AS NATURAL AS THE WORLD WILL ALLOW Stories of Nature, Culture, and Transformation from the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology by Sharon Overton
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As a teenager in the late ’60s and early ’70s, Jennifer Lowell Gallop spent summers at Cascade Head. Her father, Mike Lowell, was developing the former cattle ranch into a residential community. Jennifer and her five siblings lived in the old ranch house by the mouth of the Salmon River. “I remember playing in the barn, looking for old chicken eggs in the hay,” she says. “We would take the eggs and throw them in the river and watch them float away.” Eventually, her father tore down the barn and replaced it with the clubhouse and swimming pool. “Until then, it was like living on a real ranch. My dad bought two kayaks and a rowboat, and we would paddle across to the sand spit and play on the beach. We had a couple of sheep and two horses.” After the Boydens arrived, the ranch “was teeming with creative people,” Jennifer recalls. The Lowells held a barn raising to build a cabin for their family farther up the headland. “The doors were designed to open wide, and we would often have people over… . I remember my dad and Frank talking all the time about the arts… . I’m pretty sure the idea for Sitka was refined over a glass of wine at the barn.” Jennifer and her siblings all took classes at Sitka. One of her favorites was calligraphy. “We wrote haiku poems on small pieces of paper bags and hung them with strings on the trees and ferns around the trails on Cascade Head. The rain and sun would fade the paper, but the ink was permanent. Later, as we were hiking around, we would see the poems hanging in the branches. I vividly remember that, because it was so different from the way we learned at school.” Spending time at Sitka had a lasting effect on Jennifer, who now works as a journalist. “We learned to hike quietly and not scare the wildlife. We learned about ecology, and how to see the world around us through poetry and photography. These days, kids have access to global information at the touch of a keyboard. But caring about the environment and the elements in their own backyard is so important. Meeting teachers who can bring that to life is something I would wish for any kid.” P 3
Gray Jay
Being a subspecies, and, as the lingo goes, a lesser bird, I guess you’ll not be invited to the ball. No matter. I’m working class too, so you’ve come to the right cabin for a handout. My mother told me years ago, discrimination was a sin. “No, we’re all the same,” she said, “ just god’s creatures trying to get by.” Besides, you’re more interested in the bread I put out, I’m thinking, than the color of your feathers, or the class I might fall into, which brings me to Field Guide to Birds Of North America. It’s clear that scientists spend a lot more time describing what they see than what they feel. I know nobody wants to go to bed hungry, and you’ve come in such numbers, to me, alone in my cabin. Fearless, and unlike the uppity Stellar jay, you fly down out of the spruce to light right at my feet or on the railing, only inches from my elbow (How can I not be happy?) when you beg bread from this old poet. — Tom Crawford Published with permission from the author.
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[Tom Crawford bio] We are spiritual animals. When we forget this essential truth, we invite calamity,” writes poet Tom Crawford, whose work explores the natural world and our connection to it. Winner of the Oregon Book Award, the Pushcart Prize, and two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Tom is the author of numerous books of poetry, including The Names of Birds (Sherman Asher Publishing, 2011) and Caging the Robin (Cedar House Books, 2014). He was a Sitka resident in the fall of 2013. Growing up in Michigan and later California, “birds were always around me,” recalls the poet, who now makes his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. “That there are still 800 different kinds of birds in our country is pretty amazing.” However, many species are now in decline or facing extinction. A lifelong lover of birds, Tom makes the case that “conservation begins with the heart.” “If we don’t figure out soon how to reconnect people, our country with the natural world from which we enjoy our own earthly existence,” he writes, “then all the smart science in the world won’t save bird or man from extinction.” 5
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A Sleeping Bag and the Whole Earth Catalog At the end of the summer of 1970, Frank and Jane returned to New
Mexico so Frank could finish his last year of teaching. Their son, Ian, was born the following February. Meanwhile, Frank began raising money and support for Camp Sitka. With the promise of free land at Cascade Head Ranch, he had more success this time. In his typical charismatic fashion, Frank convinced the University of Oregon to allow some of its architecture students to design and build a permanent structure for the camp. Frank and Portland architect Bill Church would supervise the project. Church, an early advocate of passive solar and alternative housing, had also designed the rustic-modern pole houses at the ranch, as well as similar cluster cabins at Sunriver Resort in central Oregon. For Frank, the free-spirited exchange of ideas was exactly what he’d been
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The nation’s first Earth Day celebration had taken place in 1970.
