Don and the Devil

I had a stepbrother named Don. He died many years ago, young and missed now. I was thinking about him recently, having just been Chukar hunting with my Dad. His memory sticks in my mind. I don’t want to make of Don something good or bad, something that he was or was not; Don did that for himself, as do we all. Rather, I just want to tell you about him, and maybe, just for a minute, bring him back to life to enjoy his company.

Don was the son of my Dad’s second and current wife. He was a man of opposite contrasts. He was a tall, lanky sort. He was very strong for a man who was so lean. He stood over six feet, and I would be surprised if he broke 175 pounds. He was energetic, yet remarkably lazy at the same time. You would not say he was smart, and he did poorly in school, but he had a sort of sense about things that let him do all that he wanted to do. He was often unemployed but seemed able, whenever he wanted, to get a job. He could be infuriatingly obtuse, coarse, and uninformed, yet he was lovable and good-hearted just the same.

Perhaps the most important and telling thing you could say about Don was the one thing upon which he was a rock, like Peter to the Church—Don liked beer. Don without a beer was a like an ocean without water: unimaginable.

This is not a morality story about the evils of beer. Benjamin Franklin said that beer is proof that God loves us. God surely loved Don.

Let me quit setting the stage about Don and set the other stage, the one where he met the Devil and how Don vanquished him.

Chukar hunting for the Wilson clan for a number of years involved a trek into Lesley Gulch in the extreme southeastern corner of the State of Oregon. Most people in the United States do not realize that 2/3 of the state of Oregon is high desert, consisting mostly of rocks, sagebrush and sparse tracts of seemingly uninhabitable space. Lesley Gulch is a canyon running east and west whose terminus at the end is the Owyhee River Reservoir, a lonely, long narrow body of water backed up for 30 miles or more, winding its way through steep canyons and narrow ways. Its purpose is to provide irrigation water for the farmers further downstream where the land levels out. At the point where Lesley Gulch joins the reservoir, the mountains and ridges are particularly steep and rise up in sheer and long slopes to high rocky ridges on both sides of the river. They are barren ridges, full of rock cliffs, sloping mountain slides, filled with loose shale debris, and cut infrequently by twisty-turny little canyons through which the occasional rain runoff water flows. Of course, being a true desert, the water does not flow that often. Over the millennia, Mother Nature has carved the rocky spine of the hills and ridges into spires and cathedral-like spaces. It is perhaps one of the most beautiful places in the world, as far as I am concerned.

The other thing to know about the place is there may not be an electric wire or working telephone within 40 miles or more in any direction. It is truly remote.

Chukars are a partridge. They are native to the Himalayas and mountains of Pakistan and Afghanistan. Naturists and sportsmen introduced them into the high deserts of the West a hundred years or so ago. They thrive there.

The Chukar is in league with the Devil.

The Chukar is an evil bird. It can run uphill on near vertical slopes faster than a man can run down. They laugh at you in a very loud voice heard for miles. This is usually when they are on top of the mountain and you are laboriously climbing it and about to burst an aortic valve or two. Their call goes “chuck chuck chuck chuck….chukar” in a pitch that drives hunters mad.

The Chukar will wait until you are precariously balanced on one foot on a piece of crumbly rock on the edge of a 100 foot precipice, at which time 10 or so of them will take wing at your feet, sounding like a squadron of P-51s taking off all at once. The shock of the sound of their flight alone is enough to cause you to fall off your perch to a bloody, smashed up mess below. Just in case you are still in hunter mode, and did not fall as they planned, they will fly in such as way as to require you to aim your shotgun over your left shoulder while twisting on your poor abused right ankle and shoot at a vague shadow passing behind you at the speed of sound. As all of this happens, you are praying the recoil of the shotgun does not throw you off your perch to an untimely demise on the rocks below.

All Chukars deserve to die.

We used Dad’s boat to roam up and down the reservoir, pulling into canyons we knew. We would hike up the canyons, and eventually to the tops of the mountains at their end. Chukar hunting naturally involved many hours of climbing steep mountains, filled with a few seconds of terror, followed by hiking back down, lunch and a few beers, all repeated in the afternoon.

I can remember the first time I did this with Don. We all set off, each of us going to the left or right or middle, to give us each our own zone for hunting. Spread out this way, we climbed the ridge, shot at Chukars and missed along the way, and climbed some more. Finally, I had climbed so high that I could look back down to the reservoir and see our boat pulled up on the shore. It looked like a little ant boat. What did I see when I looked back? Little ant Don walking down the last little bit of ridge, eventually to the boat, climbing in and settling down to rest.

