my fathers musings

[redneck joe]

yeah how its made is more along my mental capacity...

 

[redneck joe]

What are your favorite books?


The problem I have with trying to answer that question is that my favorite book is frequently the book I am reading when asked that question.

But I will name a few.


The God Problem is one that persists high on my favorites list.
It’s by Howard Bloom who graduated from Reed College a long time ago and has never ceased being impressed by the intellect that that achievement implies.
Having read the book several times, I agree with his high self-esteem.
Howard takes his readers through a maze of history, science, math and physics and leads to the rational conclusion that things are as they are due to the inevitable facts of rules and mechanics rather than supernatural design.
At least I think that’s what he is saying.

Another book that comes to mind isn’t a book at all, but a long and deep friendship that holds together a story that is meted out in 20 volumes. The Aubrey/Maturin Epic is addictive because each time I enter it I’m back in the midst of my closest friends - Jack and Stephen drag a lot of people with them - and I can’t stop reading until volume 20 is read again. The only downside to that phenomenon is that at the end of volume 20 the story of that relationship is only beginning. Unfortunately, the epic’s author, Patrick O’Brian, dies after completing volume 20. I own the published draft of volume 21, but it’s pretty thin gruel.

The Great Rehearsal by Carl Van Doren is a good thing to read every five years. It is a minute-by-minute re-creation of the Constitutional Convention, May to September 1787. Having some idea about that morsel of United States history can help make one appear less foolish when talking Constitutional Law at cocktail events.

Adventures in Time and Space, published first in 1946, is a thousand-page anthology of the best science fiction of the first half of the Twentieth Century. I read it first in the summer of 1962. I finally found a used hardback reprint of it in 2020. It’s still untamed magic.

Speaking of magic, for me Amor Towles weaves a magic raiment in A Gentleman in Moscow. The plot is magical, so, to be consistent, the characters and their relationships are therefore magical and, in this book - I read The Lincoln Highway and the magic was missing - Towles’ prose often conjures magic. His description of vast miles and miles of Eastern Russia densely clothed with apple trees - an apple forest, he calls it - is one of the clearest pictures of a magic thing that I have ever seen.

Napoleon by Vincent Cronin comes to mind. I bought it on a whim while in the museum store at Versailles. That was my introduction to Napoleon. It’s the reason that I am a fan of Napoleon. It’s why I have read a number of other Napoleon biographies. Reading them has been interesting because biographers of Napoleon adopt one of two approaches: they are either all mayhem and battles, or they are all gossip and relationships. I prefer the latter. Cronin does a third thing: he gossips and battles and gets into the heads of his subjects. That’s why I re-read Napoleon by Cronin every now and then.

The Bears of Blue River by Charles Major is another magical thing. I read it fairly recently after not having read it for, perhaps, fifty years. It unleashed a phenomenon I had never experienced. I found myself reading a word or two and turning the page, time after time after time: I have the book memorized.

The rest of my favorite books reside on various shelves, in various locations. Some are even in boxes. Some I haven’t even read yet. They are all my favorites.

 

[flashback]

I whole heartedly agree with him on the Patrick Obrien saga. I have most in paper back except for those that I loaned out over the years.

 

[redneck joe]

How did you choose where to go to college?
A couple of paragraphs from Screen Saver are the answer to this question.

I had the good fortune to have a good job in the summer of 1960. I was on a surveying crew doing the engineering work for Wanapum Dam which was under construction.

Most of that summer I was on the crew that was establishing exactly where the railroad tracks adjacent to the Columbia River were going to be in relation to the giant lake that would form behind the dam when it filled up.

The specific function was called “shooting a traverse”.

I will leave out the details of that function.

On the traverse down the railroad tracks there were sometimes days on end when the terrain was uniform from hour to hour and day to day. I was always a chain length down the track from the level, and the terrain was unendingly the same; all I had to do was walk to the end of the chain, hold the rod plumb, and let Jerry take the elevation, and then do it again, and again. In those times I had a lot of time to think.

