Eugene, Part II

Her name is Jonnie Burns. In her photo on page A6 of the Idaho Statesman, she wears a black tank top and blue jeans, and props up a fat baby with her right hand. If you look closely, you can see hallmark Idahoan features: her sun-browned skin set against her squinting blue eyes. Her legs are muscular and thick. On her feet are a pair of huge, dirty workman's boots. The house behind her needs new paint and some carpentry around the windows.

The caption under the photo says she works for her mother getting rid of gophers in Homedale, a town of about 2,500 residents that got its name when it was drawn out of a hat.

Jonnie Burns' is a weird job, but the look on her face tells me she doesn't think so. It's a different kind of weird than running a head shop in Eugene, where everything is an euphemism for weed. It's the rare bird that smokes tobacco out of a four foot tall "water pipe" with a marijuana leaf etched onto its chamber.

I can't imagine her telling her friends "I kill gophers for a living" with the same wink and nod as the chipper blonde behind the counter of this particular head shop located just off the University of Oregon campus. She told me a story about an especially elaborate, salmon-colored bubbler that reminded me of the synaptic network of a human brain.

"The artist was here, and offered it to a girl for $300, which is way less than what it's worth, but she didn't buy it," she told me. She explained that while it was a beautiful bubbler and an original work of art, and that the girl was flattered the artist had offered her a sweet deal, $300 was still more than she could afford.

It occurred to me that the girl behind the counter may have been the girl from her story.

Ian, whose meeting with a project collaborator from out of town had given me the morning and most of the afternoon to snoop around downtown Eugene, spied me from across the street as I left the head shop. He waved and called out my name.

We found ourselves at McMenamin's, a distinctly Oregonian pub chain where I sometimes ate as a child. (My dad's office was across a parking lot from the first Portland location.) Ian snickered as we passed the table at which we ate the last time we ate there. It was situated between the doors to the men's and women's bathrooms.

We settled at a bench on a shady back patio. On the bench to my left, a tatted-up bald man talked incessantly about the broadening effects of travel; at another sat a growing group of physics students whom Ian chucklingly derided as "novices" when one of them complained about a programming language. Ian's derision reminded me of first-year journalism students obsessing prematurely over their master's projects.

The air was still on the patio, and the heavy, sweet smell of brewing beer hung in the air like dew, which seemed to delight Ian. I imagined that the tables were sticky with muggy, sugary air. We ordered beers, over-seasoned Cajun tater tots, and for my lunch, a pulled pork sandwich.

Since Thursday, I'd obsessed over the proper pronunciation of the word "Boise." Is it "boy-see," or "boy-zee?" Ian responded to my musing out loud, telling me he couldn't hear the difference. I later consulted an expert on the subject––my cousin Carley––who informed me in no uncertain terms that it's pronounced "boy-see." My sandwich safely in my stomach, our conversation dwindled, and we decided on a change of scenery. We paid the bill, and walked to the physics building.

The University of Oregon's Willamette Atrium, which houses the physics department where Ian works, looks like a refurbished gothic ruin. Its wraparound offices and classrooms enclose a cavernous interior doused in natural light from massive windows, and a high ceiling with exposed supports. Ian's office is in the basement, far from the distractions of natural beauty.

The basement workspace where Ian and his colleagues conduct their experiments is at the end of a hallway, where offices and labs cluster around a common area with a cumbersomely positioned desk, a whiteboard, and a few examples of the furniture one commonly finds in a university setting. It looked almost like a scene from a play.

Ian gave me a brief tour. In one of the labs, he showed me a few products of a machine that creates black and white drip paintings. Some of them I would have been proud to have on my own wall. In the same lab, I was drawn to a huge canister, probably two feet in diameter, sunk in the floor, containing a supercooled gas used in optics experiments. Hanging in the rafters was what appeared to be a paper maché worm, a ghost of grad students past.

But what interested me most was a map of the United States that had been put up in an obscure corner. The distance I flew the day before was worth pondering.

My tour was cut short by a long-haired man who called to Ian from the top of the staircase that ended in the cluster's common area. He beckoned at Ian using his whole arm in a gesture I couldn't quite read. The identity of the long-haired man remains a mystery to me, but if I had to guess, I'd speculate that he was either a professor or the aforementioned collaborator himself. Ian disappeared up the stairs, and I sat at one of the university-type chairs to read.

Time did not fly.

