Bicentennial memories

The American Revolution came early in Boston. 

By 1776, the action had moved south from Boston to Philadelphia. 

Boston was the hotbed of anti-tax, revolutionary fervor in the British colonies of North America. Boston was the problem child. Britain had to station troops in Boston, which brought public order while simultaneously exacerbating an angry public mood.  

We can relate. Consider the National Guard troops Trump sent to Minneapolis.

The Revolutionary War events we learned about in school preceded the Declaration of Independence. The Boston Massacre took place in 1770; the Boston Tea Party in 1773; Lexington and Concord's "shot heard round the world" took place in April,1775; George Washington took command of the Continental Army in July, 1775 on Cambridge Common.

I helped organize the celebration of the Bicentennial celebration. It was my first professional job after college and my one year of a Ph.D. program in history at Yale. I decided that the world would not change for the better because of the work of historians. I thought politics was the way to do it. 

My job at Boston's celebration of the bicentennial was a job in politics. I was hired by the office of the mayor of Boston, Kevin White. He hoped that a city in celebration would give him a  national reputation as a can-do, effective big-city mayor and a potential vice presidential pick in the 1976 or 1980 election.

The bicentennial programs avoided "rah-rah" flag-waving. It wasn't the mood. In Washington, D.C. Nixon was caught in the tar pit of his Watergate crimes and cover-up and Boston was experiencing ugly disorder in opposition to court-ordered busing to integrate schools in the racially-segregated neighborhoods of Boston and its nearby suburbs.

We staged a large exhibit in a newly-redeveloped Quincy Market, three huge century-old buildings converting from derelict into a vibrant "festival marketplace" crowded with shops, restaurants, and tourists. The years 1974 and 1975 were at the front end of that process. Our job was to bring people into the free exhibit and make sure they left exhilarated and ready to tell their friends and neighbors about the goings-on in the redeveloping city.

We used a prominently displayed Honeywell computer to tally the votes of people as they confronted several contemporary issues that closely mirrored issues that led to the revolution.

South Boston, October, 1974

-- We showed a brief movie of police attempting to control an unruly crowd, and then asked: Would you be part of, or at least be in agreement with, a crowd throwing rocks and snowballs at troops trying to maintain order? Or did you support the police? That situation depicted student protests five years prior and police trying to restrain crowds at anti-busing protests. Were we doing it today we might have shown anti-ICE demonstrations now. This was analogous to the Boston Massacre, when harassed British soldiers fired into a crowd.  

--  Would you protest a small, lawful tax by participating in a riotous takeover and destruction and looting of private property of merchants trying to obey the law and sell their goods? The exhibit showed then-contemporaneous vandalism. 

Today it might show organized shoplifting looters, feeling righteous anger over Lululemon selling leggings for $99. The looters consider the price ridiculous and unjust; the stores need to be sent a message. We see this on loops on Fox News. Bostonians who threw tea into Boston Harbor felt entitled and righteous, too. 

--  Would you support semi-organized local militias stockpiling guns and ammunition in a suburban warehouse, or would you be happy that lawful authorities travelled to the site to seize these items to protect public safety? That was the issue facing Bostonians surrounding the events at Lexington and Concord.

We showed a half-dozen scenes of then-contemporary controversies. What would YOU do? People marked their ballots, and they received a score: Which of ten prominent Bostonians were their responses most similar to. Sam Adams? John Hancock?  The exhibit was a hit because of the surprise factor and the controversy the exhibit created. Many people who presumed they were "patriots," i.e. on the side of the revolution, found that when the events were translated into contemporary events, they were instead on the side of law and order. 

I left Boston in the fall of 1975 to return to Medford, Oregon, and pursue my own, brief political career. The ethnic politics and endemic racism of Boston baffled me. I was a fish out of water there. 

Forty-five years later, in 2020, I watched rioters storm the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election. It looked like revolution to me; a coup d' état. I sided with the Capitol Police. President Trump called people storming the doors and windows to take direct action to install the government of their choice "patriots."

