RAIN Volume VIII No. 3 SPECIAL ISSUE $5 KNOWING HOME Studies for a Possible Portland Edited by the staff of Rain
KNOWING HOME Studies for a Possible Portland Edited by the staff of Rain
KNOWING HOME Studies for a Possible Portland Edited by RAIN Staff: Carlotta Collette Nancy Cosper John Ferrell Steve Johnson Mark Roseland Steve Rudman Laura Stuchinsky Interns: Scott Androes Tanya Kucak Salena Baker Typesetting: Irish Setter Layout and Design: Linnea Gilson Photographs: Ancil Nance, Judith Rafferty, David Brown, Dana Olsen Printing: Times Litho Copyright © 1981 Rain Umbrella Inc. No part may be reprinted without written permission. For information write RAIN, 2270 NW Irving, Portland, OR 97210. Cover Photos Pre-Mall Downtown: Ancil Nance Irving Street Scene: Ancil Nance River Scene: Dana Olsen, Oregon Journal Other Books from Rain; Rainbook Stepping Stones Consumer Guide to Woodstoves Sharing Smaller Pies
« ' 'f Table of Contents Preface, by Tom McCall.........................................................................4 Introduction........................................................................................... 5 Acknowledgments............................................................................... 7 An Oregon Message, by William Stafford......................................9 I A Sense of Place Knowing Home: The Basics of Bioregions, by Steve Johnson 11 Bob Benson: Patron of Our Place, by Richard Plagge.................15 Where Currents Merge: The Maritime Northwest, by Steve Johnson.............................................................................21 Greater Portland: A Birdseye View, by Bob Benson...................25 An Idea Whose Time Has Been, by John Ferrell..........................31 II A Sense of Direction Sustainable Portland: What We Need Is a City That Can Carry Us into the Next Century, by Steven Ames.................37 Life Support E n e r g y .................................................................................................... 46 F ood /A gricu ltu re.................................................................................. 48 H o u s i n g .................................................................................................. 52 T ransportation.......................................................................................54 C o m m u n ica tio n .................................................................................... 55 A r t s ........................................................................................................... 56 W ork /E con om ics.................................................................................. 57 Emergency Preparedness....................................................................60 Waste Recycling.....................................................................................62 Resources Local Self-Help Resources..................................................................67 National Resources................................................................................78 3
Preface The 1970s in Oregon could easily be called our Land Use Decade—a remarkable period of citizen activism in which the people of this state squarely faced up to the challenge of rapid growth and did something about it. From our land use planning laws to local comprehensive plans, Oregonians began to put order on the chaos of the sprawling development that threatened to destroy this state's natural heritage and future livability. Today, we are just beginning to accrue the benefits of our foresight. The times, however, have not stood idly by. The new decade has brought with it a tough set of issues which tvill only broaden the challenges of the last ten years. We must now grapple with the impacts of increasingly scarce resources, energy and capital, inflated costs of goods and services, and the decline of big government's willingness and even ability to meet social needs. The old growth and quality of life questions have not gone away—they've just gotten more complex. Nowhere is this more apparent than on the local level. The 1980s will require that the grass roots level perform as it has never performed before. Fortunately for Greater Portland—for any American city—the real creative potential of the '80s will be found in our neighborhoods and communities. This is the simple but profound message of Knowing Home: Studies for a Possible Portland. Rich in past perspectives and future visions, this guide offers us an image of a self-reliant city that will help our localities navigate the difficult choices ahead. This is not distant idealism or rigid ideology, but real, sound and humane advice for a city and a society in the throes of rapid change. We would do well to take it to heart and put its vision to practice. / diO( 4 «
