Ethos Magazine Winter 2023

Clowning Around

How two Oregon clowns are brightening people’s days, one joke at a time.

Letter From the Editor,

It may seem unusual to see a clown on the cover of a multicultural magazine, but not here at Ethos. Olive and Dingo, a Portland-based clown couple, are an important part of their community. They entertain at birthday parties, barbecues, public shows and more. They have hosted “Story Time” at a local cafe for decades, leaving each participant with a balloon animal and a smile. They see their work inspiring joy and openness as saving the world one fun gesture at a time.

“We’ll go to protests to lighten the mood, make some balloon animals, help anyone who’s freaking out or just be there to lend a helping hand,” Dingo says. “Whatever happens, the best thing we can do now is be ambassadors for peace.”

You can read more about these ambassador-clowns in “Clowning Around,” written by Daniel Friis and photographed by Ilka Sankari.

This community looks like so many things. Ethos strives to see and share as many as possible.

This cycle, our staff was overcome with illness, emergency, and more stressors than I can count, but we came together to produce this edition because we were excited to share these stories.

Emerson Brady’s story, “Sisterhood of the Traveling Semi,” highlights Women in Trucking, an organization focused on giving women truck drivers a community they can count on. Though women are outnumbered in the truck driving industry, their numbers are growing. Kaycee Rater, who works at Truck n Travel in Coburg, says “The women drivers I do see are badass. They have to put up with so much, but they just do it. I don’t know how, but they do.”

“Teachers’ Compassion Fatigue,” written by Olivia Bennett and photographed by Samantha Joh, follows local elementary school educators as they struggle to maintain their love for teaching in trying times. They are overworked, underpaid, and their schools are understaffed, but they persist. That’s resilience.

From blueberry farms supplying the food we eat to clowns supplying the smiles we share, this edition of Ethos aims to put a mirror up to the community we live in.

Thank you for reading. I hope you continue to see yourself in this edition of Ethos.

Ethos Editor-in-Chief Abby Sourwine

Email editor@ethosmagonline.com with comments, questions and story ideas. You can find our past issues at issuu.com/ethosmag and more stories, including multimedia content, at ethosmagonline.com.

Our Misson:

Ethos is a nationally recognized, award-winning independent student publication. Our mission is to elevate the voices of marginalized people who are underrepresented in the media landscape and to write in-depth, human-focused stories about the issues affecting them. We also strive to support our diverse student staff and to help them find future success.

Ethos is part of Emerald Media Group, a non-profit organization that’s fully independent of the University of Oregon. Students maintain complete editorial control over Ethos and work tirelessly to produce the magazine.

A fishing boat floats past Finn Rock Landing on the ice-cold Mckenzie River which supports nurturing bull trout and Chinook salmon.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Semi

Women in Trucking gives truck drivers a support system wherever the road takes them.

Out of the Blue

A once modest, unassuming blueberry nursery in the Willamette Valley has made it big. Guided by collaboration, sustainability, and family-oriented values, there is an intricate and calculated process that makes the Nursery so fruitful.

Clowning Around

How two Oregon clowns are brightening people’s days, one joke at a time.

A River Flowing into the Future

The McKenzie River Trust is working to protect Oregon’s natural lands, collaborate with local tribes and establish a greener future.

Teachers’ Compassion Fatigue

Teachers expect burnout in their profession. Alyssa Nelson and Christina Wagner are learning how to cope with it

SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING SEMI

Written by Emerson Brady | Photographed by Wesley Lapointe | Illustrated by Kaitlyn Cafarelli

When Vanita Johnson was a little girl, she dreamt of driving a big truck. Her family took a lot of road trips as a kid, but she never minded the long drives. Johnson would sit happily in the back seat watching semi-trucks ride off in the distance. She pictured herself behind the wheel of her very own 18-wheeler with a trusty lap dog by her side.

Now, Johnson cruises along I-24 with her hands at 10 and two, grateful that her dream came true (minus the lap dog).

“I make sure to thank God every day that I get to do this,” Johnson says.

Johnson is part of the small but growing population of female truck drivers who travel coast to coast delivering vital goods to Americans. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women only make up 10% of the truck driving industry. Johnson and her Women in Trucking “sisters,” Angelique Temple and Ingrid Brown, have made it their mission to change that.

“None of us are special,” Brown says. “We came and made something in a career that most women don’t realize they can do, too.”

Women in Trucking is a nonprofit organization that connects female truckers from across the United States. The organization sets out to encourage and welcome women into the trucking industry while giving them a platform to promote their accomplishments and a community to fall back on. WIT has over 4,000 members, a blog, a radio show and an annual multi-day conference, Accelerate.

“Transportation is just its own little culture, its own little community,” says Director of Driver Engagement Andrea Adeyanju. “It gets in your blood, and once you’re in it, it’s hard to get out.”

Johnson, Brown and Temple have all been in the trucking industry for varying amounts of time. Johnson, the youngest of the crew, has been driving for two years, whereas Brown is wrapping up her 43rd year on the road. However, age and experience don’t divide them; it allows them to create a dynamic of mentorship.

“When you’ve been out here this long, I look at my time and say, ‘Oh, my God, 43 years, where has it gone?’” Brown says. “And I think to myself, ‘How do I wanna pass this to somebody?’”

Brown is a truck-driving veteran. She has been a driver since she was 18, but transitioned to later becoming an owner/ operator. As an owner/operator, Brown owns her own truck and is responsible for all aspects of her business. This means that Brown is in charge of maintaining her truck, finding loads and finances everything on her own. She also dedicates her time to writing for the truck-driving blog, Free Wave, and producing a show where she interviews folks in the trucking industry.

Brown drives coast to coast, covering all 48 states and Canada.

“I wanted to grasp what everybody else lived,” Brown says, “and this has been how I’ve done it.”

While Brown’s craving for new places and faces is what drew her to trucking, other women were attracted to how liberating life on the road can be.

“Life after I began truck driving has been freedom,” Johnson says.

Johnson started trucking in her early 50s, but her dreams of driving a semi-truck began when she was a little kid. However, her aspirations of starting a family and becoming a teacher seemed more feasible. After her husband tragically

Women in Trucking gives truck drivers a support system wherever the road takes them.

“Life after I began truck driving has been freedom”

- Vanita Johnson

passed away around 12 years ago, Johnson started to reconsider. She began looking into how to get into a driving school and brought the idea up with her son. They agreed that when he started college in 10 years, it would be time for Johnson to start her journey to becoming a truck driver.

Johnson has only driven for two years and is already an owner and operator.

“I can see the world on my time and get paid for it,” Johnson says. “I’m pinching myself every day.”

The way Temple describes her journey to truck driving makes it seem less like a choice and more of a calling.

“I’ve known I wanted to be a truck driver since I was 12 years old,” Temple says. “It was the independence. I’ve always been a keep-to-myself kid, and I craved that independence.”

Temple is an owner and operator based out of Virginia who has been driving since she graduated high school. She has buried her brother and raised six children, primarily on her own, all while driving a semi-truck.

In all those years, Temple has never missed out on being a mom.

“I never missed a football game,” Temple says. “I might show up with a whole truck and trailer, but I’m gonna be there, and I always yell when I come in.”

Temple makes heroically driving across the country to make it to her son’s high school football seem like just a normal part of being a mom.

