INFLUX
FLUX Editor in Chief Kristin Bartus
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he School of Journalism and Communication is pleased to announce the opening of its George S. Turnbull Portland Center. The Turnbull Center offers workshops, seminars, for-credit classes, and Senior Experience, a unique experience combining half-day paid internships with late-afternoon classes for our undergraduates. Graduate-level, for-credit seminars in strategic communication will be offered beginning fall 2006. Serving students and working professionals, exploring contemporary issues in journalism, and creating new opportunities in the state's media center, the Turnbull Center will draw on the school's strengths in all professional areas.
For more information:
jcomm.uoregon.edu SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM AND COMMUNICATION University of Oregon
Managing Editor Richard Gould Copy Editor Matt Tiffany Assistant Copy Editor Cassie DeFillipo Senior Associate Editor Meg Krugel Associate Editors Sena Christian Dave Constantin Research Editor Ursula Evans-Heritage Associate Research Editors Maresa Giovannini Brittany McGrath Lucas Pollock Art Director Catherine Ryan Creative Director Sam Karp Art Associates Alexis Chicoye Krystal Hilliker Molly Horton Caitie McCurdy Caitlin McNamara Carrie Sutton Art Interns Melissa Reader Faith Stafford
Photo Editor Kate Horton Senior Photographers Alex Pajunas Kai-Huei Yau Photographers Nicole Barker Brett Crosse Cory Eldridge Katie Gleason Shaina Sullivan Production Manager Lindsay Monroe Production Assistant Megan Gilgen Production Intern/ Marketing Illustrator Emily Davis Business Manager Sarah Davis Marketing Director Kellee Kauftheil Marketing Art Associate Mia Leidelmeyer
Editor Margaret McGladrey Associate Editors Jennifer Felli Allyson Goldstein Kendal Richards Art Director Paul Weinert Art Associates Molly Cooney-Mesker Sabrina Gowette Joe Mansfield Andrew Maser Erin McKenzie Adviser Skipper McFarlane
SPECIAL THANKS American Apparel Carol Ann Bassett James Boyd Ryan Bruss Andre Chinn Jessica Evicia JR Gaddis Sally Garner Sarah Giffrow Tim Gleason Greater Goods Tommy Hannam Greg Kerber Koke Printing Company Dave Koranda Tom Lundberg Max Studio Dan Miller Zanne Miller Dan Morrison Mount Pisgah Arboretum Julianne Newton Grayson Revoir Beth Ripley Stephanie Risbrough John Russial Ryan Stasel Alan Stavitsky Sweet Potato Pie Sue Varani Tom Wheeler
Marketing Intern Matt Heath Advisers Mark Blaine Bill Ryan Jan Ryan
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Plan your summer now 2006 SUMMER SESSION Earn credit in a variety of formats: fourweek courses as well as shorter workshops and seminars are available throughout the summer to suit your needs. Formal admission to the university is not required. Satisfy your curiosity and expand your world. Take a weeklong seminar just because the subject fascinates you. Or, if you can't wait to finish college and start shaking up the world, satisfy a major requirement with a four-week course and graduate early with a competitive edge. Whether you're advancing professional goals or personal growth, summer session has something for you.
JUNE 26-AUGUST 18 Immerse yourself in art workshops, languages, environmental studies, computer science, journalism, marine biology, or music. Take advantage of innovative, summer-only courses. Earn credit for an archaeological dig or a photography workshop while enjoying the dazzling Oregon summer.
Being a staff member of Flux isn't just a job, it's an adventure. Over the last couple of months Flux staffers have had some exciting experiences in the line of duty. One writer communed with nineteen pit bulls. Another spent weeks trying to chase down the University of Oregon's latest track phenom. Out in the wilds of the Willamette National Forest, a couple of petite, yet intrepid, Fluxers ' attempted to split a I DO-foot log into planks using only a wooden mallet and a wedge. And then there were those irascible bees, which seemed to think our photographer was after their honey when all he wanted to do was get a good shot of them in action. At least they were thoughtful enough to give him a matching set of stings - one under each eye. More than fifty students have played a role in creating Flux, and these highly talented individuals have thrown themselves into whatever circumstances were necessary to get the stories we offer in this issue. This year in Flux, we feature many pieces about people whose everyday lives are an adventure.
Summer session course offerings are listed on our website, http:// uosummer .uoregon.edu. Or, to order a 2006 Summer Session Catalog, call (541) 346-3475 or toll free (800)
Grand Ronde tribal member Don Day puts sweat and soul into reviving the centuries-old practice of traditionallonghouse building, which he hopes will bring back the forgotten cultural and spiritual life of tribal ancestors. Pit bull advocate Amanda Gribben faces constant criticism as she rescues maligned dogs and attempts to turn them into upstanding canine citizens. Forester Mike Newton spends his days trying to track down the elusive mountain beaver, a tiny furball that threatens the ecology of the northwestern Oregon woods.
524-2404.
Kristin Bartus Editor in Chief
I hope all of these stories make as much of an impression on you as they have on us. Welcome to Flux.
http://uosummer.uoregon.edu Ja006 ~UÂťVMrS'cktfule First four-week session: June 26-July 21 Second four-week session: July 24-August 18 Eight-week session: June 26-August 18 Eleven-week session: June 26-September 8
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I
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
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6 Today in Flux
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Rebuilding Tradition One Grand Ronde tribal member leads an effort to reconstruct tribal culture through traditional longhouse building. by Sena Christian • photos by Kate Horton
Courting the Future New courthouse could cure urban blandness
Said The latest lowdown on American English
Seen Contemporary twists on age-old extracurriculars
40 Ambassador of the Bad Breed Amanda Gribben rescues pit bulls to keep them from getting the short end of the bone. by Robin Munro • photos by Katie Gleason and Shaina Sullivan
10 Smoking in Palestine The comfort of a nicotine fix helps an American deal with the stress of a stay in the West Bank. by Cory Eldridge • composite illustration by Kai-Huei Yau and Cory Eldridge
46 Quest for Glory A photo essay shows how an Oregon training facility turns talented athletes into ultimate fighting champions. photos and story by Alex Pajunas
12 Eco Chic Organic clothing breaks into the mainstream and makes it stylish to save the environment. by Erin Lynne Pentis • photos by Kai-Huei Yau
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16 Becoming Cree Gordon
A beekeeper's son shares stories of the secret life of beekeeping and why the industry is at risk. by Joe Hansen • photos by Alex Pajunas
A young man's days on the streets of the French Quarter leave him with HIV and the conviction to educate his peers. by Darrick Meneken • photos by Cory Eldridge
58 22 Back in Black Classic burle~ . 'e re-emerges with a gothic flair that tantalizes fans and pushes the envelope. by Adrienne van der Valk • photos by Nicole Barker
Tales from the Hive
Rodents of Unusual Surprises Protecting forests from mischievous mountain beavers puts a scientist's life in danger. story and photos by Dave Constantin
Cover Notes Front cover: Tribal elder Don Day splits a 40-foot-long cedar log, which will be used in the construction of a Kalapuyastyle long house on the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde reservation. Back cover: Volunteer Michael Michelle rests on an old-growth western red cedar, considered the tree of life by the Grand Ronde people.
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26 Learning through Labor A photo essay portrays a prison jobs program that encourages contributions to society. photos by Shaina Sullivan • introduction by Tim O'Rourke
64 Back Talk Bible Belted A Bible salesman deals with an unfortunate on-the-job encounter with a fist. by Richard Gould • illustration by Lindsay Monroe
Flux, the University of Oregon School of Journalism and Communication magazine, is planned, written, edited, designed, and produced by students. InFlux, the online version of Flux, is available at influx.uoregon.edu/2006.
Today in FLUX
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ithout a strong architectural monument to define it, Eugene, Oregon, suffers the blandness of many small American cities. Low-slung modernist boxes populate a downtown fed by asphalt arteries and surrounded by sprawling suburbs. But just over the bridge into town a colossus is emerging, wrapped in a cloak of steel and promise.
STORY: MATT CHABAN COMPOSITE ILLUSTRATION: ALEXIS CHICOYE & BRETT CROSSE
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In just more than two years, the Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse has sprung from the earth with an architectural gravitas Eugene has never known. The building may not yet be complete, but it still looks stunning, a diamond waiting to emerge from the rough. In October, the doors will open to a building that could bring the community back into the legal process, anchor the city's plans to redevelop downtown and the riverfront, and inspire future projects.
The new courthouse's design is pushing the paradigm of how courthouse architecture is conceptualized, says Thorn Mayne, founder of Morphosis, the firm behind the design, and a Pritzker Prize winner (architecture's Nobel). Mayne's judicial liaison, federal judge Michael Hogan, at first resisted his progressive vision - until Mayne wooed him with a few thousand architectural slides. Now, Hogan even talks like an architect. "One of the design strategies is to do away with the artificial distinction between what's outside and what's inside the building - making it the same, a shared space," he says. Access, however, is limited because the same bridge that gives the courthouse its grand introduction severs it from the rest of downtown. City planners have vowed to address this problem,
and Mayne's design offers plenty of incentive. Swathed in seven undulating stainless steel ribbons that enfold six courtrooms, the fas:ade draws the eye into the heart of the building. These ribbons sit upon a two-story glass plinth that exposes the guts of the judicial process. Emphasizing the interplay between inside and out, one of the ribbons juts into the lobby. It terminates halfway and hangs suspended, like magic.
The Wayne Morse Federal Courthouse, the progressive vision of the Morphosis architecture firm, will be completed in October 2006.
"Everything is really quite performance-driven in the design," Mayne says. "Everything is where it needs to be and does what it has to do." (I Hear more from Judge Hogan and check out architectural renderings at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
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seen • Today in FLUX
Today in FLUX • said
Strictly Ballroom
Modern English uring the 2004 engagement of a certain pop princess, Weekly splashed the headline "Britney, The Bridezilla!" across its cover, circulating the snarky term among millions of readers. In 2005, bridezilla made its debut in the most recent edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary, defined as "an overzealous brideto-be who acts irrationally or causes offense." Along with bridezilla, the 2,000 latest entries in the dictionary include Texas Hold 'em, prairie-dogging, fake bake, and supersize. They also tossed out a handful of words, such as information superhighway. Why so much mutation? "Because it is a living language, and like all living things, languages are constantly growing and changing," says Spike Gildea, head of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon.
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According to Paul 11 Payack, founder of the Global Language Monitor, the English language produces some 10,000 words per month. "Smaller dictionaries have to take words out to make room for newer, more useful words," says Erin McKean, editor in chief of U.S. dicti~naries for Oxford University Press. Gildea agrees. "I imagine bling-bling is probably plenty more common these days than some older, archaic words that are still in there," he says. There will be an update of the online version of the dictionary this summer, including the 2005 "word of the year": podcast. Gildea's suggestion: "I would like to see 'word' in there in its new use as a one-word sentence indicating emphatic agreement. 'Isn't it cool that bling-bling made the dictionary?' 'Word.'" -Brittany McGrath
MCs do the SATs
Running Man
HIP-HOP BEATS HELP TEENS EXPAND VOCABULARIES
OREGON PHENOM TAKES TRAINING HIGH TECH
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emember the days in high school English class when, fretfully twiddling your pencil, you made absolutely sure to avoid your teacher's gaze in an attempt to circumvent the humiliation of defining vocabulary words in front of the entire class? The trusty flash cards you used the night before helped a little, but when the teacher arbitrarily demanded explanations for beguile, paradigm, clairvoyant, or commodious your memory somehow became a barren wasteland. Alex Rappaport and Blake Harrison have joined forces to help today's generation avoid these terrors. They compose hip-hop music for use in the classroom. These two twentysomething entrepreneurs have become the Manhattan-based hip-hop group Flocabulary. Their didactic-styled hip-hop accompanies a series of study aids and SAT prep workbooks designed to improve vocabulary comprehension for high school students. They've taken Schoolhouse Rock to the next level. Flocabulary's educational materials can now be found at Borders bookstores shelved right alongside The Princeton Review guides. "When you put music in a voice that kids can relate to, they can internalize it," says
Harrison. "Our goal is to get students to feel like they own the info." Rappaport combines catchy beats and funky bass undertones with melodic instrumental phrasing. While steering clear of vulgarities, Harrison, a.k.a. Emcee Escher, keeps communication
limpid/ not too complex/ and clearer than a window thatjust got Windexed. His lyrics are cool and clean, easy for kids to relate to, and user-friendly for teachers. Students and teachers like Flocabulary so much, they're inviting the duo to perform in classrooms and assembly halls across the country. In April, Flocabulary embarked on its nationwide "Shakespeare is Hip-Hop" school tour. The group is planning another tour for next winter, which will focus on teaching history. The guys in Flocabulary are achieving success, and so is their audience. Betty Williams, an eighth grade teacher at Martin De Porres School in Queens, New York, tried Flocabulary's materials on her class. Shortly afterward, her students received the highest grades on their report cards all year, and the kids began using words like loquacious in their everyday speech. In one instance, she reprimanded a student for making a wisecrack in class. The student quipped, "I was just being cogent."
