The fence, made of sheets of corrugated metal, held up with leaning two-by-fours seemed to go on forever, there were splits and gaps, but none so wide that you could really get a view of what was going on inside. The noise was enough to let you know that the quarter mile oval was filled with cars with v-8s and straight pipes. On the inside were bleachers, and not much else around the bare asphalt, with a dirt and grass infield. The Salem Speedway had been known as the “Hollywood Bowl” because it was on the north end of the Hollywood district. Its not clear when the name was dropped officially, old timers still called it the Hollywood Bowl up until the seventies when it was closed forever, and destroyed. The anchor of the district was the Hollywood Theater, a great old fashioned movie theater where kids could go on Saturday mornings, get in for a quarter and watch a great double feature, and a serial. The cliff hanger serials were awesome, with heroes who would drive into an explosion one week, and survive it through creativity the next, when it picked up and showed you how they avoided complete and utter destruction.
And destruction was also the name of the game at the Speedway, the most exciting races were not races at all, but smashups using reinforced lead sleds with the last car running being the winner.

The midget racers were little bullets zooming around the track at high speed, no doubt emphasized by their diminutive nature, chrome nerf bars gleaming and glittering numbers shining on the fancy little paint jobs. The wrecks of these little cars were exciting despite their size and left one wondering how you could survive such a violent encounter with asphalt metal and tin. These little cars, and their smaller brothers, the quarter midgets are often credited with bringing affordable racing to the small out of the way tracks, like the Salem Speedway after the war, and they did just that, midget racing originated in the 1940s among enthusiasts unable to afford Indy cars.
The midget cars from the fifties and sixties were designed to be like the current Indy style racers, and gave off that aura on a small scale.
Heres part of a schedule from the fifties, Oregon Midget racing was rained out a lot…

Oregon Midget Racing Association, 1957

4/21 Jantzen Beach Ken McLaughlin (37)

5/17 Jantzen Beach –Rain–

5/18 Salem –Rain–

7/4 Jantzen Beach Nick Uren (?) Day Race

7/4 Jantzen Beach Pogo Lundquist (?) Night Race

7/22 Salem Bob Gregg (?)

7/28 Jantzen Beach Pogo Lundquist (22)

Thanks to Oregon Midget Racing Association Site visit here for a bit of very rare nostalgia

The original Fido logo from rtfm

When I used telnet for a connection that allowed access to ARPANet, I found an entirely new world where one could visit schools and government institutions all over the country. I was blown away as I found myself learning Unix at its most basic and traveling the highway that is so familiar to us today, this was a glimpse of what was to become the Internet, and a view of things to come.

With all that behind, and the world wide web, commercialism, spam and myspace ahead, those who foresaw some of that were rewarded well.

The idea that children who spend time doing creative things on the computer and interacting with others are wasting that time completely misses the point. The computer is a device that can help one learn how to learn, and to be creative. If we concentrate too much on the rote aspects of learning word processors, or spreadsheets, we put a cap on the almost limitless possibilities there are when we turn them loose to learn. Learning how to program. whether its in basic, html, Pascal or ‘c’ is learning in its purest form, and debugging that programming is the ultimate course in how to create.

The idea that test scores must improve to give meaning to any innovation in education is off base, even though of course, test scores mean something in the large picture, but educating a student in learning on their own is much more important. Give a man a fish, he’ll eat for a day, teach him to fish and he’ll eat for the rest of his life applies here.

If you expect kids and computers to be compatible, you have to give them some freedom to explore and to manipulate. This is not to say that unbridled access to the Internet at a young age is required, or even desired simply that we not bemoan the fact that they spend more time chatting or programming than they do word processing. The fact that jobs require computer literacy doesn’t have to put them in a box, they can learn without being in a box.

The number one time munching activity among kids is probably playing games online, and while this is probably the least productive thing they can be doing, it has possibilities for useful learning, and we should encourage creating their own, whether it be programming a game, or programming for a game.. once again, creating generates creativity…

When Khrushchev pounded his shoe on the podium and said ‘we will bury you’ he didn’t count on the generation that was coming along, and once again we may be able to thrive if we trust in the generation of the computer age, and live by the constitution -and- the declaration of independence.