In my book was a story about unrequited love and/or star-crossed lovers that ended in what seemed to me to be a particularly Idahoan fashion, taking place near the Salmon River in Idaho in the 1880s. A man who ran a booming business in a small mining town fell in love with a married woman. When the woman was mysteriously widowed, the business owner paid for her husband's funeral, and the businessman and the widow lived happily together for two years. In the second year, a third gentleman entered the picture, and the woman married the newcomer. A year later, both husband and wife were found shot to death in their home. The business owner paid for both of their funerals, let his business lapse, and became a loner in the hills. Later, miners found his decomposed body in his cabin, and in his hands he clutched a photo of the deceased widow.

When Ian returned, it was almost time for dinner. We climbed the stairs, walked through the atrium, and made our way to Taylor's, a pub that was simply too close to campus to be worth going to during the school year, to meet some of the other physics graduate students.

We found several of Ian's colleagues already there, including an incredibly awkward but sincere Indian and a tall, chubby, bearded man who had buzzed the sides of his hair and drawn the long strands on the top into a tight, shiny ponytail. Insanely shrewd flies buzzed all around.

More people showed up: Wes, the wiry, curly-headed fast-talker I met last year; two girls, one of whom chatted boisterously; an attractive couple. In the meantime, our flirtatious waitress brought me my beer and chicken pot pie.

The long table on the patio at which we sat split between two conversations. Ian, Wess, and the couple talked shop, while the rest of us probed my irrational dislike of the state of Colorado. Finishing our dinners, we went inside to play pool and shuffleboard in the back room, where Spanish-language news, with its too-attractive anchors and sex-charged soap opera commercials, played on televisions mounted from the ceiling.

I've always felt unobservant; it seems I always miss something important. While I talked with Wes about an injury he'd sustained to his elbow, Ian suggested that we invite a few people back to his apartment for drinks. I found out later that one of his former romantic interests, now dating one of his colleagues, showed up at Taylor's and had made staying at the bar uncomfortable.

We left Taylor's with one of Ian's friends, a short, Nepalese version of Snooki from 'Jersey Shore' named Martha who made every effort to communicate that she despised me.

On the way, we were intercepted by the soft-spoken couple we met at Taylor's. They absconded with Martha, who ended up buying a $3 avocado at a grocery store, while Ian and I tiredly made our way back to his apartment to wait for Martha et al.

The rest of the night went by in a hurry. Martha complained bitterly about her $3 avocado, fumbling at it, evidently with the intention of eating after she'd penetrated its plastic-looking skin. Once she'd halved the fruit, she stared blankly at the pit until someone hacked it with a knife and drew the pit out. "What the hell are you doing?" Martha cried.

That evening, I held my tongue while Martha alternated between laughing hysterically at the words "Tamil Tiger," and throwing everything I said back in my face. At one point, sitting on Ian's crowded couch and drinking red wine, she looked me straight in the eye and told me I wasn't funny.

In a moment reminiscent of that scene in True Lies in which Arnold Schwarzenegger contemplates wrecking the used care salesman Bill Paxton's face, I thought about giving Martha a what-for: "That's nice, you yak shit-eating Sherpa. Keep running your mouth and I'll put you in the common grave where the University of Oregon puts the diversity admits that just didn't work out."

But that isn't what happened. I just gave her a cold stare until she looked away. I'm not much for tact, but I didn't want to put Ian in a weird position, and I wasn't going to run my mouth at someone bent on being a bully. At that point in the night, I would have given just about anything to get her to stop talking.

Everybody left. Meeting too many new people after a full day of walking and reading and face-time with Ian had exhausted me. Ian was exhausted too, I think. We watched an episode of '30 Rock' and went to bed: We were going to the Country Fair the next morning bright and early, and we needed as much sleep as we could get.

Eugene, Part I

I sway over a patch of grass, head down, with my hands on my knees, hoping it's over. The sweetish smell of bile and sauerkraut is preferable to the taste in the mouth I woke up with––cigar smoke and heavy drinking––but is nevertheless not one I'd wanted to experience on my last day in Eugene. I look at my shoes: My left sneaker is covered in what appears to be boiled onions and bean sprouts. I vomit some more.

I'm not sure if retching at yesterday's lunch is the logical culmination of my six day visit to my college friend Ian or something anomalous, like a lightning strike or shark attack. Maybe I was physically purging the malaise that had sapped my motivation and willpower all summer up to that point. What I do know is that my vacation achieved exactly what I'd hoped it would. I feel more competent and motivated. I feel like blogging.

