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COVER STORY | IN THE NEWS | OFF THE PAVEMENT October 11, 2007
Essay: “Homeland Security Behind the Redwood Curtain” Book: The American Discovery of Europe Concert: Ricky Skaggs and Bruce Hornsby “Homeland Security Behind the Redwood Curtain” Ever wondered what a high-ranking official from the Department of Homeland Security would make of Humboldt County? Wonder no more. Get right in there and read how a Beltway-bred stuffed shirt came to find a little piece of this great and troubled nation’s lost soul while on spiritual retreat at the Riverwood Inn, on the Avenue of the Giants. According to her bio, the author of the present work is Homeland Security’s “Deputy Assistant General Counsel for Intelligence and Analysis in the Office of General Counsel.” She came to Humboldt County on vacation about a year ago — “shortly after the five-year anniversary of Sept. 11,” she writes — in order to clear her head among the redwoods. If her essay is to be believed, what she found here profoundly shaped her thoughts about how her department should interface with citizens of rural America. Her story appears in an academic journal, but she saves her analysis for the last third of her roughly 5,200 words. She spends the bulk of her time trying to adequately limn the exotic specimens of humanity she encountered one night on the Riverwood’s porch, underneath the monstrous, otherworldly trees. Here she meets several instantly recognizable Humboldt County types, and she records their impressions about terrorism, the federal government, the meaning of life. She becomes enchanted in the way that tourists to the developing world become enchanted. A kid drives by on an ATV, beer can in hand. A grown man and woman, brother and sister, come and go mysteriously. Everyone knows everyone’s name. There’s an unintentionally comic aspect to the narrative. It comes in the form of a grizzled fellow Boyd calls William — “a man in his late 50s with shoulder-length bleached blond hair and a deeply lined and weathered face.” William buys her drinks, talks about his grandkids, struggles to come to grips with his mixed feelings about the United States. He runs off to burn a CD for her and brings it back, saying it will express his feelings more deeply than he ever could. He kisses her on the head to say goodbye. Twice. But Boyd takes his attentions as signs of a damaged man from an alien culture grateful for the chance to express his thoughts to a governmental representative; she apparently never realizes that the poor sap was just trying to get in her panties. Still, not everything escapes her. “The general impression I was left with, after my conversations on the front porch of the Riverwood Inn,” she writes, “was that the locals do not expect much from their government; the biggest threat to their lives is drugs and not terrorists; and they want to maintain their frontier-like attitude of fierce independence.” Her conclusion about the threat of drugs is a bit puzzling, since she shrewdly pegs a couple of her friendly informants as dope growers, but the “fierce independence” bit certainly hits the mark. Boyd’s conclusion, after her night on the porch at the Riverwood and a next-morning conversation with Loreen Eliason, the Inn’s owner, was that Homeland Security needs to do a better job speaking these people’s language and addressing their true concerns. She reviews a bit of sociological theory before coming to the conclusion that Humboldt County, probably like many rural places, has a good deal of “bonding and bridging social capital” that the federal government can leverage in times of crisis, so long as citizens feel they are being heard. “To pierce through the Redwood Curtain, homeland security must become a local concern in order to start building the social capital that is required for a true culture of preparedness,” she concludes, sending a shiver up the spines of Williams all over the county. -- Hank Sims
Did Columbus discover America, or did America discover Columbus? Did Columbus meet Native Americans for the first time in 1492 when he sailed the ocean blue — an event marked, earlier this week, by Columbus Day — or did he meet two American Indians 15 years earlier, in Ireland? And did that meeting inspire him to make his voyages? That’s one of the contentions and suggestions that run counter to the history we think we know in this book by Jack D. Forbes, professor emeritus of Native American Studies and Anthropology at UC Davis. How did these Indians get to Galway Bay? Forbes marshals evidence to show that Natives of the North and South Americas had impressive maritime traditions and skills, and knowledge of the strong ocean currents that led to Ireland, among other places. They may have been following migrating American sea turtles there for centuries. Forbes mentions in particular the Red Paint People from Maine, who left evidence of their sea travels and culture in Norway and elsewhere. Native seafarers from the Caribbean and the East Coast of North America are most likely to have made it to Europe, by design or stormy accident, though Inuits probably got to Scandinavia and perhaps the British