I think they were traitors to their country. Of course, so was Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Hancock, and the rest of the signers of the Declaration.

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Corruption: That was then. This is now.

I was in office in the Post-Watergate Era.

What Trump is doing would have been unthinkable.

I used to be young.

Sometimes I irritated my fellow commissioners

The 1976-1985 era was not some Golden Age of everybody-get-along. There was plenty of controversy. Amid the controversies, the era was characterized by a bend-over-backwards effort to demonstrate that government was free of corruption. It was a reaction to Watergate.

Jimmy Carter was famous for being corruption free. He kept his brother at arms length. He put his peanut business into a blind trust. He asked us for self-sacrifice by turning down our thermostats and driving 55 mph on roads engineered to be driven at 65 and 70. Appointees to the Carter administration were prohibited from doing the revolving door of leaving the administration and then getting a high-paying job in the industries one regulated. 

In the trenches of local government in Medford and Jackson County, Oregon, it mean obeying the Public Meetings Law, first passed in 1973, which involved a complex set of public notices of agendas, public disclosure, and requirements that all meetings among members of a majority of any public body be done in public, with recordings and written minutes  In a three-person governing body like the Jackson County Board of Commissioners, it meant that I could not talk with my colleague in the next office. 

There were reporters out there eager to bust our chops if they thought we did. In those days the news was a watchdog.

I won election in 1980 because I was the "clean government" candidate. My Republican opponent was a civic leader, very tight with the local business, labor, and governmental establishment. They loved him, his ads said. My campaign argued that I stayed clear of the special interests. 

It was an era of full disclosure of conflicts of interest and potential conflicts of interest. The county commission heard land use appeals to zoning and building issues directly, in public. At each hearing I would report in a flat, matter of fact tone, that I had received campaign contributions of $10 from Mr. John Doe, $20 from Mrs. Mary Roe, etc.   

At no point in four years as a commissioner, in which we were making land use and other regulatory decisions with enormous financial consequences for the people involved, did anyone every ask me to have lunch. No one bought me coffee to visit about their case. There was never the hint of a whiff of feeling out whether I was amenable to "giving a break" to someone on a decision. There is enormous latitude of gray area in making zoning decisions. Where land stopped being zoned "rural residential" and developable into five-acre parcels, and where it began being "agricultural open space" — a designation that prohibited parcelization and home building — had life-changing, million-dollar consequences for the landowner.

It wasn't that I communicated prickly ethical character. It was the era. It was the norm. Government was clean. The umpires were straight-arrow fair.

Trump has reversed the polarity of clean government. Corruption and favor-granting is open. Trump gives pardons to campaign contributors who are guilty of major felonies. Trump openly helps political allies and punishes political opponents. Trump awards contracts to friends, campaign contributors, and to family. He holds banquets to recognize people who purchased his crypto coin, a direct payment to Trump. He doesn't pretend a blind eye. He thanks them at a banquet to let them know their tribute is noticed. 

Newsweek

I am hopeful that Republican voters become uncomfortable with what Trump is doing. I see signs of it among some opinion leaders in the media, but not among Republican politicians; they dare not confront Trump. Politicians will change when Republican voters change, and it hasn't happened yet.

I am hopeful that Democrats nominate a leader noteworthy for his or her straight-arrow history. Someone who hasn't traded stocks in Congress. Someone who demonstrated some self-sacrifice and patriotism in his or her personal life. 

I am ready for the pendulum to swing back to clean government. It will happen only if voters demand change because they are offended by what they see right now. I am.

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Corruption beyond parody

"The best things in life are free
But you can keep 'em for the birds and bees
Now give me money (that's what I want)
That's what I want (that's what I want)
That's what I want, yeah (that's what I want)
That's what I want"
         Berry Gordy and Janie Bradford, 1959, covered by The Beatles, 1963

He's not hiding the grift. He's bragging about it.

No grift, no self-dealing, no outrage is too much.

