Those Portland Creative Types

Monday. 6:03 PM.

In a residential neighborhood in the north part of Northeast Portland, I turn the wheel of the Bimmer and merge into the slow traffic on a placid boulevard with a grass median. After half a block I pull and over to parallel park along the curb in front of a two-story green house, the kind one sees in this part of town.

From the open trunk I take out out a summerish bouquet of flowers---orange, gold, red, brown---which I put into a paper sack printed with the name of a local grocery store chain. In the sack I also put a few other items, including two bottles of Imperial Stout. I close the trunk and carry the sack, along with my red backpack, up the steps to the front door.

On the covered porch is a table with toys on it, and large sign in a child's handwriting: Toys For Sale. I recognized it immediately from a photo I'd seen on Facebook a couple days before.

Through the glass window across the hardwood floor, I can see Nick in the dining room room. He comes to the front door and opens it.  Kat comes out of the kitchen to greet me. Their young son is also in the dining room. I give Kat the flowers and she goes into the kitchen to put them in a vase.

She says she likes the bouquet. I tell her where I got them, which is not far from their house. "They sell them right out front of the store by the parking lot," I say. "I was looking them over, and the woman there who makes the bouquet basically said buy this one, so I did."

It turns out their son is about to leave for the evening, to spend time with a friend. Before he leaves I give him a multi-tool survival kit that I had bought at the market where I had bought the beer and flowers.

"I saw you were divesting yourself of some toys, so I thought maybe you'd want something more grown-up," I tell him.

In the kitchen Nick prepares the chicken to take out to the bar-b-cue in the backyard. A door from the kitchen leads out to the patio.

I take the two bottles of Imperial Stout from the sack and place them on the counter. Nick and Kat are already drinking Coors. They offer me their own beer, but they don't mind if I drink my own, which is what I intend to do. Kat gets me a cold beer glass form the freezer while I open one of my bottles of Imperial Stout.

"I can't drink yellow beer," I tell them. "It's like poison to me. But I can drink all the dark beer I want, and it doesn't hit me."

Kat leaves to take their son to his friends.

In the backyard Nick and I chat while he starts the coals.  He is a native of this town, although most of his family is from California, a place he likes a lot. I tell Nick how nice it is to be back in Portland, especially now that I've found a way to appreciate it.

We both agree that summer is the glory of Oregon, and that this summer has been very nice. 

"This time of year is the big pay-off for being here the the rest of the year," I say, repeating something Red had told me.

Nick agrees.

"This is the time of year that people from out of town wander into the bookstore with starry eyes and say I looooooove it here," says Nick.

"I tell them to come back in January and see if you still think so."

"In college and the years afterwards I always seemed to come here in the fall," I say.  "I've put plenty of time in the dark side of the calendar here. I've earned some Oregon summer."

Nick agrees with that too.

Then we talked about people we knew, including ones from way back in college, and ones we know now, including Adam and Marie.

Adam is a creative director. The two of us worked on the campus newspaper together.  For years he has made a successful business of using his computer and other tools to create such things as logos, booklets, brochures, and corporate identities. He also does voice work for advertising. From my experience of him, I think of him as the Digital Tramp Printer, to paraphrase his grandfather.

His wife Marie is an artist, primarily a sculptor. I met her in an art class back in college. She's very successful. Her show just ran at the Denver Art Museum. Adam does a lot of her creative identity work on-line.

Kat comes back out to the patio with a beer to join our conversation. We talk about the nature of being a creative person. Kat laments that her work as vice president of bank is not creative, but at least it pays the bills.

"Nothing wrong with helping to turn the crank of the world," I say.

Nick mentions that he no longer is writing plays. "I'm through with that," he says. "I'm writing short stories now."

We talk about some of our creative-oriented friends, including Adam and Marie.

"Adam doesn't think what he does is art," Nick says.

"He always says that real creativity is what Marie does," says Kat.

I burst out laughing. "You're kidding!" I say. "If I were to put the names of creative people I know into a bin, his name would be one of the first," I say.

Of course Nick and Kat agree with me.

Nick says, "Adam's always telling me too: you're the one who does creative work.  I try to set him straight. That's how he is."

At that point I remember something I had brought in my backpack. I excuse myself and I go into the house to get it.

After I get it, I unzip my backpack and pull out a large square piece of cardboard, about a foot in length on each side. The stiff cardboard is actually a flat envelope package with an address label on it. The handsome packaging is decorated with small outlines of the state of Oregon inscribed with the name of a local bookstore.

"What's that?" Nick asks.

"Is that your book?" Kat says to Nick.

"It is " I say, with affirmation.

Nick is curious about the packaging. I had assumed he would recognize it immediately, but he's never seen anything like that. We both agree that it is a very nice design.

"I liked this shipping package so much that I decided to keep it unopened until I got here. It rode like this in my car all the way from Colorado, through Glacier National Park and down through Spokane."

Nick gets a big laugh thinking about that image.

Then I tell him, "I had the idea that maybe we could leave it like this, and you could just sign the package unopened. What do you think?"

They both love the idea.

Kat asks me what color sharpie I think Nick should use. Black, we both agree. Can't go wrong with that. She gets one out of the house and hands it to Nick. He laughs as he signs the package.

As he writes a message on the package, he says "The message is an inside joke. Adam hates it when people say this."

"I'm gonna frame it just like that," I tell him.

We have dinner in the dining room. Kat goes over to their stereo and asks me what band I want to hear, pointing to their row of classic albums in the cabinet. I see the unmistakable spine of an album I once owned and tell her, E.L.O.

Kat is pleased with my choice. Without hesistation she pulls the album I had spotted out of the stack.

"E.L.O." she says, "---which is really Jeff Lynne."

"---which is really Sgt. Pepper," I add, playfully.

The needle drops on the vinyl and the first song on Side One starts. I know all the lyrics.

 The dancing shadows on the wall
(The two step in the hall)
Are all I see since you've been gone 

During dinner, Kat changes the record at the end of each side.  The song "Mr. Blue Sky," at the end of Side Three, comes on as they are clearing the table and putting the dishes into the sink.

I remark how the song was barely got any radio play when the album was released. It was just a curious minor track on that album. But in the last ten years or so, it had become a popular song for the soundtracks of television commercials and movies.

Later after dinner, out on the patio, I bring out the bottle of whiskey that I won in a bar in Nevada, that I promised Nick we'd split, if it made it to Oregon intact in my trunk. Kat drops down three shots glasses on the railing of the deck and we down them together. Very smooth.

Later in the dark as Nick and I sit outside next to the shot glasses and the bottle, talking about the present and future of Portland as a city. We discuss the famous Portland urban growth boundary, and how it has shaped the city and its suburbs.

Nick bemoans that because of higher rents in East Portland, theater companies long established in the old neighborhoods of that part of the city were being driven out to the far-flung suburbs.

"I saw the same thing happen in Seattle," he says, with exasperation. "It's already happening here now. It's goodbye Hawthorne, hello Hillsboro."

While he's talking my cellphone gives me an email notification of a message that Kat has posted a Facebook status update about our doing the whiskey shots.

For the Love of an Orange Soda

At the top of the ridge, the wind from the north hits you hard. Windy Gap---it's evident how it earned its name. It's also evident that the barren valley I was just leaving, the Garden of the Volcanoes, had been on the sheltered and calm side of the ridge.

The trail down in the other side is in close switchbacks, visible like a ladder as you look down. But the trail is well-defined. There are no places where one must scramble down the scree, as I did on the way up.

