Tom McCall was governor of Oregon from 1967 to 1975.
He is probably best known for two things: 1) being the political godfather of Oregon's bottle bill and 2) for telling tourists "Come visit; don't stay."
At the time, when I was working for him, I thought that sharp elbow to the ribs of California tourists (because it was Californians the jab was aimed at; this was the era of the "Don't Californicate Oregon" movement) was merely campaign showmanship. After all, McCall was not a politician; he was an entertainer -- a political commentator on one of our local television news programs.
But he was serious. A liberal Republican, he did whatever he could to protect Oregon's environment -- including protecting the state from outsiders moving here. (He had a bit of the same spirit that seems to animate the current American president.) I suspect he would consider his efforts a failure if he could see the current steady stream of Priuses into the state.
That spirit is not dead. While walking through my brother's neighborhood, I caught a glimpse of two stickers low on a van's bumper. I had to stop to read them. And it was worth breaking my healthy steps pace.
It was almost as if Old Tom was walking amongst us again -- with the attitude of a Millennial. Nothing says 2017 like sarcasm.
Bend is now one of the fastest-growing cities in the country. And its housing prices are soaring even higher. Little bungalows are regularly selling for $300,000.
I know that would be a bargain in New York City or Vancouver. But this is little Bend. And a lot of that price inflation has been induced by California home equity money migrating north. It was McCall's nightmare.
There is a lot to preserve in Bend. I thought of that today when we visited the High Desert Museum south of town.
We had talked taking about a mountain hike this morning, but the temperatures have been higher here than they are in Barra de Navidad. A visit to the natural history museum seemed a good compromise.
And it was. The museum traces the development of the great desert basin that makes up a large portion of the western states. Bend sits on its western rim.
It is all there. The geological development. The Indian migration across the Bering land bridge by foot and canoe (even if you do not buy that partly-discredited theory). The evolution of Indian culture. The arrival of settlers. A fascinating exhibit on how federal money in World War Two turned an extractive economy into one based on technology. And a frank discussion of the bracero worker program with Mexico, the treatment of the Japanese after Pearl Harbor, the enlistment of Indians in the armed forces, and black troopers serving as firefighters.
My favorite exhibits, though, were the animals from the high desert. Bobcat. Porcupine, Raptors. Otter. Fish. Gila monsters. Skinks. Snakes. Turtles. It was better than going to most zoos.
Natural history museums are always a bit wistful. They remind us of what has been lost. But they also assure us our present would not be what it is without the past we have "lost."
Governor McCall was not my favorite politician. His view of the world was far too reliant on government involvement in the lives of a free people. And, for all of his King Lear railing, he could not stop the wave of immigration that has flooded Oregon. Some that may have improved the place.
But I am happy to be living elsewhere.
I may have lied to you yesterday.
I claimed I was not a person of place -- or a "someplace" person, to use Goodhart's term. At most, I am an "inbetweener."
But I certainly could have been a person of place. I share a lot of the same values -- with the obvious exception that I believe the world is better off with free trade and better access for trained immigrants across borders. Thus, my hybrid status.
What I lack is a place. And that became evident to me during our visits to four cemeteries on our trip south. What better locale to consider being a person of place than in a cemetery. You can't get much more place-oriented than when your body is planted.
The Powers cemetery sits on a hill above the county park. Almost all of the original graves are people who lived, but who were not born, in Powers. After all, the town was incorporated only a century ago.
The gravestones read like a genealogy of my grade school days. All the families are there. Bushnell. Adamek. Shorb. Frye.
And, of course, my brood. Rolfe. Munro. And one Cotton grave -- my older brother who died of a burst appendix when he was less than two months old. My mother has a plot next to his.
The cemetery brought home a hard fact of life in Powers. When we left Powers in 1957, I had a lot of relatives in town. Aunts. Uncles. Grandparents. Cousins.
They are all gone. Some are buried here. Others moved away. There were about 1500 people in town when we exited stage right. There are fewer than 700 now. And, it appears, most are families whose names I do not know when we lived there.
If Powers was to be my place, it appears that time has passed.
