Bring on the Tulips

Greetings,

You may have noticed the lack of blog postings here lately. Put another way, it seems that over the last few months, I reduced the volume of original content on this blog to match that of the rest of the blog-o-sphere (Huffington Post, anyone?) While they rehash the daily news, mining it for valuable gossip and tossing out the uninteresting facts, this blog seems to prefer presenting nothingness as what it is.

Still, the total lack of content here has given my blog the abandoned appearance of your neighborhood GM dealership, and I am not okay with that. I had a job to do, and that was to report on my wanderings and share what I've learned from them, for better or for worse. As a blogger, I try to step outside of my life from time to time and peer back in to see what larger connections can be drawn between my own experiences and what's going on in the world at large. Since February, it seems I've lost the ability to be the outsider in my own life, casually observing events as they transpire and reporting on them for your reading pleasure. Instead, somewhere in between wrestling crab pots and getting in touch with my fisherwoman self, I lost my cool and my ability to step into the third person. I didn't fall down as a writer, luckily, only as a blogger, and I managed to record - in a small heap of nearly illegible legal pads - most of my whirlwind journey as a rookie deckhand in one of the world's most dangerous fisheries. (During this time, I also found myself out of not one but two separate laptops). One day, these notes may even manifest themselves in a more readable format, but don't hold your breath.
So that's as far as I'll go for formal excuses. In the meantime, however, another strange thing has happened, something that's made me question the whole idea that launched this blog (in its eventual form as a food-and-farm advocacy tool) in the first place. This personal revelation may not seem as momentous as the catastrophic earthquakes that weakened bits of our society's foundations in the past couple of months, or the fact that at this moment, all the oil trapped in the rock beneath the Gulf of Mexico seems to be gushing out and headed for the Everglades, but it's significant nonetheless. My confession - and it is a little embarrassing to admit in this context - is this: I have been admiring tulips.

Readers of this blog may or may not have recognized my longstanding commitment to tulip eradication. Really, any flower (except those that precede fruit, of course) may be considered frivolous and unnecessary to daily existence, but tulips, for me, have always been a worst offender. I felt this way even before I read Michael Pollan's (author of The Omnivore's Dilemma) opinion on tulips in his book The Botany of Desire. He puts it this way: "Among flowers, the tulip is one of the most extravagantly useless." Unlike most of the flowers that humans have domesticated and bred selectively to serve our purposes, the tulip has no scent, no edible parts, and no medicinal qualities. On the basis of its beauty alone, it still wielded considerable flower power at one time. As Pollan describes in the book (which I highly recommend), no other flower has been as amenable to the corruption of the free market. In 16th-century Holland, it launched a lucrative futures market in tulip notes - slips of paper that promised future deliveries of high-value tulip bulbs. At one point, a prized tulip (like the Semper Augustus in the image here) could go for more than the cost of a big house on the canal. Speculation escalated out of control, and when the bubble burst, individuals who had invested their life's savings in these promissory notes found themselves holding useless slips of paper, without so much as a bulb to put in their gardens.
Tulips bothered me for other reasons than their historical role in setting a precedent for irresponsible trade. On a personal, aesthetic level, for instance, they have always seemed far over the top. With their primary colors, unnaturally straight stalks, and uniform appearance, they seem to go against what is natural, with no charming qualities to redeem them. Daffodils are frumpy and frilly but still cute, in a way. Roses - well, at least they have their dignity. Even dandelions are edible. Honestly, I didn't see the point of tulips, and every time I saw one, I wondered why people couldn't obsess over something a little bit more substantial and, to get right to the point, edible. Also, I didn't like the fact that my name (Tuula) is often misread as ending in "lip", as if I might be the type of person who goes around identifying herself as the sex organ of a plant.
Given my zero-tolerance policy toward the tulip - both the word and the flower itself - the name of this blog came up rather naturally. Everything worked fine until this spring, when my hard-nosed stance against tulips began to gradually erode. Maybe it was the brutally cold December we had here in Oregon and the generally hopeless post-holiday feeling I was experiencing, but when flower stalks began poking themselves out of the ground in late January, I didn't experience the usual sense of nausea over the anticipated floral show. On the Oregon coast, winter is short-lived, but the rainy and wet spring, with its endless assault of Pacific storm fronts, seems to take six months. It's not that I looked forward to the day when I would have to nod to the charming faces of a crowd of gaudy, candy-colored blooms ecstatically announcing the arrival of spring. But when those flowers arrived, suddenly the ceaseless grey of the sky, the ocean, and the windy highway I drove every day was enlivened with pink, yellow, purple, orange and red flowers. I tried to ignore them, at first, but they mocked me from parking lot dividers and window boxes in town, from every single front yard in my neighborhood, from behind the crumbling brick along my grandma's front walk. Resistance was futile.