-L. Jordon Frauen
hen it comes to social ballroom dancing today, there are those who hunt and those who are hunted. The·vultures begin their hunt, the rabbits stand in the shadows, and a few good men mentally check their dance cards. Vultures circle their prey, waiting to pounce as soon as a lass falls away from the pack. Rabbits dart out from darkened corners, and then back again, usually too skittish to invite a beauty to dance. But for the few good men, the roles are reversed. Instead of hunting for a dance partner, women hunt them for their passion and expertise. Popularized by the recent hit show Dancing With the Stars, the centuries-old tradition of ballroom dancing flourishes again. Young and old attend weekly dances at the University of Oregon. As in days of yore, today's enthusiasts practice ballroom according to the rules, which provides a peculiar kind of freedom. Proper ballroom etiquette requires that one says yes whenever asked to dance, giving all revelers a chance to step outside of their normal lives and into ballroom bliss. -Jennifer Felli
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alen Rupp is going against the current - but only because he's running on an underwater treadmill. Its jets provide just the right resistance as he jogs through the water, part of the low-impact rehabilitation for his injured foot. In all other respects, Rupp is on track with a rich tradition at the University of Oregon. The university has borne witness to the evolution of American distance running. The trails of Eugene, Oregon, are the birthplace of Nike and the stomping grounds of the late, legendary Steve Prefontaine. With an old school work ethic and some astounding innovations in conditioning technology, sophomore Rupp is poised to carry the torch as America's next great distance runner. An Olympic prospect for 2008, the nineteen-year-old holds the fastest times ever by an American junior in the 3,000-, 5,000-, and 10,000-meter events. "He's already running at an international level," says Olympian and personal coach Alberto Salazar. In many ways, Rupp's training is indicative of the technological progress athletic conditioning has achieved in the past decade. In addition to training on the underwater treadmill, he's been known
to sleep in an acclimatized tent in his bedroom to enrich the oxygen content in his red blood cells. More oxygen in his blood means Rupp's muscles sustain themselves longer while running. Rupp will also recover faster after training sessions. "You've got to do a lot of mileage and hard workouts, too. There's no shortcut to training well, but the fine-tuning comes in with the supplemental stuff:" says Rupp. "It's that little stuff that separates the good from the great." Other"supplemental stuff' includes wearing an oxygen mask to simulate a high altitude environment during treadmill workouts. Without training in high altitude, which many of his African counterparts grow up with, it is difficult to be a competitive distance runner today. Rupp also runs through the latest plyometric drills before and after his workouts. Runners use these calisthenics to improve power and explosiveness in their gait. But Rupp already possesses the most important traits of a great runner: a drive to win and the discipline to log obscene numbers of miles. Rupp knows that achieving success comes down to how badly he wants it. -Lucas Pollock
OPPOSITE: Illustration by LindsayMonroe LEFT: University of Oregon speedster Galen Rupp takes advantage of the tools available to him to stay on track. Photo by Kai-Huei Yau BELOW: Acouple of modern-day ballroom aficionados demonstrate all the right moves during aFriday night dance at the University of Oregon. Photo by Kate Horton
the smoke, but my hands stopped quivering.
STORY: CORY ELDRIDGE COMPOSITE ILLUSTRATIONS: KAI-HUEI YAU & CORY ELDRIDGE
Amid conflict and violence, the certainty of a simple act is a treasure to cling to only smoke when I'm drunk or in the West Bank. The daily regimen of passing through Israeli checkpoints amid disgruntled Palestinians and skittish soldiers, mosque loudspeakers blaring Hamas sermons, and a ceaseless cringe from anticipated violence injects a persistent flow of stress that only nicotine cures. Dangerous events are rare, but the everyday uncertainty makes me chew my cheek like gum. I prefer smoke to blood in my mouth. Normally a pack lasts me a week. Leaning against the room's wall and peering out the window, I dragged out the cigarette - my third in fifteen minutes. Jordan, my travel companion, stood across from me fumbling with a lighter to kindle his second-ever smoke. The snap, snap, snap of failed ignitions distracted me from the sounds outside. Mer his sixth attempt I grabbed the cigarette, breathed out to steady my hands, and touched the unlit cigarette to the other's smoldering end. As I handed it to Jordan, another Kalashnikov rifle sounded - chungchung-chung - and we dropped the cigarette. Another rush of adrenaline filled my body and sent my head to the place it goes before a 400-meter dash or during an orgasm. A second later the rush plunged into my stomach and burst. Bile burned my throat as I swallowed it baCK down. An hour earlier, a still night greeted us as we entered Jenin, a northern West Bank town within five miles of Israel. Though Jordan is an Ohio boy, his roots lie in Palestine, and we came to visit his two doctor-uncles and their families. We arrived late, so tea and talk passed quickly and we were soon
shown to our beds. Our room, a guest quarters atop the families' private hospital that connects to their homes, provided a view ofJenin and most of the local Palestinian refugee camp, which after several decades of development had melded to the town. The machine guns started firing as I unpacked. The bangs echoed off the hills and made the shooting seem both a block and a mile away simultaneously. We scurried to the window, leaned out, and looked toward the sound of the shooting - the refugee camp. "What gun is that?" Jordan asked. '~K-47, maybe. It's Palestinians shooting; they would have that gun," I said.
The shooting came sporadically, sometimes close, sometimes distant. Sometimes several guns fired at once. I looked for muzzle flashes, tracers, explosions even, but the moonlight only revealed a warren of narrow roads and winding alleyways that hid the innards of the refugee camp. Then, suddenly, as if in reply, another sound joined, higher-pitched and faster, and the shooting speeded up. "I think that's an M-16," I said. "It must be a fight. A militia must be fighting the Israelis," Jordan said. . My heart raced and I dug through my bag for a cigarette. "Just breathe deep, you don't need the cigarettes," my lungs said. "You're not in danger; stop being a pussy." "Fuck that," my heart said. "Calm me down. Now." I singed my thumb twice with the lighter and snorted when I smelled
The shooting kept up for thirty minutes. The Kalashnikovs rumbled - chung-chung-chung - and the M-16s shrieked their response.kak-kak-kak. We imagined the noise was tomorrow's news: "Three Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed when Palestinian militants from Jenin attacked an Israeli checkpoint." As Jordan exhaled the last of the smoke from his cigarette, a red tracer arced across the sky, flying from the refugee camp into a cluster of lights inside Israel. The shooting slowed but didn't die till dawn.
or breakfast, Jordan's aunt, Manar, cooked eggs and squeezed orange juice. As we ate, his three young cousins told us about their week at school, who the cute boys liked, and their field trip to Jericho. Mer breakfast, Manar took the three girls to buy ingredients for dinner, and we wandered around the neighborhood. The bombed-out Palestinian Authority buildings lay a few blocks from the families' home. So did the square named for Al-Muhandis, Hamas' top suicide bomb belt-maker until a booby-trapped cell phone exploded in his ear.
We returned to the hospital, where the front door lacked a "no smoking" decal. Instead, a "no machine guns" sticker, complete with a silhouetted Kalashnikov, decorated the glass. "Jenin has a gun problem," a nurse told me. Back in my room, I napped. Guns woke me. Just a few shots sounded at first. A second later more staggered in, unloading a cacophonous popping of rounds. The machine guns fired from within the refugee camp, just blocks away. Desperate to see the violence, we ran out of our room and onto the root leaning over a waist-high wall to look down the street. Suddenly, a caravan of cars peeled around a corner, sped down the road below us, and entered the camp. When their brakes stopped screeching, the firing grew and drowned all other noise. "Shit, I think the Israelis invaded the camp," Jordan said. "Those were reinforcements." A few moments passed and the cars restarted. The caravan rushed back toward us and the shooting accompanied it. As they pointed guns out every car window like a porcupine's quills, the fighters fired into the air. I leaned farther over the wall as the cars passed below and saw the red muzzle flashes from the AK-47s and M-16s. Jordan threw himself to the ground. "Hey, they have M-16s, too, like the Israelis," I said over the firing.
"Get down. You're going to get shot," Jordan yelled. I turned around, stared down.the barrel of a gun twenty feet below, saw it fire, pushed myself backward, and fell on the ground. I grabbed my cigarettes, lit two, and as the cars and blasts faded away I drew from both before handing one to Jordan.
The machine guns 'fired from wi,thin' the refugee camp, just blocks away. Still shaking, we went downstairs to eat dinner with the family. We told Manar and the three girls what happened and asked what they knew about it. Nervous and jittery, we asked if anyone died. Nour, Jordan's little cousin, smiled at us. "You mean all the shooting. that just happened? There was a wedding in the camp," she said. "They were celebrating." Mer dinner I returned to the roof and lit another cigarette - my sixth in twenty-four hours. I find repose in the certainty of some things, cigarettes for instance. Unlike weddings, I expect them to kill me. (I
Find out more about the West Bank through interactive maps and commentary from the author at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
Cory Eldridge and Kai-Huei Yau created these composite photo illustrations from multiple images they took in Palestine and Oregon. They melded the different images using Adobe Photoshop. For adiscussion of the ethics and creation of these composites, visit . influx.uoregon.edu/2006.
hen Elizabeth Thompson first started selling clothes, it was out of the back of her van at Grateful Dead concerts. She peddled all-natural wares - made of mostly hemp and organic cotton - to throngs of Deadheads. After a few years, she settled in Eugene, Oregon, where she opened an organic clothing store called Sweet Potato Pie in 1997. "When I first opened, my customers were who you would stereotypically think ot" says Thompson.
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Initially, Thompson's customers were often hippies and natural types - the kind of folks who tended to be involved in eco-friendly causes. In the past few years, however, a more eclectic clientele has become fond of Sweet Potato Pie's all-natural frocks. "They are all different ages, races, sizes, and styles," says Thompson.
PHOTOS: Models James Boyd, Jessica Evicia, Sarah Giffrow, and Tommy Hannam were photographed wearing eco-friendly clothing courtesy of American Apparel, Greater Goods, Max Studio, and Sweet Potato Pie at Mount Pisgah Arboretum in Eugene, Oregon.
She has adapted to her changing customer base, which includes college students and professionals, by increasing the variety of styles she carries. She has also started selling a more diverse array of organic materials and trendier creations. Apparently, hemp isn't just for hippies anymore. And the growing popularity of organic clothing reaches beyond the boundaries of progressive Eugene. Green fashion is trickling into the mainstream. More and more companies are creating clothing using organic fabrics woven from hemp, soybean, bamboo, organic cotton, and wool, as well as corn products.
ccording to the Organic Trade Association, there was a 22.7 percent increase in organic clothing sales from 2002 tQ 2003. And that number is rising. The Organic
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Exchange, a nonprofit organization that focuses on boosting the production and use of organically grown fibers, reports that the number of U.S. brands using organic materials has increased from 100 in 2002 to more than 250 today. The organization also says that demand for organic cotton has increased by more than 300 percent in the last three years. Word about the negative effects of traditional cotton is getting around. The Environmental Protection Agency reports that five of the nine pesticides used to facilitate the growth of cotton are proven cancer-causers and contribute to major water pollution, chronic illness in farm workers, and disease among wildlife. During the production of clothing, more chemicals are added. The Organic Trade Association and the Organic Exchange are just a couple of the environmental organizations that have been working to promote the benefits of organic goods. Since 1994, the Sustainable Cotton Project has joined growers, manufacturers, and consumers in the fight to use organic cotton. The project enlisted the help of Nike to raise awareness. Nike has committed to using 10 percent organic cotton in its basic logo T-shirts and shoes by 2010. New York City-based nonprofit Earth Pledge went to some other heavy hitters to push the sustainable fashion
Edition" line. These u.S. Department ofAgriculture--eertified organic cotton versions of popular styles are available in the company's 125 stores worldwide. In the next three years, the company plans to make its entire line organic. "Our organic line is continuing to expand as the demand grows for organic fashion," says Erika Martinez, representative for American Apparel's Sustainable Edition. "We expect the line to continue to grow, and we will be able to introduce more fashionforward styles." Max Studio, a Southern Californiabased clothing brand marketed toward twenty- and thirty-something working women, brings even more eco-friendly materials to the fashion scene. The company now uses bamboo and soybean fabrics in its clothing. Bamboo, which is the fastest-growing plant in the world, is easily replenishable and yields a softer-than-cotton fabric. Soybean, another popular choice among designers because it can be woven into a material that resembles silk, produces a soft, cashmere-like byproduct with amino acids that nourish the skin. The Max Studio fall 2005 collection included track jackets, T-shirts, sweaters, and yoga pants made out of these organic materials. "Customers really appreciate our organic line," says Andrea Hellebuyck, assistant manager and organic clothing specialist at Max
Demand for organic cotton has increased by more than 300 percent in the last three years. agenda. Last year during Fashion Week, Earth Pledge launched its FutureFashion initiative. The organization asked twenty-eight top designers to create and manufacture an outfit for the runway using only "renewable, reusable, and nonpolluting fabrics." Oscar de la Renta designed a stunning ivory ball gown out of hemp and Ingeo (a corn fiber). He later joined FutureFashion's board of advisors.
s tales of eco-friendly chicness began to spread among New York's high-rolling fashionistas, Los Angeles-based American Apparel was doing its part to bring organic materials in clothing to a new level. An up-and-coming brand that marries comfort with fresh design, American Apparel created the "Sustainable
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Studio in the California Bay Area. "They come in and want to know all about it." And this growing market is making its way to fashion schools, too. The California College of the Arts and Academy of Art University in the Bay Area already offer courses in green design, giving fashion studentscreators of trends to come - the power to show style devotees of the future that going green is tres chic. From a peace-loving subculture to the runway to the mainstream, organic clothing is putting its stamp on fashion.
See behind the scenes of the eco-fashion photo shoot for this story at influx.uoregon.edu/2006
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From the bayous of his untamed past, a young man emerges to a life of HIV advocacy STORY: DARRICK MENEKEN PHOTOS: CORY ELDRIDGE
z is probably the most popular dance club in New Orleans. It's certainly the most popular gay dance club. In the Big Easy, where bars go all night, Oz never closes its doors. Customers dance topless and go-go boys gyrate above the crowd. This is where our story begins, in the French Quarter, before Katrina, a place where Cree Gordon spent three months drifting like jazz music through the humid air. In tight pants and tiny tops, he became a regular at clubs such as Oz. "Men wanted me because they thought I was cute," he says. His voice is sassy and a slight Southern drawl has all but vanished since he moved to the West Coast more than a year ago. He's biracial, with caramel skin a soft mix of coffee and cream. When he smiles, his face stretches like silly putty, collecting at the lips as if invisible hands were pulling on his cheeks.
Cree hails from the sultry sugarcane country between Lafayette and Baton Rouge in southern Louisiana. Born Christopher Gordon, his nickname Cree stuck by the time he was a junior in high school. His thin features border on gaunt, and on any given day you never know what color his hair will be. He's nothing if not effusive in speech and eccentric in dress. He often ends sentences with "it's whatever" or "it happens" and enjoys wearing pastel pink and purple T-shirts printed with acerbic messages. One reads: rou don't know my name but your boyfriend does. In New Orleans, his slender silhouette
and impish charm made it easy to grab men's attention. "I was a smart ho," he says. "I knew how to work it." And indeed, he was working. When the nights got late, Cree ran his fingers up his slim thighs, threw back his long hair, and stepped out onto steamy sidewalks that stretch beneath iron lace balconies. On his best nights he made $200. He doesn't call it prostitution, preferring the term "survival sex." He was homeless; a place to stay or a hot meal was sometimes his only fee. He's not sure how many men he slept with during this time - at least forty - but after three months, he quit. He'd fallen in love with a man from Eugene, Oregon, and headed west.
