There’s a quarter moon setting above the neighborhoods. The evening light is falling away. Setting down in tangerine blood behind the fancy neighborhoods across the river. Two guys are discussing engines in Spanish as they are bent under the hood of a white Honda Accord. A man and a woman are yelling through the letter box of an apartment. A bluegrass band is practicing in the yard behind the house across from us. Katie from Colorado is busy, and I help her for a few loads, moving boxes of plants into the empty apartment next door. Kim is watching Smallville, and there are two backpacks on our front porch. They appeared there mysteriously this afternoon belonging to two girls from Manitoba on their to a Witch Camp in southern Oregon. And me, I’m thinking back to last Saturday when I walked across the Hawthorn Bridge at seven-thirty in the morning. The air was bright and cool and the streets were empty. I stood watching the river pass and in forty-five minutes it would be the 60th anniversary to the minute of the first atomic bomb drop. It’s August 6 and I had a date to table at the Portland Zine symposium.
In the world of Do It Yourself, the symposium was over the top! held in the third floor ballroom of Portland State University, the room was full of creative people from all over the states. Folding table endwise to folding table all littered with creativity and art. Xeroxed zines. Self-published poetry books. Letterset posters. Hand-screened patches. Used books. Shirts silk screened with prints of bicycles and fish. Behind the tables sat tall, cool, somewhat socially awkward men with glasses, and seemingly impossibility organized women wearing stripy stockings and munching either vegan muffins or sucking on lollipops. I spent parts of two days there behind the Earth First! Table and was completely at home in the creative epicenter of the D.I.Y. ethos.
By way of finding the symposium I wandered around the downtown Farmers Market looking for a coffee. The market is just enormous with booths stuffed full of organic greens, flowers, loaves of bread, canned fish, flavored olive oils, repeating and repeating. I finally woke up (for the most part) at 9 AM sitting on the grass in the park watching a Honky Tonk band (the Texacusioners) roll into “Mama Tried”. That’s where I heard the best line of the day; “Hello there. We’re the Texacusioners. We’re not much accustomed to playing Honky Tonk at nine in the morning”.
Saturday evening Kim and I walked to the wonderful Acme bar to drink two dollar Iron City lagers and watch the Cyclecide crew set up their traveling bicycle circus. Cyclecide is sortive an industrial mix of psychedelic cowboy mythic, meets punk, union-suited-moonshine-drunk-arc-welding-merry prankster. They have pieced together through the shear force of creativity, greasy food, and alcohol, bicycle powered circus rides sure to enchant the drunk and sober alike. If Neal Cassidy had survived the dessert, moved back to San Francisco, and lived in an industrial warehouse with 30-somethings, he might have been the elder on Saturday at the Acme bar. He would have fit in too wearing his white Prankster union suit and performing his death defying hammer twirling stunt. Neal Cassidy wasn’t there of course but his spirit sure was as the sun-burnt and stoned Cyclecide crew earnestly erected their wonderful contraptions for all to enjoy.
It was simply the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. Odd scenes of people persuing creative endeavors because, for no other reason, that’s just what they do never ends to give me hope for the world. Plus there is also the time honored trade: free beer for a good party. The underground is alive and busy with curious bands of freaks, families, painters, poets, musicians, activists, contraption builders, thinkers, tinkers, travelers, and wingnuts, all somehow simply in pursuit of simply continuing. Life out here is the trippy ongoing whirligig of the set up/take down existence. And Cyclecide are my heroes. Hi, were the underground. This is what we do. On Sunday Jeff Rosenberg and I rode bikes down to Oaks Amusement park to sus it out for the next meeting of the PDXMetro adventure club and it did indeed meet with our approval for sure. We then biked over to the Loveland club (an old brick warehouse on Produce Row) to catch some of the PDX Pop music festival. Two days. Two floors. A million bands. All ages. No alcohol. Vegan pizza. Free. Seriously now, Portland rocks.
