Dave Moulton wrote today about the evolution of mountain biking. He asked for his readers’ “take on the period” — here’s mine:

I grew up in rural Nebraska in the 1970s when banana seats gave way to BMX. My favorite thing wasn’t jumping ditches though so much as taking long rambles up dirt roads, I’d be gone for hours. In retrospect I was probably never more than 2 or 3 miles away from the house but it felt much farther. I had a fear of county roads and blacktop traffic, so I stuck to dirt roads: section road, irrigation access, that kind of thing.

We moved to the “big city” Lincoln in the early 80s and I bought my first grownup bike, a late 70s vintage 10-spd “racing” bike. I think it was a Sekai. I rode this and a Schwinn Varsity until high school. My new favorite bike thing was to ride those 10-spds all day, either around town into new neighborhoods, or to outlying towns. At age 13 I rode my Varsity 52 miles (round trip) on a surprise visit to a girl in a neighboring town. I taped cans of Coke to the frame for sustenance, and ate a slice of pizza before the ride home. The girl was out of town, that taught me to always call ahead.

For about 5 years I barely rode at all. It was too “uncool” to be seen on a bike at my gearhead high school, or so I felt anyway. I kept that unhealthy obsession with cars until college when I got my first MTB, a Giant Rincon (1992).

The Rincon reawakened the joy of being gone all day on a bike. This time it was back to dirt roads, and wasteland like timber claims or Wilderness Park (an undeveloped city park southwest of Lincoln). I also lived exactly the right distance from campus for steady bike commuting: too near to drive, too far to walk. After college I took the Rincon — and its successor: a Yokota mountainbike — with me on my archaeological adventures across the Great Plains. I never had the Xtreme Mad Huck personality ascendent in 90s MTB culture, I never railed on sketchy descents or caught big air. My ideal ride was a long distance on two-track in the hinterland. Exploring. Cow-trailing. Unsuspended steel MTBs excel at that.

I took the Yokota with me to grad school — I had long since given up cars entirely — where it was my primary mode of transport. Ironically, once I moved to Oregon — where we have actual mountains — I pretty stopped mountain biking. This was the mid-90s and MTB culture was no longer under the radar, and in Oregon at any rate you couldn’t just go ride a bike on all that sweet singletrack. Either it was closed to bikes, or it was developed into a kind of skills park for Mad Hucking. Mostly, to ride a MTB bike in Oregon it helps to have a car; you have to drive to a “trailhead” where you spin around for an hour or so then drive home. It has always struck me as absurd to drive somewhere to Have Fun by biking (or hiking, or skiing) around in little circles. Other than riding a bike to work, I never spent much time on a bike between 1995 and 2001.

Not quite a decade ago I bought another road bike — actually kind of a cross/touring bike, a Bianchi Volpe. That set me on my last — and most durable — love affair with bikes. With a road bike (or better, a ’cross bike), as soon as you step out the front door you’re Having Fun. That bike kept me sane through my divorce, when my all-day-bike-riding habits became a little obsessive. The peak of that period was my solo tour down the Oregon Coast.

This was how I met Jenny: she saw me carrying my bike into our apartment building (we were neighbors), and she asked “do you know any good rides around here?” I didn’t ask her out right that second but I eventually did, and the story had a happy ending. Much of our early courtship — and most of our vacations, even today — are had on bike. Sometimes on that Bianchi, or on one of its roadie successors.

Last spring I won a fancy new Kona mountain bike. I never would have bought this bike myself, and I’m kind of at a loss for what to do with it. Mostly it’s seen semi-legal singletrack in the weirdly-zoned terrain of SW Portland. I guess you still have to drive a car somewhere to have fun on a mountain bike, and I still think that’s stupid.

On Saturday, I rode my Vanilla road bike 90 miles — all on blacktop — into the beautiful rural hinterlands around Portland. I don’t get to do this as often as I used to but it’s still my favorite bike thing to do.

I don't know anyone who says anything other than “good riddance” to the first decade of the 21st century. I know lots of people who hope it was the anomaly, that the rest of the century will get better. I know a probably-equal number who think it’s only going to get worse.