While running a BBS for many years, the range of things I learned to do was simply amazing, simple programming, improving my typing and all the rest made me computer literate and a much better learner than I would otherwise have been.

realism

Woody Guthrie, from ‘Pastures of Plenty’

Come labor for your mother, your father and your brother
For your sister and your lover, bracero
Come pick the fruit of yellow, break the flower from the berry
Purple grapes will fill your belly, bracero
Oh, Welcome to California
Where the friendly farmer will take care of you

Phil Ochs from ‘Bracero’

The shortage of workers to pick pole beans in Independence, apples in Hood River, and hops in Mission Bottom near Salem provided the impetus, in Oregon, to participate in what was to become the Bracero program. Started by the Federal government in 1942, the idea was to bring able bodied workers from Mexico to help harvest food which was sorely needed by not only the people in this country, but the allies whose countries were torn by the war. Bracero can be loosely translated as ‘unskilled worker’, though it has been loosely translated as other things as well. When announcements asking for a few hundred workers were released in Mexico City in 1942, some 50,000 showed up. Eventually workers from Mexico were harvesting crops from Florida to California, and in Idaho, Washington and many other places. During the war and after these workers provided a significant workforce that played a vital role in keeping agriculture moving in the United States.

After the war many of these men brought their families back to the places they had worked as Braceros and began what was to be the migrant worker economy that lasted well into the seventies. Around Stayton, Independence, Woodburn and many other places there were farms set up to house workers. The housing was decrepit, sub-standard and pathetic by any standards. Long row bunkhouse style clapboard buildings often with dirt floors. Poor or no plumbing, and no or little sanitation, people were expected to be working from dawn to dusk anyway, picking crops at microscopic pay, so housing conditions were deemed irrelevant. All the members of the family worked, from grandparents to toddlers, and it was necessary, to make ends meet and be able to travel on to the next place, the next crop.

I spent some time at Green Villa farm near Independence in the early sixties, and it was a community, lots of kids, and lots of dirt, the shack bunkhouses were painted white, but that barely hid the inadequacy of the housing.

Some of these people broke out of the chain, and overcoming prejudice (there were signs saying, ‘no dogs or mexicans allowed’ in businesses in Oregon and Idaho) got their children in school and managed to acquire permanent work. The advent of the United Farm Workers Union led by Cesar Chavez in California helped to bring about changes in work and life conditions for farm workers.
The grape boycott was the most visible tool used in the fight, and it gathered a momentum unforeseen by even its creators.
In the late sixties Oregon was a pioneer in improving conditions in housing, providing schooling and healthcare to the migrant laborers. These improvements led to the demise of the large farm labor camps.

In the early seventies Collegio Cesar Chavez was opened in Mt. Angel providing education and grounding for Latinos in the Willamette valley. Taking the former grounds of Mt. Angel College, CCC was the first four year accredited college in the country oriented and managed by Latinos. Although the college closed its doors in 1983, it pointed the way to cultural and societal community for a large segment of the population.

The large latino communities in Woodburn, Stayton and other places in Oregon have their roots in the Bracero program, migrant worker immigration, and the United Farm Workers.

In this time of clamoring for the military on the borders, of hostility to immigrants, we should take a moment to think of the roots of the problem, its origins in government programs and the needs of our economy. The spiraling out of control of illegal immigration is as much the direct result of American need as it is in Mexico’s dependence on receiving the fruits of that need.