“You just have to do it,” Temple says. “What other choice do you have?”

Gender disparities are rampant in the trucking industry. According to the Women in Trucking Index, 90% of women drivers have faced some form of gender-based harassment while working. The constant need to prove oneself was a consistent theme among all of the women. Even Temple, who has been driving for 24 years, will step out of her truck only to be greeted with a remark she knows all too well: “Oh, you sent the woman.”

These women are well-versed in how to answer questions such as, “How long have you been driving?”

“I just start counting on my fingers,” Temple says. “I say, ‘Do you mean including today?’”

At Coburg’s Truck ‘N Travel, a Lane County truck stop, cashier Kaycee Rater typically sees around one female driver a day, but is awaiting the day that number changes.

“The women drivers I do see are badass,” Rater says. “They have to put up with so much, but they just do it. I don’t know how, but they do.”

Rater comes from a family tree of truck drivers. Her dad, uncle and grandfather have all been drivers, and her mom is the manager of the Truck ‘N Travel in Coburg.

As a woman, working at a truck stop comes with its own set of challenges. Rater is used to politely turning down compliments from men passing through, but just because she’s accustomed to it doesn’t mean it’s any less irritating.

“It’s frustrating because I’m just trying to do my job, and I’m 18 years old,” Rater says. “It’s gross.”

Rater describes seeing women drivers as something that is always a nice surprise.

“This is where my heart is and it’s the people.

Everyone that’s here right now and everyone that we meet along the way” - Ingrid Brown

Mud flap accessories for sale line the back wall of the TA Travel Center, a store attached to the Truck ‘N Travel truck stop in Coburg.

Truck ‘N Travel, a truck stop off of I-5, in Coburg, is seen at dusk.

ETHOS

“It’s empowering to me,” Rater says, “because they’re showing the world it’s possible to do this.”

Seasoned drivers like Brown and Temple have watched America change through the glass on their windshields. They reminisce about truck stops before people were glued to their phone screens. They miss having more conversations with strangers back then.

But they’ve also seen a lot of change for the better. They’ve witnessed a movement of women starting to take up space in what was previously known as a “man’s world.”

Brown remembers times before truck motels had a women’s restroom. “I would literally have to find a man I trusted to watch the bathroom door while I showered to make sure nobody came in,” she says.

Now that more women have entered the industry, the members of Women in Trucking believe it’s their duty to give them a reason to keep trucking.

“When you’re at a truck stop and you see someone having a hard time, you have to say something positive so their day doesn’t go from bad to worse,” Temple says. “That’s what your mission is.”

Temple and Johnson both agree that mentorship is key in this industry. One piece of advice that Temple will always preach to new drivers is to leave personal issues outside of the truck.

“You have to practice it until you can get it, because it’s very important,” Temple says. “You have distractions and you will be turned over somewhere looking at the sky like ‘What just happened?’”

Temple recalls a time she was on the road and received a call from her mother. Her mother’s house had caught on fire. With a load to drop off, Temple reacted swiftly by appointing her daughter to deal with the situation until she could come home. She says that leaving personal problems in the rearview mirror is a difficult but necessary part of the job.

While some drivers find letting go of their personal issues for the sake of their job difficult, others find that their time on the road helps them make peace with their lives at home.

A wave of serenity washes over Johnson when she looks out the windows of her 18-wheeler truck. Johnson and her colleagues describe the soothing sensation as “windshield therapy.”

“I do a lot of talking to God out here,” Johnson says.

For Johnson, the long periods on the road by herself give her the chance to connect with her spirituality in a way she wasn’t afforded in a typical 9-5 job.

“I have time out here to pray. I have time to call my family,” Johnson says. “It’s really calmed me down.”

“It’s meditative,” Temple adds.

But at the end of the day, it’s not the breathtaking views or quiet moments that keep these women on the road. It’s knowing there’s another woman behind the wheel of an 18-wheel truck, just like them.

Kaycee Rater works as a cashier at the TA Travel Center, a store attached to the Truck ‘N Travel truck stop in Coburg, owned by her parents.

ETHOS PODCAST Hear My Voice

This month our host Kate Jaques Prentice spoke with folks involved with the Hear My Voice art exhibit at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art on the University of Oregon campus. “Four years ago, the JSMA’s Education department created an annual program to engage UO students in conversations about race, identity, representation, and misrepresentation. The goal was to provide students with a space to create art and engage in dialogue about their experiences and fears as they navigate their lives as young adults,” according to the JSMA website.

Out of the Blue

A once modest, unassuming blueberry nursery in the Willamette Valley has made it big. Guided by collaboration, sustainability, and family-oriented values, there is an intricate and calculated process that makes the Nursery so fruitful.

Written by Maili Smith | Photographed by Violet Turner | Illustrated by Elena Kato & Miles Imai

Just outside of Eugene, nestled in the gently rolling hills of Willamette Valley, sits Fall Creek Farm and Nursery.

Not many Eugenians know that this nursery, encompassing three locations not more than a 25 minute drive from the University of Oregon, is the birthplace of some of the most ubiquitous blueberries in the country.

“If you take blueberries that are consumed everywhere all over the world — especially if they’re bigger, crunchy or sweeter — chances are that Fall Creek has something to do with it,” says Amelie Aust, Fall Creek’s second generation owner and executive chairman. According to Aust, Fall Creek is responsible for producing, on average, 35 million blueberry seedlings a year that have been transplanted across the globe to be grown into fully fledged blueberry plants for commercial purposes.

Over four decades ago, Aust’s parents had “a simple, bucolic dream,” she says.

“It started when my parents, Dave and Barbara, two hippies from Humboldt County, California, decided that they wanted to have a blueberry farm,” Aust says.

Her parents were not farmers; Dave Brazelton was a vet technician and Barbara Brazelton was a nurse. However, Dave had developed an affinity towards blueberries as a teen. In the summers, he would hop on the Greyhound Bus and hand-rake wild blueberries on his uncle’s farm in New Jersey. One day, he hand-harvested more than 1,000 pounds of blueberries.

It was this love for nursery and the Pacific Northwest that led the Brazeltons to settle in Lowell, Oregon, and pursue their own blueberry vision.

From its roots as a modest, family-run farm, Fall Creek Farm and Nursery has expanded into Mexico, The Netherlands, Peru, Spain and South Africa and touched blueberry crops across the globe. In pursuit of their mission statement: “To Build A World With Better Blueberries™,” according to the Fall Creek website, the Nursery has maintained its progressive and family-oriented focus.

Aust spent afternoons of her childhood tramping through the farm with the family labrador, Bing, and manning a small fruit stand with her brother to earn an allowance and build a college fund. A University of Oregon alum and Fulbright scholar, Aust returned to the family business with her German-born husband, Boris Aust, in 2007. Her brother, Cort Brazelton, took on the role of co-CEO. At the time, Fall Creek was still a domestic, Oregon-based business with a modest 65 employees. An acre and a half was allotted to blueberry production, while the rest of the land was for nursery. It had not changed dramatically since the Brazeltons had started their business in 1978. Back then, blueberries were a seasonal crop, only available in the summer.

“20 years ago, blueberries really could only be successfully grown in areas like the Willamette Valley, or areas that had winters, so the plants had to go dormant,”

says Paul Sandefur, the director of breeding at Fall Creek. “It was a very short harvest window.”