Don, you see, had turned back, being very thirsty, after climbing less than a third of the way I had climbed. He had apparently found no comatose or otherwise imbecilic Chukars standing very still on a rock that he could shoot without having to aim. Upon discovering the lack of such easy targets and considering the circumstances, he felt justified in returning to the boat to drink beer. The rest of us climbed until we were ready to puke. We chased those devil Chukars without success until we seriously contemplated calling in an Exorcist. Finally, it being lunchtime, we hiked down off the mountain.

There were four of us and we had put three beers each in the cooler. Don sat in that boat and drank all 12 beers before noon. We got none.

So it would go.

There was this other time when, while travelling up stream in Dad’s boat, a large 22 foot long 7 foot wide river sled, we came upon this measly little Shovel Bill duck. It was swimming in the reservoir just minding its business. As we came motoring along, it dove under the surface. Don became very excited and insisted he had to shoot that poor little duck. Dad obliging slowed down and stopped the boat near the spot where the duck went under. Sure enough, it resurfaced for air, but some 30 yards or so from where it went under. Don blasted away with his shotgun, missed, and the duck dove under again.

Now a shovel duck is not what you would consider a prime waterfowl. They have a shovel-shaped bill, hence their name, so they can scoop mud and yuck from the bottom of the river or swamp and strain out the edible bits. They tend to take on the smell and taste of what they strain and eat, if you know what I mean. Not only that, while they look something like a mallard, with a green head and yellow eyes, they are runty, more like the size of a teal or bufflehead. Still, Don had the proper licenses, waterfowl stamp, and it was duck season, so…

The chase was afoot, or afloat, as the case may be. Don was obsessed. We could not help being entertained. The little duck would pop up, Don would blast, miss, and repeat. It was amusing in a twisted, you had to be there sort of way. Of course, it came to a bad end for the duck. He popped up at the wrong place eventually and Don did not miss. But, Dad was firm. “You shot it, you eat it!”

Later that night, Don cooked the duck over the fire, occasionally basting it by pouring some of his beer over it, and then ate every scrap, declaring it the best he had ever had. I was never sure whether he was talking about the duck or the beer, but I have my suspicions.

Enough of that. To the Devil.

One year we were in our camp early in the morning, with coffee made and the breakfast cooking. It was a small campground at the end of the gulch near the reservoir. Campground is too generous a word, it merely being a space the BLM had graded level, threw some gravel on and put in two outhouses at one end. We liked it just fine, even if there was no running water. We would carry in all the water we needed in five-gallon cans, and when we ran out, we knew of a sweet spring 5 miles up the road where we could replenish.

Those of us in tents were working out the kinks of sleeping on hard ground in the cold desert night. Dad was not so poorly disposed. He had an old, abused, but comfortable Winnebago that none of us would sleep in on account that he snored something fierce (but so did we, so the score is even). A pickup came down the rough dirt road and pulled in next to our camp. Two men got out and asked if we could spare some coffee. It was a neighborly and thoroughly Western desert meeting. The fact that they had driven 25 miles and more than hour from the main road meant they were not just passing by. We were happy to share. They were properly appreciative. We made introductions all around, sipped our coffee and chatted about chucker hunting and the weather and so on.

What the two men were interested in was asking us about any Big Horn Sheep sightings we may have made in our Chukar hunting adventures. There were Big Horn Sheep in the area, and the State of Oregon had recently issued, for the first time in a very long time, perhaps 50 years, a half dozen tags to hunt them. One of our new friends had been successful in receiving a tag in the drawing held among thousands of applicants. His companion was helping him with the hunt. They were nice guys and, encouragingly if somewhat chauvinistically, were locals from Eastern Oregon. The tag owner owned an irrigation supply business in Ontario, Oregon. We would not have been so welcoming to a Los Angeles millionaire.

We chatted and told them what we knew. We did see Big Horns quite often in our hikes, and were able to give them not only a lay of the land, describing how the ridges, canyons and ravines ran, but where we had seen this herd or that.

Did I mention that it is rough, wilderness country?

We departed with them promising to let us know how they did and asking if we minded if they stopped in for supper and some beer if the opportunity arose. We did not mind and were quite happy at the thought. As I said, it is neighborly and friendly.

