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
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc4NTAz