48 hours in Bend, Oregon

12:30 pm, Saturday afternoon. Arrive in Bend and head straight to Jackson's Corner because you are starving and hyped up on thermos coffee and excitement to finally be working on a project you first began developing five years ago, and you know you'll want some solid hours in the studio uninterrupted by hunger. Contemplate ordering a whole pizza to devour on site but opt for a turkey sandwich on a roll with everything on it, and a pickle. Sit outside even though it's overcast and threatening rain, because you know that even if it does, it will be drier than where you come from.

1:00 pm. Go directly to A6 and meet with Pat, the owner, who quickly shows you the ropes, sets up a press for you, and lets you set to work.

Don't hesitate.

Even though you haven't got the specific pieces for your project to work with, you still have a lot to learn about the materials, and you're ready to let go of the tedious parts of your process, if only for a little while, in order to let things evolve through hours of work on the press.

4:30 pm. Look up at the clock and realize that you've been literally playing for three hours, and that you haven't felt this relaxed and carefree about your process in years. Clean up, which is quick and easy because you are working with water-based inks, and start thinking about dinner.

5:30 pm. Meet your mother at her apartment with fresh greens from your garden and a mixed six-pack of Deschutes Brewery beer. Cook dinner together and talk until 11:00, when you fall into bed and are immediately knocked out until morning.

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7:00 am, Sunday morning. Wake up surprisingly easily, having slept the sleep of someone who has started something good the day before, and who looks forward to tomorrow. Shower, fill up a water bottle and slip out the door in under a half an hour. Pick up a scone and a bag of fruit at the nearby market, and head to Thump Coffee to catch the tail end of stage 15 of The Tour and to check email. Be a tiny bit alarmed by the ease in which total strangers strike up conversation with you, and remember that Bend is still a small town. Drink a perfect latte and bang out an estimate for a client and knock off a handful of emails. You've been up for just a little over an hour and you've already handled the most mundane tasks of your day. The rest is yours.

9:30 am. Head back to the studio, where you will get so absorbed in learning the properties of the new ink you are using, in anticipating and being surprised by the results, and by just wanting to try *one more thing*, that you work two hours longer than you had planned.

2:30 pm. Find a pizza place with adorable young Central Oregon types who serve you with genuine smiles and inquiries about your day. Pass at least three drum circles on your walk downtown. Discover that the library is an excellent place to get the remainder of your internet business tidied up for the day.

5:00 pm. Go for a walk through the neighborhoods that were once your haunts. Take photos, take notes. Discover that things really haven't changed that much, and that Bend has really always been a hobbit town. Walk past a market with a friendly looking crowd composed of adults drinking pitchers of beer at picnic tables and children carousing around a play area with their families looking on. Decide on a whim to order a beer and sit among the crowd. Doodle an ill-formed contour drawing that tries to capture the wonkiness of the neighboring houses. Be invited into a conversation by a group of friendly locals.

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9:00 am, Monday morning. This morning you'll take your coffee to go to the studio, maximizing your time before the COCC printmaking class will arrive, and you will have to pack up to go back to Portland. You're starting to find your rhythm in the studio by now, and you're starting to see a theme develop. You begin to feel excited about the idea that through three days of working, just working with your hands and your materials, not over-thinking, not belaboring concept, you've reached am entry point. You've begun to see a path. You're re-discovering your art through your hands, not just through the lens of your conceptual notions.

12:30 pm. Skip out of the studio having cleaned up just under the radar of the incoming class. You're packed and looking forward to going home, back to your own studio, and to seeing the Monkey. But you accidentally on purpose take a wrong turn, and you're heading toward Shevlin Park. You keep going, and when you get there, you take your bike off your car's roof rack, you throw on your helmet and shoes, and you pedal across the river and up the bank on the other side. You become temporarily confused by the blacktop you encounter there, but then you're just as enraptured by the giant Salsify plants waiting for just the right gust of wind to blow them away. You carry on until the path returns to dust, and you ride the ridge, remembering every turn and dip from long ago rides, until you find the entrance to that other trail you used to love riding when you lived here. You climb the loose rock and are happy to find that your legs are up to the task on your single speed, even though you haven't ridden all year. Bend's dirt has given you wings. You fly back down the trail and across the ridge, back to your car, where coconut juice and a drive over the mountains awaits.

honey and health food : part two

This is the second part of the short story I began to retell here, last summer. This is background for the Bend Project...there's so much I could write about my perception of that town.

