Redistricting Board Conflict: Expeditiously Or Take Time?

My issue today is timing.  

One conflict between the Republicans and the other two members of the Board*  is whether the Board should respond to the remand 'expeditiously' as Borromeo, Bahnke, and the public testifying in support of what is now Plan Option 2 (that pairs the two Eagle River House districts) prefer, or to slow the process down, give more time for people to think and come up with options, and use up all the time the Judge gave the Redistricting Board - about two weeks.  This second strategy has been supported by the Republicans and the members of the public opposed to pairing the Eagle River districts together.  

Why does this matter?   I had memories of what happened in the previous redistricting round.  Because of court challenges, the Board's final redistricting plan was not complete in time to be used for the election of 2012.  I recalled that what happened was that the original proclamation plan that had been ruled unconstitutional by the court was used.  

So I was concerned that that would happen this time if the Board didn't act expeditiously.  I asked the executive director of the Board and others involved with the process this year about the deadline for getting a completed map to the Division of Elections for the 2022 election.  What I heard was: The filing date is June 1 so the map needs to be done by May 1.  

If that were true, taking as much time as possible would give the Republicans the chance to delay long enough that the 2021 unconstitutional map would be used for the 2022 election.  

My next question was:  When does this new map they're working on become "the new map"?  If they vote for a new map next Thursday, is that the date of the new Proclamation Plan?  Or, since it was remanded to the Board by the Superior Court judge, does he have to approve it?  

I emailed the director of the Division of Elections and when I didn't get a response after two days, I called.  Someone named Donna said she didn't know the answer and would have Michaela get back to me.  I called again the next day after not hearing from Michaela and Donna told me she didn't know.  I asked, is there anyone who knows?  And she said, I told you that's all I know.  I asked her to transfer my question to the Director.  That was Thursday and I'm still waiting.  

When I first called Donna, I also emailed Merideth Montgomery who was listed as the media liaison at the appellate level of the State Court system.  She was the one I'd talked to about getting media credentials for the Supreme Court hearing.  She had approved that overnight and was very helpful when I arrived for the hearing back on March 18.  

I did get an email back from her the next day.  These were my questions:

"I'm trying to figure out

a) when the new 2022 plan needs to be officially adopted - I'm waiting for Div of Elections to get back to me on that - and

b) how this new plan becomes official.  If the Board adopts a new Proclamation Plan next week, does that become the new plan?  Or does Judge Thomas Matthews have to approve it before it becomes the official new plan?  Or is there some other option I haven't thought of?"  

I emailed my questions at 3pm on Wednesday April 6 and her response was dated 8:20am on April 7. 

"I would say for question (a) that the plan needs to be "official" by the candidate filing deadline for the next general election (I think this might be June 1).  

For question (b) my general response would be that a plan becomes "official" when litigation ends, which is technically the day after any appeal or petition could be filed.  For example, if the Board puts out another plan, and no one comes to the superior court within the time allowed under Civil Rule 90.8, the plan is final.   If a lawsuit is filed, then "officialness" occurs when all appeal avenues have been exhausted.  As to the second part of your question this specific case and whether Judge Matthews still needs to do anything, I'm not sure, because I don't know what his instructions were after the supreme court sent the case back.  I suspect, though, that he has maintained jurisdiction of the case, in which case, yes, he would need to approve before the new plan is final." 

I was confused.  If the candidates have to file by June 1, how can the deadline be June 1?  People need to know what their district is more than a few hours to file.  The Division of Elections surely has to have paperwork and maps ready for people coming in to file.  

Part b was confirming my concerns.  If the Board delays long enough - say til the  15th of April and the judge doesn't accept it (whatever that might entail - like remanding it again?) it could drag on into May.  If the judge accepts it, someone could wait 25 days and then file a court challenge putting it beyond the June 1 deadline.  And then would the unconstitutional plan adopted in November be the map for 2022?  Like what I recalled happening in 2012?

Fortunately, I blogged the 2011 process - as yesterday's post shows - so I could go to the index page (see the tabs up top, right below the orange banner).  In fact, I wrote yesterday's post because I was going through what happened in 2011 looking for the posts that talked about adopting the unconstitutional plan.  

What I found is a reminder that we shouldn't rely on our memories.  The following comes from my May 22, 2012 post 

Supreme Court Chooses Amended Proclamation Plan, With Original, Not New, SEast Districts

What actually happened was this:  The Board had been asked to redo the maps a couple of times and had now submitted several options to the Court.  

"The Supreme Court issued an order today in response to the Redistricting Board 

"It is ordered:

1.  The Amended Proclamation Plan adopted by the Redistricting Board on April 5, 2012, including the Southeast Alaska districts as configured in the plan of that date, shall serve as the redistricting plan for the 2012 elections."

So, after ordering the Board to reconfigure Southeast Alaska to only consider the state constitution and not the Voting Rights Act at all, the Board met and worked hard to comply, though they all said they were not pleased with the result.    Now the Supreme Court is telling them to just use the Amended Proclamation Plan with the Southeast districts as they were on April 5.

The reasoning?  The court was concerned about the numerous objections they got over the Southeast Alaska districts and that the Department of Justice wouldn't find the plan in compliance with the Voting Rights Act.