# Held rightly, a sense of place is a tool for framing those bigger- than-we-care-to-imagine problems and bringing them back down to local scale. It helps us to focus our awareness on who we are, where we are headed, and what our next steps might be. In so doing, we often discover that the best solutions are those that can be found in our own back yards. —Steven Ames What the self-reliance movement is saying is that we want our neighborhoods to be the basis of political authority, and we want the small businesses to be the basis of the economic structure of the country. Our vision is that the power flows from below, not from above; that you can only have democracy if people own a piece of the wealth. —David Morris, Institute for Local Self-Reliance, Washington, D.C. Introduction This book began more than a year ago as a brief paragraph describing a possible pamphlet on "community self-reliance in Portland." As publishers of RAIN: Journal of Appropriate Technology we had long reported to our readers on a nationwide movement among growing numbers of people who were working to make their communities more livable, cohesive and self-reliant places through such strategies as setting up farmers' markets, neighborhood weatherization workshops, community gardens and co-operative businesses. We felt it would be valuable to focus in on the problems and successes being experienced by this movement in one very special community—our own home town. We soon realized we were on to something bigger and more exciting than we had anticipated. Plans for a pamphlet became plans for a book, and the book became much more than simply a guide to community self-reliance projects in Portland. In hundreds of scribbled research notes, in endless discussions among ourselves, and in fascinating conversations with dozens of Portland people who generously shared their special insights and knowledge, we explored a whole range of challenging questions relating to community values, economics, and ecology. What did we really mean, we asked, when we spoke of our sense of place—our "portlandness"? How could our community "life support" systems—food, energy, transportation, housing, etc.—be tailored to produce a more resource-conserving, ecologically-sound, self-reliant city? How much could Portlanders (or people in any community) really expect to accomplish on a local level during a time of government cutbacks and economic hardship? How much did our self-reliant vision have in common with the conservative image of rugged self-sufficiency and how would it have to differ from that image in order to address the complexities and 5
Delano Photographies, Inc. interdependencies of late-twentieth century life? How could we prevent a focus on local needs from degenerating into the kind of myopia and meanness illustrated by the oil-rich Texan whose bum- persticker urges drivers to "step on it and freeze a Yankee"? And most vexing of all: would it really be possible for Portlanders and people everywhere to become self-reliant rapidly enough to head off some future call to global war, based on the premise that our survival was dependent on access to some other nation's resources? In seeking answers to these and many other questions we have come to a much fuller understanding of who we are and where we are in this special place called Portland. Our research has shown us both a community with serious problems and a community in which many people are already working toward some very creative and promising solutions. A vision has emerged in our minds and on these pages of how Portland and other communities around the country can meet the special challenges of the coming decades and become more democratic, more beautiful and more self-reliant places in which to live. We are excited by that vision. We believe that you will be, too. —RAIN
Acknowledgments Special thanks to the people who worked closest with us to make this guide a reality: John Taylor, president of the NW Area Foundation, for believing in our vision; Steven Ames, for critical suggestions and encouragements; Patti Morris of Irish Setter, for design suggestions and patience with our process (such as it is); Ancil Nance for exquisite photographs under abbreviated deadlines; and Bob Benson for his map of the Portland bioregion, which adds depth to our perceptions of where we live. In addition, we gratefully acknowledge the people whose contributions helped shape our work. Molly Ackley-Cook Mary Anderson—Health Help Center Terry Anderson—Tri-County Community Council James Ashbaugh—PSU Geography Department George Baetjer—Oregon Environmental Council Mike Barnes—Sunflower Recycling Lee Barrett—Portland Recycling Team Bob Baugh—Oregon AFL-CIO Kevin Bell—Fair Electrical Rates Now Tom Bender—former Rain staff; Building Inspector, City of Cannon Beach Peter Berg—Planet Drum Foundation Nancy Biasi—Saturday Market Linda Boise—Portland Action Committees Together David Brown—Photographer Judith Chambliss—Eliot Energy House Jeffrey Chew Don Clark—Office of Multnomah County Executive Phil Conti—Southeast Uplift; former Rain staff Adam Davis—Northwest Attitudes, City Club Vision Committee Lane deMoll—former Rain staff Dave Deppen—Architect Elizabeth Dimon—Author of 'Twas Many Years Since Elizabeth Erickson—WARM (Women's Art Registry of Minnesota) Geri Ethen—Coordinator, Neighbors West, Northwest Jack Eyerly Marlene Farnum—Aide to Portland City Commissioner Mike Lindberg Susan Feldman—Northwest Women's History Project Chuck Ferris—Bonneville Power Administration Vi Gale—Editor/Publisher, Prescott Street Press Margie Harris—Energy Consultant Joe Hertzberg—President, Northwest Credit Union Richard Hertzberg—METRO Valerie Lee Hope—formerly of Oregon DEQ Marvin Jackson—Urban Indian Council Day Labor Sego Jackson—Tilth Information Service Lee Johnson—former Rain staff; Western SUN staff Linda Johnson—THE CRIB Peter & Trudy Johnson-Lenz— Computer Consultants Diane Jones—Idaho Citizen's Coalition Davidya Kasperzyk Dan Knapp—Whole Earth Recycling Larry Korn—Editor, One Straw