If you are middle aged, you remember a time when tattoos were a vestige of World War II and evoked the demimonde. 

How amazing, then, to see tattoos enter the mainstream culture.

Tattoo: The Art of the Sailor is one of the best exhibits ever mounted by the Columbia River Maritime Museum. It tells the story of how early maritime influences have become a part of todays vigorous tattoo culture.

This exhibit has been in our heads for some six years, says Museum Deputy Director Dave Pearson. Not a big-budget exhibit, it is long on imagination and presentation.

Sailors were always at the edge of society, says Pearson. Think of Astorias shanghaiers. Think of the legend of the Flying Dutchman.

The exhibit is an effective mix of video, artifacts from the tattoo trade and a wonderful array of anecdotes. It traces cultural links that begin with the techniques developed by Japanese woodcut printers and the art of indigenous people in the Pacific who used bird bones to mark human skin.

The tattoo was a rite of passage for sailors in wartime. One video narrator Sailor Jerry talks about Hawaii during World War II. He points out that for the same price $3 a sailor could either obtain sex or a tattoo. Jerry notes the proximity of bars to tattoo parlors, saying that you had to be drunk to do the tattooing and to get the tattoo. And all of that happened in daylight, because the island was subject to blackouts at night.

Before we shipped out to Vietnam, some of the Marines I knew did the rite of passage thing. A pal of mine by the name of Malcolm in Chu Lai proudly showed off the tattoo on his forearm:?The ace of spades and the caption?Born to lose. Another Marine named Gene had chosen the Death before dishonor tattoo.

The exhibit is up until mid-September. Dont miss it.

 

---

Wallowa County was part of my childhood. Growing up in Pendleton, our family drove there to see a distant relative my fathers cousin and her husband, who was then the only physician in that remote county. And now our company owns the Wallowa County Chieftain, a 127-year-old newspaper.

Whatever I thought I knew about Wallowa County was enhanced last Thursday night by Greg Nokes, who spoke to the Columbia Forum about his book Massacred for Gold. 

Answering a question, Nokes referred to a collective shame in Wallowa County for the killing of at least 34 Chinese gold miners and also for the travails of the Nez Perce Indians who were forced from their homeland. It is a startling contrast between the awesome, jaw-dropping beauty of that place and the human suffering in the shadow of those jagged peaks.

Annually, Nokes and his wife take part in a healing ceremony at the site of the Chinese massacre. In another sort of reparation, descendants of Charles Erskine Scott Wood gathered next to Wallowa Lake some years ago to present the Nez Perce with a horse. That extraordinary gift fulfilled a promise made by their ancestor to Chief Joseph.

 

---

The other element of surprise in Greg Nokes talk was the size of Astorias 19th century Chinese population. I have heard demographers describe the Scandinavian influx in the early 20th century, but while that immigration is celebrated, the vast Chinese presence is barely acknowledged, which is why the Chinese Garden is such a good idea.

Some 15 years ago, I heard Duncan Law tell a dinner table audience that when he was a young man, Astoria fish processing plants had two sets of bathrooms: one for whites; another for Chinese. 

 

 

---

It had been years since I had taken a morning walk on a North Coast beach. Our family spent last weekend in Manzanita. It is easy to see why Indians believed Neah-Kah-Nie Mountain was a holy place. Walking that beach, one sees the mountain rising steeply from the ocean. 

Sundays glorious sunlight beckoned many of us to Oswald West State Park. We hiked to Falcon Cove. Coming down to the beach was like  entering a tribal gathering of surfers, of course. Wearing black wetsuits and of diverse ages, they were in the water and at gathering points about the beach. The canine population was also impressive.

S.A.F.