The Suburban Juror

 © MJ McGalliard

(The Suburban Juror is a cryptically obscure reference to an obscure joke.  Don’t feel bad if you don’t get it.)

I participated in what is one of the biggest deterrents on the planet to Democracy a while back, I had jury duty.

First of all I should say that trial by jury is a fundamental part of American Justice and I believe in it.  I just wish I could get on a jury.  Just one, because, you see the thing is, well that RANDOM SELECTION dealie picks me once a year.  Too bad this strange luck doesn’t accompany me to casinos, but it’s become something I can count on.

Every summer I have to mow the lawn and I have to show up for jury duty.

I wouldn’t mind, the jury thing not mowing, I HATE mowing, but I can’t get on a jury, I always get rejected.  And it hurts.  I used to do stand-up comedy so I know a thing or two about being rejected by strangers.  But, those people didn’t think I was funny; these people don’t think I’m worthy as a human being to sit in judgement on another. 

OK, now that I think about it they may have a point.  But, seriously have you seen some of the people that show up for jury duty?  I’ve felt safer in dark alleys.  More on that in a minute, but first a philosophical word about getting out of jury duty….

A lot of people scheme in various ways to get out of jury duty.  Which I can understand, it’s no fun to have to report to a courthouse, suffer airport-like searches and security, and then go willingly into a crowded room through a door guarded by someone with a gun.  It’s kind of like jail for law abiding citizens.

However-

Karma is a bitch and she has a sister with a set of scales and a blindfold.  You only have to ask yourself one question- If that was somehow you on trial who would you want on your jury?  Somebody like yourself or the blond guy I saw with cornrows in his hair and beard wearing a black tee shirt that said “666”?  (He may be a very gentle, vegetarian with a sardonic view of the world, but see above mentioned dark alley.)   Concerning the rest of the room, I could hear the echoes of their various complaints.  No one wanted to be there, grumbles were rampant and some of the conversations I overheard would make Jerry Springer shake his head and say, “Really?”

So, why is it I can’t get on a jury?  First of all you have to fill out a form and sign it (swearing it is the truth, the whole truth and you are guilty of perjury if you lie) wherein you have to list your education.  You can bet anybody with a BA or above is put on the short list for the big bye-bye.  Lawyers, both defense and prosecution, want people that are persuadable and it is their prejudice that people with more education are harder to influence.  But, that alone may not eliminate you.

Opening your mouth will. 

In the one instance I got into the actual jury selection process, the trial was for a young black man allegedly caught with crack cocaine.  There is a point early on when they ask if anyone has any strong opinions about the subject.  Being an honest citizen I stood up and expressed that I believed the penalties for crack cocaine were onerous, that cocaine was cocaine; the form didn’t matter and the penalties should be equal.  I went on, ignoring the bulging veins in the judge’s neck, to state the fact that crack was primarily found in black neighborhoods and to punish it differently was racist.

The defense lawyer smiled, the prosecutor made a note and we broke for the day.

The next morning before selection began a woman stood up and said she’d been thinking about what I said concerning the differences in penalties between the two cocaines and she thought it was racist, too.  It was about then I noticed how purple the judge had become.

The upshot is the defense lawyer gladly seated me in the jury box and the next instant the prosecutor unseated me and I was out of there.  But, I’ve since wondered  about that young man and if he is still in jail.  Knowing that if he were a white man carrying powdered cocaine, would have had his freedom by now.

I can fantasize about what would have happened had the whole jury been full of people like me.  While deciding the guilt or innocence of the young man we might have put the law itself on trial.  And, that’s a big no-no.  You see, we are told the law is the law and we are there to decide if the person on trial broke that law, not to decide if the law is just.

My big problem with laws is that they are made by people who will do anything to stay in office.  And, if that means being ‘Tough On Crime’, which usually translates into making minorities into scapegoats, then that’s just great by them and by golly let’s get some signs printed.  The result of which is securing the votes of scared white people and winning elections.

