On Second Person Birds: From Shipyard To Library In Just Eighty Years

It’s 2003 and you’re coming up on the end of your first full year of “stand-alone journalism”, doing independent reporting and commentary on Portland entirely by blog. You’re visiting an independent bookstore run out of a church in South Portland, where friends of yours work. It has a particular focus on Western Americana, and while wandering those particular stacks you spot a plain, unassuming spine: green cloth, gold embossed lettering: “THE FINGER” and “OCT. 9, 1942 - JAN 3, 1944”.

At first, by the look of its contents, you take it to be some sort of radical underground paper from the 1960s—but those dates on the spine. Clearly, this is something else altogether.

It would seem to qualify as a zine: bound together is set of single eight and a half by fourteen sheets, each folded into a simple, four-page booklet. Any given issue at most just two colors. You quickly fall down a rabbit hole of research after discovering that it appears to have been a zine produced by and for workers at the Swan Island shipyards during World War II.

You spend hours at the Oregon Historical Library trying to track down anything you can about what it was, where either came from, or even if anyone still alive today remembers it at all.

You write up your findings late that year, in 2003. You revise them early in 2004. You revise them again in the middle of 2006, and yet again late in 2011. Each time because you’ve come across some small, new thing. It’s more than a decade before you find more, and you revise your findings in the middle of 2023 and again early in 2024.

Shortly afterward, having returned your scanned archive to public availability on the web after more than ten years, along with your written findings, you decide it’s time at last to contact the historical society about donating the originals. Fatigue prevents you from keeping to that commitment for more than a year.

You notice that this month’s IndieWeb Carnival is on “second person birds”, and you wonder what in the world anyone will manage to do with such a surrealist prompt. Previous ones such as “digital relationships”, or “impact”, or “self-expression” seemed easy. Then it comes to you: while the relevance might escape people, you think you know exactly what you should write. You think it will work, but you never know. Will it even matter if no one else can spot your interpretation?

You write up what you can, and then email the historical society librarian saying you’re finally ready. You agree to meet at the library the following Thursday.

That day, you have restless sleep and morning insomnia. You somehow successfully manage your way through your morning routine two hours earlier than usual in order to head out to the appointment.

It’s the twenty-fourth anniversary of an attack that led your country to lurch dramatically to the right and invade a country that had nothing to do with it, and you watch as the shooting death of a nazi the day before is being used to give yet another heavy pull on the Overton window thanks to a cascade of valorizing and lionizing hagiographies from both Republicans and Democrats, leaving you dangerously close to becoming a doomer because you can’t see where we can go from that.

You take the transit trip into downtown Portland, walk the last several blocks. You have to ride up in a small, older model elevator which pokes your claustrophobia, but you meet the librarian you’d been emailing, and give them The Finger. It feels weird to do, after twenty-two years in your care.

Unable to schedule your third Hepatitis B shot until next Wednesday and already downtown, you put off your blood draw and your EKG in favor of heading to the zoo for the first time since May because, as always, the fatigue. You grab The Whole Bowl on the way because it’s your go-to restorative when you need to push through a long day far afield from home. You have to take a shuttle bus part of the way because the light rail tunnel is being renovated, but you’re determined now.

You wander the zoo for as long as you can, before everything begins to feel slow and heavy. You go check out the three new goats, although you don’t yet know who’s who. You haul yourself back up the winding path, catch the shuttle, transfer to the light rail back to North Portland, hop the bus back to St. Johns. You make a quick grocery errand, head home, and take out the bins.

You finish writing this post, push the update, upload it to your blog, then email Sophia a link to your contribution.