I saw my first car on the side of the road, it was two-tone green.. a very light green, with a creamy lighter green band running around the passenger compartment. Being a 1955 Ford Ranch Wagon meant it was boxy.. but it was love at first sight. My father turned the truck around and we went back to look. It had a black and red ‘for sale’ sign in the window.. a little v8 sticker on the right front fender, and I wanted it badly. It was $150 but dad said we could work that out, I’d been working for him for quite a while, and he would let me make payments, so we test drove it. First thing I found out was that it was a three speed on the column, with no synchro-mesh in first gear. For those who don’t know what this means.. lets just say, you couldn’t put the car in first gear unless you were stopped, so you basically had to drive with two gears.
The main reason to have a car was of course, to go to the drive-in, and there were several around. The North Salem drive-in was very familiar to me, having gone there with my parents for years.. We kids would get in our pjs and go watch movies, the idea was that we would go to sleep right away, but I always stayed up and watched some of the great movies of the fifties and early sixties. From ‘Taras Bulba’ in which Yul Brenner plays a middle ages cossack chieftain, to ‘The Misfits’ a great movie about dying breeds, starring Marilyn Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.. (speaking of dying breeds)..
Running that engine to keep the window defrosted, vacuum windshield wipers on the nights it rained, and memories of surfing and hot rod movies, the sixties were a time of the Hammer horror flicks too, with Christopher Lee as Frankenstein or someone and the unforgettable Peter Cushing as lots of someones and short appearances by actors who would be names, Jack Nicholsen comes immediately to mind. Lee as Dracula, Cushing as Van Helsing.. what a cast.
The trip though was to Coos Bay, we were off to be surfers. Some 150 miles to the south, in the old ranch wagon it might as well have been a zillion, but we made it. I knew a guy who ran a surf shop, near North Bend and we went in to see boards being made.. these were all fiberglass long boards at that time, and the process was amazing. Setting it up, coating with fiberglass the end result slick shiny and beautiful. The ranch wagon was perfect for hauling boards down to Sunset Bay, and the surf was incredible. It didn’t take me long to realize that these guys were tough, in the cold pacific, wet suits notwithstanding. I couldn’t unfreeze enough in the water to do anything, but the bonfire on the beach and the beautiful sunsets made the scene amazing.
The thing is, we had spent all our money traveling to Coos Bay, and were totally broke, big question was how were we going to get back, we had jobs for the summer and we couldn’t wile it away at the beach. One of my buddies decided to take matters into his own hands, said he’d get us a tank of gas and off he went.. When he came back later with two five gallon gas cans, it looked like we were in business, at least enough to get us most the way home. While he poured them in, we said goodbye to our friends then off we went. We didn’t get far though, and as we smelled something strange, the car sputtered and stopped.
I asked him what the smell was, and he said.. it must be diesel. Wonderful, he had poured ten gallons of diesel fuel into the gas tank of my car, and with the little bit of gas left, we had tried to run the car on almost straight diesel.

We drained the tank, walked back to the beach, managed to get a ride, borrow some money, buy some gas.. and finally got home, although we were late, all in trouble, and a little wiser about what might be in gas cans.

Within a year, I had read ‘Future Shock’, the first thinking discussion of what the future might hold, and the dilemma of oil versus environment and humanity had worked its way into my consciousness. I gave up my car and tried to survive swimming upstream in the fossil fuel economy, but eventually succumbed and became one more card carrying consumer, ready to adjust my living standard to preserve my automobile. And now, I ponder the consequences of this behavior for the planet, as China moves into the fossil fuel individual automobile economy and threatens to overcome the United States as the number one consumer and polluter.

The twenty-first century has its parallel in the disaster of 9-11-2001, and the co-opting of the tragedy for the purposes of Bush’s government. The freedoms abridged by the Patriot Act, Homeland Security and their minions needed a dark, unspecified enemy to fight, and they got it in spades. It is no longer necessary to have a reason to arrest someone, all it takes is to suspect that they may have conspired, talked about, maybe even read about, anything the government deems related to terrorist activities. We can be wiretapped without a warrant, in complete contradiction to the rulings of our highest court.
The idea that crimes can be projected into the future, that nothing has to happen to cause one to be listed as a terrorist is a shift in criminal justice behavior that goes completely against the grain of constitutional rights and the spirit of the law.
We have stepped backwards into the abyss of Big Brother and 1984.

The big problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of who our enemy is, and what it is they are fighting for. Since we supported Bin Laden during the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan, we should, but we have missed the point, over and over. The very idea of a democratic government is anathema to militant Islamists who believe that the only law is God’s Law, giving control to a voting populace doesn’t interest them in the least. The small war in Afghanistan was turned into a a far war, not by the enemy, but by the president of the United States who chose to ignore reasoning, and send our troops into the heart of the middle east.
We are a target for exactly that reason, our troops in Saudi Arabia, infidels on sacred land, have engendered hostility since their arrival, and their continued presence only compounds the animosity.

There was nothing more we could have done to further the desires of our enemies than to invade Afghanistan, which was the downfall of the Soviet Union, and Iraq where we could dissipate our resources and kill and harm our children as we kill the Iraqis. All the time, incurring the wrath of the Islamic world as we destroy any goodwill we might have had amongst them. Now we are ducking and covering, waging war as imperialists (regardless of intention, it doesn’t really matter about our motives to the rest of the world) and suffering economic crisis as we spend the future in trillions of national debt.

