Elf Sternberg

As I've said before, I'm a firm believer in the red state / blue state dichotomy when it comes to marriage. As eminently described by Jonathan Rauch, the dichotomy is simple:

Red State values are predicated on two assumptions: (1) sex almost always causes babies, and (2) by applying himself, a man can get ahead in this world. The red state response to this environment is to create an idea: Marriage creates adults; that is, since sex causes babies and young people want sex, get them married, get them making children, and get them into the pipeline of providing and raising, i.e. get them into work and motherhood, those ennobling roles for men and women.

Blue State values are predicated on a different set of assumptions: (1) sex doesn't have to create babies at all, and (2) no amount of get-r-done is enough if you don't have the years of education necessary to operate the machinery of a technologically advanced civilization. The response to this is adults create marriages: that is, the task of maturation is a societal and educational one, and once twenty-something have earned the material and social capital necessary to have a stable life, then they can go about having children, often in a multi-disciplinary, shared-responsibilities way.

Early family formation short-circuits this maturation process. Taking on the responsibilities for young children interferes with the education necessary, and consigns those who have young children to the lower rungs of the socioeconomic ladder.

My favorite take on this for a long time was Catholic writer Philip Primeau's hand-wringing article about how, yes, he had to admit, blue states not only hewed to their own values successfully, they hewed to red state's values of longer marriages, lower teenage birthrates, lower teenage STD infections, and lower rates of poverty among young adults more successfully than red states did! (Primeau goes on to claim that blue state success is predicated on the "unimaginable tragedy of abortion," but somehow fails to mention that most red states have rates similar to blue states.)

But Ross Douthat may have passed Primeau with his new article, The Imitation of Marriage. Ross admits that the pattern of shared responsibilities, egalitarian roles, longer romantic experimentation, and delayed families will become the norm. Blue state marriages "prepare [young adults] for knowledge work in ways that working class family life do not."

Douthat then whines that this wrecking of the social underpinnings of masculine identity, this creative destruction of the stern paterfamilias, has left a lot of men bereft, and they have reaped "relatively little reward" for doing so.

But what really takes the cake is this:

We may have a culture in which the working class is encouraged to imitate what are sold as key upper-class values — sexual permissiveness and self-fashioning, spirituality and emotivism — when really the upper class is also held together by a kind of secret traditionalism, without whose binding power family life ends up coming apart even faster.

Conspiracies are the refuge of the weak-minded.

I mean, seriously, what he's proposing here is, first, a kind of post-Marxian, post-modern "false consciousness," the classic accusation that secularists and liberals "steal" their moral underpinnings from conservative and Christian America, and that liberals know that if their stated values were to become the norm, America would fall apart. Secondly, he accuses upper-class liberals of, consciously or not, wrecking the lower classes by promulgating their attitudes toward sexuality without a clean and compelling explanation of why or how those attitudes work.

Douthat is edging dangerously close to saying "Democracy doesn't work." As conservative writer Irving Kristol once famously said,

There are different kinds of truths for different kinds of people. There are truths appropriate for children; truths that are appropriate for students; truths that are appropriate for educated adults; and truths that are appropriate for highly educated adults, and the notion that there should be one set of truths available to everyone is a modern democratic fallacy. It doesn't work.

Douthat is claiming that there are different truths about sex and the technocratic society, and the idea that "liberal" truths should also be true for the common masses is, to Ross, a dangerous experiment.

In fact, what's really failing is the way red states don't keep up; they attempt to mire kids in the red state pattern all the while admitting that there is a different way, a more vibrant way, an urban and liberal way. It's the red states, with their abstinence-only programs and their outright bans on easily accessible birth control, that continue to fail their young adults.

Still, it's nice to see Ross admit that the blue state ideal of marriage works, if only for some people. It'll be even better whet he finally admits that there is no alternative, that the red states have been poisoning their own wells of economic power, and that the blue states are doing all right all along.

The Drive

Omaha and I had arranged to go mountain biking for our anniversary. We love camping and mountain biking, and the weather had finally decided to be kind and give us a sunny weekend. That whole "we lied about how bad the weather is in Seattle?" We lied again: the weather here has been awful. Only last weekend did it warm up enough, and provide enough sun, to be called "Spring." Otherwise, it's Junuary.

Our trip was supposed to be over two days, but Omaha caught Kouryou-chan's cold from the week before and it was only Saturday morning that she was over it enough to go. We had packed most of our stuff Friday evening in the hopes her cold would fade, and Saturday we went for it.

The ferry ride over was fun, although the bomb-sniffing dog that circled my car wasn't too reassuring.

We drove through Bainbridge, and the drive was fine except for the Hood Canal bridge being open, which delayed us about half an hour. As we got closer and closer to our destination-- a little wild resort area halfway between Port Angeles and Forks, the setting for Stephanie Meyer's execrable Twilight series, the tourism got more annoying: "Welcome Twilight Fans!" read one motel sign. A diner promised "Bella Eats Here! We have Bloodshakes and Werewolf Fries!"

We passed by some unlikely sights. A prefab hut, little more than a ship's container with a door and an external HVAC, in the middle of an unpaved plot of scragland, advertised "XXX Movies! Magazines! Novelties! Firewood!" Sure enough, in front of it were dozens of small piles of firewood, ready for camping. Another was "Maria's Mexican Restaurant" with a small billboard outside reading "Check out our German dishes!"

