Taking the Census

Sherwood Scroll, April 1977
"It was a dark and stormy night and a lone figure was trudging up the hill." Trudging. The word is used to death by writers of narratives. But there is no other way to describe how we volunteer census takers made our way through town.

I trudged, you trudged, he-she-it trudged, we trudged, they trudged.

The purpose of our trudging was to help the City of Sherwood and the data professionals from Portland State University establish an accurate population figure for the town.

You realize you are trudging when you feel the rocks along the pavement poke through the soles of your shoes. "Shoes growing thin." I whisper, making a mental note to myself, "Maybe you'll be able to buy a new pair with what they pay you."

The older houses in Sherwood have little brass door knockers that you would need little cat's paws to operate. Knocking on doors quickly has its effect on one's knuckles. I would have made a lousy Watkins Man. "Hello, I'm taking the census. They want to know the names and ages of people living here. No pets allowed on the survey."

Most people get a kick out of the pet survey remark, although reactions vary. At one place, the occupant takes a long time opening the door. All the lights are off when he peeks through and looks only at my feet. He refuses to say who he is. When I ask him the names of the people next door he doesn't know them either. I suspect he was probably a census taker himself too at one time: He knows all too well how much information people will give away about themselves without realizing it. The PSU folks said that if you can't get the information you want at one door, ask next door. "The neighbors will sing like canaries."

More then once someone yells "Come in" without checking to see who I am. They do not seem surprised or dismayed to see that it's me, a total stranger standing in the middle of their living room. At one address, the front door is standing wide open and no one but a big lazy cat stares back at me as I shout hello half a dozen times. By and large the people of Sherwood are friendly. We chat like old friends. I know their names for a brief time after I've left. By the time I reach census headquarters at City Hall, however, I've forgotten everyone again. I'm amazed by how easy it is to get the pages mixed up or to leave information off the pages. Here is an interesting fact: All those people have become nothing more to me than an armload of paper.

I can see the problem politicians have, and bureaucrats.

The man in charge of the census taking is a dour professor from PSU who rather resembles a dissident Russian author, with his scraggly dark beard. He does not believe I got the pages mixed up by accident. He has stories to tell about volunteers who didn't even knock at the doors before they wrote down the numbers. (The higher the numbers the more money the City gets). We volunteers sit respectfully while the professor puts large triangular paper clips around our sheaves of papers and places them where he can in the cramped office. I see my sheaf of papers being balanced on the windowsill as though in fulfillment of an ancient biblical prophesy: "And they were scattered and became food for all the wild beasts."

To pass the time, I share pleasantries with the professor's students, but they are not amused by any anecdote that does not contain a statistic. My story about the amazing way my sister's cat snatches birds out of the air in mid-flight is answered by: "Small animal populations diminish by fifteen percent in communities where domesticated cats are allowed."

About a third of the houses on my route are unaccounted for and so it is necessary for me to go over the route again in the evening after supper. The stars are out and the blood has drained from my head into my belly and my thoughts between houses aren't making very much sense.

I am thinking that eventually it will be necessary to take a census in locations far beyond the earth herself. I wonder how many souls are waiting to be counted out there. I see the star-group Orion above me reaching out like a census taker to the Pliades, always just out of reach there a few billion light-years ahead of him. Someone will have to keep an eye on him, just as the PSU official and his students do-- driving by continually in their brown four door car with the State of Oregon seal on the side.

Already little pieces of the earth are sailing through space. Recently the spaceship we dropped on planet Mars radioed back pictures that seemed to show numbers printed on the rocks. The bemused scientists were sure the "numbers" were only incidental shadows in the rock, just as census takers from another part of the galaxy will refuse to consider the possibility that we of the Earth might know how to count.

Census takers from beyond might already be on their way, or may have already arrived. Some scientists believe that the super novae and the X-Ray sources are exactly what spacecraft with nuclear bomb powered piston engines would look like. So get ready. First they will discover us. Then they will count us. They will be like Pastuer peering through his microscope for the first time. At first the Earth itself will look like a giant photosynthesizing engine, a living being unto itself. But upon closer inspection the investigators will see the contradictions in us. "Earth is resource rich and self destructive." the report will say.

Then they will adjust to a higher focus and they will see the cities and the freeways and, most of all, they will see the pieces of paper that flow in and out of the cars and trucks that are hauling them about. Earth's banking system and insurance system will stand proudly to be discovered. The sojourners will look closer yet and see this strange sort of vermin that flies about the air and swarms across the ground on "rills well worn into the planet's surface." They will see large craters in the ground that have been left after the soil itself has been dug up and sifted through and finally they will discover the small passengers within these buildings and vehicles. They will have discovered us at last: Always shuffling papers and signing them and handing them back and forth and losing them in the wind.

Finally they will zero in on the most curious object of all, the City of Sherwood, and will see a census taker chasing his papers about. Or, giving up on that project, sitting down at his typewriter and creating this report instead.
Copyright 2005 by Clyde List
NOTE: The City of Sherwood had a population of less than 3,000 when this article appeared.

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