And it was not for wont of trying. When I graduated from law school, I talked with a lawyer in Myrtle Point who was thinking about retiring. He liked me, without really knowing me, because "my grandfather was a good man. What could be more "somewhere" than that?
I did not take him up on the offer. He has now moved on, but the office still houses an attorney. That could have been me.
Better yet, Mast Hospital, where I was born, is just across the street. But it is no longer a hospital. It is a rest home. Talk about closing the circle. I could have simply been carried from my office to my convalescent spot.
We visited my half-sister's grave in Coquille. She died of birth complications -- a death that sounds like a diary entry on the Oregon Trail rather than Oregon in the 1970s.
We also stopped in Norway (Oregon has some very interesting second-hand town names) to search for the graves of my mother's grandparents -- Curtis and Dora Rolfe.
Both were born in Quebec in the 1850s, moved to Minnesota and then on to Powers, dying in the early 1930s. My mother, born in 1928, barely got to know them.
Their migration (that started in England in the early 1600s and moved through Massachusetts and Vermont before Quebec) may be one reason I am not a person of place. At least, on my mother's side of the family. They were an incredibly mobile group.
Not so, on my father's side.
I grew up on tales of being a fifth generation Oregonian. That certainly sounds as if I could be a person of place. And our visit to the Dora cemetery is evidence enough that I could have been.
My great-great grandfather, John Alva Harry and his wife Chloe Amelia Cook (who bears an interesting relationship to my mother's family, something to relate in a bit) came to Oregon in the early 1850s eventually settling in a Coos County broad valley. In the 1870s, they established an inn in Sitkum known as the Halfway House (half way between Coos Bay and Roseburg). "Sitkum" is Chinook for "half." ( I point that out because Mexpatriate is a diverse place.)
Sitkum is a special place in my memory. When I was around 4, our family spent the summer there logging. It is one of my few childhood memories -- and it is extremely clear.
I spent my days wandering the banks of the East Fork of the Coquille River doing the things boys do, along with my faithful dog companion Uncle Jiggs. (You may recognize the name.) Once I found an abandoned fishing tackle box. At least, I thought it was abandoned.
At night, my father taught me how to tell time. And how to count. Using coins. Coins turned out to be an inspired technique. I learned the algebraic concept of how an 8-based number system (think quarters) can coexist in a decimal-based system. They were heady days.
On our Monday drive, none of us knew exactly where the site was. But I had no doubt about its location. We were parked below a bridge on the river and a large house (the Halfway House) was across the street.
We missed it on the first pass through Sitkum -- which consisted of a few dilapidated buildings. But, once I put the elements together, we found where we spent that special summer. A house is now built on the site, but it is no less special.
According to the Dora cemetery, this could have been my place. John Alva Harry's son and my great grandfather, Osmer Colfax Harry, settled a claim in Dora in the early 1950s. The family was to farm the land for decades. His daughter, Beatrice, the poet and my grandmother, married mu grandfather,Jesse Ray Cotton, in 1919.
The new Cotton family did not appear to be people of place. They moved from farm to farm in what was to be a marriage marred by personal tragedy -- most of it swaddled in the whispered tones of polite society. Their only child, my father, was raised by his aunt and uncle.
What was possibly my opportunity to become a person of place was simply not to be. Instead, I started life as a gypsy. To hear my mother tell it, our young family lived enough places before I was 6 to require our relatives to use an Etch-a-Sketch as an address book.
Oh, yes, I was gong to tell you about my great-great grandmother, Chloe Amelia Cook. When her husband John died, she married a fellow by the name of James Laird. Thus, adding another layer of local relatives to our family. The Dora cemetery if filled with marhers for Harry, Laird, Butler, and Cotton. Such as my great grandfather James Andrew Cotton, who lived to almost 100.
But that was not her greatest contribution. While running a relationship calculator on my family tree, I discovered something very odd. In addition to being my parents, my parents are also my cousins. In fact, they are each other's cousin.
Not like Ozark cousins. The relationship is rather attenuated. They are ninth cousins once removed.