Back in the front room, and in real time now, Katya has been reading the new Harry Potter book to Tim and the kids. I’ve been sitting on the floor listening for two chapters. One of the two traveler girls has gone to bed. The other is in the shower. I think their backpacks are still on the front porch where I’m sure they’ll be fine for the night. Katya has the amazing ability to read out loud without stumbling, and can recite, with justice, Hermonie, Dumbeldorf, and Harry’s accents and temperaments (along with every other character including the living paintings at Hogwarts) all throughout the new Half Blood Prince. It’s wonderful.
With the kids going to bed I’m back in my room staring at the name Alain Lombard. He passed away at 80 years and I have had his obituary from the New York Times still on my desk since July 24th when it was published. I stumbled upon it and tore it out of the Sunday paper at the Three Friends Café. Alain Lombard was a Frenchman who set out alone in a raft called 'Hérétique to bob about in the Atlantic Ocean without supplies just to see if it could be done. He crossed the ocean surviving on plankton, saltwater and raw fish and arrived home a folk hero. The French seem to have the knack for these kinds of things and in fact the obituary reads “He joined a long list of Frenchmen who have performed seemingly silly feats at great hardship and, often, immense risk”. So I have investigated….
Slivain Dornon was born in Les Landes, France. He was a baker by trade, but best known as The Stilt Walker of Lander. On the 12th of March 1851 he set out from Paris with the aim of becoming the first to walk the 2,000 odd miles to Moscow. On stilts. This feat Dornon accomplished in 58 days. Stilt walking (stilt from the French word “tchangues” meaning “big legs”) would have for Silvain Dornon been natural. The Landes area of southwestern France was for generations home shepherds and farmers. It was also a vast and formidable wet and boggy place. In order to elevate themselves above the soggy muck locals took to walking on stilts for every day comfort. It indeed was an invention born of necessity and had the extra benefit of giving Shepard’s a better view of their flocks. This tradition waned during the Napoleonic era when it was so ordered that the Landes area be sewn with pine trees which still stand today. Remnants of the bygone era of stilt walking can be seen still in the performances of folk music, which often are accompanied by dancers wearing stilts.
Jean Francois Grnvelet, or as he was known in America, Charles Blondin, became the first Frenchman to cross Niagra Falls by tightrope. This feet he completed on June 30 1859 walking 160 feet above Angel Falls along the length of a 1,000 foot rope. His daredevil transnational crossings became something of an attraction on both sides of the river and a fee of 25 cents was charged to watch Blondon traverse (the “perilous gorge” as his promoter called it) while pushing a wheelbarrow, with a man on his back, by bicycle, blindfolded, tied up in a sack, backwards with his feet in baskets, and interestingly enough on stilts.
He made a total of 21 crossings by tightrope (from the Latin word ‘funambulist” meaning “rope walker”) his most famous being the crossing with a stove strapped to his back stopping in mid traverse to cook and eat an omelet. Grnvelet was born in St. Omer and passed away at 73 years in bed in England.
The record for the first human to swim across the Atlantic ocean goes to Frenchman Benoit Lecomte who completed the task in 1995. Lecomte entered the water at Hyannis Massachusetts and emerged again 74 days later at Quiberon France having swum some 3,736 miles (followed most of the way by a ten foot shark). (when asked for comment Alain Bombard replied “I will certainly refrain from tearing him apart, since people made fun of me”).
On July 25th, 1909 Frenchman Louis Bleriot became the first pilot to fly across the English Channel. Bleriot was born in Cambrai July 1st, 1872 and studied engineering in Paris. On the 25 of July 1909 he was delivered into the history books in a little over 37 minutes having lofted skyward from a field in Calais. In spite of getting lost over the Channel he landed his plane safely in England much to the delight of France and the annoyance of Brittan.
In 1988, another Frenchman, Remy Bricka, took 64 days to "ski" across the Atlantic on polyester floats. Which brings me back to the ocean and 27 year old Maud Fontenoy the first woman to row solo from Peru to Polynesia. She rowed for the duration of 72 days in a 23 foot long boat arriving at her destination a month ahead of schedule owing to favorable seas.
The kids are asleep with Harry Potter dreams, and I too shall fade away into the effortless bobbing of a small boat drifting across the open and forever oceans.
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