At the bottom I find myself in a narrow gulley. The contours of the pyroclastic flow are deepened by the shallower runs of a water stream from the melting glaciers. The trail takes me over the gulley on to the swell of one of the remnants of the flow. From there one can see the terrain the north, the big spill of ash and rock left over from the explosion, and at the times the great snowy crown of Mount Rainier.

After thirty-three springs there is still little grass and sporadic blossoms. I project in my mind forward in the decades. At one point does it become a prairie again, or an evergreen forest? In some decade the barren flows will become a quick memory.

The trail descends into another shallow glacier gully. Here I must pick my way over little mesas of rock, leaping from one to another. At some point I lose the trail and begin descending the gully, which seems the route to follow. It reminds me of Death Valley---the barren washes that one can ascend from the valley floor. Only later do I learn that I missed the trail on the other side. But I don't care, as I know the gully will take me down to the main trail that leads back to the parking lot.

When I'm in sight of the main trail again, I turn and look up at the north face of the mountain, at the massive Breach, as it is called, that ruined the Fuji-like symmetry of the cone before the eruption. But now the mountain is more interesting. By itself it looks like a jagged ridge from the high Rockies, plucked out from among the peaks and established as a free-standing monument above the green hills of the Cascades.

As I head back towards the parking lot, along the easy incline of the old logging road, now given over to hikers, all I can think about is the Aranciata soda in the back seat of my car. I won't care if it's warm when I get there. It will taste so good. And then I will want to go get something to eat, at some little place along the road home, maybe a cheeseburger at a convenience store in the little town Cougar, where the road comes out of the forest into civilization again. I'll want to talk to people again. It will be pleasant to do so.

Meditations above the Plains of Abraham

Sunday. 2:30 PM.

Halfway up the ridge I stop and rest. The climb up from the rocky barren valley below, although short, was especially arduous.

Here, at the base of the volcanic cone, the dust and rock is still loose. No plants have yet taken to begin turning it into soil. My feet have a trouble finding a footing. One loose step would send me sliding down in the scree on the slope. I should be using my trekking poles, which are fastened to my day pack, but for some reason I felt like going without them so far.

I am barely at 5000 feet above sea level, but it feels purely alpine, like a boulder-field far above tree line. Or it feels like being in the middle of the Nevada desert.

The  sun is brilliant in the sky. A smattering of clouds in the distance seem to be right at eye level. Nevertheless I can see the massive hulking snow-streaked crest of Mt. Adams to the east, and the pointy cone of Mt. Hood further in the distance to the south.

There's an old Klickitat legend about these peaks, a jealous love triangle, fighting over the beautiful woman they both desired---the mountain on whose devastated flank I now sit. Helen---a coincidence of history dropped that name into all that old Indian legend. The Indians called this peak Loowit, which is the name of the trail I am on.

The dust around me reminds me other dust I have experienced. I can feel it in my lungs, breathing it as the wind and my feet kick it up into the air.

For ten minutes I sit looking out over the valley, called the Plains of Abraham. In the distance across the valley I can see the wooden sign at the junction of the trails. On the way up from the parking lot, all four miles, I had barely seen a soul. When I got to the junction, several other groups arrived almost simultaneously. A pair of young women asked me which way I had come, and what the prettiest trail was. I told them to go back the way I had just come, which I they did. I was not in the mood for company on the trail today.

Not another person in sight from where I sat. Then finally I see a couple figures approaching, tiny in the distance, unidentifiable, picking their way across the boulders on the valley floor. I decide it is time to keep moving up through the scree and dust, before they get any closer.

A Clown Comes Out of Hiding at the Funhouse

Thursday evening. We are driving down Burnside. As we turn left onto SE 11th, Red remarks that it seems that the New York Times is in love with Portland.

"There's an article about Portland every week," she says, "about some restaurant or nightclub here. It must be a really great assignment for whoever gets sent here."

We park near the corner of the Division. The sign in front of the Funhouse Lounge shows an affable clown. It is neither too genuine nor too ironic. Inside the dark small nightclub, we order drinks and food. Then we sit side-by-side on the cushioned banquette along the far wall near the stage, sipping our cocktails.

Strings of red lights on the ceiling give the place a faux seedy feeling.  There are a few other people sitting on the banquette, but the rest of the room consists mostly of empty round tables.  On the small stage are four chairs side by side facing the audience.

Red and I eat our Wellington sandwiches that we'd ordered at the bar. Upscale bar food is de rigeur in Portland, as Red remarks.

Across the room in the light of the hallway by the front door I see a familiar figure come towards the main room.

"That's Nick," I say to Red.

"Let's see how long he takes to recognize me."

He sees me across the room and recognizes me immediately. We give each a big hug, and I introduce him to Red.

Right after that comes in Hudson and Shelly---haven't seen them in years.  Hudson recongizes me and looks at me like I'm the last person in the world he expected to see sitting there.

Cassie---who has acted in some of Nick's productions---shows up and the six of us take up the whole table by the stage.

At showtime, four actors---two men and two women, all wearing black---climb on the small stage and take seats in the row of four chairs.

The first piece "60 Years to Life" is Nick's, performed solo by an actress standing on stage, looking out to the audience with a single light on her. At the end of the monologue she sings a song composed by Shelly's sister Heidi, accompanied by the president of the theater company, who plays guitar from the side of the stage.

There are two other pieces, with an intermission between the first two acts of the third piece, which is called "Galaxy Blink." I learn it is is written by the woman sitting to the right of me on the banquette.

All of the pieces are effective and well-performed. Red and I agree that nightclub theater like this can work pretty well.

At the end of the evening, outside the lounge, Nick and I make plans to see each other again.  "Now that I've come out of hiding," I tell him.

"I know all about going into hiding," he says.

Greshamy

Greshamy, adj., quintessentially like Gresham, Oregon in character and style.

As in: "How's the area around your hotel?" Answer: "Greshamy."

Gresham is the Shadow Portland. Many of the streets have the same names as in Portland---Burnside, Stark, Couch, Division, Powell. But the avenues have much higher values---NE 181st instead of NE 18th.

Gresham is the most Californicated part of Oregon. It could easily be in the Central Valley, another city along Highway 99 in the orbit of Sacramento. It is as paradoxically prosperous as Fresno, and just as lacking in almost anything to do. Thankfully there are plenty of Jack in the Boxes.

Gresham is more diverse than Portland. Immigrants find homes in Gresham, and they run ethnic restaurants and groceries in strip malls down the road from the beautiful Fred Meyer. Gresham is the immigrant American dream. 

Gresham is Portland without the youth culture, and without the Portland tradition of Oregon-specific urban lifestyles.

Gresham is the great counterweight to downtown Portland. In some ways, this is the Portland-Gresham Metropolitan Area. The idea of calling it this would horrify some Portlanders.

Gresham is easier to get around than Portland. It's easier to get up into the mountains. It's easier to get up the gorge. It has a better view of Mount Hood. All this and a train that goes right into the city.

Gresham seems tidy and mostly clean on the surface as you drive by.  But the sidewalks of Gresham, especially around the train lines, look like a Zombie Apocalypse. Every single person walking there looks like a walking stereotype of  broken America.

Gresham is friendly but dysfunctional, like much of America. The motel desk clerk from yesterday, upon seeing me come in through the front door for the third time this morning, said, in a joking manner, "I guess we'll have to raise our rates."

The Uzbek Restaurant down the street was closed this evening, and for the next week.  I bit the bullet and drove to the Outback Steakhouse instead. Same diff.

So what brings you to Gresham?

"So what brings you to Gresham?"

The friendly man behind the counter of the Super 8 asked me this question Tuesday afternoon.

