Output | Oregon Humanities

New Again

Kathleen Holt

This issue marks my tenth year of editing Oregon Humanities magazine. Ten-year periods are good, solid chunks of time. They seem compact and complete, almost like an object you can hold in your hand and dispassionately consider from all angles.

The Image and Act of Communion

Kathleen Holt

If you’ve been following our work for the past couple of years, you’ve no doubt heard about the Oregon Humanities Wheel of Cogitation: a café table with a wooden-wheel top that is hand painted with topics of conversation such as, “Childhood book that changed you,” “Riveting image you’ll never forget,” and “Change a moment in history.” We take the wheel with us to events and use it to engage people in conversation.

Toward Grace, Strength, and Hope

Kathleen Holt

Richard Evans, president of an organization called EmcArts in Seattle, was in Portland last summer for a conference on innovation in the arts. His talk, “The Real Work of Innovation,” focused on best practices from arts organizations across the country. As he described successful projects, I was struck by how often Evans used the word fail, from a quote attributed to Winston Churchill (“Success is the ability to go from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm”) to his description of encouraging innovation through a culture of “fail fast, fail early, fail safe.” Failure doesn’t seem to be the American narrative of choice. As a culture, we prefer Horatio Alger–like tales of characters who overcome extreme adversity to embrace and then bask in well-earned glory. I was taken aback but also bewitched by the notion that failure is an integral component of success.

The Long Look Back

Kathleen Holt

A few months ago, several of my friends posted Facebook links to a New York magazine article by Jennifer Senior called “All Joy and No Fun: Why Parents Hate Parenting.” As the mother of two young children who was soon to edit a magazine issue on happiness and humor, I clicked through and read the piece with interest, nodding in agreement at some points, grimacing at others, chortling throughout. Then, in a true mark of approval in this digital age, I posted the link on my Facebook page so that others might read the piece. I included a comment, describing the article as “intriguing and often hilarious,” to which one friend remarked, “Interesting. I’m not getting ‘hilarious’ from this, though.”

Linfield College students and faculty, in partnership with area organizations, reel in the history of Pacific City’s fishing industry.

Eric Gold

Fisherman Bill Hook waited two years to keep his promise to spread the ashes of his late stepfather, Bernie, over tuna grounds forty miles off the coast of Pacific City. “We’d gone out and got skunked, and didn’t put any fish in the boat,” he says, “and I just didn’t figure that was his day.” Finally, Hook put Bernie’s ashes in the prop wash behind the boat, along with some Olympia beer and two cigarettes, and watched them fl oat away. Just as the water turned back to azure, Hook says, “Pshh, pshh, pshh…three lines lit up. Damn good joke, Bernie. Thanks.” (Hear audio story below.)

Collective Energy

Share brings artists of all mediums together to create.

Kathleen Holt

Sculptor Matt Sipes needs a hacksaw—STAT!—but none of the artists, writers, and musicians gathered in the Old Town Portland studio on this spring night can help. Some have X-Acto blades, box cutters, and scissors for their own projects, but nothing that can cleanly cut through the cable of thick copper wire that Sipes is using to build a set of speakers, so he settles for some wire cutters. They don’t give him the precision he’d hoped for, but this is Share—a bimonthly gathering of artists who create work in response to a prompt revealed at the beginning of the evening—and improvisation is key.

This evening the prompt is “up,” and Sipes’s vertical speakers nicely come together by the end of the two-hour work period, as do other projects. At the end of the evening, the artists share their work—a shadow puppet, chapters of a novel-in-progress, a love song, a painting of a man on stilts and a dancing dog below—and talk about their creative process.

Founders Kathleen Lane and Margaret Malone envisioned Share as a chance for artists across various media to draw on one another’s collective energy for inspiration and support. Lane and Malone met in a writing group and were used to the format of writers sharing pages of work and giving feedback. So when they started Share in 2009, they hoped to develop a format that emphasized creation rather than outcome.

Though many Share projects have spun off into successful, public projects—published poems, screenplays performed on radio, even a spring fashion line—the focus remains on creation and community. “Share is about letting yourself not be perfect,” says Malone, who admits she’s a control freak and “would draft for years before reading something in front of someone.”

Lane adds that demystifying the creative process of all artists, regardless of discipline, is another goal of Share. “Most of the art that we see in the world is so finished,” she says. “You don’t get to see that everyone struggles.”

This struggle to create something inspired by “up” using paper and wire, words and ink, has a sound: the peck-peck-peck of keyboards and typewriters, the scratch of bristles on board, the stop-and-start vibration of guitar strings. These sounds are reminders of colleagues at work and one of the reasons Malone loves the multidisciplinary component of Share: “I just wanted to see people working and hear people working who weren’t just writing.”

Multimedia artist Daniela Molnar wasn’t sure she’d be able to work alongside other artists because her process is typically solitary. But she says because Share is such a welcoming and friendly environment, not competitive like critique groups can be, she is instead energized by the sight and sound of work happening around her.

And for Lane, who says she has a loud internal “judge voice,” writing can be heavy and all-encompassing. She remembers finding the words “lighten up” written and underlined in her journal, which inspired her to start Share: “It’s a way of bringing joy back into this process.”

A People's History

Residents of Bosky Dell rely on volunteers, family, and bee houses to document the history of their community.

Kristy Athens

The Bosky Dell area of West Linn, a green sliver wedged between the eastern flank of Pete’s Mountain and the Tualatin River, was not easy to develop. The white settlers who displaced local Native Americans cut hundreds of conifers and dug out their stumps to eke out a living from the lush but dank environment.

Sharing Meals, Sharing Faith

“Ironically,” says director Hilary Jones, “the students have to come to us to come together.” The program, begun in 1999 by the US State Department and held at Willamette the last three years, includes politics courses, community service at organizations like Meals on Wheels, and visits with the Oregon Supreme Court. The finale is a debate tournament, which Jones says helps the students “leave their emotions behind and look critically at an issue”—an important skill for living in a democracy.

Before they headed home, where students organize their own civic engagement projects, this year’s group met in Washington, DC with Hilary Clinton, who offered personal reflections on the US role in getting beyond the conflict in Bosnia. “I thought of democracy earlier as a type of ‘governing’ the country,” wrote one student at the program’s end. “Now, I realize that democracy is in the people.”

Why I Give

Dallas High School teacher Justin Chin supports Oregon Humanities’ programs in rural areas.

Kristy Athens

In the struggling town of Dallas, Oregon, the humanities might seem to be the esoteric realm of scholars and artists. But for the last ten years, local high school teacher Justin Chin has used humanities as the foundation of his language arts classes.

