OCF: moments

I often embellish things to make them look a little more amazing, but this is absolutely a true story. It's a little more subdued actually, since I think he was also wearing cat's eye sunglasses, and you also do not see the rest of the crew with buckets scanning the ground for cigarette butts. I hasten to add that the truck was not moving when he did this, he was just waiting for the driver to get back and move the truck closer to the kiosk.

In the mornings the various truck crews went to service the various kiosks throughout the fairgrounds. This means rolling full barrels to the truck, lifting the barrels up onto the truck bed, and handing off empty barrels to waiting arms (or, more often, yelling BARREL DOWN as you drop on over the side, with a satisfying gooong) to replace the full barrels. Taking inventory. Make any changes (do we need another cans & glass barrel out here?) Then for the main stages the crew gets buckets and combs the field for trash. Cigarette butts, bottle cabs, paper fragments, and even -- gulp -- condoms.

I forget the exact number of trucks-and-crews we had, but it must have been something like fifteen. Certain routes were so full that they were broken down into types of refuse: compost on one truck, paper, cans and glass on another. Shifts started at six in the morning and sometimes wouldn't finish until eleven.

While they did this I wandered the fairgrounds in awe of the birdsong and relative silence. One delicious morning though I was sitting in the meadow at the far east of the property. It's a high-traffic area, and that morning it was also occupied by a lot of sloppy still-drunk vendors or crew people easing themselves into the new day. Their rhythm was stilted and unstable. Uncertain.

So it was a treat to watch Ceder's truck, Mothra come trundling into the field. Mothra is one of many ancient trucks the recycling crew uses to cart barrels. It takes its cue from the 1920's and is a flatbed truck with wooden boards nailed to the sides to accommodate loads. I am fairly vague here in the painting but that's becuase I can't remember the make and model of the truck itself, and I didn't spend much time with the trucks. And there aren't many pictures online. The public really likes Godzilla, because it has toys on it and breathes fire, but there are many other trucks. Mothra is one of them.

You know a recycling crew truck (or forklift) right away because it has a lot of gloved people hanging off of it. And as soon as it stops the occupants hop off smartly and get to work. They were such a wonderful sight, and probably a really strange pill to swallow for the bleary-eyed non-recyclers in the field. It made me proud. Yes, we are unkept and have a really ragtaggle band of workers. But by God we can get stuff done.

UNSORTED FAIR THOUGHTS

1. During the first meal I had at the staff kitchen we ended up at a bench with a great loose board on the top. Fortunately we were sitting with members of construction crew, and they fixed the thing right there on the spot.

2. Despite the relative chaos of the thing I only lost two things. The biggest loss were my beloved yoga/PJ pants. They weren’t particularly grand -- in fact they were bought after I’d forgotten mine on the move to Portland (silly chilly AC filled hotel rooms.) They were made of an organic bamboo-rendered jersey knit but purchased from Wal-Mart. I’d cut off about 5 inches from the bottom so they were hobbit-pants, unhemmed so they were a bit ragged, had bleach speckles on them from that one time I cleaned that one house, so they really wouldn’t look like anything much to anyone but me. I should have written my name in them -- really I just should have done what sensible people do and checked in with lost and found. But instead I lamented, and then resolved to make some new ones. I know they’ve got similar knits at the fabric store.

2a. The other lost thing was a towel, and we replaced that on the way home. Bath Towels is bath towels.

3. I keep mentioning that being around the recycling crew was a bit like hanging around the muppets, and I’m not lying. For a start, stuff like this guy hula-hooping on the hood of the truck kept happening. But in other ways also:

3a. The crew is not just for those strong enough to lift full barrels (really, no one person can do that. It takes two.) There are many different people-shapes, and people-types in the family. Crews were not really organized as such, but there were some trends. The delicate smallest ones (particularly those on "teen crew") tended to be the extras pulled in during the glass and plastic sorts when the trucks came back to the dock. Big beefy people tended to work at compost or on other non-truck-crew projects like fixing trucks or building things. And the biggest one of all -- an Amazonian with a knee brace -- was the lady who took everything we sorted in boxes and packed the trucks that went to the redeem-the-recyclables places at the end of the week.


3b. The weird collection of dilapidated trucks, which were often painted and made awesome.

3c. We had a house band. Or what amounts to one. A member of the Conjugal Visitors was a friend-of-someone's, and so they were there at our first night of camping, and then again at the cocktail party, and then again for a different non-party fireside night, and THEN at the week-after party at someone's house. Whenever we were together and not working, they seemed to be there. It was lovely. Good high-energy bluegrassy stuff.

3d. The fierce loyalty and sense of “all for one and one for all” that I’ve never, ever seen so strong in a group.

4. There was a spider in the tent, and he was clever clever. Our tent is a minimalist sort of affair, a new take on the old-school pup tent. It's basically a tarp-shelter with a little floor. The floor and ceiling are separate elements. Condensation drips down onto the ground outside keeping the floor and interior dry. Genius. Only drawback is it basically acts like a bug trap. We usually have a cloud of things flying around in the top, but you know. You're camping. So who cares. Though in future we may rent to a spider on purpose, because the cloud of bugs was significantly, immediately diminished when the spider moved in. The few that remained cowered on the far side and did not make much trouble.

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OCF: scaffolding

Fair. What can I say? It’s magic. And everybody says that. So what can I say that other people haven’t?



Well, as a picture maker I can say this: it was a sweet, blessed relief to be in a world that understands the need for whimsy. From the admission gates made to look like the heads of dragons to the simple shapes set up near the bank of the Long Tom River, aesthetic playfulness was there at every turn.