I read the news today, oh boy. Trump's financial disclosure, released Tuesday, shows more than $1.4 billion in crypto income for 2025: $635 million from selling his own meme coin, over $594 million from World Liberty Financial, the venture he runs with his sons, and $196 million more from cashing out a stablecoin company. Trump's trusting fans, the investors who bought the meme coin at launch have mostly been wiped out — it peaked near $74 and now trades around $1.68.

Then there's the pardon. Changpeng Zhao, who built Binance into the world's largest crypto exchange, pleaded guilty to money laundering violations, paid a $4 billion fine, and served 
four months. Around the same time, an Abu Dhabi state fund put $2 billion into Binance — paid in a stablecoin issued by World Liberty Financial, the Trump family's crypto company. Zhao received a full, unconditional pardon from Trump. Republicans in the House and Senate could cry foul. They don't.

 The Wall Street Journal notices

Don Jr. and Eric Trump bought into a shell company that merged with a stake in a tungsten mine in Kazakhstan — a deal that surfaced right after Kazakhstan's president met with their father, backed by $1.6 billion in U.S. government support. Separately, they're behind Powerus, a drone company founded about a year ago that landed a Pentagon contract and is now pitching interceptor drones to Gulf states under fire from Iran.

The Trump Organization has more than twenty foreign developments in the pipeline. In Vietnam, farmers were pushed off their land to clear space for a Trump resort. In Serbia, the government fast-tracked a Trump Tower in Belgrade developed by Jared Kushner using emergency procedures that got the country's culture minister arrested. Licensing fees from the UAE alone topped $20 million in the latest filing. None of this requires imagination. It's in the disclosures.

Qatar gave Trump a Boeing 747-8 worth roughly $400 million, and as of today it's flying as Air Force One. The Constitution has an Emoluments Clause: Foreign governments cannot hand gifts to a sitting president. The administration's answer was to donate it to the Air Force on paper and note that Trump gets to keep it for his library when he's done.

Teapot Dome cost a cabinet secretary his freedom. Nixon's slush fund was a few hundred thousand dollars and the cover-up ended a presidency. Grant's cronies skimmed whiskey tax revenue, and seventh graders learned about this blot on Grant's record in Mr. Graves' history class a century later. This was wrongdoing, disreputable. The public knew it as such, so the men involved tried to hide it. 

What's different now isn't just the size, though the size is staggering. What's different is that nobody is hiding anything. The crypto income is on an official disclosure form. The pardon was announced from the White House. The mine deal, the drone contracts, the foreign towers — reported in real time, defended on camera, shrugged off by a Republican Congress that has decided this is simply how the man does business.

Openness and shamelessness isn't innocence. It is the opposite. It reveals both the brazen corruption of Trump, and the corrupt standards of the people who could put a stop to it by threatening impeachment -- but who are silent. As few as five Republican House members could join Democrats and make an impeachment a reality. Impeachment sends a message to Trump and the public that this is wrong. It is the power Congress has that would get through to Trump that this corruption is wrong, unacceptable, un-American.  And that we are better than this.

But we aren't. There won't be any consequences from Republicans who speak up, and Trump knows it. They are more afraid of him than they are of the damage to the country and the judgment of history.

Schoolchildren are watching and learning.

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Farm irrigation: I love it when things work.

Feel free to skip this post.

It isn't about politics. It isn't even about my vineyard. 

It is about the little problems farmers encounter. And their quiet pleasure when thing work as they should.

It is about the pleasant sounds of an irrigation system. 

Medford, Oregon has a Mediterranean climate. We have cool wet winters. That means that there is a green lushness to the local plants. But then we have a hot, dry summer. The lush plants expect and need water. It takes irrigation.

I liken irrigating to a father bottle-feeding his infant. A farmer is the caretaker for vulnerable plants and I get the same feelings of nurturing that I felt about settling down and feeding my hungry infant. I am a caregiver and nurturer.

Sometimes the baby is fussing for some reason other than hunger. That is why there is a sense of relief when giving the baby a bottle and sucking starts. The baby is happy; problem solved. You don't always know. Sometimes it's something else, something unknown, and the baby stays fussy.

