Author: JohnMatel

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What were you like when you were 50?

What were you like when you were 50? My Story Worth for this week.

Worst of times
My 50th year, 2005, was pivotal but not a good year. My career was stalled. Chrissy was just starting hers. We were looking at the prospect of three kids leaving home and going to college. Now it just looks like an ordinary time of transition. Then it looked like a revolution, and not a good revolution like our American revolution, more like the Bolsheviks or Jacobins were coming for us.

Expiration date in a few years
There were lots of challenges that year. As I recall, I was narcissistically most absorbed by my career woes. Foreign Service is totalitarian. It is more than the job you do; it is kinda who you are, so lack of success hits harder and much more personally. I was low ranked by the 2005 promotion panels. You must be pretty dismal to get low ranked, at least I thought so at the time, and I thought my career was dead, although I would continue zombie-like until they finally really kicked me out. My expiration date was 2009 in our up-or-out system. I would be 54 years old, a little too old to start over, but a little too young to give up working altogether.

More than money
Money was a consideration, but not the big one. I am the kind of guy who needs a purpose, an identity. I would not be content is someone just gave me money. I want to be working toward something. I reached way back to my roots and found forestry, but that is not something you can take up as a retirement hobby. You need a forest. Fortunately, that was a puzzle I could solve.

Forestry a good investment
I studied on the subject of investing in forest land. It consumed much of intellectual energy. In fact, sound advice for someone worried about career success would be to concentrate more on that problem, but I was fascinated by the forestry. Don’t get me wrong, I still worked very hard at my State job, but I concentrated on the job and not getting ahead in the career, which paradoxically turned out to be a good strategy, but that is a story for a different time.

I became convinced that I could make forestry pay for itself, maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow but in the long run. This was crucial, a deal breaker if I could not do it. I am not rich like Ted Turner, who can buy land for pleasure. Mine needed to be an investment with a reasonable chance of producing positive results. This was important since the cash I needed to buy the land came from taking a second mortgage on the house. I always need to take the time here to thank Chrissy for having faith in my judgment. Had she said no, I would have no forest land today, and I would be a much poorer man today, maybe not in money but certainly in spirit. I was risking our future, but the way I figured (IF I did it right) it the risk was no greater than investing in mutual funds. In fact, it was better than having only a stock portfolio, since it provided diversification. It worked out well when the stock market crashed in 2008/9. Maybe the value of my land crashed too, but who could tell?
With my experience now of almost 15 years doing this, I can tell you that investing in the right forest land IS indeed a good investment with two important caveats. You must have a very long time horizon (patience is a virtue) and you must want to do a lot of the work yourself – physical, intellectual and managerial. And you must want to make it an investment. I love my forests and I live by the land ethic, but I also respect the triple bottom line in that the investment must make sense socially, ecologically AND economically. If you want to preserve untouched nature, you better either be rich or stay away from owing much forests land. Successful forest land owners are conservationists, not preservationists.

Until I become compost myself
My 50th year was the start of my forestry adventure, which I hope and believe will continue until I become compost myself. The career ended up working out alright too. The FS promoted me into the senior service and then once more (the low ranking did not matter at all), and I left on my own terms. They would have let me stay until mandatory retirement age of 65, but my forestry interest had become so great that I needed the time for that, so I retired from one passion to pursue another, a dozen years after my axial half century year.
In a very real sense, my decision to leave the FS in 2016 was made in 2005, but unlike my zombie fear, my FS career was also rejuvenated in that year. You can sometimes easily see looking back what you cannot even vaguely discern looking forward.

My first picture shows our “forest” in 2005. The little trees are there, but you mostly cannot see them. Next is that same place in 2018. They grew some. Picture # 3 is me next to a infestation of tree of heaven. It is a persistent invasive. That picture was taken before my first fight with it. I am still standing, but so is the tree of heaven, but I have controlled it. This fight will never end. The tree of heaven will outlast me, but I figure others will carry on. Also in that picture, you can see the little pine trees. They don’t look like much at that age, but they get better.        

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Man's inhumanity

I was in Poland in the early-middle 1990s, which meant that I was there for the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, of the liberation of Auschwitz (near where I lived), of various lesser known tragedies and of the Warsaw uprising.
I attended lots of commemorations, both in my official duties and as an individual interested in history. It was a very interesting time, although one that raised lots of questions about humanity.

