to each other and to our country – and to renew the duties of
government to the people”.Jiro Ishimaru of Asia Press,
an Osaka-based organisation with a network of high-level contacts in
North Korea, said that by invoking patriotic devotion, Trump appeared to
be channeling three generations of North Korea’s Kim dynasty.
Trump’s inaugural speech in full“Ordinary North Koreans hear those words every day,” Ishimaru told
the Guardian. “They don’t just appear in the media and speeches, but on
posters and in other propaganda. They hear the word patriotism at local
residents’ meetings, where, for example, they’re told to produce more
rice out of love for their country, or to collect more scrap metal for
weapons and bullets.”It is not unusual for incoming US presidents to draw on their
political and philosophical beliefs when, as is customary, they give a
new name to inauguration day. Barack Obama called his first
inauguration, in 2009, a National Day of Renewal and Reconciliation;
eight years earlier, George W Bush began his first term by declaring the
date a National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving.Ishimaru said most ordinary North Koreans were barely aware that the
US had a new president. The Rodong Sinmun reported the inauguration in a
brief article, without comment, at the bottom of the newspaper’s back
page on Sunday, two days after it took place.“I talk to North Koreans every day, and Trump’s inauguration has
barely registered with them,” he said. “Life is extremely tough, so they
are too busy concentrating on their own problems to think about US
politics.”
Since you’re here…
…we
have a small favour to ask. More people are reading the Guardian than
ever but far fewer are paying for it. And advertising revenues across
the media are falling fast. So you can see why we need to ask for your
help. The Guardian's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot
of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe
our perspective matters – because it might well be your perspective,
too.
If everyone who reads our reporting, who likes it, helps to pay for it, our future would be much more secure.
Protesters walk during the Women’s
March on Washington, with the U.S. Capitol in the background, on January
21, 2017 in Washington, D.C.
Mario Tama, Getty Images
Last Updated Jan 22, 2017 1:33 PM EST
President
Donald Trump, in between tweets about his “long standing ovations” at
CIA headquarters and his inauguration’s television ratings, implied in a
tweet early Sunday morning that the Women’s March protesters did not vote. “Watched
protests yesterday but was under the impression that we just had an
election!” Mr. Trump wrote. “Why didn’t these people vote? Celebs hurt
cause badly.”
However, shortly after posting that first tweet, he added that he respects Americans’ right to protest:
She denounced the “vulgar” comments from some at the Women’s
March on Washington, saying there was no need for such “negative”
comments. “You had profanity-laced, vulgar comments coming from
celebrities,” she said. “Donald Trump in his inaugural address talked
about the forgotten man, now these forgotten celebrities came to
Washington to deliver really negative messages.” The gender gap in the election
was large: Mr. Trump beat Clinton by 53 percent to 41 percent among
men, while Clinton won among women by 54 percent to 42 percent. The
gender breakdown among white voters was different, however: Mr. Trump
beat Clinton among white women 53 percent to 43 percent. The
Women’s March featured millions of protesters in cities across the
country rallying against President Trump’s stated agenda, with the
primary protest being a large rally in Washington, D.C. Many protesters
wore pointy-eared “pussyhats,” carried signs protesting various aspects
of the new administration’s plans, and chanted, “Welcome to your first
day, we will never go away.”
Thanks a Million, dear Letizia Mancino. You are an outstanding writer and artist.
We are so proud and happy to have you with us.
Letizia writes: One should not underestimate Wolfgang Hampel’s talent in speedily mobilizing Betty MacDonald’s friends.
We agree. Thank you so much dear Wolfgang Hampel for doing this. You founded Betty MacDonald Fan Club with four members.
Now we have members in 40 countries around the world. A dream came true.
Mary Holmes did an excellent job in translating this great story. Thank you so much dear Mary Holmes. We are really very grateful.
All the best to Letizia, Wolfgang and Mary and to all Betty MacDonald Fan Club fans from all over the world!
Lenard
Following in Betty’s footsteps in Seattle:
or some small talk with Betty
Copyright 2011/2016 by Letizia Mancino All rights reserved translated by Mary Holmes
We
were going to Canada in the summer. “When we are in Edmonton”, I said
to Christoph Cremer, “let’s make a quick trip to Seattle”. And that’s
how it happened. At Edmonton Airport we climbed into a plane and two
hours later we landed in the city where Betty had lived. I was so happy
to be in Seattle at last and to be able to trace Betty’s tracks!
Wolfgang Hampel had told Betty’s friends about our arrival. They
were happy to plan a small marathon through the town and it’s
surroundings with us. We only had a few days free. One should not
underestimate Wolfgang’s talent in speedily mobilizing Betty’s friends,
even though it was holiday time. E-mails flew backwards and forwards
between Heidelberg and Seattle, and soon a well prepared itinerary was
ready for us. Shortly before my departure Wolfgang handed me several
parcels, presents for Betty MacDonald's friends. I rushed to pack the
heavy gifts in my luggage but because of the extra weight had to throw
out a pair of pajamas!