Willamette Valley remains one of the nursery capitals of the world, due to an abundance of clean water, temperate climate and relatively low threat of pest infestation. Oregon predominantly supports blueberry varieties characterized as high “chill,” which corresponds to the amount of time spent below 42 degrees Fahrenheit.

Today, breeders have developed low and medium chill varieties that no longer require winter.

Blueberry growers have been able to produce a yearlong supply of fresh blueberries across the United States and beyond in Peru, Mexico and South Africa as a result.

“The reason why we are in all these places is that supermarkets want 52 weeks of blueberries a year,” Aust says. “So in order to do that, our customers have to grow them at many different latitudes to hit different supply windows.”

Fall Creek has played a pioneering role in this development. Since its inception, Fall Creek has focused on cultivating varieties of blueberries that can flourish in different environments and climates. Through an understanding of blueberry genetics, selective breeding and ongoing research, the genetics team at Fall Creek considers themselves to be de-facto matchmakers.

“We have our favorite blueberry mothers and we have our favorite blueberry fathers. And we just help them find the best match. So we do what the bees do: we take the pollen from the father plant, and then we take that to the mother plant. And we just pollinate the flowers,” says Sandefur. From the resulting blueberry plants, the team can evaluate their potential as new blueberry varieties.

What makes a good blueberry? Although it depends on who you ask, most people agree that they want a fresh, firm blueberry with a uniform color, Sandefur says. Connoisseurs tend to diverge most on taste. According to Sandefur, some new blueberry varieties have a strong flavor like peaches and nectarines. Others have a distinct raspberry flavor. Ultimately, Sandefur strives to create a blueberry you want to eat more of, which means you have emptied out a clamshell container of blueberries before you know it.

“You reach into the clamshell and pick up a blueberry. And after that first one, you don’t realize that you’ve gone back and you’ve eaten the rest of the clam. At one sitting, you sat down and you ate an entire six or eight ounces of blueberries,” Sandefur says.

From the perspective of blueberry growers, the ideal blueberry variety is one that produces large, high-quality yields with few resources.

The cost of land, water and various inputs like fertilizer and labor is increasing. People who grow blueberries are Fall Creek’s primary customer, who go on to sell to grocery stores.

The other main customer of Fall Creek is other nurseries, who rely on Fall Creek to generate varieties that they themselves can grow and provide to growers. Through the Oregon Blueberry Association, nurseries work together on state commissions to improve the blueberry crop.

“We’ve worked on the same team to get things like exports to Korea, to work together on pest and disease problems, and work on funding public breeding programs that then turn out varieties that help the whole industry,” says Jon Umble, director of breeding.

The COVID-19 pandemic challenged many industries, including blueberry nurseries and growers, to step up in third-world countries. Places like Peru, a growing spigot of the blueberry industry, struggled with a lack of infrastructure and clinic access. Given the resource deficit, the blueberry industry focused on “‘how can we ban together?’” Aust says.

One of the most powerful things that the industry did was collaborate with the Peruvian government to help organize refrigerated truck containers to help manage people’s bodies after they had passed away, Aust says. Fall Creek played an instrumental role in organizing these efforts.

Fall Creek also supports public blueberry breeding programs across the United States, from the University of Florida to North Carolina to Washington to Michigan to Oregon State University, according to Sandefur.

Blueberry plants go through periods of dormancy every winter as temperatures drop and daylight hours decrease, indicated by the transition of the leaves and stems to a more reddish color.

“If you look at Oregon agriculture as a whole, the nursery makes up a really, really big piece of it. And so it’s really exciting to be part of that dynamic industry,” Umble says. According to the USDA, Oregon boasts the third-largest nursery industry in the United States, contributing to 11% of the material sold nationwide.

Fall Creek has also been at the forefront of sustainable agriculture practices, employing a number of techniques to reduce the amount of pesticides and water that they have to use.

Dave Daniel, the operation manager for US facilities, discovered 15 years ago that if the farm used finely ground blue gravel, it served as weed control.

“I have neighbors that use more Roundup in a year in their yard than we do on the farm because there’s no weeds, because it doesn’t germinate in the gravel,” says Daniel. “So it’s part of our integrated pest management program to make sure that we don’t use more chemicals than we need to.”

All nursery facilities also have an intricate subsurface drainage system that collects all unused irrigation water. This ensures that the runoff does not end up in the nearby creek, and can be reused after being filtered.

Fall Creek also relies on techniques such as preemptively separating young plants in nursery pots before shipment, allowing for air flow between plants and reducing the incidence of disease that emerges in high density conditions. The introduction of new greenhouses that sense external temperatures and automatically trigger venting mechanisms has allowed the nursery to more effectively harness solar energy.

Many of these innovations are thanks to the precise and conscientious management of Daniel, who was introduced to Fall Creek in 1989. When he met Dave and Barbara Brazelton, Daniel says they could not have been more friendly. He said he was just a kid that called up and said “hey” but ended up making an appointment and spent five hours discussing the

intricacies of gravel and seasonal equipment practices.

Daniel worked as an independent contractor for Fall Creek until he was eventually invited to work full time for Fall Creek in the early 2000s. He joined with his wife, Amy Daniel, who now works as the Communications Manager for Fall Creek.

“Dave came to me at one point and said, ‘Hey, why don’t you just sell us your facility and come to work for us?’ And that’s how Amy and I became a part of the family,” Daniel says.

Daniel has engaged with Future Farmers of America, an organization dedicated to helping future generations pursue careers in agriculture, described as “more than planting and harvesting” and rather “a science, a business, and an art” by the Oregon FFA website.

“A number of young people that I’ve spoken to do not realize there was so much opportunity in horticulture, from finance to legal to sales to genomics and tissue culture,” Daniel says.

Aust echoes this sentiment. She says there are positions across the board, from the science side — including biology, biotechnology, genetics and breeding — to the human resources side and finance side. As part of its recruitment plan to bring young people into the company, Fall Creek has started to attend career fairs at the University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Lane Community College, according to Daniel.

Despite its international success and the growth of the blueberry industry, Fall Creek is still the sustainable, familyowned business that was born out of the Brazeltons’ bucolic love of blueberries 45 years ago.

“The first generation’s big legacy is creating this living, breathing thing called Fall Creek. And then the second generation: our legacy is to grow that thing. But we have the luxury of being larger and having more resources,” Aust says. “Our legacy also has to be contribution. It has to be contribution environmentally. It has to be contribution socially.”

Blueberry plants go through periods of dormancy every winter as temperatures drop and daylight hours decrease, indicated by the transition of the leaves and stems to a more reddish color.

Clowning Around

How two Oregon clowns are brightening people’s days, one joke at a time.

Written by Daniel Friis | Photographed by Ilka Sankari | Illustrated by Miles Imai

Dingo the clown gets his name from his CB radio handle in the 80s. He says it’s “been my name as long as I remember and that’s where it came from. I had a CB and I would just mess with truckers all the time in Texas.”

As one walks into the Good Medicine Theater in Portland, OR, a positive energy instantly clouds the room. Art, balloons and books clutter previously empty areas, and cheerful custom songs like “Wash it Off” or “The Ice Cream Song” play in the background. Against the wall are two hilariously tall bikes for two of Portland’s most iconic and historic clowns.

