Hanging out in eastern Oregon
Last week I spent four days in eastern Oregon, staying in a house surrounded by a horse corral and corn fields. Despite growing up in Kansas and working on the family farm, it had been a very long time since I had spent any significant time in rural America.
It is strange how much of one's life one can forget. And by that I don't mean that the memories are gone, but rather that they are so rarely recalled that what they represent is no longer substantial. I have a collection of stories about my life before I moved to California in 1985, but before my trip last week I had very little direct experience of the flavor and pace of life that defined my first 18 years. The stories have lost some of their evocative power; being in Oregon provided cues that brought the past back powerfully.
There was driving on long stretches of roads with few other vehicles. Rocking on a porch swing with a beer on a warm night. Burning a brush pile. Running along country roads in the heat of the afternoon. Looking under the hood of the pickup with the neighbors. Playing catch with the kids in the front yard. Going to Dairy Queen and A&W. Hanging out with people who know everyone in town. Pulling into the driveway and being greeted by the family pack of dogs. The twittering and chirping of birds.
Rural Oregon anchored the ends of several chains for me. There was my own re-connection with my past and the quiet lifestyle that it represents. There was the opportunity to experience the roots of the young man that I'm dating, to see the other end of the life that he has now planted in the Bay Area.
And there was the getting in touch with what I've been reading about lately: the industrial agricultural machine that feeds us. Right outside my window were the acres of irrigated corn that Michael Pollan wrote about in The Omnivore's Dilemma, something that I blogged about in early May. Like so many things in life, when seen up close, growing corn is simply people putting in a hard day's work. It's only from a distance that the price of feeding ourselves this way becomes clear.
My trip to Oregon was a spontaneous but significant step in getting to know someone and the world that shaped the curve of his life. It was an opportunity to relive some of my own early experiences. And it was an archetypical American road trip, that metaphor for life's changes and transitions that we've seen and read so many times. I'm back, and having been let into someone else's world, my own life isn't quite the same now. I'm on the road again, so to speak, and just possibly running with scissors. Augusten would be proud. :-)
UPDATES
Saw An Inconvenient Truth last Thursday. Go! (But carpool if you can. :-)
The Center for Food Safety has a campaign underway to support the labeling of genetically engineered food, the idea being to empower consumers to make informed choices about what they are eating and which food chains they are supporting. Click here to send an email to your representative in Congress.
It is strange how much of one's life one can forget. And by that I don't mean that the memories are gone, but rather that they are so rarely recalled that what they represent is no longer substantial. I have a collection of stories about my life before I moved to California in 1985, but before my trip last week I had very little direct experience of the flavor and pace of life that defined my first 18 years. The stories have lost some of their evocative power; being in Oregon provided cues that brought the past back powerfully.
There was driving on long stretches of roads with few other vehicles. Rocking on a porch swing with a beer on a warm night. Burning a brush pile. Running along country roads in the heat of the afternoon. Looking under the hood of the pickup with the neighbors. Playing catch with the kids in the front yard. Going to Dairy Queen and A&W. Hanging out with people who know everyone in town. Pulling into the driveway and being greeted by the family pack of dogs. The twittering and chirping of birds.
Rural Oregon anchored the ends of several chains for me. There was my own re-connection with my past and the quiet lifestyle that it represents. There was the opportunity to experience the roots of the young man that I'm dating, to see the other end of the life that he has now planted in the Bay Area.
And there was the getting in touch with what I've been reading about lately: the industrial agricultural machine that feeds us. Right outside my window were the acres of irrigated corn that Michael Pollan wrote about in The Omnivore's Dilemma, something that I blogged about in early May. Like so many things in life, when seen up close, growing corn is simply people putting in a hard day's work. It's only from a distance that the price of feeding ourselves this way becomes clear.
My trip to Oregon was a spontaneous but significant step in getting to know someone and the world that shaped the curve of his life. It was an opportunity to relive some of my own early experiences. And it was an archetypical American road trip, that metaphor for life's changes and transitions that we've seen and read so many times. I'm back, and having been let into someone else's world, my own life isn't quite the same now. I'm on the road again, so to speak, and just possibly running with scissors. Augusten would be proud. :-)
UPDATES
Saw An Inconvenient Truth last Thursday. Go! (But carpool if you can. :-)
The Center for Food Safety has a campaign underway to support the labeling of genetically engineered food, the idea being to empower consumers to make informed choices about what they are eating and which food chains they are supporting. Click here to send an email to your representative in Congress.
posted by michael at 3:18 PM
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2 Comments:
I took the MAX to see An Inconvenient Truth. Better than a carpool, I assume.
A moderately successful movie run is fine, but the show really needs to run on TV, in prime time.
But I don't expect that to happen until, say, Kennebunkport ME is swept out to sea, or a large chunk of Texas is devastated by hurricanes and twisters.
There's a revealing article about corn in this month's Smithsonian Magazine. It takes about a half-gallon of petroleum to grow an ear of corn. The fertilizers are made with fossil fuels, and of course it is harvested with equipment that runs on fossil fuels. Ethanol is NOT renewable in the final analysis.
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