"The court has accepted the Southeast districts as configured in the plan of April 5, 2012 rather than the reconfiguration submitted by the Redistricting Board to the court on May 14, 2012 because of the numerous objections to the reconfigured districts that this court has received.  While the reconfigured districts may comply with the redistricting criteria of article VI. section 6 of the Alaska Constitution, there is a risk that the United States Department of Justice would decline to pre-clear them under the Voting Rights Act.  Notice of the failure of the Department of Justice to pre-clear the new districts would come so late in the 2012 election cycle that a great disruption to the election process would result.  In order to avoid this possibility, the court will not require the use of the May 15, 2012 reconfigured districts for the 2012 elections." 

Two of the judges dissented - Winfree and Stowers - who thought the May 15 districts should have been adopted."

(Here's a link to the ADN article on this.)

So I was wrong.  They did not adopt the original unconstitutional plan.  The Court took part of the revised plan and for Southeast they used an earlier revised version.  And the date of the post is May 22, 2012.  So that's only a little more than a week before the June 1 deadline.  

So what does that suggest for 2022?

1.  The deadline for getting a plan to the Division of Elections can be well past May 1.  

2.  The Supreme Court can tinker with the maps and decide they which one should be used.  

Can the Superior Court judge decide on a map to use?  I don't know, but if he did, I'm sure the losing side would immediately appeal to the Supreme Court.  

Other considerations:

Timing:  

1. All the House districts have been approved except for the ones affected by the Cantwell cutout, which the Board fixed and unanimously approved with no objections from the public.  That doesn't seem like a problem.  
2. All the Senate districts except, maybe six in Anchorage are settled.  
3. So most of the map is essentially finished and the potential candidates for those districts know what their districts will be.  That can be passed on to the Division of Elections by the time Judge Thomas Matthews gets the Board's decision.  

What happens if the Judge doesn't like the changes to Senate Seat K?

1.  He could send it back again with new directions

2.  He could fix the map himself. 

3.  Either way there could be an appeal to the Supreme Court.  

It seems there is enough time to send it back with instructions and a deadline.  If the Court makes changes to the map for the 2022 election, I suspect it has to be backed by the Supreme Court.  

From the Board's discussions this week, I think that at least member Simpson would comply with a Supreme Court instruction.  But that's a just a guess.  But he spoke about following the law on a couple of occasions - Binkley's decision to vote no on the Cantwell revision because he disagreed with the Court's ruling and when he voted no on accepting the Craig Campbell proposed Senate K fix that would have required changing a House seat.  

These are the potential next steps.  It appears that the courts can take their own action to determine what map the Division of Elections will use and that there is enough time to get a map for the regular primary in August and the November 2022 election.  

I would just add that Andrew Gray testified today and made the point that there are no negative consequences for trying to politically gerrymander the map.  It could go through without a lawsuit. But even if a lawsuit were filed, and successful, there are no negative consequences to any members of the Board for trying to abuse the process.

* The two other members are not identified with any particular party.  Whether they have leanings - well they aren't leaning with the Republicans on the Board on the issue of political gerrymandering that the state Supreme Court found.  For some of the people testifying, that seems to automatically make then lean Democratic.  But there are other options.  They don't have to lean toward a party.  They could  lean toward other issues and one that they appear to take seriously is the Alaska Constitution and the idea that the interests of ethnically diverse (I guess that's a euphemism mainly for non-White, but also includes non-Christian, and LGBTQ, and people with disabilities, etc.) should have their voices heard in the legislature.  

First Draft Of Suggestions For Next Alaska Redistricting Board

 

Lessons

Starting from scratch every ten years is hard Need way to maintain institutional memory Start much earlier  Get professional help Don't require local areas to make 40 district maps Do map making sessions with public at public hearings Enforce:  board members not selected based on party affiliation Guidance to Board on Alaska constitution, laws, and court decisions regarding redistricting should be public Better rules about incumbents:  Not protecting incumbents should be paired with not target incumbents

I think it might be helpful for everyone involved in this process to think about what happened and write up some lessons learned for the next Board.  People playing different roles will see different things.  

So I'm starting my list now before I forget things.  This won't be the 'final report' but at least I'm doing a first draft

What have I learned from this round of redistricting?

Maybe I should start with lessons learned from the 2010 round of redistricting:  

1.  We aren't done yet.  If the courts agree with any of the lawsuits, the Board will be reconvened and begin mapping again. It will be easy if just Skagway or East Anchorage needs to be changed.  Calista has the potential to have wide ranging statewide impacts if Tyonek is pushed back into the Kenai Peninsula Borough.  The Valdez-Mat-Su complaints will require significant remapping and strong opposition from Doyon which worked hard to get all its communities and Ahtna communities into one giant (physically) district.  