Chin grew up in Dallas and has witnessed the decline of the logging industry his entire life. He is now a teacher of his disenfranchised neighbors’ children. “This town has experienced a lot of change,” Chin says. “It’s the last vestiges of a mill town. It’s really been dying the last five years. Mom-and-pop hardware stores and restaurants have gone belly-up overnight. Things that used to seem untouchable aren’t anymore. I’ve never had classes with this many kids’ parents unemployed and barely making ends meet.”

Chin is grateful for the work of Oregon Humanities, especially in economically depressed towns like Dallas. “The outreach programs create an opportunity for rural areas to connect and talk about what makes Oregon Oregon.”

Chin recently used Rich Wandschneider’s Oregon Humanities essay about televised football (Spring 2010) as a segue into the impact of technology on modern life. “The moment we lose humanities,” he says, “we lose touch with what makes us human and humane.”

The Places In Between

This summer, Oregon Humanities joined Metro and Oregon Lottery to offer a series that explored natural areas in untraditional ways.

Eloise Holland

Ecotone: the biologically diverse zone where two or more habitats adjoin. The Know Your Place summer series—a special collaboration between Oregon Humanities and Metro regional government, cosponsored by Oregon Lottery—explored human relationships to nature through language, movement, and observation and can be thought of as a kind of ecotone, said writer Barry Lopez. Lopez and Debra Gwartney, coeditors of the book Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape, kicked off the series with a program at Graham Oaks Nature Park in Wilsonville in July.

Whether participants came out to Metro’s protected natural areas for a love of the humanities or a passion for ecological stewardship, they found themselves in rich and diverse space—between nature and development, environmentalism and the humanities, art and the senses. In these in-between spaces, people were free to explore and understand their surroundings in ways that may have been completely new to them.

For example, filmmaker Matt McCormick, who will lead the September 24 program at Cooper Mountain Nature Park in Beaverton, will ask participants to observe cinematically as a way of better knowing a place. And artist Linda K. Johnson, who led the series event at Scouter Mountain in August, asked participants to explore places by passing through them: “Some people exercise their bodies by walking,” Johnson says, “but I exercise my being by walking.”

Forty Years On

Oregon Humanities reflects on its history.

Eric Gold

In 1971, the National Endowment for the Humanities gave seed money to six states, including Oregon, for local humanities projects. The Oregon Committee for the Humanities began with six volunteers and $100,000. This model tested by Oregon and Wyoming (other states funded the humanities through arts councils or extension schools) eventually became the national standard, with forty committees planned or in operation by 1973.

The NEH enforced two requirements: projects funded by the humanities councils had to address public policy and be selected through a competitive process. These were still in place by 1977, when Dick Lewis became the second executive director, succeeding Charles Ackley. That year, the Oregon committee had twenty-one members and a newsletter with a circulation of 2,500. The public policy and regrant requirements were relaxed in the early 1980s. “At that point,” Lewis says, “it really broadened and became a much more fully humanistic public learning agency.”

Lewis, who served as director for two decades, recalls certain highlights of his tenure at what, by 1992, was called the Oregon Council for the Humanities. In 1980, two Eastern Oregon State College professors proposed a summer lecture series they planned to tour around the state. Lewis says, “That became the germ of Oregon Chautauqua,” a popular statewide speakers bureau that was converted in 2009 into the Conversation Project, which emphasizes community discussion as well as humanities scholarship.

Also in the early eighties, the Oregon council responded to Cold War tensions with a program, What About the Russians, on the people and culture of the Soviet Union. Opponents’ concerns about what they supposed would be the program’s radical agenda spurred an investigation of all state humanities councils by the General Accounting Office, which found no improprieties. In 1989, an exemplar of the Magna Carta, dating from 1215 and insured for sixteen million pounds, was brought from England for a series of programs on constitutional law. In 1990, the First Oregonians conference brought representatives from all nine federally recognized Oregon tribes and tribal confederations together for a two-and-a-half day exploration of Indian history and culture. The organization published a book of the same name in 1992 and reprinted it in 2007.

A forum and exhibition investigate the Columbia River Crossing project.

Lucy Burningham

While there’s nothing simple about building a major interstate bridge connecting two states, the Columbia River Crossing (CRC) project, which will replace the I-5 bridge between Vancouver and Portland, has become an especially convoluted and controversial multiyear effort. To help the public, elected officials, and the design community navigate the latest proposal, the Architecture Foundation of Oregon (AFO) and PDXplore presented the exhibition and forum “Crossing the Columbia: What Does It Mean?”

Returning Home

Working to better serve veterans

Lucy Burningham

Caroline Cummins

“Some people argue that it’s a yuppie thing, to be into local food,” says Lily Brislen, who runs Douglas County’s Think Local Umpqua program. “And this is not a yuppie community. But connecting with your community spans all ideologies.”

Supported by an Oregon Humanities grant awarded in March 2009, Think Local Umpqua is, according to its downloadable buying guide (http://www.thinklocalumpqua.com/localpages.html), “a coalition of farmers, business owners, and community supporters who encourage our community members to ‘Think Local First’ when selecting goods and services.” Local food is a big component of the program—the guide lists everyone from the gargantuan Umpqua Dairy to the teensy Arrow’s Delight Chocolates—but Think Local Umpqua embraces all independent, locally based businesses in the county.

Nearly a quarter of the program’s grant award went to licensing the rights to screen the popular documentary Food, Inc. At the film’s November 2009 showing, Brislen says, the room was so crowded the organizers had to turn people away. “We had locally grown popcorn with Umpqua Dairy butter,” Brislen says. “But what was most exciting was that all ages were there—middle schoolers, some Girl Scouts serving popcorn. And that’s rare to see.”

Beyond the local boosterism, Brislen adds, lies a possible shift in outlook among community members. “It’s easy to live in your own bubble,” she says. “But we’re seeing and hearing our messaging coming out of other people’s mouths, in the newspaper, or at community meetings. People are taking ownership of the whole think-local idea.”

Humanities Front and Center

OSU–Cascades professors mobilize to offer American Studies major.

Ellen Santasiero

Last fall, Oregon State University–Cascades English professor Neil Browne posted on his office door an excerpt from Harper’s magazine describing the marginalization of humanities programs in academia. That trend, Browne says, weakens graduates’ grasp of civic values and their ability to express them.

Such concern is part of what motivated Browne and his colleagues to propose a new American Studies major, one grounded in the humanities and heavily guided by interdisciplinary principles. “We’re trying to put humanities back in the center of civic discussion,” Browne says. “The humanities teach people how to think and communicate from multiple perspectives. Students need that to succeed in the twenty-first century.”

To test student interest, last fall the professors taught four courses focused on the 1960s. The courses—one was on the Vietnam War, another on the Grateful Dead—proved popular, fueling the professors’ hopes for an official major in 2010.

