The old truck on the road to Mount Hope, (2014)
A (brief) pit stop for an overdue surgery
The most difficult transition I’ve ever experienced is that from being an active, competitive athlete (football, swimming, tennis) to becoming a writer. It happened suddenly, under the lights on a frozen field in Pullman— a long, arching spiral that seemed to hang in the cold air for an eternity before being snatched by a leaping receiver who, unfortunately, was playing for the other team. Game over. We’d played well enough to win but didn’t. Nothing to be ashamed about. But that was it—the end of the last formally organized athletic event I’d been involved in since I became a gym rat when I was five years old.
Still. I played in pickup games until my mid-fifties and lived the dream of throwing touchdown passes to my son. I could still run then. On Sunday mornings we played with dear friends on a field in Vinegar Flats in the Latah Creek valley—alternating between touch football and ultimate frisbee.
It was in a frisbee match, thirteen years ago, that I tore the meniscus in my right knee. I was fitted with an enormous, metal & velcro knee brace—to try to offset the unwelcome tilt in the knee structure that has always been there—and tried to continue and did until it just became too painful. It was hard to let go. The men and women I got to play with and against in our Sunday morning contests are just some of the funniest, kindest, most interesting people I’ve gotten to know.
Football in the snow at Vinegar Flats (2010) with some of Spokane’s finest. That’s my beloved son, Devin, in the helmet over my left shoulder
When I could no longer run, I kept my football cleats, because I’m peculiar that way. Fortunately they were in the trunk during the one of the Beautiful Wounds misadventures—on a late winter day, when the car got high-centered on icy, drifted snow on a steep, primative road in the Drumheller Channels north of Othello. I stripped the laces from the cleats to re-attach the crumpled under-shielding. I like the poetry of that—keepsakes from a former life used to rescue the present. It reminded me of the day, in high school, when I discovered my mom had tucked a small crucifix into the lining of my shoulder pads.
—-As I write this, there’s an ice pack on my right knee.
A year ago, I sat with my physician’s assistant, Brian, as he looked at a new x-ray. I knew I was bone on bone in the knee. I could feel that.
What do you see? I asked.
“You’re at a four,” he replied.
“What’s that mean?” I asked.
He looked me square in the eyes. With a tight, empathetic smile he replied, “there is no five.”
The joint is now bone-on-bone and has markedly deteriorated in the last year, complicated by severe arthritis. It is scheduled to be replaced with a sturdy metal, ceramic and plastic device on Monday of next week. My wonderful ex-wife, Connie, is coming from her new home in Florida to help me out, as are both our endearing offspring—Audrey from Portland, and Devin from Denver. The recovery will take weeks but (as you’d expect) will be especially intense in the first few weeks. So, yes, today’s housekeeping message is that my writing schedule for The Daily Rhubarb will be sporadic for a few weeks as I focus on physical therapy and recovery.
On one hand, I’m blessed by the timing. I got as much out of my crooked knee as I could under the circumstances. It could have been much worse given some of the precarious ground (i.e. countless miles hiking and climbing on fractured basalt) I traverse doing nature photography.
On the other hand—in the world beyond my injuries, and the usual social and professional challenges—there is a tsunami of chaos and purposeful destruction underway in our politics and governance. In my lifetime, the stakes have never been higher, and that includes Vietnam, Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination and Watergate. I’m highly motivated to bear witness to what we’re enduring and continue to write about it. In a large way, that’s what I’m here for and what people have reasons to expect from me.
Face-off between Trump protestors and MAGA faithful on north Division Street in early April
A week ago, Monday, veteran CBS journalist Scott Pelley—of 60 Minutes fame—delivered an emotional commencement address at Wake Forest University. I didn’t learn about it until this week, as it deservedly gathered more and more attention. It’s a powerful speech and Pelley does what journalists should do in times like these—which is to give context and meaning to actions that may otherwise seem unrelated and less harmful than they are in sum.
This is part of what he said:
As a reporter, I have learned to respect opinions. Reasonable people can differ about the life of our country. America works well when we listen to those with whom we disagree and when we listen and when we have common ground and we compromise. And one thing we can all agree on – one thing at least – is that America is at her best when everyone is included.