Caught somewhat off guard, I paused a moment.

"I've heard Gresham is...the place to be," I said, in as genuine a tone as possible.

He laughed. He didn't push the question. "Just had to ask," he said, revealing that he was genuinely curious.

Why indeed? A guy with an out-of-state driver's license and umpteen thousand Wyndham Rewards points probably didn't check in to this place very often.

In the eyes of my Portland friends, the suburb of Gresham---the expansive community on the eastern edge of the metro area, flush up against the Sandy River---is synonymous with "living death." Their image of this place, at least one time, was typified by a story a friend once told me, of being in urban Northwest Portland, and watching the suburban crowds pour out of the Tri-Met trains to attend a Billy Graham revival at the downtown baseball park.

"Greshamites," my friend said of them, with low-grade contempt.

Gresham is the big catch-all for many folk who come to Portland but who aren't part of the young hipster set. They are from small towns in Oregon, or other smaller cities in the Northwest, or California. They come here to work and live, or because they have relatives living nearby.

They represent the uncouth, semi-washed, semi-literate "real Oregon" that stands in such contrast to the image many people outside the Northwest have of this state, but which is intimately and painfully familiar to many Portland urbanites. Some get by on whatever dole they get.  Some commute in on the train and do the jobs of the city. They come back home with their bicycles and walk them from the train stations to apartment complexes. They dine at strip malls. They come in every single color.

Because of all this commuter and other income, Gresham---unlike Hillsboro and the western suburbs of Portland----has a reservoir of middle class wealth. It makes staying here a couple days quite easy.

It has a a wide variety of decent budget motels, fast food outlets, and other typical American businesses. It only took about twenty minutes on the freeway to get here, all of it in the opposite direction from the traffic jams I'd recently had to navigate.

It also has an Uzbek restaurant.

Tanishganimdan hursandman...bodomqovoq...

Portlandia Meets Old Portland, Medium Rare

Monday evening I came by Red's place just after she got off her clinic shift. When I got out of my car, the first thing I said to her was "How 'bout steaks?"

She thought it was a great idea.

"Ever been to Sayler's?" I asked her. It was only a few miles from her place. She hadn't heard of it.

"Excellent," I said. "Then that's where we're going tonight."

I added, "It's old Portland."

We got in her car and I guided us there---east down Burnside until it forks off to become Washington,  then across the freeway past 105th Avenue and loop back around on Stark.

We pulled in the parking lot a little before eight. It was almost full. As we walked towards the side entrance, Red took delight in the restaurant's towering outdoor sign---a rotating polygon showing a cooked steak on both sides.

Inside the place was humming. Most of the tables were occupied, but the hostess at the front door, upon hearing our request for a table for two, immediately picked up a pair of the steak-shaped menus and led us to a free booth.

Red ordered a rib-eye, and I, a New York strip. We both got the salad (over soup) and a baked potato (over other starchy sides). All was delicious and served just as one would want.

I love these kinds of steakhouses, especially the ones like this one that all seem to date from right after World War II. Sayler's Old Country Kitchen, as it is properly called, was founded in 1946.

Red loved it too. She said was it like the places she knew back in Ohio where her grandparents lived.

"People think of Portland as being full of hipsters," I said. "But when I think of Portland, this is the kind of place I think of."

Of course we were the hipsters that night. "If only they offered mixed vegetables as a side dish," I lamented. "Then it would be truly perfect."

DIY Portlandia, Scene 2

One of Red's favorite restaurants that she has turned me onto is Dove Vivi, a casual but nicely upscale pizza place on NE Glisan. They make splendid cornmeal-crust pies with interesting combinations of toppings. The atmosphere is comfortable and relaxed, at a modest price.

Not surprisingly, it's quite a popular place for dinner.  You usually have to wait a few minutes for a table. In the meantime, they serve a nice selection of wines.

Last time we went there, we put our names on the list, then went outside to wait on the bench. I noticed that one of the outdoor tables that evening was set up right to the front door. It was a thin table, and it was so close to the door that both chairs were arranged on the same side of the table, facing the foot traffic of the door only a few feet away.

Except for the place settings, the table looked as if it were set up to receive registrations for people coming to the restaurant for an event.

A few minutes later the server called our name. She offered us this same table outside by the front door. I looked at Red and shook my head.

"I think we'll wait for another table," I told the server. We sat back down on the bench. A young couple nearby was happy to take our place there.

Only a few minutes passed before the server called our name again. This time she motioned us towards a proper two-person table inside near the window.

The cornmeal-crust pizza was delicious, as usual. As we dined, I peeked out the window to the young couple happily eating at the table that we had passed over.

"Imagine sitting there and when someone walks up to go in the restaurant, you could hand them a clipboard with a petition on it," I said.

Red liked that idea.

"It would have to be a petition against the restaurant itself," I said.

"...about some kind of meat served here," added Red.

"And the manager comes out and asks them what they're doing, and they act astonished at him, that he would confront them."

Do-It-Yourself Portlandia Episodes

As far as the television show Portlandia goes, the episodes pretty much write themselves.

Yesterday Red and I went to the People's Co-op on SE 21st to do some Sunday grocery shopping. Among other things, we bought ourselves each a G.T.'s Cherry Chia Kombucha. Red was already drinking hers as she drove back home. We were coming down Hawthorne or Division, can't remember which, and Red points to a small restaurant on the right side of the street.

"I had lunch there once," she said. "It's a Vegan place. It was sort of...disgusting."

She makes an unsavory face as she says this. It's not like her to dislike a place so much.

"Right there's another Portlandia episode," I said. "It opens with a couple driving by that restaurant having exactly the same conversation we were just having. Then it cuts inside, where we see the main charcters from the show sitting at a table eating a meal, and saying how much they love this place."

The World's #1 Portlandia Fan

I'm the world's Number One Portlandia fan (or certainly in the top 100). Let me tell you how.

It was early October 1985. I'd been in Salem about a month. I'd gotten over my early jitters that had made me want to flee the place. I'd met a few friends, and even had a few girlfriends.

One day in the Cat Cavern I was reading a stray copy of the Oregonian. On the front page that day, I think, was a picture of a giant sculpture of a woman being floated down the Willamette River on a barge. The woman had waving hair, and was holding a trident. She was stooped down, and giving her free hand towards the river in a gesture of welcome. The caption of the photo said the sculpture was to be installed in Portland.

That's for me, I decided.

A Conversational Fancy Between Messrs. Wm. Stafford & Wm. Blake

William Stafford (1914-1993)

Blake:  "Rintrah roars & shakes his fires in the burden'd air; Hungry clouds swag over the deep."

Stafford: "Achilles laments by the sea; Odysseus wavers before the wind; Don Quixote thinks in a cracked helmet."

Blake: "Once meek, and in a perilous path, the just man kept his course along the vale of death."

William Blake (1757-1827)

Stafford: "A box arrived. It said 'Any side up.'"

Blake: "Roses are planted where thorns grow, and on the barren heath sing the honey bees."

Stafford: "Beat your megaphones into ear trumpets ."

Blake: "Without contraries there is no progression."

Stafford: "About the pessimists: how can they know that much?"

Blake: "From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil."

Stafford: "We survive by our limitations"

Blake: "All Bibles or sacred codes have been the causes of the following errors:"

Stafford: "All errors are errors of taste."

Blake: "That Man has two real existing principles: Viz: a Body & a Soul;

Stafford: "Anything said implies the kind of speaker who would say that."

Blake: "That God will torment Man in Eternity for following his Energies."