Browne and Henry Sayre, distinguished professor of art history, already teach a popular year-long sequence of courses called A Cultural History of American Art and Literature. Sayre, who will co-teach in the program with Browne and others,
points out that OSU–Cascades’ program will be global in scope. “You can’t talk about twentieth-century America without talking about Dresden, Hiroshima, or Japanese technology.”

Telling It Straight

Eugene’s Telling Project goes to D.C.

Caroline Cummins

Tension. Laughter. Absurdity. Sadness. Connection. Over and over, theater directors strive to bring these things to an audience. In the Telling Project, a “witness theater” production begun in Eugene in 2007, neophyte actors—all members of the U.S. military who have served mostly in the Gulf, Afghanistan, and Iraq wars—do just that, drawing on their firsthand experiences.

Boredom. Fatigue. Enthusiasm. Frustration. In a video of the Eugene production, which traveled to Washington, D.C., in November 2009, a man recalls taking the edge off his overseas posting with a recurring practical joke: posing a Strawberry Shortcake pillow next to sleeping comrades, then snapping photos of them. Drool was a plus. A woman recalls a superior officer, late on a lonely night watch, making a pass at her—even though both of them were married at the time.

“I was working with people who had dealt with both the extremes of boredom and the extremes of terror and grief that most actors never experience,” recalls John Schmor, the University of Oregon theater professor who directed the Eugene production. “It isn’t about ‘pretend’—it is about a truth in action. And it’s rough.”

After Eugene, the performance was re-created in Portland, with new actors telling new stories. Now the project is going nationwide, with versions under way in California and Mississippi. The goal, as the group’s website (thetellingproject.org) makes clear, is to have a project in every state.

Terror. Grief. Return. “They were waiting in line when it happened—chow line. They were just waiting to eat,” recalls Shirley Cortez, a Navy electrician on night watch, about the bombing of the U.S.S. Cole. “One of the people that died that day, she was my age, and I remember she’d just found out she was pregnant. And I remember thinking, you know, I bet they didn’t wake up this morning and think, ‘This is a good day to die.’”

Remembering the Dead

Film tells story of Portland’s earliest Chinese immigrants.

Caroline Cummins

They came by ship. They worked gruelingly hard. And when Portland’s earliest Chinese immigrants died, they were dumped, anonymously, into graves at the city’s Lone Fir cemetery.

“Chinaman, Chinaman, Chinaman”—that’s who was buried in Lone Fir according to a list kept by Multnomah County. A man reads these names aloud—or rather, these non-names—in Ivy Lin’s 2009 documentary film about the fate of the workers, Come Together Home. He continues, “The funeral home knew their names. The Chinese Benevolent Association knew their names. But the county just never thought it was important.”

The nameless dead were unearthed more than half a century ago and shipped back to China, where their remains got stuck in the limbo of a Hong Kong warehouse. Lin, a filmmaker who came across the story of Lone Fir’s exhumed Chinese workers while working on an earlier documentary about Portland’s Chinatown called Pig Roast and Tank of Fish, traveled to China to see what had become of the bodies.

“I think it was my personal transformation from being an Asian in America to an Asian American that inspired me to become interested in the stories of Chinese immigrants who arrived in Portland before me,” says Lin, who came to the United States from Taiwan in 1989. “Early Chinese immigrants endured a tremendous amount of hardship to pave the way for newer immigrants like myself. The very least I can do is to tell stories of their lives and raise awareness of their contribution in helping to build the city of Portland and the state of Oregon.”

Trailers for both films can be viewed online (http://www.vimeo.com/6226018), but full screenings of the movies are rare. The Friends of Lone Fir Cemetery showed Come Together Home in October 2009, followed by a December showing at Portland State University and a February 2010 screening at Portland’s White Stag building. But something more permanent may soon come out of Lin’s work: an official monument to the workers on the empty cemetery block where they used to lie.

Giving Kids a Choice

Redmond turns a four-day school week into a learning experience.

Caroline Cummins

Last summer, when budget constraints pushed Central Oregon’s Redmond School District into a four-day school week, the community decided to try to make that fifth day into a different kind of learning experience. The results, dubbed Choice Friday, are giving some five hundred Redmond students a new kind of education.

“It’s about schools getting out into the community and the community getting out into the schools,” says Choice Friday’s volunteer chair, Jamie Christman. “It’s a new paradigm.”

Some of Choice Friday’s offerings are essentially traditional after-school activities: crafts, sports, the sorts of things kids do in summer camp. But other programs—an academy with the Redmond Police Department, a buddy program with disabled children—have proved both unconventional and popular.

The creativity and big-picture thinking that Christman is trying to build shows in such programs as Global Nomads (a cultural exploration for the area’s international exchange students) and Literature and the Outdoors (a course combining leadership, English, science, and physical education).

Choice Friday, says Christman, isn’t about simply filling in an empty day. “This is about creating an entire learning community beyond the classroom,” she says. “That means adults as well as kids. And what’s really exciting are the students from middle and high school hopping on board and creating those next-level programs. But it’s like trying to build a jet while you’re flying it. It’s innovative, but very challenging.”

From the Director

Cara Ungar-Gutierrez

As a preface to meeting with our federal delegates and asking them to support funding for the National Endowment for the Humanities, I’ve met with some of our board members to determine why the work of Oregon Humanities is important at all times but especially right now. Board members noted that this seems to be a time of political and social divisiveness, as well as economic uncertainty. Given this context, what can we offer?

Oregon Humanities is committed to bringing diverse Oregonians together. Each summer, our Happy Camp gathers urban, rural, high-achieving, and at-risk students to reflect on topics like consumerism, religion, and politics. It’s been a powerful experience for me to see the next generation come together, across their differences, to consider these subjects in such healthy, reflective, and compassionate ways.

Our statewide Conversation Project reaches Oregonians across the state, convening neighbors to discuss the economy, citizenship, the urban/rural divide, land use, the environment, and Iraq. Oregon Humanities also serves as a moderator: last year, we produced responsive programs that helped divided communities discuss issues like censorship and political scandal.

My point here is that in this complex time, the work of Oregon Humanities helps us move forward, provides us with insight, compassion, and understanding. I hope you’ll support us by contacting your delegates when we ask you to do so later this spring and at the end of the summer. In the meantime, enjoy the magazine, enjoy the weather, and be in touch—I love hearing from folks about their experiences with Oregon Humanities!

From the Director

Cara Ungar-Gutierrez

By now, many of you know about changes that we’ve undergone here at Oregon Humanities, formerly Oregon Council for the Humanities. (See full story on page 5.) How we embarked on making our work and our programs more accessible and relevant in response to a board-directed vision. How we worked with advertising superstar Jelly Helm this year on creating a new image that mirrored these changes, which in large part hinges on three letters: O. Hm., which is not only an acronym for the organization but what we like to say is the sound of hearing a new idea.

