Bob’s knowledge of the area he grew up in is uncanny. He sees things on several levels at once so that you sometimes feel you are riding in a car with some kind of X- ray machine that is equipped with a time-shift module. “We are now passing over a latitude line,” he says. Then, a moment later, “This road used to climb the grade up towards that farmhouse, but in '48 when this new highway went through, the state managed to finagle an easement through here.” Or: “That big boulder over across that field is probably an erratic which floated over here in a chunk of ice during one of the post-glacial floods.” Bob loves to make inventories. He has produced lists (often accompanied by maps) of prize-winning trees, waterfalls, mineral and hot springs, or unique botanical areas, nudist beaches, endangered species. "Non-Parks in Oregon" is a list of still-up-for-grabs places that a sensible society would have preserved a long time ago. Bob is usually working on several inventories at once. He even has an inventory of proposed inventories. One of his indexes (to Washington County sites of historical or ecological interest) runs to 1100 cards. It’s not easy to grasp the meaning of this list-making obsession. In part it is playful: Bob, the kid-adventurer, searching out the highest waterfall, or the biggest tree. He will spend a whole day wandering about a foothill of the Coast Range looking for the remains of an historical road. But in a deeper sense Bob wants his listitems to lose their invisibility so that they begin to appear on the maps used by the bureaucrats and the realtor/developers. He despises the outside developer’s perspective of the land, which, he feels, tends to see only the survey lines and the profit potential; which ignores the pretty waterfall, the vestiges of an Indian dancing ring, the 100-year- old farmhouse. The 1,100 sites mentioned in his card-file boxes are B ob’s knowledge of the area he grew up in is uncanny. He sees things on several levels at once so that you sometimes feel you are riding in a car with some kind of X- ray machine that is equipped with a time-shift module. what, in Bob’s view, give his country its texture: erase them and you are left with a sprawl of roads and buildings, denatured and without history. Some of Bob’s projects can seem rather eccentric, what you might expect from a hermit-intellectual-mapmaker- dreamer-farmer-ecologist. Head-in-the-clouds stuff. Once he got curious about whether or not a replica of Stonehenge (built by the son-in-law of a railroad magnate, it sits on a bluff high above the Columbia River) possesses the mathematical qualities of the original. His 50 or so pages of calculations indicate that it is a few degrees off. Another project was a chart illustrating the location of star constellations for the next five hundred years. But when he learns that one of his beloved places is threatened, he can move into the valley with practical authority. A 1971 letter to Riviera Motors, a large Portland Volkswagen dealer, begins: Gentlemen: One of your officers was quoted in the press as seeing “No problem"in the fact that the Five Oaks tract along the Sunset Highway in West Union is prime agricultural land. Your , Volkswagen installation on this acreage, while welcome from many points of view, forms an entering wedge for the destruction of one of Oregon's very few areas of highly productive soil. There are people who do not look on this as “no problem." Bob goes on to point out that “nobody in your organization seems to have made any public comment” on the presence of the Five Oaks—“the gathering place of the earliest independent farming community of Americans in the West”— on this tract of land. He suggests that the trees, “if left standing as a center of attraction, will pay developers many times over [in favorable publicity] for the small space that they occupy.” Riviera Motors responded by naming their development “Five Oaks Industrial Park” and agreeing to preserve the trees. “This is about the best you can expect,” says Bob, who feels that a sensible society would have turned the area into a state park. An inventory that Bob made up in 1968, “Notes On Natural Areas, Trails and Landmarks in the Portland Area,” has this entry: BIG CANYON is mostly Bureau of Land Management (BLM) land; the tract was logged in the thirties, but the bottom of the canyon was only lightly damaged and many big firs were spared. A group of botanical enthusiasts, reinforced by some local botanists of standing, are pestering BLM for a ten-acre natural reservation to preserve the canyon-floor flora, once so common, now so rare. Access only by special permission through private property. Five minutes to three, a misty afternoon in 1978: Bob Benson removed a shapeless brown hat from his very round head as he shuffled into a gray barracks-like building in Tillamook, headed for a BLM hearing on the fate of Big Canyon. He was feeling “nettled” that he had been notified too late to attend a previous meeting which, he has heard, was attended by many loggers and no botanists. Wedging his roly-poly body uncomfortably into a retired school desk at the very back of the meeting room, still holding opto his hat, Bob took a look about the room. 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