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Julie’s Good Question. 2. Oregon

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so…i arrived at my friend Janes.  my friend from when i was seventeen years old,  my friend Jane who felt most like family to me.  she lived on 45 acres in Cheshire Oregon.  it slanted upward, gently from her home.  beautiful land.  and the thought was that i would build a Yurt there, in the Far Back of those acres.

but soon, after i arrived, her husband, a firefighter, a HotShot, told her he wanted a divorce.  so…not my own unforseen, but hers

and i needed to find something different.  i bought the Avion, which is a People's version of an Airstream.  and took it to a mountain, a little over a half way up, in Horton Oregon.  no electricity. no running water except for a mountain stream.  it was a wonderland.  i went to the Artists Market in Eugene on the weekends and set up my booth there,  selling the fiber figures i made all week.  and the drizzle.  the drizzle, wore me FLAT.  then the two maybe, stellar months of the most perfect place in the world, and then the drizzle.  the fog.  the mud.  and at the Market i met some people who owned land in Snowflake Arizona.  ok.  and i went there.  

they had inherited the land.  there were two houses.  no one had lived in them for years.  full of stuff.  in the morning i would be awakened by HUGE cattle rubbing themselves on the side of the little Airstream to itch…and i think as i write this, just like the Goats do….!  and i would sit on the roof of one of the homes there every morning and watch the coyotes run rabbits.  watch the life and death.  the kill.  listen to it.  on the roof of the house.  the people said i could live there forever.  they had no use for desert anymore.  and all it took really, was hauling water.  no water.  and i walked the arroyos endlessly and found that gasket thing that hangs today in the ROOM in one of those arroyos.  and i sat.  LONG hours under scrub trees and called my daughter from the pay phone at the laundromat in Snowflake.    after a while, one of those conversations:  she had had a second baby.  could i come back?  she wanted to go to the junior college there.  could i come?

i remember driving back.  it was i guess in the fall.  because it was hunting season.  deer would flee across the "blue highways" i drove…suddenly, lunging out.  deer in headlights.  it's an expression that might have fit all of us at that time.  so…

for a while i stayed with her.  i shared my granddaughter's room.  she had a bunk bed.  i got the top.

it didn't work out all that great and i think i lived in 4 different places.  that didn't work out all that great.  They say you can never go home again.   and i couldn't.  so after almost a year, i LEFT again.

 

 

 

 

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32 responses to “Julie’s Good Question. 2. Oregon”

  1. Laura R Avatar
    Laura R

    Where was the JC that your daughter wanted you to go with her? Did she want your help with the children, rent? We all want to help out children, but did something happen? Only curious, not judging. I lived in Eugene from 1972-74. Did you sell at the Saturday Market? I went all the time.

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  2. grace Forrest Avatar
    grace Forrest

    Washtenaw Junior College in Michigan. she wanted me to take care
    of her second child, really, but also the first. Jeff. he was
    maybe a few months old. Alyssia, who is now almost my Mentor, was
    about 18 months apart. no. nothing happened. she just wanted ME.
    I DID sell at the Saturday Market. i will think tomorrow about the years that might have been…well..no….i don’t have to wait to think…this would have been in like 1989, 90?
    I LOVED that market. really LOVED it. the comraderie with other artists, the wonder full street person who would bring me scavanged food to share….still in their styrophoam doggie containers
    i LOVED that Market and did well there.

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  3. Laura R Avatar
    Laura R

    I went there from 1972-74, then moved back to Vancouver/Portland, then to UW in Seattle in ’76, then to Palo Alto in ’77, then to UW again, then to Portland, then back to the Bay Area, to El Dorado Hills, Granite Bay, and now Rocklin, and itching to move back to Portland. Saturday Market in Eugene was the best! I still have my old Nishiki that I rode all over that town.

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  4. Mo Crow Avatar
    Mo Crow

    Ha! Grace I was wondering about your need to live in the desert where it doesn’t rain much! That cold dampness of the NorthWest is really something, you need a nice warm house with a glass blowing studio or a good big ceramic kiln going 24/7 to keep dry! everything grows so well up that way & the scenery is totally magnificent… had a very inspiring 2 weeks at the Pilchuck Glass School just north of Billingham in Washington State in 1989, stunning spot, shouldn’t mention that I was so obsessed with the piece of glass I was working on that I didn’t step outside and walk up the hill to see the Northern Lights….

