In 1994, when I was 23, I was shopping for graduate schools. I remembered a paper I’d read by U of O archaeologist Madonna Moss, “Shellfish and Gender.” So I applied to the U of O. A year later Dr. Moss was my graduate advisor.

In 1990, I was obsessed with Twin Peaks. It was set (and filmed) in Washington, but that was the first intimation of the coming Pacific Northwest Cultural Wave (Grunge, Starbucks, Microsoft) that kind of wormed its way into my perceptions of the world.

In 1986, when I was 14, my family took a vacation to the Pacific Northwest. On that trip I first saw the ocean, probably at Neskowin. We stayed in Manzanita. I’d had dreams about the ocean my entire life: swimming in heavy waves, being underwater, sailing, standing on beaches. The beach at Neskowin was exactly like I imagined an Oregon beach should be. Even the smell was familiar; the whole experience was familiar. Cold feet, salt air, windburn, gray sky, woodsmoke, rotting seaweed.

In 1985, I saw the movie Goonies. It was a good enough story but I fell in love with that landscape. Trees and cliffs and rocky beaches, set hard against the restless water.

In 1981, I was in fourth grade, the year that Nebraska children first learn state history. We lived in Scottsbluff, within sight of the famous bluff that featured prominently in diaries of the Oregon Trail. Near at hand were actual physical artifacts of the Trail: the Rebecca Winters Grave, Signature Rock, wagon ruts on Windlass Hill. Much of our state’s history was the story of people moving through. To Oregon. These were gruesome stories of hardship: hunger, starvation, dysentery, Indian attack, freezing in passes, drowing in river crossings. It didn’t take a genius to figure: Oregon must be pretty nice. Nice enough to walk for four to six months across a continent.

The year previous, Mt. St. Helens erupted. It struck me as profoundly weird that people would live in a place with volcanoes. And Bigfoot. And flying saucers. All of which were childhood obsessions.

Also around that time I read a book I think no one else has ever read: The Haunted Cove by Elizabeth Hazelton. I think I got it free from Scholastic Book Club for ordering umpteen other books. It’s a Young People’s Mystery (ala Hardy Boys/Nancy Drew) set on the Oregon Coast. Hazelton did a superb job drawing the Oregon land/seascape. Her prose is why my dreams of the ocean looked exactly like the ocean in Oregon. This obscure book is probably singlehandedly responsible for my ultimate move to Oregon.

We’ve a long gray wet spring that just can’t seem to quit. It’s easy to complain but — for me, anyway — easier to remember: this is why I moved here. I came here for the gray and wet and chilly. So mild, so green; so unlike the fierce wilting humid heat of my childhood summers. The coldgraywet makes me grateful for books, for bicycles, for mud and coffee and hiking boots, for empty beaches and quiet forest trails. It makes the beer taste better.

Dave Moulton wrote today about the evolution of mountain biking. He asked for his readers’ “take on the period” — here’s mine:

I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1970s when banana seats gave way to BMX. My favorite thing wasn’t jumping ditches though so much as taking long rambles up dirt roads, I’d be gone for hours. In retrospect I was probably never more than 2 or 3 miles away from the house but it felt much farther. I had a fear of county roads and blacktop traffic, so I stuck to dirt roads: section road, irrigation access, that kind of thing.

We moved to the “big city” Lincoln in the early 80s and I bought my first grownup bike, a late 70s vintage 10-spd “racing” bike. I think it was a Sekai. I rode this and a Schwinn Varsity until high school. My new favorite bike thing was to ride those 10-spds all day, either around town into new neighborhoods, or to outlying towns. At age 13 I rode my Varsity 52 miles (round trip) on a surprise visit to a girl in a neighboring town. I taped cans of Coke to the frame for sustenance, and ate a slice of pizza before the ride home. The girl was out of town, that taught me to always call ahead.

For about 5 years I barely rode at all. It was too “uncool” to be seen on a bike at my gearhead high school, or so I felt anyway. I kept that unhealthy obsession with cars until college when I got my first MTB, a Giant Rincon (1992).