The tipping point came on a walk I took one evening through my neighborhood. I noticed about ten huge tulips growing in a neighbor's garden, looking like half-inflated. bubble-gum pink birthday baloons upon thick green stalks. Their enormous size startled me, and I had to have a closer look. I approached cautiously and peered inside one, noting how the petals just barely overlapped one another as they curved gracefully inward. I never imagined something  so orderly, so tame and pleasing, occurring in nature. I stared into the flower for a while, probably long enough for whoever was watching inside the house to consider phoning the poilce, but didn't touch it. It seemed like it would be a thing easily distuurbed. The next time I came across a smaller version of this marvel in my grandmother's front garden, I gently felt its petal. Just as I suspected. Smoother than skin.
The tulips, I had to admit, had defeated me. In all their uselessness, and despite their inane obedience to human selection and cultivation, they were beautiful and put joy into my day from that point forward. Now that I am back in Eugene, where spring is a bit behind the more temperate coast, I am experiencing a tulip re-run, and it's just as chidishly pleasurable as it was the first time around.
My war on tulips is officially over. I have called off the troops; they are frolicking homeward with ridiculous garlands on their heads. What does this mean for the future of the blog? I haven't worked that out yet. Like my attitude toward flowers, my approach to the craft of writing has changed. There are other projects that have eclipsed blogging in this venue, which I will hopefully share at a later date. Employment-wise, my next gig is with Northwest Youth Corps in Eugene, where I will be leading summer day camps for kids that allow them to experience food production first hand. (In other words, I will be happily demonstrating the finer points of playing in the dirt and greenhouse-grazing at the NWYC Farm.) I would love to start up a complimentary project involving some sort of educational blog that is kid-friendly. Right now, I'm still working on removing the crab-bait smell from my clothing and finding myself (another &%$!@) laptop.
So thank you for reading NoTulips, and stay tuned for its reincarnation. Many of you have shared with me that this blogging effort has been entertaining or inspring in some way (I even apparently recruited my replacement at Collins Farm!) and your encouragement has been incredibly helpful in keeping the words flowing. As soon as my next project is up and running, you'll be sure to hear about it. In the meantime, keep eating well.

Tuula(lip)

On the River

Inspired by/in tribute to Edward Abbey’s wonderful documentation of his float down Glen Canyon in the book Desert Solitaire.

When a cool breeze, a precursor to evening, rushes across the water and over your face, when you’re eye level with the water and the party downstream moves out of earshot, the river almost seems wild. I let myself believe, for a moment, that I’m here two hundred years ago, before the loggers and the homesteaders and the tourists started arriving by the boatload. It’s like squinting at someone in a hazy bar and convincing yourself, just for a moment, that he or she is more beautiful than you first observed.
Not that the river, especially on a sweltering day like today, isn’t beautiful. The sun, low in the sky, highlights each ripple on the wide, shallow expanse of water moving slowly toward the Alberni Inlet and eventually the Pacific. Trees loom on either side like living canyon walls, taking on a slightly disjointed appearance with the slanted shadow cast by the sun. It’s that long, hot stretch of summer that reaches lazily between July and August, but the river always has somewhere to go ¬– crisp, cool and smelling of high forests.

We’re close to the end of our float. Crystal and I, hot and tired after the Saturday market, had set our inner tubes in a few miles upstream of the farm and spent the past three hours taking our time coming home. This river, which runs right by Collins Farm, is known as the Somass. The salmon run here in greater numbers than any other river in North America – earning Port Alberni (the closest city to us) the title of Salmon Capital of the World.

We aren’t too concerned with salmon, though, other to watch them jump as we float effortlessly down the river. I keep one eye skyward in search of eagles, which are another common sight in these parts. Just last week, Peter and I were in the barn chatting with the horses when we noticed a crowd of vultures gathering around a glistening, translucent blob of cow afterbirth in the field. We stood on the lower rung of the fence watching, and soon an eagle joined in the feast. To us, it seemed like an undignified way for such a regal bird to get a meal, but eagles are, after all, scavengers. A second eagle landed and the vultures began to back away, and with good reason. Even from five hundred feet away, I could catch the sharp, menacing look in the bigger birds’ eyes. We stayed where we were, trying to keep still, the toes of our boots pointed firmly toward the dirt.

