In a Perfect World

In a perfect world, today I would have rented a motel room in Connell, Washington and picked out spots up and down Highway 395 to take photographs. In a really perfect world, I would have had a 360 degree lens and been able to make visible in a permanent way the panorama of colors, cloud formations, mixtures of cloud and sunshine, incoming weather patterns, and slowly encroaching darkness that the Palouse afforded travellers today.

Then I would have rented another room in Boardman, Oregon or in Rufus, Oregon and travelled up and down I-84, between the I-82 interchange and The Dalles and done the same thing.

My favorite color is gray. I love gray's mutedness. Driving today in mostly gray conditions, until darkness fell, meant no strain on the eyes. When sun rays tried to break through the gray, they formed slanted lines that made me think of what I thought God looked like when I was a young boy.

What's more, the slate clouds occasionally opened up close to the horizon and starting at about 2:30 or so, a long sunset emerged. North of Kennewick, the sky was a theater of scratchy rain falling miles away to the east, magenta clouds over pale blue sky over tan hillocks to the west, puffy cumulus clouds both ivory and darkening gray to the south, but picking up the surrounding faint purples and pinks.

If ever a person doubted the existence of multiple realities occuring at the same moment, all a person had to do was stop and observe this almost chaotic Palouse sky and see multiple weather fronts, a variety of colors, and the assertion and recession of the sun all happening simultaneously.

I felt awed.

Later, as I drove along the Columbia River, the tawny mounds on the north side of the Columbia seemed like screens for color slides as they absorbed and reflected the purples, yellows, and reds from the sky. These mounds amaze me each time I drive east or west on I-84 in the way they are never the same color, as if they are never the same mounds. I have seen the color of these mounds range from deep purple to faint green to reddish-brown to light tan and have even seen them seem black, depending on the light and what's going on in the sky.

How would a person determine what color these mounds really are? They don't have a color aside from what the atmosphere and weather and light conditions around them dictate.

I have to say, that once past The Dalles and moving on toward and beyond Hood River, I find the scenery more spectacular (water falls, evergreens, rugged rock formations, the lower regions of the Cascade mountains to the south starting to rise from the Gorge, and, on a clear day, a magnificent view of Mt. Hood), but not as interesting.

Tonight, in fact, I hated being in this rain forest climate. For about fifteen to twenty miles the rain fell in huge black bullets; it was as if the dark sky itself was raining upon the freeway. I was deeply grateful to the semis on the road. I perched myself behind a couple of them which helped keep my speed reasonable and helped me see. I was disappointed when they had to leave the freeway for a weigh station. I had to go solo for a while, but caught up to other cars and never passed them so that I could navigate this downpour more safely.

The hardest part of returning to Eugene is leaving Kellogg.

The second hardest part, in the winter, is driving during such short days.

In a perfect world, the sun moving low in the winter sky and the slate condition of the sky and all its colorful change would last for twelve to fourteen hours a day instead of for about nine hours.

Or, in a really perfect world, I'd have all the time I wanted to get back to Eugene and could spend only the daylight hours driving, with long photo stops, and would relax along the way, blogging in motel rooms, posting pictures, never worrying about when I got back to Eugene or to work.

You'd Think Stalin Was Coming to Town

"I Feel Like Going Home" by The Walkabouts. Press play and read today's post.

You'd think Stalin was coming to town.

Because in Eugene, Oregon, it sure isn't Santa Claus.

I live in a dour, gray, humorless, gutless city. I feel like going home. I feel like going to Kellogg.

Driving through the rain and dark on late December afternoons in Eugene, I roll down the window to listen for dirges playing at every corner. Why doesn't the City of Eugene just put The Walkabouts singing "I Feel Like Going Home" over loudspeakers so we can all join together and sing a dour tune to mark the dour December death march the rest of the country calls the holiday season?

Is this happening everywhere? No public decorations? No lights? No Ho Ho Ho?

If Christmas was established as the next in a long history of solstice season festivals to celebrate the light of life coming into a dark, December, shortest days of the year world, then Eugene, Oregon prefers a festival of darkness.

Eugene, Oregon's only public place of festivity is the mall.

Local buses fill with people going on tours to see people's Christmas lights. Streets with houses with lights are annually in gridlock.

Eugene citizens hunger for light. The City is too gutless to provide light.

So what do we get in our public streets? Nothing. It may as well be late January on the common streets of Eugene.

Why not hang black mourning bunting? Why not pull horse drawn caskets through town?
In Eugene, is this the season of new hope, of light, of the year turning away from darkness toward light?