There was an overwhelming feeling of sadness, this was the president whose speeches I had listened to, ‘ask not what your country can do for you’, ‘ Ich bin ein Berliner‘ and who to me, at the age of 13 had seemed to epitomize the good in government and in our country. And suddenly, it was all gone. A Texas old school politician was the new president, and I felt a letdown that can only be summed up by the relief I felt five years later when I heard Lyndon Baines Johnson say ‘ I will not seek and will accept my parties nomination for another term as your President’. His heart was heavy, mine soared. Of course, it was the precursor to other assassinations, Martin Luther King Jr., Robert F. Kennedy..then the riot at the Chicago Democratic Convention, which appeared to be more of a police riot than anything else. The railroading through of the party bosses’ candidate, Humbert Humphrey, was the ultimate insult, leaving McCarthy, McGovern and the slain RFK all behind in favor of Johnson’s VP. Did I say ultimate, well not quite, the election of Richard M. Nixon would take that honor, and the aspirations and hopes of the generation growing up in what should have been the Kennedy era were all destroyed. The war would rage on another five years, while our president sought ‘peace with honor’ and bombed Laos, Cambodia, North Viet Nam, and of course South Viet Nam.

There’s another ‘where I was when’, a revelation, that I’ve also never forgotten. Perhaps it should have given me a bit of a warning of what was to come, but I was very young, very very naive..

We had our Junior Scholastics magazines in class, a weekly occurrence when I was in elementary school, I was 12 at the time, the assassination a year off, and I learned something I would never forget. My country was involved in a war, one that I knew nothing about, one that wasn’t on the evening news, or if so, was very low profile. The article was about the Plain of Jars in Laos, a funny sounding place, in a country of which I had never heard. It seems that our president had been sending advisers there to help the Laotians fight a little battle with communist insurgents. These advisers were in reality, combat troops, the United States Army, and foretold much of what was going to become of my country in the 1960’s.

I remember the first peace sign I saw, crudely painted on a sign post in San Francisco, below it a cryptic, ‘bring our troops home’.. and I thought of the Plain of Jars, and wondered what had happened in the ensuing years. Of course, it stopped being such a private little adviser war and, in time, we would all know about South-East Asia and our war.

When men landed at on the moon for the first time, I was once again watching on a small black and white TV, in the backroom of my first house.. a narrow mobile home (what can I say, it’s not tornado country after all).. and I wondered, out loud in fact.. if this was all staged. With the advent of all color, all definition, all the time TV, its a little hard to imagine squinting at that black and white poor reception and being able to question, let alone clearly see. One small step for man, one giant leap for Nasa’s budget. Now days, the flag blowing straight out in the breeze in those pictures, the seeming narrowness of the stage, all lends towards a more general conspiratorial feeling, one which I share only in retrospect. We did or we didn’t, it doesn’t really matter in the overarching sequence of events.

politics

So, we headed for the coast, walking down the winding road, alongside the river, hitching and hoping for a ride. Three days later, and with lots of experience of riding in trucks, cars, and walking endless miles of coastal highway 101, we found ourselves set down on Van Ness Boulevard near the wharf in San Francisco. The marina was a marvelous place of tall narrow row houses, with garages built underneath, which had largely been converted to extra living space, the pastel colors seemed a pallet of bath inspired taste.

One of the first places I wanted to go was Haight Ashbury of course, so we got on a cable car, changed to a green and white electric bus and headed off. We found it a busy place, full of young people, tourists, and bikers. The cars drove down the street in an endless procession as the ‘rubber neckers’ watched the hippies and interacted as sellers of the ‘Berkeley Barb’ and other papers sold to the tourists in their cars.

Head shops, poster shops and combinations of the two took up most of the storefronts on Haight Street, between bars and older establishments of the neighborhood. What had been the Haight theatre had been redone as the ‘Straight Theatre’ and on its marquee it touted up coming acts in movie theater lettering..Charlie Musselwhite was up and coming it seemed. There had been a convergence of events bringing thousands to the area, Monterey Pops in June, some of the local bands were gaining national attention, ‘the summer of love’ was in the news as was analysis of countercultural behavior, hippies were a hot item. Ironically enough, most of the early inhabitants and the bands had begun to move to the country, to Marin or further north by the time attention truly focused on the district.

