The first thing I invariably do when the Thursday Chronicle arrives is turn to the Opinion page to make sure that I haven’t been fired from this pulpit. Last week was different, though, because the first thing I saw was the story by Jessi Loerch about a solo hike along parts of the Pacific Crest Trail.
The solitude, the chance to be alone with your own thoughts, can never get any better than that. Could that be the reason some people avoid it? I’ve been there myself, and I remember writing about it in the past: how I took what I thought was the right trail and ended up at dusk in the woods when the trail ran out.
I wasn’t lost, you understand. I never hiked without a map and a compass and could triangulate my position darned near as good as a GPS.
A year or two later, my son and I were more successful, leaving our car in Packwood, hitchhiking to White Pass and taking the chairlift up to the Pacific Crest Trail. We passed by the trail that had fooled me before. The first night was in a peaceful valley, McCall Basin, but it was too crowded for us with a father and his daughter there.
The second night was spent at the north end of Packwood Lake, alone. The third night was back in our beds, nursing shin splints from the constant downhill walking, but with dreamy smiles on our faces.
Change of topic. Are shootings by police increasing or are more of them just being reported? It seems to me from every police target I’ve seen, the idea is to shoot to kill instead of shoot to disable or maim. Why?
The overwhelming number of victims are men, not women. I don’t know about you guys, but if a bullet passed even close to a certain part of my lower anatomy I’d sure be inclined to stop whatever I was doing just as fast as I would with a bullet in my chest.
Enough of that. I certainly should clean the top of my desk more often. This past week I found a note from last March that I’d wanted to comment on at the time. It was a notice of the death of Jazz singer Ernestine Anderson.
Many years ago, my business partner and I were in Seattle at a meeting of radio broadcasters, and Miss Anderson was there to entertain us at lunch. She’d been raised in Seattle and began her career there, tried her hand at national recognition, became discouraged and returned home. She re-emerged in the ’70s and became an international favorite, appearing, for instance, six times at the world famous Monterey Jazz festival.
Anyway, she sang for us that day, accompanied by a pianist on one of those baby grand pianos. You know what they look like. At one point she decided she’d like to sit on the flat top of the instrument, but was having trouble getting there. I was at a table, only a few feet away, and rose to the occasion, so to speak.
I lifted her into position, returned to my seat, and we listened to the rest of her performance. Now, most people would remember an action like that fondly, and I’m no exception. However, I remember it slightly different than others might.
Instead of recalling it as the day I helped a lady sit on a piano, it will be lodged in my memory forever as “the day I held Ernestine Anderson in my arms.” It’s all a matter of perspective.
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Bill Moeller is a former entertainer, mayor, bookstore owner, city council member, paratrooper and pilot living in Centralia. He can be reached at bookmaven321@comcast.net.