Irrigation systems have many points of potential failure. There could be a lack of water at the water source. The water there could be gritty or have plant material, and when pumped, it fouls  the lines. The foot valve -- the part of the irrigation line in the water -- may have problems being fully submerged when it is in a shallow ditch, and therefore draw air. The pump motor may not start, or keep working when started. There may be leaks at the joints of the distribution line. The sprinkler heads may be stuck in an open or closed position for some reason. The sprinkler heads may be fouled by grit sucked up from the ditch. The spray from the sprinkler heads may not cover the ground needing irrigation.  

And this litany of problems starts with a premise that one has all the water rights and other legal requirements, including the right to pump that water, the right to pump it from the place you want to pump it, the right to access that place, the right to put that water where you want to irrigate, and the ability to measure and report what you are pumping, if required, and the ability to show that that water came from flowing water, which you can use, not ground water, which you cannot. (Those issues are all fine for me, so I ignored them in listing points of failure, but they are big, big deal-killers for lots of farmers.)

Yesterday's irrigation was as good as it gets. My pump is in a good spot, with ample water, and the foot value is secured under water by a rock that holds it down. The water is clear of silt and debris. The distribution lines have little leaks at the joints, but they are minor and unimportant. I am running ten sprinkler heads, which cover the ground I want to irrigate. I moved the pipes 50 feet across the field from where I had irrigated the day prior, and everything moved and reattached easily. My nephew poured ethanol-free gasoline into the tank without incident. He pulled the starter cord exactly once. Once! (I love this Honda pump.) The Honda motor started, making the choked-engine sound as it ran. After two seconds my nephew moved the choke lever from ON to OFF, and the engine sped up and made the everything-running-great humming sound it makes while the pipes fill up. After 30 seconds the line filed up, the seals on the pipe closed, the sprinkler heads started spraying water. There was now pressure against the pump so the pump motor sound adjusted again. This time it made the all-pressured-up-everything-working-routinely sound.

If this always worked so perfectly , there would be no sense of relief. This time everything worked.

I have two short videos, each about seven seconds. The first is what a happy pump sounds like. Hummmmmmmmmmmmm. It is a nice sound, an everything-is-OK sound.  Enjoy.

Click Here: YouTube

The second video captures what sprinkler heads sound like as they go chi, chi, chi, chi, chi, chi. The pump motor is audible faintly about 200 yards away.

Click Here: YouTube

Feeding my infant son was one of the quiet, simple pleasures in my life. That experience is gone, but new ones arise in their place.

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Take their oil. What could go wrong with that?

Trump, 2016: We should have taken Iraq's oil.

Trump, 2026: We took Venezuela's oil.

Trump, 2026: We should take Iran's oil.

The USA has a long history of interfering with other countries domestic politics for the purpose of securing resources. Sometimes bananas. Sometimes pineapples. For the last hundred years, oil.

We say we are in it for the "democracy." That is the excuse and cover story. We want the resource. 

Jack Mullen has a theme to his guest posts: The foreign policy problems facing the USA today have roots in our forcing regime change in small countries to secure a resource. We don't care about "democracy" there, or a nation's leader who prioritizes the interests of his own people. In fact, that is a negative. We want countries whose leaders exploit their own people so we can enjoy their resources on good terms for us. 

Jack Mullen attended Medford, Oregon, schools, then the U. of Oregon. He worked beside me in local orchards during high school, and we worked together in the congressional office of Jim Weaver (D) in the 1970s. As a student he read history and still does. Jack is retired and lives in Washington, D.C. where he and his wife recently examined the reflecting pools.

Mullen

Mullen, at the reflecting pool this week

Guest Post by Jack Mullen

Significant presidential decisions

Ken Burns views the American Revolution as the most significant event in world history since the birth of Christ. The Revolution established a radical experiment in democracy. Strong headwinds plague 250 years of this radical experiment in self-governance.