We thought little of it later that day. We hunted and for once were quite successful. I was semi-unconscious, which is the only way you can explain how I shot four birds that day. Everyone else did well and had at least a couple birds to his credit. We ate well that night; I fried the Chukars we had bagged with a lemon pepper and flour coating. Served with a gallon of cheap red wine and/or beer, they were a big hit.

The next day we did even better. I believe I bagged eight birds all by myself that day. Forget calling in a Priest, I started thinking that I was the Exorcist. The evil birds were finally feeling the wrath of the righteous. Everyone else had a good day, too

At the end of the long day, we finished it off by scouring the shoreline for several miles up and down the reservoir for driftwood for our campfire, which we loaded into the boat and offloaded to the pickup for transport to camp. That night we had plenty of firewood, lots of cold beer and wine, and ate like kings on Chukars grilled over the fire. Replete and intoxicated, we settled onto our stools or camp chairs around the fire and contemplated just how good life could be.

The night came down and was as dark as only the wilderness can be. Except that, when the sky is clear in the high desert, it is not that dark. The Milky Way is so bright in the sky that on a clear night it is almost possible to read a book by the starlight. If you have not seen it, you have no conception of just how much the heavens are on fire.

Still, when you are drunk and sitting looking at a large fire, your night vision is not the best.

Just as we had reached that sleepy state of rosy, warm belly from the alcohol and warm front side from the fire, the Devil came to take us.

The first notice was the dogs started to whimper. Both belly crawled under Dad’s Winnebago and hid. Don, who was sitting opposite me, looked over my shoulder, exclaimed, “What the fuck!”, and then seemed to freeze in place, his eyes the size of a beer can bottom’s diameter. I spun out of my chair and looked into the darkness behind me.

Coming out of the night were two glowing eyes. They shifted from glowing red to an eerie green fire and back. They stared straight into my soul. As bits of starlight and firelight caught the apparition, and my eyes adjusted to the dark, I could make out the Devil’s horns arcing around those eyes. He was walking upright, very tall, more than six and half feet at a guess, and I dared not look down for sure I would see his cloven hooves striking sparks from the ground.

The thought of all those Chukars we had killed that day came over me, and I will admit I wondered if now it was time to pay the Devil his due for killing and eating his minions.

His otherworldly, strangely intoned voice swept over us and echoed through the canyon.

“Have you got a cold beer there?”

I won’t say I was the first to figure it out, but I can attest that Don and the dogs, and I am not sure in which order, were the last.

It was not the devil, but our sheep hunter’s companion. He was carrying the cape and head of a Big Horn Sheep on his shoulders; in fact, the head was resting on top of his head, the easier to carry it. The eyes of the sheep were stuck open and reflected the fire and stars in weird ways.

I have never seen a man drink a beer so fast in my life, not even Don.

As he explained, during his third and slower beer, they had stalked this large sheep for a day and half, before getting a good shot. They were miles and miles from their truck, once they were able to come up to the dead creature. They debated what to do, and agreed that trying to take the sheep back to the truck was not possible. The solution was to pack it down the long canyon to a place where they could get the pickup close. They were sure that one canyon they were looking at culminated in our camp next to the Owyhee. The plan was for the friend to hike the skin and the head to our camp, while the hunter would hike back to the truck and drive around to meet up.

Sure enough, within half an hour the pickup with the hunter pulled into our camp. We offered up more beer.

They explained that they hoped to enlist our help to pack the remainder of the sheep’s carcass out, and if we could not help, at least they would have a base to do it one bit at a time, now that they knew where the canyon ran. Without a second’s hesitation, Don said, “I’ll help you.”

He was deadly serious and would brook no entreaties of, “Are you sure?” and “It’s a very long hike.”

Don said he had never been involved in a sheep hunt, nor seen one taken, and he was determined to have the experience. He meant every word. He might be a lazy Chukar hunter, but when something intrigued or stimulated him, you would best get out of his way because no constraints could hold him back or deter his course.

They agreed to pick up Don around eight the following morning, which they did. We all shared coffee and then wished them luck. There was a third man involved but I do not remember him so well and some of details seem a little fuzzy now. They were fuzzy then, too, owing to my drinking my thanks to God for not letting the Chuckars’ Devil take me.