2.  The 2021 Proclamation Plan will probably be the plan for the 2022 election.  June 1 is the deadline for state candidates to file for office.  I wasn't exactly sure the timeline so I checked with Board executive director.  His response was: 

"We expect a decision on Feb 15. The timeline is that appeals have to be filed in 2 business days. So if the decision comes Tuesday the 15th, appeals are due by Thursday the 17th. The court will convene a status hearing, likely by Monday, Feb 21.  Appeal briefs are due 10 days later, or about March 2. Appellee’s response is due 5 days after that, and then the court will likely hold an oral argument the week of the 14th or 21st of March. If the court sticks to the appellate rule, it will decide the appeal by April 1.

I think the idea here is that an April 1ish decision would give the Board some time to potentially resolve a remand order (make a change) with enough time for Div Elections to still do their job properly leading up to June 1.  But of course, if it's a complicated remand (like start over), that could be very difficult."

And I would add, if the revision is challenged, there probably won't be time and the new Proclamation Plan districts (the ones being challenged) would be used.   

3.  The Board might want to start mapping new options right now.  Let me rephrase that because the Board does NOT want to do that.  Why do possibly unnecessary work?  But they could get started before the final court verdicts are in.  At the very least they will know what the Superior Court decision is by Wednesday.  And they have a meeting already set for Wednesday at 11am.  The hardest adjustment will be, as I said above, if the Mat-Su/Valdez and Calista cases win.  The other two they should be able to fix easily.  But to the extent that Board members have vested interests in the existing maps, that's another reason to delay so that the current Proclamation Plan goes into effect for the 2022 election.  

Suggestions For The Next Board (The Legislature May Have To Help With This)

1.  Starting from scratch every ten years is difficult -  To rev up a brand new organization every ten years has some advantages but also some real problems.  The Board members don't get appointed until the decennial census year.  That was 2020 this round.  They then have to find office space, get equipment, hire administrative staff, hire legal counsel, learn all the rules, learn the mapping technology, figure out how to do the public participation road show (I really don't like that term, it makes it sound like it's superficial and it emphasizes the "show" part and not the listen part.  

On the plus side, you get fresh perspectives and new ideas.  But there has to be better continuity and some sort of institutional memory established.  

2. There should be a way to maintain some institutional memory - Perhaps having a state agency that's responsible for keeping up the Board's website, and ideally an employee who was involved with the Board who can help get basic things done for the Board.  \

The last Board's website disappeared.   And even it it had been kept alive, much of the material would have disappeared because it was on various State websites which got cleared when new governors got elected.  The best available record for the public of what happened in the 2010 cycle is my redistricting page with an annotated index of all my posts.  And a lot of my links are bad because the Board's documents are gone.   That isn't how it should be for an important government agency.  

Peter Torkelson tells me he's doing what he can to make sure the current Board's website is preserved. But that responsibility should be institutionalized, not just depend on a former Board employee. 

3.  Start much earlier - This current Board should leave a todo list and a time schedule for the next Board and even meet with them early on.  Steve Colligan, Mat-Su's redistricting/mapping consultant said that they began planning for redistricting five years ago.  They were keeping up with changes in the Census Bureau's advances in technology and data.  They started mapping ideal districts early.  Sure, you're working in a  bit of a vacuum because you don't know the ideal size of a district.  But by the time you get that information, you've spent a lot of time working the mapping software and overcoming technical obstacles.  He also said he has highly skilled GIS people to do much of the work.  This Board got appointed in the second half of 2020.  They didn't start playing with the software until July 2021.  They may have learned some basics quickly, but they are still amateurs. 

4.  Get professional help - Even if the software gets much easier to use in the next ten years, Board members learning it on-the-job is not a good model.  I know the Board members believe they got proficient and did a good job, and that's probably true.  But a trained, skilled GIS person knows a lot of tricks hidden in the software and lots of shortcuts.  I suspect Board member Simpson had the right approach - he says he didn't actually.  I've taken a couple of semester long university level classes in Photoshop and I can do a number of things, but the software has capabilities way beyond my level.  

5.   Don't require local areas to make 40 district maps - This Board's attorney explained in court that they required local governments to do whole 40 district maps, not just do maps of their area.  The justification was that it's easy to just do your area, but that you have to the whole state to see how your boundaries affect other districts.  That's logical, but it's also an easy excuse to not pay attention to what local people do.  It's the Board's job to listen to what local areas want and to try to incorporate them into a whole state map, not local communities.  

6.  Do map making sessions with public at public hearings where the Board techs work with local residents to try to fix boundaries that work with other areas' concerns.

7.  Enforce:  board members not selected based on party affiliation

8.  Guidance to Board on Alaska constitution, laws, and court decisions regarding redistricting should be public

9.  Better rules about incumbents:  This round's Board made a rule not to protect incumbents.  That's fine, but only if they also have a rule not to target incumbents.  

My granddaughter has a serious sibling rivalry with my laptops.  So this is going to have to do for now. This is just a first draft.  I'll also try to make a list of things the Board did well later.  And I'd encourage Board members, staff, the public, and others to make suggestions too.

Henry v MOA - "It Is What It Is"

It's lunch break.  Since yesterday's post, I've been trying to figure out what I should be doing here. What parts of the trial to focus on.  The ADN and KTUU are also attending the trial, so I should do what they aren't doing.  But that still leaves a lot.  It's easier to take notes when Doug Parker is asking the questions because he speaks slower than Meg Simonian.