Revolution Doug LaBelle—Urban Indian Council Day Labor Lee Lancaster—Bookkeeping & Management Consultant Susie Lane Mike Lindberg—Portland City Commissioner Maureen Linear—Communication Workers of America Mimi Maduro—Automatic Data Processing Mike Maki—Tilth Information Service Janet Mandaville Theresa Marquez—Food Front Tom McCall—former Governor of Oregon E. Kimbark MacColl, Portland historian Margaret McCrea—Garden Variety Produce Dave McMahon—Cloudburst Recycling Rick Michaelson—Aide to Portland City Commissioner Margaret Strachan Joe Midgett—Action Conservation, Inc. Ruth Miller—Neighbors Against Crime Ken Mitchell—Times Litho Madeline Moore—Northwest Women's History Project Jerry Mounce—Neighbors North, City of Portland Mark Musick—Tilth Dana Olsen—Photographer, Oregon Journal Kim Osgood—Oregon Historical Society Randall O'Toole—Cascade Holistic Economic Consultants Skeeter Pilarski—Friends of the Trees Richard Plagge—Freelance writer John Platt—Intertribal Fish Commission Jerry Powell—Resource Conservation Consultants Kalee Powell —Nutrition Information Center Judith Rafferty—Photographer Deborah Robboy—The Catbird Seat Brad Rogers—Photographer Steve Roso—North Portland Citizens Committee Judy Roumpf—California Office of Appropriate Technology Mike Saba—METRO Sam Sadler—Oregon Appropriate Technology Linda Sawaya—former Rain staff Joel Schatz—Transition Graphics Ethan Seltzer—METRO Joan Smith—Portland Planning Commission Barbara Snyder—Tilth Adrienne Stacey—Richmond Neighborhood Association William Stafford—Poet Laureate of Oregon Beverly Stein—Alliance for Social Change Kaye Stewart—Albina Ministerial Alliance Lorna Stickle—Multnomah County Planning Division Margaret Strachan—Portland City Commissioner Joy Strieker—Coordinator, Southwest Neighborhoods Nandie Szabo—Recycling consultant June Tanoue—Tri-County Food Bank Dell Taylor—Southwest Neighborhoods Lynn Taylor—Northwest Women's History Project Vicky Tempey—KBOO Radio Karen Thunderhawk—West Hotel Bill Trieste—Pocket Creek Farm Herbs Roger van Gelder—Sunflower Recycling Mary Vogel—Oregon Appropriate Technology Wendy Westerwelle—Storefront Actors Theater Karen Whitman—Artquake Lynn Youngbar—Portland Sun Elaine Zablocki—former State Legislative Aide Organizations are listed for identification purposes only. 7
Dana Olsen
i « An Oregon Message When we first moved here, pulled the trees in around us, curled our backs to the wind, no one had ever hit the moon—no one. Now our trees are safer than the stars, and only other people's neglect is our precious and abiding shell, pierced by meteors, radar, and the telephone. From our snug place we shout religiously for attention, in order to hide: only silence or evasion will bring dangerous notice, the hovering hawk of the state, or the sudden quiet stare and fatal estimate of an alerted neighbor. This message we smuggle out in its plain cover, to be opened quietly: Friends everywhere— we are alive! Those moon rockets have missed millions of secret places! Best wishes. Burn this. —William Stafford Reprinted by permission: © 1968 The New Yorker Magazine, Inc. 9
I. A Sense of Place Communities strong in their sense ofplace, proud and aware of local and special qualities, creating to some extent their own culturalforms. . . are in fact what one healthy side of the original American vision was about. They are also, now, critical to ecological survival. —Gary Snyder, The Real Work
Knowing Home: The Basics of Bioregions by Steve Johnson In a city, the first tier of political involvement is the neighborhood; neighborhoods whose boundaries are sometimes created by natural features (Mt. Tabor), but more often by a combination of land development schemes (Laurelhurst, Ladds Addition), major arterial roadways and other industrial and commercial developments. It is most satisfying to respond to problems at the neighborhood level. We can see and feel the problem, and when we are successful in implementing change, we are gratified with immediate results. Our association with problems beyond this immediate reality are informed through mass media. We are mindful of and concerned with events hundreds and thousands of miles away on a daily (and often more frequent) level; we are not, however, equally empowered to take action that influences these events. Oregon, 100 years ago, was officially a part of the United States, but its citizens were more oriented to the region they lived in. They were mostly energy and food self-sufficient and could not be as easily affected by political events in another part of the nation or world. This changed with the coming of the railway, and it changed again with the coming of the automobile and eventually the growth of modern mass communication systems. The nation today is bound together through an intricate fabric of interstate highways, telecommunications, and a centralized economic structure, which creates a franchised, or what some have called a "world-wide mono-culture." As we literally blanket the earth with our enterprises, we create increasingly complicated jurisdictions and boundaries. In cities, neighborhoods become districts, and districts are often separated (as in Portland) by rivers. One citizen may belong to dozens of political entities: In Portland we belong to a city and county and regional government and state. Within the state we may identify with distinct geographic areas. The maritime region of Oregon, west of the Cascades, has a