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  5. Michelle in NYC Avatar
    Michelle in NYC

    Oh how I LOVE that Oregon clothesline…and the adventure just gets better and better…big leaps of faith!

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  6. patricia Avatar
    patricia

    the bitter sweetness of all of this. someone in one of these postings mentioned “the women who left” . we are our own tribe of sorts, aren’t we. “women who left.” and our stories –where we went–what we did-where we are now. and the “why” of it all. a thread of gypsy spirit running through a going blanket.

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  7. Julie Avatar
    Julie

    I noticed the same thing as Patricia yesterday. ..with Grace stepping up to the mike and so many tentatively raising their hands in the audience. Me too. And me. I have been thinking and wondering for 24 hours…last year, I read a wondrful book looking at what happened to the people who trully tried to “go back to the land,” in the sixties and seventies (vs those who stopped by to get high between junior and senior year of college) and I feel like there is the same here….The Women Wno Left. Wonder if I am up to taking this question to the next step.

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  8. patricia Avatar
    patricia

    and what would that next step look like?

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  9. julie Avatar
    julie

    research: first, has it been done already? second, and this is a real commitment, initial interviews and exploration and somewhere in there answering the bigger question: do I want to take this on???

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  10. grace Avatar
    grace

    a lot of moving for you. but that was when you were
    a student, right? and somehow we don’t think of it so
    much as leaving when we are students. interesting. what
    IS it that seems different later? and the most
    significant thing is leaving people. leaving a lifestyle.
    yes. i spent very little time in other parts of Eugene.
    pretty much just the Market. it was enough for me.
    i spent the week days alone.

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  11. grace Avatar
    grace

    yes..dry. SUN.
    i spend so much time outside, always have. to not be
    able to do that comfortably was just too hard. i
    watched everyone there just put on their rain jackets and
    hats and work outside all day and not blink an eye.

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  12. grace Avatar
    grace

    that’s the part i want to get to. how it was just this
    Just Going. at the time it didn’t feel like leaps of
    faith. just to the Next. it was quiet really.

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  13. grace Avatar
    grace

    yes. elizabeth said that.
    and yes…the “why” of it all, looking back and
    for me, the What WAS it all? am thinking about it now.

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  14. grace Avatar
    grace

    what was the book, Julie? i think i’d like to read it.
    i read a while back an interview with Ina Mae Gaskin and
    it felt so good to hear how it all went and still goes
    with her…reading about a sister.

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  15. grace Avatar
    grace

    eeeee, a slitty eyed soft soft eeeee.
    i am preordering your book, Julie.

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  16. beth Avatar
    beth

    I was in Eugene for about 6 months. Along about… 1975? Where we go. Why we leave. Where we end up. Almost a randomness to it. And yet so important because it shapes us. Enjoying your story, Grace.

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  17. Nance Avatar
    Nance

    I never moved alone at first. My dad was in the army so we moved. He retired we moved to be near his parents. I married. We moved for education then to different jobs to take him up the ladder. Then he died and I finally moved on my own. Back to the town I loved the best, Portland Oregon. My two sons had grown up through all the moves and finally settled in Oregon as well so it made perfect sense to move here. And we are all still here. One son moved away twice and back. But each move was never made to leave something, alway made to move toward something. And I did it with my family. I never went off into the unknown for adventure or seeking what life would bring if we were there. It was alway preordained… Job interviews and acceptances so off to make another new home for the family. Usually lasted two years until the last move before he died. Seven years. Then here 21 years. I have moved so much and felt like I would be able to make a life anywhere but now… I wonder. I don’t think I have it in me to ever do what you have done, grace. I don’t think of myself as a woman who left but a woman who went.

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  18. Nance Avatar
    Nance

    And I probably saw you at the farmers market in Eugene when visiting my son there.

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  19. grace Forrest Avatar
    grace Forrest

    those are EXTRAORDINARY words, nance…
    ” I don’t think of myself as a woman who left but a woman who went.”
    and maybe they are a Key to it?????
    oh….THANK YOU. an amazing distinction………..

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  20. grace Forrest Avatar
    grace Forrest

    as i picture it in my mind, i was on the edge, the NE corner, down the way a little from an extraordinary young woman named Beautiful Mountain. she made essential oils and sat almost naked, breast feeding her baby.