This morning was Anthony Henry being cross examined.  Parker (the attorney for the Municipality of Anchorage - MOA) is trying to give the jury a different view of Henry than we saw yesterday when his attorney questioned him.  Some lines of questioning were:

1.  Questioning the image we were presented yesterday of this long time officer with a spotless record.  Parker raised  prior complaints and internal investigations of Henry.  He asked how many there had been.  Henry didn't know.  Parker said ten and started asking about each.  Henry dismissed them as routine things that all police officers have - like investigations after a vehicle collision.

2.  He spent time on the discussion yesterday of the Rick Brown investigation.  He tried to discredit Henry's claims that he repeatedly asked Rick Brown to show him the documents so he could refresh his memory of events several yeas old, but that Brown wouldn't show him even when he had them.  He quoted Henry's attorney Ray Brown on the video deposition with Rick Brown, saying "He repeatedly begged you, 30 times, to share the documents so he could refresh his memory."  Henry denied that he ever begged, but Parker said, "Your own attorney said that."   He needed this access to documents, Henry had said yesterday, because the APD had taken away his access the computer and to all the records so he couldn't refresh his memory.
Parker went through the transcripts of the two interviews with Brown and pointed out that instances where Henry asked Brown if he had one document or another and told him he (Brown) should get the documents and read them.  Not that Henry wanted the documents.  In fact he got Henry to acknowledge that he did have access to most documents on his own computer which seemed to contradict his claim yesterday that he had no access to anything.  Henry's repeated response was - An investigator should have all this material, it's where he should go first to get the facts of each event.  To police reports, to the informant records that would show much of what he needed.

3.  Trying to pin Henry down on inconsistencies in his testimony.  There were a lot of times when Henry said, "correct."  But there are also times he would not give a yes or no answer.  I have sympathy there because often such an answer has no context.  Here's one exchange: [Note, any citations like this come from my rough notes which I took in court.  They are close to what was said, but not verbatim and there may be missing bits]

Parker:  You agree now, you were collecting for investigation.
Henry:  Correct
P:  Yesterday you denied it.
H:  No I don’t remember.  Yesterday I wasn’t clear headed.
P:  Have to be clear headed to tell the truth?
H: I was emotional
P:  Do they get a pass if emotional or not clear headed?
H:  I agree.
S:  ???
H:  The Truth is the Truth.
P:  Did you tell Rick Brown in your interview, if you had records, I can come up with emails.
H:  Yes.
P:  You never told him at any time you didn’t have access to computer?
H:  confused  I was confused yesterday, I didn’t have access on my computer, but had on other computers.

When Parker tried to pin him down - sometimes Henry agreed like he did here, but often refused and said something like he does here with "the truth is the truth."  In fact I counted in my notes that four times in this exchange between Parker and Henry, Henry said "It is what it is" or "It says what it says."  These responses came when Parker would compare what Henry said at one point (like in yesterday's testimony) and what was written in the transcript from, say, his interrogation with Rick Brown.  He'd point to the words on the page and ask, well, isn't it right here?

P:  but you don’t say that [in the document]
H:  It says what it says.

Here, Parker was trying to refute Henry's claim that he repeatedly asked to see documents to refresh his memory, say of a date.  Parker was countering that actually, most of the time Henry wasn't looking to refresh his memory, but was simply asking whether Rick Brown had seen this document or that one, because BROWN needed the information.

P:  For discussion Ex 835 - first day interview - about Prieto - lines 24 25, "you need to go back and look at the paper work it lays out the National Guard involvement.  You need to look at paper work" - you aren’t asking for documents

P:  Fr discussion Ex 835 - first day interview - about Prieto - lines 24 25, [reading transcript] "you need to go back and look at the paper work it lays out the National Guard involvement.  You need to look at paper work" - you aren’t asking for documents
H:  It says what it says

4.  Selective Memory - Sometimes Henry could remember things in great detail.  Other times he had no memory.  Of course that's fairly common.  But it seemed that he had a better memory for things that helped his case than things that didn't.  And he even spoke of three phases of memory.

H:  There are 3 phases, 2010,  what I knew during my interviews [2014], what I remember now. 

I understood this to mean, there are things I remembered back in 2010.  Four years later when I was having my interviews with Rick Brown, I remembered less than in 2010.  Now, I've had my memory refreshed by reading transcripts and documents, sitting in on all the depositions, and generally preparing for the trial.  It seemed that the 'now' memory was a mix of things that he actually remembers personally after having heard others talk about things, or reading about them, and things he still doesn't actually remember himself, but which he knows from the record.

Examples:

P;  You never took action to send to Tim McCoy anything after June 4 meeting?
H:  That’s broad statement talk to him a lot.  If there was something I needed to report.  I don’t have a direct memory.  If something had happened.

P:  You learned something about Nieves ?
H:  I don’t have an independent memory.P:  I don’t want to build your memory, just your memory.
H: I don’t remember.

