What Things are Like Here

Skinner’s Bird’s Nest

 Introduction

I wrote the following for a British blog buddy who wishes to honor me with a visit, but I then had the thought that it might interest others also...

Eugene, Oregon, was founded in 1846 by an Easterner named Eugene Skinner. Upon surveying the area’s enveloping ridgeline from the 682-foot hill in the foreground of the photo, he said “it looked like a bird’s nest.” Skinner had planned to name the town Marysville after his wife, but upon learning that the name was taken by another Oregon community (which later changed its name to Corvallis), his wife designated his new town Eugene City—which was shortened to Eugene in 1889. She also named the aforementioned hill after him, and it bears the name Skinner Butte. However, a highrise near the bottom of the butte bears the mountain’s Kalapuya Indian name, Ya Po Ah, which inexplicably means a very high place.

Mary Skinner

On the west side of Skinner Butte are 45-foot basalt columns which Peggy used to climb in preparation for forays into the High Cascades. In recognition of her mountaineering achievements, the women of her climbing group ceremonially dubbed her Princess Climbing Rose. 

Basalt Columns on Skinner Butte

The distant hill in the top photo is five miles away at what is currently the southern edge of town. 2,058-foot Spencer Butte bears the name of a young Englishman who was killed and mutilated by a Kalapuya Indian on the flank of what they called Rattlesnake Mountain. His was the only known death at the hands of the Kalapuya while their tribe was destroyed by the violence and diseases of the white invaders. I will devote the remainder of this post to a description of the county of which Eugene is the county seat.

Origin: In 1851, Lane County was named after its first territorial governor, General Joseph Lane, an Indian killer and Mexican war hero. Although Lane soon lost favor in Oregon for his support of slavery and Southern secession, early Oregon was nonetheless racist. For example, in 1843, the Provisional Government of Oregon instituted the following punishment for black people who attempted to live here: “…not less than twenty nor more than thirty-nine stripes, to be inflicted by the constable of the proper county… if any free negro or mulatto shall fail to quit the country within the term of six months after receiving such stripes, he or she shall again receive the same punishment once in every six months, until he or she shall quit the country.”

Location: Lane County extends from the Pacific Ocean to the summit of the Cascade Mountains. Midway between the two is the Willamette Valley, a 120-mile long depression which begins near Eugene and ends near Portland. Although the valley is tiny compared to Oregon’s total land area, three out of four Oregonians live here. Willamette (pronounced wil LAM ette) is a Kalapuya Indian word for Valley of Sickness, a name that was inspired by its supposed healing qualities.

Size: Although Lane County is sixth in size among Oregon counties, it is four times larger than Rhode Island, twice the size of Delaware, and nearly as big as Connecticut. Oregon itself is the tenth largest of American states.

Parks: 12-mile long, 2,000 acre Ridgeline Park is Eugene’s largest followed by 240 acre Spencer Butte Park and 100 acre Skinner Butte Park. Added together, this town of 175,000 people has an impressive 4,200 acres of parkland, while over half of Lane County itself is owned by federal, state, county, and city governments.

Precipitation: Eugene gets 41-inches of rain per year, and isolated parts of the Coast Range get over 100-inches. Precipitation in the Cascade Range consists largely of snow. Due to global warming, the amount of snow in the mountains has dropped dramatically since my arrival in 1986. This is worrisome because the Valley depends upon melting snow to fill its reservoirs.

Deepest Lake: 420-foot, glacier-carved Waldo Lake.

Largest Rivers: the Willamette, the McKenzie, and the Siuslaw. Until the coming of the railroad, steamboats traversed the 300 Willamette River miles from Portland to Eugene—the straight-line distance is a hundred miles.

Elevation: From sea level at the coast to 10,358-feet in the Cascades.

Number of Mountains: 703

Mountain Ranges: Lane County contains portions of the Cascades and the Calapooyas, both of which are volcanic. The Cascades can be further divided into the High Cascades and the Old Cascades—the Calapooyas are a segment of the latter. Lane County also contains a portion of the thousand-mile long Coast Range, which was formed by uplift when the Pacific Plate slid under the North American Plate. 4,097-ft. Mary’s Peak is its highest point in Oregon. 

Number of Active Volcanoes: Seismologists are monitoring a slowly growing bulge on the west side of Lane County’s only active volcano, the South Sister. 