Stafford: "The Gospel Is Whatever Happens"

Blake: "Energy is the only life and is from the Body and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy."
 
Stafford: "The golden bough grows from your hand."

Blake: "Energy is Eternal Delight."

Stafford: "If it happens to me, it's all right."

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 1

Blake: "Those who restrain desire, do so because theirs is weak enough to be restrained;"

Stafford: "I'll dance with anyone---royalty, comers, but especially refugees."

Blake: "The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he rote of Angels & God, and at liberty when of Devils & Hell, is because he was a true Poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it."

Stafford: "Bright lights create sharp shadows."

Blake: "As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius;"

Stafford: "A scholar applies a rule; an artist follows a lead."

Blake: "which to Angels look like torment and insanity."

Stafford: "No dreams but the one: 'reality.'"

Blake "I collected some of their Proverbs: thinking that as the sayings used in a nation, mark its character."

Stafford: "In Oregon the coyotes are still the best poets."

Blake: "How do you know but ev'ry Bird that cuts the airy way, is an immense world of delight, clos'd by your senses five?"

Stafford: "All events and experiences are local somewhere."

Blake: "In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. "

Daily writing, March 17, 1956

Stafford: "It's dirt makes a garden." 

Blake: "Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead."

Stafford: "Every mink has a mink coat."

Blake: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom."

Stafford: "Lost pioneers were the ones who found the best valleys."

Blake: "Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity."

Stafford: "Off a high place, it is courtesy to let others go first." 

Blake: "He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence."

Stafford: "Before you hear the music, you do the dance."

Blake: "The cut worm forgives the plow."

Stafford: "By bending, the grass develops a surface." 

Blake: "Dip him in the river who loves water."

Stafford: "Yes, I've been thinking quite a bit recently. But there are still a few things I haven't thought of yet."

Blake: "A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees."

Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 8

Stafford: "An owl needs dark to see."

Blake: "He whose face gives no light, shall never become a star."

Stafford: "Trees do not demand any response, whatever their stance."

Blake: "Eternity is in love with the productions of time."

Stafford: "Believing our way, we find."

Blake: "The busy bee has no time for sorrow."

Stafford: "The wars we haven't had saved many lives."

Blake: "The hours of folly are measur'd by the clock, but of wisdom: no clock can measure."

Stafford: "Anyway, history has me in it."

Blake: "All wholsome food is caught without a net or a trap."

Stafford: "I say craft eats innocence."

Blake: "Bring out number weight & measure in a year of dearth."

Stafford: "How shall the lion feed if the deer be saved?"

Blake: "No bird soars too high. if he soars with his own wings."

Stafford: "Arrows punish a bow." 

Blake: "The most sublime act is to set another before you."

Stafford: "Meeting cement is never easy."

Blake: "If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise"

Stafford: "If there is a trail, you have taken the wrong turn."

Blake: "Prisons are built with stones of Law, Brothels with bricks of Religion."

Stafford: "Forced language reveals its forcing."

Documentary copy, 1951, William Stafford

Blake: "The lust of the goat is the bounty of God."

Stafford: "The jaguar at the dance; a silken leash." 

Blake: "Excess of sorrow laughs. Excess of joy weeps.

Stafford: "Velvet feels black."

Blake: "The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, and the destructive sword. are portions of eternity too great for the eye of man."

Stafford: "When he saw the leopard jump, he knew he was poor."

Blake: "The fox condemns the trap, not himself."

Stafford: "Successful people are in a rut."

Blake: "Let man wear the fell of the lion. woman the fleece of the sheep. "

Stafford: "I have spells of desire to tell the truth."

Blake: "The bird a nest, the spider a web, man friendship."

Stafford: "Many things true when said, the world makes untrue."

Blake: "What is now proved was once, only imagin'd."

Stafford: "Now is made of ghosts."

Blake: "The cistern contains: the fountain overflows"

Stafford: "When you fear winter, summer is over

Blake: "A dead body revenges not injuries."

Stafford: "The arrow tells what the archer meant to say."

Blake: "Every thing possible to be believ'd is an image of truth. "

Stafford: "There is such a thing as helping history to get along with its dirty work."

Blake: "The eagle never lost so much time, as when he submitted to learn of the crow."

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Plate 12

Stafford: "There might be someone so successful you wouldn't know it."

Blake: "The fox provides for himself, but God provides for the Lion.

Stafford: "Faith is easy, doubt is hard."

Blake: "Think in the morning, Act in the noon, Eat in the evening, Sleep in the night."

Stafford: "Between the roar, the lion purrs."

Blake: "He who has sufferd you to impose on him knows you."

Stafford: "Kierkegaard said, 'Drink from your own well.""

Blake: "As the plow follows words, so God rewards prayers."

Stafford: "It's not the the sound of an ax that cuts the tree."

Blake: "The tygers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction."

Stafford: "The stream is always revising."

Blake: "You never know what is enough unless you know what is more than enough."

Stafford: "Recant whenever you can."

Blake: "If others had not been foolish. we should be so."

Stafford: "Come, be human. Let's sit down and talk."

Further Reading

The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake, with introduction and commentary by Sir Geoffrey Keynes. (Oxford University Press, 1975). Originally composed between 1790 and 1793 in London and published by Blake himself.

Not the Sound of the Ax: Aphorisms and Poems by William Stafford, ed. by Vincent Wixon and Paul Merchant (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2014 [forthcoming]).

The conversation between Robert Bly and William Stafford is from William Stafford and Robert Bly: A Literary Friendship, a film by Haydn Reiss (Magnolia Films, 1994). Used by permission of Haydn Reiss."

[ed. note. Special thanks to Kim Stafford, and to Jeremy Skinner of the Special Collections at Lewis & Clark College.]

Berry Time at the Intersection of Stafford and Not-Stafford Roads

What the river says, that is what I say.

What the river says, that is what I say.

I will listen to what you say.
You and I can turn and look
at the silent river and wait.  - See more at: http://shenandoahliterary.org/blog/2012/01/ask-me-by-william-stafford/#sthash.Lr3xrybo.dpuf

Those of us who make up poems have agreed not to say what the pain is. --- Robert Bly

What the river says, that is what I say --- William Stafford

It was just past eight this morning when I drove away from the Best Western Wilsonville Inn & Suites. A few blocks down Boones Ferry Road, at the busy stop light by Fred Meyer, I turned left onto Wilsonville Road and passed quickly under the mighty stream of I-5, emerging on the other side of the underpass by the 76 station that towers above the freeway.

There, in what may be called Wilsonville's downtown, one encounters several pleasant modern strip malls, including one with a Starbucks. Going eastward, the road meanders through a newer landscaped residential area, past the city park (the one with the walnut barn), and makes a big sweeping arc to the north to reach the intersection of Boeckman Road on the outskirts of town. From there the landscape becomes quickly rural.

From that point north the road is named Stafford Road. On Monday I'd asked Kim the question he must hear so often, "Is it named after your father?" It was appropriate to ask, since his father was the subject of the course I was now taking in the Heritage Room at the Lewis and Clark library.

Kim told me this father's standard response. When asked how to get to their house in Oswego (later Lake Oswego), he would tell them, "when you see the exit to Stafford Road, don't get off there. It's the wrong exit."

Kim Stafford (b. 1949)

But in his youth Kim himself had plied his father with requests based on the simliar theme, "Daddy, why can't we buy a ranch in Stafford," using the now almost defunct name for the semi-rural unincorporated area between the south edge of Lake Oswego and the north edge of Wilsonville proper.