Golden Gate Park was originally designed as an urban retreat to rival New York’s Central Park, and went far beyond in some ways in its eventual execution. Known to early residents as the “outside lands”, it was carved out of sand dunes and shore. In the sixties, the park was amazing, in walking through its thousand acres, one went from Kezar stadium to the ocean and the Great American Highway, past and through hundreds of sights, sounds and intrigue. It is long and narrow, and streets run by on either side, but in the park between you could find yourself lost in all that it held. Along Frederick, Haight street fed into the entrance to the park, under a tunnel, with the stucco concrete walls of Kezar to your left, it was an ediface of amazing size, but completely unremarkable in the face it presented to the park entrance, just a blank yellowish wall.. could have been nothing on the other side at all, but of course, it was a football stadium, home to the 49’s and the Raiders at that time. Walking through the park on winding paths past what would become known as ‘hippy hill’ after the be-ins, love-ins, and happenings, the conservatory came into view on the north side of the park. The inside of this gorgeous greenhouse was like a jungle, full of tall tropical trees and ponds full of giant koi and carp.

The Japanese Tea gardens were stunning with arched bridges, stone and wood, pagodas and bonzai shaped plantings.

The model boats in Spreckels Lake were amazing to someone who had spent hours guiding boats down gutters on rainy days in northern Oregon. The impression I took away from the park, away from the main attributes was one of overhanging branches, benches, and people.. always a good spot for people watching, Golden Gate Park in 1967 was really ‘where it was at’. Young people from all over, beatniks and hippies, musicians, speakers and it seemed, everyone.

The journery through the park ended at the highway, and the ocean.. you could look south and see San Francisco Zoo, and north to see the Cliff House..

in between were the amusement park, and an old storefront that would be the Family Dog, a music venue in a couple of years.

Some of my fondest memories are of the panhandle, a narrow strip of park which extended east from the city end of the park, paralleling the Haight. It was here that afternoon meals were served by the Diggers, a group of avant garde actors who had a number of projects to help the flood of young people coming to the district at the time. They opened free stores, the one on Frederick was amazing, a two story building, kind of like a thrift store, except it was free, and open for donations. Eventually the Diggers would include a number of well knowns, including actor Peter Coyote, and a number of members of the San Francisco Mime Troop. They were not in reality mimes, but a guerilla troupe who performed anti-war and anti-establisment in the panhandle, around town and in the park itself. Sometimes a flatbed truck would pull up into the panhandle, and bands would play using it as a stage and power source. At the time a number of the local talent, which included, the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, and Big Brother and the Holding Company, and others who lived in else where in town, or across the bridges, like Quicksilver Messenger Service and Country Joe and the Fish would play a set. It was great live music, in its formative stages and a great setting.

We walked along the road, cars lining it on both sides, and stopped, filling both lanes, thousands of people moving along.. you could see across the valley from the high vantage point of the highway, and it was a beautiful day. We were hearing that traffic was stopped from the gates of McIver park to 82nd Street in Portland, 40 miles away, and it was easy to believe from the flowing river of people and cars. As we turned east, Mt. Hood before us, the road swept down and into the Valley to Milo McIver state park, and the number of people shot into the thousands as we wound down the hill and saw the meadow where a stage had been constructed. We didn’t know what we were going to see, there had been nothing but rumors of a free rock festival, sponsored by the governor and funded by Portland business men, who wanted to avoid problems during a convention in town..

We could see the Clackamas River to our left through the trees, running down to meet the Willamette.. Sun bright, sky blue, the greens of the trees and the yellow of the grass in the meadow with the makeshift (but substantial) stage.. an amazing kaleidoscope of colors and of course, of people.

We sat down on the edge of the access road which ran to the stage, under a tree with too many others to really be in the shade, it was August after all, and in northern Oregon, thats really summer, as good as it gets, and as hot as it gets. A few cars went by, bringing, we assumed musicians and technicians.. We had heard rumors of great bands set to play at this state sponsored event, but we didn’t care if Santana (who seemed to be everywhere at the time), the Grateful Dead, Jefferson Airplane, or the Youngbloods showed. We were there for whatever happened and were ready to ‘groove’ as the governor had said in his letter to the leaders of the “People’s Army Jamboree”, on the beauty of Oregon and rock and roll. As we watched the people walking by I felt a bit manipulated, thinking that this was a strange confluence of events…. though the details wouldn’t be known by most of us until years later.

The theme of the annual convention of the American Legion, to be held in Portland in august of

1970 was “Victory in Viet Nam”, and its keynote speaker was to be President Richard M. Nixon.

This took place against the backdrop of the massacre at Kent State, which Portland State students had protested in May by shutting down the park blocks, ending when the police riot squad swept through leaving 32 protesters and bystanders bruised, bleeding or both. Anti-war groups planned to be in Portland in August, in a little get together called the ” People’s Army Jamboree”, hoping to draw 50,000 and shut down the city as a welcoming party for RMN.. Much as had been done by a quarter of a million in shutting down Washington DC earlier in the year.