It was during one of those extended periods of days of never-ending repetition that I had a life-changing revelation. It was late enough in the summer that my savings account was getting fairly large, at least by my standards. I had calculated that by the time I ended my summer I would have $730 in the bank. That was, for a seventeen-year-old, a lot of money in 1960. Then I began to think about the financial implications of going to Portland University, even with the partial scholarship. The more I thought about it, the less sense it made. I was going to have to spend most of the $730 just to pay for my tuition. I would have almost nothing left over for clothes, or dates or whatever. And why was I going to Portland University? Certainly the scholarship had had something to do with it, but the real answer to the question was that I was going due to inertia. Other than the “assumption” that I was going to go to college, where or how had never been addressed. The $730 addressed the how, but the catastrophic effect addressing it would have on my now treasured bank balance caused the “where” to suddenly surface for the first time as something to be thought about. The answer to “where” came almost magically. And it came in the form of a decision, not a possibility, which made it even more unusual. My typical decision-making process had been to come up with one or more possibilities and worry them to death until I could decide what to do. Those decisions frequently ended up concluding to do none of the above and going back to discovery mode. But on this day I had jumped from a problem to a solution almost instantly. And the solution had just felt right.

The fact that my choice of “where” had felt right from the outset was amazing. Other than being vaguely aware that there was a member of Oregon’s higher education apparatus in Portland, and that its name was Portland State College, I had never thought any more about it. All of a sudden, that was where I was going to go to college. That had been my first object lesson in how money would serve me well as a significant catalytic contributor to clear and decisive thought.

 

[redneck joe]

My father loved nature.

He was fascinated by it from the time he was a small boy and spent his summers in the woods north of Seattle.

Those woods are now all subdivided and built upon and named Lake Forest Park.

But when my father was a little boy those woods were just woods. They had no name. They were expansive and un-subdivided.

Those woods were full of plants and creatures that were so interesting they made the three month summers pass as if they were only a few days long.

My father told me that when I was a little boy.

Those creatures were hidden from all but the most dedicated eyes and ears.

My father was an enthusiastic and dedicated observer. So he had many things to tell that he saw during those summers.

The red huckleberries when they appeared shone like Christmas lights in the forest gloom. Normally those huckleberries were the most nondescript of forest floor shrubbery. They were things that no one would ever notice.

The sudden appearance of dark coral berries changed that briefly.

When the berries appeared those nondescript bushes changed into glorious light green laceworks spattered with countless specks of red.

Then the birds descended upon them.

And then the berries disappeared.

And then the bushes receded from sight into their former anonymity.

But my father knew they were still there.

He told me about them when I was a little boy.

Clusters of gelatinous material laced with tiny spheres appeared every spring in the swamps that oozed out of the little creek that wandered through the woods.

And those spheres always did the same thing.

They always disappeared.

In their place there were instead large numbers of tadpoles.

And before long the tadpoles disappeared.

In their place there were instead large numbers of little thumbnail sized frogs.

The tiny spheres disappeared and then the tadpoles disappeared leaving only little frogs because they were all three one and the same.

The gelatin encased spheres turned into tadpoles and the tadpoles turned into frogs.

My father knew that.

He told me about that when I was a little boy.

Underwater in the little creek were things that looked like bundles of fir needles. And there were bigger things that looked like tubes made of sand grains.

Both of those things were insects.

Rather, they were the larvae of insects yet to become.

“Larvae” was a word my father taught me.

Those larvae lived in the creek bottom until one day they all disappeared.

When they disappeared the air was filled with flying insects.

The larvae disappeared when the flying insects appeared because they were one and the same.

The larvae had turned into flying bugs.

My father knew that.

He told me about that when I was a little boy.

Of all the wild things my father loved, birds were the most loved.

He had books and books of them.

The biggest of the books was the Audubon Bird Book.

When I was a little boy I spent hours and days turning the pages of that gigantic book.

Even now I can often guess at what sort of bird I am looking at aided by flashes of memory from that great Audubon Folio.

I inherited my father’s love of wild things.

And like him, I put birds at the top of the list.

This little collection is the result of several years of wandering Lopez Island.

The beautiful creatures pictured here all did me the honor of sitting still long enough to allow me to capture their images.

I have too many for a little book like this one.

But here are a few of them.

Each bird speaks for itself.

They are not identified.

I leave that enjoyable task to anyone who looks at this book.

If they want to.

 

[redneck joe]

dads sister died when he was ten



Annie's Song
Annie’s death had been a great deal closer to my heart. She was a year and a half younger than I was. We were the typical mixed gender, close in age siblings. We cared deeply about one another when we weren’t fighting or trying to kill one another. She was expert at getting me in trouble with my mother. I was expert at stumbling into her snares and artifices that got me into trouble. All in all it was a satisfying and loving relationship.