It was good to see playfulness. To see giant stars made of kite material lit up at night and in the early morning by Christmas lights. To see a bench surrounded by a wicker creature. To see people walking around in tree costumes. It seemed no visual field was left unadorned. Even the recycling kiosks were all distinct and interesting. There's a kind of acknowledgement of the spiritual there -- and I don’t mean just the knee-jerk hippie woo-woo kind of spiritual. I just mean that hunger for colors and shapes that we recognize in children. Grown-ups have that hunger too -- and probably need it even more than children do, in the face of their busy, messy lives. But rarely does one see it in quite the way one saw it at Fair, and it was lovely to behold.



I know a lot of people see Fair as a throw-back to Woodstock, but I don’t think it’s as simple as that. I don’t think it would have endured this long if it was just about a lot of burnt out hippies. All the pieces fit too neatly together. The dust gets bad, so there is a water crew that keeps the road sprayed down. There are barrels of water around for the vendors to attend to their own paths. There is a fanatical commitment to using every resource and not over consuming, so there is a truck that picks up wood -- old timbers, usable sticks -- and takes it to what is essentially a giant filing cabinet near the compost barn to sort them out. There are shelves for every kind of thing they find. So when the construction crew needs to build a new vendor-space, or fence, or recycling kiosk, the wood is ready and waiting. When de-construction pulls the extra things back at the end of the week, (the traffic control chairs, the extra fences, the sign posts) the wood goes back to the filing cabinet. Ready and waiting for next year.



I’m not ready to be back in civilization. It took me a few days to really click into the rhythm of the place -- it’s so different from regular life. Now that I’m there it’s hard for me to click back out. I sort of hope I don’t, actually. I’ve not felt so calm and wonderful in a long time. I didn’t do anything out of the ordinary, it’s just what happens when you are around a group of people that assume the best of everyone.

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Continuous as the stars that shine

I was off to Eugene for the weekend, a quick getaway from the GO! GO! GO! rhythm I've had for a while now. It was exactly what I needed.

It's always a good drive, but this time of year it's especially rewarding. There's all kinds of WEATHER blowing around us here in the Northwest, and it's fun to drive through the various phases and leave them behind. It's also lamb season, so the stretch of I-5 past Albany was filled with the usual woolly blobs accompanied by much smaller woolly blobs -- some so tiny it seemed as though they could hardly reach mama's milk.



I also noticed (to my delight!) that daffodils speckled the roadside for almost the entire journey. I can't remember if I've seen them there like that in previous springs. Last spring I wasn't doing much driving, and I suppose the year before I was too busy with my new job to notice? But how could you not notice row after row of happy waving faces like that? Who planted them? I like thinking of some troupe of farmers taking it upon themselves to pretty up the corridor. Or did the flowers get there all by themselves? How do daffodils spread their bulbs? They come from bulbs after all, not seeds. Or do they? I will have to look into this.

Dorothy wrote in her journal: "When we were in the woods beyond Gowbarrow park we saw a few daffodils close to the water side. We fancied that the lake had floated the seeds ashore and that the little colony had so sprung up. But as we went along there were more and yet more and at last under the boughs of the trees, we saw that there was a long belt of them along the shore, about the breadth of a country turnpike road. I never saw daffodils so beautiful they grew among the mossy stones about and about them, some rested their heads upon these stones as on a pillow for weariness and the rest tossed and reeled and danced and seemed as if they verily laughed with the wind that blew upon them over the lake, they looked so gay ever glancing ever changing." (From The Writer's Almanac, 4/15/10.)

Eugene was healing for all the usual reasons, but this time we also took a quick rainy stroll through the woods to look at this downed tree Anthony had been talking about, and from there we sat on a wet log over some rushing water.



This is but a gesture, a thumbnail sketch. If I had the time to show you, I would paint it as it truly was; each individual leaf dancing and crisply clear under the dripping canopy of that enchanted wood. But the little flowers were there, part of some other nearby blooming tree. We saw them from the ground and got to climb up through them, almost worth the journey all on its own. There was moss all over the log, which was slick to walk on and squishy to sit on. But also wonderful.



We were quickly soaked through to the skin but we didn't let that worry us. Rainy Saturday adventures are not the time to stay warm and dry. It was too beautiful be worried about such trivialities. We stopped picking daintily over puddles and boggy grass almost as soon as we stepped off the sidewalk. We just squished along and felt all the better for it.

This weekend I stole away to what turns out to be something of a seaside icon here in Oregon: the Sylvia Beach Hotel.

It's worth every bit of its somewhat secretive reputation. It was incredible in every way. I sort of want to live there.



This was my first stay at the coast itself. I've camped near the coast -- in the bushy undergrowth where the seaside campsites are -- but not really on the coast itself. Certainly not at the beach. I don't think it would be wise to camp out on the sands of the beach, whatever the weather. And in March the Oregon coast is really not all that inviting.

Not to say that we had rain the WHOLE time. But we had a lot of it.

This though. This was delightful.



To sit in the northwestern window of the reading room, tea at my elbow, sun almost too warm on my feet, looking out over a beach-full of people to Yaquina Head lighthouse. It was nice out there -- sunny and mild-looking. But it was even nicer to be indoors, under a blanket in an armchair.

And the nicest thing of all was we had several days out there. So instead looking at the ocean all day long only to have a wearisome two-to-four-hour-drive-home, we got to stay.



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