With faces covered in colorful makeup and bodies cluttered in colorful bows, ribbons, jewelry, bandanas and other accessories, it’s time for Olive Rootbeer and Dingo Dizmal to host their weekly “Story Time” show for local preschoolers.

“Parents will come up to us sometimes after shows, emotionally saying stuff like, ‘I really needed that,’ or ‘Thank you so much,’” Olive says. “That’s when everything kind of all sits in, and we know we’re doing something good.”

Olive and Dingo are two professional clowns and selfproclaimed “goofballs” in Portland. They’re well known for their years of entertainment, through clowning, arts and crafts, humorous props and infectious personalities, that have left a positive impact on many. They adore being themselves, having fun, and most importantly, delighting anyone that crosses their path.

“We became clowns and community people out of the necessity for the community to have jesters in it,” Olive says. “The jesters are there to hold up a mirror to society, to show them who they really are.”

Olive and Dingo originally met in March 2008 in a Portland park through mutual friends, who all thought that they shared a similar quirkiness and silliness. One day, friends of Olive and Dingo asked them, among others, to come over to help paint a room, but Olive and Dingo were the only two that showed up. They braided each other’s hair and talked for hours. In November 2008, they officially became a couple and are now happily married.

At the time they met, Dingo was in a transition phase as a clown.

For the previous 10 years, he’d been running a clown house on Alberta Street in Portland, but he moved out in 2007. This clown house consisted of Dingo and various other clowns in the area, and it became a staple of the Portland area in the early 2000s. Fans visited the house to see whatever random yet funny gimmick, stunt or performance the clowns would perform and, more often than not, it was a comical success.

The original purpose of the clown house was to entertain, but according to Dingo, when the profits started slowing down, the other clowns started to pocket money secretly. Seeing that they were no longer an asset to the rest of the team and himself, Dingo left.

“The first thing I ever ask a clown who wants to work with me is, ‘Who do you want to be a clown for?’” Dingo says. “If they say anything besides something to do with making the audience happy, I don’t want to work with them.”

Dingo ties off a balloon bow-and-arrow, a crowd favorite.

Dingo’s clowning days can be traced back to 1987, when he ran away from home to join the circus as a candy man. Spending all his free time with clowns, Dingo knew he’d found his passion.

In 1997, Dingo was a traveling hitchhiker and environmentalist in Eugene. As he attended wetland protests in the area, he met many people with clowning and environmental backgrounds like himself. Come to find out, their makeup resisted tear gas and their clown costumes were very protective from potential brutal force.

“It was perfect to be a clown and activist in Eugene because no one knew what to do with us; it was awesome,” Dingo says. “As we did that enough, we started to do cabaret and burlesque, and we got really good at being clowns.”

When Dingo met Olive in 2008, she had no clowning experience. She was a creative-minded person with a past in acting, singing and art, and was a great performer. Over time, Olive became Dingo’s sidekick during his cabaret shows.

After a few shows, Dingo realized that Olive was a natural clown. Dingo formally invited her to become his official partner, but she needed to commit herself to it full-time. Olive agreed, and from then on, it’s been Olive and Dingo.

“Dingo was a little rusty around the edges at the time,” Olive jokes.

“She revamped my clown outfits to make me more userfriendly to the public,” Dingo adds. “I also certainly didn’t know how to make balloon animals. In many ways, she became a better clown than me.”

The two started to become popular in the Portland area in the early 2010s. Cafes, birthday parties, public shows, barbecues, drinking parties – Olive and Dingo did it all. They even started a Youtube channel highlighting their daily endeavors. As local coverage and media started to spread the word on just who Olive and Dingo were, both became iconic for their fast-paced shows, incredible music and silly vocals and costumes.

In January 2020, small business owner Judi Martin and her husband leased Uplifted Boutique and Makers Market in Portland, OR. The boutique displays all kinds of arts and crafts from local artists with an overarching theme of supporting the community. The space also consisted of a courtyard that connected the Good Medicine Theater to the boutique. Martin and her husband placed a clown costume in the window, and sure enough, it caught Olive’s attention.

“I caught a clown,” Martin says. “It’s what I always say.”

A few weeks later, Dingo walked into the boutique looking for places to do an open mic. Martin brought him to the theater, which is right down the street from where Olive and Dingo live, and Dingo immediately fell in love.

Since then, Olive and Dingo have used Martin’s space to host “Story Time” every Tuesday and an open mic every other Sunday. They’ve missed just a single show, and haven’t shown up late once. Martin trusts them to the point where they carry around their own store key.

“The jesters are there to hold up a mirror to society, to show them who they really are.”

- Olive Rootbeer

“They’re amazing,” Martin says. “Just their integrity, their professionalism. They’re truly professional clowns.”

Before COVID-19 hit, Olive and Dingo hosted “Story Time” at Uplifted Boutique three to five times a week, but now, they host just once a week. This still hasn’t stopped the entire community from recognizing and regarding Olive and Dingo as icons. Martin and her husband once went on a double-date to a local fair with Olive and Dingo, and Martin most prominently remembers all the attention, hugs and photos with fans that came along with it.

But sometimes, this attention also comes with glares and stares.

Riding around Portland in colorful props while wearing clown apparel 24/7 has yielded many comments from strangers referring to Olive and Dingo as “those people.”

Similarly, Olive and Dingo both say that there’s been countless times where the father of a young boy discourages his choice of balloon animal or balloon color because it’s not “masculine” enough. This kind of behavior is the exact opposite of what Dingo and Olive want their message to elicit in people.

“You can tell by how we dress and how we are that we’re radically ourselves and comfortable with ourselves,” Olive says. “We just want kids to feel that same way.”

Olive and Dingo both admit that working together and touching the hearts of many has helped their marriage itself.

“There’d be times that we went into a show, possibly in some kind of fight or dispute, but after we get positive feedback from kids and parents, our love will intensify in a way,” Olive says “That, and therapy helps too.”

Besides their silliness, Olive and Dingo have also attracted many fans through the thoughtfulness of their work.

The “Story Time” show has remained just five dollars for guests ever since its inception. Each fan also gets a free balloon animal at the end of the show. While money has admittedly been slow and hard to come by for Olive and Dingo, they say they will never change their pricing ways.

“We do like to make a living, it’s just not super crucial,” Dingo says. “If someone comes up to us and wants to work with us, we might not care about how much money we get, but we do care about advancing the culture of humanity or saving the world in some way.”

Lots of Olive and Dingo’s recognition has also been through their political experiences. The environmental protests for Dingo in 1997 or the World Trade Organization’s protests in Portland in 2000, among other events, shaped Olive and Dingo into both political and humanitarian resources for all.

“We’ll go to protests to lighten the mood, make some balloon animals, help anyone who’s freaking out or just be there to lend a helping hand,” Dingo says. “Whatever happens, the best thing we can do now is be ambassadors for peace.”

“We’re here for the people,” Olive adds. “That’s why we call ourselves the ‘people’s clowns.’”

Olive and Dingo now keep their political agendas out of their work, largely because of the majority of their audience: young children.

“That’s the beautiful thing about them,” Martin says. “They don’t pontificate their beliefs at all, like I don’t get that vibe from them. I think they really want everything to feel welcome regardless of their political or religious affiliation. The guiding light for them is, ‘How do we bring joy to this person at this moment?’”