The rest of us hunted most of the day for Chukars, and as I recall, we did not do so well. We knocked off a little early and were back in camp around 3 pm. It was just in time to see Don coming down the canyon towards camp, pack settled high on his shoulder and high stepping it the whole way. He marched into camp, dropped the pack with half a sheep carcass in it without ceremony on the ground, and grabbed a beer out of the cooler. The beer took two gulps. He tossed the empty and grabbed another. That one took three gulps. The third beer he actually nurtured for a few minutes after settling himself into a camp chair.

Twenty minutes later, the other two packers came into view around the bend a quarter mile up the canyon. Don had beaten them into camp by nearly half an hour.

All were clearly exhausted and near the edge. It turns out the hike was nearly 7 miles, over rough terrain and few trails to follow. Gratefully it was mostly downhill, but the two sheep packs weighed nearly 80 pounds apiece. Their strategy was two men would carry a sheep pack, while the third carried a pack with beer. After 30 minutes or so, the third man with the beer pack would take a sheep pack and pass the lighter beer pack on. After another thirty minutes, the second beer pack man would take a sheep pack and the remaining sheep pack man would take the beer pack. In this way, each man got 30 minutes relative rest carrying the lighter beer pack for each hour of carrying a heavy sheep pack.

Of course, the third man was not without a burden, for these crafty carcass packers had foreseen the need to have plenty of beer along for the hike. They put a case of beer into the third pack at the outset, along with some frozen ice packs to keep it cold. In the beginning, the beer pack was not light. But, during their periodic half hour stops, each had a beer, and the weight in the beer pack went down steadily.

They made commendable progress off the mountain in this way over the hours. Until, at last, they ran out of beer.

One of the packers put it this way:

“It was the most awesome thing I have ever seen. We were worn down, tired, and nearly at the end of our strength. We collapsed on the ground after the last half hour hike when it was time to switch packs. I knew we were still a long way from the camp, but I was just about done. Don had been carrying one of the sheep packs for an hour and it was his turn to trade off and carry the beer. As we sat there, he asked me to pass him a beer. I looked into the beer pack and discovered we did not have any more. We had drunk the last of it on the last stop. We were so tired no one realized I was carrying a pack with just empty cans.”

“What do you mean there’s no more beer,” Don demanded.

“Once he looked in the pack and realized the truth, he said ‘Fuck this! I’m going for a beer!’ He got up still wearing the pack with half the sheep in it and started down the canyon at double quick time. We tried to keep up, but he was just gone.”

As the man explained, “It was like he had the devil in him for a beer.”

I do not know how better to say it.

Don beat the Devil that day, and will be remembered with awe by those sheep hunters for his packing exploits.

Don is gone. We won't talk about how or why that happened. None of us really no the truth, only Don does, where ever he may be.

Vaya con Dios, Amigo.

One Offs

Reggie Bush’s decision recently to give back his Heisman Trophy prompted me to think that perhaps Obama should give back his Nobel Peace Prize. After all, the Norwegians awarded the prize less than a month into his presidency not on anything he had actually accomplished, but on the hope of his intentions. Since that time, he has accomplished absolutely nothing to cause peace to break out anywhere, and done just about everything to inspire and motivate our enemies. In that light, Reggie seems of the two more honest and deserving to keep his prize.

******************************

Facebook’s founder recently gave a NJ school district $100 million to help improve the education of the children. You know what would have been more effective? He could have given 20,000 kids $5,000 each, based on their financial need, on the stipulation that they use the money to pay for private school tuition.

The 20,000 kids and their parents who took it and used it for that purpose would at least be those motivated to get a decent education. Even better, it would reduce the public school population by that much, allowing the schools the opportunity to lay off their most ineffective teachers and administrators.

Throwing a $100 million at the public school system, no matter what the stipulations and rules for spending it are, is not much better than flushing it down a toilet.

******************************

Historian Victor Hanson recently published an article in the National Review Online in which he described the difference between the peasant mentality of the feudal ages with that of the ancient Greeks. In the peasant mentality, the belief is that there is only so much to go around: wealth, opportunity, that kind of stuff. It says that the economy and society are like a big pie. If one person takes a bigger slice of pie that means others will get a smaller slice and some no slice at all because there is only so much pie to go around.

In contrast, Hanson says “… Western civilization began with a very different, ancient Greek idea of an autonomous citizen, not an indentured serf or subsistence peasant. The small, independent landowner — if he was left to his own talents, and if his success was protected by, and from, government — would create new sources of wealth for everyone. The resulting greater bounty for the poor soon trumped their old jealousy of the better-off.”

