When you walk along the street with the houses fac-
ing out at you, you’re in 2005; when you walk the alley-
ways, or this bike path, it seems like 1950 again. It feels
a lot like the neighborhood I lived in then, in Murphy’s
Meadows, Ind. I take a little detour and walk along the
street for a few blocks — Hayden Bridge Way — to see
what the fronts look like. Out there people are heading
off to work. Grown-ups out the front, kids out the back,
just like when I was a kid. Two different worlds.
Out toward Hayden Bridge, Springfield thins out to
a lovely example of edge-of-town spaciousness, back
yards opening up right into fields. You can see remnants
of the old farms and orchards that used to be here.
Finally you walk up what feels like a country road, then
you cross the river, and surprise — there’s a highway
there, Marcola Road. Country’s on the other side.
Traffic is heavy. At the Hayden Bridge Store you get
another cup of coffee, and then, at last, you head down
Camp Creek Road along the McKenzie off to the right.
There’s 11 hours of walking ahead, and those are the
hours you’re doing this for — but at this point your
head’s still full of Eugene and Springfield.
As a Eugenean, whenever I’m in Springfield
I’m struck by the difference between the two towns.
Springfield thinks of Eugene as elitist and liberal, and
Eugene sees Springfield as blue-collar and conservative.
On that day the difference was especially easy to see,
because from Olive Street to Marcola Road I could
watch the election signs on front lawns gradually red-
shift from mostly Kerry to mostly Bush. Enough said
about that!
But it made me remember how a few months ago
there was chatter in the newspaper and on TV about
whether Eugene and Springfield should merge. What a
crazy idea! Obviously we could save a lot of money with
just one government instead of two, one set of agencies
and districts instead of two. And if government is sup-
posed to save money, why not?
taper off at 6 feet. And I can tell when I’ve bitten off
more than I can chew.
Wait: who am I, in the middle of a 40-mile walk, to be
talking about balance and moderation? Wisdom con-
sists in knowing your limits, knowing when to slow
down and stop; and five hours into my day, when I
reach that country store halfway to Walterville and find
it’s been boarded up, all I can think about is how nice it
will be to slow down and stop — four miles from now
at the Walterville Store.
By noontime, seven hours into my walk and half-way
to Russ’s, I’ve had my rest at the Walterville Store and
I’ve doubled back about a mile on Route 126 down to
Deerhorn. Now I look forward to many hours of peace
and quiet walking along the south side of the
McKenzie. Five or 10 minutes go by between each
passing car. Under the magic spell that rivers inspire,
when time seems to slow down, and maybe even dis-
appear — “Old Man River, he just keeps rolling along”
— it’s easy to fall back into my nostalgic reverie about
old-time, small-town America.
A few months before, my daughter and I canoed 40
miles of the Willamette River from Armitage Park to
Peoria, stopping for lunch in Harrisburg’s lovely river-
bank park. If coming into a town on foot gives you food
for thought, you should approach one by canoe! Even
industrial Harrisburg is utterly charming as a river town,
like something out of Mark Twain. A few miles south of
town, a bald eagle dropped out of the sky right ahead of
our canoe, plucked a fish out of the river and flew off
over the trees. We were in a mythological America, like
Lewis and Clark.
You don’t feel exactly like Lewis or Clark as you’re
walking the asphalt of Deerhorn Road, but between the
eternal calming pace of the river, and the patient busi-
ness of moving ahead one step at a time, you do fall into
a very different sense of America’s history. One reason
to go on a long walk is precisely to escape that sense we
now live with of faster and faster change. Sometimes
Twice during my long trek I halt my forward
movement long enough to go down to the river and
soak my feet — once on Camp Creek Road, once again
on Deerhorn. Walking is solitary enough, but the river’s
more solitary yet. As I scramble down the bank through
bushes and around rocks, I can’t help anticipating a spe-
cial encounter, mythological maybe — and of course
what I feel instead is the inevitable letdown: no sublim-
ity, no poetry, no river god; just sore feet. The image of
soaking them in the river seemed so perfect, but the
river turns out to be overwhelmingly just itself.
I can’t tell if I feel disappointment or relief. When
you walk you’re not really in search of the extraordinary
anyway. The hiker and the mountain climber may be
after something big, but the walker’s after the ordinary.
Not a new thought. Countless writers over the centuries
report finding refreshment, revelation, or even salvation
in the everyday, the ordinary, the obvious — in the
earthworm, the sparrow, the leaf of grass, the scrap of
newspaper blowing in the street — in the world staring
us straight in the face while we look away.
No looking away today. This water’s painfully cold.
Hot water would be a lot more comforting right now.
Still, it’s a river, impressive just for being there and for
flowing so constantly, and it’s great to be here. Five or
10 minutes later, though, back on the road and back in
the groove, my body can’t even tell it stopped to rest.
Now I’m going to tell you the thoughts that
occupied my mind on Deerhorn Road all the way to
Leaburg. The morning’s observations about the divide
between Eugene and Springfield flowed on in a rambling
meditation about the river that runs through the middle
of Eugene. Eugene, it occurred to me, is really two cities.
Eugene nestles into the hills at the far south end of
the valley. There’s a natural barrier to the south and
east, where development slows down as you get farther
into the hills; but to the north and west it’s old farm
country, and in that direction development can proceed
It actually feels daring
for me to write about
being a normal human
being walking down the
road, instead of big
ideas. Maybe that’s why
I walk the roads, to get
my nose out of a book, to
get back in touch with
the world, to get back to
the surface of things.
But can you imagine a City Council meeting of a
combined Eugene/Springfield? The Eugene council is
divided enough as it is! There’d never be any agreement
if you added Springfield into the mix. What was Rick
Dancer thinking about night after night on the evening
news? I think that guy’s a trouble-maker!
What is it, anyway, that makes people think bigger is
better? It’s in my nature to believe in moderation and
balance as goals. It’s an ancient Greek ideal: moderation
in all things. Nothing’s more natural than growth —
grass grows, trees grow, people grow, families grow, cities
grow — but it seems to me everything has a right size.
As a teacher I know when a class is too big. It’s nice
watching your children grow, but it’s good when they
everything just seems too big and too fast for this little
human body to bear.
Well, walking returns you to what I call human time-
and human space. It’s the only completely natural mode
of transportation, a direct expression of the bodies that
nature gave us. Maybe e=MC 2 , and maybe light years
are the only constant in cosmic space-time, but in
human space-time a mile is 20 minutes, and a long day
means from my house to Russ’s, right up the McKenzie.
Before white settlers came into the Willamette Valley,
Indian tribes who lived that far apart spoke different
languages, and a full day on the road will tell you why.
It’s a lot of effort to get your body from here to there!
You wouldn’t want to do it very often.
relatively unimpeded. That explains why the urban
growth boundary was drawn so close in on the south,
hugging the ridgeline, with almost no room left for
growth, but so far out on the north, way out beyond
Belt Line, to leave lots of room for expansion. Thirty
years after the line was drawn you can drive out River
Road to Beacon, where new neighborhoods press on the
inside of the boundary, and Tom’s Apple Orchard, that
classic slice of old-time Americana, sits nervously going
in and out of business right across the road.
Because of this geography, Eugene south of the river
is still pretty much a sleepy little college town, with the
ambiance and down-scale economy of a hundred other
college towns in America. Like a lot of them, it struggles
JULY 14, 2005 13