P:  Sean Cockerham wrote long letter [article?] in Alaska Dispatch News that talked about sexual assault in the Guard and Blaylock’s blog
H:  I don’t recall, may have read it.
P:  Talked about Blaylock saying brought sexual assault victims to Police and Gov and got in trouble with chain of command there. You don’t remember that?
H:  No,  Don’t remember the article.
P:  Likely you read it?
H: I read the paper, but don’t recall

P:  You know there was sig increase of National Guard sex assault being covered.
H:  I knew it was around the Gov’s election, sexual assaults
P:  You thought it was all political?
H:  That’s what ??  told me  I thought it was all political.
P:  Reports about drugs and young women being lured, that was all political?
H:  Don’t know what you were reading from.
P:  You knew there were all sorts of articles coming out.
H: I knew it was political
P:  Blaylock was saying things about you?
H:  I knew he was writing and gave him no credibility.
P:  You’re aware of all this? [a meeting Henry attended with Blaylock and Katkus where Blaylock said there were sexual assault victims but he wouldn't reveal the names to Katkus.]
H:  I don’t have memory of meeting, but nothing bad at the meeting,  It was appropriate for Katkus to discuss those things.  I don’t have that memory.  If it had been, I would have take action,  That’s certain.

P:  June 3 you get call, repeatedly told Rick Brown that Katkus asked why Seth doesn’t trust me?  H:  I remember call, but no memory.
P:  You don’t recall telling Katkus about Blaylock and Seth?
H:  No, the first knowledge I had was when I got the blog.
P:  You have no memory of this crazy Blaylock, unbelievable right?  I believe is not credible or believable.

P:  You can’t tell us when KatKus called you on June 3 and asked why Seth didn’t trust you you had no idea if Katkus knew about Blaylock?
H:  I don’t have a memory of that, but it’s likely that Katkus knew that.  I don’t have an independent memory of that meeting now.  

5. Retirement - Parker seemed to be questioning  Henry's talk about how the termination had destroyed his life, when he said he couldn't get a job now that paid more than 1/3 of what he made as an APD  Lieutenant and so now he's working in Iraq in security for the US Embassy (where presumably he's getting pretty good pay compared to what he can get in Alaska.)  Parker suggested that Henry could have retired under the police retirement plan.

P;  Are you an expert on retirement system?
H:  I wouldn’t all myself an expert
P:  You talked about this retire and rehire, you could have done that before, but didn’t.
H:  Correct.  There was a change in the system that made it better to wait longer
It was always in my plan, wanted 30 years and retire, the state’s Plan 4 and I wasn’t edible for that which was a 401K plan so I wanted to wait to 30 or 32 years.
P:  Mark [Mew, Chief]  said you wanted to retire at age 50.
H:  He may have told you that.  My wife and I have not planned retirement, we have no children and our work is our ives. 

Redirect  11:28
Simonian:  When do you plan to retire.
H:  I’m 58 now, my family has longevity my wife is 12 years younger, I plan to work until I’m 70

What I took from this, was that Parker was pointing out Henry could retire, get his retirement pay and pursue other work.  Even if he got paid less, he'd still have his pension on top of it. I don't think there are very many APD officers who work until they are 70.   [I'd note that I heard 58 here as his age, but yesterday I thought he said he was a man of 50, so I must of gotten something wrong.]

It's much later now.  The afternoon began with Derek Hseih, former president of the Anchorage Police Union and now representing sheriffs in San Diego.  His key function was to show that the Municipality changed their policy of allowing Police Officers to see their own IA (Internal Affairs) electronic records.  He said that after Henry won his arbitration over his right to have are access to his files,  the MOA imitated this change. When asked how he knew this was in response to Henry's case, he said, "We informally called it the Tony Henry rule."

Hseih was followed by Ann Kirklund. (Spell check is telling me it should be with an 'a', but I really thought I heard her spell it with a 'u' when she was sworn in.)  Kirklund is a FBI agent who was in charge of the joint task force that included the FBI, APD, State Troopers.  Her function here was to:

1.  Say that there was only one investigation into the National Guard, and it was under her.  If there had been others, she would have known.

2.  She also said, that if Carson and McMillan said they were connected with the FBI investigation or were running such an investigation as part of the APD Special Activities [Assignment] Unit (SAU) then that would not be truthful.  

There were other issues she addressed - like the large drug bust that was not hampered by anything Henry was alleged to have said to Gen Katkus.  

There simply isn't enough time in the day for me to do this justice.  Tomorrow I'm going to miss most of the morning.  I've signed up for an OLE class on the Second Amendment that retired Judge Karen Hunt is giving over four Thursday mornings.  

Note to me - Role of investigator and investigated  Henry needs to be in control

My Perfect Yosemite Moment - 8 AM Hike To Mirror Lake

The fantasy spurred this trip to Yosemite was a chance to relive the magic I remember of Yosemite as a kid.  So Monday morning I got up early, caught a shuttle to the Mirror Lake trail, then wandered up the trail, by myself.  Well, just me and my camera.  I paused a bit reading the sign that warned of Mountain Lions and that you shouldn't go alone.

It's such a beautiful trail.  My pictures don't do it justice.  But for an hour or so, I was alone in Yosemite hiking to through the quiet woods to a spot I remember vividly as a little kid.  There were warnings that by October the lake is really mostly sandy beach, but I was willing to try to find some reflection in Mirror Lake.