Hanson goes on to make the point that Progressives and Liberals think of the economy, society and nation through the lens of the peasant mentality. To their way of thinking, a rich man is only wealthy because many other men are poor. Therefore, they think it is only right and just that they redistribute the rich man’s large slice of pie to others who have smaller ones.

As Hanson points out, Obama leads the way. Hanson wrote, “America is returning to a peasant mentality of a limited good that redistributes wealth rather than creates it. Candidate Obama’s 'spread the wealth' slip to Joe the Plumber simply was upgraded to President Obama’s 'I do think at a certain point you’ve made enough money.'”

The irony is, as Hanson says, “The more his administration castigates insurers, businesses, and doctors; raises taxes on the upper income brackets; and imposes additional regulations, the more those who create wealth are deciding to sit out, neither hiring nor lending. The result is that traditional self-interested profit-makers are locking up trillions of dollars in unspent cash rather than using it to take risks, since they will likely either lose money due to new red tape or see much of their profit confiscated through higher taxes.”

As he says, “No wonder that in such a climate of fear and suspicion, unemployment remains near 10 percent. Deficits chronically exceed $1 trillion per annum. And now the poverty rate has hit a historic high. We are all getting poorer in hopes that a few won’t get richer.”

******************************

So, Comedian Stephen Colbert testifies to Congress about migrant workers. He worked for a day picking beans to get a feel for their experience and it just about killed him he says. Well, you know, it’s like real work. Real work is hard. What a wuss.

I’ve picked several thousand pounds of beans in my youth, between the ages of 11 and 14. I was able to get out of the picking business when I turned 15, the age at which Oregon allowed youths back then to work for an hourly wage. When I was in high school and two years in college, I worked summers on different farms. On one farm my job was to carry 40 foot long 3 inch diameter aluminum irrigation pipe over my head through the bean fields. To move all the sets of irrigation lines took 2 or 3 hours. We did it twice a day, starting at sunup for the first set, and starting the second set about an hour before sun down. During the middle of the day, I lugged 70-100 pound sacks of beans a hundred yards to the weigh station for middle aged ladies’ who had just picked them — some of those ladies were the mothers of kids I went to school with. When I wasn’t lugging sacks of beans, I was picking up alfalfa bales from the fields, loading them onto trailers and trucks and then unloading and stacking them in barns.
Other jobs on other farms were similar in that they were all hard, muscle aching, hot, dirty work. None of that killed me. I wasn’t paid that much, but they were jobs and I was happy to have them.

Accordingly, I don’t have much respect for Colbert’s nonsense. The greater bit of nonsense is that members of Congress invited him to testify about his one-day “job”. Did they think that made him some sort of expert? Predictably, his testimony was completely in line with a comedy skit, not that you would expect anything different from this self-promoting ass. Even more bothersome is that the Democratic chairperson of the committee and other members of Congress seemed to think this was an appropriate use of their time and our tax dollars. Was this serious Congressional work, or just intended to be an entertaining break from all the hard work they do?

Whatever, it’s a bad joke on the rest of us.

******************************

I am more and more bothered over the last several years about our spoken conversation. You hear it all the time in TV and Radio interviews, as well as in every day conversation. Take a typical interview. It doesn’t matter who is being interviewed, be it a sports star, actor, politician or man on the street. When asked a question, for example, “What do you think the weather will be tomorrow?” the response typically begins, “Yeah, I mean…”

Well, I certainly hope they mean what they say. Seriously, though, the original intent/meaning of the phrase is to explain a statement the speaker believes he may not have made clear or that the listener may not have understood. But, that is not what is going on here. Invariably, the speaker hasn’t said anything yet so there is nothing to explain further.

The phrase “I mean,” is essentially meaningless. It is just noise, perhaps used to get the speaker talking, like priming an old fashioned hand pump. More likely, however, its purpose is to allow his brain time to catch up with his mouth. One hears all sorts of such words and phrases in our speech today. “Yeah, I mean, like you know, it’s so going to be hot tomorrow.”

We The Jury

I recently received a summons to report to jury duty in Delaware County Ohio for the next four months. The notice sparked some dark and painful memories, and I thought I would relate them here.

In 1987-88, (I think that was the right time) I was a juror in a capital murder case. I lived in Portland Oregon at the time. It was my first and last time as a juror. It was not fun. Frankly, I never want to do anything like that again, and trust me, you don’t either.