Today, Cree works as a volunteer speaker at HIV Alliance, an awareness and outreach center near the University of Oregon. He talks at various high school and college conferences about the seriousness of HIV/AIDS and how to best prevent transmission. "This kid is really going places," says Niki Martin, director of HIV Alliance's youth program. Martin believes Cree will have a future as a public face. "All these things that he's experienced make him such a dynamic presenter," she says. Human Immunodeficiency Virus causes AIDS, more fully known as Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, an incurable disease that destroys the
OPPOSITE: Cree Gordon, at acrossroad in his life, has forged anew path as a University of Oregon student and activist, devoting much of his time to volunteering with HIV Alliance. FLUX • 17
the then nineteen-year-old Cree, just a month removed from his hustling days. "Sometimes it's hard to elicit information about risky behavior," she says. "But with Cree it didn't take long for him to open up. There was less shame." Moore administered the oral swab test and told Cree he could receive his results - and the ten dollars - in two weeks.
ecilia, Louisiana, is little more than a gathering of houses at the intersection of three state highways, a Piggly Wiggly grocery store, and incessant acres of sugarcane. The locals, at least the white ones, take pride in the Confederate general buried in their cemetery. This is where Cree grew up and where, at fourteen, he announced he was gay. His dad, by then long divorced from his mom, didn't take it well.
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"My father stopped doing stuff for me when I came out," Cree says, pushing specifics aside. As a child, Cree changed homes with the regularity of the sugarcane harvest. He says that he was "tossed around" and that his parents never showed him unconditionallove. In turn, he has trouble moving forward with any type of relationship with them today. He now calls his parents by their first names. "I don't have that respect for them," he explains. "I don't like either one of them." Then he backpedals. "I need to let go of all those negative things. I might write them a letter." ABOVE: Cree takes the opportunity to round out his college education with an African dance class.
immune system and eventually leads to death. Unprotected sex and shared intravenous needles are the two most common ways the virus spreads. But chatting about this stuff with a room full of teenagers isn't easy. For relief: Cree swings a giant red dildo in front of the crowd and demonstrates the proper way to unfurl a condom. He also shows off things such as dental dams and finger condoms. Kids laugh - and learn. Later, when he asks audience members if they can tell by looking whether or not someone is HIV-positive, some say yes. When he asks what they think about him, the same people guess no.
T
o get from New Orleans to Eugene, Cree rode a bus for two and a half days. It was
18 • FLUX
raining when he arrived, and morning fog clung to the wet one-way streets that grid downtown. Aside from a sore back and two days of missed sleep, he felt good. It was to be a fleeting feeling. "He's a closet case," Cree now declares of the man he moved more than 2,000 miles to be with. "He didn't want his roommate to find out he was gay." Homeless again, Cree moved into a recovery house and lived on food stamps. He hung out at a drop-in center for homeless youth. When HIV Alliance's Kelly Moore came to the shelter and offered him ten bucks to take an HIV test, he agreed. Moore, a soft-spoken woman with large eyes and a morose expression, is the counseling and testing director for HIV Alliance. In Cree, she found a young man with a passionate personality. "I was impressed with him," she says of
During his junior year in high school he moved out and attended a boarding school for gifted teens across the state. Once, a man asked him out to the movie Ali and later invited him home. From there the details abate. Cree thinks he was drugged. "I remember him giving me something to drink," he recalls. "I remember lying down in the bed and him taking off my clothes. And then I kind of passed out." He woke up naked and pinned stomachdown with the man forcing himself on him. The following day it hurt to walk. In the bathroom, he found blood in his stool. Like that, Cree lost his virginity. "I don't count it," he says. "I didn't tell anybody. I didn't think about it. I tried to be like it wasn't true." One good memory from back home is senior prom. Cree slipped into silver
high heels and a dress of red sequins. His hair, uncut for two years, draped to his back, and his date, a girl, donned a tuxedo and top hat. Before their arrival they got drunk. Through half-blurry eyes Cree recognized his decorated high school gym - the same place he sat through PE classes afraid to break a sweat. Before the night ended, an upbeat tune spilled over the floor and he danced with the prom king. A few months later he enrolled at Xavier University in New Orleans and dove into the city's happening gay scene. He ambitiously celebrated Mardi Gras in the French Quarter, openly twirling his ... well, you know ... in the street. "I said, 'OK, I'm going to snag me three different dudes and they're going to be from three different states.'" He doubled the goal. "Most of the time I just did it for the attention," he says. He wasn't yet charging. Despite parental conflicts, Cree was back in Cecilia soon after Mardi Gras. By April, just a year after senior prom, he'd dropped out of Xavier and was home cooking meals, cleaning house, and longing for the French Quarter. He told everyone he was going for a visit, packed a single bag, and bought a one-way ticket. By day, he snoozed under leafy trees on the banks of the Mississippi River, a modern-day Huck Finn hiding from his past. But unlike Huck, Cree didn't free a slave as much as he enslaved himself "I'd pretend for a night or a weekend or whatev~r that the person I would go home with cared about me," he says. As for condoms, only some men used them. A year later - just eight days before his twentieth birthday - Cree arrived at HIV Alliance in Eugene to get his results. Inside, Moore prepared to deliver the news. "That's definitely the hardest part of the job," she says, "telling somebody that they have HI~" Cree responded with shock, and a few tears after the news set in. It was, however, not a complete surprise. "He told me that he had had a dream that he'd come in to meet with me and that I'd given him his result," Moore recalls. "That it was positive." The dream was prophetic in another way, too. "My dream kind of skipped," Cree remembers, "and I was speaking in schools."
ree began attending the University of Oregon in winter 2006 and hopes to earn a family and human services degree. He still receives food stamps and now lives in a sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment paid for by the Oregon HOME Tenant-Based Assistance program. He's an active member of the Black Student Union and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer Alliance.
C
"You know when you're friends with someone and you can't remember the
one thing that made you friends? I think he just kind of has that personality that makes you think you've known him forever," says Felecia Wheatfall, who met Cree through the Black Student Union. "He's really active and really involved in trying to make a change." Of 330,000 Lane County residents, Cree is one of the 200 to 300 the HIV Alliance estimates are living with HIV/AIDS. Before testing positive, he had unprotected sex with two males in Eugene - the thirty-something man he left New Orleans for and a seventeen-year-old boy. Both have since tested negative. Cree hasn't yet begun taking the drug cocktails that extend life for many HIV and AIDS patients. Highly Active
Antiretroviral Therapy, also known as HAART, was introduced in the mid-1990s and has altered the perception ofAIDS as a death sentence. Previously, the average lifespan from original HIV infection to death was ten and a half years. With HAART, the average lifespan is seventeen years, meaning Cree will probably die before his fortieth birthday. "He'll feel better some days than others," Martin says. "(But) he's not going to get over this." Cree won't begin a HAART regimen
until his doctor says so. There are some intense side effects, and for now, based on his comparatively healthy viral load and cell count, waiting seems wise. Wheatfall, who as an elementary school student watched AIDS kill one of her aunts, is pleased with Cree's robust and active pursuit of his goals. "He's planning for his future just like anyone else," she says.
ABOVE: Cree now resides in atwo-bedroom apartment - amarked improvement over his homeless life as ateenager.
In early May, Cree was awarded The Pride Foundation's James and Colin Lee Wozumi Scholarship, given to select HIV-positive students who focus on the virus' treatment and eradication. The $1,200 award was accompanied by a $1,000 Phil Sullivan Scholarship for students with significant financial need, also delivered by The Pride Foundation. FLUX • 19
Spent too much money during Spring Break in Cancun.
Your rent is a week late.
Fender bender on your way back from the airport.
ABOVE: On the one-year anniversary of his arrival in Eugene, Cree screams with fellow demonstrators at the Day of Silence rally to protest the bullying and harassment of gay, bisexual, and transgender people nationwide.
oday, Cree is twenty-one years old and remains sexually active. "I always let them know," he says. As he talks, a small collection of colorful awareness bracelets rings his lower arm: blue for Don't Hate, rainbow for Gay Pride, and red for AIDS Awareness. "If you care about somebody, that kind of stuff doesn't matter," he says. "It's just going to be there." His days of unprotected sex, however, are somewhere in a land called Oz.
T
the door at HIV Alliance. "I was like, (OK Cree, you can do one of two things: You can dwell on a bad situation and make it worse, or you can educate yourself and find something good about it.' So, that's what I did."
ree primps himself on a stage erected inside a ballroom on the UO campus. Students and community members stream through the doors and find seats among long rows of chairs lined up on a large "The thing is, I made a choice. I don't want hardwood floor. hundred somebody to feel sorry for me, because I'm Eight people come to the not going to feel sorry for myself:' drag show. Electric rock plays overhead as performers apply makeup. Men turn into women, There's no way to know who gave women into men. They're letting it all him HI~ Based on his viral load, he hang out. Steamy renditions of "Save can only say, with tragic irony, that a Horse, Ride a Cowboy"; "Man in he contracted it while using survival the Mirror"; and Queen's "Princes of sex. Asked if he has any regrets, he the Universe" kick off the night. Then shakes his head. "The thing is, I made comes "Be Without You" by Mary a choice. I don't want somebody to feel J. Blige. Cree prances on stage in a sorry for me, because I'm not going to silky, brown body suit and kitten heel feel sorry for mysel£" Two days after sandals. His hair is much shorter than receiving his test results, he reopened
20 • FLUX
C
Trip to the vet because Sparky swallowed the remote while you were away.
it was in New Orleans and he wears it pinned back in a shock of bright orange dye. "We love you, Cree," someone yells from the crowd as he begins lip synching. He swings his arms wide on the high notes, like a cross, and as the music ends he ducks behind the curtain to loud applause. A few weeks later he makes a more quiet statement. As part of the Day of Silence, an annual event that mimics the silent fear faced by gay, bisexual, and transgender youth, he places a strip of red tape across his mouth and refuses to speak. At five o'clock that evening he joins others who had done the same in the student union plaza. In chorus, the high school and college students tear the tape from their mouths and release a long overdue scream into a warm spring night. "He's somebody that you kind of have a sense that he's a survivor," Moore says. (Md he will be a survivor no matter what." (I
It happens. That's why we offer Book Buyback. At the University of Oregon Bookstore, we want to make it easier for you to save money. Go online to UOBookstore.com/coursebooks/CCRA and check current buyback prices for your books. Use our online classifieds to sell or find textbooks that other students are offering and receive email alerts when we are conducting our buybacks.
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
Experience how Cree Gordon breaks the silence at an LGBT rally at
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Burlesque is reborn, this time with a tattooed edge STORY: ADRIENNE VAN DER VALK
PHOTOS: NICOLE BARKER
D
ahlia Black has spent eight hours under a tattoo artist's needle. Her body has holes in twelve places that weren't there when she was born. Her hair is short and black, unless she's wearing waist-length blue hair extensions. She is no stranger to adorning her body, but when she steps behind the back-lit curtain during one of her performances, Black disappears and so does all the dye, ink, and stainless steel. She becomes Sasha, "Queen of the Screen," a sensuous silhouette removing her clothing one piece at a time.
Sasha is one of the performance personas Black, twenty-five, adopts when headlining Black Rose Burlesque, a variety show she co-owns and manages. No stranger to the stage, she started out doffing her duds two years ago when she spied an ad soliciting dancers for a "Broadway Review" to be held at John Henry's, a bar in Eugene, Oregon. "They did a strip-oft and I got up there and did my thing. Afterward, I decided to give them a call," Black says, tucking her striped stockings under a lacy black crinoline skirt. Black began her career in sex work as a "cam girl" at twenty, doing live Web camera shows on the Internet and working as a phone-sex operator. "Eventually I got tired of doing that stuff I got married, and my husband
was the only guy or girl I was interested in gratifying sexually. I had been into burlesque, and I have always been a huge fan of people like Betty Paige and Ducky DooLittle. I wanted to do something that was funny and sexy," she says. After trying out her pasties at John Henry's, Black and her friend, Rose, decided to start their own troupe - classic erotic performance with a modern, gothic edge. They combined their names and debuted in August 2005 as Black Rose Burlesque. "Alterna-porn," as some social commentators have dubbed acts such as Black Rose, has made a recent splash; in cities such as San Francisco and New York, large, commercially successful burlesque troupes have shimmied their way into the pocketbooks of newly
OPPOSITE: Dahlia Black, co-founder of Black Rose Burlesque, strikes aclassic pinup girl pose. FLUX • 23
as an art form distinct from mainstream pornography.
Americas relationship with raunch is a gold mine of tantalizing material for contemporary artists exploring sexual media. Burlesque high-kicked its way across the pond from England in the 1840s and enjoyed more than a century of sinful popularity before the shock value became dated. Originally, burlesque performers entertained with the goal of mocking or "burlesquing" stuffy upper-class operas and plays, providing both arousal and social commentary on an increasingly stratified socioeconomic system. During World War II, pinup photography gained mainstream distinction from "smut" when well-known movie actresses did bathing suit photo shoots to boost the flagging spirits of American GIs. The pinup girl became frozen in time, her iconic one-piece bathing suit and conical brassiere maintaining their staying power until sex visionaries such as Suicide Girls co-founder Selena Mooney resurrected and redressed her in studded collars and leather G-strings. Modern artists such as Black and Mooney find themselves juggling the task of reinventing naughty art forms in an era when images of women have typically been tailored for men. By widening the intended audience to include anyone with a taste for tassels, alterna-pornographers hope to rescue erotica by re-establishing it as a less stigmatized forum for self-expression.
porn-tolerant urban hipsters. The Portland-based Suicide Girls have flaunted their inked and bejeweled
"Burlesque is an art. That's how we see it. It is not a strip show:' bodies online and onstage since 2001. Even Playboy is representing a friskier, more punk-rock aesthetic among its airbrushed centerfolds. Suddenly, if the
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nudity is partial and the girls look as if they would just as soon kick your ass as sleep with you, alterna-porn projects find themselves in a financially lucrative niche market and earning respect in the progressive community for being "artistic" and "empowering." But as stylized nudity unapologetically stomps its way into the public eye wearing stiletto heels, anti-porn critics resist the notion that alterna-porn has legitimately earned its reputation
Black seeks inspiration for her variety show from the work of modern revivalist dancers like Ducky DooLittle or Dita Von Teese. In one of Black Rose's sets, a dancer balances a sword on her head while gyrating to Rob Zombie. In another, a woman twirls her pasties to techno and strobe lights. The acts are distinctly crafted to express the personalities of the performers, although Black and her partner maintain some creative boundaries to ensure that the show adheres to their standards of taste and artistic merit. Like Black Rose, the Web site Gods Girls follows in the steps of an increasing number of enterprises owned and operated by women, being one of the newest sites to spring from the recent punk-porn style explosion.