Human capacity to do harm is usually matched by our capacity to endure. I came to wonder about the virtue of perseverance and even bravery, never resolved the issue. Existential struggles bring out the best and the worse in people, often in the same person.

In my discussions with young people (and I almost fit in that group back then), I would often hear harsh judgements of people of the past. “Had I been there, I would have …” was a common refrain.

What would I have done? I like to think I would have been always heroic and selfless, which probably would have meant I would not have survived the war. In fact, I think the best we can hope for is that we would be heroic and selfless in situations where it made a practical difference.

I was competitive swimmer, but nothing compared to a guy like Michael Phelps, winner of 28 Olympic gold metals, but there is a way that he is no better than me – neither of us can swim from California to Hawaii. This is not a trivial thing. There are things beyond human possibilities, but that does not let us off the hook for being better.

I learned a lot about tragedies and pondered human nature. I read Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning”, and I met dozens of people who had endured things I could not imagine. I felt very privileged to talk to many of them at length, including Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel, maybe the most impressive soul I have ever encountered.

The thing that impressed me most also surprised me profoundly. These people who had suffered so horribly were very often joyful and had transcended hatred and vengefulness. They did not minimize the suffering and evil; they had just (sorry to use the word again but I can think of none better) transcended it. This made them no less committed to fighting evil and in many ways made them much more effective.

People who fought in the Warsaw uprising were mostly civilians, some children. The Nazis were especially brutal in their suppression of the uprising. Of the combatants that survived, many did so my wading through filth in the sewer system.

There is a coda, a tragic one. For many Poles who fought the Nazis the war did not end in 1945. The communist government did not treat them as heroes. On the contrary, many were persecuted and some executed. The new communist order did not easily tolerate vestiges of the old and personal heroism was especially suspect in their world view.
Reference

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The Conservative Sensibility

George Will proved to me that he is much more erudite than I am, but he might have used his intelligence to write a shorter book. It seems to me that he was trying to pack in everything he knew. Sometimes he lost the theme, or maybe I did. As I said, he is more erudite than I am. With that in mind, I am not going to even try to include all the parts, but rather will concentrate on what I thought best.

Will starts out with a simple definition of American conservatism. American conservatives are similar but not the same as English conservatives. They are not much like conservatives in continental Europe. The reason is that conservatives conserve and their characters depend on what they are conserving. In parts of Europe, they are conserving (or maybe trying to revive) past aristocratic, royalist or authoritarian structures. We never had these in America, so American conservatives don’t conserve those things.

American conservatives, according to Will, are conserving the ideas of the American founding. American founding was based on classical liberal principles, so – confusingly – American conservatives are conserving the liberal tradition. Will did not originate this idea, BTW. I learned about this concept way back in the 1970s, when I was at University of Wisconsin.

Liberalism split in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Conservatives kept the liberal tradition, while those who called themselves liberals or progressives put more faith in centralized authority and government activity.

I don’t think that you can call Woodrow Wilson the villain of the book, but Will thinks Wilson was responsible for, or at least articulated much of the progressive ideas. Wilson is pushed the idea that government should have the power to address your needs. In this he built on what Theodore Roosevelt had done, creating the cult of the presidency.

World War I greatly advanced progressive effectiveness. Let’s think about those times for a minute. Restrictions on free speech, prohibition, scientific management, income taxes and concentration of power in the hands of “experts” were all progressive enterprises. The red scare that persecuted immigrants was carried out by progressives. Eugenics was a progressive idea and “scientific” racism was developed by progressive thinkers. In a remarkable feat of intellectual jujitsu, progressive have managed to get most people to associate the negatives with conservatives.

What does it mean to be a conservative in the USA?
First let’s stipulate that few politicians are conservative, even if they call themselves that. Progressives have natural advantages in politics, since they can promise people stuff and pretend to offer solutions and conservatives who want to get elected need to do that too. In what When there is a problem, government official ask HOW they will address, not whether government is appropriate. Conservatives and progressive struck an implicit bargain. Politicians on left and right provide more services than people would be willing to pay for and run up the debt.