Today there is no real town of Stafford, Oregon, just sparse housing developments and farm fields, and the occasional picturesque moss-covered barn left to rot in the trees beside the road, a reminder of an earlier eraa. Wikipedia says it was named by a prominent Portland pioneer for his hometown in Ohio.

As I drove northward this morning on the road not named for William Stafford, along the open fields and clumps of lush forest north of Wilsonville, I felt overwhelmingly lighthearted----full of the organic whole milk of human kindness, as one might say.

In my mind I hurled grateful wishes for copious amounts of peace and goodwill out the window, directed to all the people living and working in the farmsteads, berry stands, churches and housing developments along my route.

North of I-5 in Wilsonville, Stafford Road was free-flowing almost the whole way on my commute, including where it crossed the bridge over I-205, which was crowded below in the typical Portland way. As the Bimmer zipped over the bridge, I felt as if I were being borne by an angel soaring over the tortured souls of Purgatory.

The road then sweeps smoothly up into the hills on the other side of the Tualatin River for a couple miles. When I got to the outskirts of Lake Oswego, things jammed up a bit all at once. It was stop-and-go, creeping through stop lights, until to the north side of downtown Lake O.  Portland has suburban rush hour traffic jams.

Along the way through downtown I passed the Starbucks where less than two weeks ago I'd first seen that flier for the Fishtrap summer session.

The idea of taking the course on Stafford starting this week at Lewis & Clark had been Kim's suggestion at Fishtrap. It was Sunday morning, right before the very last panel discussion before the conference adjourned for the summer. Kim saw me sitting on the edge of the last row of chairs by the kitchen. When I got up to refill my coffee cup, he handed me a note with his email address and then said, "Why don't you take my class next week on William Stafford?"

William Stafford (1914-1993)

I told him I'd think about it, but pretty much I decided right on the spot that I would do it. As I told him later in Portland, "It took me so long to get back here. No way I'm going to punt now."

I realized immediately that the schedule for Kim's course meant I'd have to rearrange my day job duties for the week. We were right near the end of a "sprint," as we call it in the software business. But that kind of shuffling was simple enough, given the freedom of time that I have with my job. So long as I get things done, as they say---and I always do.

Scott Russell Sanders spoke in the discussion panel that followed, extending his discussion of the role of beauty in evolution from the previous evening's dinner. Among other interesting things he said, he decried the prevalence of irony in contemporary fiction.

Since I knew I'd have to get a jump on work, towards the end of the panel discussion, I crept out of the lodge, whispering "see you later" to Kim as I passed him in the aisle. Maybe I could have stayed until the very end of the morning's activities, and said good-byes to all the wonderful people I'd met there. Part of me very much wanted to do that, but I knew it would be better if I got back to Portland before dinner. It would eliminate any temptation to change my mind about taking the course.

Besides, once I decide to do take action about something, I build up steam pretty quickly and need to get something rolling. It's hard for me to stay in my seat in that kind of situation.

The six-hour drive down the gorge on Sunday afternoon passed smoothly, despite the heat. It was a dry heat for the first half, then humid heat once I got into the lower gorge below The Dalles.

On Monday morning I woke up and left Laurelhurst in plenty of time to make the beginning of class, even stopping for coffee on the way. But the commute from East Portland down to campus on I-5 was simply unacceptable as a stress-filled traffic experience.  Before I even got there, I decided that I needed to relocate nearer to campus for a couple days, to make it easier on me.

Looking over the available hotels nearby the Lewis & Clark campus, I realized it was finally time to cave in and book a room in Wilsonville, a town on the very south edge of the Portland metro area where I-5 crosses over the Willamette River and enters the flat farmlands of the Valley proper. It's a modern exurb of nice houses, apartment complexes, and recently-built businesses located near several major tech-oriented employers---a nice community.

Ironically I'd been avoiding Wilsonville on this trip. As far as this part of the Portland metropolitan area goes, Wilsonville is the epicenter of sure-fire budget motel rooms. It had been my base the last time I was in Portland. This time I'd wanted to seek out other lodging pastures for as long as possible.

But now, after having explored the other corners around the edge of Portland, I found myself being led by the Google hotel tool to my former haunts.

And as Bill Stafford liked to say, you should follow the "Golden Thread," wherever it leads. Just don't pull on it too hard. Those who try to master it in that way inevitably break the thread. Pull on it gently, he said. It will lead you to "Jerusalem."

Plate 100 from Blake's Jersualem (1820) depicting Los and Enitharmon

So that's how I found myself back here in Wilsonville at the Best Western, and commuting along Stafford Road this morning---one big wonderful berry-filled Möbius circle of mythological goodness.

And as a commute, the route along Stafford Road was much better than the route on I-5 that I'd taken on Monday.

It must be noted that Stafford's use of the Golden Thread metaphor here is actually taken directly from a passage in William Blake's Jerusalem. Stafford could recite these lines from memory, as he would do for his friend Robert Bly, who was a great admirer of Blake.

Ask me how I know this. Go ahead, ask me...

Something the Rest of the World Knows but that You Don't

writing exercise: Wed, July 17, 2013, SW Portland
prompt: An Encounter with a Famous Person/a Pilgrimmage/Something...

Monday morning, just before the stroke of nine. Under fluorescent lights I sit at the end of a polished wooden conference table in a small room with carpeting and a low paneled ceiling.The air of the central air system rushes through the ceiling vents of the cozy room like a faraway waterfall.

From my seat I look back towards the glass doors, above which an institutional clock with a red second hand measures out the remaining seconds to the top of the hour.

Around the table beside me, in padded armchairs, sit about a dozen people, men and women, mostly about my age, but also one young man of college age. We are quietly chatting, waiting for others. On the table in front of us rest sleek laptops, black moleskin notebooks, and pens suitable for writing.

The side walls of the room are lined with tall stately wooden bookcases with etched glass doors and brass handles, They hold a neatly organized, heterogeneous collection of volumes, modern and antique, individual and in matching sets, deep red, indigo, cream-colored, and earth tones with gold lettering on the spine, as many as can fit. All of the books on the shelves have identical-looking notated cards protruding from the top. On the far wall beside the door hang framed posters, portraits and vintage lithographic maps of varying size and design.

As I wait for the class to start, I gaze up at the the two large framed painted portraits hanging side by side next to the door. They are both of identical dimensions, in matching gold frames, obviously depicting two gentlemen from the early Nineteenth Century. Both men are distinctly American in their countenance.

I wonder who they are. Looking at the one of the dark-browed man on the right, I muse: is that James Knox Polk?

Then it hits me, who they must be, given where we are sitting.

Well, duh, I say to myself.

I look at the portrait again, now with a clearer mind. 

I've been where you died, I say silently, as if talking to him. I almost died there too.

Of God and the Ambient Trauma

During the Saturday morning workshop at Fishtrap, Don Snow mentioned something that really got me thinking.

He said that much of contemporary story writing, both novels and memoirs, was concerned with trauma. He said that this was a rather recent development in literature---the extreme and almost universal focus on the personal tragedies that one has suffered.

Amen, I thought. I just can't stand the whole here's how I was a victim thing much anymore. I know a lot of people enjoy that, but it doesn't speak to me. As Don pointed out, personal downfall can always be an element of any story, but we have come to believe that it is the only thing worth writing about.

"Folks seem to think that unless something terrible has happened to them, then they have nothing to say in a story," he said.

He mentioned the works of Henry David Thoreau and Aldo Leopold as counter-examples from the era in which trauma was not assumed to form the core of all good narrative.

"Where's the trauma in Walden?" he asked. "There is none. It's a story about a guy who goes out and lives in the woods by a lake."