Personally, the decade was rock bottom and tip top. This was the decade I became a Real Grownup. I started it gliding along with a certain degree of dissatisfaction with success. I’d just stumbled into my new career as a web designer, and my new marriage to my first wife. I was six months away from rock bottom in that marriage but had no idea what was coming or why, only that the unstable place I was in wasn’t going to hold. On this subject, the less said, the better. That new career was subject to the whipsaw vagaries of the Dot-com boom — although in the long run I’ve never been worried about jobs or work or money in quite the way I probably should be.

In 2000, that all cracked up. The marriage wobbled through two separations and a little ugliness until it dissipated altogether in 2002. The cool new career ping-ponged between Real Jobs and freelance and outright unemployment, until I regained my footing at Curiosity (also in 2002). 2002 was the year I learned that I was boy who never quite figured out how to be a man. It took breaking my marriage totally and irreparably to figure it out. The pecularity of modern American manhood is that it’s defined in contrast to womanhood, which is all backwards. Manhood isn’t the state of not being a woman, it’s the state of not being a boy. Anyway, by the end of 2002 I was stable, back on my feet.

2002 was also the year I began riding my bike. A lot. I have one piece of advice for someone who wants to be happier: ride your bike.

Three really important things happened in 2003. I shaved my head. I met Jenny. I put Sitka to sleep. I didn’t realize it at the time, but those three things taught me to release vanity, embrace vulnerability, and accept loss. Together they taught me the only important thing I’ve ever learned: my life isn’t just about me. When Orion was born I learned that the rest of my life isn’t about me at all. The rest of my life until I die is about my children and their children. My haircut is not even remotely important any more.

The glide path of my life turned upward after 2003. Jenny and I married in 2005 — probably my favorite year of the decade, if you really pressed me. We moved to China in 2006, and back in 2007. Orion joined us in 2008. The only two years in which nothing much happened to me personally were 2004 and 2009.

So that was me: pretty good decade I guess. A little bumpy, but the bumps made it good, ultimately.

Impersonally, this was an awful decade for America. (It was a lot better for 2-3 billion other people, though, something I won’t touch on.)

I won’t dwell long on politics except to note that no one got what they wanted. The nation didn’t get the president it voted for in 2000, but we did in 2004. By 2006, we had serious buyers’ remorse. It sucked elephant balls to be a liberal this past decade, but it had to really grate to be a conservative. Conservatives got everything they ever wanted for six or so years and it was an utter failure. I wonder if the resulting cognitive dissonance isn’t driving the utter batcrap crazy nonsense coming out of conservative mouths these days.

Lots of people will want to think September 11, 2001, was a nadir for America (and maybe the world), but I think in a couple of decades it’ll look like the 21st equivalent of Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination. A big deal only for the stuff that happened around it. Really big objects are in motion, globally, stuff that only crackpots and visionaries discussed ten years ago. Global warming, peak oil, globalization, the shift of global capital eastward and southward, the imminent plateau of human population, the emergence of the infosphere as a pervasive element of society. Ferdinand’s death didn’t start the Great War; the Great War was the first, protracted battle of World War II. The whole mess fell out of the final crackup of the ancient world order of empires built by monarchs.

I wonder whether the 2000s weren’t so much the first decade of the 21st century as the last decade of the 20th. The 19th century didn’t really end until 1918. And then it got worse.

The Internet and mobile phones — the democratization of information, actually — are quietly and relentlessly euthanizing whole industries. 2009 was the year people stopped consuming printed matter. Think hard about what that means. 20 years ago, if you wanted to know a random piece of information — for example, who played the second Catwoman in the Batman TV show with Adam West, for example — it would require several minutes, perhaps hours, of legwork. Minimally, a trip to the library. That’s a measure of how free information has become: we no longer rely on institutions or interlocutors to tell us what apartments are for rent, what a used car should cost, or how much our neighbors’ houses are worth. When people say “information is power,” there’s a concrete case. Twenty years ago, I was at the mercy of the used car guy. I had to hope he was honest, or I had to do days of expensive legwork to keep him honest.

The democratization of information will have consequences. Lots of people depend on that friction for their paychecks. In just a few minutes I can name a dozen or so professions fast becoming obsolete: publisher, newspaper editor, used-car salesman, newspaper carrier, ad buyer, payroll clerk, shipping clerk, bank teller, real estate agent, travel agent (anyone with “agent” in their title, really).

On the other hand, and this really blows my mind, my job title didn’t even exist when I graduated high school 20 years ago. The industry didn’t even exist. The words “web designer” were a meaningless nonsequitur. Man did I luck out there.