After we had moved to Portland and after my parents had divorced my mother and Annie and I moved to a court apartment on North Ainsworth Street. Annie and I had shared a bedroom. That Christmas we each got a new Schwinn bike. Annie’s was blue. Blue was her favorite color. Mine was red. Red was my favorite color. Neither of us had known how to ride a bike. Learning to ride was to be the major non-scholastic project of the coming year – once the weather improved enough to allow us to take our shiny new bikes out without getting them wet and muddy.

As it happened, we never took them out together, that year or ever. That is because “we” had become “I” before the new year was out. Although “I” ultimately did learn to ride my bike Annie never got to touch hers. There never was a “we” happily careening around the neighborhood.

One day not long after Christmas Annie had looked at my mother and my mother had seen one of Annie’s eyes cross. My mother took Annie to the doctor. The doctor had been taking care of Annie and me since we had moved to Portland which by this time was half of Annie’s life. He took one look at Annie and referred her to a well-known brain surgeon. The well-known brain surgeon took one look at Annie and said some things that really upset my mother. It must have scared the hell out of Annie. I never knew, because she and I never got to talk about these events. In almost no time at all Annie had undergone brain surgery. They had shaved off all of her beautiful dark blond hair and drilled a couple of holes in her head. What this was supposed to have accomplished I would never know. Whatever it was, it didn’t. Apparently it was hopeless because what we did next could only have been done in a medically hopeless situation.

My grandparents - my mother’s parents - occasionally used the services of a chiropractor. He was a large, bald, rather loud man who had lots of opinions. His name was Bob. One of his opinions was that somehow a daily regimen of chiropractic adjustments would cure whatever it was that was afflicting my sister.

My mother, Annie and I moved to Seattle to live with my grandparents to submit Annie to this regimen.

As Annie continued to worsen – she went from eating with the family at meals to being served in bed, and from being able to sort of talk to not being able, or perhaps being willing, to talk – we added a daily novena to the chiropractic regimen. Life seemed to stabilize into a daily routine of visits from Bob the chiropractor and my mother and my grandparents and me gathering on our knees in the back bedroom around the bed of the presence that had once been my little sister. We mumbled the various Catholic incantations that were required by the novena. Annie didn’t improve; Annie didn’t worsen; Annie was in suspended in some state of not being quite fully alive, but not dead.

None of this seemed ominous to me. Nor did it seem odd. It was just what one did until a bad situation turned for the better. It had never occurred to me that Annie wouldn’t get better. She was my little sister, not a frog or a caterpillar – or even my mother’s best friend, favorite entertainer or favorite baseball player. Little sisters didn’t die; they got better. But Annie didn’t get better. One morning early in the summer she went into convulsions. I saw my mother on the bed straddling her and pushing on her chest. The back bedroom was a scene of chaos. I was hustled out of the house to my friend Dickey’s house for the day. My belief remained unshakable that this was just one more pre-requisite activity on Annie’s ultimate return to being my troublesome and wonderful little sister. Dickey and I went to the arboretum with kitchen strainers with long sticks attached to them with multiple wraps of string. The attached sticks made the strainers into quite long handled nets. We spent the day gathering creatures from the waters of our favorite frog pond. In later years that pond would become a Japanese garden, a sad metamorphosis.

Early in the evening my mother picked me up at my friend’s house. Although my grandparent’s house was only a block away she had come in the car. We got in the car and she started driving away from the direction that would have taken us to my grandparents’ house. After we had turned up the hill that would lead to the lake and had sat in silence to that point I broke the silence. “How is Annie?” “Annie died.” At that instant something happened to me. Something either entered me, or something left me. In either case I never knew what it was, but I forever after felt its iron influence. It was a sense of aloneness; it was a sense of self-preservation; it was a sense on uniqueness; it was a sense of anger; it was a sense of fear. I never lived without it after the moment I heard the words, “Annie died.” I inhaled the deepest breath of my life and filled the car with my wracking sobs of grief.

Not long after that day I was back at the apartment in Portland on North Ainsworth Street. On the lamp table by the front window were two crisp, new looking twenty dollar bills. The blue Schwinn had been sold.