Conservatives in America conserve the founding. That means we believe in limited government, dispersal of power, modest goals, personal responsibility and generally prudent leadership. If something NEED not be done it need NOT be done. Just say no.
The personal responsibility part is something Will covers at length and I generally agree. He talks about Obama and Elizabeth Warren talking about communal nature of society – the famous “you didn’t build that” idea. Will says that this is a straw man. Everybody knows that no individual is self-made, but that does not mean that individuals have no agency. If you have a successful firm, you did indeed depend on the general society, but you also built it. The two are no mutually exclusive.

Will sees that as a fundamental difference between conservatives and progressives. Conservatives believe that individual initiative matters. They know that history is contingent and has no direction that individuals do not give it. Things can have worked out very differently.

The government’s job is to create and maintain conditions so that individuals can prosper, not take care of people or create prosperity. Individual citizens, often working in voluntary cooperation, creates wealth, not government.

It is a good book. Takes a long time to get though and there is a lot of diverse information, but it is certainly worth it.3

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Beer belongs

Some of our usual beer pictures from yesterday and today. We are glad that the city grew around us and we now live in a walkable place.

We walked down to Gold’s Gym and did the proper workouts. After that, we needed to replace our energy and carbohydrates, so we walked over to Caboose brewery and had the proverbial couple of beers.

The other pictures are from Blackfinn, right across the street.

I was thinking about how walking and driving change drinking and living. People used to have a couple beers and then walk home. There is joy in walking home in the open air after a couple beers.Substitute the beer for the wine and you have it said.
The Grape that can with Logic absolute
The Two-and-Seventy jarring Sects confute:
The sovereign Alchemist that in a trice
Life’s leaden metal into Gold transmute:

But driving after a couple beers, in the confined space of a car, is dreadful and dangerous. Having a place where you can walk is great. As it should be for humanity.

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The Southwest

Some years ago, I disparaged the “lifeless” deserts of the American Southwest, full of unpleasant lizards, venomous snakes and lots of dust. Looking back, I think I had a mental model, a hierarchy of ecosystems with dense forests and deep soils near the top and deserts with their regolith at the bottom. That was a long time ago. Since then, I have come to understand the earth’s ecosystems as a complex tangled network, not a ordered line. The wonder lies in the complexity and a person could spend a fulfilled lifetime studying details or looking to the vastness.

I have to credit my sister-in-law Lisa Sandoval with starting me on the path of loving the Southwest. Lisa chose to live in Arizona and came to the understanding way before I did. In a show of remarkable bad manners based on ignorance, I was disparaging her region. I don’t recall her exact words, but she in essence told me that I was not seeing because I didn’t know how to look. She was right. A person’s mental model determines what you can see and mine let me see only dust and reptiles, as above.

Maybe it is like that perception exercise we sometimes do, where you just sit, look and listen intensely. Soon you are seeing, hearing, feeling and tasting things you did not know were there. I started to pay attention. The first pieces to click into place were the sky islands. This was an easy one, since as you got higher up, you got more into the woods I could recognize. I remember driving up Mount Lemmon near Tucson.

The mountain features eight major biomes. As you climb the mountain, you pass from the Sonoran Desert, through scrub and open woodland, to ponderosa pine and finally to spruce and fir forests. You essentially go from Mexico to Canada in about a half hour’s drive. It was on the way back down that I really noticed the place of the desert for the first time.

The saguaro cactus forms a forest. It is not the woods of home, with leafy galleries creating shady glades, but it is a forest with the complex biotic relationships for a forest. Even the regolith is not just regolith. Like soils elsewhere, it is a living complex.

Anyway, over the years my perception had broadened, so that I see a lot more than I once did. To that end, and the reason I was thinking about the Sonoran Desert is that I am reading a book about the natural history and conservation challenges. The descriptive and prosaic title is “A Natural History of the Sonoran Desert.” It is not much beyond a beginner’s book, but I am learning a few things. There is a section on Native Americans, and I enjoyed the part about the Hohokam farmers. They irrigated the desert around what is now Phoenix. When we visited Chrissy’s sister Julie & Orris Olson we went to Case Grande to look at one of their settlements. Next time we are back, I hope to visit again and pay more attention.