Here's a bit of the trail that goes through different kinds of terrain.

It's about a mile hike from where the shuttle bus lets you off.  And relatively flat.  Not like the Vernal Falls hike.

Later I thought about all the huge boulders everywhere and how it's clear that they come from the walls of granite that surround you everywhere in Yosemite.  They most come down sometime.  Fortunately, not while I was there.



And everywhere you are, if you look up, you see those massive chunks of granite towering above you. The wide angle lens takes away the closeness and sheer size of rock, but the regular lens can't catch the whole rock.

I didn't see any mountain lions, but I did see a huge pile of pretty fresh bear poo.  I'll spare you the picture, but I did check with a ranger because it was very different from the bear scat I'm used to in Alaska.

And there was enough water to get a good mirror image of the mountains of  rock above.












It was still very smoky from the Northern California fires.  Our car had ash on it each morning.

With the low water level revealing the sand, it looked a lot like a Zen garden.


And here's one of those walls above Mirror Lake.

It was a magical hike.  All alone on this beautiful trail.  I didn't see anyone until after I'd been at the lake about 20 minutes.  It was what I went to Yosemite for and was wonderful.

Clutter Wars: Mom Liked Pussy Willows, Files, Neighborhood Clutter

My mom's house and garage are a great stimulus to clean out our own stuff and we're working on it daily.  But the inflow of paper courtesy of the US mail makes it a never ending process.

But then there's stuff that has meaning.  For instance, my mom loved pussy willows and had bunches of dried pussy willows in vases around the house when she died.  My heartless friends saved me lots of agonizing decision making by glaring at me and pointing to the garden recycling bin in LA.  (Thank you, really.)

But as I wandered our snow free yard recently, I couldn't help but break off some fresh pussy willows.  There's a reason my mom like them.





So I put them in a vase in the bathroom.



Then I saw the little glass bowl where I've put the even littler blue velvet bag with some of my mom's ashes.  Since my mom like the pussy willows, I thought I'd put her next to them.

I understand this could seem rather bizarre, but having a bit of my mom nearby gives me some sense of normalcy, that she's still around.  I can share things with her that she would like.  Fortunately, I have no sense of her being there when I wouldn't want her watching me.   She always gave me lots of space and freedom and never guilted me over things.  That was a great gift.

As I said, I've been tackling old paperwork, sorting through files upon files.  One pile is for direct transit to the recycling bin.  (I've been removing this pile before getting more files, so there was a lot more than just this.)  Another pile has to be shredded first - anything with identifiers, particularly social security numbers.

As you can see in the picture, there are a lot of empty folders too.  Some go to recycling, some I might reuse.

And there are things to sort through more carefully.  For instance, I found a small envelope from my father with a handwritten label, "Some poetry Steve might enjoy reading."   There's insight to parts of my father's life we never discussed when he was alive.  And then there's a poem called "Heimweh."  Only the title is in German (it means homesick).  It's about suddenly thinking about his childhood home and how it made him cry..  (His aunt in Chicago helped him secure a visa so he could flee Nazi Germany, but he was never able to secure visas to get his parents out.)   The last stanza gives some justification for keeping some of this stuff.

"I shed my tears in agony
for I was mourning,
      but in vain,
since all the world that
      used to be
will never be again"

My father lives here still with me, through his poems, his old letters, some of his things and documents.  This document was in the same folder with the poems.

It fills in bits and pieces of his life I knew very little about.  This was in files I'd glanced through after he died and knew enough to keep for sorting later.  Later is here, I guess.  It's back into another keep and look through later pile.  But I'm getting rid of a lot of the stuff that is just taking up room.  And while the historian/archeologist in me would keep all the old income tax folders and checkbooks, because they do document the times I lived and how we spent money and how much things cost, my mom's garage screams out at me to just shred it.  

Here's the nearly empty file cabinet where all this came from.  There are some folders I still need to go through and sort more carefully, but this does feel like I've accomplished something.







And then I walked around the block to get some fresh air and was reminded that my clutter level wasn't all that bad.







Here's the house that burned last month.

And here's another neighbor's backyard.  

And front yard.





Stuff!!  Glad I don't have to clean out their yard and house.

Road Closed Lost And Found

This barrier and sign have been at this alley since last fall, maybe September or October.  Some utility did some work in the alley then left.  But they also left the sign behind.  I called MLP and asked if it were their sign and if not could they check with other utilities who might have left it.

But it's still here in January.

Maybe it belongs to a contractor.  I couldn't find any identifiers on it.  I'm thinking about offering it on Craigslist.  Anyone leaving something like this lying around for three months is guilty of littering and surely this could qualify as abandoned.

On RoadTrafficSigns.com you can buy a Road Closed sign like this from $42 to $72 depending on the quality.  I suspect this is the cheaper quality.  And I found similar traffic barricades ranging from $463 to $896.

You'd think someone would have notice these missing.

Well, if you lost these, let me know and I'll tell you where they are.  Or if you're looking for something like this, I'll tell you too.

[Sorry for those seeing this reposted - Feedburner problems again. This seems to be getting all too common.]