 

[redneck joe]

on the meaning of life


“Imagine yourself in the ultimate dream. It is ultimate for its strangeness. It is ultimate for its familiarity. It is ultimate for its feeling of urgency and proximity. A series of sights and sounds have flown past your view and you have almost lost yourself into each as it has passed. But you have remained immobile and unmoved by the visions.

“And then everything folds backwards upon itself. The time of a clock that appears from nowhere is at hyper speed even as it stands still, even as its hands pass one another intermittently backwards, even as it blurs, even as it disappears. A sense of mortality blends with the realization of boundaries. The dream is not a dream. The dream is reality. And reality is a dream. And the boundaries fade and opportunities lost and achievements unattained loom and overwhelm. Whatever it had been that one had ever thought that one might be or might have been is becoming a neatly wrapped package; it is becoming a sleekly designed capsule. And then some infinite unseen and unseeable facility or force compresses it all – the hopes, the dreams, the illusions, the achievements, the misses and near misses, the loves, the hates, the intentions good and the attentions bad - into an expendable portion and inserts it into infinity.”

“And then think about the mirrors, the matrixes, the scutes and the slime of time across and intersected with all of that: the mélange of what is, or could be”

 

[flashback]

2001 comes to mind. Heavy!

 

[redneck joe]

My First Day On The Wanapum Dam team

Monday 16 June 1960, I was assigned to one of the crews. I was introduced to the crew chief whose name was Nick. Nick was an older man – probably thirty-five years old, but old to me – with wavy sun-bleached hair, a receding hairline and a generally red-brown, sun-baked complexion. He had ice-blue eyes. He had a distinct limp and kind of a to-the-right-slump in his overall frame. He had broken his back as a younger man in some kind of an accident, which had involved letting enough air out of the tires of his car to be able to sink down on a railroad track and go like hell. Apparently he had found it necessary to execute evasive action to avoid a train, and had come out the worse for it. I think he had significant pain associated with this malady.

Nick didn’t seem very interested in meeting me, which was fine with me, because my mother had told me that, since she worked for the company, the less any of the crews knew about me the better. She warned me about having a smart-assed-kid-whose-mother-works-in-the-head-shed attitude. So she had told me not to volunteer anything, and be damn circumspect in any information I gave in response to direct requests for information from the crews. So the fact that Nick had seemed to be a man of few words was a good thing.

I was the fourth person on the crew, counting Nick. When we got to wherever it was that we were going to do whatever it was that we were going to do, we sat in the rig for a while as Nick scrutinized his notebook. Without any outward sign, but as if some inaudible starting horn had sounded, Nick and the other two guys got out of the vehicle. The vehicle was a new thing to me. It was an International Harvester four door, two rows of seats with copious storage in back kind of vehicle. If I had had future sight, I would have described it as a crummy Cadillac Escalade. Oddly, the crew called it “the crummy.”

I knew nothing about surveying. I had been assured that I would be the most current of a long line of Pettijohn legacies who had learned the trade, and that all I needed to do was listen, and do as I was told, and work hard. That had seemed reasonable. What I hadn’t been told to factor into the learning process was the language barrier.

After some milling around and – to me – incomprehensible activity on the part of my three associates, Nick said something to me. If Nick was anything, he was laconic. And he mumbled. The one word I understood was “lagging”, or “nagging”, or “frigging” or something. Since he had accompanied whatever it was that he had said with an expansive gesture toward a distant hill, I thought that I knew that whatever it was that I was going to do involved that hill. I thought at frantic speed, reprocessing again and again what I had heard, and trying to make it mesh sensibly with the distant hill. But I couldn’t decipher it. I had to ask. Nick was already acting like he was dealing with a cretin and asking him what he had said seemed to confirm his assessment. With as much understated disdain as I had ever experienced, he repeated himself. Or, at least, he said something slightly more clearly. I couldn’t tell whether it was exactly what he had said at first, but it had the same gesture toward the hill. He wanted me to go out to the hill with a “rod”, pound a “hub” into the ground, give him a “shot” with the “rod” on top of the “hub”, pound a “stake” behind the “hub” and “flag” the “stake”. That was clear. “What’s a rod?” I said. Nick’s disdain was palpable. It increased to an almost visible aura by the time I had asked the rest of the “what’s a …” questions. A rod was a twelve-foot-long piece of mahogany with a metal face on one side. The face had feet calibrated to tenths. A hub was a foot long two by two with a milled point on one end. A shot was the focused view a level operator - a level being a telescope with a level bubble on a tripod - took of a rod, and then wrote in his book. A stake was just that: a pointed, foot-long three by one half. Hubs and stakes were pointed so that they could be pounded into the ground. “Lagging”, or “nagging”, or “frigging” turned out to be “flagging”. Flagging was a roll of orange plastic material, about the size of friction tape. You “flagged” things with flagging. That made it easier to find them later, when as it turned out to be inevitably, the whole process needed to be repeated.