"It all comes down to taste. Different strokes for different folks -literally!" jokes Gabrielle, nineteen, one of the most active models in the Gods Girls scene and an art photographer in her own right. "It's not sugar-coated. It's not fake. The site asks you to be real." Gabrielle is a classic Gods Girls beauty: dark haired and sharp-featured with an abstract ink pattern winding around her arms, legs, and torso. She did a variety of modeling gigs before Gods Girls and has an opinion of what the site provides an alternative to. "I couldn't do it with anything less than the best. It is an opportunity to get involved in modeling and participate in something that is quality," she says. "A lot of sites out there are cheap and tacky. You can take the first thing that comes along, or you can wait for something like Gods Girls." But what does "something like Gods Girls" actually mean? Do tattoos and a female manager make some porn okay, while the general depiction of a sex act harms women and society at large? Pornography's traditional critics refuse to draw the distinction. Those who verbalize their uneasiness about porn-positive developments express concerns ranging from personal squeamishness to global fear for the welfare of women. Feminist dialogue is especially heated. Anti-pornography activists such as Catharine MacKinnon and the late Andrea Dworkin have asserted that pornography's effects are tangibly harmful - enough to justify civil claims of sex discrimination against its producers in some cases. While others take a less extreme view, the alterna-porn debate often includes the argument that the welfare of women in front of the camera cannot be the only consideration when sex goes up for sale. If looking at naked women does create a culture of objectification, it ceases to matter if the model felt empowered when the shutter snapped shut. Annie Sprinkle has borne the brunt of anti-pornography criticism since she starred in her first blue movie at eighteen. A self-described "post-porn modernist," Sprinkle theorizes that by lumping all sex work together, society is denied the opportunity to learn more about the positive and artistic properties of sex. "It is what you bring to it. There are many different genres of pinup
modeling, different ways of doing it," she says. "But trying to totally stop or repress the freedom of creative sexual expression in art, entertainment, and
Black's promotional efforts have paid off The site generated 339 "friends" and recently attracted the attention of one of the women responsible for
"Experimental, sexually oriented work is a chance to explore our bodies, our sexuality, our culture, and put it out there for everyone to talk about and look at and ponder:' the media is when you get into even more trouble." In Sprinkle's mind, the ability to maintain personal power is really up to the individual who puts her sexuality on the market. For Black, starting her own dance troupe meant drawing clear boundaries around a beloved art form with regard to public nudity. "I really, really, really make sure my girls go by the code of the old time: girls wearing pasties, no nipples showing. Burlesque is an art. That's how we see it. It is not a strip show. If you call something burlesque and it's not, that can be harmful," she says. Black flirted with the allure of becoming a Suicide Girl and was literally on her way to meet Mooney when she changed her mind. "I knew a lot of girls in Portland who were Suicide Girls, and I backed out because of the way they were treated on the street. On a Web site, you can't say what you are trying to do. On a stage, you can explain to people. I always do that at the beginning of a show. There was a time when these guys started yelling at us, 'When do the whores take their clothes offi'" she says. "I stopped the show and came out and told them if they wanted to see that, they should go to a strip club; that's not what we do. They didn't give us any trouble after that." This conversation is exactly what Sprinkle hopes the evolution of sexual entertainment can promote. "Experimental, sexually oriented work is a chance to explore our bodies, our sexuality, our culture, and put it out there for everyone to talk about and look at and ponder."
Black set up an account at MySpace. com to publicize Black Rose and keep the digital world abreast of its latest gigs and changes to the act. They recently added a new troupe member and have plans to dance in a Portlandbased show called "Creepy Cabaret."
keeping burlesque alive in the twentyfirst century. "Ducky DooLittle is one of my heroes, and she wrote to me! She's coming to Portland and she wants to see the show," Black says. Black lights a celebratory cigarette and reminds herself to make an appointment to have her hair extensions re-braided before performing for the woman who has inspired her for almost a decade. "Of course she can come to the show," she says. "She can come for free. I'm going to buy her a drink." (I
Take a tour of the history of burlesque in American culture at influx.uoregon.edu/2006
OPPOSITE: Azooming, long-exposure photo captures Black Rose Burlesque performer Morgan Lynn as she fluidly mimics the motions of her steel dancing partner -a sword. BELOW: Dancing to "I Alone" by Live, Black Rose Burlesque member Julie unapologetically sashays across the bar at Samurai Duck in Eugene.
"Not only do I run everything in the furniture factory, for the most part the only difference between me and my boss is that he wears agreen shirt and goes home at night:' -Tom Adair, Oregon State Penitentiary PREVIOUS: Tom Adair serves as the furniture factory foreman. RIGHT: Transfer inmates march into Pendleton State Penitentiary. BELOW: An inmate at Oregon State Penitentiary sprays furniture that will be distributed throughout the state.
"The older members train incoming people in math, software, and computer mapping processes. The greatest benefit of this program is that the continuing knowledge is passed on from inmate to inmate:'-Kevin Roper, Oregon State Correctional Institution ABOVE: Eastern Oregon Correctional Institution inmate Michael Newton tailors Prison Blues jeans to be sold worldwide. LEFT: Candida Rodriguez, an inmate at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility, sits among furniture and a toilet constructed by male inmates.
FLUX • 29
"Stainless steel is avery hightechnical type of welding; it takes alot of finesse. It's the top end of the business. That's gratifying." -James L. Garrick, Oregon State Penitentiary RIGHT: Michael Wheeler, an inmate at Oregon State Penitentiary, grinds a stainless steel bed frame. BELOW: Helena Allee embroiders shirts for local companies at Coffee Creek Correctional Facility. OPPOSITE: The tight quarters of Cell Block Aare home to nearly 25 percent of the inmates at Oregon State Penitentiary.
Hear the voices of these inmates at influx.uoregon.edu/2006
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Grand Ronde tribal member Don Day strives to restore culture through traditionallonghouse construction STORY: SENA CHRISTIAN
on Day's favorite wooden mallet is broken. A large chunk of its head has fallen off, and Day knows the thing is a lost cause, but he still looks up hopefully and jokes, "Maybe duct tape will fix it." He tosses it into a pile of discarded mallets and wedges hiding beneath the shade of old-growth western red cedar logs, all between 200 and 400 years old, killed in the 1910 Tillamook fire. The trees lie in wait on the reservation of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde, which is located thirtyfive miles west of Salem, Oregon, underneath the shadow of the sacred Spirit Mountain. The warm April sun beats down on Day and Michael Michelle, his one-man crew for
PHOTOS: KATE HORTON
the afternoon, and the men sweat continuously. Day picks up another mallet and inserts a wooden wedge into a crevice on top of a forty-foot log. He strikes the wedge a half dozen times, attempting to split the log down the middle. Each time the split widens, Day moves to another section of it, inserts the wedge, and strikes it with the thirty-pound mallet. The tools and plank-splitting technique are reminiscent of the technology the tribe used the last time it built a longhouse in the valley more than 150 years ago. Day repositions himselÂŁ the four diamond studs in his left ear catching the sunlight as he bends his legs for strength, and strikes a blow. Nothing happens. Or so it seems.
FLUX • 33
and canoes. The soft red-brown timber, resistant to decay, is also used in outdoor construction - typically in the building of longhouses.
Day, a Grand Ronde tribal elder and University of Oregon graduate student, and his crew are revitalizing the vanishing Native American practice of traditionallonghouse building throughout the Pacific Northwest. For Day's master's project, he is building a Kalapuyastyle longhouse on the Grand Ronde reservation, involving tribal members in the process. However, the tribe's tumultuous past and conflicted present make traditional plank splitting and the construction of a longhouse an arduous task. A history of oppression, violent conflict, and forced removal from native lands, a tribal council with divided interests, and apathetic tribal members make every plank splitting a struggle.
On a warm spring day, the snow freshly melted, Day and his girlfriend, Delva, venture just north of the Willamette National Forest to Breitenbush to split out planks from a 100-foot red cedar. Rot has eaten away at the tree, estimated to be about 600 years old, breaking the five-foot thick trunk completely from its roots. Day gets right to work, using a chain saw to smooth out a rough edge. He dislikes the rare but necessary times when he uses the modern tool.
"All manner of needs are brought to the longhouse, and elders provide instruction to individuals and families," says Gordon Bettles, Klamath tribal member and interim steward of the UO Many Nations Longhouse. "It's a place of dialogue. A place to bring your problems and have them decided in a traditional way."
Day strikes the log again, and it crackles loudly.
"It's time for hot dogs," says Delva three hours later. Day will be just a
Although longhouses are built in several different styles, entrance doors
"It's talking to us," Michelle says. When a western red cedar talks, the men listen, pausing to allow the log to work on its own. The log splits ten feet and stops.
Range in western Oregon. Day waits for men traveling from their homes in Salem, Eugene, or Albany to arrive at his house in Stayton so they can embark on an eight-hour day of recovering fallen timber in the forest. When Day's tired of waiting, he goes alone.
Longhouses have a deep historical and cultural significance. They are spiritually blessed places where members privately gather to participate in sacred ceremonies, dances, and rites of passage.
"We've forgotten many things. We're becoming more distant from our past and there is not a lot being done to preserve our culture."
At this rate, they should be done by dark.
ay rarely rushes, moving instead within his own timeframe. His typical style of baggy jeans and a T-shirt mixed with a leather vest and a long ponytail of curly grayish-black hair illustrates the cultural transitions that concern him. "How fast are we going and what have we forgotten?" asks Day. "We've forgotten many things. We're becoming more distant from our past and there is not a lot being done to preserve our culture." Although notorious for never being on time to class, for allowing tractors to pass him on his 1-5 commute, and for his long-winded conversational manner, Day does not always take things slow. When it comes to the revival of traditionallonghouse building - integral to the lives of Oregon's Native American people for thousands of years before the arrival of white settlers - he says there is no time to waste. Often, though, Day must wait. He waits for the snow to melt so he and his crew can drive to the Willamette National Forest, which extends along the western slopes of the Cascade
second. Ten minutes later, he grills up a hot dog at the campfire. Three minutes after that, Day is back on top of the log, splitting another plank. Delva extinguishes the campfire. It's time to go, she says for the fifth time. He just needs a couple of minutes, he responds, which turn into thirty. Finally, Day picks up the first of twenty planks to load into his truck. Heavy with water, the planks weigh on his shoulders, but he does not ask for help.
always face east toward the rising sun, which goes up and across the sky, witnessing everything down below. Tribal members bring food to cook in the fireplace or prepare in the kitchen, as ceremonies often last several days and usually go all night. Longhouses are also ideal places for storytelling. Currently, when tribal members gather on the Grand Ronde reservation for storytelling events, they find themselves sitting in a school gymnasium.
When a western red cedar falls to the forest floor, the U.S. Forest Service calls Day to see if he is interested, issues him a permit to recover the wood for cultural purposes, then basically hands him a map and points him in the right direction. It's not exactly as simple as going to a lumberyard, but the Forest Service's debris is Day's gold mine.
Once complete, the longhouse will accommodate between 300 and 400 people. Tribal members will no longer have to travel fifty-five miles south to the reservation of the Confederated Tribes of the Siletz for funerals, or host cultural events in gymnasiums. Besides the community center, wellness center, housing authority offices, library, education building, and recently built housing for elders, tribal members will have one more reason to visit Grand Ronde.
The Grand Ronde consider the western red cedar the tree of life, having supported Native American tribes in the Pacific Northwest for thousands of years. Tribal members utilize every part of the coniferous evergreen tree, stripping and harvesting the bark to make rope, basketry, and clothing, and splitting the wood to make totem poles, tools,
"The project is pulling the people together at the reservation," says Day. Day never needed any help being pulled back to his community. Although he did not grow up on the Grand Ronde reservation, as is the
PREVIOUS: After splitting planks out of alOO-foot western red cedar, Don Day assesses the afternoon's work. OPPOSITE: Day splits a fallen old-growth tree in the Willamette National Forest, an hour east of Salem, Oregon. That afternoon, he split twenty planks for the planned longhouse. FLUX • 35
ABOVE: longhouse project volunteer Michael Michelle forces open asplit log on the Grand Ronde reservation.
case with most living tribal members, he always keeps one foot on the land. Before returning to school, he worked as an archaeological site monitor for the tribe. Actively involved with tribal affairs, he serves in an appointed position on the Cultural Committee, an advisory group to the tribal council and other departments. He also acts as the de facto foreman for the construction of the longhouse, a role he was at first reluctant to fill. Day wants the longhouse to be built by and for the people. He does not want it to be seen as "The Don Day Project." Day cultivated his interest in plank splitting a few years ago when he
8,000 years ago
18405 and '50s
Ancestors of the presentday Grand Ronde enter the Willamette Valley.
Massive migration of white settlers to Oregon along the Oregon Trail.
36 • FLUX
I
:
I
The government establishes the Grand Ronde reservation through treaty arrangements and, later, through the Executive Order of June 30, 1857.
took an undergraduate course in traditional technologies at the UO. As a flintknapper, he already had some traditional technology down, manually manufacturing arrowheads and blade points out of obsidian. For his term project, he split a block of wood using a wooden wedge as the whole class stood watching at the south end of Condon Hall on the UO campus. Now he splits logs much longer and thousands of pounds heavier. "You look at the logs and you can't imagine that you can use this technology to do this, but he does," says Jon Erlandson, UO anthropology professor and Day's graduate adviser. "He's just
unstoppable. He's like a force of nature. He gets something in his mind and nothing is going to stop him. I'm convinced the guy could do anything." Once he learned the basics of plank splitting, Day knew right away that he needed to bring this knowledge back with him to the reservation. He saw the use of a forgotten practice as a way to reawaken tribal members' connection to their past. Day and the Grand Ronde Tribal Council, however, didn't quite see eye-toeye. He wanted permission and funding to construct a longhouse using traditional plank-splitting techniques, but some council
1856
1872
February 8, 1887
The United States removes numerous tribes from their laonds in the Willamette Valley and surrounding areas and relocates them to the Grand Ronde reservation.
Farm plots on the Grand Ronde reservation are allotted to individual Native American families, who immediately fence and clear their land allotments to build homes.