But “O. Hm.” suggests more than just a moment of clarity; it represents a moment of insight that changes the way you think about something. For example, when one of our Conversation Project scholars, Elliott Young (see profile on page 10), led a group in Lincoln City on an exploration of thorny topics—immigration, ethnicity, and culture—they began by listening to each other’s stories and slowly realized that, in some ways, they were all immigrants. When seventy high school students from Ashland to Pendleton to Astoria gathered in Portland this summer at Happy Camp, they asked questions, listened closely, and began to consider how they would move forward with their lives. After a Humanity in Perspective student read about and talked with his fellow students about questions of power, justice, and language, he went on to become a vocal advocate for HIV awareness. And when twenty-five high school teachers (who collectively reach 9,000 students each year) gathered at our Teacher Institute to consider class, mobility, and the American dream, they reimagined how they might inspire their students to become better citizens.

Oregon Humanities is doing good, important work. My hope is that the refocusing we’ve done these past few years will be meaningful to Oregonians and will provide us all with a sense of deeper understanding, insight, and connectedness.

The Road to Oregon Humanities

Behind the scenes of our recent adventure in branding

Kathleen Holt

Maybe you’ve noticed: we’ve changed. Maybe you’ve seen and read about our new look in the September Oregonian article, or on our new website, or at one of our recent events. Maybe you’ve watched our short films on YouTube or our website. Maybe you picked up our new business cards or pins at Wordstock or a Conversation Project program. Maybe you’ve received correspondence from us on our new stationery.

You may wonder how this all happened. It wasn’t a quick, sudden process, but more of an evolution, a gradual response to changing times, values, and experiences. Here’s the short version of the long story of how the Oregon Council for the Humanities became Oregon Humanities.

June 2008: Based on discussions at winter retreats, board and staff prepare a three-year vision and planning document that focuses on program responsiveness and improved access to all Oregonians, and the value of inquiry and conversation as tools for transformation and growth. This vision, these plans, were a long time coming: For years, staff had been thinking about how the humanities could be seen as tools of change and how our programs and publications could better engage more Oregonians. How can Oregon Chautauqua be redesigned to encourage dialogue among participants? Could we start a discussion series held in a bar? How should the magazine model and inform humanities inquiry? As part of these plans, staff and board prioritize organizational branding and website redesign to better communicate the new direction.

A Borderless World

A Lewis & Clark College professor wants Oregonians to talk about immigration, globalization, and changing communities.

Eric Gold

On September 15, 1891, the Mexican journalist Catarino Garza put down his pen and picked up a Winchester rifle. It was the eve of Mexico’s Independence Day. Garza led a band of peasants, merchants, and former soldiers from both sides of the border across the Rio Grande from Texas into Mexico with the aim of overthrowing the dictator Porfirio Diaz. Their hatbands bore the words libres fronterizos—“free border-people.” The Garzistas, as the group was known, battled the armies of both nations, as well as the Texas Rangers and local police, for two years before their revolution was put down. In 1895, Garza was killed while in exile in Panama.

Though Garza’s story lived on in border community song and legend, his failed revolution was largely forgotten by history until, in 2004, Lewis & Clark College professor Elliott Young published the first lengthy study of the man and his mission: Catarino Garza’s Revolution on the Texas-Mexico Border. The book isn’t just about rescuing this fascinating, if short-lived, movement from obscurity. Young sees parallels between that time, more than a hundred years ago, and today. “It was a moment when the border [between the U.S. and Mexico] didn’t really exist, or was just coming into being,” Young says. “It existed on the map, but the cultural and economic connections across the border meant that people living on the border lived on both sides. And today, despite the militarization of the border, because we live in such a globalized world, borders are becoming less meaningful, or meaningful in a different way.” By studying the genesis of the border, Young hopes to better understand how the boundary was and is used as an instrument of nationalism, and how, in spite of that, many people continue to live transnational lives.

Telling the Story

Board member works to ensure a healthy economy for Oregon’s future.

Raina Hassan

Gillian Floren admits she is a little uncomfortable about being interviewed. As a communications professional with a lengthy background in journalism, she hasn’t been on the other end of the microphone very often. Her life’s work has centered around telling other people’s stories.

“What I’ve always appreciated about journalism,” she says, “is the opportunity to find ways to tell stories that are compelling, share important ideas, and try to make those stories and ideas accessible to your audience.”

But Floren, who has been an Oregon Humanities board member since 2008, has an interesting story of her own. A meandering path through early adulthood began with her first job as an auto mechanic. She later worked in a medical lab examining cancer cells and then for the Arizona state Senate on the research staff of the education committee.

After earning a bachelor’s degree at the age of thirty, Floren immediately entered graduate school and earned a master’s in journalism from the University of North Carolina. “I saw journalism as a career choice that would open up worlds, rather than narrow them, and that suited me well,” she says.

O. Hm. Essay Contest Runners Up

Mark Twain in East L.A.

By Tim Gillespie

Thirteen years old, I’m on my elbows reading in a circle of lamplight on a warm spring evening, the low thunder of the freeway down the hill seeping through the window screen, ceaseless traffic always streaming somewhere else.

But I am already somewhere else: transported to a sleepy medieval Austrian village at the far edge of what I can imagine by Mark Twain’s last fiction, The Mysterious Stranger.
My eighth grade teacher has suggested the book.

I am still transported by that text and that act.

My old school photo of Mr. Donald Seif’s eighth grade class of 1962-3 at Fremont Elementary in Alhambra, California, on the East L.A. border, shows thirty-six kids, a diverse urban mix. A tough teaching assignment. I know; I’m a teacher now myself. But in my memory, that room was always abuzz with learning.

Mr. Seif was enthusiastic, tough, interesting, approachable and funny. He convinced me algebra was beautiful. His U.S. history curriculum connected the past to the lively argument of current events: the Cuban missile crisis, the fire hoses and police dogs of Birmingham, Alabama. He posed philosophical questions for us to write and talk about. In that classroom, our old flip-lid wooden school desks were bolted to the floor. But all year, I felt unmoored by Mr. Seif.

His greatest provocation was encouraging me to read Twain’s unfinished novella, a personal recommendation for his class bookworm. Mr. Seif knew I was an avid Twain reader who’d already gobbled down Tom Sawyer, Pudd’nhead Wilson, Huck Finn and A Connecticut Yankee. Too callow to catch most of the deeper drifts, I thought these novels grand entertainments. But Mr. Seif’s copy of The Mysterious Stranger was something altogether different—-disturbing, stimulating, a revelation. Transported from my L.A. window to that Austrian village, I identified with the lederhosened schoolboys of the story, lost in the excitement and disquietude of visits from the mysterious stranger who challenged their—-and my—-youthful certainties. Twain railed against religious platitudes, conformity, factory owners, warmongers, and moral self-righteousness employed to protect power and wealth. For this dutiful altar boy, these ideas were troubling and thrilling. I felt—-for the first time, I think—-truly disturbed by ideas. Twain’s tale gave me the unnerving and enlivening notion that I could question the world I’d received.