After we had landed we took a taxi to the
Hotel in downtown Seattle. I was so curious to see everything. I
turned my head in all directions like one of the hungry hens from
Betty’s farm searching for food! Fortunately it was quite a short
journey otherwise I would have lost my head like a loose screw! Our
hotel room was on the 22nd floor and looked directly out onto the
16-lane highway. There might have been even more than 16 but it made me
too giddy to count! It was like a glimpse of hell! “And is this
Seattle?” I asked myself. I was horrified! The cars racing by were
enough to drive one mad. The traffic roared by day and night. We
immediately contacted Betty MacDonald's friends and let them know we had
arrived and they confirmed the times when we should see them.
On
the next morning I planned my first excursion tracing Betty’s tracks. I
spread out the map of Seattle. “Oh dear” I realized “the Olympic
Peninsula is much too far away for me to get there.” Betty nodded to me! “Very difficult, Letizia, without a car.”
“But I so much wanted to see your chicken farm”
“My chickens are no longer there and you can admire the mountains from a distance”
But
I wanted to go there. I left the hotel and walked to the waterfront
where the State Ferry terminal is. Mamma mia, the streets in Seattle are
so steep! I couldn’t prevent my feet from running down the hill. Why
hadn’t I asked for brakes to be fixed on my shoes? I looked at the
drivers. How incredibly good they must be to accelerate away from the
red traffic lights. The people were walking uphill towards me as briskly
as agile salmon. Good heavens, these Americans! I tried to keep my
balance. The force of gravity is relentless. I grasped hold of objects
where I could and staggered down. In Canada a friend had warned me that in Seattle I would see a lot of people with crutches.
Betty laughed. “ It’s not surprising, Letizia, walking salmon don’t fall directly into the soft mouth of a bear!” “ Betty, stop making these gruesome remarks. We are not in Firlands!”
I
went further. Like a small deranged ant at the foot of a palace monster
I came to a tunnel. The noise was unbearable. On the motorway, “The
Alaskan Way Viaduct”, cars, busses and trucks were driving at the speed
of light right over my head. They puffed out their poisonous gas into
the open balconies and cultivated terraces of the luxurious sky-
scrapers without a thought in the world. America! You are crazy! “Betty,
are all people in Seattle deaf? Or is it perhaps a privilege for
wealthy people to be able to enjoy having cars so near to their eyes and
noses to save them from boredom?”
“When the fog democratically allows everything to disappear into nothing, it makes a bit of a change, Letizia”
“ Your irony is incorrigible, Betty, but tell me, Seattle is meant to be a beautiful city, But where?” I had at last reached the State Ferry terminal.
“No
Madam, the ferry for Vashon Island doesn’t start from here,” one of the
men in the ticket office tells me. ”Take a buss and go to the ferry
terminal in West Seattle.” Betty explained to me “The island lies in
Puget Sound and not in Elliott Bay! It is opposite the airport. You must
have seen it when you were landing!” “Betty, when I am landing I shut my eyes and pray!”
It’s time for lunch. The weather is beautiful and warm. Who said to me that it always rains here? “Sure
to be some envious man who wanted to frighten you away from coming to
Seattle. The city is really beautiful, you’ll see. Stay by the
waterfront, choose the best restaurant with a view of Elliott Bay and
enjoy it.” “Thank you Betty!” I find a table on the
terrace of “Elliott’s Oyster House”. The view of the island is
wonderful. It lies quietly in the sun like a green fleecy cushion on the
blue water. Betty plays with my words: “Vashon Island is a big
cushion, even bigger than Bainbridge which you see in front of your
eyes, Letizia. The islands look similar. They have well kept houses and
beautiful gardens”.
I relax during this introduction, “Bainbridge” you are Vashon Island, and order a mineral water.
“At one time the hotel belonging to the parents of Monica Sone stood on the waterfront.” “Oh, of your friend Kimi!” Unfortunately I forget to ask Betty exactly where it was.
My mind wanders and I think of my mountain hike back to the hotel! “Why is there no donkey for tourists?” Betty laughs:
“I’m sure you can walk back to the hotel. “Letizia can do everything.””
“Yes, Betty, I am my own donkey!” But
I don’t remember that San Francisco is so steep. It doesn’t matter, I
sit and wait. The waiter comes and brings me the menu. I almost fall off
my chair! “ What, you have geoduck on the menu! I have to try it” (I
confess I hate the look of geoduck meat. Betty’s recipe with the pieces
made me feel quite sick – I must try Betty’s favourite dish!) “Proof that you love me!” said Betty enthusiastically “ Isn’t the way to the heart through the stomach?”