radically different climate and ecology, and therefore a different culture than eastern or southern Oregon. Beyond the state we are considered a part of the Northwest region—Oregon, Washington and Idaho. In some federal government breakdowns we are part of Region X, which includes such unlikely neighbors as Alaska and Hawaii. From other points of view we are one of the Pacific Coast states (Oregon, Washington, California) or we are one of the eleven western states. Problems do not always pay heed to political boundaries. Countless special government units such as the newly formed Regional Energy Council are created to deal with the meandering problems of rivers and streams and the distribution of unequally available food or energy. Portland is the big city for the state of Oregon. In a pattern that is repeated in many western states, there is one major city, and two or three other mediumsized ones, while the remainder of the state is rural or wild. The Greater Portland area has about one-half of the state's population and uses more than one-half of the energy and resources consumed in the state. It is obvious that Portland is not a self-sufficient community living within the limits of its own resources. The creeks and streams are dried up or encased in drainage pipes. Its farmable land is mostly covered by streets and buildings, and most all of its energy is imported. The city cannot sustain itself without help from neighboring communities, and by regional development of energy, water and food resources. In many ways, the degree of self-sufficiency of other communities in Oregon has an added direct impact on Portland. If, for example, an investment firm builds a retirement housing development near Bend, it will have some positive economic impact on Portland, as the goods necessary for development and maintenance of life are produced and/or shipped through Portland. The development will also likely have a negative impact on the environment, further taxing the physical capacity of the Portland area by creating additional industrial and transportation-related pollution. As we expand the city's role as basic life support supplier for other communities, we stretch the limits of the city to maintain its own high quality of life. The detrimental impact on the city is accentuated by the development of cities and towns that have little or no economic viability of their own. In order to understand how to continue to live in this region, or any region, we must look at how the region functions. We are, as poet Gary Snyder has said, extremely deficient in regional knowledge. There was a while, before Oregon became a part of the franchised and centralized economic structure, when citizens knew about the land, the seasons, and how to carve out a living. We cannot return to this past era, but we can change our direction and look at what kind of life our region is able to sustain. When we think regionally we can learn, or re-learn, what is available to us within our region, in our community and in our backyard. The information provided may come to us in different forms. As energy costs rise we think
twice about accepting houses designed with another climate in mind. As food prices rise we suddenly realize that gardening need not be only a summer pastime but that food, with simple technological assistance (greenhouses, for example) may be produced year- round. As the prices of nuclear energy continue to rise, we look again at hydroelectric power, a renewable, bountiful and affordable energy supply. The instructions for how to survive in a particular region are there, but they are obscured by the messages produced by our urban culture. We can listen more attentively, pay attention to the common sense of old-timers, and examine the particular ecological balances of our region, but in order to plan for the future, and to sustain the population even at the present level, we may need some sophisticated planning tools. Bio-regional planning perhaps offers some new conceptual tools for this. Peter Berg, a bioregional planning consultant and founder of the Planet Drum Foundation (San Francisco), defines a bioregion as: A distinct area where the conditions that influence life are similar and these in turn influence human occupancy. The extent of a bioregion can be determined by using climatology, physiography, animal and plant geography, natural history and other descriptive sciences. The idea of a bioregion, however, is cultural. It defines both a place and adaptive ideas about living in that place. In Renewable Energy and Bioregions: A New Context for Public Policy, Peter Berg and George Tukel lay some groundwork for bioregional planning. The publication was prepared for the Solar Business Office of the State of California, headed by Jerry Yudelson. In the introduction, Yudelson describes what a bioregion is and why it might be important in planning: The bioregion is a more suitable decision-making unit. A bioregion is a geographical province with a marked ecological and often cultural unity. It is often demarked by the watersheds of major river systems, but can be composed of smaller hydrogeologic or biological units. Since renewable energy resources rely heavily on localized "solar" resources (sun, wind, vegetation and terrain), energy supply planning at the bioregional level makes good sense, for it allows more diversity and flexibility in planning and reduces the potential for conflict between political jurisdictions. The bioregional approach has also been adopted, with considerable success, for controlling both air and water pollution throughout the United States. Key to bioregional planning is watershed consciousness. The roots to “watershed" start in old English with words related to "parting of hairs." The 19th century sense of watershed came from "parting" (of the flow) or "separation" (of the waters). It meant the boundary line that separated the flow of rainfall. In the United States we call this the "divide." Eventually the meaning of watershed was stretched to include an area of land which drains water, sediment and dissolved materials to a common outlet at some point along a stream or river. Because waterflow does not obey human desires, it forces humans to 12 Dana Olsen