Thoughtfulness has become a two-way street over time. Hundreds of Olive and Dingo fans and supporters have helped them financially during times of need. Whether it’d be legal fees during a dispute, or money for a new car or bike whenever one has broken down, fans have repaid the favor to Olive and Dingo a few times before.

“You see them riding down the streets in their tall bikes holding hands; they just couldn’t be any more adorable,” Martin says. “They both have the best smiles. I just really love them.”

“They like to make people smile,” says Johnny Carter, a fan of Olive and Dingo. “I see them regularly socializing with strangers around town. They’re always looking to have fun.”

Fun, because that’s what the world needs more of in their eyes.

In 2021, when the pandemic subsided and some sense of normalcy resumed, Olive and Dingo were quick to go back outside in their tall bikes and became a kind of symbol of the community.

“People would see us and occasionally start bawling,” Dingo says. “If we were back out there, then everyone knew some kind of normalcy was back. That’s what it feels like when people depend on you. It’s an overwhelming feeling.”

“We’re like the local firefighters,” Olive adds. “We feel like we’re perpetually here because we need to be. I don’t feel like I ever want to stop, though.”

While the two may never stop clowning, they’re constantly having to evolve their craft. Dingo sells painted pictures of rubber chickens doing random activities as a side hustle. He also hosted a wedding recently, and is planning on working a rave in the future. But whatever happens, for Olive and Dingo, happiness will be at the forefront of everything.

“We are radically, as best as we can, kind to the people around us,” Olive said. “We try to find the joy and uniqueness in every moment. There’s always a different path than what’s handed to you.”

Olive loves bringing color to the world through clowning. “There’s so much black and gray everywhere you go,” she says. “It kind of breaks up the monotony of the road.”

The crystal-blue Mckenzie River emerges through the thick early afternoon fog.

A River Flowing

into the

Future

The McKenzie River Trust is working to protect Oregon’s natural lands, collaborate with local tribes and establish a greener future.

A boat of fishermen floats through the ice-cold Mckenzie River that supports nurturing bull trout and Chinook salmon.

Written by Ryan Connors | Photographed by Kai Kanzer

Joe Moll drove up to Green Island in his Volkswagen Westfalia van, covered with past travel destinations as bumper stickers. In true adventurer form, he laced up his hiking boots and put his binoculars around his neck, then his walk through the land’s trails began. It’s the same land that Moll has been fighting to protect for over 15 years.

Green Island is a part of the 7,000 acres of Oregon land that is protected and owned by the McKenzie River Trust. Moll became the trust’s executive director in 2005.

The McKenzie River Trust is a nonprofit, established in 1989 with the purpose of protecting wildlife in Western Oregon. The land trust has two ways of owning property, either owning the land outright or through “conservation easements.” In the latter, the trust works with current landowners to have dual responsibility in protecting the land.

Green Island is home to the confluence of the Willamette and McKenzie Rivers. It was purchased in 2003 and has a diverse river ecosystem. The trust has worked to restore the land to its full potential by planting over 650,000 native trees and shrubs. It’s also connected many of the land’s channels back to the river by removing thousands of feet of levees, which are embankments built to prevent the overflow of a river.

“The original plan was to get it into the hands of a bigger organization, like the national fish and wildlife service, who we worked on the initial restoration of the land with,” Moll says. “But over time, we had more volunteers come to help with maintenance, and more people began enjoying the land. It really grew on us, and we shifted the plan to us holding on to it long term.”

Moll says volunteers are essential to the trust’s work. Volunteers work in the lands to help push forward the conservation efforts. Rick and Sandy Wiese, a husband and wife, have been volunteering with the trust for several years and have served as the welcoming faces for hundreds of community members when the land is open for walking visits once a month. The couple says recent local wildfires have played a large role in their volunteer efforts.

“We have 1,500 members within the land trust,” Sandy says. “After local disasters, people have seen the land trust as a way to help.”

Moll says the land trust makes a conscious effort to have a good relationship with the community it works in.

“We care about the communities that depend and live off of the McKenzie River,” Moll says. “We show up and try to be a part of the environmental conversations.”

The river trust works with partners across Western Oregon to design and implement large-scale restoration projects that are to the advantage of the fish, wildlife and people of the region.

There’s a push for more accessibility of natural lands in the country. Through social justice initiatives that have gained national interest in recent years, Oregon’s Native American community has brought attention to the large amount of land that was taken from their ancestors by European colonization. This has led to a bigger-picture question of how to move forward with redistributing land to Native tribes.

The McKenzie River Trust is facing that question themselves.

“We are working more and more with the tribes in the area,” Moll says. “The tribes had a lot of land lost and stolen, but it’s not fair to just throw land at them and tell them to take care of it. So, we’re trying to figure out how to make that switch to someone else easier.” Moll says recent land purchased on the coast is intended by the trust to be given back to Native ownership.

Moll also points out that the former tribal owners of the land had a very high respect and appreciation for the natural world. “There’s a lot of cultural wisdom we can learn from the Native tribes,” he says.

Local artists and activists use their creativity to tell a story. The Mckenzie River Land Trust works with various native tribes in order to help restore land.

Mckenzie River Land Trust executive director Joe Moll passionately explains the best way to bring all people into the environmental conversation.

Although the McKenzie River Trust is working on a relatively small scale when looking at the overall effects of climate change, Moll says implementing new strategies in an attempt to limit climate change is one of the land trust’s main goals. According to the United Nations, climate change is “the single biggest health threat facing humanity.”

Moll says the river trust is pushing for a future of green infrastructure, the idea that the country can find sustainable solutions to climate challenges within the natural world. It incorporates the environment and modern engineering to provide clean water and protect ecosystem functions, rather than building harmful infrastructure.

“The answer isn’t always found in bricks and cement,” Moll says. “A lot of our answers are already here.”

The river trust has been putting this to practice throughout its protected lands. It has been fighting to bring back biological diversity, which it said has been lost in many ways. It’s also been creating a wider floodplain, which will create more water availability for drinking water and industrial/agricultural uses. Moll says in the long-term, the trust aims to expand on the size of its protected lands.

Moll says the battle for protecting Oregon lands and ecosystems is dependent on community involvement and awareness.

“The biggest problem we face is irrelevance,” Moll says. “If we move to a point where people don’t care about nature and taking care of it, we’re in trouble.”

After 20 years of environmental protection work, Moll says creating a cleaner and more protected McKenzie River can be a gateway to creating environmental change and conversations within the community.

“We’re hardwired to have wonder about the natural world, so if you give people the space to rediscover it, I’m confident they will,” Moll says. “Let’s not be quick to wag fingers, but let’s extend a hand instead.”

Finn Rock Landing, a protected land, is the launch point for thousands of raft and drift boat trips down the McKenzie River every year.

Finn Rock Landing, a protected land, is the launch point for thousands of raft and drift boat trips down the McKenzie River every year.

A fishing boat floats past Finn Rock Landing on the ice-cold Mckenzie River which, supports nurturing bull trout and Chinook salmon.