The Rincon reawakened the joy of being gone all day on a bike. This time it was back to dirt roads, and wasteland like timber claims or Wilderness Park (an undeveloped city park southwest of Lincoln). I also lived exactly the right distance from campus for steady bike commuting: too near to drive, too far to walk. After college I took the Rincon — and its successor: a Yokota mountainbike — with me on my archaeological adventures across the Great Plains. I never had the Xtreme Mad Huck personality ascendent in 90s MTB culture, I never railed on sketchy descents or caught big air. My ideal ride was a long distance on two-track in the hinterland. Exploring. Cow-trailing. Unsuspended steel MTBs excel at that.

I took the Yokota with me to grad school — I had long since given up cars entirely — where it was my primary mode of transport. Ironically, once I moved to Oregon — where we have actual mountains — I pretty stopped mountain biking. This was the mid-90s and MTB culture was no longer under the radar, and in Oregon at any rate you couldn’t just go ride a bike on all that sweet singletrack. Either it was closed to bikes, or it was developed into a kind of skills park for Mad Hucking. Mostly, to ride a MTB bike in Oregon it helps to have a car; you have to drive to a “trailhead” where you spin around for an hour or so then drive home. It has always struck me as absurd to drive somewhere to Have Fun by biking (or hiking, or skiing) around in little circles. Other than riding a bike to work, I never spent much time on a bike between 1995 and 2001.

Not quite a decade ago I bought another road bike — actually kind of a cross/touring bike, a Bianchi Volpe. That set me on my last — and most durable — love affair with bikes. With a road bike (or better, a ’cross bike), as soon as you step out the front door you’re Having Fun. That bike kept me sane through my divorce, when my all-day-bike-riding habits became a little obsessive. The peak of that period was my solo tour down the Oregon Coast.

This was how I met Jenny: she saw me carrying my bike into our apartment building (we were neighbors), and she asked “do you know any good rides around here?” I didn’t ask her out right that second but I eventually did, and the story had a happy ending. Much of our early courtship — and most of our vacations, even today — are had on bike. Sometimes on that Bianchi, or on one of its roadie successors.

Last spring I won a fancy new Kona mountain bike. I never would have bought this bike myself, and I’m kind of at a loss for what to do with it. Mostly it’s seen semi-legal singletrack in the weirdly-zoned terrain of SW Portland. I guess you still have to drive a car somewhere to have fun on a mountain bike, and I still think that’s stupid.

On Saturday, I rode my Vanilla road bike 90 miles — all on blacktop — into the beautiful rural hinterlands around Portland. I don’t get to do this as often as I used to but it’s still my favorite bike thing to do.

Orion’s been home sick a few times lately. Because my work schedule is more flexible I’m the one who gets to stay home with him. It’s easy for me to get a little tired of this, especially as Jenny has parent conferences right now so I’m doing extra-long childcare shifts (15 hrs.) with a (slightly) sick kid, and no car.

I lack Jenny’s talent for getting Orion to fall back asleep at naptime so I generally wind up holding him and rocking in the chair while he falls asleep ... and then sitting motionless for [X] minutes while he finishes his nap. Well when this happened about an hour into O’s nap yesterday, [X] turned out to be about 180. That’s a long time to sit pretty much unmoving, upright, with 25 pounds of kid sleeping on your lap. It could get a little boring.

But when this happened yesterday I had the good fortune to receive, at that exact moment, a memory transmitted backward in time from myself in ten or twenty years. Holding my napping toddler son while my legs fall asleep seems painfully boring at the moment it’s happening, but apparently it’ll become one of my favorite memories. And someday I’ll wish more than I can imagine right now to relive that feeling for even a few minutes.

I don't know anyone who says anything other than “good riddance” to the first decade of the 21st century. I know lots of people who hope it was the anomaly, that the rest of the century will get better. I know a probably-equal number who think it’s only going to get worse.