I can’t remember any of the names, not the victim, the judge, the attorneys, the accused or any of my fellow jurors. I wrote extensive notes every day of the trial and stowed them away, thinking I would want them some time later in my life. I remember finding them in an old box years ago. I think I threw them away, as near as I can tell. It’s a fuzzy memory, and I can’t find them now. It’s funny that I can see all of the people in my mind, the court, the judge, my fellow jurors, the defendant, the lawyers, even the family members of the victim who came to court every day. However, no names, not even one. Are you sensing something going on here?

You see, we found the accused guilty and we ordered him to die for it.

In Oregon, there are two phases to a capital murder trial. The first is to determine if the defendant is guilty of the crime of which he is accused. All we did in the first phase is determine did he commit the murder, and did the circumstances of murder meet the qualifications of Capital Murder, or perhaps some lesser charge, such as second degree murder or manslaughter. If we said he was not guilty of the crime that would have been it, case closed. We spent more than a month and half as I recall listening to testimony with occasional days off while the court conducted other business or heard motions that we were not supposed to hear, before the judge release us to deliberate our verdict.

The second phase of the trial is to determine, again according to the strict definitions provided by statute, two things: did the circumstances of the crime fit a certain set of criteria or not, and was the defendant likely to be a future danger of society. A yes answer to both questions was required for a sentence of the death penalty. A no answer to either or both of the questions meant the sentence was mandatory life in prison. Those were our two choices. We spent another month or more on that phase with a two-week interval between the two phases.

As I recall I first reported for jury duty on a Monday morning in early December. (Again, I could have the time wrong, but that is what my memory says) They drew my name for the very first jury pool within 30 minutes on that first day. Between jury selection and the two phases of the trial, I wasn’t done with it all until mid-April. We started in early winter and ended in mid spring.

My boss was not amused.

The jury selection process was not what I expected. We started out as a group of about 120 people. They split us into three groups of about 40. One by one, each group went into the courtroom and met the judge, who told us that we were being considered as jurors on a Capital Murder case. Today we were to fill out a questionnaire that we were required by law to complete as fully and honestly as possible. The Prosecution and Defense attorneys could dismiss up to a certain number of us based on our questionnaires. Once we had completed the questionnaire, the clerk excused us for the rest of the day and, in fact, the rest of the week. We were to report to the main jury waiting room on Monday the following week. At that time, either we would go back to the general jury pool if rejected by the Prosecution or Defense, or we would report to the courtroom and proceed with the voir dire process.

The questionnaire was huge. It took three hours or more to complete the form. It was the most detailed thing you can imagine. It wanted me to list all my living relatives’ names down to first cousins, as well as addresses if I knew them. There were the expected questions about my education, employment, hobbies, criminal record, and marital status. They wanted to know odd things, too, like how often did I get drunk and had I ever had a venereal disease. There were questions that didn’t appear to have much to do with a trial or murder, but a psychologist obviously created them to analyze our thinking and personality. We had to fill it out while being under the scrutiny of guards and court clerks.

As you have surmised, when I came back the following Monday, I was told to report to the courtroom. I made it through the questionnaire process and was still in the pool of potential jurors for the trial. Voir dire is the process where the attorneys and even the judge interview the jurors. They did us one at a time, with none of the other jurors in the room. It took all week. They told me that I could go home, but that I should report to the courtroom for my interview on Wednesday morning and be prepared to spend the whole day waiting my turn. On Wednesday, the clerk called me into the courtroom about mid-morning as I recall. They asked all the usual questions you would expect: how did I feel about capital punishment, did I feel differently about black people than white, did I think I could be impartial and that sort of thing.

At one point, the judge told me that if I were on the jury, I would see evidence that included pictures of a nude woman. Did I have a problem looking at such pictures? I said no with a straight face. The Defense attorney chimed in that I would also likely hear offensive language and bad words, and was that a problem for me. That was too much. I chuckled and replied, “Man, I grew up in Riddle, I’ve heard it all.” The judge laughed at that. So did the attorneys. I realized I was screwed at that point. There was no way I was getting out of being on that jury.

And I did not. All the potential jurors reported to the courtroom on the following Monday, and the clerk announced that she would call 14 names (12 jurors and 2 alternates). If our name was called, we were to stay, if not, we could leave and our jury duty service was ended. They called my name. When just the 14 of us were still in the room, the clerk gathered us up and we went in to see the judge. He told us that our service would probably last several months, but he was giving us three weeks or so off over the holidays. He told us to report at 8:30 am on the first Monday after New Year’s Day for the first day of the trial.