This was to be the second year in a row I'd joined Ian in Eugene for the Oregon Country Fair, a massive festival featuring food, music, exhibits, plays, and bare-breasted hippies that runs over a weekend in early July. Last year we ended up stumbling through the dusty labyrinth of Pocahontas-costumed fairgoers for a full day looking for Ian's friends from the University of Oregon Department of Physics. This year would be different. This year, I got to Eugene by air.

The man-child sitting next to me on the hardy little prop plane that shuttled a trail mix of students and businessmen between Portland and Eugene wore his hat backwards, ears muffed by an oversized set of headphones jacked in to a hand-held video game console at which he squinted for the duration of the brief flight. When the startlingly attractive attendant asked him to turn his apparatus off during takeoff and landing, he closed the screen, only to brazenly open it again the instant she turned her back.

He removed his headphones only once after we touched down in Eugene. "Damn near thought we'd crash!" he said, turning to me. I looked into his face for the first time: He was at least 35 years old.

Transportation makes me nervous, and I suffer from the same anxieties on planes as I do on Greyhounds. I fret endlessly about delays, my baggage, and whether I'm headed in the right direction. This is why I always pack a book at random in my carry-on: The stress of starting something new is easier on the nerves than tying myself into knots over what has already been done. On the Portland-Eugene flight, I failed to notice my seat-mate's age, so deeply immersed was I in my choice for this trip, Mountains of Memory: A Fire Lookout's Life in the River of No Return Wilderness, by Don Scheese.

Scheese, a some-time fire lookout on Ruffneck Mountain in Idaho, put together a collection of anecdotal essays that alternates between capturing the quietude of life in the woods and butchering his achievement with that nasty habit endemic to feature story writing, putting words into people's mouths.

Without thinking, I'd elected to read about reclusive life in backwoods Idaho while on a trip to a place where men in Hawaiian shirts with ponytails passes for high fashion. My home state's least appreciable attributes, coldness and disapproval of civilization, would literally be part of my baggage.

My skepticism of Eugene-folk started at the luggage claim, where the leggy redhead who sat two rows up from me on the plane shared with who I assume was her youngish boyfriend a sprawling and almost cinematic embrace.

It reminded me of something a carpenter working with me in McCall, Idaho, once said about his neighbor who lived in a yurt: "When his girlfriend's in town and they're getting busy, at least he turns the NPR way up." At least the yurt-dwelling environmentalist in McCall had the courtesy to drown out the rutting sound with public radio. Standing there at the luggage claim conveyor belt, puritanically surveying the mess of copper hair and black skinny jeans, I prayed for a distraction, a bird to crash into a window or a bomb to explode––anything that would divert my attention.

It was at this moment that Ian strode into the terminal, his long arms swinging purposefully. Our greeting, though hardly effusive, was certainly warm. We only see each other once a year, and I'm always thrilled to see him. My bag was one of the first through the rubber flaps at the gate between the luggage loading and retrieval areas, and with it in hand, Ian and I beat a path to his Ford Taurus station wagon, leaving the discomforting couple behind us.

It was 4:00; we had an ultimate Frisbee engagement at 6:00. After arriving at Ian's narrow two-story flat, I changed into shorts and we drank glasses of Ian's latest concoction––ginger tea wheat beer––to celebrate my arrival.

...

We walked everywhere in Eugene, starting with our trip to the ultimate Frisbee game, which was some fifteen blocks from Ian's flat. The sunny, warm weather and cool breezes dulled my feeling of being someplace foreign, and made our long treks into downtown extremely pleasurable.

Along the way, we were passed by a pasty, black-haired nerd type on a bicycle who seemed to nod at Ian and I as we walked past some university buildings. I made a forgettable comment about nerds, only to remember a promise I made to myself on the plane: "Harrison, don't talk shit." Ian said nothing. Debuting at the large field attached to a baseball diamond where we would play, I found the curly-headed nerd talking to some girls on the sidelines. He proved to be a tenacious Frisbee player.

I wasn't sure whether it was old age or the quality of my footwear, but the two-hour match felt more like two hours of work than play. After an hour and forty minutes, my feet had developed large blisters; out of fear for the rest of my weekend, I grudgingly tapped out and retired to the sidelines. My evening, despite the hamburger dinner with Ian's friends and two girls we'd met at the match (Erin and Callie, who were a repeating feature of my trip), was over, and blank congeniality was the most I could muster in mixed company for the remainder of the evening.

That night, safely back at Ian's apartment, we watched episodes of 30 Rock and Star Trek: The Next Generation. It was good to see Ian again, and the physical exhaustion of travel balanced well with the exertion of Frisbee. After a couple of hours of letting our nerves and bodies settle, we called it a night.