join together to control and to use and to re-use beneficially. Because waterflow does not follow human desires or subdivision maps, it creates the need for cooperation. What happens upstream changes life downstream, and the demands of downstream alter upstream activity. From the forested headwaters to the agricultural midstream valleys to the commercial and industrial centers at the river's mouth, good and bad news travels by way of water. Did my drinking water take a farmer's supply, cause his farm to close down and vegetables to be imported to the city from longer distances and at higher prices? Did my toilet flush give a downstream swimmer gastro-in- testinal upset? —Peter Warshall, The Next Whole Earth Catalog Another important concept in biore- gional planning is carrying capacity. The concept was originally developed in the field of wildlife management to give definition to the number and types of animals that plant populations could support in a particular area. Used in the study of interactions between human and natural communities, carrying capacity is a method for developing a model of the relationship between the population of an area and the levels of service that can be supported by renewable energy sources, available food, water, air and essential raw materials. In order to understand the carrying capacity of an area, bioregional resource inventories and energy and raw material consumption patterns must be developed. Such a listing should include descriptions of native plants and animals, climate, soils, geology, topography, water resources, land use patterns, population densities and air quality. Berg adds: “To fully portray bioregional life, a resources inventory also includes domestic plants and animals, and surveys low-energy sources such as solar radiation, wind, moving and standing water, and biomass which can become the basis for determining appropriate energy-generating technologies.” A final aspect of bioregional planning is the place of human culture, and the knowledge that can be gained by living closely with the earth. Using an anthropological concept, “figures of regulation," Berg & Tukel describe the importance of indigenous common sense: Figures of regulation are cultural ways of expressing information which are necessary to maintain day-to-day stability and to respond to danger signals which indicate disruption of the balance between human activities and ecosystems. Anthropologist Roy Rappaport has shown how some cultures develop myths and rituals that act as common sense methods for keeping a balanced relation between man and nature. In one tribe that Rappaport studied in New Guinea, there were distinct rituals for regulating relationships with other tribes and nonhuman species that at first glance appear to be nothing more than religious rituals; ways of communicating with the supernatural. Ritualistic conflicts with neighboring tribes are a function of the size of pig herds as Rappaport explains: A local group signals that it is entering into a truce by sacrificing all but its juvenile pigs to its ancestors. . . . There is prestige to be gained in the eyes of members of other local populations by sacrificing large numbers of pigs. . . . Large pig herds are burdensome because they must be fed, and nuisances because they invade gardens. When women's complaints concerning the labor they must expend in feeding pigs and the nuisance of garden invasions by pigs exceeds a certain point, the limits of tolerance of a sufficient number of people shape a consensus, a corrective program in the form of a pig festival is staged, during which the pig herd is drastically reduced. Garden invasions and women's complaints about pigs are reduced to zero or nearly so, and at the same time obligations to ancestors are fulfilled, permitting the celebrants to initiate hostilities once again. To rephrase one of the most rephrased of phrases, “it's what you can do for your region and what your region can do for you." We are not taught in our schools about the place we live in terms of an interplay of natural and man-made systems. Such an education would allow us to answer questions like: Where does your water come from and where does it go as wastewater? What watershed do you live in? Where does your energy for heat come from? Where does the food you eat grow? 13 Ancil Nance