The General Allotment Act becomes law, splitting up 33,000 acres of the Grande Ronde reservation into 270 tracts for individual Native Americans.
members were confused as to why they couldn't just buy finished boards from a lumberyard. Day persuaded the council to let him build the longhouse traditionally with the help of a UO architecture student to draw up plans and tribal members to build the future community cornerstone. "By invoking tribal members in the process, he is teaching them how to get back in touch with the history of their people," says Erlandson. "A lot of people are really excited about what he's doing."
hen not working on the Grand Ronde longhouse project, Day travels throughout the Pacific Northwest, conducting planksplitting demonstrations for crowds of eager learners at the Cow Creek tribal headquarters in Roseburg, for the Coquille in Coos Bay, and for the Haida people on the Queen Charlotte Islands, British Columbia. In the world according to Day, splitting logs is easy, something anyone can do. He just needs to supply tribal members with the appropriate wooden tools and demonstrate their use.
The support of the tribal council, however, still goes in waves.
On a drizzly Saturday afternoon, against the backdrop of a mural of
1954
The Indian Reorganization Act allows the Grand Ronde to purchase land to provide homes for its people.
Congress passes the Termination Act, dissolving the Grand Ronde's status as atribe and effectively severing the trust between the government and the Grand Ronde.
I
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Tribal leaders begin the laborious task of re-establishing the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde.
W
November 22, 1983
September 9, 1988
Congress passes the Grand Ronde Restoration Act, which restores the trust between the government and the tribe. The act reverses most ofthe 1954 Termination Act's effects.
President Reagan signs the Grand Ronde Reservation Act, giving 9,811 acres of original reservation land back to the tribe.
the South Umpqua Falls, more than thirty people gather in a room at the Cow Creek reservation administration building. Lewis LaChance, the softspoken Umpqua tribal elder who organized the event, leads the group in prayer. Then Day steps aside as his three trusted volunteers create a small cleft in the eight-foot red cedar and insert a large wooden wedge into the space. One volunteer picks up an oak mallet and strikes the wedge four times before a plank splits oft freeing itself from the rest of the log. Soon a woman from the audience wants to try. By the end of the demonstration, volunteers have split twelve planks, which they will eventually manicure and add to
ABOVE: Day, an interdisciplinary master's student in anthropology, archaeology, geology, and linguistics at the University of Oregon, hopes to complete the longhouse by the end of the summer.
2000
The Grand Ronde acquire a10,300-acre reservation consisting mostly of timber land near the Polk County city of Grand Ronde.
The Grand Ronde begin construction of the Spirit Mountain Casino, which is owned and operated by Spirit Mountain Development Corporation, an entity of the Grand Ronde.
The casino earns $63 million in profits for the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde. It is the most-visited tourist destination in Oregon.
FLUX • 37
the stockpile of finished boards on the Grand Ronde reservation. "When I have all the material gathered, then it will be an invitation to the people to build the house," says Day to the group. "The people will build the house. I'm not building the house."
"When I have all the material gathered, then it will be an invitation to the people to build the house. The people will build the house. I'm not building the house:'
During the Cow Creek demonstration, Day often comments on the importance of history, but he does not dwell on the negative aspects of the past, instead focusing on his hope for the future. He does not mention the year 1857, when a treaty arrangement and executive order by the United States government removed more than twenty Native American tribes and bands from western Oregon and northern California, relegating them to a reservation located on the eastern side of the coastal range on the headwaters of the South Yamhill River. He does not mention the Rogue River Wars of the mid-1850s, when the U.S. army and local militias violently displaced the Rogue River Indians of southern Oregon. He does not mention the 130 years when the U.S.-established Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde was left landless on its own land. Nor does Day mention how tribal members lost their sovereign rights to water and salmon fishing, and the right to sustain a cultural base. Native people had no choice but to disperse, doing what was needed to survive. Maintaining culture was not a priority. (~er the split up of the tribes, traditional technologies died out and went by the wayside," says LaChance. "There were few things left, few things in our memory, and few things written down. Everyone was just trying to survive after Rogue River. We are just now waking up."
ABOVE: Day uses handmade tools, such as this oak mallet, to craft the materials for the longhouse. Depending on the length and thickness of the log, he and his crew may go through as many as five mallets and thirty wedges in aday's work.
38 • FLUX
During the Cow Creek demonstration, Day chooses not to discuss how white colonizers, recognizing the importance of central rallying places for tribal members, destroyed dozens of longhouses and killed the headmen who were in positions to rally the rest of the tribe against intruders. When the colonizers destroyed the longhouses, it was one more way they decimated the spirit of a people who no longer had the will or ability to resist the takeover of their lands, which forced them to abandon traditional ways of life. During the demonstration, however, Day does mention the year 1954,
when, with the stroke of a pen, the U.S. government passed initial legislation terminating the Grand Ronde tribe and reservation, and after a two-year process of adding and subtracting members from tribal rolls, completed the termination. In 1983, with the passage of the Grand Ronde Restoration Act, tribal members began the difficult task of re-establishing not only their reservation but also the cultural knowledge once housed there.
raditional plank spl.itting, it turns out, takes tIme. The tribal council pressures Day to finish the longhouse project quickly, often asking him why it's taking so long. But a traditional longhouse, just like a reservation, won't be built overnight.
T
While the council supports the project, it directs the majority of its attention elsewhere. Some tribal members accuse the council of being too consumed with the Spirit Mountain Casino, which the tribe has operated for the last ten years. Although revenue generated by the casino helps create jobs and develop economic and social services, some say the casino's presence has taken its toll in other areas. "Everyone seems to be so casino-crazy," says David Lewis, Grand Ronde tribal member and a UO Ph.D. student in anthropology. "Everything is going into the casino, and there isn't a corresponding development of culture. We're not really running a tribal nation; we're running a business." Additionally, the council focuses on resolving controversial enrollment policies, recently creating a committee to address the issue. Native American tribes issue their own enrollment cards and establish their own requirements for proving ances~ Currently, just under 5,000 people are enrolled in the Grand Ronde, but strict requirements prevent many others from enrolling with the tribe. Day remains largely unbothered by tribal council politics or historical conflict. He is too concerned with how to get tribal members, both enrolled and unenrolled, back to the reservation. He sees the longhouse project as part of the answer, but he struggles to maintain involvement. For the first several months, the project only attracted a
few volunteers. After Day advertised in Smoke Signals, the tribe's newsletter, many tribal members stepped forward, and a crew of about twenty volunteers, primarily men, assembled. Even with the crew, Day sometimes has to work alone. "It's really hard to sustain involvement when there are people saying it's unnecessary," says Lewis. Day agrees that the longhouse project would go faster with the council's full support and funding to pay the crew. Then again, the structure would also be built sooner if Day purchased finished boards from a lumberyard. But completing the project quickly is not the point. And so Day carries on, hoping to obtain enough timber, split enough planks, and maintain enough volunteers to complete the
Grand Ronde longhouse by its fastapproaching August deadline. If he misses the deadline, so be it. The longhouse will eventually be built and, in the meantime, the satisfaction of sharing traditional plank splitting knowledge with the technology's other rightful owners keeps Day going. "It's a gift," says Day. "I can't keep it. I have to give it back."
B
ack at the reservation, the sun has started its descent. The heat subsides but the plank splitting does not. Bark flies off wooden mallets as Day and Michelle work next to each other on top of the log, striking the wedges. "We look like we know what we're doing," jokes Day.
"The tree's cooperating today," says Michelle. The red cedar's water-soaked end troubles the men. Michelle gives the log a few solid kicks. Suddenly, the log tears apart, exposing its moist inner core, allowing the light wind to spread the wood's rich fragrance. Although slightly rotted at one end, the log will produce at least twenty planks. Two hours earlier, the split log was nothing more than a fire-killed red cedar recovered from the forest floor.
ABOVE: Day rests after a long afternoon of plank splitting with Michelle. Sometimes, up to twenty volunteers step forward to help and Day will randomly select avolunteer to serve as the boss.
"It looks good," says Day. "I'm pleased with it. That's a page of history right there." (I See photos and hear the photographer's impressions of a plank-splitting demonstration with Don Day at influx.uoregon.edu/2006
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Amanda Gribben rescues America's most condemned dogs because no one else will STORY: ROBIN MUNRO
PHOTOS: KATIE GLEASON & SHAINA SULLIVAN
verything about the Multnomah County pound is cold. Cold metal. Cold concrete. Cold bars. Cold skin-slicing air. It could be a meatpacking plant. In a sense, it is. This is where the county stores unwanted animals - strays, discards, rabies threats, bite threats - neglected and abused, homeless animals. Amanda Gribben, pit bull advocate, needs no direction or permission. Preoccupied with a dog intake, the receptionist ignores the slender, heavily pierced redhead who moves directly to the cages. From narrow pens divided by concrete walls, dogs bark hysterically. Little red Chows with lioness faces twinkle, wooing passersby. Middle-aged behemoths balance on hind legs, bellowing. Some dogs barely make eye contact. Others look sick, lonely, dejected, and old. They sit behind signs that read "Senior - Half Price" or "Beauty is only skin deep." Amanda points at one dulleyed Am Staff mix pacing from kennel craze. "1 give that one two weeks," she says. "He's given up." She bends down to meet a little black pit bull at eye level. "This one's got great focus," she says, running her finger back and forth in front of his eyes as though delivering a sobriety test. "I'd walk this one." Amanda is easily mistaken as an employee at the shelters. At least ten keys hang from her belt loop and her presence is commanding. Amanda directs Pawsitively Pit Bull, the only no-kill pit bull sanctuary and adoption nonprofit in the United States, just an hour north of Portland, Oregon. Along with
40 • FLUX
co-founder Darren Linder, a roster of ninetyone volunteers, and a five-member board, Amanda rehabilitates, trains, boards, and adopts out pit bulls rescued from euthanasia C\t shelters in Oregon and Washington. Today, we're scouting shelters for pit bulls with high potential for rehabilitation. Yes, pit bulls. The dogs bred to fight. The dogs featured on the evening news for attacking small children. Dog of choice for wife beaters, drug dealers, and scabrous street thugs nationwide. Short and squat and muscular and mean. Pit bulls. "How can you want to save aggressive dogs?" Amanda hears that a lot, usually prefaced by, "Hey, you stupid bitch." But the thirty-yearold activist has always been a bit of a rebel. After getting the hell out of her 402-student high school in upstate New York, she moved to Eugene and enrolled at the University of Oregon at seventeen. She studied Marxism. She chained herself to trees slated for removal in downtown Eugene and got pepper-sprayed and arrested. She worked for ShelterCare, a nonprofit emergency homeless shelter in Lane County. A flower-powered eighteen-year-old
OPPOSITE: Lucky to be alive, Jolly frolics at Amanda Gribben's sanctuary, Pawsitively Pit Bull.
FLUX • 41
in flowing skirts, Amanda managed 200-pound men on mescaline, prostitutes on heroin, and angry drunks wandering the halls throughout the night. She weighs 122 pounds. She earned $10 an hour. These days, Amanda makes $12.50 an hour as a veterinary technician at a clinic in Portland. "I've gone full circle," she says. "1 was raised poor. For a while, 1 had a good job, new car, new clothes. I'm back to [barely] making ends meet." The first female staff member to work with teenage sex offenders at one facility, Amanda worked in mental health for thirteen years. "When other staff would burn out, they would call Amanda because she's got that way with patients," says Darren, who met Amanda while working in mental health. But after getting a call at 2:00 a.m. to identify the body of a twenty-four-year-old paranoid schizophrenic she'd seen only twenty hours before - the latest in a string of suicides at the facility - she'd had enough. "1 think I'm done," she thought. "1 don't think 1 can do this anymore." So she cashed in her retirement and started rescuing pit bulls - creatures that don't commit suicide. BELOW: Amanda Gribben snuggles with the deaf six-year-old pit bull that started it all. The first pit she ever adopted, Fleece, so impressed Amanda that she created a sanctuary for the breed.
42 • FLUX
She took home her first pit bull in 2000. While volunteering at the pound, she met Fleece, her inaugural adoptee. With artichoke-shaped ears that register no sound, Fleece languished for months at the shelter. On lunch breaks, Amanda taught
Fleece hand signals using books on how to train deaf dogs. No one adopted him. So she did. She rescued Squiggle, a squirmy black and white pit bull/whippet mix with a square-inch benign tumor in his chest. She rescued K-Bear, a three-year-old dark brown female with a limp from an untreated broken leg. She rescued Lava, an abused, over-bred Am Staff
Web sites than explain yet again that pit bull jaws, unlike alligator jaws, do not lock. She's tired of explaining that pit bulls "seem mean because they're treated mean," and that she's seen people slip a homeless man a twenty to sneak up on their dog and beat it while the dog is chained to a fence post in the backyard. "Why would anyone do that?" they ask. To make it a "guard dog," of course. To make it mean.
"I'm like a pit bull. I'm loyal, I'm smart, I love to snuggle, and I've got a little bit of a temper:' found caught in a barbed wire fence by Animal Control. Malnourished, pregnant, twenty-five pounds underweight with a gaping wound on her side, Lava sat unclaimed in quarantine until Amanda brought her home to deliver eleven healthy puppies. Too aggressive for adoption, Lava was scheduled for euthanasia. Too attached, Amanda couldn't let this happen; because of Lava, her emerging rescue operation became a no-kill sanctuary for pit bulls. "1 thought, 'OK, 1 love pit bulls. 1 think 1 have a niche here. No one has a sanctuary for pit bulls - they're the bad dog. This is a challenge. 1 like challenges. 1 can handle this,»' Amanda recites methodically, as though she's repeated these lines to disbelievers and naysayers countless times. She seems wearied of dispelling myths and would rather refer these same naysayers to
Pit bulls are not inherently humanaggressive, but because of their intense loyalty to their owners and high tolerance for pain, they are regularly trained as fighting dogs.
t the clinic, 1 watch as Amanda deftly extracts blood from sick cats and - clips puppies' toenails. She calls the animals "kiddo" or "sweetie," talking to them like a pediatrician would to a small child receiving his first shots. "OK, a little cold, kiddo," she says as she swabs a black eat's leg. "Hi, sweetie. Hi. Just lick your lips and you won't notice," she advises a white rat named Nick as another technician scrapes off skin cells with a razor blade. With feathery reddish-blond hair scrunched in a poof-ball ponytail, ears rimmed with silver rings and another piercing her nose, she doesn't look thirty. Nor does she dress thirty. She's wearing tight stretch jeans with little rhinestones and turquoise swirls on the back pockets. They could fit a pre-teen. But her eyes tell a different age. Smart and scrutinizing, cobalt blue, Amanda's eyes have seen it all. They've seen sickness. At twenty-six, Amanda had cervical cancer. They've seen poverty. She lived on welfare with her mom in the New Jersey projects before moving to her grandfather's farm. They've seen abuse. "My first husband pushed me down the stairs when 1 was pregnant at seventeen." They've seen homelessness. To escape her husband, Amanda slept between classes in her car. Completely full, the homeless shelter where she worked couldn't offer refuge. So she'd drive to the coast and back at night, her three rescue dogs steaming the
ABOVE: Asweet-hearted pit bull, K-Bear (short for Kissy Bear) gives a warm reception to Pawsitively Pit Bull co-founder Darren Linder. LEFT: When Jolly arrived at the sanctuary, he was mangy and ill-behaved. After months of herbal and traditional treatments, as well as behavior training, he's furry, well-mannered, and ready for adoption.
