Dispatches from Ellie’s preschool:

Ruby, age four: “Remember when we had the cupcakes for snack? That was so much fun.”

Nora, also age four: “Ruby, that was literally yesterday.”

It is kind of interesting to think that back during the George H.W. Bush administration, a guy named Eric Berge threw together a little tune in a MOD tracker that would get picked up for a computer game called Star Control II as the theme for the toucan-like Pkunk.  Ellie wouldn’t be born for a few years yet.  But eventually she would be born, and grow up, and I would introduce her to that game, and she would like that little tune as much as I had.  Ruby and Nora and their classmates wouldn’t be born for a few years yet.  But eventually they would be born, and grow up enough to head off to preschool, where Ellie would blast this little tune and the tiny children would have chaotic dance parties to it.

Speaking of toucan-like entities, I only just now found out about the kerfuffle that erupted a couple of years ago when Kellogg’s teased a grotesque redesign of Froot Loops mascot Toucan Sam that reflected a misunderstanding of how mouths work or how dimensions work or both.  While I was poking around on the internets to learn more about this, I discovered that the original packaging from the 1960s actu­ally billed the cereal as “Froot Flavored Loops”.  I guess that the FDA demanded that Kellogg’s specify that the cereal was not composed of but merely tasted similar to actual froot.

While on one of my many drives to and from Portland a while back, I wanted to grab a snack and went to the only supermarket I could find in the town I happened to be dri­ving through, a Grocery Outlet.  I was astonished at some of the deals⁠—actual Terry’s chocolate oranges for $1.99! actual San Pellegrino aranciata sodas for fifty cents!⁠—and since then I’ve been stopping at other Grocery Outlets semi-regularly.  Some of the musical selections are dubious, though.  Like, I know that one generation’s cutting edge is the next generation’s muzak, but it was still a little odd to have the PA system playing Kurt Cobain’s throat-rending scream of “SHI‑VER‑R‑R‑R” from “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” while I was looking at the frozen pizzas.

Ellie accompanied me on one of these drives.  She decided that she wanted to pop into a pet store we passed in Willits, so in we went.  The store turned out to be full of parrots, which were allowed to roam fairly freely: there was a large white cage in the center of the store, but the door hung open, and only one African Grey was inside it.  Another African Grey sat on top of it, a white cockatoo crouched underneath it, and a scruffy green parrot sat on a nearby perch.  Two blue macaws huddled under a bench, one of whom darted out and bit the toe of my shoe.  By far the loudest parrot was a yellow and green one that screeched and screeched for several minutes⁠—but then climbed to the top of the white cage and started talking.  “Hello, every­body!” it called out.  “Good job! Good job! Hello, everybody!”  The store was pretty packed, and these announcements caught most people’s attention.  At which point the parrot threw its head back and screamed up at the ceiling: “GOD HELP ME!!”

I remember that when my father was around my current age (which is kind of weird to type⁠—I don’t think of myself as having yet reached any age my father has been during my lifetime), he was very averse to driving at night.  Now I know why.  I recently got a new pair of glasses, and paid extra to get lens coatings that cut down on glare on the roads at night; however, without that glare, everything seems so dark, especially when I get any distance out of town.  A couple of car lengths and the highway just disappears into nothingness.  I did some poking around and discovered that, apparently, the pupil’s ability to dilate diminishes with age, so my retinas actually are receiving significantly less light at night than they used to.  The real lightbulb moment for me came when I realized that the same deterioration means that my pupils don’t constrict as much as they used to, either: no wonder I had to start wearing blackout sunglasses during the daytime pretty much as soon as I turned forty!

In large part because I didn’t want to drive through the mountains at night, we truncated our trip up the Oregon coast after reaching Reedsport and got on the 38 while there was still plenty of daylight to see by as we made our way down narrow, winding, unfamiliar roads.  We weren’t far from making it to the 5 when we encountered a sad sight: a dead dog on the road, right in our lane.  It looked to be some sort of border collie mix.  I slowed down to steer around it⁠—at which point it opened its eyes, looked at us, and twitched.  Gyah!  At the end of a long guardrail, I found a spot to pull over so we could run back and see whether there might be anything we could do⁠—keep other cars from running over the dog, at least.  Ellie ran out ahead of me, and by the time she got to the dog, someone else had stopped in the middle of the lane, hazard lights on.  At which point the dog got up and ran under the guardrail and down the hill.  Holy crow!  So… was it just stunned, then?

Sadly, no.  After a few steps the dog collapsed in the grass.  The driver left, and Ellie and I went down to see how the dog was.  One of its front paws looked pretty chewed up, its muzzle was bloody, and it had left behind a puddle of blood on the road.  It lay in the grass, its breath rapid and shallow.  Ellie, blinking back tears, crouched down to cradle the dog and try to at least offer it a little comfort as it died.  I deci­ded to go look for help.  I spotted a house in a weird location: it had a driveway connecting it to the highway, but a set of train tracks actu­ally ran across that driveway, like, right in front of the garage.  Must be annoying to want to go run some errands or head to work but be trapped in your house because there’s a train going by four feet away.  Anyway, I knocked on the door, and a tall, thin woman answered.  “Sorry to bother you,” I said, “but it looks like a dog got hit by a car right on the highway there, and this is the closest house. The dog is still alive. I have no idea what the proce­dure for this is⁠—is there any chance you could call animal control, or the highway patrol, or whoever would deal with this sort of thing? We would call, but we don’t have any signal out here, and I wouldn’t even know what location to give them⁠—we’re just passing through and don’t even know exactly where we are.”

