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About Eugene weekly. (Eugene, Oregon) 1993-current | View Entire Issue (Dec. 28, 2006)
we could hit a winery on the way back. When we got to Oregon, we visited Silver Falls State Park. “Oh, look,” said Jake. “Trees.” We left them in the lodge while we hiked. They didn’t have wireless access, so they played Risk. The house deal had fallen through. I started work, commuting from the KOA in Corvallis. We spent the next weekend with a fistful of listings and a road map, found a place and moved in two weeks later. That was it. Our lives had been thrown up in the air and come back down pretty much in the same place, only about 3,000 miles to the left. – Teri Gray SOME LIKE IT WET Kathy and I moved here 17 years ago after enduring five years of drought in Wyoming. We were living in a cabin at the foot of the Bighorn Mountains, and after two wells and the creek went dry, we closed up the cabin and drove for wetter climes. We had friends in Seattle, Eugene, Cottage Grove and San Francisco, so we drifted down the coast from friend to friend, “riding the grub line,” as Wyoming people call it. Our Eugene friends kept telling us how beautiful it was here. We drove in from Florence, so our first view of the place was West 11th, which didn’t impress us much. Hendricks Park did, though, and the view from Skinner Butte. We got rained on there, and we probably scared people when we stood out in the middle of the parking lot with our faces aimed skyward, our mouths open and our arms outstretched like people in religious ecstasy. (There was still a cross on the Butte back then, so we probably did look like religious fanatics. Maybe that’s what prompted the anti-cross movement that eventually brought it down … ) We were liberals in Wyoming, but we quickly discovered we were right of center here. A couple visits to the Saturday Market for tie-dye cured our sartorial conservatism, and a few good arguments with our friends over taxes and health care nudged our atti- tudes leftward, too. It was such a joy to talk with people who actually thought about their effect on society and on the world. I remem- ber saying to Kathy on our third or fourth Kathy and Jerry Oltion at the Owen Rose Garden Lois Eagleton’s farm and homestead in Junction City, circa 1941 night here, “We’ve found our people.” Kathy got a job in the medical lab, and I settled in to write science fiction. We fig- ured we would stay here a couple of years just for fun and then go back to Wyoming, but every time the subject came up, we would say, “Not yet.” Here we are 17 years later, and we’ve pretty much stopped talk- ing about moving back home. There’s no “back” to it anymore. We’re at home right here. – Jerry Oltion SLICE OF RURAL PARADISE It was December 7, 1941. My parents had decided that Los Angeles was not a good place to raise my brother and me, so we were in the car on our way to Oregon to find a new life. Daddy pulled the car into a gas station. Dale and I were asleep in the back seat. It was dark outside as it was late. I woke up to hear the gas station attendant asking our father why he didn’t have blue cellophane over the headlights! Daddy did- n’t have any idea what he was talking about. This is how we learned that the Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor and our country was at war. The government had decreed that anyone driving their car at night must cover the headlights with blue cellophane so that you would be harder to see. We continued on our way without the ordered blue cellophane. With excitement we searched for just the right place to buy. We found the perfect place: a 27-acre farm with huge Victorian house, large barn and several chicken houses one mile east of the Danish settlement of Junction City in the southern Willamette Valley. Relatives of my mother’s already lived near, and, both children of Danish immigrants, my parents thought we would fit right in. Our parents could not have found a more exciting place to move to. The house had the reputation in the community of being “haunted” because Anton Sorensen, who had begun building the house in 1898, never finished it after his fiancée ran off and married someone else. He lived alone except for his best friend — wine. After we moved in, total strangers knocked at the door and sheepishly asked if we would let them see the inside of the house because they were so curious. It was an interesting way to meet the neighbors. We attended the Danish Lutheran Church. Dale and I graduated from Junction City High School. We both went on to get degrees from OSU, and Dale eventually earned his Ph.D. from the UO. Our parents, Ejner and Arta Christiansen, finished the inside of the house and farmed the land for awhile, and then Daddy started a sheet metal shop in the barn which he operated until he retired. Mama was active in the church and sang in the community choir. Together, in Danish costume, they made aebleskiver at the Scandinavian Festival in its early years. They both took up painting as a hobby and were members of the Junction City Art League. Daddy died in 1987 at age 88. Mama lived to be 100, passing away in 2005. What a wonderful childhood my brother and I had because our parents had the fore- sight to move us from the rat race of big city life to that wonderful farm in rural Oregon. – Lois Eagleton COAST TO COAST The letter from the UO graduate pro- gram arrived in my sublet-apartment’s mailbox in April. Now the decision was mine: Would I leave Boston, where I lived a cramped life full of friends and cultural opportunities that I couldn’t afford, or would I stay near people I knew and loved and learn to make my way? It didn’t take much thinking to know I needed to take the plunge. Both my parents had been born and raised in Western states, and my grandparents and great-grandpar- ents were all Westerners. Though I grew up on the coast of Virginia and knew very lit- tle about Oregon, I had driven through it, south to north, with a boyfriend a few years before. I remembered liking what I saw: big trees, houses that looked funky but cared- for, women working jobs that at that time (1973) were held only by men back East. I sensed that a freedom would be possible in Oregon that the East didn’t offer, so I mailed a trunk of books to myself care of the university post office, packed my remaining things into two suitcases and boarded a flight to Eugene. When I arrived, I knew no one. I found a couch to crash on by looking at index cards posted on bulletin boards. I borrowed a bike from a friend of the woman whose couch I was sleeping on and figured out Eugene’s grid well enough to make my way to several interviews with folks who were looking for a roommate. Typically, there were five vegetarian friends who’d known each other since middle school and were looking for one more person to sleep in a closet and pay an equal share of rent and utilities. It was rough forging a new life, but I loved the green smell in the air, the Coburg hills in the distance, the pony-tailed LTD drivers. I made friends with the woman across the street, and she and her sister took me on a bike ride along the river. We pedaled through Skinner Butte Park with the Willamette rushing along on one side and cottonwood leaves blowing across the path. I was in heaven. Though I bridled at the way strangers would smile at me (“What’s their prob- lem?” I would ask myself) and thought it was disingenuous for my professors to ask to be called by their first names, there was nothing foreign to me about being in a land populated by pioneers rather than pilgrims. These were my people, and this was my landscape. I’ve lived in Eugene for more than 30 years now, and there have been times when I longed to move back East — longed with all my heart. But I’ve come to accept that I couldn’t flourish there the way I have here. On good days I smile at strangers and am glad I made that leap from East to West. – Cecelia Hagen ELEVEN HONKS IN SEVEN MONTHS Tired of hurrying crowds and noisy traf- fic in Manhattan, in August 2001 I took early retirement from my 23-year career as a human resources executive. Eugene kept popping up on every list of the most ideal retirement cities, and this worked for me since my brother lived in south Eugene, where I took summer vacations. After watching the horrific events on DECEMBER 28, 2006 13