Decades later, I’m still a bit stunned by Mr. Seif’s act of recommending to me such a subversive and potentially controversial book—-and grateful for his risk and confidence. Twain’s courage as a writer was matched by Mr. Seif’s courage as a teacher, admired figures willing to challenge and discomfort their admirers.

Years later, a teacher myself, I have been buoyed by this example. I learned that a teacher—-that sort of mysterious stranger who enters young lives for a short period—-can have confidence in his students’ capacity to tackle challenging texts, question truisms, think past the low thunder of convention and the window screens of their comfortable rooms. And travel somewhere else.

***
h5. Self-Fulfilling Expectations of Violence

By Susan Pandian

On a late rainy night in Portobello, Scotland, I was turning back from a long walk on the beach when I saw a man coming down the steps that led up to the road. He turned, saw me, and started running toward me.

By the orange glow of the sodium street lights I could see that he was about twice my size, dressed like a biker in leather boots and jacket, with tattoos over his bald head and hands. The light glinted off the steel piercings in his ears, lips, and eyebrows.

The friends with whom I was staying had told me the area was rough, that it was foolish to go alone on a walk on the beach late at night. It was too far to run for the road, and I carried no weapons. As I watched him pound across the sands, I saw Death running toward me.

He stumbled to a halt in front of me. “Have you seen my mum?” he asked, his voice shaking.

After I managed to squeak out, “No, I haven’t seen your mum,” he turned and ran back the way he had come, the chains on his jacket jingling. That moment gave me a disturbing epiphany. I realized that if I had had a gun, I would have used it.

I had been raised in a nonviolent family of Quakers and Conscientious Objectors, and admired Gandhi and Martin Luther King. But in Portobello I realized how American I was; that no matter how much I might mouth the values of nonviolence, I had been raised to think of guns as a culturally appropriate option in extreme situations. The American Revolution. Shootout at the OK Corral. Dirty Harry.

David Leo Kennedy, Ashland

History can be viewed as a constant shifting of balance between the individual and the collective. There are as many variations on this theme as there are, or have been, cultures. The poorest and most technologically primitive people, hunter-gatherers, are the most egalitarian and among the more collectively organized. They have to be to survive. From the beginning, we humans have always had to come together in some form of extended family—band, tribe, village, city, and upward—to make a living for ourselves.

Migrations

Ann Euston, Port Orford

The Aleutian cackling geese are heading back north. At Floras Lake on a windy mid-April day they soar out toward sea in banners and ribbons and clumps and Vs. They flap and honk as they bunch up and re-form, one group taking the lead from another. Some fly low, mere feet overhead, casting quick shadows on the dunes. Others are only high black lines, suggestions against the thin spring clouds. In one morning we see over two thousand.

The Aleutian geese are answering a primal beckoning back to their island nests. Having bulked up on Langlois farmers’ newly greening pastures and fields, they are making a nonstop flight across the north Pacific toward an archipelago of tiny islands stringing out from Alaska toward Siberia. Somehow they know this is exactly where they belong. And they are going there.

Not only, it seems, do Aleutians know where they belong, they know who they belong with. Families banded with the same color in Alaskan refuges have been discovered feeding side by side in California fields.

At sixty, I’ve had thirty addresses. I’ve tried just about every corner of the country. Recently, I’ve landed in Port Orford after an extended stint in the Southwest. I think (hope!) I will stay. My family is small—not much room for expansive growth at this point. My memberships have lapsed; few affiliations remain. Right now “belong” is an elusive verb, personally and geographically.

And yet, as I watch these geese flow overhead through a startling blue sky, something tugs deep within: A gossamer strand seems to stitch me to their feathered breasts. I recognize, at some visceral level, my extended tribe up there, streaking north. DNA twists, untwists. Perhaps there is even a brief quickening across my shoulders. For a fleeting moment do I almost remember the muscles for flight? Is there still a kernel of truth lurking within Haeckel’s worn-out maxim, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny?

The Oregon state motto is Alis Volat Propiis: She Flies With Her Own Wings. In 1854, the Oregon Territory adopted this motto in recognition of the original settlers’ 1843 formation of a provisional government dependent on neither Britain nor the United States. Readopted in 1987, the desire was to celebrate this tradition of independence and innovation.

This day is brilliant. The geese stream north. Alis Volat Propiis. Perfect.

“Belong” has become an easier verb to conjugate.

Belonging to Uncle Sam

Dennis H. Strayer, Cave Junction

In my youth, I didn’t belong to many groups. I belonged to a neighborhood dirt lot baseball team. When our family moved from Illinois to Oregon City in June 1955, I belonged to a Cub Scout troop for a year or two, but that was it. Our parents, through the Catholic Relief Society, helped a number of Cuban families who had fled Castro’s Cuba and moved to Oregon. For their ongoing help, our parents were made honorary lifetime members of the Cuban Club.

On December 18, 1965, just six months after graduating from Cleveland High School in Portland, I received my draft notice to join the US Army. The Vietnam War was gaining momentum, and I did not look forward to belonging to the army. My cousin, a career army medic, told me to take my notice down to the navy recruiting office the following Monday, and I did.

Within an hour, I belonged to the US Navy.

Upon completing navy boot camp in San Diego, I received my first set of official navy orders to the USS Annapolis, a communications ship that patrolled off the coast of South Vietnam relaying messages to the Pentagon. The following year, I received new orders to attend the navy admin school in San Diego, and then the SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape) School at Coronado Island, nearby. I was then stationed with the US Navy Seabees (construction battalion) near Da Nang, where I survived three close calls. I did not want to belong to the group of KIA (Killed in Action).

After completing my active duty and two years of reserve duty, I received an honorable discharge from the navy in 1972. I have followed in the footsteps of three cousins (Korean War), an uncle (World War II), and my great grandfather (Civil War, Union side). I am proud to say that I now belong to a special group—veterans.

Born Again (Again)

Wesley Mahan, Portland

For forty-six years, from age fourteen to age sixty, a sense of belonging was naturally a part of my life. As an evangelical Christian, a theology graduate, and a missionary, wherever I went in the world, I could find a gathering of like-minded religious people. We pretty much accepted each other, imperfections and all. Like a family, my local church in Oregon gathered around and helped my family make mortgage payments when I lost my job of fifteen years and when I had open-heart surgery and had to take time off work without pay.