Place, and perception of place plays a huge role in my work. I'm fascinated by places in flux and/or in stasis. I'm fascinated how place is defined - by its inhabitants and by its outsiders. This fascination (not necessarily the content of this story) is the basis of my upcoming work about Bend and Central Oregon.

note: I've removed names of places and people, simply because I don't feel they need to be implicated in my own rendering of the town.

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Eventually, my family moved to a different part of town, and life sped up. My mom joined the work force, and my brother and I were adolescents with no interest in the slow food philosophy that our small town health food store exemplified. Our family rarely ate together, and grocery shopping became dominated by foraging for frozen foods. By the time I was in high school I had all but forgotten my hippie roots and the days of the health food store; the sunlight coming through handmade curtains, the creak of old hardwood floors, and the smells of bread baking and sprouts sprouting and of yogurt being made.

me in 1996 outside the health food store

Bend, OR. 1996. Population: 55,000

I've just arrived in town in a VW beetle four years older than I am with two large tropical birds, a black cat, and a boyfriend. We've come from a tiny southern Oregon town where I'd been working what had meant to be a simple summer job, but had turned into a fiasco involving the DEA, the INS, and the Montana Militia, and which had lasted until December. Bend has become a mecca for a great number of people. Skiing, mountain biking, rock climbing, white-water rafting, you can do it all in Bend. You can’t, however, find a job. Especially if your last known work number has been disconnected.

After two months of pursuing the lowliest of jobs: dishwasher, janitor, golf-club assembler, and being turned down left and right, I suddenly remembered the health food store.

The quintessential mom and pop store had evolved with the town. Now simply called by the owner's last name, they catered to the new wealth that had been coming en masse to Bend since the late 1980’s. The little shop's specialty was now wine, a gourmet deli, and organically grown produce hand selected by the humble husband/owner. Gone were the dirt roads and in their place were busy thoroughfares complete with parallel parking and bike lanes. Gone were the juniper trees and volcanic ash of the hill behind the store, gone were the caves and forts and hiding places of children, and gone were the graves of many of their beloved pets. In their place were townhouses, condominiums, and multi-million dollar mansions. The merchandise area of the store had been replaced by a new, high tech produce case, and the ice-cream freezer no longer held yogurt push-ups but a cornucopia of gooey Ben and Jerry’s flavors. I now had to go to the health food store across town to get bulk honey, the little health food store that could was the only place in town where you could get bamboo shoots or pig’s feet from Mexico.

One thing that hadn't changed were the owners, who still lived in the apartment above the store. But now a short, elaborately coiffed and theatrically painted woman managed the store. She apparently liked me when I came in. I was barely interviewed before being hired.

She had worked as an actress in Chicago, and she taught me how to play the part of the retail clerk - how to separate yourself from the role in order to prevent insanity. It wasn’t easy though. A new kind of clientele had been keeping the store alive over the years, and it pained me more and more each day to be pleasant to the horrible, bored housewives who were either lonely and just wanted to talk, or hell-bent to make every service worker’s life miserable by being miserable themselves.

I discovered that I loved working with the produce - arranging it to look the most appealing to customers is an artform!

Old friends of my parents started popping in to the store, too, once they learned that I was working there. People that I remember hanging around our house nearly every day when I was young, but who my parents rarely see anymore. Our store was notorious for having a very liberal wine tasting policy, and many of these old friends would come in on the pretext of getting lunch, but would usually only pour themselves a generous glass from whatever bottle was open, and I would sit on the front porch with them on the hot, slow summer days, getting to know them now that I was an adult. I got to know that they were alot like me, mentally in their early twenties, transient and uncertain.

Summer rolled on, and I rode my bike around a lot, drank beer, got my heart broken and broke a heart, and then one day in September I woke up and it was cold. Bend has no spring or fall - when the wind blows down from the mountains it's time to hunker down and prepare yourself for six months of deep freeze. Summer had been too short for me. I'd planned to save money and move away in the fall, but I hadn't saved, and I didn’t even know where I wanted to go. I wasn't mentally or physically prepared for another winter in Bend. I had no car, which meant I was going to be riding my bike 10 miles a day through slush and ice and snow if I wanted to keep my job.