Teachers’ Compassion Fatigue

Teachers expect burnout in their profession. Alyssa Nelson and Christina Wagner are learning how to cope with it

Written by Olivia Bennett | Photographed by Samantha Joh | Illustrated by Jordan Scott and Maya Merrill

At 6:30 a.m., Christina Wagner walks into Awbrey Park Elementary to start preparing for her first grade class. Alyssa Nelson, another first grade teacher, arrives by 7:00 a.m. and makes sure her students have everything they need at their desks for the day. By 8:20 a.m. the two teachers stand at their doors and greet their students as they walk into the classrooms, ready to start by 8:30 a.m.

The day is nonstop after that. The classrooms have attendance, the good morning song and the question of the day. From there, they go into foundation lessons, then split into reading groups, recess, math time, music or physical education – depending on the day – and lastly, either science, art, social studies or health. The two are on their feet all day, walking around the amount of steps one would at Disneyland.

Wagner and Nelson’s contract says they have to be on school grounds from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., Monday through Friday. But most days, they are there at least an hour early, don’t leave till 5:00 p.m., bring work home with them and then come in for a couple of hours on Sundays.

“I literally couldn’t get stuff done in the amount of time I’m given,” Nelson says. “That is just one level of exhaustion: just always working, all the time.”

Overworked, underpaid and understaffed, teachers are constantly fighting an uphill battle through the school year. According to RAND Corporations – a nonprofit research organization dedicated to helping improve public policy challenges – 59% of teachers experience burnout and 73% of teachers experience frequent job-related stress.

During the pandemic, teachers were doing their jobs over Zoom, trying their best to give their students the best education possible. Being back in-person has brought challenges some teachers weren’t prepared for. These include children not being able to sit for long periods of time, kids not being prepared for the grade they are entering and general behavioral issues.

Wagner and Nelson are just two teachers in the system trying to stay afloat. The two best friends met back in August 2021, when they both started their first teaching jobs at Awbrey Park Elementary. They care a lot about their students, but they are tired of administration and the community not listening to them.

“The burnout really comes from not being heard,” Wagner says. “Like no matter what we say or beg for or do, our needs are not being met.”

Wagner says she spends about $75 a month for her students’ snack time. Teachers can ask for parents and others to donate snacks and other materials to the classroom, but whatever isn’t provided, it’s usually the teachers who pay.

Both Nelson and Wagner spend a lot of their own money on materials for their class. Some things they get donated from their teacher friends or the community, especially books. On the back wall of Nelson’s room is a bookshelf filled with 1,000 books that were either gifted to her by other teachers or thrifted. Wagner just received 2,000 books from her aunt who retired from teaching.

Both Nelson and Wagner grew up in families of teachers; it’s in their blood. Wagner says she knew she wanted to be a teacher “since she was seven,” but it took her some time to get there.

As a mom of four, Wagner, 37, did not go to college until she was 34. She was a stay-at-home mom for many years, then an education assistant at her kids’ schools. Wagner saw the impact teachers could make in students and she knew it was time to take the leap.

“I was just really drawn to the fact that teachers have this power to create a community, and I saw that even as a kid,” Wagner says. “I wanted to be the one who had that power to do that.”

Since Nelson was a young girl, she knew she wanted to be a teacher as well. Her dad is a middle school band teacher and her mom was an education assistant and is now a SPED coordinator, so it has always been a part of her life.

Alyssa Nelson, a third-grade teacher, watches her first-grade students participate in a Halloween-themed craft activity in the last hour of the day.

She attended the University of Oregon and started as just a Spanish major. Nelson says she kept telling people that she wanted to teach at a “Spanish immersion school,” which made her realize that she “should switch to an education major.”

While Nelson did all of her student teaching through Zoom, Wagner got to go back in-person for a little bit. Once they finished their one year of student teaching, the two were ready to enter the classroom. Both Nelson and Wagner applied to be teachers back in the spring of 2021. That’s when they both got the job at Awbrey Park Elementary.

Nelson’s first year teaching was not a walk in the park. For starters, Nelson couldn’t find an apartment in Eugene, so she would commute from Albany every day.

“I had all this stuff planned and we got through probably two of the things,” Nelson says. “I didn’t realize how much time transitions take, it was just really new.”

During Nelson and Wagner’s first year of teaching, they dealt with problems of having to reteach kindergarten-level concepts to their students as they all did that grade over Zoom. Now they’re dealing with behavior management, and it’s overwhelming.

Through the months of January 2022 to May 2022, the School Pulse Panel – a study under the National Center for Education Statistics that collects information on the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on education – sent surveys to 800-850 public schools

measuring the impact of COVID-19 within schools. In their surveys, they found that more than 80% of public schools reported “stunted behavioral and socioemotional development because of the pandemic.” The surveys also found that there is a 56% increase in “classroom disruptions from student misconduct.”

In her first year of teaching, Nelson never had to do a room clear. A room clear is done when a student is making a classroom unsafe for the rest of the students or teacher and all students leave the room until it is safe to reenter. There was a week in October, though, where she did a room clear every single day. Children throwing chairs and scissors and flipping tables are just some of the things Wagner and Nelson have experienced.

Teachers will call a special education teacher to help the child during a situation like this. Venus Reeve is one of the special education teachers at Awbrey Park Elementary. Reeve started teaching all the way back in the mid-90s and has taught everything from high school to elementary school.

Being a special education teacher, though, has a special place in her heart.

“It’s just always been a part of me to want to work with all children,” Reeve says, “but especially those who aren’t given the same advantages and who don’t have the same appreciation from our society.”

When it comes to helping her students and teachers who have children who are struggling in the classroom, Reeve believes a leading factor to children acting out is that during the pandemic there were certain rules they didn’t experience because they weren’t in a classroom setting. They weren’t having to sit in chairs as long, they were having loads of screen time and they weren’t having to share their toys.

Going into teaching, the two first grade teachers knew they would experience burnout. “I didn’t fully understand it till I was here,” Nelson says. “I try to go into everything with a positive mindset, but it definitely has been more overwhelming than I was ready for.”

For future teacher Kelley Reade, burnout is something she has had to start preparing for. Reade is currently a part of the UO’s masters program, where she is doing her one year of student teaching.

“At some point I can’t keep sacrificing my family’s time, my family’s future, my financialfamily’ssecurity.”

- Venus Reeve

“I’ve definitely heard a lot about burnout from teachers,” Reade says. “You know you see Instagram accounts online literally titled ‘burnt out teachers,’ and I even saw it with some of my teachers in high school. There’s just not as much of that spark anymore.”

She knows burnout can especially be a problem when schools don’t have supportive administrators and staff. Reade is trying to be proactive about dealing with burnout by highlighting the little accomplishments throughout her day and finding a supportive group among other teachers.

“Physically, mentally and emotionally exhausting” is how Nelson and Wagner describe burnout. “When they all hit at once, that’s a bad week,” Wagner says.

Reeve is also having her fair share of challenges in her position. At the age of 47, Reeve worries for her physical health as she says she is “stressed every single day.”

“I struggle because, at some point, I have to take care of my family,” Reeve says. “At some point, I can’t keep sacrificing my family’s time, my family’s future, my family’s financial security.”

When it comes to funding, money is a problem, specifically regarding special education. The federal government is supposed to give 40% in addition to the average per student cost for each special education student. In reality, according to the National Education Association, the government provides less than half of that funding amount for special education students. Of the 7.4 billion dollars the state of Oregon spends on K-12 education, 18% of that is from the federal government. The average amount of money given to each student in the state of Oregon is $12,450.