As a dorky, skinny, and awkward high school student, I could always turn to my church family when I felt rejected by a sports, and popularity-obsessed culture. Studying theology at Multnomah University, we fellow students felt a common aspiration to follow God. As a young father, I could compare parenting notes with other “born again” fathers. It seemed that whatever stage of life I was experiencing, I could always turn to my church family, even when my own biological family was on the other side of the globe.

Then, about three years ago, my religious faith and my steadfast belief in a loving, heavenly Father dissipated into thin air as I begin to seriously reexamine everything I once held dear. How could a loving Father God invent and maintain a place called Hell, which would be the eternal tormenting abode for most of humanity after they died? My studies showed that the Bible was not inerrant or infallible. Its stories about creation and worldwide floods and talking donkeys suddenly seemed, well, made up. I reluctantly became an agnostic, and with it, lost the religious family where I once belonged.

While the sense of freedom and release was very liberating in one sense, the loss of that spiritual family is taking longer to heal than I thought it would. Rebuilding that sense of belonging is slow and tenuous, as I gradually find other nontheists and humanists that I can relate to. It may never quite match what I had in the church, but I will persist.

Who Loves the Sun?

Jacob Morehead, Beaverton

For two years, when I was in high school, I wore a button that read, “Sensitive Artist and Cheap Labor Source.” This was going to be my life—struggling in dead-end jobs to survive, all the while counteracting and contradicting any bit of convention that came my way. Fifteen years later, the struggle has overcome just about every bohemian sensibility I had. My tattered résumé of entry-level jobs bears witness to this fact.

Case in point: The last customer had left, the doors were locked, and my shift at my latest job, with a retail giant, was over—or so I thought. We workers all stood together in the break room, among the tables and chairs, single microwave, and vending machines—specifically the psychotic one in the corner that would spit out any quarter celebrating the state of Idaho.

Our attention was drawn to a bulletin board, the usual corporate messages and measurements replaced with construction paper cutouts of little suns and drops of rain. One of our names was in the center of each one. We were told the suns were the employees who had successfully convinced a customer to apply for, and obtain, one of our credit cards. The raindrops were those who had yet to accomplish this feat. And doesn’t everyone want to be a sun? Then we were further encouraged to solicit a credit card, because every time we did, we would also get a “snack pass”—that is, a piece of paper that allowed the bearer into the back office to choose from a variety of junk food.

This was not a professional business furthering the integrity and dignity of its workers. This was a kindergarten class. This, I was informed, was being a part of the team. The family.

I looked at the raindrop on the top right of the board—the one with my name on it—and felt the odd stirrings of pride. And, in true bohemian fashion, in the pursuit of belonging to something by not belonging to anything, I wondered how hard it would be stay that raindrop, and still keep my job.

Anatevka

Celia Scher Wagner, Portland

As a choreographer of high school musicals, I’ve done Fiddler on the Roof three times. Fiddler has an unusual dramatic arc: the first act is comic until the soldiers break up the wedding. The second act gets darker and darker. It’s an ocean liner of a musical, and the cast has to turn the wheel, get the audience to stop laughing, and feel the heartache. The song where the ocean liner really has to make the turn is “Anatevka.” When we’re close to opening night, I give a little talk:

In the beginning, in “Tradition,” I tell the cast, Tevye talked about Anatevka, the little town where everybody knows who he is, and what God expects him to do. It’s like being in a play. You know who you are, and what the director and all the cast members expect you to do. You know how important you are. This play isn’t about something that happened in Russia one hundred years ago. It’s about you. You’ve been in rehearsal for a couple of months. You have built a community. Every one of you is important. If you miss a cue or an entrance, everyone suffers. And in just a few days, it will be closing night, and we will never, ever be together again. We’ll miss each other. Homework and chores won’t fill the holes in our hearts.

About that time, some of the girls usually start to cry. And by opening night, everyone on stage gets choked up singing “Anatevka,” and the audience comes along.

I thought of “Anatevka” when my company of thirty years folded and closed its doors. I had been laid off a year earlier, so I hadn’t had to be there through the final stages, for which I was grateful. But I’d been aware, that whole year, even though I was gone, that there was a place on earth where a fair number of people I cared about congregated. And I knew there would no longer be such a place. I’d keep in touch with individuals I cared about, but the community itself would no longer exist.

Mob Mentality

Ben Bishop, Halfway

We can’t think about the idea of a group without turning our minds, sooner or later, toward that most primal of all groupings—the family. We use the language of parents and siblings to describe our involvement in collectives as disparate as armies, sports teams, religious denominations, and the fan clubs of pop stars. Corporations licit and illicit refer to their workers as “The Family.” Like our flesh and blood families, the various groups we seek membership in as we grow up and press outward into the world are each collectives of individuals bonded by a common story.

Prominent among the benefits of belonging to any group is safety. In seeking out those with whom we share some common bond we often seek respite from, even solidarity against, that which threatens us. Cue anti-immigration rallies, church small groups, all-women kayaking tours, and LGBT softball leagues. Groups offer the pleasures of camaraderie, affirmation, the opportunity to speak an intimate language—the reassurance that someone else shares our view of the world.

As with your family, groups have their drawbacks too. Just ask anyone who’s been kept outside of one. One of the greatest powers afforded any group is its ability to legislate membership, to police itself. The more heightened the sense of belonging within any group, the more glaringly obvious the presence of an outsider. We all want to be insiders, yet sometimes we seem to feel that there are only so many spots available before the potency of membership becomes diluted.

To whatever extent membership in any collective is predicated upon exclusion, there exists the potential for harm. What’s more, there’s a real danger of blindness for those on the inside. If diversity is an effective antidote for contempt, the opposite is also true—homogeneity breeds it.

What, you ask, of prisoners? Wounded veterans? Anyone in the history of middle school, shoehorned into a random quartet for a group project in algebra? Do those in a subset not of their choosing rejoice? Oftentimes not. But, see, the secret ingredient with groups is time. Time, that yeast by which the good and bad in any group dynamic is multiplied, becoming far better or worse. The longer we’re part of a group the more secure we are in it. And the more potential we have for being blinded, callused, or desensitized to the experience of being left outside.

Close Orbit

Barbara Liles, Portland

I have never been a team player, though I have tried. Girl Scouts, basketball, church committees, the list is short; it quickly became apparent that I have problems belonging to a group.

Groups, by definition, involve boundaries—who belongs and who doesn’t, are you on or off the bus? Groups involve rules of behavior and strata of leaders and followers. Just the hint of inclusion and exclusion makes me nervous. But in my early twenties, I learned that belonging is a state of mind.