“Well, we usually call the sheriff for something like this,” she said.  “I’ll call.”  I thanked her and went back to Ellie.  The dog was still alive.  After a couple of minutes the woman came out to meet up with us and verify that I hadn’t just been some crackpot making stuff up.  She called the sheriff’s office; I started up the hill to flag down the officers’ car, since I wasn’t sure anyone could see us from the road.  But apparently someone could, because a twenty-something guy stopped his car on the other side of the road, got out, looked down at us, and asked whether we were okay.  We explained the situation.  “Yeah, I saw that dog on the road a few min­utes ago, but I had to help some people, but then as soon as I was done helping them I came right back,” he explained.  “I bet it jumped out of the back of a truck.”  (Ellie would later tell me that this all struck her as kind of fishy and theorized that this guy might have been the one to hit the dog in the first place.)  The two locals started talking about various people who lived in the area, trying to figure out whose dog this might be⁠—they both seemed very surprised not to re­cognize the dog.  Many long minutes later a black-and-white pulled up and out came a young rookie (“It’s my second week on the job,” he said) and his training officer, a bald guy, also pretty young, in thin sunglasses.  (While the sheriffs were nearby, the dog wagged its tail and kept trying to get up, as if to say, “No, no, I’m fine! Let me just shake it off!”, but collapsed each time.)  They sized up the situation and then announced that they were going to try to locate the dog’s owner.  “Train’s coming,” the training officer said offhandedly.  The woman went back into her house, saying she had to tend to her kids.  Then the train came.

So, yeah.  For upwards of fifteen minutes we sat there as a ridiculously long train crawled by, making an ear-splitting shriek despite its slow speed, while Ellie cradled the terri­fied, dying dog.  It was like a sequence from an absurdist film, testing the audience’s patience with a nigh-endless tableau.  After hundreds of cars stacked to the brim with lumber products had passed, the caboose finally went by, and quite a while after that (as the young guy put up a post about the situation on the community Facebook page, and kept repeating his explanation that he’d had to go help some people but had come right back as soon as he could) the rookie officer came back with an older man in tow.  “Hey, I know this guy,” the young guy said as they started the long walk over to where we were.  “He’s nice but he can’t hear anything and he loves to tell stories that go on forever.”  Sure enough, the rookie cop said something to the old man, who replied, “WHAT?”  He looked at the dog.  “OH, THAT’S NOT MY DOG. HEY, I KNOW THIS PLACE PRETTY WELL. FORTY YEARS AGO I WORKED AS A LOGGER ON THAT MOUNTAIN RIGHT THERE—”  And on and on he went.  The tall woman came back out with a bowl of water and an old blanket for the dog.  It was starting to get dark.  The rookie cop said he was going to go to ask around to try to locate the actual owner.  The old guy and the tall woman left in turn, and it was back to just being me, Ellie (still holding the dog), and the young guy.  “I could just put the dog down right here,” the young guy mused.

I thought that Ellie, who had spent her childhood watching her father shoot any number of family pets, might react badly to this suggestion.  Instead, she asked, “Would you get in trouble? I don’t think this dog is going to make it. I just wanted the dog not to be alone when he died, but he just won’t let go, and he’s suffering so much.”  The guy seemed surprised by this response.  “Well, I dunno,” he hemmed and hawed, “there are laws about using a firearm this close to a road and a house, and what if the sheriff gets back with the owner and I’m like, whoops, I just shot your dog…”  Eventu­ally the officers came back, still unable to find the dog’s owner, and laid out the situation: they were legally barred from taking the dog to a veterinarian, because the owner might then be on the hook for unwanted bills.  A private citi­zen could, though, and there was a 24‑hour animal hospital in Roseburg, about an hour away (in the wrong direction).  Ellie asked whether the hospital would try to save the dog without someone paying up front, and the training officer seemed skeptical.  As for shooting the dog… they really did have to locate the owner… “—but look,” the training officer said to the rookie, “let’s just load the dog into the back of the car and we can take it around to some houses we haven’t tried yet.”  I don’t know whether that was actually the plan or just a polite cover story, but after some discussion of logistics, they picked up the dog and carried it up the hill to the car.  (The dog sank its teeth into the training officer’s shoulder along the way.  Which just goes to show, even in situations like these, a dog just wants to bite a face.)

I guess this item is not very minute.  The big takeaway for me is that society is even less organized than I had thought.  Like, even on the rural level, isn’t it a cliché that one of the elected positions is dogcatcher?  I didn’t think that an ambulance was going to come screaming down the road to pick up this dog the way one presumably would if it had been a human who’d been hit, but I did expect that there would be some kind of animal control van that would arrive in due time and that up front would be a specialist or two who would either take the dog to a veterinarian or euthan­ize it.  But no such official structures were in place, nor did the law reflect any sort of recognition that, when a sentient creature was actively suffering and no one with responsi­bility for the creature could be found, the greater society might have an interest in resolving the situation.  Instead it was a couple of hours of neighbors asking neighbors whose dog this might be⁠—and when the authorities did get in­volved, that’s basically all they were doing as well.  I imagine that things unfolded in 2022 in much the same way they would have in 1872.

As might be expected, in the rural areas and small towns between the Bay Area and Portland, the masking rate looked to me to be well under 10%.  What surprised me was that in Portland itself, it wasn’t much higher⁠—maybe 20%?  I won­dered what I would find when I returned home.  The answer: pretty much the same thing as when I left.  Masking is still above 95% around here, in the stores at least.  Two places with similarly leftie reputations, but in this respect markedly different!