Personally, the decade was rock bottom and tip top. This was the decade I became a Real Grownup. I started it gliding along with a certain degree of dissatisfaction with success. I’d just stumbled into my new career as a web designer, and my new marriage to my first wife. I was six months away from rock bottom in that marriage but had no idea what was coming or why, only that the unstable place I was in wasn’t going to hold. On this subject, the less said, the better. That new career was subject to the whipsaw vagaries of the Dot-com boom — although in the long run I’ve never been worried about jobs or work or money in quite the way I probably should be.

In 2000, that all cracked up. The marriage wobbled through two separations and a little ugliness until it dissipated altogether in 2002. The cool new career ping-ponged between Real Jobs and freelance and outright unemployment, until I regained my footing at Curiosity (also in 2002). 2002 was the year I learned that I was boy who never quite figured out how to be a man. It took breaking my marriage totally and irreparably to figure it out. The pecularity of modern American manhood is that it’s defined in contrast to womanhood, which is all backwards. Manhood isn’t the state of not being a woman, it’s the state of not being a boy. Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was stable, back on my feet.

2002 was also the year I began riding my bike. A lot. I have one piece of advice for someone who wants to be happier: ride your bike.

Three really important things happened in 2003. I shaved my head. I met Jenny. I put Sitka to sleep. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those three things taught me to release vanity, embrace vulnerability, and accept loss. Together they taught me the only important thing I’ve ever learned: my life isn’t just about me. When Orion was born I learned that the rest of my life isn’t about me at all. The rest of my life until I die is about my children and their children. My haircut is not even remotely important any more.

The glide path of my life turned upward after 2003. Jenny and I married in 2005 — probably my favorite year of the decade, if you really pressed me. We moved to China in 2006, and back in 2007. Orion joined us in 2008. The only two years in which nothing much happened to me personally were 2004 and 2009.

So that was me: pretty good decade I guess. A little bumpy, but the bumps made it good, ultimately.

Impersonally, this was an awful decade for America. (It was a lot better for 2-3 billion other people, though, something I won’t touch on.)

I won’t dwell long on politics except to note that no one got what they wanted. The nation didn’t get the president it voted for in 2000, but we did in 2004. By 2006, we had serious buyers’ remorse. It sucked elephant balls to be a liberal this past decade, but it had to really grate to be a conservative. Conservatives got everything they ever wanted for six or so years and it was an utter failure. I wonder if the resulting cognitive dissonance isn’t driving the utter batcrap crazy nonsense coming out of conservative mouths these days.

Lots of people will want to think September 11, 2001, was a nadir for America (and maybe the world), but I think in a couple of decades it’ll look like the 21st equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. A big deal only for the stuff that happened around it. Really big objects are in motion, globally, stuff that only crackpots and visionaries discussed ten years ago. Global warming, peak oil, globalization, the shift of global capital eastward and southward, the imminent plateau of human population, the emergence of the infosphere as a pervasive element of society. Ferdinand’s death didn’t start the Great War; the Great War was the first, protracted battle of World War II. The whole mess fell out of the final crackup of the ancient world order of empires built by monarchs.

I wonder whether the 2000s weren’t so much the first decade of the 21st century as the last decade of the 20th. The 19th century didn’t really end until 1918. And then it got worse.

The Internet and mobile phones — the democratization of information, actually — are quietly and relentlessly euthanizing whole industries. 2009 was the year people stopped consuming printed matter. Think hard about what that means. 20 years ago, if you wanted to know a random piece of information — for example, who played the second Catwoman in the Batman TV show with Adam West, for example — it would require several minutes, perhaps hours, of legwork. Minimally, a trip to the library. That’s a measure of how free information has become: we no longer rely on institutions or interlocutors to tell us what apartments are for rent, what a used car should cost, or how much our neighbors’ houses are worth. When people say “information is power,” there’s a concrete case. Twenty years ago, I was at the mercy of the used car guy. I had to hope he was honest, or I had to do days of expensive legwork to keep him honest.

The democratization of information will have consequences. Lots of people depend on that friction for their paychecks. In just a few minutes I can name a dozen or so professions fast becoming obsolete: publisher, newspaper editor, used-car salesman, newspaper carrier, ad buyer, payroll clerk, shipping clerk, bank teller, real estate agent, travel agent (anyone with “agent” in their title, really).