A PORTLAND VISION ... First of all, I would like to see this for the year 2000: that anyone who wanted to work would have a job. I would say that is an absolutely critical part of any vision. . . . If you really get at the problems of crime, of fire prevention, of neighborhood deterioration—a lot of it has an economic base. The second thing I would like to see is that we would be a city which had significantly decreased reliance upon the automobile. People would be relying on buses, light rail, bicycles and walking. The results would be a very good air quality, reduced congestion, and a pedestrian-oriented type of city. This would probably involve several major light rail lines connecting parts of Portland and physically separated bicycle paths and pedestrian ways. There would be a bridge across the Willamette dedicated to bicycles and people. In the area of energy I would see us being one of the most efficient cities in the United States. We would have retrofitted our houses and businesses and planned our city in such a way that people would live near mass transportation. Businesses would be able to provide more jobs and thrive because they wouldn't have a tremendous increase in energy costs. Consumers would have more money to spend on other things because they wouldn't have to tie up so much of their income paying for energy. There would be a significant decentralization in the way decisions were made and money was allocated in government. Neighborhood associations and community-based groups would have a lot more control, and this would mean there would be a higher percentage of people who felt they had a vested interest in their community. They would feel they had control over their own lives, over developments in their neighborhoods, and over many of their resources. Along with this, I would see a much higher level of self-sufficiency in such areas as energy and emergency preparedness. I would also see that because the city government would have progressed so far with decentralization and with tapping into the talents and energies of people in the community, it would be financially well off and well run. Because of full employment and people with a vested interest in their community, there would also be a crime rate that was relatively low. There would be a much greater emphasis in the budget on prevention of crime in the first place than on taking care of it after it happened. This prevention would be in two ways. One would be neighbor helping neighbor—a sense of community on each block making it more difficult to commit crimes, fust as important would be an understanding of the causes of crime. The vast majority are committed by people who are relatively young and we would have more emphasis on youth employment programs. We would also have an improved educational system with greater choices for kids to stay in the system and develop their potential. —Mike Lindberg, Portland City Commissioner 14 t
My heart is moved by all 1cannot save: So much has been destroyed 1have to cast my lot with those who age after age, perversely, with no extraordinary power, reconstitute the world. —Adrienne Rich, The Dream of a Common Language I Bob Benson: Patron of Our Place by Richard Plagge During the middle years of the Great Depression, although they were both very poor, Bob Benson and his father bought 150 acres of near-wilderness land on the southwest slope of the Tualatin Mountains, 15 miles northwest of Portland, Oregon. Bob says he is embarrassed to tell how little they paid for it. Bob still lives on this land, alone now, in the house his father built during World War II, while Bob was away clerking for the army. The outbuildings are crumbling, vines have overgrown the remains of a picket fence which must once have squared off a pleasant little front yard. Just as his father did. Bob runs a few cattle and sells a little firewood—he is still very poor. The land, however, is worth a fortune. From a certain hilly clearing on Bob's land there is a dazzling view: two huge volcanic cones (Mount Jefferson and Mount Hood) punctuate the distant skyline; beneath them, 30 miles across the rich soil of the Tualatin Valley, the Chehelem Mountains snake their mild way across the low horizon. This valley—where, until the epidemics of the 1830's killed most of them, the Tualatin Indians hunted deer and gathered camas roots, where the very first Oregon Trail covered wagons finally came to a halt— is presently one of the fastest-growing areas in the state. Ambitious suburbanites—who have turned the eastern end of the valley into a typical late-twentieth century jumble of jammed two-lane roads and bleakly similar franchise outlets—have made it clear to Bob that selling his land is a duty. Why 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 ? Bob was born in 1915 in Portland, where his parents owned a rooming house at East Grand and Davis. His earliest memory is of holding his mother's hand as he toddled across the Sullivan's Gulch Viaduct. In the early '20s, wanting to leave urban life behind, dreaming of "five acres and independence," the family bought a small house a muddy half-mile from the railroad stop at Valley Vista, a tiny community located about halfway between where Bob lives now and the notorious Rock Creek Tavern. Bob's word for Valley Vista's educational edifice, the two- room Rock Creek School which he attended through sixth grade, is "palatial" : it had a concrete-lined basement, a furnace, a piano, and even a P.T.A. Bob's parents tried to supplement their income with various ventures: chickens one season, goats the next. Nothing proved to be very lucrative. But then it wasn't a very lucrative town; to be well-off in Valley Vista was to have