Greatest Natural Hazard: The Cascadia Subduction Zone is a 700-mile long area where the aforementioned tectonic plates are colliding. There is a 37% risk of a +9.0 earthquake erupting along this fault in the next fifty years. Before moving here, I had lived with hurricanes, thunderstorms, and tornadoes for my entire life, and there is no way that I would have moved to a place at risk of a megaquake had I known of it, but the threat was not known at the time.

Number of Waterfalls: 206 (https://www.waterfallsnorthwest.com/Oregon/County/Lane)

Number of Glaciers: 7 remain but are rapidly melting.

Tallest Waterfall: 286-foot Salt Creek Falls

Number of Hot Springs: 4

Tallest Tree: a 310-foot Douglas Fir. The Douglas Fir is Oregon’s “State Tree” and its primary timber source.

Number of Covered Bridges: 20.

Ten Crops: 90% of Lane County is forestland, but mint, hops, berries, hazelnuts, lavender, rosemary, vegetables, tree fruits, wine grapes, and Christmas trees, number among its other delightful crops.

Ten Fun Things to Do: hike, bike, ski, raft, fish, kayak, skateboard, snow ski, mountain climb, fly kites at the coast.

Population by Race: People of northern European ancestry constitute 89% of the population followed by Hispanics, Asians, indigenous, and black.(3) Despite the area’s racial homogeneity, modern Lane Countians honor racial diversity with bumper stickers, yard signs, murals, and statues. They also name parks, schools, and streets after well-known members of minority groups. Although black residents represent only 1.3% of the county’s population, they constitute a majority of honorees.

Lane County’s Indigenous Peoples: The last full-blood Kalapuya was “Aunt” Eliza Young who died in 1922, seventy-five years after her relatives offered the hand of friendship to Eugene Skinner. A large majority of Oregon’s Indians died of European diseases that were introduced by an ever increasing number of arrivals starting with the Spanish gold seeker Juan Cabrillo in 1542. Of those Indians who survived smallpox, typhus, typhoid, cholera, measles, pertussis, and other diseases, some were murdered (there being no penalty for it), but most died of neglect after being imprisoned on barren reservations. Even that wasn’t enough for immigrants who believed that America was a modern day Israel; that white Americans had replaced Jews as God’s chosen people; and that indigenous Americans were the equivalent of the Biblical idol worshipers that God ordered killed. By the printing of the March 16, 1872, edition of the Eugene Guardian, few Kalapuya remained, yet this didn’t deter the editor from labeling them a “disgrace” and demanding that they be “tarred, feathered, and hung.”

The Pioneer Mother

Politics: The pendulum has swung to the opposite side of the stupid spectrum since the days when Chinese railroad builders were called chinks and cooleys and the Ku Klux Klan burned crosses on Skinner Butte in order to intimidate Jews, liberals, non-whites, suffragists, and Catholics. Some examples.... In 2020, Eugene businesses and vehicles were vandalized when a black man 2,000 miles away was killed by a policeman. In another incident, a monument honoring Lane Countians who died in World War II was vandalized, and in a third, University of Oregon students pulled down two large statues and battered one of them with sledgehammers after hearing their history professor say that the Oregon Trail pioneers were thieves, rapists, and murderers who thought they were serving God by destroying lives and cultures that they deemed worthless. Although the demonstration was filmed by scores of cameras, no arrests were made, and the university declined to restore the statues.

Religion: 75% of Lane Countians have no religion followed by the 13% who are Protestant and the 6% who are Catholic. My previous county in Mississippi is at the other end of the American spectrum with 79% of its residents saying they are religious and 0% daring to say that they are not. Religious oppression served as a major motivator for me leaving the state. In one memorable incident, I was rapped on the head by another juror when I declined to stand for a prayer that was led by the district attorney.

Noteworthy Movies: My first glimpse of Lane County came from the movie Animal House with John Belushi (1978), but Stand By Me with River Phoenix (1986) and The General with Buster Keaton (1926) are far better movies that offer a far better look at the countryside. For a list of movies that were shot entirely in Eugene, go to Wikipedia, Films Shot in Eugene.

Nicknames for Eugene: Emerald City, Track Town USA, and Track and Field Capital of the World. The name Emerald City was inspired by the greenery, the others by Eugene’s prominence in track and field events, among which are try-outs for the Olympics. Appropriately, University of Oregon track coach Bill Bowerman invented the first spikeless track shoe (his company became Nike) in Eugene. Without Limits is a Eugene-made movie about Bowerman and his best-known runner, Steve Prefontaine, who died in a car accident in Eugene at age 24.