For Nelson, these first couple of months of the new school year have not been easy. While Nelson dealt with big personalities in her first year of teaching, this year has been worse.

She gives credit to the other teachers who support and encourage her, Wagner being one of them. When the two met, it didn’t seem likely that they would become friends. Now, they are each other’s best friends, and Wagner says they “bicker like an old married couple.”

As they navigate the school year, the two are making sure they are involved in their students’ lives. Both Wagner and Nelson try to go to their students’ soccer games, baseball games, dance recitals, cheerleading competitions and birthday parties.

“If you ask a six-year-old to come into school everyday and buy into and care about the things that I care about as a teacher, I had better be willing to buy into and care about whatever it is that they care about,” Wagner says.

They both hope that in the future, people realize how important it is to support schools. Wagner also hopes that teachers are paid their worth.

“We are severely underpaid,” Wagner says. “I have a bachelors and a masters, and I could make the same amount of money at Taco Bell.”

While Wagner and Nelson may be working almost 11 to 12 hours a day, they keep coming back for their students. They know it may not be easy, but they have each other and a job they love.

“This is what I will do for the rest of my life. It took me 30 years to get from ‘Oh, I have this dream’ to ‘Oh, I’m doing this.’ I will do this forever,” Wagner says. “It’s truly about the children for me and none of the burnout is their fault.”

“The burnout really comes from not being heard. Like no matter what we say or beg for or do, our needs are not being met.”

- Christina Wagner

Once her students leave at the end of the school day, Wagner is bombarded by the lesson plans and student check-ins that pile on her desk throughout the day.

Vivian

Sam r. Team Member since Aug 2021 Majoring in Art and Technology

From working at our counters to studying in the classroom; from directing our stores to cheering in the stands; the people we serve — the students — are the very people who are The Duck Store.

b. Team Member since Aug 2021 Majoring in General Music

Smoke Show

Oakridge locals prioritize community and togetherness during and after the Cedar Creek Fire

Written by Megan McEntee | Photographed by Megan McEntee | Illustrated by Miles Imai

Erika Stalcup pours her heart into her rendition of Blue Moon, a popular ballad that dates back to 1934. The audience watches with awe, and her long belts are met with shouts and applause.

Stalcup is using this performance to heal after serving as a volunteer firefighter during the Cedar Creek Fire. “To have something fun like this to look forward to after that traumatic experience is awesome for me,” she says.

While the smoke was trapping everyone indoors, community member Chelsi Corcoran-Rhule had a spark of inspiration and decided to put together the performance. She wanted to uplift the community and give everyone a night to remember when the smoke finally cleared.

“I was just in bed one morning and thought, when the smoke clears, we need to have fun. We need to do something that’s energetic and exciting and sexy,” Corcoran-Rhule says.

The weeks of preparation for this moment were colored with hard work, grief and pain. Burn scars are still visible from the peak of Dead Mountain, and clouds of smoke choked the town for months. Locals say they felt fear rooted in their guts during the burn season, and it took the whole village to fight that uphill battle.

Still, love, pride and community spirit erupted from calloused hands as applause shattered the silence. Resilience, a trait that’s been apparent in Oakridge residents long before the fire, sparked.

What looks like a small stretch of Highway 58 where a passerby may fill their gas tank is actually a colorful collection of residences and small businesses — whose employees know most of their customers by first name. For an Oakridge local, walking down 1st Street almost guarantees a friendly face and lively chat.

This being said, many Oakridge locals reminisce about a time when the town was thriving economically as well as socially before the closures of the Westfir Mill and the Pope and Talbot Mill. In 1990, the federal government enacted logging restrictions that closed off much of the Willamette National Forest to the timber industry. Oakridge was historically a timber town, and the logging restrictions followed by the mill closures caused about 1,400 people to lose their jobs. At the time, this was about one third of the population.

Since this economic collapse, many citizens have fallen on some difficult financial times. Much of the population moved away after individuals and family members lost lumber jobs, and this cut the already small population by a large margin. According to the 2020 census, the poverty rate is now at a staggering 37.7%, an 11% increase from the year prior and well above the 2020 United States average of 11.4%. Since the mill closures, the population went from 4,800 people to a little over 3,300, also according to the census.

Out of the remaining population, the biggest employers are the U.S. Forest Service and the local school district. Others might work in a few of the small businesses in the area, but many make the one-hour commute to Eugene and Springfield. The most popular occupations include firefighting, construction, extractions, accommodations and food service.

“You can’t go forward unless you really look at your past,” says Susan Dodge-Bryant, a local artist and longtime Oakridge resident. Dodge-Bryant is excited to see more families and young people move to the area in recent years and describes this as a “turning point” for the community after the mill closures. Dodge-Bryant performed alongside her peers in Blue Moon Burlesque and saw the occasion as a physical manifestation of that turning point.

Many residents were born and raised in Oakridge and oftentimes tend to move away and come back later in life. Sarah Altemus-Pope, who is an Oakridge native, moved to Eugene for her undergrad and then pursued a career as a smokejumper in Missoula, Montana. After 10 years of jumping out of planes into live fires, she moved to Washington D.C. to work for the U.S. Forest Service’s International Programs before moving back to Oregon to pursue her master’s degree. Altemus-Pope’s multitude of experiences with the U.S. Forest Service definitely informed her future work, but so did her home life.

“I grew up in a timber community and had a family that worked in the woods,” she says, “and then I started working in the woods when I was 16. Through spending so much time in the woods, I’ve understood the connection between rural economies that are forestry-based and the work that’s available. Just because there’s not a mill here anymore doesn’t mean there’s not people whose livelihoods are still very much tied to what’s happening in the woods.”

In 2016, Altemus-Pope started the Southern Willamette Forest Collaborative, an organization aimed at connecting community members and land management agencies in order to “work through conflict and build trust.” The collaborative was born out of Altemus-Pope’s thesis project for her

master’s degree in conflict resolution and grew into an organization that has accomplished a wide variety of projects. These projects are aimed at forest restoration, improved air quality and ensuring Oakridge as a Firewise community. Firewise USA is a national program that helps communities who are at risk for wildfire increase the ignition resistance of their homes and structures.

Altemus-Pope and other members of the collaborative have been partnering with the Oregon Department of Forestry to complete Firewise assessments around Oakridge proper and the greater Oakridge area. They secured the funding for it in 2019 and had just completed improvements within the greater Oakridge area when the 2020 fires hit.

“That changed the perspective of fire in Western Oregon for a lot of people,” Altemus-Pope says. “They realized that we’re in forests that are still fire-prone, and wind-driven fire is extremely, incredibly dangerous.”

Altemus-Pope also started Oakridge Air, a program funded by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and aimed at improving the air quality in the area. Oakridge Air was initiated with the goal of improving wintertime wood smoke and then branched out to the realm of wildfire smoke during the 2020 fire season. During the most recent Cedar Creek Fire, Oakridge Air was able to distribute over 3,000 air purifiers to its constituency. This allowed for each household in the area to have at least one room of clean air.

“Sarah is one of the sharpest young women in our community,” says Lynda Kamerrer, the retired owner of a former local bed-and-breakfast. “When the AQI is 500 or 600, you cannot keep it out. The smoke comes in, and if you have health issues, you’re scrambling to figure out how you’re going to evacuate or protect yourself.”