a retired soldier's pension. On the whole. Valley Vista, a railroad development which had had the bad luck of being subdivided into existence on the eve of the automobile age, turned out to be a disappointing project for its speculator- backers. Sixty years later the place is still small and still muddy. Bob's father was a carpenter and small-time contractor who read a lot (Darwin and Kropotkin) and liked, as Bob does, to speculate on "the future of mankind." About the time Bob entered junior high the family leased out their Valley Vista place and moved to a cheap rental house in Oregon City, where his father, strapped for money, had taken a steady job. Bob discovered the nature section in the local library: all sorts of bird books, tree books, flower books. He devoured them all, and while he claims that he has never gained a profound knowledge of botany and biology, being able to identify the flora and fauna has been "a pleasure and a comfort" ever since. Many years later, speaking so softly that his visitors have to lean close to hear him. Bob will point out "lovely rare flowers" with his pudgy farmer's hand: There's the corydalis, an extreme rarity, related to the bleeding heart but quite different in the detail of the flower: it's gone to seed here, but when the whole thing is a spike of these odd-shaped flowers it's quite impressive. That little fringe of vine with the lacy flower, that's the saxifrage. And there's the native waterleaf. There is also a weed waterleaf from Europe which is very coarse-looking. As you can see the native waterleaf is anything but coarse. I didn't know about 15
David Brown that colony of tiger lilies . . . see them? There will be quite a show when they get into bloom. As Bob grew older the delicate petals of his “lovely rare flowers" would gradually assume the role of threatened protagonists in a dramatic geographic and temporal scenario. Now, in his sixties, he points out that the natural vegetation in his botanical zone is on the defensive, beleaguered by modern technical progress, constantly threatened by monster timber and earth-moving machinery, and by poison spray. The arch villains in this scenario are the sales representatives of poison spray companies whose incomes depend on convincing people, especially officials in Salem, that even if their product should happen to wipe out a native plant or two, there's no reason to join the petty hysteria of the environmentalists. These native plants are just weeds after all, which, when left to their own devices, try to spread their messy way onto (what 16 should be) neatly poisoned roadsides. Lesser villains in Bob's vision are certain flourishing non-native plant species which now cover acres and acres of Oregon and Washington. "A few newcomers have made themselves right at home here," Bob says, waving toward a gigantic tangle of himalaya blackberries. “They find our climate to be just what the doctor ordered. We must have a care for the native species or they'll be elbowed out by these immigrants. We crowded out the native Indians; we certainly don't want to see the scenario repeated in the plant kingdom." Bob likes to explain that the North Pacific Coast botanical zone, which extends from about Eureka, California north to Alaska, is either the smallest or the second smallest of the world's 24 botanical provinces (New Zealand might be slightly smaller). He says that there was a time when we could feel more complacent and say “Oh, even if it is a comparatively small botanical area. there's still so much land that there are bound to be holes and crannies here and there where almost anything could escape." But these days we can't be so sanguine about it: “With thousands of bulldozers rumbling about, and with all these poison merchants showing their bright shiny teeth, and treating the officials to banquets and giving them awards and medals for their assiduity in destroying weeds—why some of these valuable species might be lost. And that will be a particularly poignant tragedy, because our botanical zone is rather crucial in the evolutionary process." Crucial in the evolutionary process? “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 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 whole works. He tried manfully, says Bob, to get a successful company going, and did produce a surprising number of maps: of Hillsboro, of Washington County, of Sauvie Island. But somehow, for reasons Bob has never quite figured out, he was never really efficient. Maybe, he says, it was a certain laziness inherited from his paternal grandfather, a Minnesota Swede so captivated by the 10,000 lakes that he focused his life on fishing. "One can't do one thing entirely anyway," Bob says, "unless he's a sort of automatic producer. The boss cracks the whip at eight o'clock and you just keep on producing until five. You know, I can't do that." But when he closed down his little business Bob did not stop making maps. There is the wonderfully precise map of Indian dialects that was selected for the prestigious Oregon Historical Atlas. And there is the elegant multicolored map that gives such a clear image of the Northwest Maritime Climatic Region: imagine that you are looking south from a point two miles up in the air to the north of Vancouver Island. The island looms huge underneath you in the foreground; the Pacific Coast, with its inlets at the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Columbia