b>Jump: Silverton, OR → Gervais, OR, High School grounds: 15 miles
LEFT out of the school…arrows to HWY 214 NORTH to Mt. Angel
Follow arrows to Mt Angel-Gervais Road to Gervais
Arrows to the lot…
Shows at 5pm/7:30pm

Pitched the tent on the grounds of a high school. No Smoking, Spitting or Selling Crack on School Property signs were posted in English, Spanish… and Russian. This was Gervais, Oregon, a nondescript little town rising from the hop fields.


In 1987 at the end of the Cold War, 2,000 or so Russian Old Believers emigrated to the farmlands between Gervais and nearby Mt. Angel. I’m not sure what creed distinguishes them exactly, only that back in the middle of the seventeenth century their ancestors objected most strenuously when the Tsar decided the Russian Orthodox Church needed to be more like its Greek Orthodox sister. Persecution, diaspora to Siberia ensued. When the Cold War segued into glasnost, the Old Believers decided the weather was better in Oregon. Today there are more than 10,000 of them hereabouts – the largest concentration of Old Believers in the continental U.S (although I seem to think Sitka, Alaska was actually founded by Old Believers.) A few of them showed up at the circus’s performances – ladies in babushkas, men with forelocks. They’re a little like the Amish I suppose, except they drive cars and send their kids to public school. They’re not supposed to eat off plates that have ever been touched by nonbelievers – a boon for the local Styrofoam-throw-away-using fast food industry.
The Russian Old Believer churches are all in nearby Woodburn, one of the towns I explored on my way into Portland. Woodburn was otherwise distinguished by the fact that the businesses besides the I-5 are Anglo businesses whereas all the businesses in the city center – along the railroad tracks – are Hispanic. In fact, except for the trees, you’d think you were in Mexico in downtown Woodburn.


I love the way the early morning mists rise from the ground in this part of the world:


Portland has history for me. I spent the summer of my twentieth year picking fruit in the nearby Hood River valley, hanging out at a commune in Pe Ell, Washington, making periodic trips into Portland to pick up unemployment checks. This was not my idea of a good time, it was Mark Conly’s; but I was in love with Mark Conly, and Mark Conly was in love with Woody Guthrie, Tom Joad, and their peculiar version of the American dream.

Being lazy and terrified of heights, I was lousy at picking fruit. Also I hated Pe Ell, a ghost town clustered around a long dead mill with a vaguely sinister aspect. I passed my time there smoking dope and walking long distances on the railroad tracks, pretending the single rails were a tightrope and I was balancing 40 feet above the heads of an invisible crowd of admirers and detractors. This allowed me to keep out of the way of the speed freaks in our little hippie collective.

Loved Portland though. Loved, loved, loved it. Being in Portland felt like one long assignation in the lobby of a noir hotel.

Mark moved back to Portland – oh, about ten years ago now. Suspect because of Oregon's liberal suicide policy.

All day long as I scurried about on my various errands – to Powells to pick up reference books for the Great Robin Home Schooling Project; to the Best Mac Store in the world where I spent way too much money on a new battery for the G4, a new wireless Internet thingy for the iBook backup, and an iTouch for Ben’s birthday; back to Powell’s again where I sat in their coffee shop all afternoon, blissfully surrounded by metric tons of books, and wrote – I kept thinking, I must see Mark.

I didn’t want to see Mark. But it was the right thing to do.

Finally around noon I called him – busy signal. What are you busy doing, Mark? I thought. Dying?

The last time I’d called Mark he’d told me the same anecdote three times in a row. Something that happened in Ghana when he was in the Peace Corps. Something having to do with corn crops, economic development.

I didn’t complain. A part of him knew he was repeating himself. Finally he said, “My mind is going, Patreetz.”

“Is that part of the disease process?” I asked cautiously.

“I don’t know. I can’t tell. Docs say it shouldn’t be. Docs say I’m depressed.”

“I wonder why,” I said.

Mark still had that braying laugh. “All I want to do is sleep.”

“Sleep? But why?”

“In my dreams I run,” he said simply.

I called Mark three more times. Busy signals every time – beep, beep, beep, beep. Honestly? I was glad. I didn’t have to have my heart broken but I still got to lie to myself, tell myself I’d made an effort. Sometimes you have to be shallow to survive.