Memorial at Site of Accident

Ten Delightful Crops: grapes, mint, hops, berries, hazelnuts, lavender, rosemary, vegetables, tree fruit, Christmas trees.

Ten Popular Things to Do: hike, bike, ski, raft, run, fish, kayak, skateboard, snow ski, mountain climb.

Ten Things that Oregon Got Right: The city of Eugene has purchased over twelve miles of encircling ridgeline so its residents can see trees rather than highrises when they lift their eyes to the hills. Every inch of Oregon’s 362-mile coastline is publicly owned and publicly accessible, and Oregon led the nation in passing a bottle bill, legalizing assisted suicide, decriminalizing cannabis, voting entirely by mail, electing a LGBT governor, legalizing psilocybin, automatic voter registration, and mandating an end to coal-fired power.

A Virtually Unkown Event in Oregon’s History:

The following isn’t related to Lane County, but I’m going to close with it because it is so interesting and so undeservedly forgotten, even in Oregon. On May 5, 1945, Oregon suffered the American mainland’s only World War II fatalities when a woman and five children were killed by a Japanese balloon bomb while picnicking. Some of the women who manufactured the 9,300 balloon bombs that were launched by Japan later apologized for those deaths. The attack had been in retaliation for the 300,000 Japenese deaths in American firebombings of the Japanese mainland. Other nearby Japanese attacks consisted of a submarine firing upon an Oregon fort, and a submarine-carried float-plane dropping incendiaries on an un-inhabited mountain in the hope of starting a forest fire.

In closing: “Renew your youth, enjoy life, and start for heaven from the best town on earth, Eugene, Oregon.”                                                                     Anybody’s Magazine 1906

5 tails, 10 eyes, 20 feet, 56 pounds, 90 toes, 120 whiskers, 150 teeth

 

I hate it when people ask why Peggy and I have five cats because I don’t want to make her look bad for denying me my right to have ten. I ask her, “When I’m dead, won’t you regret preventing me from spending our life savings on cats?” to which she replies, “I’ll just be glad that I don’t have even more litter boxes to clean.” 

From 10:00 to 12:00 each night, I read in bed in the company of cats. Timid little Scully—the tuxedo cat second from left—took years to gather the courage to join me in bed and another year to move close enough for me to reach her. When the noise of wind, airplanes, car doors, heavy rain, and other things frighten Scully, I have the privilege of calming her fears. 

The middle cat—seven-year-old Ollie—was abandoned while nursing. A cat rescuer bottle-fed him every two hours around the clock until he was old enough to eat, and then Peggy and I adopted him. Upon entering his new home, he immediately sought comfort from our fifteen-pound tabby, Brewsky. Brewsky hadn’t been near another cat since he came to us as a kitten five years earlier. He now looked at us as if to ask: “What in the hell am I supposed to with this thing?” After a tense moment, he bathed Ollie and then allowed him to “nurse.” Seven years later, Ollie is still nursing.

Ollie’s worst problem is that he vomits up everything he eats unless I—me, personally—give him special food in a special feeder. Two year’s ago, he started vomiting anyway, so I had to switch from three large meals a day to six small ones. He’s now back to three meals and chattering happily to himself the entire time he’s eating.

The cat at the end of the bed is five-year-old Sage. I usually get out of bed before Peggy does only to have him ignore me. When Peggy appears an hour later, Sage talks to her nonstop being cuddled. In the evenings, she holds him in her arms while dancing through the house. Late at night, they have extended conversations similar to the following. Peggy: Miaow. Sage: Meow? Peggy: No—miaow. Sage: Miaow? Peggy: Yes, miaow. Sage’s eyes open like saucers. Peggy laughs and roughs his fur. Sage says Miaow!!! Peggy responds Meow yourself, Mr. Man! Sage whispers in her ear. Peggy laughs. Peggy and Sage embrace.

Sage’s only flaw is that he becomes abusive when angry, and that too is directed at Peggy. Happily, he only becomes angry every other Friday when she clips his toenails, and only then when she does his back feet. She has to put her face near his while she works, and it is my job to keep his head pointed away from her face.