I won’t go into the details, other than to say that the defendant, a young black man in his mid-20s, was accused of raping, then strangling a young black woman in her apartment.

As I said, there are two phases to the trial. At the conclusion of the first phase, the guilty or not phase, the judge gave us instructions and sent us to deliberate at just before 11 am. They locked us in the jury room. Seriously, guards stood at both the hallway door and the courtroom door to the jury room. They were there both to keep people out and to keep us in. We were a little shocked that they could summarily extinguish our freedom to move and associate just like that. It was like being in jail.

Once the doors closed and, yes, locked, our first question was whether we needed to elect a jury captain. The judge hadn’t said one way or the other. We debated that for a few minutes and decided we would not for the time being, as long as we could keep things moving along. Someone suggested that perhaps we ought to take a vote, to which someone else said that we ought to look at the evidence a little closer first, including photos and other materials. It’s not that we needed to look at it; we had seen it all before. I think that many of us wanted to look at it again to give the appearance, if only to ourselves, that we were carefully weighing our decision. There was also a certain morbid curiosity and, to be honest, titillation in looking at that poor young naked dead woman lying on her back on her bed. She had been pretty in life.

Finally, around 11:30, another person suggested we ought to vote to get a feel for the lay of the land. We agreed, tore up some paper into ballots, wrote guilty or not guilty on them, and threw them into an unused coffee cup. That took 2 minutes, tops. One of the guys took the ballots out, put them on the table and tallied 12 guilty votes, unanimous on the first try and in just about 30 minutes.

Someone said, “I guess we should call the Bailiff and tell him we have a verdict.”

Someone else said, and it was not me, “Wait. If we are still in here at noon, they will pay for our lunch and have it delivered. “

That was a grand idea, we all agreed, and that is just what we did. We waited it out, got our free lunch, ate it, and when were all done, informed the Bailiff that we had a verdict. By 1:30 pm, we were back in the courtroom and passed the judge the form we had to fill out announcing our verdict. We were all remarkably unemotional and cool about it all. It was just like going to work, no big deal. I think that was so because after a month and half of evidence, none of us had any doubts of his guilt.

That was the easy part. Little did we know just how hard would be the second phase.

I don’t know that I can describe the weight of that decision as it bears down on you. I will try to give you a sense of it, of what it is to find yourself in a position of having to decide to say to a man, “we are going to kill you.” It is not something you prepare for or even think about in realistic terms until you find yourself in the position of having to do it.

It’s not as if the defendant was shooting at me. He never threatened me or anyone I know. I would have no trouble killing someone who threatened me or my family or some other innocent person. I’m not against capital punishment and actually still support it. The hard thing is, the thing that sometimes wakes me up at night, is that what we did, my fellow 11 jurors and me, was more cold blooded than the crime the bad guy committed. Our decision was well reasoned, purposeful, open, supported by facts, logic, and the lawful rules of the great State of Oregon. He committed his act in probably ten minutes of alcohol-induced insanity. We spent months coming to ours. He was going to die for his momentary bad decision and we were going to spend a long time living with our purposeful and carefully thought out one.

This is not some sort of guilt-ridden confession. I am not seeking to cleanse my soul or induce cathartic psychological healing in this rant. I did my duty as the statutes of the State of Oregon required. I do not feel guilty about that. I did not kill that 21 or 22 year old unwed mother of an 18-month-old baby. I did not rape her and strangle her with the telephone cord. I did not leave her naked body lying haphazardly across her bed while her baby was in a crib at the foot of that bed, a baby that was found in that crib next to his dead mother hours later by neighbors who got worried because they heard him crying all morning. I am convinced of the defendant’s guilt still, and he deserved to die for what he did.

How often have you heard people say that we should “line all those”—pick the bad guy du jour—“up against a wall and shoot them.” Whom would we want to do that to today? Al Qaeda? Taliban? Mexican drug lords? Liberals? Conservatives? Often those who say it are quite passionate and really mean it. But, I’ll tell you what: put Osama Bin Laden against a wall, pick any one out of the crowd professing to want him dead, give him a .45, stand him in front of OBL and tell him to let ‘er rip. Many wouldn’t do it, couldn’t do it. The reality of the act hits you in the face like a bucket of cold water, and suddenly it’s personal.