Chloe is the culprit. Nicholas Noyes and Mary Cutting married in Newbury, Massachusetts in 1640. Little did they know when they launched their DNA into the world, that their streams would reunite when Chloe married John in 1857. And again when my parents married.
Thus, I am my own cousin. And I suspect that is a far better tale than being a person of place.
The label is old. But it is no less accurate for it.
My friend and philospophical racconteur, John Hofer, and I share similar backgrounds. We were both small town kids. Before he left his central Washington farming community for college, he was raised primarily by his Congregationaliust grandmother surrounded by a bushel of aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Whenever we would discuss our backgrounds over lunch or dinner, John would get a bit wistful about his family roots. As if he were an exotic plant re-planted in foreign soil. He really cared about the place he was from. I believe I even wrote a poem about that facet of the human condition.
I, on the other hand, felt a bit rootless. As if I did not quite belong where I was -- or that I could belong wherever I was.
That distinction led to a label for John. He was a person of place. And I was either a person of no place or anyplace.
A similar analysis appears in David Goodhart's The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics.
He uses different labels -- a dominant minority of people of "anywhere" against a majority of people from "somewhere." But the concepts are the same.
"Anywheres" have achieved status based on professional and educational success. They value social and geographical mobility. "Somewheres" identify themselves by place, honoring family, authority, and nationality. In Goodhart's parlance, I am an "Inbetweener."
What I am not is a person of place or a person of "somewhere." And I felt that strongly on our trip to southern Oregon.
My mother was born and raised in Powers. She did not leave there until she went to college. After marrying, she returned. But, even when we moved to Portland in the mid-1950s, she remained a Powers girl. Her background informed all of her decisions. The town has not worn well since then.
Even though I often say I am from Powers, at most, I lived there for five years. But I do not identify with the town. Nor do I identify with Milwaukie, where I lived twenty-three years. Or Texas, Colorado, California, Greece, or England where I was stationed with the Air Force. Or Salem where I went to law school and practiced law for thirteen years. They were all pleasant places, but not my "somewhere."
Having said that, Mom, Darrel and I experienced a pleasant two days in her old home town. There are very few places I have lived where the town itself has a town reunion. That is not remarkable when you realize the town's civil society and its high school are the same thing. People may diverge on church and social clubs, but being a Cruiser is the community's cement.
Darrel and I talked with several old childhood friends who lived on our street. My brother had a better recollection of events; I had a better memory of who was related to whom. One neighbor even put on a full court press to convince me I should move back.
The offer was tempting. I retain enough "somewhere" volunteer conservatism to be tempted to live in a community based on personal involvement. School events. The library. Bike races through town. All need people to keep the town running -- or pedaling.
One of the community's great accomplishments is a county park at the north end of town. When we moved away in the mid-1950s, logging put meals on the table in Powers. But The Cancer had set in. Within a decade, the woods were shut down -- or shutting down.
Where the park now sits was a thriving lumber mill. When it shut down, it was an eyesore for a decade. Then, someone stumbled on the great idea that it would make a perfect recreation site. After all, I used to catch tadpoles in the mill pond. Why not turn it into a fish pond?
So, they did. The place is now an RV campground with day use picnic facilities.
And, if you have feel a transcendental urge to become Henry David Thoreau, you can rent a pond cabin for $45 a night.
With this as your contemplative view -- where you might be able to make some sense out of Thoreau's ramblings. "If the day and night make one joyful, one is successful."
I doubt I will move to Powers. Well, that is me being nice. There is next to no chance I will move to Powers. But I will most likely return for a visit. Even though it is not my somewhere.
Tomorrow I will share a visit the three of us made on Sunday that defines a somewhere I could have owned.
This is a story about life. And a manure spreader.
Yesterday, Darrel, grandson Baron, and I ventured forth into the hinterlands of La Pine -- a flat plain spotted with juniper and ponderosa. But we were not searching for trees. We were on our way to audition a used bicycle for Christie.
While Darrel did what he does best (chat and negotiate), I wandered off onto a portion of the owner's 400 acres. When we drove in, I saw an interesting piece of farm machinery near the road.