My hand is on three year old Harvey, who is a beautiful cat although he looks like a dirty dust mop in the photo. After lovingly parenting our other kittens, Brewksy walked right up to Harvey when Harvey arrived with the intention of bathing him. Despite being more fluff than cat, Harvey flattened his ears and hissed. He remains our only cat who has never deferred to The Patriarch of the Cat Side of the Family. He is usually on hand to welcome visitors, and to do what he can to assist repairmen. He also likes to steal my chair—or my place in bed—within seconds of me getting up to do something. When Peggy is brushing him, he will often hook a finger with his claws, hold it in his mouth, and go to sleep. 

Prior to Brewsky’s arrival in 2010, I lived with dogs for 61-years, so I can confidently say that dogs and humans are hierarchists while—except for lions—the world’s 38 cat species live alone except when rearing their young. Yet...

Year in and year out, my five cats live within the same four walls. They share food, play together, tolerate foibles, bath one another, sleep with their bodies touching, settle arguments without bloodshed, and worry when one of their adopted siblings is upset. But if Felis silvestris catus is a solitary species, how are such things possible?

When we got Brewsky, I was as nervous as a new father who had never held a baby. Two days later, we took him to our vet—Sean Barrett—for his first check-up, and I was so impressed by Sean’s handling of him, that I resolved to also move slowly, touch gently, and speak softly. Brewsky and our other cats continued my education by teaching me to behave predictably; respect their independence; demonstrate joy in their existence; pay attention to what they tell me; abandon any hope of obedience or conformity; and avoid coercion whenever possible. 

The love of a dog is a given; the love of a cat is a reward for good behavior. Yet I treated one of my cats in ways that surely would have caused the others to hate me.

Within months of his arrival, Brewsky grew from a cute kitten to a stubborn and willful adolescent who would look me dead in the eye while doing the very things I had just told him not to do. One night while Peggy was at work, I became so angry that I chased him thorough the house while yelling and slapping floors and overstuffed chairs with the flat side of a yardstick. I thought he would run under the couch, but he instead ran through the house in a circuit that ran from living room, to hall, to dining room, and back to living room. After a few laps, he stopped, turned, caught my eye, and rolled onto his back and asked for a belly rub. Thus began a nightly ritual in which I would play the role of a homicidal human; Brewsky would play the role of a terrified inferior; and then we would cuddle. Try as she might, Peggy couldn’t wrap her brain around the idea that what looked like a prelude to murder was actually a male bonding ritual worthy of drunken cowboys in a John Wayne movie.

“Dogs look up to us. Cats look down on us.” —Winston Churchill

Contrary to the feline snobbery suggested by Churchill (who was himself a cat lover), no cat is proud of belonging to one of the better families or ashamed of being from the wrong side of the tracks. While chimps, rats, wolves, humans, hyenas, and meerkats, are busy forming cliques, waging wars, installing dictators, and conspiring to mistreat others, cats are at quietly at home minding their own business. 

People who consider cats cruel, selfish, unloving, fawning, and antisocial, project onto cats what their motives would be if they behaved similarly. According to animal behaviorists.... 

Asking for food, eating it, and then seeking privacy in which to bathe and nap only means that cats feel drowsy after they eat, and that they prefer to sleep in secluded places where they are safe from large predators. Likewise, they wash away food odors so that large predators can’t locate them.... Cat critics are also wrong in thinking that cats have repeatedly capture the same bird or mouse because they’re cruel, the truth being that they are honing their hunting skills. As for other errors...

While it is true some cats dominate other cats, such behavior is situational rather than ongoing, and—unless it results from close confinement—the roles of dominator and dominated reverse after a few months. Although males often fight over females, the queen (for that is what she is called) reserves the right to choose her mate, and she often chooses the loser.... Male cats have the reputation for being absentee fathers, yet some males love their own kittens and—as with Brewsky—the kittens of other males, and even the offspring of other species. 

The following is from the Desiderata* poster that graced the walls of teenagers during the ‘60s and ‘70s: 

“Go placidly amid the noise and the haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence… As far as possible, without surrender, be on good terms with all persons… Speak your truth quietly and clearly…Avoid loud and aggressive persons… do not feign affection… in the noisy confusion of life, keep peace in your soul… do not distress yourself with dark imaginings. You are a child of the universe no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here.” 