Somehow I had gotten a job at a New Age retreat and was participating in a psychodrama activity about tribes (work with me—it was the seventies). Fifty-plus people, high on life, playing games that held deeper meanings. We formed circles within circles and danced. The drums pulsed, the circles moved faster, and then, we were directed to break out and “find our tribe.” The large group disintegrated and morphed. Smaller circles formed with dancing and hugging, chatting and clapping. Tribes. Tribes that had some secret handshake I did not know.

Wandering from group to group, I felt the familiar, uncomfortable conflict between being a participant and an observer. I danced for a while, I hugged, and then I moved on. As groups coalesced and I still wandered, I began to get nervous. What was wrong with me? Was I just a cynical observer? Antisocial? Where was my tribe? Then I found them, or we found each other—four or five of us, without a rhythm or song. Wanderers. Awkwardly, we acknowledged each other, checked each other out, keeping a certain distance.

“The satellite people!” cried one woman, laughing.

We shared stories and saw ourselves in each other. We hugged, a bit, then the space between us grew and we drifted on. Yes, we were all wanderers, and just knowing that there were others made it all right. Isn’t belonging about not being alone?

I spent the rest of the evening visiting groups and moving on, feeling supported in the knowledge that I was part of a cohort of travelers, though we chose to travel alone. Still, just that connection sustained me and supports me still when I feel awkward in a group.

I am not alone—I am a member of the Satellite Tribe.

Donnie's Plan

Claudia Charlton, Port Orford

He was fourteen—a nice kid. It was his parents who were messed up, drinking their welfare checks, squatting in a tattered tent in the river bottom with autumn evenings running cool, mornings iced with frost. And six kids, shabbily clothed, meagerly fed, not enrolled in school. Donnie was the oldest.

We were young too—married at nineteen, three sons by twenty-five, bursting with the fuzzy altruism of inexperience and periphery-blind optimism of possibilities. The world would welcome our outstretched hands; we’d all walk forward together. It was the Sixties.

Even in the Sixties, money helped. Altruism is tougher on a beginning teacher’s salary. We started with foster home care. If not the world, maybe one child at a time. Maybe.

Foster children can be challenging—wounded but bristly, distrustful but needy, gratefully sweet but ragingly angry—sometimes in the course of tumultuous minutes. We had had only mixed success. Our case worker pleaded, “This is a great kid, deserves a break. Good student, at least when he’s in school. We’re hoping to get his parents sobered up—then place their kids back with them in a real home.”

We caved. And Donnie was a sweetheart. Slight, blonde, polite—a charming boy who patiently tolerated our much younger sons. I didn’t think then how he must have missed his own siblings. He didn’t speak of them; I failed to inquire.

Why some kids go to Europe and other kids stay home

Mary Rechner

It was Friday afternoon at Laurelhurst Elementary School. Spring break had begun and there was more joy on the playground than usual. Even we usually harried parents seemed relaxed. Maybe we could take it easy because all the major school fundraisers were behind us: Carnival, Sock Hop, and the Laurel Ball. I chatted with a few parents on the playground, making tentative plans with families who, like ours, were home for break.

My younger son, Oliver, and I got ready to leave. As soon as we started walking home, he became grouchy.

“What’s the matter?” I asked. “Are you hungry? Tired?” I tried to reach for his hand, but he’s eight now and often steps away from me when he’s upset.

For many years, I’ve worked by day in the nonprofit arts and culture sector, interested in issues of equity and civic engagement, and by night as a jazz musician. Folks I’ve known have often remarked on the one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-otherness of these professional poles.

But after thinking hard about how we construct community, I’ve realized that my conceptions of community and the public realm are deeply informed by the inclusiveness and idiosyncratic individuality that were passed on to me by the jazz community—musicians with names like Mr. Smooth, Cornbread, Cee-Po, Wild Bill, Mild Bill, Old Floyd, Cap’n Jack, and Jimmieapolis.

Uprockin' the Rose City

The community that hip hop built

Walidah Imarisha

Public Servant

A cab driver who’s an elected official by day has his work cut out for him.

David Bragdon

It was around ten o’clock on a Saturday night, at Northeast Glisan Street near 28th Avenue. The woman had been in the cab just long enough to tell me the name of the bar she wanted to go to. Within another thirty seconds she said, “Can I ask you a personal question?”

The Artist as Worker

Rilke would never have understood the current desire to merge commerce and creativity.

M. Allen Cunningham

In his remarkable book Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton writes, “In a meritocratic world in which well-paid jobs [can] be secured only through native intelligence and ability, money [begins] to look like a sound signifier of character. The rich are not only wealthier, it seem[s]; they might actually be plain better.” Characteristically canny and concise, Botton articulates a dilemma at the heart of any life dedicated to inspiration over income, creativity over commerce. In my life, that dedication is art—namely, literature—or more namely, fiction writing. The economic hazards of art-making cannot be overestimated, and since fiction writing, next to poetry, is the least lucrative of the arts (in my past three years of sustained work I’ve earned virtually nothing), the writer or aspiring writer is peculiarly charged to accept, and over time even affirm, a condition of impecuniousness. Wildly lucky name-grade novelists notwithstanding, most writers—even those with one or more novels to their credit—must labor, often for years, sans payment. In our increasingly doctrinaire publishing climate, even the finest among us labor without any guarantee of eventual publication or income. The greater number of literature’s real practitioners (those who have not let cynicism or status anxiety eat away their gifts) work under such conditions. To paraphrase Emerson on the subject of his ideal American scholar, these artists ply the slow, unhonored, and unpaid task of observation. But being cashless and devoid of cachet, they are, according to the meritocracy, inferior to those who earn their keep. Lesser intelligences—or weaker wills—they appear to be (we might as well say it) apostate Americans. Can what they do be classed, by any stretch of the imagination, as work?

The Working Class

Hard times are good times to rethink our attitudes about the fungibility of workers.

Bette Lynch Husted

I grew up in a working-class community. We had our own social distinctions—were you a logging company operator’s daughter or a girl whose father pulled on the green chain at the sawmill? A cattle rancher’s son or a stump rancher’s boy? My father even had his own definition of royalty: a man with compassion as well as integrity was “a prince of a guy.” But our families were working people, or wanted to be. Having work was important.

Continual Watching

Oregon’s long history of protecting workers

Bob Bussel

In a recent fact sheet outlining highlights from its first year under new leadership, the U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) declared that it was “Back in the Enforcement Business.” DOL went on to describe some of the new initiatives it has undertaken to protect American workers, including hiring more staff to enforce occupational safety regulations, taking steps to ensure that workers are properly classified as employees rather than independent contractors, and launching a special effort to counter black lung disease.

Blank Slate

In a single day, a forty-year-old man finds himself unmarried and unemployed. What to do next?