"And where's the trauma in A Sand County Almanac? Maybe you could say it is when he's looking into the eyes of the dying she-wolf, but that's really stretching it."

When he was done, I raised my hand to comment.

"In a way, there is a trauma in both Walden and A Sand County Almanac," I said. "But it's not a personal trauma. It's a societal-wide trauma that hangs in the background. Thoreau was reacting against the trauma of the Mexican War. Leopold was reacting against what he perceived as the trauma of the destruction of the natural environment."

He agreed with my point and elaborated upon it,in  a rather poetic way, coining the phrase "ambient trauma" to describe the background tension in both of those stories. I liked that phrase: the ambient trauma.

After lunch I had to squeeze into the lodge to find a seat for the afternoon panel discussion. It was Snow himself who was to moderate it. The speakers, who sat beside each other on chairs on the small stage in the back of the room, were William Kitteridge,  Judy Blunt (a noted essayist about her life as a Montana rancher), and a man who was community activist whose work it was to bring together local ranchers and farmers with the environmental community.

The theme was the Changing Landscape of the American West. Don Snow introduced the discussion by describing how decades-ago  many of the western states had adopted a policy of trying to transition from a hard resource-based economy to the "amenity economy" of tourism and other "low impact" activites favored by environmentalists. But this policy, although successful in many cases, had unforseen consequences, both in terms of land usage and human communities. For example, many of the best stewards of the land were actually the ranchers themselves, and they were ironically being pushed out by the success of tourism.

"Just look at the main street of Joseph," he said. "Look at the businesses that have been moving in there. They're part of the amenity economy."

The panel discussion was lively and interesting. At dinner time, I found myself back out on the patio, once again joined by many of the same folk as the night before. To my right was a woman from Western Massachusetts whom Kim introduced as the editor of Orion, a literary magazine in which many people at the conference had published essays and stories, and which they held in high esteem. Scott Russell Sanders, whom I'd met the night before, sat across from me.

It was very interesting to listen to him. He was wrestling with understanding the role of beauty in evolution. He wanted to understand how natural selection acting through evolution could produce the seemingly useless but beautiful features found in nature, not only the rich variations of the blossoms of the many flower species around the world, but also in the human achievement of, say, higher mathematics.

"It reminds me of how Einstein sometimes did physics," I said. "He called it his aesthetic criterion, the idea that fundamental equations of nature should be beautiful in their mathematical form.  That's supposedly how he came up with the tensor equations of General Relativity that govern how spacetime responds to localized presences of matter and energy. He asked himself what would a beautiful equation looked like, that related these physical quantities?"

It would look like this!

Scott was acquainted with Einstein's aesthetic criterion. I could tell he'd thought about it a lot.

"There was that expedition to Africa during an eclipse, around the time of World War I, to verify Einstein's prediction that light would curve around the sun," he said.

"The Eddington expedition," I chimed in.

Scott continued:

A.S. Eddington, The Observatory, 42 (1919)

"Someone asked Einstein what his reaction would be, if the prediction had not been true. He said that he would have been disappointed that God had designed a universe less interesting than it could be." (ed. note: this is my paraphrase of Scott---I am not familiar with the Einstein quote cited here).

After dinner there was a lively set of readings by various authors, as well as music. The lodge was so packed that people had to sit outside on the lawn in chairs listening on the loud speakers.  I stayed outside the whole time, pacing about, as is my usual habit. I often stopped in front of the open door to peek at the various speakers, curious to see what each one looked like, standing at the podium in the warm-light glow of the little stage.

The highlight of the evening was certainly the Fishtrap-themed Guy Noir parody, performed with great humor by several of the writers and staff members, who spoke with uncanny imitation of the style of A Prairie Home Companion, augmented on stage by funny, appropriate sound effects. For a few moments it felt like Summer Stock in some earlier era of Americana.

I went right up to the window to watch this one. I wanted to see them performing it. It was received with warm applause by all.

The Ones Left Intact Seem Ready to Wash and Eat

When I got to the Fishtrap lodge, I had two options for the morning. I could go for a hike in the forest, which is what many of the week-long participants did, or I could attend the morning workshop with Don Snow, whom I'd met at dinner the previous evening.

I'd done plenty of hiking lately, and since this was a writer's conference, I didn't think twice about my choice. I went inside the lodge for the workshop and took a set at the table in the corner, under the towering clear windows of the A-frame outlined in wooden beams partially in the shape of a crucifix.

In this case, despite ample attendance that nearly filled all the chairs, no one else joined me at my remote table.

Don started us off with a writing exercise. This is how nearly all writing workshop sessions start, I've learned. Then he spoke briefly about the meaning of the theme of this year's conference: "Breaking Trail."

He asked the class to brainstorm variations on the word "breaking." He compiled a list of phrases as people called them out from the room: breaking up, breaking out, breaking down, breaking apart, breaking bad...

For the next exercise, which was to be longer, he asked us to come up with our own bit of writing on some variation of the theme "breaking." It could be prose, poetry, or even a short play. He told us that if we didn't like that idea, we were of course free to do something completely of our choosing, or to continue working on some project we had already started (I've learned this is the standard disclaimer that one receives).

For the next forty-five minutes, we went off to write in separate parts of the lodge and outside on the patio. I took my backpack outside and found a picnic table behind the lodge by the rivulet stream that ran through the conference grounds.

I figured the best thing for me to do was just to write a blog post about what I'd done that morning so far, including stopping in Joseph and trying eating a giant mound of hash browns. I was planning on writing that up anyway.

Unlike most of my blog posts, I wrote this one out long hand first, in my hasty impatient handwriting, then revised it. Since there was still time,  I went back into the lodge to my corner table and typed the entire revised draft into my laptop.

When the time for exercise had elapsed, Don called the rest of us back into the lodge and asked for volunteers to share. I wanted to read my own work---something I hadn't done in a very long time---but I wanted to let a bunch of other people go first. Most of the people who read had written moving and interesting pieces. I felt like I had my work cut out for me, to live up to the standard that had been set. Finally during a pause in the string of volunteers, and when Don was looking my way, I raised my hand.

It was quite fun, and a little nerve-wracking, to read what I'd written. I wasn't used to live audiences and instantaneous feedback. A couple paragraphs into it, I wasn't sure if anyone was still following me, when I got to the line about how "I'd long since gotten over that kind of petty guilt over my personal consumption," half the room burst out in laughter.

They laughed again at a couple more lines, but interestingly not where I would have thought people would laugh, if you'd asked me. It was quite enlightening to find out what people actually responded to.

After I finished, Don called it "well composed."

After a moment's reflection, he added, "I never thought of onions as roadkill before."

I had resisted the fleeting temptation to append a denouement to the onion story in the surrealist style of Borges, one in which I would bring the narrator right into the conference lodge. Then he would write an essay about his morning as part of a writing workshop, and finally he would read it aloud to the class. It was unnecessary elaboration, I realized. I'd gotten enough laughs to validate the effect of humor I was going for.

Breaking Onions

On Saturday I got up out of my little tent early, awakened by the sadistic crowing of a rooster in a coop right next to the campground. The sky was already brightening over the pastures beyond the fence and the jagged outline of the Wallowas beyond.

I knew from the conference schedule that they were serving breakfast at the lodge, and that it was included in my weekend package, but I decided instead to stop on the way in the little town of Joseph, which is named after the famous Nez Perce chief, who is buried only a few miles away. I wanted to contribute to the local economy as part of my experience there, and also to meet some locals.