Other Desert Cities

We squeezed in a stop at Cyrano's Thursday night to see Other Desert Cities.   We didn't really know what we were going to see except that it had won acclaim Outside. 

It turned out to be a perfect play for the theme of this blog - it's all about knowing, our memories, their limits, and how our own emotions color our mind's records of our own experiences.  It's about keeping secrets and the damage that does. 

The cast of five was fantastic - to me, they were all the characters and not actors playing the characters.  And all the characters were rich blends of strengths and weaknesses.  And you should stay right to the end. 

If you're paying attention, you'll have noticed that the titles of the post and the book in the picture are different.  The book is what the character Brooke presents her family (in manuscript form) over the Christmas holidays in Palm Springs.  Not the novel they thought she was writing, but a memoir that includes them all.  She wants their blessings.  

The play is Other Desert Cities. I'm not really sure I'm excited about the title or understand why it was chosen to label this play.  Yes, I caught the mention in the play, but I still don't think it's a great title for this story. 

It's at Cyrano's for those of you in or near Anchorage, this weekend and the next two and definitely worth going to see. 

Peace Corps Reunion Portland

This is just a quick filler post.  My Peace Corps group is together for the second time since our official tour of duty ended in 1969 (though some of us stayed a third year and others lingered in the Peace Corps or in Thailand other capacities).  I did manage a break yesterday morning - the hotel has bikes for guests to use - and road along the river and some old routes from when we lived here in Portland in 2003. 


It took me a bit to figure out what Greenland was, but I stopped to snap a picture of Alaska's future.  I think Oregon's ahead on this because they've had more organized medical marijuana sales.

I really haven't had my camera out that much.  I've been enjoying reuniting with old friends, some whom I haven't seen in close to 50 years as well as meeting their equally interesting partners. 


And we're living out the reality of how unreliable memory is.  Some of us remember things that no one else does.  Others remember some parts of our training and others don't recall them at all. 






We talked in the bar, at breakfast, on the shuttle, at the Japanese garden.







Here's a sloppy group picture from our dinner Saturday night.  Some folks are totally recognizable after all these years and others not at all. 

There's a few more than half of the original group who went to Thailand to teach English together in 1967. 

And this morning a bike event is happening outside our hotel window.  I haven't had time to process all this.  Maybe there will be more later. 

Traces Of A Life

People's lives tend to be put in brackets of birth date to death date.  Inside those brackets we list basic facts like parents, spouses, kids, employment, and other key achievements or events.  But a life is made up of much more than that and I've been going through the traces of those other things in my mom's life.

There's so much I could write about but there are things my mom wouldn't want on the blog, so I'll just do a couple of examples.

The deer and the squirrel sat on my mom's night stand when I was a little kid and probably longer.  I don't know when they got put away.  I'd forgotten all about them until I found them wrapped up in the back of a drawer.  They're small.  The squirrel could sit on a quarter.  But they were part of our life together, a connection we had over these little animals. 

Another little piece is this temporary pass that was in my step-father's belongings.  He was a good friend of both my parents (and my father continued to have good relations with my mom and step-father after they divorced).  I'm not sure what meaning this particular pass had.  But it's interesting as a connection to the man and to a bit of documentation of history. 

Below is the back of the pass.

Here's part of Thailand Peace Corps Group 19's picture when we got to Thailand and just before we headed off to our assignments in 1967.  My mom wasn't particularly excited to see me off to Asia then, but she never let on until we talked about it much later. 

This is a shot from near the water at Venice beach the other evening.  We finally were able to get some time together, just sitting on the beach enjoying the surf.  There were more dolphins out there.  My mom and I also had a beach bond much of which developed at Venice beach.  She was still using her boogie board in her 70s.  And there are a couple still in the garage. 

And here's a picture she had in her room of my brother Glen, who died in a work accident at age 23.  That had a huge impact on my mom, but she kept working and helping others. but went to the cemetery every week to give him new flowers.  It's actually a picture I took and developed, including burning in the picture of him surfing in the background.  That was before photoshop when you could doctor pictures in the darkroom. 

There's also wedding pictures of my mom an dad, her wedding ring, and thousands of other little things. 

Brian Williams, Memory, And What It Means For Everyone

An ADN letter writer today wasn't taking any crap about Brian Williams:

"The article about Brian Williams and his “misremembered” story in the paper is an unbelievable spin. The spin is even incorrect. Mr. Williams wasn’t in the helicopter behind the one that was shot at, either he was going in the opposite direction. Get your facts straight. A lie is a lie no matter how you want to spin it to protect one of your own."

I didn't know who Brian Williams was until the other day when reports about his inaccurate helicopter story came out.  I assume the letter writer above was responding to the ADN story (from the Washington Post) about a psychologist saying that memories can get conflated and we believe we remember things we heard about as things that happened to us.

It must be nice to live a world of black and white of the letter writer and to be so certain about what one knows.

Is he, without a doubt, a liar?  Was this a case of lying to bolster his credentials?  Or was it conflation of memories?  The event had enough witnesses that lying about it seems a bit stupid.  Someone would eventually challenge it.  But lots of successful people have a history of getting away with lies, or other abuses of their positions of power, so they may think they'll never get caught.  And they may start believing . . .   oh yeah, that's the point the psychologist was making.