While I am at it, I have also to tag my Tucson dwelling cousins Carl Hankwitz and Elise Hankwitz. They appreciate the desert. I recall the first time I visited them, we went to see saguaro cactus, but what I remember most vividly was the quiet and the desert quail murmuring.  

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My longleaf through the years

I post a lot of pictures of my longleaf, but generally w/o a size comparison, since I am often down there by myself. A selfie would not give the proper perspective. Adam Smith took this picture of me with our longleaf planted in 2012.

The next picture is (maybe) the same tree in 2016. The next two are BOTH from 2015 and the same tree. The little one from April and the bigger one from September same year. The last picture is May 2012. I doubt that is the same tree (could be) but they were all looked the same back then anyway.Notice that the trees change, but I keep the same clothes.

Longleaf is more diverse genetically compared to loblolly. If you plant loblolly, they are all about the same height at the same age and conditions. My longleaf go from a few feet high to around 20 feet that you see in the picture (I am 6’1″ for comparison).

Some people think that is an adaptation to fire. Longleaf are fire adapted, but not all ages are the same. They are most vulnerable when they are about 6′ high. The flames pass over the smaller ones and do not reach the terminal buds on the taller ones, so having various sizes means that some survive. I don’t know that pine trees do all that much thinking, but it could be true.

This makes longleaf harder to grow than Loblolly. You just do not know what to expect from them.  My longleaf are an experiment anyway. They have not been growing in the Virginia piedmont for more than 100 years, and these trees are native of North Carolina. Not sure how they will do.

More likely, I think, is that the loblolly have been bred to be commercial trees for generations. They bred out much of the variation. Who knows?

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Succession

Grassy wetlands
To everything there is a season and a time for every purpose under heaven. The more you observe in nature, the more sense that old wisdom seems. Last time on the farms I found the value of the devil’s walking stick, for which I never had much previous use. Last time, they pollinators were swarming those plants and the rattlesnake masters. Today I found that pollinators had moved on to the joe-pye weed. The joe-pye is a perennial plant that loves full sunlight and perpetually moist soil.

The cycle and the swerve
In the shade of the thickly planted 22-year-old trees, these herbaceous plants could not prosper. They waited. When we harvested the 22-year-old loblolly last year, they suddenly had a bonanza of sunlight and water, as the pine trees no longer blocked the sun or sucked up the water. The harvest has created temporary wetlands, temporary because they will dry up again when the forests regrow and demand more water.

Impermanence
Everything is transient and their wonder lies in their impermanence.  I am sure the joe-pye were were present but suppressed. Now they burst forth in glory and will do for maybe another 5-7 years. How many times has this cycle repeated?

It was an interesting day weather-wise today. I arrived at the farms around 8am. It was partly cloudy and already hot and humid. I got through two rounds of cutting and was taking a break with my can of Coors when I notice the wind was cool. I heard the thunder and noticed the storm clouds rolling in. It dripped for a few minutes and then poured down a Noah-level cloudburst. This lasted for around 45 minutes, followed by intermittent rain for maybe an hour more. After all that, we got more glorious sunshine.

Dog fennel – What is it good for?

I spent the last hour of the day, and my last tank of gas for my cutter, going after an obnoxious patch of dog fennel. It was thickly covering several hundred yards of former fire break. I know that dog fennel must be good for something, but I don’t know for what. It smells bad. It is of no use to pollinators. Birds don’t like it; deer won’t eat it. It is kinda the a-hole of the plant community, and it grows profusely enough to block paths. It gets 7-8 feet tall in one season. At least it doesn’t have thorns. I cut a path through on Brodnax it for our next fire run. I expect it will grow back next year.

Quail forever
After the day’s work was done, Adam Smith invited me to a meeting of a local Quail Forever meeting. People who love quail love quail with real passion. Quail used to be very common in Virginia. They are not endangered now, but there are not as many. A couple reasons for that. One is a “good” reason. There is less disturbed land. Quail thrive in early succession habitats. As our forests have matured, there is less quail habitat. The other has to do with the culture of agriculture. Used to be that farms were messier. There was a lot of tall grass and weeds along fence lines and roads. Quail like this mess. More mowers and chemical herbicides have changed that. Maybe just let it go. Sometimes doing less is better.

