Salon.com > Bill Donahue

Watching the beach for debris from Japan

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:00:00 +0000

It was just garbage, most of it: crushed Pepsi cans, cigarette butts, stray bits of rope, old bottle caps swimming in a bed of wet sand. Ugly stuff, forgettable stuff: It was exactly the sort of no-account junk you’d expect to wash up at the “Dash for Trash or Treasure” beach cleanup culminating the recent weekend-long Ocean Shores Beachcombers Fun Fair, on Washington’s Pacific coast. But each time an earnest steward of our shorelines trundled out of the dunes with a sack full of it, Curtis Ebbesmeyer brightened with anticipation. And then the good oceanographer adjusted his thick leather work gloves and watched, hungrily, as the detritus was dumped down onto the folding wooden table that sat before him, in the breezeway outside the Ocean Shore Convention Center.

Ebbesmeyer sifted through the colorful piles. “Now this is interesting,” he said with curatorial precision. “Here’s a pretty good nose cone to a fireworks thing.”

Black copters over Oregon

Mon, 08 Sep 2003 23:29:00 +0000

The helicopters were indeed black, and when they came thwocking through the clear blue skies above Redmond, Ore., on the afternoon of Aug. 19, Don Berry happened to be having a slow day selling campers and fifth wheels at Courtesy RV. "We just stood there in the lot, my friend Chuck and me, watching," he says before launching into a bit of detail that government sources will not confirm. "They were Chinook military helicopters -- huge things with round noses. There were three of them, and they were moving in tight formation, lollygagging over the woods, zigzagging near [the town of] Sisters and out toward Black Butte," some 25 miles to the northwest.

The copters were in Central Oregon, officials from the U.S. Forest Service would later note, to do reconnaissance in advance of an Aug. 21 visit to the dry, wooded region by President George W. Bush. "They were doing routine surveillance," according to Ron Pugh, a Forest Service special agent. The president planned to speak in Camp Sherman, a little town near Black Butte, and to call, controversially, for the "thinning" of 20 million acres of fire-prone public forests.

Day of the Jackal

Wed, 08 Dec 1999 17:00:00 +0000

I first met Jackal on a cold and gray Seattle morning, and the city seemed stilled. Over 100 protesters of the World Trade Organization meeting -- placid hippies, mostly, and earnest college students singing "America the Beautiful" -- had just been hauled off to jail, and police were rolling armored tanks through the streets. Jackal was standing on the hood of an ancient Plymouth Valiant, kicking in the windshield. The smack of his combat boots echoed through a desolate parking lot just east of downtown, and shards of glass danced to the pavement.

"Fuck!" Jackal said when he saw me. "I wish I had a fucking crowbar!"

His voice carried rage, certainly, but it was also convivial. Jackal was pleased, it seemed, to find someone intrigued by his labors, and me? I was quite curious. This gnarled, 25-year-old punk in baggy fatigues and a black hooded sweatshirt emblazoned "Profane Existence" seemed archetypal. Here was the angry soul of the anarchist horde that had, the night before, shattered windows and looted downtown Seattle, prompting the city's mayor, Paul Schell, to call in the National Guard. Jackal had helped trash both McDonald's and Starbucks. I stepped toward him, squinting in the shower of glass.

Bad dirt

Thu, 15 Apr 1999 16:49:00 +0000

The summer I turned 12, there was not much to do in Gilmanton, N.H., so I went to the post office daily and hung out, listening to the old-timers who congregated by the mailboxes to chew on the town's choicest rumors -- or "roomahs," as they pronounced that powerful word. These were true Yankees, men with calluses on their hands and framed photos of the grandkids atop the TV back at home, and listening to them, I could discern how a New England town works. People know one another's lives; every human error is as public as a sheet on a clothesline. Usually, the error is small -- a neighbor forgets to return a borrowed chainsaw, say -- and it is forgiven, laughed off as charming. Occasionally, though, the error is wounding and unforgivable. It is a sin, and it can be digested only through myth.

The greatest myth floating about the post office that summer of 1976 was an ancient one, and it involved Gilmanton's most famous writer, Grace Metalious, whose blockbuster 1956 novel, "Peyton Place," aired the pettiness, the crimes and the carnality of, ahem, a small town in New Hampshire. "Peyton Place" spawned a movie and a TV series. It will be reissued today by Northeastern University Press, and reissued again this fall by Random House. But in Gilmanton, a town of 2,600 that I have lived in, at my grandmother's house, every summer of my life, rumor still insists that Grace did not write the book.