Memory expert Lawrence Patihis said, in a New Republic interview:

In one of our studies, about 20 percent of our participants generated false memories of an event when something false was suggested. [For instance, if Patihis mentioned video footage of Flight 93 crashing in Pennsylvania on September 11, one in five participants said they remembered seeing it. No such footage exists.] If we repeated the false suggestion many times over a period of weeks or months, I am sure an even larger percentage would develop a false memory.
In the case of Brian Williams, that misleading information may have been in the form of seeing the footage of him and his film crew examining the damage of the helicopter that was actually hit, and seeing it over and over again.

Most somewhat sentient beings in the US have heard about convicted criminals who have been exonerated through DNA testing.  You can watch a 60 Minutes episode of such a case here, where a rape victim tells the story of how she identified this guy, how certain she was, and how mortified she was ten years later when DNA proved it was another, similar looking, man.

OK, recognizing the face of a stranger you've only seen once is hard.  I remember when my wife had her purse snatched in a subway station in NYC. I was looking eye to eye at the snatcher playing tug of war with the purse before he turned with it and jumped from the platform, ran across the tracks and caught a train going the other way.  A light skinned black man with dreadlocks.  Pretty easy.  But when the police later showed me a book of faces of light skinned black men with dreadlocks, I knew it was impossible to pick one over the other with any certainty.

But in the 60 Minutes episode (it's in four parts on YouTube) Leslie Stahl also talks about how the suspect's alibi turned out to be for a different weekend than the one of the crime.  His memory too was faulty. And he had good reason to get it right.  The faulty alibi story hurt him at the trial.  But that's still different from the idea Williams' creating a false memory.

But the last part of the 60 Minutes piece talks about showing people advertisements of Disneyland that included someone dressed as Bugs Bunny.  Then they were asked later about their memories of Disneyland.  A number of the experiment subjects said they remembered meeting Bugs Bunny, and when asked for details, they came up with stories of handshakes and more.  Of course, Bugs Bunny was a Warner Brothers character, not a Disney character and would never have been at Disneyland.  But the fake ad planted a seed that allowed people to remember meeting Bugs at Disneyland.  This is like the Patihis example above. (I wasn't so lucky on my first trip to Disneyland.  I don't remember meeting Micky, Donald, or Bugs.  I did see Richard Nixon, but that's another story.)

And I have a couple of old, old friends who remember things we did together  very differently than I do.  So I'm sure that memory is malleable.

Scientific American has an article that lists four myths about memory that most people believe:

1. Memory works like a video camera, recording the world around us onto a mental tape that we can later replay.
2. An unexpected occurrence is likely to be noticed—even when people’s attention is elsewhere.
3. Hypnosis can improve memory—especially when assisting a witness in recalling details associated with a crime.
4. Amnesia sufferers usually cannot remember their identity or name.

Number 1  is particularly relevant to the Williams case. The explanation notes that

"research . . . has shown events to be recalled based on “goals and expectations,” . . . It also “contradicts the well-established idea that memory retrieval is a constructive process,” too, which can be shaped by assumptions and beliefs"

Not only do we see events and interpret them in a way that aligns with what we want to see, we remember events the way we want them to have been. I'm sure everyone whose been married more than ten years has remembered an event entirely differently from what their spouse remembered. But what does that mean for us beyond the Brian Williams story?

• Does it mean we should be more sympathetic to people whose memories proven fictional?
• Should we be more skeptical of everyone's memories?
• Should we be more skeptical about our own memories?
• How can we verify other people's memories as well as our own?
• How do we distinguish between those who intentionally recreate a false past from those who simply misremember?  

1. I suspect each one of those questions is deserving of its own post, and I certainly don't know the answers to them.  But it would appear to me that a good strategy is to work on how we talk about such things.  Try to be more tentative rather than certain in our discussions.  Instead of "You're wrong" try "I don't remember it that way."
2. Find other witnesses to give their accounts of the same event.  
3. Google can often locate contemporaneous accounts of an old event.  For example, I located online audio of speeches I attended as a student at UCLA in the 1960s.  Let's just say there was a lot I forgot.  

I don't suspect the letter writer will be persuaded by any of this.  I do think that if you know people over a period of time, you gain more insight into whether they are likely to be lying or not.  

I also know that we tend to assume that other people behave the way we would behave.  So people who tell the truth (except maybe when a friend asks "can you tell that I've lost weight?") are more willing to give someone the benefit of the doubt.  People who frequently lie, will more likely assume that someone else is lying.  If you are dealing with a liar, giving the benefit of the doubt puts you at a disadvantage compared to the person who assumes he's lying.  But if you assume everyone you're dealing with is lying, I suspect your life won't be all that happy.  The key, for me, is to maintain a degree of skepticism, and find ways to test for the truth.  

This is one of those posts that jump right in to the basic theme of this blog - how do you know what you know?  If you were looking for answers, sorry to disappoint.  I learned long ago that the more I learn, the less I know.  Not because learning is a bad thing, but because you as you learn, you discover that the universe of things you don't know expands faster than the universe of things you do know.