Robert R. Mitchell's Blog, page 2

Monte Cristo by Philip R. Woodhouse

Review: Monte Cristo by Philip R. Woodhouse

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


My parents drove us up to the old Monte Cristo town site in our beige station wagon sometime in the late seventies before the road was washed out on December 26, 1980. Our childhoods were spent camping along the southern loop of the Mountain Loop Highway, built atop the old railroad right-of-way that led to the sporadically bustling mining town. When we got older, we hiked the 4 miles my parents had driven us years before to see the old railroad turntable and rare relics collected around the scrappy, miniature cabins. Today, plans are in place to clean up and contain the arsenic-rich tailings left behind by the various 19th and early 20th century mining operations to prevent continued contamination of groundwater and rivers below. Even if you do not have a personal connection to this beautiful part of the Pacific Northwest, Philip R. Woodhouse’s invaluable and entertaining history, “Monte Cristo” is a remarkable read you will always remember.

Woodhouse’s extensive research and approachable writing ensure that not only are historically significant details and photos preserved before they turn brittle and decay, but the evanescent spirit of the time is illuminated and celebrated before we lose the last few individuals who either lived there or sat at the feet of those who did listening to amazing stories of a time nearly impossible for us in the internet age to fully comprehend. This small, periodically populated mining town, crushed time and time again by the unrelenting landscape, never became the source of limitless wealth its name foretold, but it nevertheless played a key role in the history of the Puget Sound region and even the country. If you are fascinated by the difficulties our ancestors faced trying to make a living in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, enjoy a flawlessly written history or want to better understand our current age through the lens of time, I heartily recommend this remarkable and invaluable work.




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Ten-Sentence Story #5

First Destination

Cobblestone clouds set in gray dawn awaited the morning’s traffic. He realized, sitting in his beige fabric cubicle, that he was spending a lot of time looking at the clouds lately. Not just at work. Everywhere. They make sense and are good company. Omnipresent but constantly and eternally unique; momentarily euphoric, stoic, evanescent and craggy. They glow like embers, flush the landscape clean, frame the moon and turn the sun two-dimensional white. We are born to the earth and for years our perspective remains stubbornly terrestrial, only raising our stare slightly when walking to avoid collisions. Not until we reach our first destination do we realize how much exists above. He dialed into a conference call and stared at the cobblestone clouds.

Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell

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Clouds Like Schooners

Sitting atop the windswept, rusty brown mesa in the early evening coolness, he pushed up the brim of his battered hat with the tip of a dirty index finger, leaned back on strong freckled arms and began to count the clouds. They were smaller today, each flat-bottomed with three fluffy white sails like the 19th century scow schooner he’d seen at Hyde Street Pier, swept by the almighty wind in all directions across the clear blue firmament like the sailboats on San Francisco Bay. The Honor Society trip six weeks prior was the first time he’d seen the ocean and he posted a million pictures and strained to breathe as much of the salt air as he could from San Diego to Neah Bay feeling alive and ornery like the loggers and prospectors and troublemakers he’d learned about on the Underground Tour in Seattle. Returning home he immediately missed the Pacific but realized for the first time how much he loved the big, broad, clear blue sky of his family’s Eastern Washington farm, a sky that curved around and arched over and stretched from one end of the earth to the other.

The dusty, scratched iPhone 3G in the left back pocket of his Carhartts vibrated, letting him know it was time to get moving: no cell coverage for a half mile in any direction but he’d never worn a watch in his life. He got up, brushed the dirt from his backside, picked up his 30-30, removed the handkerchief tied over the muzzle and shoved it into a pocket, triple-checked the safety and started down the trail, his boots magically kicking up little dirt devils like the almighty wind does in the plowed fields between Washtucna and Othello. Ten minutes off the mesa and then fifteen minutes down the trail running along an old split-rail barbed wire fence brought you to an ancient root cellar dug into the side of a hill and a roughly square brown patch of ground that his dad said used to be a cabin. The bottom of the red sun had just kissed the horizon when he came around a bend and saw her standing there, just like his parents’ old Beatles song. She was toeing the earth, her .243 in her right hand, a camo baseball cap turned backwards on a head full of red: she didn’t look up until he stopped a couple feet away and toed the earth himself. She offered a small smile and looked him straight in the eyes as if searching for something. Not sure if she’d found it or not, she lifted her cap off and shook out her hair a bit, not too much, checked the safety on her rifle and gently laid it on a clear patch of ground, muzzle nestled in her overturned cap. Pulling his handkerchief out of its pocket, he mirrored her maneuver, toed the earth again, looked up, offered a small smile and said “Hey.”

“Hey.”

“I didn’t know if you’d show.”

The hint of smile on her face disappeared faster than a flushed quail. “Don’t be a jerk.”

“Yeah, you’re right. My bad.”