To move forward, we debate, not demonize. We discuss, not destroy. But in this moment – this moment, this morning – our sacred rule of law is under attack. Journalism is under attack. Universities are under attack. Freedom of speech is under attack. An insidious fear is reaching through our schools, our businesses, our homes and into our private thoughts. The fear to speak. In America? If our government is – in Lincoln’s words – “of the people, by the people and for the people” – then why are we afraid to speak?
The Wake Forest Class of 1861 did not choose their time of calling. The Class of 1941 did not choose. The Class of 1968 did not choose. History chose them. And now history is calling you, the Class of 2025. You may not feel prepared, but you are. You are not descended of fearful people. You brought your values to school with you and now Wake Forest has trained you to seek the truth, to find the meaning of life.
Pelley delivered his address with a passion that amplified his words. Edward R. Murrow would be proud. There are millions in the MAGA/TRUMP movement who excuse Trump’s vulgarity, cruelties and braggadocio as just “owning the libs.” But it’s not just the libs whom Trump seeks to own. It’s all of us, and he’s using the expanded powers of his immunity (thanks to the Supreme Court’s 2024 decision in Trump v. U.S.) and Congressional obeisance to close the deal.
That leads to one last recommendation, before I sign off for a few days. It’s Adam Serwer’s latest piece in the The Atlantic. I quote Serwer often, as he was among the first to alert us—nearly a decade ago—to the depth of harm that Trump and his movement would do, not just to our politics but to the malleable moral fabric of our society. His piece is entitled The New Dark Age, The Trump administration has launched an attack on knowledge itself.
This is the opening paragraph:
The warlords who sacked Rome did not intend to doom Western Europe to centuries of ignorance. It was not a foreseeable consequence of their actions. The same cannot be said of the sweeping attack on human knowledge and progress that the Trump administration is now undertaking—a deliberate destruction of education, science, and history, conducted with a fanaticism that recalls the Dark Ages that followed Rome’s fall.
This is, by no measure “Trump derangement syndrome.” As usual Serwer shows the math, in a piece close to 4,000 words in length. The examples—including the actions and the justifications offered for the budget cuts, firings, and legal attacks—are broad and indisputable. In my May 23rd post, I used the example of the dramatic cuts to climate change research—cuts the White House justified as “ending woke science spending.” To which Serwer adds this bon mot from his notes—that a climate change research grant awarded to Princeton was severed last month for fear the results would give children “climate anxiety.” How Orwellian is that?
Another excerpt from his piece:
Trump and his allies see highly educated people, in the aggregate, as a kind of class enemy of the MAGA project. Highly educated voters have trended leftward in recent elections, a phenomenon that has not-so-coincidentally appeared alongside the conservative movement’s growing conviction that higher education must be brought under right-wing political control. In short, destroying American universities will also limit the growth of a Democratic-trending constituency—fewer educated voters will translate to fewer Democrats in office. The tech barons supporting Trump have companies that rely on educated workers, but they want submissive toilers, not active citizens who might conceive of their interests as being different from those of their bosses.
A formal education does not immunize anyone against adopting false beliefs, but two things are true: Many of Trump’s supporters have come to see knowledge-producing institutions and the people who work for them as sources of liberal indoctrination that must be brought to heel or destroyed, and they do not want Americans trusting any sources of authority that are not Trump-aligned. This is of a piece with Trump’s longtime strategy regarding the media, which, as he told CBS News in 2018, is “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”
I regard and approach journalism as a public service rooted in the sacred values of democracy. I’m proud of my work and for the times that it has made a difference. It’s not reporters who are the “enemy of the people” as much as it is those who’ve elevated a deeply flawed human being to the presidency where he continues to do great damage to our institutions and to the lives of the most vulnerable in our society.
I so appreciate all of you who follow me here—and especially those of you who are paying subscribers and hung in there with me a year ago when I took leave to take care of a dear friend (Devin’s godfather) who was recovering from heart surgery. (He’s now doing great by the way.)
I will continue to write as I can and, with any luck and slivers of grace, be back in full stride by the end of July.
—tjc
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