No. It's the season of don't offend. It's the season of senstitivity. It's the season of resignation. It's the season of joylessness.


In Eugene, I feel safer telling strangers to go to hell than wishing them Merry Christmas.

I'm going home. To Kellogg. I'll tell everyone I see Merry Christmas. I won't risk being glared at or being the subject of a letter to the editor because I said Merry Christmas.

Shhh. Come here. I'll whisper in your ear. Don't tell anyone in Eugene. Here's my secret: I'm dreaming of a White Christmas.

Just like the ones I used to know.

That's why I'm getting out of Eugene.

I'm tired of acting like Stalin's coming to town.

Thanksgiving Weekends with the Valley Boys....and Patty, too

Back row: Ed, Bruce, Terry, Scott, Jake
Front row: me, Mike
The serenity glowing in the center: Patty

I don't think it had to do with the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I'd survived a 1974 Zinc Plant accident, Scott survived testicular cancer in '00-'01, Bruce is always under observation for melanoma and has been through treatment, I survived an attack of spinal meningitis in '99, and Ed drives log truck and has been speared, busted, bent, and bruised in every way possible, plus he fell off a roof in '03 and busted up his pelvis and leg. He was back in the log truck in about three months. Jake's diabetic. Terry has an ulcerous job in management at Xerox. Mike helps juvenile delinquents. He knows stress.

So, it was coincidental that this bunch of old friends from Kellogg High School Class of '72 started in 2001 getting together every Thanksgiving weekend and that it was the same year that the twin towers fell. We thought we'd better start meeting every year before 9/11 and we decided to do it not because we thought the world could end any day now, not because the 9/11 attacks "put things in pespective" for us, not because we "got our priorities straight" after the day America would never forget and that changed the course of history forever. No, we just figured any one of us could die any day now. We figured it out on our own. We didn't need 9/11.

I live a very responsible life. I worship, work hard, invest myself in my students, provide for my family, and try to do what's right by people. It's the Silver Valley way. It's also the Silver Valley way to drink hard, tell profane stories, mock sports teams, complain about how things have changed for the worse, gamble, eat bad food, and watch sports on television. Starting the day after Thanksgiving and lasting until Sunday, Bruce, Scott, Ed, Mike, Jake, Terry, and I pack all of this into a weekend. We get drunk. We get loud. We get hungover. We eat crap. We play cards. We play slot machines. We glorify the past. We complain about past injustices. We deride the way world is changing around us. We tell stories again we've told 5,000 times already. We pick on each other. By the way, picking on people is not a normal part of social life here in Eugene, Oregon. Because, in Eugene, actions are always seen as an expression of one's menacing and racist/sexist/masculinist/homophobic/enraged subconscious (known in Eugene as "issues"), it's implicity forbiddened to pick on people or get picked on. It would be seen as masking real aggressiveness toward others behind a facade of joking around. Jokes are never jokes in Eugene. In this humorless, self-congratulatory, Narcisstic town, speech is not free, but measured.

In Kellogg, I guess we never got far enough in our Freudian Studies class to recognize all the cruelty and violence that underlies flipping each other some shit. In Kellogg, we just love to pick on each other. In Kellogg, harrassment is a positive word. I go to Kellogg as often as I can so that I can get picked on. I want to wear a sign in Eugene: "Please give me some shit! Pick on me! I'll pick on you. We can do it together!" But, it ain't that way here -- although I have some fellow teachers I can pick on and who pick on me and I have found a few select students who enjoy it. By and large, in the eggshell environment of Eugene and its institutions, where being offended is a sign of high character and where anything from wine served at a function welcoming new faculty to wreaths of Douglas Fir at Christmas time (a holiday I've joined my wife in calling Winter Day) to a Poltergeist derived jokey comment can offend, it's just not much fun to be yourself. Someone will be offended and in high dudgeon.

So, you ask, what's Patty doing as the serene center of this picture? Last year, after our 40 some hours of man-fun in Lincoln City, the boys and I looked up Patty Reasor, another classmate, in Newberg, Oregon where she's a nurse. We invaded her hospital looking for her and scared the stuffings out of some nurses and desk attendants who evidently hadn't seen this kind of tonnage moving together as a merry pack before. Patty had called in sick. We reached her by phone, met for coffee, and had a terrific visit. I think all of us guys would agree that we enjoy each other's company, but that the highlight of last year's trip was spending an hour in the company of our beloved Patty.