The Cedar Creek Fire started on Aug. 1, 2022, caused by a series of lightning strikes that touched down about 15 miles east of Oakridge, igniting a dense section of the Willamette National Forest. By Aug. 15, the fire had scorched 4,422 acres of forest, with no sign of containment. By Aug. 27, that number grew to 7,632 acres.

In the early weeks of the fire, it was incredibly difficult for ground crews and firefighters to combat or contain the burn due to rugged and inaccessible terrain. This caused the fire to spread quickly across a large area before any hope of containment.

As the fire grew, so did the crews. On Sept. 19, there were over 2,500 personnel actively contributing to the firefighting effort. At this point, the fire was only 11% contained and had burned over 113,000 acres of land, according to the official InciWeb report. The AQI index in Oakridge reached levels that were off the charts, as the fire got within six miles of the Oakridge city limits.

Chelsi Corcoran-Rhule performs her solo routine on opening night. Finally, after a bedroom epiphany and weeks of work, her vision came together– and was met with shining reviews from the community. “I’ve never had an experience where it felt like the universe brought it about,” she says, “because everything just worked out.”

“We felt confident that the fire command was doing the best job they could,” says Kamerrer. “It was just up to Mother Nature. The fire started with lightning and it was going to end with natural causes: the rain and snow.”

According to Altemus-Pope, one of the biggest barriers that Oakridge Air faced during their outreach process was communication. She states that only 63% of residents have internet in the home, and most of those people are accessing it on their phones. There used to be a print newspaper in town, called the Highway 58 Herald. The paper ceased print production during the pandemic and then moved completely online — which contributes to the same communication barriers.

“That was a major form of information sharing, and so that was a big hit when it closed,” Altemus-Pope says. “Word of mouth is the strongest information source in our community.”

Oftentimes if a piece of information needs to get out, flyers are posted in the local stores and on the post office bulletin board. This posed an issue during the intense smoke, as most of the population was stuck indoors, and many did not have enough reliable internet access or technological literacy to stay informed about the fire day-to-day.

The citizens of Oakridge were put under a Level 3 evacuation notice on Sept. 10. This information was posted to InciWeb and the city’s official Facebook group. On the day that the Level 3 evacuation warning was issued, the Lane County Sheriff’s Office drove around town with a megaphone, alerting any remaining residents that the fire was coming in hot.

Erika Stalcup was one of these residents. Stalcup is a volunteer firefighter for the U.S. Forest Service and was stationed on the Cedar Creek Fire. She’s a legacy of her father, Lloyd Stalcup, who has worked at the Forest Service for over 44 years.

“It was devastating,” she says, “thinking that I still had to come back to Oakridge regardless.”

Stalcup’s first instinct was to get her family and pets to safety. She evacuated with her family on Friday and then returned to town on Sunday for her shift at the pub. The following Monday, she pulled a 24-hour shift fighting the Cedar Creek Fire. Stalcup wasn’t the only one who was put in this position. She describes how both of her best friends have husbands who work directly on the fire line.

“They didn’t get to come home when we had to evacuate,” Stalcup says. “It was very hard, knowing that you have a loved one out there fighting that fire, day in and day out for weeks. You only get to come home to shower, scarf down a banana and sleep before you’re back out.”

When Stalcup returned to Oakridge for her firefighting shift, she saw a familiar face wandering the streets – a houseless individual whom she recognized from growing up in town.

“She’s somebody’s daughter. She’s somebody’s mom. She’s someone’s cousin. She’s a sweet person,” Stalcup says. “My heart just broke for the people who could not get out.”

Stalcup and another young volunteer firefighter, Emerald Escovedo, both performed in Blue Moon Burlesque following the Cedar Creek Fire. Escovedo is also a resident of Oakridge, and spent time fighting the Cedar Creek Fire in 2022.

This performance was not something that Oakridge had ever seen before. The Zero Clearance Theater —the local performing arts group that put on the production — had only ever done classical plays. This was their first show that involved singing, dancing and risque comedy. The Zero Clearance Theater is directed by Loren Christopher Michaels, a multidisciplinary performer who moved to

A charred stump sits on the fire line. This is one of the areas where hundreds of firefighters were working to contain the burn. Those people did the very best they could to hold the line,” says Lynda Kammerer, Oakridge resident. “They had over 2000 people assigned, and you could see how much was going into this. And if people knew the terrain out there; it’s remote, it’s steep and there’s a lot of fuel.”

Oakridge to be with his wife. Michaels has performed across the world, and most notably in Las Vegas’s MGM Grand, Caesar’s Palace and The Venetian.

Blue Moon Burlesque took place in the bakery-turned-theater, Lion Mountain Bakery. This was the first show that had ever taken place in the bakery, as the stage had only been installed six weeks prior. Jacqui Lamont created Lion Mountain Bakery in a self-described “act of insanity.” After a careful assessment, she noted two things that Oakridge needed and lacked: a gym and a bakery. As building a gym tends to be both difficult and expensive, she decided to direct her efforts towards creating Lion Mountain Bakery.

The bakery was originally located on 1st Street, within the epicenter of town. In November of 2015, a fire broke out in the adjacent building, scorching her business in the process. Luckily, much of the equipment was salvageable, so she moved to her current location on Highway 58 in the spring of 2017.

The new Lion Mountain Bakery started out as a cavernous, concrete-walled building and grew into a unique dining experience, art gallery and theater. The room is divided in two, with makeshift walls displaying work by local artists and artisans. The wide array of various tables and chairs have been donated by community members, as well as curated from Lamont’s personal family collection. The bakery em-

Shortly after Lamont moved the bakery to the new location, another fire broke out in the neighborhood, burning the entire hillside behind Lion Mountain Bakery. No businesses or residences were damaged in this fire, but Lamont found the situation unbelievable. Lamont carried these experiences with her once the Cedar Creek Fire started inching closer and closer to Oakridge.

“I grew up on the East Coast, so we didn’t have forest fires,” Lamont says, “I was freaking out because we didn’t know what was going to happen from day to day. I’m extremely grateful for all the people that showed up to help.”

When Corcoran-Rhule approached Lamont about the idea of doing a burlesque show, she was more than thrilled at the idea. Lamont was a theater major in college and finds it important for everyone to have a creative outlet.

“This show has brought in so many new people,” she says. “We really needed some fresh new energy.”

Fresh new energy seems to be the perfect descriptor for a production like this one. Made up entirely of local community members, the cast consisted of firefighters, business owners and mothers alike. Stalcup kicked off the show with a song: her rendition of Blue Moon, the popular ballad from 1934. Corcoran-Rhule ended the show with her own version — a reprise that tied the evening together in a bow.

They didn’t leave a dry eye in the house. Applause rang throughout the peculiar Lion Mountain Bakery — the hidden gem of Highway 58. Following the devastation of the Cedar Creek Fire, the show served as a reminder that Oakridge is vibrant and alive, and no amount of wildfire smoke can stifle this community’s spirit.

Burn scars from the Cedar Creek Fire are visible from the peak of Dead Mountain. The fire cut through this area as it approached the Oakridge city limits. The lookout is a popular spot for bikers as they ride the trails along the ridgeline, and stop to admire the still everpresent beauty.