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Britain, Germany, China, and three U.S. cities: Denver, Miami, and Cincinnati. Incredulous, I ask: Why pit bulls? Again, the answer comes well prepared: Because shelters have way too many. According to Mike Oswald, director of animal services for Multnomah County, pit bulls made up about a third of the dogs that entered the shelter in 2005. The increased popularity of pit bulls and greater breeding activity has dramatically increased the number of pit bulls in shelters over the last twenty years, before which only 6 percent of Multnomah County shelter dogs were pit bulls.
ABOVE: With some help from Amanda, BusterSamson launches himself at alength of rope for some rough and tumble fun in agame of springpole.
windows of her car. ''A lot of people get into the mental health field to solve their own problems," she says. "It's a lot easier to tell other people how to fix their lives than to fix your own." She's friendly, but there's an edge. I worry about saying the wrong thing - like how some dogs are fine, so long as you don't touch their ears or paws or whatever sets them off. "I'm like a pit bull," Amanda says. "I'm loyal, I'm
/l1'm a rogue at everything I do. And I'm opinionated:' smart, I love to snuggle, and I've got a little bit of a temper." Little bit of a temper? According to a study in the Journal ofthe American veterinary Medical Association, pit bulls and Rottweilers were involved in more than half of the fatal attacks on people nationwide between 1979 and 1989. Pit bulls are banned in Ontario, Canada, the Netherlands, France, 44 • FLUX
When her tech shift ends, Amanda walks to her car, boisterous but intent, as though just unlatched from a very short leash. "I'm a rogue at everything I do. And I'm opinionated," she announces as we reach her dirt-crusted 1989 Ford Taurus station wagon. The car smells of wet dog and dry kibble, 1,800 pounds of which Amanda recently hauled to the sanctuary. Her phone buzzes and beeps, sending messages to three full voicemail boxes. Volunteers took the messages for a while, but they burned out quickly from hearing too much hate mail "a pit bull attacked my child and you should be euthanized, too" - or even more disheartening, requests to take a dog because its family redecorated and it no longer matches the furniture. Amanda gets about ninety-eight requests per week to take dogs. Her sanctuary will only accommodate twenty-five. "If I were to take ninety-eight dogs per week, I would be way overrun because we don't adopt them out that fast and I wouldn't adopt them out that fast," she explains. We're flying down the fast lane, her cell phone buzzing, her cigarette smoke leaking out the window. "I'm not about warehousing dogs, sending them out to fail. I'm about improving quality of life, training them, making them ambassadors of the breed." What makes a pit bull an ambassador? ''An ambassador is a dog I'm 110 percent confident will only take steps forward for the breed. Do they bite? Do they bark? Do they get along with cats and dogs and children?" And then what? ''And then we find them a forever home. Not a home
that says two weeks later, 'I'm moving, can you take this dog?' It's a family member."
t's an icy February morning when I meet Amanda's family: nineteen pit bulls and the three non-pits that steamed her windows on midnight drives to the coast. Pumpkin, Peanut, and Flower stampede out the door as though running with the bulls in Pamplona. Two buildings, a trailer, an old VW van, and a couple of ponds cover the well-fenced sanctuary property. A muscular guy bounds up the hill. Blond curly ringlets sprout from his head and the tip of his goatee juts at a devilish point. Darren laughs easily, flexes a paw print tattoo on his bicep, and confesses he'd never met a pit bull until his early twenties. He grew up with poodles - the little ones with bows. On display inside the house are pictures of Darren on skiing expeditions with at-risk youth from Friends of the Children, which employs mentors to work with children from kindergarten through high school graduation. "Darren's more the PR guy," Amanda insists. "I prefer to stay out of the limelight, but I'll do it for them." She'll speak publicly for the pit bulls, which she has done in news segments on dangerous dogs. "She's a good spokesperson for our cause," Darren says. "She's eloquent and heartfelt ... I've always thought it was kinda cool that she's a petite woman. You might think someone who wrestles pit bulls all day would be a hulking, 200-pound beast, but even she can control these dogs." We walk down to the "out building" - the doghouse - and a little white pit named Thumper greets us with a feral bark. His hind legs drag behind him because of a birth defect. He wobbles like a drunk, moving sideways when he wants to move forward, often whacking himself into walls. Following months of hydrotherapy in a doggy life jacket, Thumper has made progress. With prodding from Amanda and Darren - "Come on Thumper, you can do it buddy" - and intense concentration, his resolve builds and his body runs where he wants it to go. Then he'll stumble, belly up, panting but happy like a child fallen in the snow.
Next I meet Pig. "Let Pig approach you," Amanda advises. This makes me nervous, even though she's assured me her dogs don't bite: "I don't have any human-aggressive dogs. I dont believe they should be saved. Only a very small percentage of them actually turn it around. Would I trust that dog to adopt it out under my organization and my name? No." There's a scuffle and a brief interlude before this hairless, tan, golem-like creature streaks out the door toward us. Unlike Thumper's direction, Pig's is flawless. She runs directly between us and off into the yard. We follow Pig to a tree, where she's hanging by her teeth from a knotted rope, trying to climb higher without letting go. "This is called springpole," Darren tells me. "Some people think it makes them more aggressive, but it actually releases their energy, and it's great exercise." Pig's body writhes in circles as she gnaws at the rope. "Do the hula, Pig, hula," Amanda encourages, her voice as sweet as a new mother cajoling her baby to do something cute.
Amanda's partial to the girls. "Yeah, I have favorites," she says with a laugh, drawing out the words as though confessing a bad habit. She strokes Lava, whose nipples, over-suckled by puppies, stick out like inflated fingers on a blown-up surgical glove. I meet Jolly, Squiggle, and Drunken Noodle, a deaf Dalmatian mix with poor depth perception from a neurological disorder. I meet Maui, K-Bear, BusterSamson, and Cone. They slobber and snort and pant and dash around the yard, occasionally stopping to pee or sniff Some of them bark, stick their heads in my crotch, and then lick my hand. Others ignore me. They respond when called, sit when asked, and lumber home without hesitation. These are just dogs. Dogs that love to snuggle. Ambassadors of their breed. As for the others, the "half-priced" seniors shivering on concrete floors and the dogs trained so humanaggressive they'll never turn their behavior around, Amanda sighs. "Some
dogs need to go to the next plane and come back another time," she says, her voice softening. Unlike some rescue groups, she knows she can't save every dog and won't ruffle feathers at Animal Control because she can't meet the "quarantine babies" awaiting certain death.
ABOVE: Amanda connects with Henry, atwo-year-old male. Henry was rescued \ in New Orleans where he was found wandering the streets in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
Amanda stands silhouetted against the late-afternoon sun, her hair on fire, her eyes all iris. She is like a pit bull. Like Squiggle, she's been sick. Like Lava, she's been abused. Like K-Bear, she's been homeless. Like Fleece, she's been misunderstood. But she understands. Before quarantine was closed to the public, she'd visit the death row dogs, give them treats, and say, "It's all right. Yeah, your time is limited, but you are loved." One ugly one, so scarred and mangled from a fight, compelled her to stop and tell him, "'You are beautiful,' because inside," she says, "this dog was. It was totally beautiful." (I
See and hear the pit bulls in action at influx.uoregon.edu/2006
FLUX • 45
QUEST for
A Portland area training facility is a mecca for athletes aspiring to be ultimate fighters PHOTOS & STORY: ALEX PAJUNAS
ABOVE: The crowd at the Roseland Theatre in Portland reacts to the eXciting conclusion of afight during Rumble at the Roseland XXI. OPPOSITE: Team Quest's Zach Ross delivers apounding to his opponent, Kyle Prather, who would later recover and win by referee stoppage in the second round. 46 • FLUX
he air that fills Team Quest's red-and-blue padded room is thick and stale with sweat. Under the bright fluorescent lights of the Gresham, Oregon, training center, pairs of fighters perform a strange dance, throwing punches and combinations at each other. While some are there solely as Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) fans looking to stay in shape, others have higher goals of competing in the increasingly popular sport.
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Founded in 1993, the UFC brings fighters with different martial arts backgrounds and specialties together to compete inside an octagon-shaped ring surrounded by a chain link fence. There are typically three five-minute rounds in which almost anything goes. Hits to the back of the head, spine, and groin, along with eye-gouging, biting, and other "dirty" moves are outlawed.
The moves that are allowed come from a combination of boxing, kickboxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu, known as mixed martial arts. Comparing a boxer to a mixed martial artist is like comparing a sprinter to a decathlete. In order to win inside the cage, the competitor has to be skilled in multiple fighting styles.
OPPOSITE: Greg Thompson demonstrates ground-and-pound techniques on John Krohn in an advanced mixed martial arts kickboxing class instructed by Ed Herman (right). Herman is a contestant in the UFC's reality show The Ultimate Fighter. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Mike Sixel gets his face lubed up with Vaseline to prevent dry skin, which can lead to cuts and abrasions during afight. Head coach Robert Follis tapes up afighter's hands and wrists to prevent sprains before the gloves go on. Ian Loveland (left) helps Teammate Sixel warm up and shake off afew jitters before Sixel's first appearance inside the ring, afight at Sportfight Proving Ground II at Mt. Hood Community College. Elijah Fey pulls his hood over his eyes while trying to visualize his match in the locker room before Sportfight Proving Ground II.
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eam Quest is one facility that has embraced the new sport. The opportunity to learn fighting techniques from coaches who are professional fighters has attracted more than 300 UFC fans to the gym. However, it hasn't always been that way. The training center started humbly as an empty garage in the back of a used car lot. The space was used as a training area for wrestlers trying to make the 2000 Olympic team, including UFC champion Randy Couture. Believing Team Quest could be improved, president and head coach Robert Follis helped persuade Couture and the other fighters to open the gym to non-fighters in 2000 and run it more as a business instead of just a place to train.
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Now most people come to Team Quest wanting to emulate their favorite fighters after witnessing a UFC fight in person or on television. Spike TV and pay-per-view are the best stations to see
what the UFC has to offer, and a third season of The Ultimate Fighter reality show, complete with two members of Team Quest, is under way. As interest in ultimate fighting continues to grow, Team Quest plans to open franchises allover the world. The franchises will join the many regional mixed martial arts organizations forming around the United States that promote matches and give skilled amateur fighters a place to prove themselves before trying to compete at the highest level in the UFC. With its reputation for producing fighters through intense training and team camaraderie, Team Quest will likely continue to stand out from other gyms and bring solid competitors to the UFC ring. (,
OPPOSITE: Scott "The Schoolteacher" Trayhorn climbs the cage to celebrate a13-second first-round knockout in the main event of Rumble at the Roseland XXI. He earned his nickname because he teaches at an elementary school in Troutdale, Oregon. ABOVE: Former UFC World Champion Randy Couture, who recently retired at forty-three, signs an autograph during an intermission at Sportfight Proving Ground II.
Find out more about the next generation of ultimate fighters at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
FLUX • 51
hen bees are happy they fly, filling the air with a healthy buzz that makes the air vibrate as they eagerly go about their business gathering pollen, water, or anything else the hive needs. When bees are angry, though, they tend to crawl up your pant legs, through gaps in the buttons on your shirt, anywhere they can to find an exposed bit of flesh and drive a stinger into it. As the son of a professional beekeeper, I learned at an early age that it's very important to always keep your cool when working with bees. Incredibly attuned to body language, they react violently to aggressive gestures. Jerky movements or angry muttering will cause a cloud of otherwise placid bees to change their opinion of you quickly. Then their buzzing rises an octave or two, and the individual bees become a well-oiled stinging machine. My dad taught me everything I know about bees. But the most valuable lessons I've learned come from just watching the way he moves around them. It's not exactly slow-motion, just relaxed-motion, as if he's moving through air that's slightly thicker than normal. My dad can walk up to a beehive in jeans and a T-shirt, without any protective gear at all, open up the hive, and take a look around. No stings.