The Industrial Revolution, with the rise of the modern petroleum industry, became a stress test for the viability of certain democracies. Mexico survived the stress test petroleum played in confronting its democracy. Iran did not.

The role the United States government played in Mexico and Iran's efforts to control their own natural resources is telling.

FDR and Mexico

A major consequence of the Mexican Revolution was a provision in the 1917 Mexican Constitution that asserted Mexican ownership of all "subsoil," including any natural resources discovered below the ground, which included oil.

Mexico became the world's second-largest producer of oil in the 1920s. Most of the oil produced in Mexico was exported to the world market with oil companies keeping most of their profits. The fact that the oil companies paid Mexican workers half of what they paid other workers in the same capacity led to the inevitable resentment that caused President Lazaro Cardenas, on March 18, 1938, to nationalize Mexican oil.

The U.S. oil industry was livid. So was Secretary of State Cordell Hull.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt, consulting with his cabinet, sided with his Treasury Secretary, Henry Morgenthau, in allowing Mexico to nationalize its oil.

Roosevelt and Morgenthau felt it best to keep warm relations with Mexico. After all, Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy was in effect. As a Good Neighbor, the United States did not oppose Mexico's expropriation of foreign oil.

Mexico kept its end of the bargain of being a good neighbor by paying a $29 million compensation to American oil firms. The United States avoided its penchant for invading Mexico.

Every March 18, Mexico celebrates Oil Expropriation Day.

Truman, Eisenhower, and Iran

The 60-year D'Arcy Concession had granted the British one-sided control over Iran's oil. Both houses of the Iranian Parliament took the opportunity to claim control of oil within its borders and, in March 1951, voted to nationalize all its oil — not unlike Mexico in 1938.

British Petroleum (BP) met with President Truman to seek help in overthrowing the government of Iran. Prime Minister Churchill wanted America's help in forestalling the dwindling power of the British Empire wherever he could, especially in Iran, which bordered an expansionist Soviet Union.

Iran's Prime Minister, Dr. Mohammed Mosaddegh, came to the U.S. in October 1951 to make Iran's case before the United Nations and appeal to the American public.

Mosaddegh first stopped in New York to deliver a speech to the United Nations, then moved to Philadelphia. The Iranian prime minister addressed the American public in a speech, symbolically, in front of Independence Hall. In part, he spoke with an eloquence similar to what an American president expressed in defense of his country's commitment to its young democracy 90 miles away, in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania:

"If my contrast of your own abundant freedom with our shackled liberties is touched by envy, it is because we share with you a love of liberty and because we have been less fortunate than you in wrestling our prized freedom from that country which in 1776 had to yield it to you."

After the speech, Prime Minister Mosaddegh walked over to touch the Liberty Bell. The next day he was to meet with President Truman at Blair House (the White House renovation was not yet complete).

The world emerging from World War II was a world of a rising Soviet Union along with nations yearning to toss off the yoke of their imperialistic masters. Under the circumstances in these changing times, Harry Truman met with Mohammed Mosaddegh on October 23, 1951. The meeting resulted in the United States taking a stance of neutrality with regard to the differences between Iran and the United Kingdom. While not the total win Iranians craved, Mosaddegh, for his efforts, became a hero in the Persian world and beyond.

Presidential elections matter. With Truman soon out of office, the arduous diplomatic efforts of the Truman administration's chief diplomat, Averell Harriman, to settle differences between the UK and Iran, were quickly tossed aside by the Eisenhower administration. The British Petroleum Company found favor with President Eisenhower along with his Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Allen Dulles, the new director of the CIA.

Swayed by the British arguments, in August 1953, the CIA, coupled with British intelligence, orchestrated a coup that toppled Iran's democratically elected government and sent Dr. Mosaddegh to prison for three years.

With Mosaddegh sent away, and with the help of the United States and the United Kingdom, the Pahlavi dynasty, founded in 1925 by Reza Shah Pahlavi, returned Reza's son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to power as the Shah. The new Shah proceeded to establish the Bureau for Intelligence and Security for the Imperial State (SAVAK). Censorship of the media began. The Shah's reign lasted until his overthrow in 1979 by the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Consistency in United States foreign policy, and democracy's forward march, often become bogged in the smog of oil.