The Somass drifts past a shooting range, a large greenhouse, a few small farms and quite a few houses. Crystal and I get off our tubes and bask in the sun whenever we feel in need of a break. At other points, curiosity simply gets the better of us. The Field of Weeds, for example, demanded investigation. From the river, we could make out over a rocky embankment hundreds of tall, strange-looking plants. Crystal is here on the WWOOF (Willing Workers on Organic Farms) program and is, like me, interested in all that grows. We park our tubes, climb up the rocks and up onto a large pasture hosting a few cows and some geese. The odd plants take up half the field, but we can’t quite figure out what they are. They grow two or three feet apart over bare ground, towering over our heads with thick stalks, huge leaves and pointy heads that bend over with their own weight. A few that have fallen over sprout three or four new heads out of the side. I express jealousy for the plant’s ability to bud offspring so effortlessly; Crystal admires its resilience in the face of potential setbacks.
Life lessons learned, we decide the best course of action will be to run through the plants with our arms outstretched, yelling nonsense at the top of our lungs and feeling the beat of hundreds of stalks against our hands. It doesn’t solve the mystery, but it gives the cows something to ponder over as they chew their cud.

***

Back on the river, I’m daydreaming with my chin pointed toward the empty sky when I notice Crystal out of the corner of my eye, floating with the top of her head in the water. I question her motives. She tells me I have to experience this perspective, so I follow suit, leaning all the way back on my tube until I’m taking in my bobbing surroundings upside-down. I have to admit that this is unexpectedly amazing. The last few of my cares and worries, already fried to a crisp in the sun, fall right out my ears. The trees look even taller. The water and sky are even bluer. I feel like Lucy in the sky with diamonds. Few experiences in life require a person to instantly begin singing at the top of their lungs, but this is one of them.

The only possible threat to our enjoyment this afternoon may be an encounter with George Fleagle. Mr. Fleagle represents the crème-de-la-crème of the Port Alberni beer-gutted, tobacco-stained bachelor crowd. I’d met him a couple of weeks ago while swimming in the river with Crystal and Andre, another WOOF-er, near her farm. He came snorkeling down the river, unnoticed by us until he popped out of the water just as Crystal was lighting a cigarette, sure that she wouldn’t mind if he bummed one and oh, by the way, do you gals ever want to go tubing? We claimed a strong aversion to water, a defense that was probably undermined by the fact that we were in bathing suits, dripping wet by the side of a river. George stuck around anyway, educating us on the many pleasures of inner tubing and the river in general.
I was due back at the farm soon and decided to head home, leaving Crystal to deal with our new friend. My car was parked in her driveway at the top of the hill a short distance away. I hadn’t been paying much attention when we came down, and it was my first time there. Naturally, I assumed I would find it anyway and became utterly and completely lost in the thick brush. I ended up back down near the river, but some thirty feet away from the path I was supposed to be on with a thick patch of thistles blocking my way forward. Luckily, I could see my friends from where I stood, so swallowed my pride and yelled for direction. George, who happened to have grown up in the very house Crystal was staying in, jumped to the rescue. He gallantly escorted me up the hill, questioning my rash decision to move to Canada all by myself without anyone to help me along. Because of my embarrassment, I found myself being what probably came off as friendly to the hopeful Fleagel, who now considered himself a bonafide hero. He promised to come visit me at work.
When I told Ann and Bob about the experience, they seemed quite amused. My gut feeling – namely, nausea – about him had been dead-on. George had grown up with their two sons – he and his friends habitually threw rocks at their campground sign, picked on their kids and generally made nuisances of themselves. Fleagle was a man who lived up to his name.
Thankfully, we haven’t seen him yet, and the prospect of a redneck admirer has turned into a favorite farm joke instead of an actual threat. Still, when we near crowds of young guys on the river, I sink a little lower in my tube, ready to go for an impromptu swim.

But the waters are surprisingly quiet today. Tubing is something of a sport in this town, where most of the kids seem to have nothing to do but drink beer, smoke pot and go for a float, often taking with them giant boom boxes strapped to rafts, which shake the trees to their roots for miles around. Like many places in the Pacific Northwest, the two major industries here – logging and fishing – collapsed on themselves in the latter part of the last century. This leaves the young people with the unexciting prospects of collecting welfare checks and scrambling for tourist dollars if they wish to remain in the area. Boredom seems to hang heavy over the town. If only they could all be bussed out to Collins Farm to pull weeds. All, of course, except the pesky Fleagle.

***

Before the river meanders around to our jumping-off point at the farm, it flattens out and gets wide for a long, shallow stretch. Over the sound of water scurrying over rock we hear music – not the obnoxious thump of a tuber’s bass but a lighter melody. It actually sounds like the trees themselves are ringing.
The music gets louder, coming from the left bank ahead now. I crane my neck to peer through the underbrush. Then I spot the source. A ray of lingering sunlight makes its way through the trees and illuminates a man standing with his back to us, his arms flying across the keys of a huge xylophone, wooden mallets in hand. The chiming, stacatto music rises on the breeze above his back yard, his house, and the river. He seems to be performing for nobody but himself and the trees, completely lost in the joy of it. I stand up in the shin-high water, entranced by the sight and the sound, the sudden reminder of life’s endless mystery.