I have heard insect experts claim that human beings have an irrational fear of bees. I disagree; fear of honeybees is perfectly rational. Although you're far more likely to get hit by a bus than killed by bees, when they sting it hurts like hell and causes uncomfortable swelling. I once saw a 250-pound truck driver reduced to running around in circles, flailing his arms, and screeching like a banshee because a few bees were buzzing around his head. The ironic thing is that this insect capable of inspiring such fear in even the manliest of men is, in fact, a fragile species in deep trouble. The cause of the trouble is an even meaner organism: a bloodsucking, pinhead-sized parasite called the Varroa mite.
t first glance, the Varroa mite doesn't look like a killer. It vaguely resembles a tick, deep red in color and typically a couple of millimeters in diameter. Basically, what this malevolent little creature does is hop onto the backs of bees - where the head meets the torso - and starts gnawing on them. Afflicted bees have the distinct appearance of having been chewed up and spit out, with misshapen bodies and tattered wings. To add to the trouble, the Varroa carries many viruses that easily jump to bee populations, so
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the beekeepers go out of business, agriculture at large is in big trouble. We can import honey, but we can't import pollination," Burgett says. Pollination doesn't just happen. The natural insect population cannot adequately pollinate the densely packed crops planted by farmers. So cultivators of certain crops - almonds, pears, apples, and cherries are major ones - rent hives from beekeepers during the bloom. The bees are placed directly in the fields and orchards where they gather pollen by buzzing from one tree to the next, thus mixing different pollen strains. This genetic commingling increases the health and yield of the crop. The USDA currently estimates the value ofcommercial pollination to agriculture at large to be $10 billion annually. So when beekeepers suffer, so do farmers.
n a clear February day near Oakdale, California, I'm driving along a dirt road, winding through endless, rolling cow pastures and almond orchards. I crest a low rise and am greeted with a spectacular sight. Sitting in a gravel holding yard, nestled among neatly lined rows of almond trees and farm equipment, are several thousand bee hives. Because the weather is nice, the bees You won't catch Jllf the beekeepers go out of business, agriculture at large is in big fill the air in a me doing that. thick cloud as Maybe I just trouble. We can import honey, but we can't import pollination:' they whiz out lack the innate in every talent, but I possible direction, doing the job they've mite-infested bees are being eaten doubt it. I think it takes decades of been brought here to do: pollinate inside and out. experience to master bee-friendly the almonds. motion, and people who have the The U.S. Department of Agriculture ability usually don't even realize it. For The colonies belong to my dad and a (USDA) estimates that since it was first my dad, it's second-nature, and both couple of other beekeepers, and they've introduced to the United States from he and my mom have told me that its native Asia circa 1986, the Varroa been arriving over the last few days it's all mental. For my mom's part, she mite has wiped out roughly 80 percent on the backs of eighteen-wheelers. says she imagines that she is in a happy of wild honeybees and has either killed The hives sit on pallets, four colonies place while around bees. More than or severely weakened 50 percent of apiece, which have been unldaged with once, as I was covered in crawling, commercially owned hives like my dad's. forklifts and arranged in geometric stinging honeybees, I've wondered just clusters of six or nine. These bees are where the hell that place is and why I This isn't just a problem for beekeepers. well-traveled: some have come from can never find it. Michael Burgett is a professor emeritus Oregon, others from Montana, and of entomology and director of the Bee still others from Texas. It's like a grizzled, unsympathetic Texas Lab at Oregon State University (OSU). beekeeper once told me: "I don't give a Burgett has spent the better part of As I park the truck and get ready to go damn if your girlfriend did just dump to work - mite treatments are today's two decades working on agricultural you, Joe. You'd better get over it before task - I know similar scenes are extension projects for OSU, and he has you go to work on bees today." It's out around the region as beeplaying seen firsthand the need for honeytrue. When working with bees, leave keepers from as far north as bees to pollinate numerous crops. "If your troubles at home.
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PREVIOUS: Pavel Mordvinov checks the health of one of George Hansen's beehives at Foothills Honey in Colton, Oregon. LEFT: Ethan Benne, an employee ofWild Harvest Honey outside Corvallis, Oregon, weighs bees for sale. Beekeepers who want to start anew colony or augment aweakened hive can purchase a three-pound load of bees with aqueen, acan of syrup to feed them, and a cage for $61. FLUX • 55
Minnesota and as far east as Florida are dropping off their bees. Once the hives are shipped in, the bees will be fed and given mite treatments before being loaded onto smaller trucks and shuttled out to individual farmers' orchards. The California almond crop requires more than one million beehives to be properly pollinated. While local beekeepers used to do the job, now more than half of the hives are imported from out of state. The process of moving beehives around on this scale is absolutely nervewracking. Pallets are loaded onto trucks with forklifts in a gut-wrenching highwire act, with hives tottering twenty feet off the ground.
beekeepers. They take over the hotels, cafes, and bars; traffic is clogged with rumbling bee trucks. Almond growing is an integral part of the economy here, and beekeeping is an integral part of growing almonds. So everybody in town knows a lot about both. I remember going in for a haircut in Oakdale one day and getting grilled on our Varroa treatment methods by a nineteen-year-old hairstylist who looked as if she had just come from prom. Another time I was picking up a shipment of queen bees from the post office and a man approached me with tips on how to keep bees healthy with an all-organic diet. Assuming he was a beekeeper, I asked where he was from and how many colonies he ran. "Oh,
they inevitably intermingle, as some bees become disoriented and wander into the wrong hive. This means that parasites also intermix, as Varroa hop from the back of one bee to another. In a holding yard like that, parasites can spread like wildfire. When the almond bloom is finished, the bees are shipped back to the four corners of the country, carrying the Varroa with them. Beekeepers are unwittingly giving the pest a free ride into new breeding grounds.
first caught up with Kenny Williams, owner of Wild Harvest Honey, on a beautiful August day in 2005, outside Corvallis, Oregon, but unfortunately I couldn't enjoy the day because I was wearing thick jeans, heavy boots, three shirts, leather gloves, and a hat I've witnessed a pallet of Even efficacious treatments only buy the and veil to keep out the bees tumble to the ground. I remember thinking it thousands of honeybees beekeeper afew months' reprieve; looked like some sort of filling the air. I was spendbomb being dropped, Varroa populations rebound that quickly. ing the day with Williams releasing a living shrapnel as he was harvesting honey of angry honeybees that in one of his bee yards I'm not a beekeeper, I'm a traveling immediately located the nearest living in the Oregon countryside, amid the rolling hills and green fields of the rural creature - the beekeeper - and salesman," he responded. Northwest, the Oregon Coast Range stung the hell out of it. This is the job, looming in the distance. though, and beekeepers are willing to There's no question that pollination on do it because it's so profitable. In 2006, the scale of the California almonds is Williams is a member of the old the going rate for pollination stretched the future of beekeeping. But in a way, guard of beekeepers: in his late fifties, to $150 per hive, up from $100 the it may also be its downfall. This occurs rail-thin with scruffy hair and an easy year before. to me every time I go to a holding-yard smile. He seems to be thoughtful about like the one near Oakdale. everything he does; his movements So for two months out of every year, When that many hives are in one place are slow and deliberate, every word towns like Oakdale are inundated with
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carefully chosen. He is careful with his beekeeping methods as well, and after twenty-eight years in the business, Williams knows what he is doing. He also knows how much the art of beekeeping has changed.
"It used to be that all you had to do with bees was feed them in the winter. Now that has changed because of parasitic mite infestation and other things," Williams says, shaking his head slowly. "We now have half as many beekeepers in the U.S. as we had in the'50s. The demand for pollination is much greater, though. So there is definitely a need for this profession." I wanted to know how Williams was doing with the Varroa mite, but asking him what kind of losses he had suffered seemed rude somehow. I danced around the question, but he was surprisingly candid. His losses had been between 12 and 15 percent that year, a respectable figure for any beekeeper trying to keep bees alive through the dark, wet Pacific Northwest winter. But that was 2005. When I talked to Williams during winter 2006, he admitted his losses had been much worse, around 30 percent. That's the kind of year that makes beekeepers cringe. Solid beekeepers can weather one year like that, but two or three could very well put them out of business. Why the bad year? "I suspect it was the mites and probably the viruses vectored by them," Williams says matter-of-factly.
Bee Venom Therapy For centuries, people all over the world have been getting stung by honeybees - on purpose. Apitherapy, also known as bee veno therapy, treats infla matory diseases such arthritis, carpal tun el, and tendo ·tis - e multiple sclerosis. Although apitherapy is not cons· red an official medical treatment by s e, many people swear by the healing power of the stinger. Years ago, Pat Wagner, now a board member of the American Apitherapy Society, was bedridden with multiple sclerosis at the age of twenty-five. "She decided to try bee venom therapy, and within a year, she was back on her feet;' says Ina Abercrombie, fellow board member of the AAS and owner of Dancing Bee Acres in Irrigon, Oregon.
mbie administers bee venom apy as a free service to first-time patients. Once patients have com mitted to the therapy, they purchase a "bee condo" to house a batch of honeybees they'll use to sting themselves up to twenty times a week. When it's time for a sting, the patient places a bee directly on the afflicted area. Without much coaxing, the bee will sting, injecting venom that contains traces of melittin, a natural anti-inflammatory. W· mmation reduced temporarily, t body has time to repair itself. But for the apy to work, patients must endure i stings throughout the day or week. S e people are healed after just a few trea m r, the b for others, like Pat Wa becomes a permanent fixture. -
There are chemical treatments for the Varroa mite, such as Apistan and Coumophos. They are costly to buy and implement, but some can kill up to 97 percent of the parasites in a given hive. Unfortunately, the resilient 3 percent that survive then form the gene pool for the next generation, and so treatments become less effective over time. Even efficacious treatments only buy the beekeeper a few months' reprieve; Varroa populations rebound that quickly. For this reason, most beekeepers use a variety of treatments, throwing a chemical cocktail at the mites. This doesn't solve the problem, though, it only contains it. To date, there is no realistic way of eliminating the pest. This unwanted immigrant is here to stay.
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ack in the holding-yard near Oakdale, I step out of the truck, into the swirling clouds of busy bees, and sigh at the magnitude of the task ahead. It will take days to open all the lids, throw strips coated with mite-killing chemicals into each one, and close everything. I walk down the rows of hives, popping the waxencrusted wooden lids off the boxes and pumping smoke into each hive. This momentarily confuses the bees and gives me a chance to work. But wayward bees ricochet off me, and it takes only a few moments for one to crawl up my pant-leg and sting my ankle. The bees don't know that the medicated pads I'm placing in each hive will keep the colony healthy and vibrant. I'm doing them a favor, but they treat me the same way they would treat a grizzly bear trying to steal their honey. That's how it is with bees. And it's why most people probably don't see the problem with a shrinking bee population. To the average American, bees are nothing more than pests. They rudely land in your beer or lemonade, ruin picnics, and frighten children, not to mention truck drivers. And if you try to shoo them away, they sting you. Bees are right up there with ants and mosquitoes as being a gigantic pain in the ass. But the people involved in agriculture know bees are vital to their industry. Once, years ago, I asked my dad why he had decided to become a beekeeper
in the first place. He didn't answer the question directly. Instead, he talked about how he had spent some time teaching Russian at a public high school - he speaks the language fluently, the result of a Stanford education and hiring Russian-speaking employees - and had become disenchanted with the bureaucracies and politics of modern life. He summed it up with: "Well, Joe, I just have a real problem with working for idiots."
ABOVE: George Hansen, the author's father, finishes loading hives onto atrailer headed to ablueberry field in Forest Grove, Oregon.
This explains why he might want to become an entrepreneur in an industry outside of mainstream culture, but why bees? I asked Williams the same question and he gave me what I thought was a thoughtful and honest answer. "Well," he says, after pausing for a moment to think. "This is a job I can feel good about. What bees do is to increase things in people's lives, by pollinating crops and making honey. I can be proud of being a beekeeper." So the next time you take a bite out of that juicy apple or swallow a ripe blackberry, spare a thought for the bees and their keepers who made such things possible. Without them, that produce might never have made it to your mouth. And the way things are going in North America, bees and beekeepers both are becoming dying breeds. (I
Find out what really happens when a bee stings at influx.uoregon.edu/2006
FLUX • 57
The elusive mountain beaver is not just a bane to foresters; its fleas could kill you STORY & PHOTOS:
DAVE CONSTANTIN
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eep beneath the earth, the creature sits in total darkness. The tiny tremors it felt earlier, maybe from the footsteps of a hungry coyote prowling the damp, nighttime chill above, have ceased. Now it can surface, collect what it needs, and quickly return to the safety of its burrow. Gripping the slick, muddy walls of the tunnel with stiletto-tipped, finger-like claws, it makes its way toward the surface. As it pushes through a cluster of sword fern blocking the tunnel entrance, its head brushes two concealed wires, releasing the lethal mechanism. Steel crossbars snap shut, breaking the mountain beaver's spine in two places, killing it instantly. Nestled in the animal's fur, the giant flea lies unscathed. As it feels its food source slowly growing cold beneath its spindly legs, instinct compels it to move. But for now, all it can do is wait. A new source of heat and food will arrive shortly.
n the morning ofJuly 22, 2002, Mike Newton knew something had invaded his body. His head hurt, his skin felt sensitive, he had racking chills, and he was sweating profusely - a "bad, big sweat," as his wife, Jane, remembers it. Newton was scheduled to do a field study in Alaska the following week with a team from Oregon State University where, for nearly four
O OPPOSITE: Aholding pen at the National Wildlife Research Center in Olympia, Washington, offers arare glimpse of alive mountain beaver. Hiding in amakeshift nest of straw, the animal awaits study. 58 • FLUX
decades, he had worked as a forest ecologist and professor of ecology and silviculture. Although he formally retired in 1999, he'd remained on board to volunteer his expertise in the field. He definitely didn't want to feel subpar during a trip into brown bear territory. But there he was, running a 10 I-degree temperature and experiencing a host of strange symptoms that would only worsen as the day progressed. That night, Newton went to bed feeling awful and awoke the next morning on fire with a fever of 102.8. When his temperature suddenly plummeted to 97.2, Jane persuaded him to go to the emergency room. Seventy-three-year-old Newton stands six feet two with a powerful build, sharp eyes, deeply etched features, and white hair kept short and spiky. He describes himself as "rugged" and has spent most of his life successfully cultivating that image. He doesn't seem the type, in other words, to check into an emergency room unless there's a damn good reason. But on this occasion, he didn't hesitate to follow his wife's advice. Doctors at the emergency room were stumped. They drew blood samples, ran some tests, and tried like hell to figure out the cause of Newtons illness. Then he told them about his frequent
extensively since 2001. "We're trying to help the timber industry understand the mountain beaver," she says. Even Arjo concedes that, as of now, lethal trapping remains the only viable control method. The other options - excavating burrows to set non-lethal box traps or fencing individual saplings - are both economically and logistically unfeasible. "The only way to stop them is to run a fence at least seven feet below ground," says Arjo. "But they can chew through the fences, too."
ABOVE: Wendy Arjo (right) and colleague Julie Harper perform an equipment check before heading into aclear-cut in western Washington to do aradio telemetry search for amissing mountain beaver.
dealings with an obscure, flea-ridden rodent in the remote woods of northwestern Oregon. And that changed everything.
manage pests such as the mountain beaver, which sneak around at night eating other people's trees, is with a good steel trap.