She nodded. “S’alright. I got some of that coming I suppose.”

“I’m…glad. I mean I’m glad you came.”

“Me too.”

Knowing better, he pushed again: “What changed?”

She nodded, looked down, looked at the sun slowly slipping behind the distant Cascades and said “Your brother.” He stiffened a bit and she hurried: “Last week was the first time I’d seen him since he came home.”

“OK. What’s that got to do with anything?”

“How’s he doing?”

He regurgitated the paragraph like he’d done a hundred times before: “He’s doing good. Drives the hour to the VA twice a week. Gets his meds, talks to the doc. Spends an hour or two visiting those worse off than him. Works hard on the farm seven days a week. He’s doing good.”

She nodded several times quickly and thrust hands in her back pockets. “Has he said anything about it over there?”

“Hey, look. Maybe this wasn’t such a good…”

“Please.”

“The only thing he’s told me is that they would pile into vehicles every day and drive around until the bad guys either shot at them or tried to blow them up. Then they’d try to kill as many as they could without hurting civilians, most of whom were probably helping the bad guys. He was shot once and was hit by an IED three times during his tour. I try to imagine what it was like. I read all the books. I watch the videos on YouTube. I can’t understand. So I’m sorry. What does that have to do with…this?” The sun was nearly down. The eastern sky was gun barrel blue. The western sky was on fire.

“My priorities were upside down. I was acting like an idiotic high school chick and that affected how I reacted to you on the trip. I knew it all along but I was able to ignore it until I saw your brother. Everything I was into was fake. Life is real. Death is real. I’m 18. Time to grow up and be real. No more BS. You. You’re real and I can’t stop thinking about you.”

He leaned in and kissed her hard, too awkwardly and pulled away before his south-searching hands could reach her ass. He’d never been cool a day in his life and he almost had to bend over to catch his breath.

She smiled: “Like I said, you’re real.”

He took his hat off and wiped the sweat up and over his closely cropped hair. “You don’t have any idea how long I’ve wanted to do that. Well, not exactly that. It was always a lot more smooth when I imagined it.”

She laughed a sweet laugh and looked at him. “You got a headlamp? Forgot mine.”

“Huh? Oh yeah. Here we go.” He replaced his hat, lit the lamp and put it on. “Walk you home?”

“Sure. Only cause you got the light, though.”


Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell

Ten-Sentence Story #4

Easter, Orcas and Fake Ice-Cream

Horn-rimmed glasses on a hornbill nose with a violet cardigan sweater and a grey bun: “I got vanilla Harold I got vanilla Harold that’s what goes with the strawberries!” The 911 seriousness, volume and pitch of her pronouncement; her appearance, erect posture and strident stride; and the red plastic handled translucent plastic tub of artificially flavored, artificially colored, filler-infused frozen water swinging from her talon of a hand (when the all-natural real vanilla kind was on sale RIGHT THERE for chrissake); spark a stream of negative stereotypes and judgments in my human mind for which Jesus died and rose again explaining why the grocery store is so bloody crowded on what should be a sleepy, suburban, April, Saturday afternoon. St. Paul wrote in the Good Book that he doesn’t do the stuff he’s supposed to and he hates the stuff that he does. When push comes to shove, that’s about as good a summary of the difference between a human’s typical day and that of any other mammal that I have ever heard. Ever see a lab agonize over eating an unattended plate of kielbasa left too close to the table’s edge? Do chimpanzees assemble commissions and evaluate their use of force against neighboring groups? Do orcas grapple with the suffering they inflict when tossing seal pups to and fro so their kids can learn how to hunt? What if Ms. Generalissimo runs a non-profit organization that saves a thousand troubled youths a year in part because of her firm but loving leadership and Harold is both hard of hearing and lactose intolerant? I look down at my grocery cart and count the items full of artificiality and wonder why I react so violently to fake ice cream and then run into a display of cheap beer half-racks stacked in the shape of an Easter egg. At the checkout stand I sympathetically respond to the harried, unhappy query with an enthusiastic “Oh yeah, plastic is great!”

Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell

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Ten-Sentence Story #3

Pollen

Thirty-six people were shot in thirty-six hours over the weekend in Chicago. Last time I checked, Chicago was a city in America. Urban analysts pointed to the high temperatures. Historians recalled the past whose pain is so perfectly being repeated. The police chief cited ubiquitous guns. The police themselves responded to the calls, complicating the theory of ghettoization by a vacuum, by abandonment, by quarantine. 2,000 miles away, in a suburb of Seattle, the rain falls with the sound of a distant waterfall, bouncing off cars in driveways and streets, washing over asphalt, pouring down storm sewers, flowing into suburban creeks, emptying into Lake Washington. I walked for 35 minutes this evening taking phone pictures of the sunset; listening to the birds singing their goodnights; watching the pewter and sepia clouds swirl before the retreating sun; smelling the sweet and pungent pollen in the air; listening to the frogs suddenly silent on my passing. Every other night or so, I read about a shooting in Seattle; in my mind at least, usually near Martin Luther King Junior Way or Pike Street. We are fellow travelers of comparable means in the same life with aligned morals and identical work ethics and yet I’m not in the habit of dodging bullets.

Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell

Also check out my novel! http://www.amazon.com/Only-Shot-At-Go...

Blood In Four Nights: the almost completely true story of my walk to Safeway

Blood in four nights! Even more than usual when waxing, she was feeling her oats; chasing the smoldering, gaudy, coppertip-colored, retreating sun westward more swiftly than she had in years; over the next ridge, over the Olympics and into the cold, dark Pacific where her lavish, golden narcissism would be extinguished for another cool, pure, silver night. Then, in four nights the moon would once again demonstrate to Earth’s slovenly, lascivious, brutish inhabitants with her own deep, crimson hues that the sun is no more than an amateur magician; and worse, a cheap, painted, fickle mistress who warms with carcinogens and incites riotous passions only to disappear like a cowardly demagogue before the police arrive.

The moon shot through the sky so quickly in pursuit that powdery dust as fine as Iraqi sand sloughed off and coalesced in miniature, wispy, rose-tinged clouds that caught the eye of a midlife crisis guy walking briskly on the fancy new sidewalk the city put in when the new housing development was built. The man’s doctor told him to exercise a lot more and drink a lot less so he all but gave up the hard stuff and made himself walk the mile to the flashy new grocery store for his nightly beer. As he approached the sparkling automatic doors he looked up and noticed how far the moon had progressed: he must be walking slowly tonight.

Friday night in a middle-class, suburban grocery store: everyone tired of the requisite work week bullshit and looking for their fix: road crew guy with three tubs of Ben & Jerry’s; family of four with take-out pizzas and a movie; rumpled, comb-over, almost-retired guy with a fifth of Jack; and the midlife crisis guy heading for the beer aisle. As he settled into the beer-perusing stance before the six-foot wide array of chilled 22 ounce craft brews, a young woman flashed past him with her cart in a blur of dyed red hair, high heels and swiveling wheels. She was a thin woman with a thin nose, thin face, thin waist, green eyes and the exact quantity, application and hues of make-up guaranteed to elicit lust (“hotty”) in the prey and derision (“whore”) in the competitors. She jerked to a halt in front of the energy drinks, speed read her way along the shelves with a thin index finger as if tracing a bus route on a sign and then thrust her hand forward grabbing a sleek black can like an engineer seizing the emergency brake on a runaway train. “People in a hurry buying energy drinks are funny,” thought the man, remembering the times he’d done the same. Meanwhile the woman continued to yank black cans from the shelf and toss them in her cart until half her arm disappeared into the refrigerated shelf like a dairy farmer shoving her arm up a cow’s ass. The man’s smile faded as he grabbed his beer and walked to self-checkout. The woman, not surprisingly, caught up and slid into place exactly opposite him so they could have carried on a conversation if she were not so intent upon the new task at hand. Like a Seattle sous chef competing onstage at an oyster shucking competition, she was focused and efficient, almost mechanical. She stopped for only a millisecond to ask the self-checkout cashier the code for a lime in a thin, hurried voice, before completing the process and racing to the parking lot before the stunned man had even retrieved his ad-covered receipt.

Halfway home the man pulled his smartphone out of the left back pocket of his faded Levi’s and checked the time. The moon was dead ahead and the sun had been replaced with a steel blue dusk, the color of stars. Confused, he figured he’d taken longer than usual to select a beer: usually he timed the journey so his walk home coincided with the sunset. A crow, taking a short rest stop en route to his nightly Bothell roost, perched carefully on a discarded Keystone box in the trashy, tall roadside grass and stared at him. The man smiled and thought to himself: “the most highly evolved creatures under the….moon.” The crow clucked and flew toward her roost.

Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell

Ten-Sentence Story #2

Stewart Street Bum

Rain pounded down and the wind off the Sound prompted sweatshirt hoods over baseball caps. A tarnished, weathered, middle-aged man, sitting cross-legged with his back against the wall, barely sheltered by the narrow awning overhead, strummed a guitar with dirty, calloused hands in front of the open case filled with ones, change and the occasional five. We dug out drunk-crumpled ones and dropped them in and paused to listen to the strangely gripping melody, simultaneously remembered and foreign like a déjà vu. Eyes clenched shut, he concentrated on the notes and chords like his life depended on them, not saying a word until he concluded. When the last tone faded into street sounds, he looked slowly upward and offered a grim smile of accomplishment and thanks to each of us standing before him until he came to my buddy Russ and connected eyes with him. The man said in the quietly cadenced, eloquent, street-worn voice of a story-teller: “My grandfather worked in a logging camp out on the Peninsula when I was two. He was tall and broad like Paul Bunyan but his eyes looked out in perpetual fear. Everyone thought it was from the war and weren’t surprised he leaned heavy on the bottle, but the only war he’d fought in was life, and the gear he was issued at birth was shoddy and broken. One sopping cold day like today, he was drunk again and trimmed his femoral artery instead of the cedar branch before him and watched his blood flow out and mix with the rain puddles on the ground. Son, a little fear in the eyes is good but when there’s too much, our home remedies often do more harm than good.”

Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell

Ten-Sentence Story #1

Thunder rolled across the sky like a load of Douglas Fir thrown off a jackknifed Kenworth. The rain, emboldened by the aerial shock wave, renewed its trillion-pronged assault on the earth with maniacal fervor. Inside, corned beef hash and hot black coffee in thick, brown porcelain mugs steamed on the table. Outside, a man who could have been on that TV show about hoarders if he wasn’t homeless, walked slowly by the café window beneath a mountainous, visqueen- and clothesline-wrapped bundle, in totality very much resembling a plasticized, down-and-out version of the old man on the cover of Led Zeppelin’s fourth album. Raindrops exploded on the grimy visqueen, atomizing into a gray mist that hung about him like clouds on Huangshan. Apparently intent upon his march, the man looked neither right nor left and gave no indication in posture or facial expression that the stinging rain was anything more than an ephemeral, if not entirely imaginary circumstance. One of the café diners looked at his iPhone and commented across the table that the church over on Tower Street, some eight blocks away, had just been struck by lightning, suffering a three-foot wide hole directly over the pulpit. The man carrying his life on his back slowed as he approached an absurdly cheerful, North Face-covered young woman with a Miss America smile and a Faith Hill head of blonde, who held out a quart-sized ziploc bag with a sandwich, apple and napkins.
“Wonder if she’s one of those Bible-thumpers?” he said.
“Do you really think he gives a shit?” she said.

Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell

First Spring Storm, Part 1

Celtic knotted cumuli corral one thousand acres of sky into a blue, house-shaped pentagon
Directly overhead as if sent by God to alert the world to your location in a quiet evening neighborhood.
Tilt your head back in the middle of the street and marvel like an idiot at its expanse and perfectly delineated boundaries as the residents watch the strange, middle-aged man in flannel and baseball cap,
Hiking boots and blue jeans, accidentally summoning suspicion and pity like a clumsy conjurer.

Gusts tear around you, flapping shirt tails like an invisible miniature maelstrom made manifest
By grimy, weathered cigarette butts, deteriorating maple leaves spattered with vein-revealing disintegration like Matthew’s AC/DC t-shirt when he screwed up with the jumper cables
In the school parking lot, detonating his battery in an acid atomizing pop heard in the lunchroom.
Think you’re old King Lear, raging at the storm? Get out of the street: no one knows Shakespeare.

Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell

Suburban Sunset

Contrail crack in watercolor sky delineates disputed border of Tyrian and Azure.
Seashells without insignia assemble craftily; camouflaged by Botticelli Venuses
In reproduction knee-high white, shiny, vinyl go-go boots and red locks held just so.
“We didn’t see them coming” pled the defeated Azure troops to the U.N. peacekeepers
According to Bob whose house sprouts a litany of anti-government shortwave radio antennas
Eavesdropping on prison-worthy punk rock riots and FEMA officials clandestinely buying
Shipping containers packed with twenty-two caliber ammunition destined to rest beside
The hallowed Hollywood remnants of Titanic without the “the” of course to signify
It’s significance in a sea of lesser billion-dollar blockbuster entertainment extravaganzas.
Bob parts the antique blackout curtains with shaky, ink-stained fingers embarrassed by
His latest run-in with The Law at a strip mall outside of town when his homemade
Password-gathering drone crashed into the faux marble siding between Starbucks and Phantastic Pho’s
Six-foot wide, fingerprint-laden, streaky, dusty, strategic, safety-glass picture windows.
Bob parts the antique blackout curtains and peers at the middle-aged man in flannel,
Faded Levi’s, beat-up Vans and a baseball cap pulled down over his brow, walking
Up the hill with aggressive, middle-age crisis strides, turning occasionally to pull a device
From his back pocket and snap pictures of the West, always the West, which in this case
Includes a nuclear submarine base only 50 miles distant, a highway that eventually leads to
A ferry dock upon which landed the would-be LAX bomber with a trunk-load of explosives,
The Pacific Ocean from which the Japanese launched torpedoes and attack balloons
Back in Double-U Double-U Two, and the sunset split by a suspicious contrail where it all turns blue.

Copyright 2014 by Robert R. Mitchell