 

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Iran and Vietnam: A president needs to save face.

You fasten all the triggers
For the others to fire
Then you sit back and watch
While the death count gets higher
          Bob Dylan, "Masters of War," 1963

March, 2026: Trump: we will leave "in two to three weeks."

April, 2026: Trump: we will leave "pretty quickly."

May, 2026: Trump: we are willing to wait "a few days."

June, 2026: Trump says "very soon."

Trump wants a way out of the Iran war that doesn't look like losing. 

Trump is scrambling. The polls are bad. Gas prices are high. Republicans expect to lose the House, even with all the gerrymanders. Senate Majority Leader John Thune cannot round up 50 Republican votes to meet Trump's demands. The war that was supposed to be quick, decisive, and glorious has become a political liability.

The strategic goals of the war — regime change, elimination of Iran's nuclear program, end to support of regional proxies — are unmet. The regime is still in place, with younger leadership and a fresh sense of national grievance. Their nuclear ambitions remain, only now inspections are a matter of negotiations. And Iran has acquired something more dangerous than a bomb: control of the Strait of Hormuz. Before February 28, the strait was an international waterway. Now it isn't. Iran can threaten the flow of oil the world needs. Countries that depend on it are seeking side deals. The goalposts have shifted so much that now we are negotiating to try to keep the strait from becoming a toll road for Iran. 

This war may bring regime change -- at the U.S. Iran can flip the power balance in the U.S. House by what they can do to the price of gasoline and the mood of the stock market. This war gave Iran "the cards."

Today's Wall Street Journal

So the war continues. Not because we can turn this into a win, but because Trump needs a formula that lets him say we won. He cannot pretend we won if Iran keeps shooting at ships and lobbing missiles into the oil kingdoms of the Gulf. We are supposed to protect them and their fragile, exposed economies, but we have shown we cannot. The oil kingdoms can protect themselves, though, by making nice with Iran and demanding we remove our regional military bases. 

This war is a loser, but the war continues.

I've seen this before.

In 1971 I was in my last year of college. My student deferment was expiring. When I graduated, I would be eligible to be drafted and sent to Vietnam.

My lottery number was 202. The army estimated that it would need to call up the first 195 numbers, unless something came up and they needed more. I was seven numbers from a war that Nixon and Kissinger had concluded could not be won. I didn't know that then. I thought they thought we were fighting for principles of democracy and anti-communism. I thought our leaders were sincere, but wrong. They weren't. The tapes and diaries that were revealed after their terms of office showed that they were cynical, selfish, and immoral. They were fighting to win an election. American lives were just the price to pay to avoid Nixon having to admit the war was pointless.

Here is what Nixon and Kissinger knew, and said to each other privately:

They said the war was unwinnable. Soldiers would be sent there, some would die, but the outcome was already determined. The Pentagon, State Department, and CIA had told them that even after Vietnamization — the plan to train the South Vietnamese to defend themselves — Saigon would not survive without U.S. combat support. Leaving meant losing. Our military was going to leave as soon as it could do it without endangering the 1972 re-election. Nixon wanted to claim "peace with honor." Since it couldn't, it needed to wait until the re-election was safely squared away. Then admit reality.

On December 21, 1970, White House Chief of Staff H.R. Haldeman recorded in his diary that Kissinger "argues against a commitment that early to withdraw all combat troops, because he feels that if we pull them out by the end of '71, trouble can start mounting in '72 that we won't be able to deal with, and which we'll have to answer for at the elections."

On March 19, 1971 — the year I would have been drafted — Kissinger told Nixon on tape: "We can't have it knocked over — brutally — to put it brutally — before the election." Nixon's response: "That's right."

On August 3, 1972, Kissinger told the president: "We've got to find some formula that holds the thing together a year or two, after which — after a year, Mr. President, Vietnam will be a backwater."