All this change was in the air 10 years ago, but most people overlooked the “destruction” part of “creative destruction.” The 90s had been pretty good — pretty great, actually...remember when gas was 89¢/gal? — and the 80s were nearly as good. The 70s sucked a little, sure, but Disco wasn’t as bad as everyone remembered, and black people could finally sit in the front half of the bus. 1975 was the point at which the disparity between rich and poor was lowest in the United States. (I wasn’t alive in the 60s so I can’t tell you whether anyone felt nostalgia for the passing decade on Dec. 31, 1969.) 1999 was coming at the tail-end of 50+ years of economic, political, and military stability for the United States.

I understood this, growing up, in an indirect way. When I read about Henry Huggins in 1979, the life he lived in 1949 was pretty substantially like mine. No kid lives like that in 2009.

So this is where “personal” hits “impersonal.” I’ve led a blessed life: a trouble-free childhood, my teenage and twenty-something years no worse than usual, a career I stumbled into by a fluke of history. All the troubles of my life — the divorce, mostly — are entirely of my own doing. This blessed life is a result of a lottery I won at birth. I was smart enough to be born in America, smart enough to have middle class parents with a good marriage, smart enough to be born into a largish extended family in a prosperous midwest state. All at the point in history when America was doing great and we had plenty of everything we needed: energy, water, topsoil, forests, fisheries, family farms, colleges, factories, credit cards, doctors. We still have doctors and colleges in good supply, I’m not too worried about those. Some of that stuff — e.g. factories and family farms — we’ve surrendered more or less intentionally through economic relationships, so we can get them back. Most of the rest we’ve simply eaten up and crapped out. However much there may be left of topsoil, or forests, or energy, or fresh water, we aren’t making more of it nearly fast enough. For 50 years, America’s been on a pretty effortless upward path; but there’s nothing in history or our present situation to suggest we can rely on momentum alone. I think we need to grow up a little and get a little serious about what America can do (halt global warming) and can’t do (build shopping malls in Kabul). But none of that is gonna fix itself, the way my life just kinda sorta turned out awesome. I think the “era of stuff just turning out awesome” is over.

Before Orion I used to say: I could imagine a heaven no better than to live my life again. But that’s not the heaven I want any more. Heaven to me now would be: I want Orion (and his sibling[s], and their kids) to live a life as good as mine. I mean this literally, by the way, not figuratively. I would gladly surrender personal immortality in paradise for the guarantee that my progeny get to live happy, fulfilling, plentiful lives.

From a romantic perspective, I want that life to have the exact elements I had: snow in the winter, trees to climb, bears in the mountains, paper routes and bicycles, cheap college with cheap beer, travel to fun places, no military draft, and a little dose (but not too much!) of free love. But that world isn’t gonna happen (see above re: creative destruction, stuff in short supply), and nothing as good as that will happen again unless we make it happen.

So this morning a guy yelled at me for signalling a legal lane change.

I made a (signalled, legal) lane change into the far right lane on a one-way street. Then I noticed that on the next block, this lane was closed for construction. So I immediately signalled a change back into the lane I had been in. I noticed the car that I had just changed in front of was immediately to my left (i.e. in my line of travel), so, while signalling my lane change I gave him a little wave-wave gesture meaning “you pull ahead so I can pull in behind you.”

At which point he rolled down the window and shouted at me: “You just changed out of this lane!” (For the record, he was driving an Acura, which I’m fast learning is the preferred car make of egotists with entitlement issues.)

I knew he couldn’t see the lane ahead like I could (cyclists have good visual command of the roadway, being up at SUV height and having no blind spots). So I said, as politely as I could while being yelled at, in traffic, with only one hand on my handlebars: “The lane ahead is closed, you fucking moron.” (OK, I left out the last part).

He dropped back (!) so I changed lanes in front of him. As we passed the obstruction I pointed at the lane closure and mimed “This is what I was talking about. You fucking moron.” I don’t know how well this translated, especially that last part.

But here’s what gets me: everything I did was completely, totally legal. Courteous, even. And we were all moving at the same (downtown rush hour) speed: about 13mph. There were a great many nonlegal, noncourteous things I could have done in this situation, including ride through the lane closure past the construction equipment, cut the guy off without signalling, or ride down the lane stripes. I didn’t, but got yelled at as if I had.