Tom McCall (sic): “Our commitment to law and order has not tempted us to infringe upon the constitutional rights of Americans to peaceful assembly, to freedom of movement, to nonviolent dissent. While we’re prepared to deal with violence, keep it clear that our first priority is to avoid violence. It is within this framework–avoiding violence–that Vortex One emerged.”

He wrote to the organizers of the “People’s Army Jamboree”: “I am flattered that so many people believe Oregon to be a beautiful state. Everyone is entitled to groove on its beauty. However, the City of Portland has limited facilities for the holding of conventions, and I am informed that these facilities cannot accommodate two major conventions being held simultaneously.”

The governor said after approving the event, “I’ve committed political suicide”.. but he was wrong and the American Legion Convention went on, the “People’s Army Jamboree” took place, but the violence predicted by the FBI didn’t take place.. Tom McCall was easily re-elected.. we had a rock festival, a legend was born. And Nixon didn’t show…

As a band started to play, we moved toward the stage area, with thousands of others.. great local bands played until late into the night… then as we set up an area to sleep amongst the trees a bus nearby fired up a generator and started playing electric guitar and bass, sounding much like a ‘Fish’ jam, which I had heard many times in the panhandle in Golden Gate Park.. I went to sleep listening and as the governor had said, grooving on the beauty..

Walking down the road to the stage the next afternoon, a yellow Cadillac with dark tinted windows pulled up next to me, the window rolled down..the smoke poured out and the driver handed me a hash pipe.. saying.. “wow man, what a scene huh?” I looked inside and seemed to recognize a couple of the passengers.. thinking to myself..” the Grateful Dead?”, but said, yeah.. a great scene..as I handed the pipe back..

As a child I learned to love the river close up, my father bought a wood runabout, about 15 feet long.. he didn’t realize at the time the amount of upkeep needed.. it wasn’t long before I had a putty knife in my hand, scraping old paint with highly toxic paint remover from the hull of our boat…but that was just the cost of entry, and he soon replaced it with a fiberglass boat, requiring much less maintenance, and no scraping.
We launched our boat at Wallace Marine Park in Salem, though when I was a child.. it was just Wallace Park. In reality it was simply a concrete strip reaching into the swift running, northbound Willamette. Cold and swirling in the spring, full of water from high in the cascades, in spite of its long twisting course through its namesake valley heading north to meet the Columbia in Portland.

It was a beautiful river, bright and shiny, surrounded by lush north Oregon foliage, and as we loaded our coolers full of hotdogs, six packs of Olympia (“its the water”) and generic sodas into the boat, the kids amongst us were excited about the day of swimming, water skiing and maybe, if we were really lucky, boat driving that lay ahead.

When the river was running full and fast, it was hiding a growing problem. Chemical pollution, effluent, manufacturing discharge, were not as obvious as the things I began to experience, the cans and bottles and other trash floating by but they were growing at an alarming rate. When i began to see animal parts floating in the river, and dead fish drifting by, it became unquestionable that something was wrong. By the middle to early sixties the river in summer was dangerous, a far cry from the river my father tossed me into as an encouragement to learn to swim.

We stayed clear of the Willamette as the sixties moved on , while Governor Tom McCall led the effort to clean up the river, and get back one of the most beautiful rivers in the country.
By the seventies enough progress had been made that it was possible to get close to it again, and in the early seventies, along with three friends, I kayaked from Eugene to Salem, seeing much of the valley from the river for the first time.

The river was still polluted and we didn’t swim in it (intentionally, although under the foot bridge at the U of O in Eugene, I took an unexpected plunge as my boat was swamped and capsized).. but it was getting better, healthier.. Now, the river remains at about that level of pollution, still there are effluent and industrial discharges, and the encroachment of urban growth is threatening.
There’s no doubt in my mind that my love for the river and my personal experience in watching it deteriorate, helped to shape my early environmental radicalism, and stays with me now as I ponder the continuing destruction of our planet by rampant consumerism, commercial greed, governmental indifference and the infection of our world by fossil fuel waste. It may be true that we can never have that river back to its former glory, and in fact, I missed the true beauty of the river, because the destruction has been going on for nearly a hundred years. This is not to say, that it could not be done, but we need leadership that is aware of the problem and not complacent in its own little box.