I have fallen & I can’t get up
One last little story. When I was working among the joe-pye and the cypress, I wore my knee-high rubber boots, since there was a lot of mud and water. There was more than I thought. I stepped onto what I though was marshy grass only to sink into water above my boots. I awkwardly stood with my cutter strapped to my shoulder as my boots filled with water. I had to laugh. I kept on thinking of that commercial, “I have fallen, and I can’t get up.” For a little while I thought that might be me.

First two pictures are the joe-pye wetlands. Next shows the storm rolling into my longleaf, followed by looking the other way at the loblolly. Last is the bald cypress on Diamond Grove. That is one of my “personal” trees. I planted it in 2007 and have tried to protect it from the vicissitudes of fortune. It is getting big enough not to need that protection. I thought the picture was cool. It has a primeval character.

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Steve Bullock

Went to a Steve Bullock event in Washington. I like him. He seems intelligent and moderate. What sold me was when he answered a question about climate change talking about cover crops and sequestration in soil.
Bullock got reelected governor in 2016 in a state that Trump won by 20%. He is a viable candidate. If he makes it as far as New Hampshire, I told him that I would deploy there at my own expense to help with the campaign. Don’t know if he will or if he will take me up on the offer, but it would be fun.

Anyway, I have an ask. I think it important that Bullock qualify for the next round of Democratic debates. He needs a larger number of individual donors. Please make a contribution. It can be as little as $1 and you need not support him for president. Just get him into the debates.

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Were your parents strict, or relaxed?

My Story Worth for this week.

My parents were very relaxed. They never spanked me, and I don’t recall them even raising their voices to discipline me. Of course, I was probably just a good kid. But my parents’ reactions to my behaviors was very different from the parental reactions experienced by my friends in similar situations. Some of my friends feared their fathers. I never did. But I think my parents had stronger influence over me than other parents had over their kids.

No punishment
My parents’ influence on me was reason-based, not punishment-based. I could “get away” with almost anything w/o suffering the usual kid punishments. I never got grounded and I never suffered the physical punishment some of my friends did. What I really could not endure was for my mother to say, “you know what you did was wrong?” and know she was right.

First lesson at the corner store
I recall the one time I stole anything when I was a kid. I don’t recall how old I was, but it was maybe four or five. It is one of my earliest memories and I think it was before kindergarten. There was a grocery store at the corner of Howell & Rosedale run by an old couple, Cortez. They had those general bins with cookies. I just helped myself to one and was eating it as we left the store. My mother asked where I got that, and I told her. She gave me money and made me go back in and pay for the cookie. Mrs. Cortez was very nice and told me I could have it. When I got out there and triumphantly told that to my mother, she said no. I had to go back in and tell Mrs. Cortez that I really could not have the cookie and that I had to pay for it.

It was a protracted ordeal but consider the lesson. I had to acknowledge that what I did was wrong, even though I got away with it and even though a competent authority was willing to overlook my transgression. In addition, I was trusted to make it right. At any point, I could have ended my problem by simply lying about it, telling my mother that I had paid. I doubt my little mind figured this out, but of course my mother likely would have talked to Mrs. Cortez about it later. It does take a village.

Strict but loose
So, I guess we had a kind of strict morality, with a loose enforcement, or maybe a strict enforcement but one that depended on internal controls.

The simple rule was that I was not supposed to lie, cheat or steal, but I was spared some of the other strictures suffered by my friends. For example, my friends had a strict “respect your elders” rule that did not apply to me. We lived in a neighborhood of busybodies, who were always calling the cops or calling our parents to complain about our behaviors. Sometimes we deserved it, but mostly we were just hanging around or playing football in the streets or open fields.

Talking back to the elders
When the local nudnik would come out, we would usually run off, but I would sometimes “talk back.” I considered myself very eloquent, but my elders were not amused. I recall a few times when they called my parents or even came up to the house.

My mother’s reaction shaped my personality in that it was both moral and devious. She asked me the circumstance of my talking back. In the cases I recall (maybe selective memory) were mostly unjustified in their anger, and my mother did not castigate me. She generally knew the specifics to the nudnik in question and told me that I should just avoid antagonizing them, not as a matter of right or wrong but just a practical rule.