On my last few blocks into work, I tried to parse exactly what the Acura guy wanted me to do, and the best I can figure is “vanish from the face of the Earth.” Not just me, specifically, but all traffic between his present location and his intended destination. It’s just that I was on a bike and therefore a) unprotected and b) available for yelling at in a way I wouldn’t have been were I in a car. So he felt he could yell at me without fear of retribution.

So this reminds me of two stories.

Story the First

When I was in elementary school, all the teachers held the boys in my grade late one day. Someone, they said, had pooped in a urinal in the boys’ room, and we would all be punished until the culprit(s) stepped forward. No one stepped forward, so we were all punished. (I forget the punishment.) Indignant, all the fifth grade boys met at recess to find the bad guy, but again, no one stepped forward. While we were meeting, some of the popular girls came over and asked what we were doing, so we told them. They started laughing: because one of them had pooped in a urinal one day. (In thinking about it now, I wonder if she — one of the really pretty teacher pet types who teachers would never imagine doing such a thing, but who was one of the chief psychological tormentors on the playground — hadn’t done this particular deed to achieve just this effect: to get some boy(s) in trouble.)

A few days later, a couple of the more-troublesome boys pooped on the floor in the girls’ bathroom. The logic was flawless: if we’re going to be punished regardless of our behavior, we might as well do the things we’re being punished for. Of course, we were all punished again, but this time we knew who did it, and why, and we felt triumphant, not indignant.

So the next time you see a cyclist blow a red light, remember this story about fifth graders pooping, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

Story the Second

At some point in the 1980s, when systemic homelessness was a relatively new problem, I recall watching a talking head TV show about the subject. One of the panelists was a lady Reaganite, someone in the Phyllis Schafly mold. Hell, it might have been Phyllis Schafly. She offered no useful solutions to the problem of homelessness beyond, basically, “people shouldn’t allow themselves to be homeless.” When pressed about confounding factors like drug addiction or mental illness, she had no quick answer and kind of got flustered. She blurted out something like “if we quit feeding the homeless, pretty soon they’ll all go away.” The subtext was obvious: they would either clean up, or die. (This might actually be a workable solution, I dunno. This story isn’t really about homelessness, so lets don’t talk about that.)

Her “solution” to homelessness was exactly the same “solution” that many noisy anti-bicycle commentators (and I imagine Acura Guy) offer: ”couldn’t you all just vanish?” This is the de facto behavior of many drivers. They cut me off, hook me while turning, jump stop signs in front of me, refuse to yield right of way. They fail to see bicycles as legitimate traffic. They may (like Acura Guy) hold this view consciously, which is bad enough, but I have enough faith in humanity to assume most of the people who honk and yell at me won’t, when pressed, actually murder me.

But most drivers hold this view unconsciously, like the woman who damn near right-hooked me (i.e. turned right across my line of travel) this very morning at the Vermont/Capital Highway intersection. She wasn’t mad at me — she didn’t even recognize my humanity enough to hate me. I was not even worth looking for. These are the people that scare me, although they don’t make me nearly as mad. I have such encounters — which could quickly injure or kill me — probably two or three times a week. I’m still alive after commuting by bike in this city for nearly a decade, because I have to make the sad assumption that I actually am invisible, unless I’m directly in front of someone’s bumper, pissing them off. I’d rather have a motorist angrily acknowledge my existence than accidently kill me. Equal road access isn’t just an abstract principle; to someone on a bicycle it’s a matter of life and death.

In the “war” between cyclists and motorists (which I think is bogus, BTW, but let’s just play along for now), cyclists “win” if they continue to exist. Conversely, motorists will “win” when all the cyclists have either given up and quit riding, or died gruesome deaths in traffic collisions. These are not morally equivalent outcomes.

So the next time you hear a pro-cycling commentator bluster about equal access to the roads, remember this story about the lady Reaganite and homelessness, and my altercation with the Acura guy.

While dumping a bucket of compost at 5am this morning I looked to the southeast and saw my son’s namesake rising ahead of the sun.

Orion is a lot of people’s favorite constellation. Almost everyone knows it from the bright stars in the belt, and it’s visible from most places on Earth. It has a nifty nebula and lots of bright stars. In the northern hemisphere’s fall, Orion is visible in the early mornings to the west of the sun. The sun falls gradually behind it, and Orion rises earlier and earlier. By midwinter it’s at the zenith in late evening hours.