We passed by another set of small signs, "Foresters plant trees / for future generations / to have wood products / and fine recreation!" But there was no "Burma Shave" at the end. I felt so disappointed.

The Ride

We reached the trailhead about 1:00pm, and headed out. At first, we weren't convinced it was the trail. It didn't look like a railbed, it looked like a technical-2 single-track with some mud. Easy stuff. It got harder, with rocks, and then it got to Crescent Lake, where the trail was at times narrow and edging up to the lakeside, sometimes high, sometimes low, and often with a steep fall to the water.

At one point, we stopped to get water and all these pretty blue moths swirled around us. They really loved our gloves, for some reason, lighting on both my blue and Omaha's grey; I'm not sure what in the gloves was so damn attractive, but it was very strange. (Bonus photo: Blue-white moths on Omaha's glove.)

We rode about four miles when we reached the actual railbed, which had been paved with bicycle-friendly rubber-recycle pave. We were advised not to take the dirt road that paralleled it, as the bridge was out. We later saw that bridge, and sure enough it was unfinished.

We stopped twice to talk with hikers along the way. One couple was from the area, told us about which road to take after the bridge-out, and generally were very kind with their information. I asked if he was embarrassed about the Twilight stuff. He shrugged. "I have a vampire slide in presentations I give," he said, telling me he sold nutritional supplements. "We joke about it. Hey, they're tourists, they bring money."

After four more miles, we decided to head back. That was the easy part, as we'd been going uphill almost the entire way. I just coasted back to the place where the railbed ended and the rough trail began. Omaha and I plunged back into the woods, and soon we found ourselves lakeside again.

Over the Edge

As we rode along a particularly tricky part, the trail narrowed at a place about 6 meters above the lake, with a 60° slope of sharp, broken shale going down to the water. A large rock from the slope above had fallen into the trail, and I decided I had more room to the right, closer to the water.

Maybe, but not enough. I hesitated going around the rock, the front tire lost traction. I knew already the bike was going to go so I tried to leap off, but already the back tire had caught up and was also slipping down the hill. I went over.

I fell maybe two meters and landed on my shins, screaming the whole way down. I tumbled once, hitting my right shoulder, then slid down on my backside, feet-first, stopping only when one shoe hit the water. Then the bicycle hit me in the back of the head, went over me, and sailed into the lake.

I lay there, surprised to be fully conscious, and did an assessment. Arms worked. Thumbs and fingers moved without noticeable pain. The legs, too.

I stood up.

Another couple, hikers, had seen the accident and come running to help. "Your bike! It's going down."

I turned and grabbed it. By this time I was so pleased at being relatively uninjured that I just picked it up, put it onto dry land, grabbed the water bottle and took a swig.

Omaha was not amused. She yelled at me that I was being an idiot for rescuing my bike, for not paying attention to the profuse bleeding on my left knee, and in general for going around the wrong side of the rock, all the while she was picking her way down the cliff-side to join me.

With much bickering, I convinced her to hand the bike up to the couple at the top of the ridge, then we both climbed up, using a tree a few meters south of where I'd fallen as support. She wanted to leave the bike lakeside until she was sure I was fine.

I wasn't that fine. A follow-up assessment was that I had lacerations and abrasions on both shins, on my ass (can Elf legitimately write, "Damn, my ass hurts so much this week" without the audience getting the wrong impression?) right where buttocks meet thighs, and my right arm. And contusions just about everywhere. The worst was the left knee, where I had a deep cut bleeding quite a bit.

Even scarier, when we looked at my helmet: a seven-centimeter gash right at the back of the skull, about a half-cm deep. That could have been my head. Always ride with a helmet, kids.

We cleaned the wounds and bandaged me up with the first-aid kit, applying butterflies and "fingertip" bandages for ad-hock butterflies to the knee, and gauze-and-tape to the abrasions. Then we kept riding.

We saw this awesome cave mouth on the way back. A closer inspection revealed that it wasn't a natural formation, but a raw tunnel built back during World War I in order to connect a rail line that brought timber down from the northern edge of the Olympic Peninsula. It was never finished.

Although I was aching and sore, we pushed on, completing the last two miles of the trip, and made it back to the trailhead where we had parked the car.

And so, to eat and sleep

We packed up and headed down to the Elwha campground, where we set up our new two-person tent. We put down the footprint-- a layer of plastic meant to protect the tent proper from sharp rocks-- and then set up the framework before adding the tent body. After struggling to match the instructions with the actual work, Omaha looked inside to see if maybe we'd assembled it upside down. "Elf? Where's the floor?"

I looked. There was no floor. We looked twice before realizing we'd assembled the rainfly, not the tent. A quick disassembly and we were back in business, this time with a proper tent, an assembled rainfly. The tent was nice, an REI half-dome that I paid extra for, but it had been worth it: this tent has two egresses, one for each occupant.

The campsite was lined with wild raspberries, all of which were too unripe to eat.

I fetched firewood and Omaha set up the fire, and then we assembled our dinner: Chicken Foil, or Hobo Chicken, which is basically raw boneless chicken, a handful of vegetables, a handful of sliced potatoes, and some milk or cream soup, packed into a watertight foil packet, shaken, and cooked in a fire. Delicious.

We cleaned up. There were signs everywhere that this was bear country. I replaced straining bandages, especially the ones on my high-traffic knee that kept pulling at my leg hairs (ouch!), sponged-bathed off all the blood, and then we went to bed. By then, everything had scabbed over. It looked like I would live.

I must have fallen asleep almost instantly.