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