Isles. Forbes believes that tales of mermaids, mermen and “fin-folk” in Scotland and Ireland could be based on Inuits who wore the same skins as covered their kayaks, and seemed to be one with them. He cites evidence of Arctic culture in early England. Later on, before slaves were brought to America, Native Americans were taken to Europe as slaves. For a century or so after Columbus, there may have been more Indians in Europe and Africa than Europeans over here. Forbes suggests that over the centuries Native genes became part of the pool in Africa and all over western and eastern Europe. This book is not the only one that calls into question much conventional wisdom, from the actual age of humanity and the theory of migration from Asia to America across the Bering land bridge, to the idea that Native Americans were isolated and didn’t have seaworthy boats, including sails. Vine Deloria, Jr. is especially caustic on several of these topics in Red Earth, White Lies, for example. While Forbes is not as entertaining a writer as Deloria, he engages in careful and original scholarship, and brings a Native eye to what non-Natives miss in the available evidence. (There’s ethnicity in science, too, Deloria points out.) Much of the relevant evidence for any theory on these topics is often pretty scanty, and as I know from previous reading (like The First Americans, by Adovasio and Page) the state of actual knowledge about pre-history and early migration, as well as these aspects of history, is precarious and messy. And “established” conclusions are jealously guarded, not to be confused by new facts. So the best message from Forbes’ book for non-scholars may be: Don’t be too sure you know what you think you know. -- William S. Kowinski
The last time I saw Ricky Skaggs was inside one of those megachurches in Southern Nevada. And he was a very different Skaggs from the man on stage Sunday night in the Van Duzer, where he and his band, Kentucky Thunder, played with Bruce Hornsby. Back at the church, Skaggs was a little more cut-loose and personal. Picture it: Thousands of worshipers of either God or the banjo or both, sitting in the convention-style seating ready for the man on stage to rock them into a state of frenzied joy. If this was church, I remember thinking, I’m all in — except for the in-between-the-picking preaching sessions which, frankly, left me cold and a little bit itchy. Skaggs was in his element. He talked gently about his recently passed mother, poked fun at liberals, rapped about the good lord with the pastor and then transfered all that deep-set conviction and hearty love into wondrous, emotional renditions of solid-Skaggs warp-speed bluegrass and sad-porch-sessions fare. He was sometimes down-home rowdy, sometimes reflective and humble, and yet other times polished to a high, righteous gleam. The best, musically speaking. Sunday night at the Van Duzer, the personal Skaggs took a back seat to the teamplayer and industry professional Skaggs. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thing. Skaggs and Hornsby — a musical pairing that has some fans bitching, others marveling — presented a mature, oft-lilting, oft-jazzy blend of mountain funk meets sappy dark-pop melody. And in between songs, Skaggs shared snippets of bluegrass history. Skaggs opened the night with the entirely bluegrassy “How Mountain Girls Can Love,” and then they embarked on a dancehall-evoking tune that marked how the evening would progress: Hornsby verbally, before songs, appearing to defer to Skaggs, but Skaggs and the Thunder in fact following Hornsby’s lead at the piano. The effect was a muted Skaggs — and, unlike many people in the audience, I suspect, I was there for Skaggs, not Hornsby. About midway through the show, Skaggs observed sarcastically, making air quotes with his fingers, that this whole gig was supposedly “where I sing some of ‘Bruce’s songs’, and he sings some of ‘mine’ and — cheese-a-delic.” But, he seemed to imply, it was much more than that. And it was. Hornsby’s smooth style — though more raw, reaching for his Virginia roots, here — was an antidote to the usual frenetic, proselytizing energy and twangy lonesome of the Kentucky-born Skaggs. One moment they were ripping through a Bill Monroe classic like “Toy Heart” and the next they were soothing you with Hornsby’s “That’s Just the Way It Is,” just a little bit stanked up. First you were racing, exhilarated, to the top of a wild mountain for a good shout across the canyons, then you were dropping back down to the rolling foothills for a reflective ramble through a sepia-toned landscape. Too much bluegrass for too long of a duration can fray the nerves. Too much of the other stuff and you fall asleep — and then, praise be, for the bright, happy slap awake from Jim Mill’s banjo. Toward the end, however, Skaggs, Hornsby and the Thunder broke all molds by playing Rick James’ “Super Freak” — but let me tell you, the words “She’s a very kinky girl, the kind you won’t take home to mother” didn’t have half the effect at the Van Duzer as they did at Skaggs’ raffish get-down sesh at Central Christian in Las Vegas. -- Heidi Walters
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