Dave Weich

Ten days after my fortieth birthday, I walked from the county courthouse in downtown Portland to the office of my former employer. At the courthouse, I signed my divorce papers. Several blocks away, I signed my severance package.

At such moments, a person will take inventory. Mine counted no job, no wife, and no children. Responsibilities numbered a cat, a dog, and a reasonable fixed mortgage on a house that I adored. This was in August of 2009. The job market sucked, but my savings, buffeted by a generous exit check, would cover me beyond the end of the year. Longer if I skimped.

I pursued no leads, filed no applications, distributed no résumés, and ignored job-listing services. A startling fact soon dawned on me: this would be my first summer vacation without a job since junior high.

Second Opinions

Seeking professional advice for Oregon's ailing economy

Camela Raymond

In a June 5 Oregonian op-ed, Tim Duy, University of Oregon economics professor and director of the Oregon Economic Forum, looked back over the past twenty years of Oregon’s economic woes, lambasting the too-rosy growth projections underpinning the state’s present catastrophic budget shortfalls. Job gains made in Oregon during the tech boom of the late 1980s and ’90s have been almost completely wiped out by job losses sustained during the 2001 and 2008 recessions, Duy wrote. Wages, submediocre even at their high point—94.3 percent of the U.S. average in 1997—have shrunk considerably, to a meager 89.4 percent of the U.S. average as of 2008 (which should be noted is not a B-plus, but rather a fraction of a C grade). With positive job growth recorded for the first time since early 2008, the state’s latest Economic and Revenue Forecast contends that the recession has bottomed out here as elsewhere in the country. But with Oregon taking thirty-fourth place in the national Blue Chip Job Growth rankings, job growth here remains relatively sluggish, and it is not expected to exceed 2 percent until 2012. In short, over the past two decades Oregonians have become steadily poorer and less economically secure in relation to their national counterparts, and this trend continues.

Go Ahead and Look

In praise of forbidden looking

Scott Nadelson

I was maybe eight or nine years old, sitting with my family at the Hunan Restaurant in Morris Plains, New Jersey. It was a weekday evening in winter, the place raucous with kids and businessmen, no different than the dozens of times we’d been there before. We were in a booth beside a bank of windows, and outside it was dark enough for me to see my reflection in the glass. I enjoyed watching myself as I ate, making faces and tracing the movement of food down my throat. But then, just as I took a bite of spare rib, I heard a woman’s voice behind me, not much more than a whisper: “I hope you choke on it.”

The voice was slow and deliberate, full of anger, weighted with a bitterness deeper than any I’d encountered before, and this startled me even more than the words themselves. For an instant I was sure those words were directed at me, though I had no idea how I might have provoked them. I was sure, too, that I was the only one who’d heard them, the only one capable of hearing them, as if they’d been spoken directly into my ear, or only within my head. I chewed carefully and swallowed.

Abnormal Beauties

Long live jolie-laide

Karen Karbo

In a recent poll by Travel + Leisure that rated the cities with the most attractive citizens in America, my home city garnered a curious set of rankings. The residents of Portland, Oregon, were rated as the second most fit in the country (behind Denver), but they were thought to be only the seventeenth most attractive, behind the populations of cities that don’t exactly spring immediately to mind when one thinks of hotties. Despite our tight abs, firm thighs, and healthy glow, the nation considers Portlanders to be less attractive than people living in Kansas City or Minneapolis.

How can this be, given our national convictions that the first step to looking like Jennifer Aniston is to take up Ashtanga yoga, and that it’s impossible to be beautiful without triceps of steel? Travel + Leisure was equally perplexed. The magazine’s explanation: despite Portland’s mad devotion to 10Ks and bicycles, when it comes to our looks we simply don’t “conform to most visitors’ standards of ‘normal’ beauty.”

“Normal” beauty? Isn’t that an oxymoron? Doesn’t being beautiful always include an aspect of individuality, which is heightened and underscored by how we manage our appearance? Maybe the readers of Travel + Leisure were confusing our lack of beauty with our general lack of style. Setting aside our love of Gore-Tex, we’re a city where you can attend a black-tie function in dark-wash jeans and no one will bat an eye.

Designing the Good Life

Beauty is a desirable bonus when design improves our lives.

Lisa Radon

Lucy Burningham

I know where I was sitting the moment I wrote the line.

I was in an Internet café off a dirty street in Cusco, Peru. The city was built by the Incas and conquered by the Spanish, who supposedly covered much of it in gold, but today European twentysomethings with dreadlocks walk down the streets without shoes and crippled beggars whine for change in the town square.

“Poor people are happier,” I’d written on my blog, a new tool for me at the time and my primary means of updating friends and family on my three-month travels through South America.
Even then, I felt embarrassed by my hasty generalization, which I knew smacked of ignorance. But I was feeling bold, in touch with a new reality. Here, people lived simply, seemingly content with bootleg CDs, nonorganic vegetables, and a lack of order. Seat-belt laws and emissions standards? Peru seemed just fine without them.

Like a college freshman who, upon reading Nietzsche for the first time, buys her parents a copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra for Christmas, I wanted to tell everyone about my discovery. Even though I’d spent a summer studying abroad in Europe and had briefly visited Turkey and Nepal, on this trip I’d found an even bigger world outside the United States—one that included vast amounts of poverty and, yet, joyful people.

Seeing this new world also meant acknowledging a deep, nagging guilt. After all, I was a white, educated, middle-class American who’d been born into unquestionable opportunity. And I’d needed this trip to really begin to contemplate the realities of the developing world and my relationship to it. No book, movie, or essay had ever pushed me to evaluate my identity in the same way. The daily sights, from men urinating in bushes along the side of the road to schoolchildren skipping to class in neatly pressed uniforms, prompted me to form many theories and make quick declarations. My emotions ran high.

I knew the danger of my position. Travel tends to bend truths, obscuring an otherwise clear gaze with a mysterious gauze. Was I making valuable insights or simply seeing what I wanted to see? Did these insights make traveling more than 4,500 miles from home worth the time, money, and resources? Did they justify my cultural voyeurism and contribution to a tourism infrastructure?

The Crossing

A two-week journey toward hope and home

Vicente Martinez

This essay, adapted from a longer unpublished work, chronicles the fifth border crossing to the United States by Vicente Martinez (a pseudonym). Oregon Humanities magazine editorial advisory board member Camela Raymond worked with Martinez on editing this essay for publication. Some names and details have been changed.

New Again

The Image and Act of Communion

Toward Grace, Strength, and Hope

The Long Look Back

Sundays, Too

A Closer Look

Seeking and Finding

Dory Stories

Linfield College students and faculty, in partnership with area organizations, reel in the history of Pacific City’s fishing industry.

Collective Energy

Share brings artists of all mediums together to create.