cess? "Yes,” says Bob, and at this juncture, when he is about to stretch the taffy of one of his ideas to its tensile limit, about to pull its sticky ends into the farthest reaches of time and space, Bob usually stares at a point on the ceiling above his listener’s head, and speaks more softly than ever. Yes. There is evidence that this botanical zone is the nexus, the most important connection, between the north and the tropics (or subtropics). When the botanical areas of Europe and Asia are pressed southward by ice sheets, as they are from time to time, why the plants are pressed right up against the Alps and the Himalayas with no refuge, no way to get across. Those east-to-west running mountain ranges form an impenetrable barricade. But here, where the mountains run north-to- south, there’s easy refuge right down to California for an escape. Then when the ice sheet recedes another age later, the plants can move north again. Eventually they repopulate the northern hemisphere. The redwoods are a good example. At present they only live south of here, in Northern California. But at one time there were redwoods all over the northern half of the world. Given time, the redwoods will perhaps re-tree the northern continents. So you see, if you wipe out a native plant in Oregon you interrupt a rather significant evolutionary cycle. Bob’s family moved back to their home in Valley Vista just in time to experience the economic terrors of the Great Depression. Too broke to pay for outside entertainment, the family spent its evenings in long discussions with a recent immigrant from Switzerland. This "Switzer” (as Bob always calls him) was a fanatic W h y then does he remain this odd figure, part awkward hermit, part old-world gentleman, who shuffles through spiffy Beaverton shopping malls in rumpled coat and wrinkled pants, when, with a quick land deal, he could transform himself into...a successful man? on the Single Tax ideas of Silvio Gesell. He knew Gesell's books forwards and backwards, could quote them like a parrot. “In Depression times,” Bob says, "almost everyone was thinking somewhat along Gesell’s lines. Money wasn’t circulating because the big shots were hoarding it. The Single Tax seemed like a wonderful way of forcing money back into circulation.” A central tenet of Gesell’s philosophy, one which Bob inhaled into his bloodstream, is that all sorts of economic evils stem from a single corrupting root: speculation in land. This is why, for the past 35 years, Bob has snubbed the real estate sharks who come sniffing around his acreage, hoping he will sell. For a couple of years Valley Vista felt to Bob like the Concord of Emerson and Thoreau, with spontaneous seminars going late into the nights, with words flying so fast that Bob, a high school student, learned to talk monetary theory with the agility of an unusually coherent economics professor. (Bob's knowledge of the technical intricacies of economics still often startles people.) But then a fly, or rather, a spy, entered the ointment in the person of a nosy retired soldier. "Apparently he had us under surveillance,” says Bob, “any time we had a visitor he would make up some quick excuse, maybe bring over a squash or something, so that he could see who that visitor was. I doubt that he was anyone’s agent because later on we learned that he had been in an insane asylum, had been divorced by his wife for some sort of paranoia. But, who knows, he just might have had a cobweb right straight to the FBI. Anyhow, it just burnt my dad up, and I think one reason he bought the land up here was to get away from this character.” Bob's ideas, on wildflowers, on the ways 50,000 year flood cycles effect Oregon geography, on the myopia of bureaucrats, on the economic theories of Silvio Gesell, always somehow come around to being about “the land question.” He often says that the limited amount of public spirit that the human race is capable of must be used where it counts the most: on the land base of our own civilization. For many years he has studied the land holding systems of the American Indians, fascinated by the way they were able to get along without seriously harming the earth. This is why the very idea of public officials condoning poison spray so dismays him: in poisoning the land, Bob feels they violate their most sacred responsibility. This deep concern with land made mapmaking a natural for Bob. Maps were a hobby from early in his teenage years, but he only began to make them professionally when he was in his thirties. There were some troubles in his local fire district. Firemen would fling themselves onto their trucks and roar out, sirens wailing, only to discover that roads marked on the Gay Nineties maps they were using no longer existed. This situation came to a head when firemen watched an old woman’s house burn to the ground across a huge un-mapped gulch at the end of Myers Road. Someone on the fire board got wind of the fact that this guy Bob Benson could draw a map. For about ten years he had a little map business in a rented office in Hillsboro, a blueprint machine, the ★ ♦ * ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ * * ♦ ♦ ♦ * * ♦ * * * * * * ♦ * ♦ ♦ * ♦ * ♦ * ♦ ♦ ^ *<4***4********^ .*^ * REOPENING :♦ The Original Pantry ♦ Bill Hayden and his staff prepare * Continental Executive Breakfasts * Lunches Dinners * Saturday & Sunday Brunches * Oregon Wines and Cocktails * Join us for our opening * Friday, Dec. 11, 1981. J ♦ * Louise Lane (former chef at Delevan's) * creates exciting holiday fare. * Ask about our innovative Catering Kitchen for * parties, luncheons, banquets, serving 1 to 500. For reservations and dining hours, call 284-3995. * * The Pantry * 1025 NE Broadway, Portland, OR * ♦ <^ ****4********* Clinton St. Quarterly 33
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