To humans, these are aspirational values; to cats, they’re descriptive. 

*https://www.desiderata.com/desiderata.html

Why Straight Men Are So Weird About Women

My Cat and i

Girls are simply the prettiest things
My cat and i believe
And we’re always saddened
When it’s time for them to leave

We watch them titivating
(that often takes a while)
And though they keep us waiting
My cat & i just smile

We like to see them to the door
Say how sad it couldn’t last
Then my cat and i go back inside
And talk about the past

—Roger McGough

 Heterosexual men are drawn to women like steel to magnets. The attraction is so strong and unremitting that they are often powerless to put it out of their minds. Many conclude from this that women are knowing and powerful beings who have the ability to purposefully control the strength and direction of a man’s feelings. Although naive women sometimes find this view flattering, its overall outcome is unhappiness for men and misery for women. For example:

(1) Some men elevate women to the status of demigoddesses. Because knowledge destroys delusion, a man who builds a relationship with a woman eventually comes to recognize his mistake. Although he might love her by then, his realization that she is human forces him to find someone else upon whom to project his delusion, whether within or without of his current relationship.

(2) Other men’s lust for women leaves them feeling vulnerable, so they attempt to turn the tide by making women vulnerable. Some resort to rape, physical abuse, or browbeating. Others claim that Satan uses women to drive a wedge between men and God, and so it is God’s will that women be rendered powerless and invisible. It was for this reason that the church of my childhood denied women the right to preach, teach Sunday school, ask questions, and make announcements, along with discouraging them from attending college or working outside the home.

As a small child, I was so captivated by the wife of a visiting cousin that I spent the evening in her lap. I would have done anything to please her, and I believed that everyone in the room recognized the necessity of me sleeping with her. When my mother forced me from the woman’s lap, I cried while the adults laughed. 

In an adolescent fantasy, I envisioned a woman walking through Arlington National Cemetery on a lovely spring day. The woman’s beauty gave her such power that entire regiments of dead soldiers followed after her. Such fantasies are not unusual…

Plots of the hit TV show Rawhide! sometimes revolved around the irresistible influence that beautiful but unscrupulous women had over a young and naive drover named Rowdy Yates (played by a boyish Clint Eastwood). Rowdy continued to be entrapped by such women despite his trail boss’s repeated admonition: “Rowdy, just because a woman looks like an angel, it don’t mean she is one.” 

In Jimmy Dean’s song, The Cajun Queen, a New Orleans’ woman resurrects a man who had been dead for days by placing “a red-hot kiss on his cold blue lips.” Then there were the pop-music goddesses from my adolescence: Venus, Earth Angel, Teen Angel, Venus in Blue Jeans, and My Special Angel, songs that flattered women and spoke truth to the fantasies of men. But what does any of this have to do with a poem about a talking cat? 

Although they try to hide it, men often react to a beautiful woman like a dog reacts to a female in heat. This is why some women regard men as slobbering buffoons whose stupidity runs neck-and-neck with their wickedness. The truth is that both genders conform to the roles that nature assigned them. During his lifetime, a man produces 525-billion sperm. During her lifetime, a woman produces 400-500 eggs, only a few of which can become people. This is why nature programmed men to insure the survival of their DNA by impregnating as many women as possible, while it programmed women to seek protection for themselves and their few offspring. 

The man in the poem is tempted by two or more flirtatious women, but instead of hurrying them into bed, he smilingly awaits their departure so he can be alone with his cat. Most men would have as soon thrown the cat—or the piano, for that matter—out the window if doing so would get the women into bed quicker.

Even if a man manages to think about something other than sex in one moment, he is at risk of being overwhelmed by sexual desire in the next, even if he is alone. The man in the poem is not alone. He has leisure, privacy, and two or more willing women. Fortunately, he also has the ability to say no. After age reduced my hormone levels, I too was able to say no. I also stopped mythologizing women. 

“I’m so sorry for that ghost I made you be. Only one of us was real and that was me.” —Leonard Cohen

Despite what women often believe, a man’s struggle isn’t between virtue and intelligence versus depravity and stupidity. It is more akin to the Homerian story in which the irresistible song of temptresses would have lured the hero Odysseus to his death had his crew not protected him. Real men are without protection. Real men struggle alone until they die or old age renders the problem moot.

“I don’t need a lover, no, no, no. The wretched beast is tame.”

—Leonard Cohen