The character Orion is usually depicted as facing away from the Earth, with a club in his left hand overhead and a lion skin hanging from his right arm (stretched before his body). My astronomy software shows him holding a shield in his right hand, which I’d never seen anywhere else. I always pictured Orion shooting a bow left-handed (the way I shoot a bow), stretching the string from behind his ear, like a samurai. From Orion’s famous belt (the three bright stars Mintaka, Alnilam, and Zeta Orionis) hangs a sword. At the end of the sword is the purple Great Nebula of Orion, M42. He faces Taurus the bull, and is backed up by two hunting dogs (the Canises Major and Minor). They are all standing, with a motley menagerie of other sky animals, at the river Eridanus.

As a kid fascinated by astronomy (and a lifelong insomniac), I spent a lot of time outside looking at Orion in the winter. This was easier in the dry Nebraska winters than the rainy Oregon kind. My father would drive me to the ridge north of our house, with a thermos of cocoa, where we’d stargaze with a pair of binoculars. Because we’d do this in the winter, we always found Orion, and the Great Nebula made a good target for the binocs.

Decades later, living in northwest Portland (and just before meeting Jenny), I would get up early to ride my bike up Montgomery and do laps on Fairmount drive. On clear mornings, at certain points of the road, I could pick out Orion’s belt and sword through the trees.

The constellation Orion is like an old friend — I always know where to find Orion, at any time of day, at any time of the year, because he rises just ahead of the sun on my birthday. I can find a lot of things in the sky by finding Orion first — the Hyades and Pleiades in Taurus, Gemini over his left shoulder, and the really bright star Sirius in Canis Major behind his left heel.

When we were in Bali, one sweltering night in Padang Bai I stepped outside for fresh air. On the equator, with no cities nearby, the sky was ablaze with unfamiliar stars. (The southern stars are much brighter than the northern ones, because the south pole points toward the center of the galaxy.) I looked all over the northern sky for Orion’s belt, but it was probably too late and Orion had set. Eventually I made out Leo and had the disorienting sensation of seeing it upside down. Which had the secondary effect of making east and west reverse themselves.

The name Orion was actually Jenny’s idea, but once she said it, it shot to the top of my list. A few people have suggested, either coarsely and in jest or gently but seriously, that it’s kind of a weird name. We wanted a nature name (like “Clay” or “River”), an unusual name (hopefully he won’t have to go by “Orion S.” to distinguish himself from some other Orion in his third grade class), and a name that had some personal significance for us.

At the moment of his birth, we hadn’t chosen a name from the list of finalists. But the anaesthesiologist asked, “do you have a name picked out?” and we both answered “Orion.” A hunter in the sky with two dogs, staring down a bull on the banks of the river Eridanus.

This video (thanks, Scott) set me to thinking a little bit about Star Wars:

I first saw Star Wars 31 years ago. A friend of the family named Jim took my family to see Star Wars in the theater ... we were living in rural Nebraska and at that time (1977) even blockbusters like Star Wars took a month or two to hit the theaters out in the sticks. So Jim had seen it like a dozen times already (he was from the Big City, Lincoln) & explained it in great detail to myself and my brother. This was (is?) my first clear memory. From that day until puberty (ca. 1983), pretty much the only games that interested me were either a) Star Wars or b) another outer space–related game.

Based solely on the extreme coolness of the Star Wars movies — Empire in particular — I wanted to be an astronomer until I was about 14. Carl Sagan had an influence here as well. It must say something about me that I thought (OK, still think) Carl Sagan is one of the coolest people with whom I have shared the Earth.

One of the awesome things about Star Wars in the 70s and early 80s was that it didn’t have an “expanded universe” in the same scope as it has today. There was a Holiday Special, novelizations, a few scattered novels like Han Solo and the Lost Legacy, some Sunday comics, and a comic book series. I remember a cartoon about Ewoks, and some Ewoks TV specials too. There was precious little “canon” and most of that was hard to get at. On the other hand, the movies hinted at a lot of stuff happening around the edges. Who was the bounty hunter on Ord Nandell? What cargo did Han Solo drop? Why did Yoda live in the swamp? What’s a Womp Rat? For six- to eleven-year-old boys, richly hinted backstory + poorly developed canon = endless possibility to expand the stories. The only game I ever played was Star Wars and I never once played out a scene from a movie.