On the other hand, and this really blows my mind, my job title didn’t even exist when I graduated high school 20 years ago. The industry didn’t even exist. The words “web designer” were a meaningless nonsequitur. Man did I luck out there.

All this change was in the air 10 years ago, but most people overlooked the “destruction” part of “creative destruction.” The 90s had been pretty good — pretty great, actually...remember when gas was 89¢/gal? — and the 80s were nearly as good. The 70s sucked a little, sure, but Disco wasn’t as bad as everyone remembered, and black people could finally sit in the front half of the bus. 1975 was the point at which the disparity between rich and poor was lowest in the United States. (I wasn’t alive in the 60s so I can’t tell you whether anyone felt nostalgia for the passing decade on Dec. 31, 1969.) 1999 was coming at the tail-end of 50+ years of economic, political, and military stability for the United States.

I understood this, growing up, in an indirect way. When I read about Henry Huggins in 1979, the life he lived in 1949 was pretty substantially like mine. No kid lives like that in 2009.

So this is where “personal” hits “impersonal.” I’ve led a blessed life: a trouble-free childhood, my teenage and twenty-something years no worse than usual, a career I stumbled into by a fluke of history. All the troubles of my life — the divorce, mostly — are entirely of my own doing. This blessed life is a result of a lottery I won at birth. I was smart enough to be born in America, smart enough to have middle class parents with a good marriage, smart enough to be born into a largish extended family in a prosperous midwest state. All at the point in history when America was doing great and we had plenty of everything we needed: energy, water, topsoil, forests, fisheries, family farms, colleges, factories, credit cards, doctors. We still have doctors and colleges in good supply, I’m not too worried about those. Some of that stuff — e.g. factories and family farms — we’ve surrendered more or less intentionally through economic relationships, so we can get them back. Most of the rest we’ve simply eaten up and crapped out. However much there may be left of topsoil, or forests, or energy, or fresh water, we aren’t making more of it nearly fast enough. For 50 years, America’s been on a pretty effortless upward path; but there’s nothing in history or our present situation to suggest we can rely on momentum alone. I think we need to grow up a little and get a little serious about what America can do (halt global warming) and can’t do (build shopping malls in Kabul). But none of that is gonna fix itself, the way my life just kinda sorta turned out awesome. I think the “era of stuff just turning out awesome” is over.

Before Orion I used to say: I could imagine a heaven no better than to live my life again. But that’s not the heaven I want any more. Heaven to me now would be: I want Orion (and his sibling[s], and their kids) to live a life as good as mine. I mean this literally, by the way, not figuratively. I would gladly surrender personal immortality in paradise for the guarantee that my progeny get to live happy, fulfilling, plentiful lives.

From a romantic perspective, I want that life to have the exact elements I had: snow in the winter, trees to climb, bears in the mountains, paper routes and bicycles, cheap college with cheap beer, travel to fun places, no military draft, and a little dose (but not too much!) of free love. But that world isn’t gonna happen (see above re: creative destruction, stuff in short supply), and nothing as good as that will happen again unless we make it happen.

Which occasioned me to reflect that this year is my twenty year high school reunion.

The year I graduated from college:

• The big summer movies were Indiana Jones & the Last Crusade, the first Batman movie (with Michael Keaton), and the Abyss. Only the Abyss used computer special effects to any great degree, and then only in one scene.
• John McTiernan filmed Hunt for Red October because the Soviet Union represented a safely evergreen nuclear threat.
• There were two Germanys and one Czechoslovakia.
• China was a hermitic third-world country with a troublesome democracy movement.
• There was no World Wide Web. The industry where I have made my career did not yet exist.
• Futurists like John Naisbitt and Alvin Toffler thought industries like finance, media and publishing would lead the new Information Economy.
• HS advisors said journalism was a solid career choice for the future.
• Cell phones cost about $3/minute to use, and weighed about a pound.
• Colleges would accept neatly-handwritten application essays.