They called it a "decent interval." A face-saving delay between when American troops came home and when the communists took over — long enough that Nixon wouldn't have to own the loss before Election Day.

What they did not discuss, in any of those conversations, was what it meant for the men who would fight and die in the interval. Miller Center of Public Affairs historian Ken Hughes, who spent decades on the Nixon tapes, noted this specifically: "Neither man mentioned the additional losses that prolonging the war would cause — there is nothing about what it meant to American POWs in the North, American soldiers in the South, or the Vietnamese on either side."

More than 20,000 Americans died during Nixon's first term. 

Trump is now doing a version of what Nixon did. He is carrying on a war with a strategic outcome baked in, willing to accept any "deal" so long as it gets us out of there, with the stock market happy and gasoline prices down. Karl Rove wrote about it frankly in a Wall Street Journal column on Sunday: We are settling for a very bad deal because we want out at any cost. When Trump loses Karl Rove and The Wall Street Journal, all that is left is pretense and the politics of the midterm elections. 

Young Americans are in harm's way while a president worries about how to avoid embarrassment while pretending there is some higher purpose for the war. A decade from now, lives lost, money spent, diaries and documents and tell-all memoirs by aides will reveal that it was all done for the self-serving political goals of the president. I have seen this movie.

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Easy Sunday: Baby grapes

 I scared people with this photo a week ago.

The photo wasn't staged or cherry-picked. It was me at 11:29 a.m. on a day that was already heating up. I had been working in the vineyard, putting floppy, unruly vines in between wires that shaped the plant into a narrow, vertical one. I had been out there for about five hours by then. I was quitting for the day.

People called and texted me and said I looked "terrible." One said I looked like "death warmed over," a phrase I hadn't heard for decades. Their point was that I needed to take it easier.  

Here I am five days ago, also at end-of-day, at 11:23 a.m. I am doing the same job, but going through the vineyard now on a second pass through. It is lighter work now that the job is dealing with only the previous week's growth. I think I look OK, i.e., not killing myself.

Yesterday I took photos of the grapes in progress, photos to create a record and for analysis by the vineyard operators at Valley View Vineyards, who have been supervising my vineyard from the beginning. 

Each variety of grape plant is different in the vigor of the plant, the natural shape of the vines, the shape of the leaves, the shape of the canes, and the size of the grapes and how big the harvest.

The varieties are on different clocks, too. Pinot Noirs bud out and blossom early; Cabernet Sauvignons are about three weeks later. Malbecs are in the middle. The frosts we had in April damaged the Pinots and Malbecs, because their buds were out and vulnerable. The Cabernets were still dormant and apparently unaffected.  Toward the season's end, I picked an exploratory crop of Pinots on October 6 -- enough for Valley View Vineyards to buy on spec to ferment, barrel, and age for a year to see whether 100 percent pumice-grown conditions are as good for grapes as they are for melons. These are Pinots:

There were negligible Cabernets to pick in that third year. But my Malbecs were advanced and they bear a heavy crop; it was going to be a giant harvest even this first harvest-year for the vineyard -- except the starlings which had not noticed my Pinots discovered my Malbecs and ate the entire crop in two days, just before we planned the harvest. I will put up nets this year, another expense and bother.

This is what Pinot Noir grapes looked like yesterday, June 27.

The Pinot Noir vines are vigorous -- if anything, too vigorous. I am avoiding watering my grapes to try to keep the vine growth manageable. The roots are finding the water and nutrients they need without my help.

My Malbec vines shown below are even more vigorous, again without fertilizer or water. The giant growth we see in the new floppy canes has all taken place in the last week. My nephew, Liam Flenniken, who is helping me all summer, is six feet, three inches. These canes have grown out of the top pair of wires at five feet off the ground, and need to be clipped so they don't flop over and shade the plant. It will be fast work, but there is a lot of it, because every plant in the two acres planted to Malbecs looks like these. 

Liam and I decided to take Sunday off. We will get to the Malbecs and Cabernets next week. Then back to the Pinots, which we just finished. The work continues all summer.

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