It turned out to be a manure spreader. Until recently, the owner's parents used it regularly. It had now been relegated to a genre trendy in these parts -- farm yard art.
What had until recently been a utilitarian part of the farming process had been demoted to an aesthetic artifice. Similar to those dead airplanes on sticks favored by air force bases.
The symbolism was not lost on me. The spreader was passing through its stages of life. Once a robust part of the family, it had been literally put out out to pasture. To rest and to provide artistic enjoyment as it rusted into oblivion.
Very similar to our own lives.
Take me, for instance. That is easy because I am the one tapping on the keys.
I decided I wanted to be an attorney when I was a sophomore in high school. When I discovered it would be another seven years of schooling after I graduated from high school, I was sorely disappointed. I wanted to be an attorney right then.
As it turned out, I did not graduate from law school until 12 years later. An unplanned five year detour to the Air Force intervened before I got back on course.
Not everything was rosy about my law career. In 1988, I lost a very narrow race for the Oregon legislature, my law partnership broke up, and I turned 40 -- all in the span of three months. It was my personal annus horribillis.
But, just like one of those cheesy Eastern religion movies, I learned a lesson from tragedy. I had fallen into the same trap as so many people have -- especially American men. I had defined myself by what I did for a living rather than realizing I am a moral agent who is not dependent upon a profession to define my being. It was an awareness raiser.
I suspect that terrible year was what made retirement so easy for me. When I stepped away from the position I adored at SAIF Corporation, I had no regrets. And, unlike a large number of attorneys I know, I did not fail retirement. The reason was simple: I was focused on what I could now do without the restraints of my profession.
Rather than finding my sole worth in my title, I found it in life. Writing. Reading. Traveling. Simply doing whatever popped into my head.
As I walked around the manure spreader (an apt analogy for an attorney turned essayist), I wondered if it was happy with its lot -- or if it longed to spend its day flinging cow patties. Was its new-found role as an art object as fulfilling as its former job?
Of course, it was the wrong question. For it -- and for me.
What we all need to ask ourselves is whether we have learned to settle for what we get? Railing against inevitability is the madness of youth (and some political activists). A lesson we should have learned long ago from Merrily We Roll Along.
As for me, I am happy that I am here -- and that you took time today to visit.
Now, I need to head off to Powers to meet another side of my destiny.
Everyone looks at your shoes.
Well, the people who look at shoes do.
As of today, I am prepared to suffer their nosy judgment. My ever-swelling feet are to be clad with fine Corinthian leather, as Ricardo Montalban would (and did) lie.
Mr. Postman delivered my latest purchase this afternoon from Amazon. If I had not come north, I would not now own them. Amazon would not deliver them to my Mexican address, and Amazon Mexico did not offer what I wanted.
As you may have guessed, I am a tad picky about my shoes. I favor a certain brand and make. About a decade ago, I started wearing a variation of these Eccos.
Most shoes make my feet feel as if they are being restrained by a Sylvia Plath jacket. Not these. They are so light, I feel as if I am walking foot nude. Dancing shoes could not be more comfortable.
Unfortunately, Mexico has not been overly kind to the three or four pairs i have worn out in my travels. Quality leather and Mayan ruins do not make good partners.
In most Mexican cities, there is a shoe shine man within easy walking distance. They do miracles with my shoes.
In our little fishing village, there is only one shoe shine guy who shows up periodically in the Barra de Navidad plaza. He repairs luggage as a sideline.
You have met him already in "i simply adore the colors here". In May of last year, I dropped off my scuffed mahogany-colored Eccos. When I picked up the refurbished shoes, they were shiny. But in a new color that could charitably be called muddy brown.
At least, they were uniformly brown. That is, until they started peeling like an old barn in Kansas.
While I was in Bogota last April, I stopped in a square for a shine. I pulled out my telephone and either read the newspaper or stumbled through my Spanish lesson in Duolingo.
Whichever it was, I was so engrossed I paid little mind to what was happening at my feet. When he announced he was done, I was shocked to see my shoes had acquired a new layer of paint. This time, the brown was dark enough to pass for black. To gild this particular tale, he charged me almost twice what the guy in Barra charged.