Art exhibition review: "Juxtaposed"

Not the Same:
“Juxtaposed” at the Maude Kerns Art Center

Machine parts and moss.
Alarm and absurdity.
Substance and empty space.
What do the above items have in common? Nothing – that’s the point. They’re juxtaposed, internally conflicted. Or are they?
This is not a question ripe for answering, but for a visual aid, visit the Maude Kerns Art Center between now and March 20th and take in its main exhibit, “Juxtaposed.” The sculptures and installations on display are from six artists – three of them local to Eugene – who are fond of consciously positioning unlike objects and ideas side by side. Each unique, provocative piece on display explores the tensions that tend to make viewers most uncomfortable, encouraging comparisons that are sometimes humorous, sometimes disturbing.

The Maude Kerns itself is a bit of an anomaly among Eugene's art galleries. Housed in an old church in a residential district, the non-profit Art Center has a folksiness and approachability that defies the cold glass exteriors of downtown’s art halls. With classes and lectures happening regularly and studios just next door, the venue prides itself in its ability to engage the whole community in art.
The journey through “Juxtaposed” may start from any of three entrances – another quirky feature of the converted building is the lack of a definitive main door. Visitors wandering in from the street side, however, will first confront Gerrit Van Ness’ installation “Campaign Trail,” a cynical take on the American elections process. The piece invokes the game of Candyland with lollipops, bright colors, and giant walking feet following a path – one made of dollar signs. Van Ness’ other works in the exhibit take jabs at Wal-Mart, bureaucracy and hypocrisy in general. Each piece functions as a 3-D, pop-art political cartoon, though most lack the biting cleverness that can be found in the editorial pages. And with the Bush Era over and an economic crises at hand, Van Ness’ lingering outrage over stolen votes and corporate profits feels a bit passé.
Better to enter the exhibition from the other end, where “Judging the Heart,” a site-specific installation by artist Mike Walsh, compares ancient and modern-day conflicts in the Middle East. The four boxes, or “Gates,” contain representational artifacts of ancient Egypt as well as modern-day maps of the region. Faces of soldiers are stenciled, ghostlike, on the glass, and the last box houses an image of George Bush. However, this political reference, in contrast to that made by Van Ness, speaks poignantly to the endlessness of war and the difficulty of measuring morality. Vertical ladders between the boxes possibly indicate an exit route in each stage of history.
The two pieces by James O’Keefe also approach serious subjects – nothingness and insanity – but do so with interactive whimsy, social commentary lurking just beneath the surface. “Psychological Storage Unit” is the quintessential impractical business model: Insert a quarter in the slot, the ramshackle cart instructs with stenciled lettering, and then write your psychological hang-up of choice on no more than three sheets of paper. Return for the problem later or just leave it behind. Psychoses already packed away are evidenced by the dozens of boxes, drawers and containers stacked on the cart, with labels like “illusions,” “violent thoughts,” and “panic attacks.” Metamorphosed by their kooky setting, these conditions become infinitely less frightening.
Here’s a juxtaposition: Next to O’Keefe’s fanciful construction is John Paul Gardner’s modernistic installation “Boundary.” A single set of parallel red fishing lines beam across the stage at the end of the room, creating a tension between movement and solid walls. “Range 1-4,” Gardener’s series of drawings also on display, capture the same effect with less drama.
Also working with the idea of flatness and dimensionality is Afrikaner sculptor Andries Fourie. His piece “The Carrion Eaters” is plantlike in form, with metal plates bearing silkscreened images – including a human heart, carnivores, a slingshot and a windmill – reaching out on solid vines. “Talking to Mr. Bhengu About Cattle” employs another metal plate along with a wood frame, a meat grinder, and a water faucet. This and Fourie’s third work on display, a frayed jacket hung with metal keys, defy interpretation. Perhaps the juxtaposition invoked here is that between logic and artistic inspiration.
The artist with the most work on display in this exhibition is Jud Turner, whose found object sculptures incorporate the contradictions between nature and technology; past and present. Witness a tree growing out of jumbled engine parts, a zeppelin strung from clouds and a machine that incorporates a human femur. Turner’s Artist Statement is almost as interesting as his art, describing how an exploration of quantum physics led to his fascination with dichotomies. “I have many ideas for sculptures roaming around in my imagination,” it reads, “but only those that operate on multiple levels of meaning and visual satisfaction are featured in the physical world.”

Visual satisfaction may, at times, take precedence over meaning in “Juxtaposed,” but the artists do aptly define and explore the theme, each making a unique contribution to the well-executed exhibit. By placing together objects and ideas of unequal stature, they demystify one while bringing new meaning to the other. Ultimately, out of disorder comes order, these reactions creating a sense of the grand congruency of the universe.