You want to know why some juries are hung, and can’t reach a verdict in capital murder trials? I think one or more of the jurors refuses to agree to convict because they suddenly see themselves holding that pistol and pulling that trigger.

In the sentencing phase, we needed to determine did the rape of the victim constitute one of the crimes during the commission of which a murder qualified for capital punishment. If so, did the defendant commit the murder to facilitate the rape or to hide the evidence of his having done it. The answer to these questions was a big Hell Yes.

In addition, our task was to determine if the defendant posed a continued future threat to society. As I said, we had to say yes to both questions in order to impose the death penalty. The first part, the rape murder connection, was easy. This second part was not easy.

The prosecutor spent a great deal of time showing how the defendant had committed an ever-escalating seriousness of crimes in his young life. The point being that he had culminated that escalation in raping and murdering a woman, so who knew what the next act would be. It was a fair point, but really, I thought it was a little much presenting evidence of how he had stolen a handsaw from a school when he was nine. His mother told, us but not tearfully, (I felt she really was trying to feel all emotional about her son, but it didn’t come off very well) “what a loving son” he was, and how being without a father for most of his life meant he didn’t have any “good role models” on which to pattern his behavior. I suppose the point she was making, and the defense attorney through her, was that we should not sentence her son to death because it was not his fault that he was a bad man. She probably believed that. I know many people do. The concept is that we are what our environment makes us; we can’t help being what we are and are therefore not responsible for what that makes us do. It is the old nature versus nurture argument. It’s a load of horseshit, in my opinion. In this case it only raised the question in my mind that if it wasn’t her son’s fault was it then her fault for the environment she gave him?

We spent a month listening to this sort of thing. To be honest, I think the best argument made by the defense attorney had to do with whether the defendant posed a future danger to society. He argued that if we sentenced the defendant to life in prison he would not be in society, and so could not endanger it, but only possibly his fellow prisoners, and that hardly counted as society. He actually had me thinking on that one. Remember, we were duty bound to follow the letter of the law, but that doesn't mean we were not also asked to interpret the sense of that letter. The point is this argument made a good deal of sense depending on how you defined “society”. His argument was spoiled I think when no one could or would tell us whether the defendant would qualify for parole at some point; we weren’t allowed to hear that. There was also the remote possibility that he would escape from prison. In my own mind, I assumed that because they wouldn’t tell us about parole that meant he could qualify for some sort of release, and thus could be back in society. My fellow jurors also raised this point and it helped persuade us I think. I personally believed that he was a threat to the rest of us, if only because he was too stupid not to stay out of trouble. Darwin wasn’t wrong.

We had a lady on our jury who was smart, college degreed, well spoken, level headed, imperturbable, and very attractive. She was the executive assistant of a CEO of a corporation with headquarters in downtown Portland as I recall. She was like a rock. Most of us would on occasion make macabre jokes or act sophomoric in attempts to break our tension. She was all business and even keel throughout. I much admired her.

When all the evidence and arguments were done, the judge sent us off with our instructions. We found ourselves locked in our tiny jury room again. It was a narrow space maybe 20 feet long by 10 feet wide. It was just wide enough to put a 4-foot wide, 8-foot long table in the center, and fit chairs around the table. At the hallway end of the room, there was a small 5 x 5 foot restroom. Its walls were paper-thin and nobody used it to do their business if they didn’t have to. Everyone in the jury room would hear every grunt, splash and tinkle.

We slowly walked into the room and heard the lock snick behind us as the bailiff closed the door. The mood this second time around was very sober and subdued, all that it had not been in the first phase. We just stood around looking at each other, at the walls, at our feet, but no one said anything or sat down at the table. Sitting was a sort of symbolic act that said its time to make a decision, and I don’t think any of us wanted to do that.

Our rock lady, looking as calm and composed as always moved across the room and went into the restroom. We heard the door close. To my horror, from out of the restroom came the most heart rending, painful sobbing I have ever heard. It wasn’t a wail, so much as a loud moaning with gasping pauses as she tried to get her breath and emotions under control, only to start in again. Our rock had lost it.

It was more than distressing. I thought I was going to vomit.

It took her five minutes or so to get back in control and the sobbing to cease. A few moments later, we could hear the water running. A few moments after that, she came out of the room, looking as composed and in control as always, if a little red and puffy around the eyes. She stepped up to the table, apologized for upsetting us, and then pulled out a chair and sat down. The rest of us stood a moment longer, and then we all sat.

So began our decision to kill a man.