« 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
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