This attitude has been very useful to me in my life and especially my diplomatic life. I can detach myself from the action if it is not a matter of high principle. I can very easily “give in” w/o being defeated and often with no intention of being affected. I make a strong distinction with what is said and what is done, being concerned with the former as an aspiration and the latter as something that matters.

I also learned that some of the nudniks were content ONLY to talk. My mother explained that one of them, a Mrs. Connolly was just a lonely old lady and I should make a special effort with her, even though she was a pain in the rear. Next time it snowed, I shoveled her walk and she became my advocate. She told my mother that most kids were delinquents, but I was okay.

Figure out what they want
Consider that lesson. Had I been punished for talking back, I would have avoided getting caught talking back. Instead, I learned how to be more charitable and in the practical sense how to get along better with people. I still follow that lesson when faced with a difficult person. I try to figure out what they really want and what I can give them. Often, I can give them something w/o it causing me much, or any trouble.

My mother did most of the discipline. My father worked all the time. They were building the Interstate system in those days and my father got a lot of overtime at the cement factory. He was very tired after those 12-hour-days. He was mostly a benign presence. Comparing again to my friends, their mothers would sometimes say something like, “Wait till your father gets home.” This filled them with dread. I don’t recall my mother ever saying anything like that, with the possible exception that I sometimes had to go up to the store and get some bread before my father got home.

No deep philosophy
Neither of my parents were well-educated and I doubt they developed their parenting philosophy from any books or articles. They were involved deeply in my life, but not broadly. I had a lot of choices that I could make.

I have mixed feelings about criticizing their style, since I am very content with how my life turned out. Sometimes I think they might have pushed me harder. The one attitude they had that I think was pernicious was a self-limiting ethos. My father sometimes said that I should not try some things because they were “only of rich kids” or just were too much trouble. Life turned out okay, however, so I cannot complain. My parents parenting style was not perfect, but it was very, very good and it gave me life options for which I am grateful.

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Afternoon at Tysons Mall

Chrissy & I spent the whole afternoon at Tysons Mall. Went to see “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” I recommend it. More on that below. If you don’t want to know the ending, don’t read to the end.

We had lunch and beer at Gordon Biersch (first couple of pictures), went to the movie and then drinks at La Sandia, across from Gordon Biersch. Chrissy wanted a margarita because the Leonardo DiCaprio had one in the movie. (I don’t drink tequila since January 4, 1974, when I drank a whole bottle and still feel sick at the reminder of the taste) Sandia also featured a good caipirinha, uncommon in the USA. You can see our respective Gordon Biersch and La Sandia photos below.

“Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” is a good movie, especially if you were a fan of 1960s TV. There are lots of references and it is fun to find the allusions sometimes not plain.
The plot centers around a declining cowboy actor (DiCaprio) and his best friend and stuntman (Brad Pitt). They live next door to Sharon Tate and the Manson family figures prominently. This is the spoiler. The movie leads up to what you think is going to be the Manson family killing Sharon Tate and the others in that infamous crime. But that is not what happens. It is a “once upon a time” and it is Quentin Tarantino. It is what we wish would have happened to the Mansons.

Three of the Mansons, Tex, Squeaky Fromm and one other, show up that house of the old actor, where they find the stuntman and his dog. They plan to kill everybody in the house and are holding a gun on the stuntman, but he gets the drop on them. His dog attacks the gunman, mauling his arms and biting him in the scrotum. One of the girls runs at the stuntman with a knife. He throws a can of dog food and hits her in the head, killing her in a nasty way. The other woman tried to kills the actor’s wife, but then is hit. She falls into a poll where the actor was floating with earphones, oblivious to the events. She starts shooting randomly. He goes into his garage and gets a flame thrower (yes Tarantino) and burns her to a crisp.

The cops show up and the mood is almost jovial. The stuntman & actor are joking how they had to kill the hippies, who BTW needed killing. They are portrayed as very bad. The actor goes next door and meets Tate et al, who in this version of events are not killed and they play the title “once upon a time …” showing that this is a fantasy of a better way it could have turned out.

BTW – as I mentioned Brad Pitt was one of the stars of the movie. I know that there might be some confusion in the photos. That is indeed me and not a picture of Brad Pitt.