Joseph is the kind of farming town you find in a lot of places across the West near scenic mountain areas that tourists have discovered. Its one-time exclusive agricultural character has partially given way to the influence of summer and winter visitors. For now, most of the businesses in town are still oriented to farming and everyday life, but the main street has acquired an upscale boutiqueish feel from the infiltration of shops, restaurants, and real estate agents that serve the out-of-towners. It was easy to conjecture that in twenty more years, the agricultural businesses might well be displaced entirely to somewhere else in the valley.

I parked in front of a cafe on the main street. The lit neon sign said "open" but all the windows and even the front door were shaded with thick curtains as a shield against the morning sun. I wasn't sure the door would open until I pulled the handle.  I parted the heavy curtains on the other side to step inside, as if going back stage at a theater.

The interior was plain to the point of barrenness, in the manner of a typical small-town rural cafe. The sound of a pleasant fan filled the room. About half a dozen diners sat at the simple tables eating. All of them were obvious locals. The cafe was part of the old Joseph, not the new.

I took a seat by the window and a few minutes later the waiter---either Asian or Indian, I couldn't tell, came out smiling and offered me coffee and a laminated menu. I looked it over and ordered the bacon and cheese omelette, as I was hungry. For the sides I chose hash browns and toast. I typically might eat only part of those, since I try to stick with a mainly protein diet lately. The paleo regimen seeems to work very well for me.

As the waiter left with my order, he passed by another table where an older couple was just finishing their meal. He remarked to the man that "it's looks like you'll have to take some of that home."

Ample portions, I thought to myself. I won't go hungry this morning.

My order came back quickly. When the waiter put it down in front of me, I got a big kick of out the spectacle that greeted me. The three-egg omelette was of normal size---it alone would have sufficed for my breakfast. But it was dwarfed on the plate, crowded to the side by the enormous mountain of hash browns. I'd never been served more potatoes at a restaurant before in my life.

I thanked the waiter and began eating my omelette. I knew there was no chance I was going to be able to put any size dent in the hash browns, let alone eat the whole thing. They looked like they would fill my entire stomach for the day. I could already picture the kitchen staff scraping most of them off into the garbage.

At one time in my life this would have caused me sorrow, in some way that anthropomorphized the potatoes and their tragic uneaten end. But I'd long since gotten over that kind of petty guilt over my personal consumption. It was what it was.

Instead the idea of so many potatoes being served to me, right near the potato-growing regions of eastern Oregon, gave me a warm feeling, as I were participating in a festival of local agriculture abundance, in the way I wish the Portland Rose festival had been.

The overly ample portions reminded me of when, a few years back, I was driving across nearby southern Idaho for the first time, on the back roads and two-lane highways through the farming region around Boise.

It was autumn and I noticed the large number of heavy trucks that I passed, all with open beds heaped with thousands of recently harvested potatoes and giant onions. They are piled on the truck with a minimum of effort to keep them secured, and inevitably stray ones fall off the heap and tumble onto the road, where some get smashed by the tires of other vehicles.

It's obviously a tolerable waste for the farmers and a minimal cost to the agricultural industry, otherwise they wouldn't let it happen. But it has a curious side effect, at least for the giant onions. When they get smashed down into an exploded pancake form on the asphalt, their sweet fresh aroma fills the air,  and you can get a deep nostril-full of it, even when you are just driving by with your car window rolled down.

When I smell that now, it carries me far away. I imagine myself in France, with my friends, gathering in the kitchen in the late afternoon to start the meal. It always begins with the smell of fresh-cut onions.

My Entire Life Comes Tumbling Down Out of the Wallowas

I'd handed Kim that note when I did because I didn't know how things worked at Fishtrap and I wasn't sure if I'd get to spend much time with him. I had wanted to make sure I accomplished my prime mission of the trip, and I figured the earlier I gave him that note with my blog address, the better.

As it happened, this anticipation was completely erroneous. In the informal setting of the conference, there was ample opportunity to chat with anyone there.

Nevertheless, having committed myself to the gag, I kept my mysterious distance during most of the afternoon as people milled around outside the lodge. Then I made myself scare by going for a long walk in the woods before dinner time, up along the river as it comes cascading out of the Wallowa Mountains and cascades towards the peaceful lake.

I got back to the lodge in time to hear the dinner bell ring and arranged to be one of the first in line to fill up my plate. The tables inside the lodge were scarce, so I took my food outside to the patio and sat at an empty round table in the corner. A group of high school kids had taken a few of the other tables nearby and slid them together so that they could eat together. I began eating my meal in empty-minded solitude, grateful just to have arrived and to be there.

A few minutes into my meal, a woman about my age approached the table and asked if she could join me. She introduced herself as Pat and took a seat next to me. Within a few minutes the entire table had filled up, with two other men a little bit older than me, and then finally Kim and his wife Perrin. Kim sat right next to me. As he sat down he eyed me suspiciously as if to say, "who is this guy?"

By then I had officially registered and was wearing my apsen-slice name tag around my neck, showing only my first name.

"Need a hint?" I asked him with a grin, holding up my name-tag necklace.

What happened over the next hour of dinner was splendidly fun.

Pat asked me where I was from.  "Colorado," I said.

"What town?"

"Fort Collins."

"Oh, yes," she said. "I lived in Fort Collins."

At that point that man next to her chimed in. "I used to live in Fort Collins," he said.

He turned out to be Don Snow, one of the authors leading the week-long workshop sessions. He was a published naturalist essayist, and was the chairman of the Environmental Humanities Department at Whitman College in nearby Walla Walla.

He said he'd gone to graduate school at Colorado State in the mid 1970's. He had lived there in the years right before my family arrived. He waxed about the good times he spent in the English department there.

"Did you know Bill Tremblay?" I asked him, referring to a retired member of the CSU English faculty whom I knew. It turns out he knew him well.

"How do you know him?" he asked me.

"I went to high school with his son," I told him.  I said the Tremblays were good friends of my folks, and that they still lived in town.

Don brought up James Crumley, who had been on the English faculty before Bill Tremblay.

"Oh yeah," I said. "The Last Good Kiss." I had read that book a long time ago without even knowing the author had lived in Fort Collins. The hero is a private eye who drives all over the empty spaces of the American west in his old El Camino. It had somehow been inspiring to me.

Don lamented the sad end of Crumley, after he had gone to Hollywood and tried to get his screenplays produced there. He inferred that Crumley's writing had deteriorated sharply in those years possibly due to cocaine usage.

Don said he'd recently been back in Fort Collins and was greatly impressed the city's acquisition of the Soapstone property along the Wyoming border.  It preserved a key mountains-to-plains segment of the ecosystem.

"Oh yeah," I said, "one of my best friends from high school was instrumental in shepherding the purchase of that. He's high up in the Nature Conservancy."

Then it came up that Pat, the woman next to me, had been married to a theoretical physicist. He had worked at Los Alamos before they moved up to Fort Collins, where he had been on the physics faculty at CSU. They got divorced because of the strain on their marriage there, according to her.

It also turns out that her physicist ex-husband was recently in the news as the man who started the Galena Fire last month, which sadly burned up even more of the area around Lory State Park in the foothills above town, scorching sections that had escaped the apocalyptic wildfires from the summer before. It turns out that his electric fence had been the culprit. Ironically the fire burned away from his property, leaving his house untouched while destroying neighboring properties.

"Ain't that how it always happens?" I said.

"Say, diid you ever know Sandy Kern?" I asked her, mentioning the name of another member of the CSU physics faculty.

"Yes, of course," she said.

"He was actually very influential in my becoming a physicist," I told her. "I had a key conversation with him right before I went to Willamette."