Laws should be fair. You shouldn’t get ten years for stealing a blue car instead of five for taking a red car.

Jury selection is based on ignorance, lack of opinion and vulnerability to persuasion.

I can understand not wanting a raving bigot on your jury, but eliminating some one for a considered opinion seems to defeat the spirit of a trial by your peers.

Assuming the glitch is fixed in the ‘random’ method for picking people for jury duty and I don’t have to go every year, maybe we should just try taking the first twelve people through the door and see what happens.

If we educate our people, if we ever overcome our racism, if we balance impartiality with compassion that just might work.

Green River II: Super Fun or Superfund?

Green River Part II: Super Fun or Superfund?
Text and photos  © MJ McGalliard

(To recap part I- We put in to the River in Kent and had to abort the trip in Tukwila.  Incoming tide, exhaustion, sinking boat, etc.  For those of you keeping track, SeaScum is no longer water-worthy {still looking for recycling ideas} SeaScum II has become the main media platform.  Yes, a used kayak has joined the fleet.  You can send your ideas for a name with your kayak recycling thoughts.  I was toying naming it after a character in my books.  That still might happen)

Deep thinker, adventure buddy, and Supervising Adult Craig had a great idea-  Launch from our destination in West Seattle and paddle to the mouth of the Duwamish arriving at low tide.  That way we would be going up the river as the tide came in and we could paddle to the bail-out point completing our trip in a Zen, one hand clapping (remember it’s the journey, not the destination) kind of way.  
 

Of course, pretty much as long as humans have traveled on the sea, they’ve known how to use the tides to move about.  Tides are not something most of us think about, human hubris tends to believe we are no longer at the mercy of our environment.

 We are.

The Green River/Duwamish watershed is parched.  The rivers are very low for this time of year.  Water is being held back in reservoirs, our snow pack is already gone and the only thing trickling down the mountains is the ancient waters of glaciers. 










 And, it goes both ways- the environment is at our mercy.


Case in point, in order for our expedition to get where we were going we had to paddle through a Superfund site.  The lower Duwamish was a place we humans threw away things we didn’t want.  In the really olden times if you lived by a river, all manner of waste went into the water and was carried away.  Which, I’m sure helped prevent disease, since so much of what was thrown away was toxic in one way or another.  I’m sure the practice helped those people flourish for generations…. Until somebody moved in upstream and started doing the same thing.  

But, we’ve begun to see the error of our ways and started to clean up our messes.  I don’t think most people know how bad it was before we passed environmental laws and started to clean out our sandbox.  People complain about excess regulation, it is the nature of people to complain, I do it myself.  But, whenever I hear complaints on this subject I remember the bad old days-  The Los Angeles basin in the ‘60’s with its perpetual shroud of smog or Houston at the same time with airborne chemicals from unregulated refineries so thick the trees dripped black ichor and to park under one was to have the paint on your car dissolve.  But, like I said, we decided to mend our air, land and waters and so came the Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund Site, what they couldn’t clean up they buried.

It is still very much a working river and an integral part of the port.  Bodies of water were our first super highways and frankly, without working ports, we couldn’t live the lives we live.  However, we can learn to respect the water, the shores and, the fact that, as it says on the bumper sticker, “everybody can’t live upstream”.

As things have become less toxic the animals have started to return, living in the shadows of long abandoned enterprises.  Which stirs your heart more?  The sight of an Osprey soaring over a shore covered in old-growth or the same bird flying over what once was a toxic wasteland? 



 The latter gives me hope that we can undo some of the damage.  That maybe we are evolving beyond the Boom and Bust, take it (gold, timber, fish, etc.) and leave the mess history of the Western United States.

SEASCUM’S LAST VOYAGE

© words and photos by MJ McGalliard

The two pieces of music going through my head that morning were “Dueling Banjos” from ‘Deliverance’ and the theme from Gilligan’s Island (the part about “a three hour tour” seemed to be looped).