Because the soles on my shoes are beginning to give way, I decided to retire them. After all, makeup can be ladled on just so many times.
Thanks to the wonders of Amazon, I ordered a pair on Tuesday, and they are here on Thursday.
I can hear some of you right now. Yes, there are plenty of shoes in Mexico. Leon is one of the largest manufacturer of shoes in the world. But good shoes are a rarity in our local shoe shops.
One of these days, I will return to Mexico City and shop the halls of El Palacio de Hierro until my Visa cries "tio."
Until then, These new shoes will keep me on the stylish road. And, Jennifer, you are correct: they are better than bacon.
I do not miss much about American culture.
When I am in Mexico, I almost forget there is a country north of the Rio Bravo. That is until one of my fellow bloggers or Facebook friends overdoses on Trump or Obama hysteria.
But, once I am here, I start suffering from my own bout of eccentric nostalgia.
This morning I popped into Costco to reconnoiter. I was not in a buying mood. My sole reason for being there was to (1) look at items I might buy if I still lived in Oregon (a 75" curved SUHD Samsung screen) and (2) list items I might want to take back to Mexico with me (almost nothing).
Everything in Costco is available in Mexico. I learned that lesson long ago. There is very little reason to lug any of it across the border. And, when I do, I often end up paying either duty or IVA on what I bring back. There certainly is no saving.
But that does not keep me from indulging in my category 1 dreams -- things I would buy if I still lived here. Food usually tops that list.
Take the chicken sausage pictured. Chicken sausage is one of the foundations of my cooking up here.
The prime example is my favorite macaroni and cheese dish. Sun-dried tomato penne pasta. Onion. Garlic. Fresh basil. Sun-dried -- or fresh -- tomatoes. Chicken sausage -- usually, mango and jalapeño. Topped by a home-made three cheese cream sauce.
When I was here in June, I made some for Darrel. We experimented with several variations. Each one better than the last. Well, with the exception of the cheese sauce where we mistakenly used whole cream and ended up with what looked like vanilla pudding.
I cannot make that particular dish in Mexico. Well, I can with some drastic revisions. There is simply no spicy sweet chicken sausage in my area of Mexico.
And I am fine with that. There are plenty of dishes I can make in Mexico that I cannot make here.
What is consistent between the two countries is shopping, I have the opportunity to dive into crowds of strangers -- each one another conversation possibility.
That probably says a lot more about me than my preference for chicken sausage.
My niece Kaitlyn lives in Seattle.
You have met her before. She is the gun enthusiast and collector of exotic pets (shootout at the kaitlyn corral).
The other day, while doing her laundry, she grabbed a bra to throw in the washer. What you see is what she saw. A giant black scorpion. It startled her.
It shouldn't have. It is merely one of her pets. It could have been worse. She owns a seven foot Vietnamese python with a biting personality.
The scorpion had managed to find an escape route out of its cage -- as they are wont to do. I am amazed how scorpions can squeeze through the smallest of cracks. Just like a crafty lawyer.
A trip to Home Depot for additional building supplies has the scorpion safely locked in its cage. Well, until the next time it manages to escape.
My nephew Baron decided to honor his Aunt Kaitlyn this afternoon. Baron is here for a couple of weeks visiting his grandparents, Darrel and Christy. It has been interesting hanging out with a 9-year old. We tend to relate at the same level.
Christie took him to a candy story downtown today. He returned with what I thought was a garden variety sucker. Strawberry, by its color. But the garden it came from must have been the midnight garden of good and evil.
Here it is.
If you look closely, you might note the sucker has a chewy center. A scorpion to be precise.
Baron could not wait to slurp the sucker down to the level of its novelty core. It was better than Cracker Jack.
And slurp it, he did. The scorpion is now freed of its sugary cocoon. If we were in one of those terrible mummy movies, the scorpion would come alive in the night and call down all sorts of Egyptian evil on our lives.
Or maybe it will just call Kaitlyn's scorpion to pay us a visit riding the back of the pesky python.
I gave you fair warning. I have been talking with a 9-year old -- and all of this makes perfect sense to me.