The day pretty well went downhill from that high point.

The next morning I was assigned to a different crew.

 

[redneck joe]

My Second Day On The Wanapum Team

The next morning I was assigned to a different crew. It was, counting me, a three-man crew. The crew chief was named Jerry. The head chainman was named Jerry also. I was the rear chainman/rodman.

The Jerry and Jerry crew was running levels on a traverse down the railroad track from Moses Coulee to Rock Island Dam.

A traverse is an imaginary line on the earth’s surface that can be located exactly on a map. Such a line, once established, could be used for a variety of useful functions. A traverse was created by taking a distance and angle offset from a previously established point on the earth’s surface. This created a known and locatable starting point. The traverse extended from that starting point with distance and angle offsets from the starting point.

Crews measured distances by using a “chain”. A “chain” was a steel device roughly half the dimensions of the metal strapping on bundles of lumber.
“Chains” came in two lengths, one hundred feet or three hundred feet. They had feet and tenths of feet embossed into their surface.

At the end of the traverse you “tied it off” to another previously established point on the earth’s surface.

Sometimes that was all that was done. In that case, a line was all that had been created. Such a line could be the initial centerline of a highway yet to be built, for example. Or it could be used as the reference for more useful information, such as the contour of the land on both of its sides out a quarter mile on each side in fifty-foot increments. To do that you needed to establish the elevation of incremental points down the traverse, and their associated incremental offsets on each side every fifty feet.

If you had seen it drawn on the map, it would have looked like a giant fish skeleton, like in the comics: the balloon over a cat’s head has one when the cat is dreaming of a fish dinner.

Jerry and Jerry had run the traverse previously. It had taken part of the late winter and all of the spring. When I joined them, our new job was to shoot the contours. We needed to create the fish skeleton and get the elevations from its points. That was thought to be a job that would take most of the rest of the infant summer.

And it did.

 

[redneck joe]

Memories are easy things.

All one needs to do is have them.

Getting them on paper is probably more difficult but getting them on paper is just mechanics: key on some keyboard and, buffered or not, print.

Of course I will do that here.

That may be the majority of what I do.

But, for my father, it’s the impressions that matter in the long run.

And matter the most.

And it is a long, long run.

We shall see.

I leave it for the reader to distinguish which is which: impression or memory; or, maybe, they merge to hybrids; that’s going to be interesting.

Burpee seed catalogue came today.

We lived in a rental duplex in Portland.

It was old enough to be two asymmetric houses built on one foundation.

Our other side of the duplex neighbors were the pastor of the Episcopal Church down the street and his wife.

They were wonderful neighbors.

The duplex was built on a fairly good-sized lot.

So, Daddy and I had plans for a vegetable garden.

“Burpee seed catalogue came today”, he said as he riffled the various envelopes that had arrived that morning.

It is hard to believe the joy and anticipation I experienced as I looked page after page through Burpee Spring 1954.

Our duplex was on the edge of a veldt.

In the 1920’s a developer named Lloyd had either heard of, or invented, the idea of what became to be known in the 1980s as a Mall.

Lloyd Center it was to be called.

1929 happened and the Lloyd Center didn’t.

Happen.

The time machine put me and Daddy on the cusp of its exhumation.

The veldt - all the vacant lot grasslands that had been created in the 20s in preparation for Lloyd before the Crash became bigger in the 50s.

More and more houses were torn down to add to the footprint of the incipient Lloyd Center.

A lot of good stuff just got trashed.

I collected an amazing number of goldfish from the pond of a house torn down to service the Lloyd footprint.

Daddy even got enthused by the salvage opportunities.

We somehow got some rather large, long rectangles of granite from a demolition site to the front steps of the duplex.

Over several weekends we dug out the soil adjacent to those steps and laid in granite slabs along both sides.

My father should have been an architect.

I think I remember that we planted some seeds.

I think I remember that we got a few gourds and a cucumber.