SeaScum and SeaScum II were safely loaded on the portage vehicle Otis, cameras, life-jackets and lunch all packed.  There was nothing left to do except pick up Supervising Adult Craig and begin our journey.

The plan was to put the boats into the Green River at Van Doren’s Landing, stay on the Green until it became the Duwamish, paddle on out into Elliot Bay on the Salish Sea and have support team leader Patti pick us up.

The trip was not exactly spontaneous, but it could have been better equipped.  SeaScum in particular shouldn’t have been out on the river that day.  SeaScum’s hull had been patched for the 5^th time and although the repairs looked good, you just never know.  When the possibility of Seascum’s patch failing came up, we joked about duct tape and as part of the bit I peeled a long strip off of the roll and stuck it to the boat.  Ha, ha.

Going down a river in territory you are familiar with is an experience in bent reality because the perspective is so different.  Roads and railroads pass overhead as you drift in the current and you can only guess where you are in relation to intersections, farmland, Starbucks and other essentials of modern life.

The river was low, running in the early part of June at the level it usually runs in August.  This made things less exciting, but we were out to paddle the river, not defy death.

We bumped and scraped along, SeaScum bumping and scraping more than SeaScum II because it draws more water.  We stopped for lunch on a sandbar still a ways from civilization although the evidence was all around us.  Massive logs chained and cabled together as debris control for when the river floods.  Backwater holding ponds for the extra water in the winter and spring have been carved into the surrounding land.  So much work and money put into an infrastructure that most people downstream never even know about.

It was in the wilds between Kent and Tukwila that SeaScum started taking on water.  Bailing worked for a while, but I couldn’t bail and paddle at the same time so we pulled out to inspect the damage.  The patch on SeaScum’s stern had failed.  There was a long, jagged edge where the patching material had pulled away from the hull leaving plenty of room for water to join me in the cockpit.

We were a long way from anywhere, down one boat and had only one option.  The ‘joke’ bit of duct tape I had slapped on the hull became, after some careful cleaning and drying, the patch on the patch.  I prayed The Mythbuster’s were right and it would hold.

It did hold, for another three hours when we met our biggest challenge yet. 

By then we were in the Duwamish estuary and there was evidence all around us of the river’s working history.  Abandoned docks, heavy machinery and what I like to call River Trolls.  These are made of rotted off piers of docks long gone but sustain grasses growing out of their tops.

This was all very interesting, but defeat was rushing to meet us head-on.  Time and tide waits for no man and sometimes is not very kind to kayakers, either.  The current of the tide was rushing in faster than the river was running when we put in at Van Doren’s Landing and our paddling arms were close to spent after six hours.

When SeaScum started taking on water again, Supervising Adult Craig said, “I’m done.” And headed for the bank.

It was by no means a great place to land being about 15 feet up a steep slope to something we couldn’t see, but traffic noise told us we weren’t in Kansas anymore.   We gained the top with both boats, a little cursing and a small amount of blood.

I’ve never time traveled or teleported, but it felt like I had when we popped up over the bank almost directly on a bike trail with several office buildings and a big multistory parking garage all only yards away.

We were back in civilization, but where?  I took a moment to review our situation- We had just popped out of the brush muddied, bloodied and sunburned, probably not the best time to stop a stranger and ask that embarrassing question, “Excuse me, Sir.  Where am I?”

In order to avoid this I made appropriate use of technology and using a nearby ATM checked my balance thereby obtaining an address for the support team to pick us up.

It’s not over, the trip is incomplete.  Next we launch from the Boeing Employee’s Credit Union parking lot, probably after visiting the espresso cart, just after high tide when the waters of the world will be going our way to finish what we started.

In the meantime, SeaScum must find a final resting place.  I thought about a Viking funeral, but I don’t think setting him on fire and launching him into the lake would be very good for the environment.  I’m making it a mission to find a way to recycle him so that the spirit of SeaScum lives on.  I’m open to ideas.