I order the geoduck. The waiter looks at me. He would have liked to recommend oysters. “Geoduck no good for you!” Had he perhaps read my deepest thoughts? Fate! Then no geoduck. “No good for me.” “Neither geoduck nor tuberculosis in Seattle” whispered Betty in my ear! “Oh Betty, my best friend, you take such good care of me!”
I order salmon with salad.
“Which salmon? Those that swim in water or those that run through Seattle?”
“Betty, I believe you want me to have a taste of your black humour.”
“Enjoy it then, Letizia.” During lunch we talked about tuberculosis, and that quite spoilt our appetite. “Have you read my book “The Plague and I”?”
“Oh Betty, I’ve started to read it twice but both times I felt so sad I had to stop again!”
“But
why?” asked Betty “Nearly everybody has tuberculosis! I recovered very
quickly and put on 20 pounds! There was no talk of me wasting away! What
did you think of my jokes in the book?”
“Those would have been a
good reason for choosing another sanitorium. I would have been afraid
of becoming a victim of your humour! You would have certainly given me a
nickname! You always thought up such amusing names!” Betty laughed.
“You’re
right. I would have called you “Roman nose”. I would have said to Urbi
and Orbi “ Early this morning “Roman nose” was brought here. She speaks
broken English, doesn’t eat geoduck but she does love cats.”
“Oh
Betty, I would have felt so ashamed to cough. To cough in your presence,
how embarrassing! You would have talked about how I coughed, how many
coughs!”
“It depends on that “how”, Letizia!”
“Please,
leave Goethe quotations out of it. You have certainly learnt from the
Indians how to differentiate between noises. It’s incredible how you
can distinguish between so many sorts of cough! At least 10!”
“So few?”
”And
also your descriptions of the patients and the nurses were pitiless. An
artistic revenge! The smallest pimple on their face didn’t escape your
notice! Amazing.”
“ I was also pitiless to myself. Don’t forget my irony against myself!”
Betty
was silent. She was thinking about Kimi, the “Princess” from Japan! No,
she had only written good things about her best friend, Monica Sone, in
her book “The Plague and I”. A deep friendship had started in the
hospital. The pearl that developed from the illness. “Isn’t it
wonderful, Betty, that an unknown seed can make its way into a mollusk
in the sea and develop into a beautiful jewel?” Betty is paying
attention.
“Betty, the friendship between you and Monica reminds
me of Goethe’s poem “Gingo-Biloba”. You must know it?” Betty nods and I
begin to recite it:
The leaf of this Eastern tree Which has been entrusted to my garden Offers a feast of secret significance, For the edification of the initiate.
Is it one living thing. That has become divided within itself? Are these two who have chosen each other, So that we know them as one?
The
friendship with Monica is like the wonderful gingo-biloba leaf, the
tree from the east. Betty was touched. There was a deep feeling of trust
between us. “Our friendship never broke up, partly because she was
in distress, endangered by the deadly illness. We understood and
supplemented each other. We were like one lung with two lobes, one from
the east and one from the west!” “A beautiful picture, Betty. You were like two red gingo-biloba leaves!”
Betty
was sad and said ” Monica, although Japanese, before she really knew me
felt she was also an American. But she was interned in America,
Letizia, during the second world war. Isn’t that terrible?”
“Betty,
I never knew her personally. I have only seen her on a video, but what
dignity in her face, and she speaks and moves so gracefully!”
“Fate could not change her”
“Yes, Betty, like the gingo-biloba tree in Hiroshima. It was the only tree that blossomed again after the atom bomb!”
The
bill came and I paid at once. In America one is urged away from the
table when one has finished eating. If one wants to go on chatting one
has to order something else. “That’s why all those people gossiping
at the tables are so fat!” Betty remarks. “Haven’t you seen how many
massively obese people walk around in the streets of America. Like
dustbins that have never been emptied!” With this typically
unsentimental remark Betty ended our conversation.
Ciao! I so
enjoyed the talk; the humour, the irony and the empathy. I waved to her
and now I too felt like moving! I take a lovely walk along the
waterfront.
Now I am back in Heidelberg and when I think about
how Betty’s “Princessin” left this world on September 5th and that in
August I was speaking about her with Betty in Seattle I feel very sad.
The readers who knew her well (we feel that every author and hero of a
book is nearer to us than our fleeting neighbours next door) yes we, who
thought of her as immortal, cannot believe that even she would die
after 92 years. How unforeseen and unexpected that her death should come
four days after her birthday on September 1th. On September 5th I was
on my way to Turkey, once again in seventh heaven, looking back on the
unforgettable days in Seattle. I was flying from west to east towards
the rising sun.