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  21. grace Forrest Avatar
    grace Forrest

    yes. almost a randomness in the specifics.
    i’ve said this before…as a very young child, before i
    could read, i sat in the attic and looked at pictures in all the National Geographics of the South West. i knew then i wanted to go there. that it was my True Place.
    and when i set out from Michigan the second time, i was
    heading for Magdalena. that town that’s some 30 minutes
    from here. i wanted to live there. almost made it.

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  22. grace Avatar
    grace

    i know you are recuperating and not feeling your best,
    but if you feel like it, i’d like to hear you thoughts
    on the difference of those words
    left
    went
    i am looking CLOSELY at them

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  23. julie Avatar
    julie

    “Back From The Land: How Young Americas Went to Nature in the 1970s and Why They Came Back” by Eleanor Agnew. She did same with her husband and kids in the 1970s so she knows.
    Here’s a sentence: “In the summer of 1972, Pat Foley and her husband did not plan to spend the following winter in a 6 x 10 foot toolshed…[in Maine]. As winter closed in, the prospect of living in a small toolshed seemed far less painful than the thought of returning to New Jersey.”

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  24. julie Avatar
    julie

    Young AmericANS.

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  25. Laura R Avatar
    Laura R

    So much in your stories. Come, go, leave, enter, immigrate, emigrate, flee, land, fester, heal, save, harm or lose, feel, die. You don’t say that you regret anything. Maybe you do, maybe you don’t. I so admire the way you went to heal, feel, and live. I hope my words are understood in the loving way they are intended.
    Your open life as you have written is breathtaking. I don’t know many women who have the courage that you do.
    xoxo

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  26. grace Avatar
    grace

    Laura…i read your words as THUNDER speaks over and over
    but still not so close that i need to turn this off…
    and i
    THANK YOU
    for all the words you give here. i could not give them to
    my self. really…could not., because it was just a life lived and these words give it More than it seemed, ever, really.
    and
    REGRET. i have used that word to my self, with my self
    MANY times. Many. over the years. and it might be
    a crux. do i Regret? and really, i can say that no. i
    don’t regret any of it. in the end, there were things…
    and those are some i am not free to talk about. i wish i
    was, really, because they are not uncommon as i have come to understand. but again, they are not MINE. so i can’t.
    BUT. even those that are so beyond anything i would have ever imagined i would need to live with and through in my life, even those. i think…hmmmm. Is this True? I Think that although i would have “asked” to be exempt from such grief, such harshness on behalf of my family, i think
    that i cannot regret even that. it took away from me any shining shell of ego. it took away from me any sense of being exempt from the HUGE reality of what can occur. and
    i LEARNED what i could not have possibly learned any other way. so i cannot regret.
    and the Life is not at all quiet now. it is On Going…it
    clearly will be MORE to come. and for this, i not only don’t regret, but also am amazed.
    xoxo to you

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  27. Laura R Avatar
    Laura R

    (My comment seems to be stuck in the ether, aparently waiting for approval. I will try again soon.)

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  28. Laura R Avatar
    Laura R

    Nope, not regret. Regret implies that a mistake was made.
    XXOO

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  29. Minka Avatar
    Minka

    I did not go back to the land but I sure did more around a lot in my 20’s…various places in Colorado (where I grew up) and then when I finally got away I went to NYC, then Boston, later Ann Arbor, later still Colorado, and then St.Louis, and then back and forth from Boston to New Hampshire where I settled and had no idea that’s the place I was going to stay. Three decades later, I see myself moving again…maybe…if I could figure out where!

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  30. grace Forrest Avatar
    grace Forrest

    i love just knowing this about your Life. the places. the settling and then, this thought…maybe again….
    this is good to know. Thank You

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  31. mimmin Avatar
    mimmin

    it makes me happy that you have no regrets about your decision
    regrets can eat away at you
    always loved the thought of an airstream. some have made it over the water but they are really too big for our smaller roads and they are often static and rented out or used as food outlets for festivals etc. i didn’t know there were other companies who made aluminium campers.

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  32. grace Avatar
    grace

    i look at it Out there…just sitting now, a flat tire on
    one side. Sometimes i think about “getting rid” of it.
    But the kids, daughter/granddaughter still have connection to it…so….
    it was a very excellent and Enough Home for those years.
    it was totally Enough. i was warm. i was dry. my stuff was warm and dry. it was very much Enough. today, what i have is really opulence in comparison.

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