But who knows?

Or who, really, cares.

Those memories are fun.

Let them stand.

I definitely remember that when fall came Daddy and I scheduled a burn day.

We had an abandoned steel barrel of some sort out in the garden alcove, and we decided to burn a lot of - something - I don’t remember what, in it.

But we burned it.

And, late in the day, as the late fall sun began to disappear and darken the sky, and the heat from the fire became a rosy glow, we roasted hot dogs on sticks.

Hot dogs on sticks have always been my favorite food.

We had somehow gotten on a high mountain lake in a small boat with oars and a pink-shrimp colored sunrise dramatizing the mountain.

The mountain was a perfect cone.

The lake was positioned as if she - the mountain - had a bib, and the lake was it.

We caught some fish - rainbow trout and landlocked sockeye salmon, called kokanee by the original people.

It was one of the earliest fishing trips I ever had with Daddy.

Obviously, I have never forgotten it.

17th Avenue was not an arterial, but it was quite wide.

It took a lot of maple tree branches to block it.

Daddy and I had, nonetheless managed to block it with the branches from our two maple trees that we had been trimming since mid-afternoon.

It was exciting work, and the excitement was augmented by the enthusiasm of watching all those branches fall to earth to be disposed of thoughtfully.

As it got darker, and colder - it was a frigid January afternoon - the question began to form independently, but in both of our minds.

“What are we going to do with all of these branches?”

All I remember is that we did something, and I think it involved fire, and a late night on the street.

I don’t remember any hot dogs, but what a time to have had them?

Maple smoke smoked hot dogs in the fire-lit dark on 17th Avenue in Portland?

It could not have gotten better than that.

I was, probably, fourteen years old when I might have had maple smoked hot dogs with Daddy in the middle of 17th Avenue in Portland that Sunday long day’s journey into night, but I had a thought.

It just popped.

And I have always remembered it.

And wondered what it meant.

“If I ever have a son, I want to burn a big pile of cut down trees with him; and we will have an Oppenheimer Moment.”.

I have never known what that must have been intended to mean in the great scheme of things.

After the fishing trip on that mountain lake, fishing became something we did, Daddy and I.

(I have tried to make “Daddy and me” be correct; but I can’t do it).

The time was the mid-1950s.

Spinning reels had just been invented by the French; Airex was the premier brand; but Airex cost a lot of money - probably $30.

Daddy found a brand from somewhere called Horrocks-Ibbotson, or so I remember, and they were perfect little spinning reels for $15.

$30 was outlandish; $15 was an abject luxury, but Daddy bought us two of them.

And we fished.

With them.

A lot of places.

And I have thanked and loved him for that, ever since.

Having memories of fishing is good.

We spent a lot of time at the new place - Bobby had died and Grammy volunteered the proceeds from the sale of her Seattle house on 32nd Avenue to be applied to a house in Portland that could house her and her family.

That’s how we got the tree with the maples.

The new place was where I “grew up”.

And my growing up was time-consuming.

I realize now that time has become a cascade.

Of seconds, minutes, hours, days and years: the backup alarms of garbage trucks seem to be there every morning, as I re-examine my state and ask am I still.

Daddy died with my hand in his.

I was driving into Portland, and I decided to stop at the hospital where Daddy was.

I didn’t even know what ICU meant.

I broached the main desk, announced my presence and received more of a greeting than I would have expected,

“Hearing is the last that goes,” I was told.

“I wonder what that means?” I thought.

After being taken to Daddy I discovered what that meant.

I held his hand.

He didn’t seem to be there.

The green jagged line machine said he was.

There.

Until he wasn’t.

He threw his head to one side and the green line went horizontal.

I knew an indomitable spirit had just gone elsewhere.

And I thought about Normandy.

 

[jlh3rd]

"The God Problem is one that persists high on my favorites list.
It’s by Howard Bloom who graduated from Reed College a long time ago and has never ceased being impressed by the intellect that that achievement implies.
Having read the book several times, I agree with his high self-esteem.
Howard takes his readers through a maze of history, science, math and physics and leads to the rational conclusion that things are as they are due to the inevitable facts of rules and mechanics rather than supernatural design.
At least I think that’s what he is saying."

haven't read the book, so maybe my comment is considered ignorant, but...

just where did these "things" come from then? "Rules and mechanics" state something can't come from nothing.