The previous week, Newton had been measuring tree growth on a series of university-owned forest research plots about thirty miles east of Astoria in an area known as the Blodgett Tract. Along the way, he had also been dropping some deadly housewarming gifts into the burrows of his least favorite animal: Aplodontia rufa, commonly known as the mountain beaver or "boomer." A beaver in name only, A. rufa bears no genetic similarity to the familiar, flat-tailed variety, or, in fact, to
Sharing Newton's sentiment is the timber industry, which competes with the mountain beaver for much of the same real estate. Timber companies lose countless new saplings every year to the animal's ruthless incisors. In response, they hire professional trappers to help thin out the population. For Newton, whose controlled studies often yield data used in determining regulations for tree harvesting practices, trapping mountain beavers simply comes with the territory, and he's always done it
It must have been in one of those routine moments that the mountain beaver, resourceful even in death, took its revenge. any other member of the rodent family. It is a unique species. But to a forest ecologist like Newton, the mountain beaver is just a two-pound, ten-inch firestorm of fur and teeth that can cut through foliage like a riding mower. With almost a half-century of scientific experience under his belt, Newton has developed, among other things, an unabashed distaste for what he refers to as the "nature-knows-best types." He believes a healthy forest is a wellmanaged forest, and the best way to 60 • FLUX
himself But he's selective. He estimates he's removed maybe a couple hundred "problem boomers" from the Blodgett Tract in ten years of trapping. Still, with science and industry pressing in on both sides and a formidable list of natural predators always ready to pounce, the mountain beaver doesn't seem to have many friends. That's where Wendy Arjo comes in. Arjo, a federal wildlife biologist based in Olympia, Washington, has been studying the mountain beaver
The abundance of clear-cut timberland in the Pacific Northwest presents an interesting quandary. Clear-cuts can trigger sudden population explosions in terrestrial herbivores such as deer, elk, white-footed deer mice, meadow voles, and, of course, mountain beavers. The irony is, even as the timber companies are combating the beavers, their clear-cutting practices lead to an increase in the animal's numbers. Kind of like that multiplying broom scene in Disney's Fantasia. But that hasn't stopped Newton from trying to protect his research plots. So that week in July 2002, as usual, he was setting traps in every burrow entrance in his path, and collecting the spent ones he'd set previously. When he would come across a full trap, he'd remove the carcass and toss it aside to get "recycled" by scavenging animals. Then he'd set another trap in its place. It must have been during one of these routine moments when the mountain beaver, resourceful even in death, took its revenge.
hat happened next puts Newton in a rare category indeed. Outside the scientific community, most people don't even know the mountain beaver exists. First of all, it's endemic to the Pacific Northwest, ranging only from lower British Columbia, Canada, down to the northern tip of Point Reyes, California. Particular about its habitat, it prefers the high, open forests of the western Cascades (especially clear-cuts) and certain spots along the coast, but not many places in between. And although it's rather easy to locate the mountain beaver's six-inch wide burrow entrances - often marked by neat little "haystacks" of clipped foliage that lie like sacred offerings across the
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forest floor - it's nearly impossible to catch a glimpse of a live one. Skittish and vulnerable, the mountain beaver spends most of its life underground inside well-worn tunnel networks that can run anywhere from a few inches to ten- or twelve-feet deep. But even though individuals keep to themselves, separate burrows are often linked by what some scientists refer to as "1-5 corridors," after the major interstate connecting Washington, Oregon, and California. "You sometimes can hear them because they have runways that go right under the surface of the ground," says Newton. "That's why they call them boomers, I think." Considering its contentious relationship with humans, it's a wonder the mountain beaver hasn't already gone the way of the dodo. Although the animal itself may be elusive, its population seems to be, well, booming. Of the seven different subspecies of mountain beaver that share this slim Pacific Northwest-range, only one, the Point Arena variety (A. rufa nigra), is on the federal endangered species list. Maybe that's because the story of this animal's success predates the human intrusion by eons. Fossil records indicate that the mountain beaver, for reasons unknown, has remained virtually unchanged since the Miocene (five million to twentythree million years ago), earning it the dramatic nickname "living fossiL" As is the case with sharks and crocodiles, this could mean the mountain beaver had its ecological niche figured out a very long time ago. But alas, evolutionary stagnation has come with a price. For one thing, primitive kidneys demand constant hydration, requiring that the beaver drink water at least once every twenty-four hours to stay alive. Then there's the lack of stress tolerance. When a mountain beaver gets upset, it secretes a white substance from its eyes that can render it blind for a day or more. Arjo speculates that this substance may have something to do with keeping the rodent's eyes free of dirt. But nobody knows why it happens in response to stress. Then, of course, there are the fleas. Giant, boomer-loving, scientist-biting fleas. At some point in its long history, the mountain beaver, like most warm-
blooded animals, came in contact with the common flea. But these fleas made themselves comfortable and soon settled in as permanent houseguests. Eventually, for some reason, they began to grow larger and more genetically distinct. By the time Newton picked up one of those occupied traps in the woods outside Astoria in July 2002, a
flea vastly different from the familiar barnyard variety made a smooth and quiet transition from boomer to scientist. "I didn't see the flea, and I didn't actually know that it had bitten me," says Newton. Normally though, at roughly one-third of an inch long, Hystricopsylla schefferi would be hard to miss. It is the largest flea species in the
BELOW: Mike Newton takes ameasurement of a Douglas-fir in the Blodgett Tract, the same stretch of woods where, in 2002, he received afleabite that nearly killed him.
world, and it lives only in the fur of the mountain beaver. But like its rat-riding cousin, Hschefferi sometimes carries a nasty bacterium known as Rickettsia with a long history of death and destruction to its credit. Not exactly the bubonic plague, but no
The mountain beaver may be shy, but it can be vicious when cornered. picnic in the park either. "Mike almost died," insists Mark Gourley, a longtime friend and colleague of Newton's. Gourley, a forester employed by Starker Forests, Inc., has supervised mountain beaver trapping on timberlands for twenty-seven years, so he's no stranger to the giant fleas the beaver carries. Still, Newton is the only person he knows of who has ever gotten sick this way.
BELOW: Newton demonstrates the lethal mechanics of amountain beaver trap.
Even Arjo has managed to stay healthy, and she's been nearly elbow-deep in the fleas. Arjo's work is unique in her field, earning her the reputation of foremost mountain beaver expert. It was Arjo who confirmed, for instance, that mountain beavers have unusually high levels of copper in their system. And that they prefer sloped terrain because it facilitates "indoor plumbing," a reference to the constant flow of fresh water she often finds running through excavated burrows. Arjo also noticed
that, despite their mud-slicked habitat, the beavers always seem to keep themselves and their nesting material miraculously clean and dry. But from a strictly scientific standpoint, the most useful data on this animal has come from Arjo's radio-collaring technique, which she adapted from her previous experience with coyotes. The first thing she learned is that it's not easy to collar a mountain beaver. "They don't have a very well-defined neck," she says. So just keeping the collar from falling oft or worse, strangling the animal, takes some skill. "We've come up with a very good method that avoids any unnecessary stress," she says. For one thing, they've eliminated the use of tranquilizers, which is good for the animal but bad for the scientist. The mountain beaver may be shy, but it can be vicious when cornered. Like all rodents, this one must chew incessantly to wear down its constantly growing incisors. If a scientist's intruding finger happens to get in the way, it's just one more opportunity for dental maintenance. "I've gotten bit once or twice," says Arjo. Luckily, she's managed to keep all her digits and, at the same time, avoid Newton's unfortunate fate.
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fter Newton's trip to the emergency room and a treatment of broad-spectrum
antibiotics, his misery continued unabated. "I really felt like I could die at that point," he says. Desperate, he went to see Troy Garrett at Samaritan Family Medicine, his long-time family physician. "I certainly had never seen anything like that before," Garrett says. "It was the sort of thing where I had to just look it up in the textbooks." The textbooks pointed to Murine typhus, a Rickettsial strain normally just associated with rat fleas. But the diagnosis fit all the symptoms. Garrett sent some blood samples to a commercial lab, and later samples were sent to the state and to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta, Georgia - on account of the disease's bizarre source. Oddly enough, the results from the commercial lab came back positive for Murine typhus, whereas the CDC's results came back negative. But Newton's health had already begun to turn around. The antibiotic cocktail seemed to have found its mark, which indicated Murine typhus was probably the right diagnosis anyway. Newton would live, but the experience didn't do much to improve his relationship with the mountain beaver.
t's mid-March 2006, three and a half years after his bout with Murine typhus, and Newton has returned to the Blodgett Tract, where he stands fiddling with the release latch on a mountain beaver trap. He bends down to replace the old one that now sits triggered but unoccupied, hidden among sword fern just inside the burrow entrance at his feet. As he pulls the trap out of the hole and gives it a closer look, he notices a few wet clumps of tan hair still clinging to the steel bars, the last vestiges of an unlucky mountain beaver long ago scavenged by animals, or maybe just dissolved into the seething biomass of the forest floor. "That's what I like to see," says Newton, almost to himselÂŁ "That's a good sign." He pockets the trap and heads off into the forest. The vibrations from his receding footsteps penetrate deep into the earth, bouncing down a dark, wet tunnel and passing beneath the claws of a hungry rodent that waits patiently for the footsteps above to fade away. (I
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See what it's like inside a mountain beaver burrow at influx.uoregon.edu/2006
THEY WERE FINISHED, BUT THEN WHAT? THEY NEEDED SOAfETHING, THEY NEEDED AfO~E: ..
.....--------WHY, JAN? WHY DOES IT HA VE TO END?'
BACK talk
e UO offers over 11 0 study abroadprofTams Being a door-to-door salesman is hard; getting slugged by a customer doesn't help STORY: RICHARD GOULD
y wire-rimmed glasses flew off my face and landed in a weed-filled flowerbed. Getting blindsided with a punch to the side of the head feels pretty weird. I always figured it would hurt like crazy, but it didn't. It actually took me a second to realize that this wild-eyed,
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scruffy little guy'd hit me. When you're six feet seven and selling Bibles doorto-door, you don't expect to get sucker punched. Especially not by a scrawny guy who might be five feet eight on his tiptoes. "What the hell was that?" was all I could think to say. He turned around and bolted up the steps, across his rotting porch, and through his front door, slamming it shut behind him. I heard several deadbolts click and a chain slide into place. Dazed, I just stared at the door until I heard him yell, in his thick Tennessee accent, "I'm gonna call tha po-Ieese!" I'd had enough. "Make sure you do!" I y~lled back. 'Md make sure you tell 'em you just assaulted me!" He didn't
64 • ·FLUX
ILLUSTRATION: LINDSAY MONROE
respond. I couldn't think of anything else to say either. After a couple more minutes of staring at his front door, I decided to quit for the day. I drove back to the trailer in the cornfield near 1-40 that I rented for $108 a month and sat on the front porch. I listened to the interstate traffic, ate some raw corn pilfered from the field, and drank·a six-pack of beer. That trailer was nasty. The stove was broken and the fridge was just a place to put your Little Debbies if you wanted to make the ants work a little harder to get them. Most nights I'd wake up to find a huge cockroach scurrying across my bare chest. I'd grab the little sucker and fling it across the room. Then I'd try to roll over. But Tennessee's summers are plenty hot, and my sweaty back was always getting stuck to the lime green vinyl couch I slept on. I'd peel the cushion off: roll over, and sleep until the next roach woke me up. In some ways that trailer wasn't all that different from the one in Florida where I grew up, a place where the nearest paved road was a mile off and the closest McDonald's was a half-hour drive away. We were in the Baptist church every time it opened its doors, and I lived in constant terror of the rapture. My father outlawed movies, dancing, and rock'n' roll in our home. My exposure to the wider world was limited to what I read in books and the thousands of Marvel comics I kept under my bed. After a couple years of attending Jerry Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia, I needed to earn some tuition money. I knew a guy who knew a guy who'd made a lot of money selling Bibles. I'd always liked books, so I signed up to spend a summer selling Bibles for Thomas Nelson, Inc. in Decatur County, Tennessee - home to 11,650 of the state's finest residents. I drove to Nashville and paid $100 to attend Thomas Nelson's weeklong
sales school, where they taught us some effective stuff. For instance, always, always knock at the informal side door like a friend or neighbor, not the formal front door like a peddler. They taught us how far back from the door to stand while we waited for the occupant to open it. Closer for girls and little guys; much farther for big galoots like me. Basically, they taught us how to coerce timid rural people into letting us into their homes. If you want to sell a Bible, you've got to get inside the house to do it. I don't know why, but no one buys a Bible on a porch. Here's another trick: When the occupant answers the door, tell her it'll just take a minute of her time to see what you've got. Then put your head down, grab your case, and start wiping your feet vigorously as though you've already been invited in. You'll usually be pretty far from the welcome mat, but that doesn't matter. Just bend over, look at the ground, and grind your feet into the grass, dirt, sidewalk - whatever you happen to be standing on - until they submit and let you in. They will. They don't want to be rude.
in more than 70 countries and more than 140 internships in 50 countries Facts About VO Overseas Programs: • • • • •
Earn UO credit ("in residence") in all approved programs and internships Use UO financial aid funds, with a budget tailored to your program costs Apply for special scholarships reserved for study abroad students Enjoy excellent on-campus and overseas resources, including thorough orientation Gain valuable professional experience and rapid personal development
Featured Program Combined Study/Internship Program in London • Choose from fall, winter, and spring terms (any combination) • Enjoy wonderful excursions to all the major sites in London and longer trips around England • Earn 16 to 21 credits per term, at a fixed cost • Select from courses in literature, art history, political science, history, theater arts, and more. • Complete a custom-tailored, half-time internship (20 hours per week, for 7 UO credits) in any major and any professional field • Journalism students have interned in PR, advertising, editing, photojournalism, and other specializations • Easily combined with other European programs, for a two-term or full-year adventure • Apply early: program is first-come, first-served
Options in lournalism* Ecuador. Three-week environmental writing program in the Galapagos Islands. Finland: Innovative subjects like multicultural reporting, political propaganda, and transnational media. Independent study also possible. Ghana: 8-credit summer program in Accra: 4 credits course work, 4 credit internship. IE] Global Internships: Assorted position openings in the Americas, Asia, and Europe. Italy: Study advertising, graphic design and photography in Paderno del Grappa. Singapore: Study in the Communications and New Media Programme at the National University of Singapore.
I tried to remember if assault had ever been covered in Thomas Nelson sales school. I'm pretty sure they neglected to mention it. They did say that if someone comes out in a rage, you stop talking, open the sample bag, and pull out a random book. Hold it up and say, "I'm selling these. Do you want one?" They'll say no, cuss you out, and go back inside. A lot of these guys will assume you're a bill collector or a lawyer until you prove them wrong. That's what I was trying to do when that guy punched me. He didn't give me a chance to say or show him much of anything. I really don't blame him. Trying to get poor people to buy overpriced stuff they can't afford in the name of God isn't much of a job. I'm proud to say I wasn't very good at it. (I
*AII of these options have courses taught in English.
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Information: http://studyabroad.uoregon.edu Advising appointment: (541) 346-3207