With those last words I halfway turned to Kim, hoping he'd catch them as a hint of my identity, but he was busy talking to other people at the table.

Pat mentioned the names of a few other people in the physics department at CSU.

"Actually Sandy is the only physicist I knew there," I said.  "I really only knew him because of his wife Maxine, who was my high school drama director."

"Oh how's Maxine?" she asked with sudden curiosity.

"Last time I saw her she was doing very well." I explained that she and Sandy had gotten divorced, and that Maxine lived in New York City.

"At least the last time I saw her, she did," I said.

She asked me how long it had been since I'd seen her. "A ways back," I said. "In 2001."

"But I saw Sandy a couple years ago in Fort Collins," I added. "He was doing well. So are their kids."

"Yes, what were their names again?"

"Laura, and Michael," I said. "I went to high school with both of them. They were just older and younger than me. Laura lives in Australia and has kids of her own. Michael lives in Seattle, if I recall what Sandy said."

After that the conversation shifted I did more listening that talking. The other man at the table turned out to be Scott Russell Sanders, who was perhaps the most revered author at the entire conference. Over the next few days, many of the other people sung his praises effusively as a naturalist and as awriter about natural history and evolution.

At one point he was talking with Kim about a recent experience that I inferred that they had shared in Central Iowa, walking out among some virgin prairie that had been preserved there. It turns out that my late grandfather was highly instrumental in the preservation of those remaining sections of the prairie around Des Moines. Two years we scattered his ashes on one such piece in back of the high school where he taught.

Then Scott shared his experiences regarding a piece of former swamp in eastern Indiana near Fort Wayne that had recently been restored. It had been drained over a hundred years ago after the discovery of natural gas. When they restored the swamp, the original seed bank of native species sprung back to life almost by deep natural magic.

"I know that area," I said. "I was just there last year. My family is from around there. They came from West Virginia to set up glass factories around Gas City after the discovery of the natural gas fields there." My (other) grandfather had been born in nearby Blackford County.

After dinner, as the crowd waited outside the lodge for the evening program to start (a keynote address by Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild), I was standing by myself when Kim's wife approached me. Smiling, she told me that Kim was very curious about how we knew each other, and that he was definitely going to look up my blog.

At that point I realized that the gag had far outlived its purpose. So I decided to spill the beans.

"Actually I'm one of his former students," I told her, "from a long time ago. I took a couple of his classes at Willamette back in the 1980s."

She wasted no time in hurrying over to her husband to relay the information.

I watched as she told him. Then he looked at me at said, with a huge big smile.

"Chaucer!"

"That's right," I said.

"You're the rocket scientist, right?"

"That's me."

Then he added almost immediately, with an even bigger smile.

"You're the guy who traded his computer to some Shoshoni for a car in the middle of the Nevada desert!"

"Yup," I said, erupting with laughter. I couldn't believe he remembered that one.

Dramatic Tension in the Stafford Style

It was almost 1:30 PM on the dot when I finally pulled into the gravel driveway in front of the Wallowa Lake Camp. After nearly seven hours of driving, and even with Google map pulled up on my computer showing the camp's precise location, I still drove past the entrance twice before stopping at the cafe at the intersection of the main road.

I had showed the map page on my laptop to the women at the counter of the cafe.  "Can you tell me where this place is?" I asked them.

At first they were mystified. Then one said, "Oh, that's the Methodist camp." Once they had that figured out, they told me how to find it quite easily. It was close by. Once I knew where to turn, I noticed the small hand-lettered signs saying "Fishtrap" that I had missed before when driving past.

I pulled into the parking lo andt ook a deep breath. I'd been driving since 5:30 in the morning, all the way up the gorge and over the Blue Mountains to La Grande with only short breaks. Then it was another hour over the pass into the Wallowa Valley, where I had stopped at the campground north of Joseph long enough to check in and set up my tiny tent. Then I had headed south through Joseph and along the impossibly gorgeous lake set against the jagged outlines of the Wallowas, which are by far the most scenic mountains I have seen in Oregon. I couldn't believe it was my first time visiting there.

After three hundred miles of driving, with my impeccably uncanny sense of timing, I had finally arrived at my destination at exactly the minute that the workshop started. The conference center was visible through the fir trees. I crossed a large grassy lawn, past a cluster of wooden yurts, to the towering a-frame wooden structure built in the familiar style of church camp buildings from the mid-to-late Twentieth Century. These kind of places give me a good relaxed feeling. I'd spent part of my childhood in church camps and had only pleasant memories of them.

The tables outside the door were staffed by a row of friendly Fishtrap folks awaiting the registration for the weekend program. I'd arrived too early for that, specifically so I could attend Kim's workshop on digital storytelling. One of the staff members pointed me to the cabin a couple hundred feet up a side road.

With a light heart, anticipating a fun reunion with a friend, I halfway skipped over the tiny creek that ran across the road, scurrying up to the cabin with my backpack.

The cabin was not large. Approaching the door, I could already tell the session was in progress. A rustic-looking bearded man, whom I would later learn was Mike Midlo formerly of Oregon Public Broadcasting, was at the door with an upturned hat collecting donations for the workshop. I put in the suggested five bucks.

He said that there might not be room inside. A peek inside the door confirmed his diagnosis. There were at least fifty people crammed into the small space, some sitting on a wooden platform, which looked rather uncomfortable. I went inside anyway. After having come all this way, after so long a time, I wasn't going to be denied.

The only free seat I could find turned out to be right behind Kim's chair, flush up against the front wall. I had to crane my neck to watch the video presentations that he and his wife Perrin were showing us. At one point, Kim noticed me behind him and asked if I wanted to swap chairs.

"I've seen all these before," he said. Clearly he didn't recognize me. But I didn't expect him to, after so many years.

Kim looked much the same as I remembered him, with the expected changes from almost three decades of the passage of time. I had known him when we were both young men. Now even I had a stubbly white beard (I had almost shaved off the week's growth but Red suggested that  I keep it on for the conference).

The workshop was informative and inspiring. The subject was how to make short personal essays using an I-Phone and other "democratic" video tools. It seemed like something Kim would be doing lately.

He  directed us a couple writing sessions in which we composed possible personal video essay scripts based on an old family photograph, among other things. I chose to write about the photograph of my sister and I sitting in my first car,  a 1978 Volkswagen Rabbit, right after I bought it and before I set out for college in Oregon.

Among the other things we learned was how to use copyright free music.

"You'll find yourself making friends with any musicians you know," Perrin said. She said the music for one of her videos, about her nephew with Down's Syndrome who studied Sasquatch and Superman, had come from a street musician in Berkeley from whom they had asked to record the first music that came to his mind.

When the workshop was over and we got up to leave, Kim looked at me with a puzzled look, mostly because it was the fifth day of the conference and I was a brand new face. Since I hadn't yet registered, I also wasn't yet wearing the ubiquitous Fishtrap nametag, a thin slice of aspen log with one's name written on it, that everyone else was wearing around their necks.

Knowing that I had come in late, Kim located one of the workshop handouts and handed it to me.  It listed urls for video-making tutorials.

After he gave me the handout, I gave him a small note that I had written during the workshop:

Kim,

A blog post about you: http://theticketcollector.blogspot.com
"The Physicist's Tale"

--a grateful former student

He read the note right after I handed it to him. He looked back up at my face, trying to figure out who I was.

"Help me out," he said, fumbling through his mind for my identity.

"It's all there," I said, pointing back to the note.

He grinned. That seemed to satisify him. I slipped out the door and left him to talk with the other students.