I think Empire spoiled my generation. It’s really the only undeniably good movie of the entire six-pack. It was so good that it made the first movie deeper and the third movie palatable. I saw Empire when I was nine years old, old enough to understand a lot of the grownup type themes about love and loss. It was heavy and dark in a way that fascinated me.

I have a theory about Star Wars films:

A Star Wars film can be great cinema, or it can have a scene on Tatooine, but not both.

Until the second (prequel) trilogy, I used to phrase this theory as “The cinematic greatness of a Star Wars film is inversely proportional to the amount of Tatooine it contains.” Actually, that theory might still hold, I dunno.

On my college admissions form (1989), I listed my religious preference as “Jedi.” This was actually not too far off the truth.

In college, I lived in a house near campus with several friends, and if the TV was on, it was probably playing a Star Wars video (or American Gladiators).

In 1996, I went to see a movie with my then-girlfriend at the mall in Eugene. One of the trailers was for the digitally remastered series:

At the moment when the announcer says “Now, for its twentieth anniversary...” my then-girlfriend said, “I think I’m going to cry.” I said, “I already am.” (FWIW I’m a little misty watching it again right now.)

I think I’ve seen the first three Star Wars movies several hundred times each. I’ve seen each of the three prequel films exactly once. Pretty much out of a sense of obligation: “oh, it can’t possibly be as bad as they say...” No, actually it’s worse. About 10 of the last 20 minutes of the last movie, and one scene in each of the first two movies, held a tiny kernel of the old Star Wars magic.¹ So maybe 13 or 14 good minutes out of six excruciating hours.

It’s cliché for people of my generation to say, whenever filmmakers recycle beloved ideas from the 1970s and 1980s, that they’re “raping our childhood,” or “molesting me retroactively.” This is especially true on this topic. But after I saw Phantom Menace, that’s kind of how I felt. I lay awake all night — I was living in a hot, noisy apartment directly above West Burnside, not very conducive to sleep anyway — feeling a little like I’d just learned my father wasn’t really my father. I suppose that must be what it’s like for a devout and rather credulous young Mormon to hear about the Planet Kolob stuff . “Whoa, you mean I grew up thinking that was cool? Ugh, now I feel all dirty.

One of my favorite mental games for bored-times is to imagine plot outlines for better prequels. The Internets are awash with nerds pontificating about how the prequels suck, and I’m sure someone has written some plot outlines or somesuch. I haven’t — and probably won’t ever — go that far. But I think Lucas missed two (and a half) really big opportunities in the prequels. My mental plot outlines concentrate on those missed opportunities. In particular:

• Obi Wan is almost totally lacking in backstory. Lucas could have filled three prequels with his story: his youth, his Jedi training, how he came to work for the Organas, his involvement in the Clone Wars. That’s two good movies right there, and we wouldn’t just be treading water for two interminable hours on Tatooine. Late in the second movie he meets Anakin Skywalker, and the third movie is all about Anakin’s fall, but told from Obi-Wan’s point of view.
• Similarly, Padme/Amidala is a whole lotta nothing. You know what would be awesome? If she were a Jedi. You know what would be even more awesome? If the prequels were all about her in exactly the same way they could have been about Obi Wan Kenobi. You know what would be even more awesomer? If the reason Obi Wan and Anakin fight to the death in a volcano is because they are both in love with her.
• (This is the half idea) Lucas really missed an opportunity by failing to introduce any new plot twists in the prequels. The worst thing about watching the prequels (two and three in particular), was the grim inevitability of it. You knew exactly what would happen, and whaddyaknow it did. Perhaps the most memorable scene of humanity in the entire six-pack is when Darth Vader tells Luke he’s his father. So what if he wasn’t? I’m just saying.

Notes

¹ In the first movie, when Liam Neeson is fighting Darth Maul, there’s some kind of force field or something. It keeps interrupting the fight. Darth Maul and Obi Wan are all twitchy nerves jumping around looking menacing or scared but Liam Neeson sits down to meditate. I thought: “there’s something Yoda would teach.” That’s one. In the second movie, Natalie Portman and Teen Vader jump into a spaceship to go rescue Obi Wan. Portman pulls off that scene in such a way that you think “shit, she’s all psyched to go save her buddy’s ass,” and it feels a little Princess Leia-ish. That’s two. And in the third movie, the sequence where the robots are turning Teen Vader into Darth Vader...that’s three.