River, is a fine curving pen line to the right; to the left the line of volcanos, each drawn in as a satisfying little mound, disappears toward California. In the upper left the following message appears on a huge cloud, written in Bob's neat, straightforward calligraphy; ON A RARE DAY OF PARTIAL CLEARING, CLOUDS SEPARATE TO REVEAL THE MARITIME NORTHWEST. ON THE EAST, THE CASCADE RANGE PROTECTS IT FROM THE THIRSTY PLATEAU. ON THE WEST IS THE PACIFIC. To the right, in the crescent formed by the Pacific Coast, a second cloud contains this message: SOUTHWARD THE SISKIYOUS AND TRINITY ALPS PALISADE THE MARITIME NORTHWEST AGAINST THE BARE BROWN HILLS AND BURNING PLAINS OF CALIFORNIA. NORTHWARD, THOUGH MARITIME CLIMATE PERSISTS, AGRICULTURE CEASES, TURNED BACK BY MOUNTAINS THAT RISE FROM THE SURF. The Maritime Region map illustrates one facet of Bob's mind, the ease with which it can get up above and see the lay of the land, the broad patterns. But he is \ 17 David Brown
equally fascinated by the specific and concrete, a focus perhaps best illustrated by the astonishing article (published in the Washington County Historical Society Journal) entitled “The Tualatin River, Mile By Mile." Beginning at the mouth of the river (Mile Zero) he takes his readers on an incredibly detailed journey along its banks, giving one paragraph for each tenth of a mile. For example: 1.7 Fields Bridge, takes Highway 212 across the river. I remember it as a covered bridge, but the modern replacement is an ordinary concrete span. There used to be tree swallows, an uncommon species, nesting in a bank near the bridge. Perhaps they still do. Just upstream from the bridge is a gauging station . 3.33 Harris Bridge, where Farmington Road (Highway 208) crosses. The dips where wagons gained access to the ferry can be seen a few rods south of the bridge. West of the bridge a furlong or so was Farmington, with a historic church and store. Both have disappeared but the community's picnic grove, long owned by the church, still rises forlornly behind the old site. Commerce has fled to the east side of the river, where Twin Oaks Tavern, at the River-Road-Highway 208 crossroads, enjoys an active till. 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, water falls, mineral and hot springs, of 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 a historical road. But in a deeper sense Bob wants his list-items 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 1100 sites mentioned in his card-file boxes are what, in Bob's view, give his county 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. A1971 letter to Riviera Motors, a large Portland Volkswagon 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 Volkswagon 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 expert," 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 onto his hat. Bob took a look about the room. Three or four BLM guys, sharply dressed in cream-colored shirts and wide neckties, bustled self- importantly about, carrying cups of coffee. The other desks were empty. Standing next to a map of Big Canyon, which was ensconced on an expensive- looking easel, one of the young men began the presentation, talking more to the other BLM people than to the plump man in the back row, whose socks seemed to be slipping toward his battered old shoes. When Bob raised his hand he looked like a large round fifth grader. "Yes?" said the lecturer, a tinge of impatience in his tone. Looking not at the young man, but off to the side. Bob, in his soft, clear voice, began to explain that there were a few problems with the map. The road at E-6 wasn't, he didn't think, there anymore, though there was a road near there until a mudslide washed it out around 1928. And were they aware that there was a nice little waterfall on that creek at about F-9? He went on in this vein until, in a couple of minutes, he was talking to an absolutely quiet room. A couple of people padded over to join the lecturer at the map. They stared at it curiously, as if they hadn't seen it before. A man hovered next to Bob, waiting to ask if he wanted his coffee dark or light. Bob was asked a lot of questions. He explained that his organization, The Tualatin Valley Heritage, felt that it was important to protect certain rare wild flowers which grew along the streambed in Big Canyon from the logging companies. The young men assured him that they shared his feelings, that the BLM would make every effort, etc, etc. Later, on the drive back to Portland, Bob was asked if he thought the BLM people were sincerely concerned about the flowers in Big Canyon. "I believe that there's enough of a leavening of really dedicated people that quite a bit might be done," he answered. "But you never know because there's always the other moiety that has its eye only on the main chance, which in this case means pleasing the big shots, the big timber producers." When it was suggested that his manner at the meeting had really wowed them. Bob said, "Oh sure, they have a certain respect for me in a small way, but it can't be a very big respect because I'm sure it didn't escape their notice that my group is rather small and weak. In the report they turn in on this meeting about Big Canyon a notation hidden in the fine print will make it clear that disapproval from the Tualatin Valley Heritage is not something to lose much sleep over." 19
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