missing at the University of New Mexico. “It was like a big shotgun with a huge barrel at the end,” he recalls. Any idea was open for discussion. “Eventually, all of that filtered out and we ended up with something really simple.”
The final design resembled a barn, with one large open space that could function as both an art studio and classroom. Skylights and a bank of westfacing windows brought in natural light and views of the trees and meadow. Unfinished plank walls and floors gave the space a raw, utilitarian feeling. There was a drain in the middle of the floor so you could hose the building out. Frank persuaded local lumber and utility companies to donate most of the materials. The architecture students arrived early that summer and set up tents on the banks of nearby Crowley Creek. “There were ten or twelve of these guys with their girlfriends and their dogs and their dope—all the accoutrements of the summer of 1971,” Frank remembers. They were under a tight deadline:
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the Boydens had agreed to partner with the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry to host as many as thirty kids for a weeklong session in late August. They planned to house the OMSI campers in tents, but were hoping to have the studio and a separate bathhouse ready by the time they arrived. Gradually, word filtered out about what the Boydens were doing at Cascade Head. The Oregonian ran a full-spread story about Sitka that summer with photographs of Frank leading a hike and Jane investigating a tide pool with baby Ian strapped to her back. People started coming out to see what was happening. Some were interested in alternative building; others wanted to enroll their children. Still others just wanted to be part of the scene. “People just began to arrive,” says Frank. “About the only things they had in their cars were sleeping bags and the Whole Earth Catalog.” The timing couldn’t have been better: The nation’s first Earth Day celebration had taken place in 1970. Growing awareness of the need to protect fragile ecosystems would soon lead to the passage of the Endangered Species Act. Sometime later that year, Frank and Jane decided to change the camp’s name to the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. It wasn’t simply clever marketing. The name reflected their vision of a place where art and nature, people and poetry, students and teachers, kids and adults, could peacefully coexist. P
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SUMMER
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In August of 1970, some hundred miles east of Cascade Head, an estimated thirty-five thousand people gathered at McIver State Park near Estacada for what later would be described as the nation’s first state-sponsored rock concert. Vortex 1 was Oregon’s version of Woodstock—three days of music, drugs, and counterculture grooviness— and it happened with the blessing (and substantial logistical support) of then Oregon Governor Tom McCall. McCall’s motives were largely political: he hoped to avoid a confrontation between Vietnam war protestors and Legionnaires, who were convening that summer in Portland. President Richard Nixon was scheduled to speak at the convention and McCall feared that violence might erupt. His gamble paid off. The convention went off without a hitch (though Nixon was a no-show). At McIver State Park, young people swam naked in the river and tripped on hallucinogens while state troopers watched from a discreet distance. At the end of the week, members of the governor’s staff linked arms with concert organizers in a meditation circle.
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These sorts of blissed-out happenings helped fuel the perception of Oregon as a mecca for hippies, peaceniks, and freethinkers of all kinds.
These sorts of blissed-out happenings helped fuel the perception of Oregon as a mecca for hippies, peaceniks, and freethinkers of all kinds. In 1969, Life magazine featured Oregon’s Family of Mystic Arts commune on its cover. By the summer of 1970, Oregon author Ken Kesey had moved his psychedelic Merry Pranksters to a farm outside Eugene. Three years later, Oregon became the first state to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana. It wasn’t all about sex, drugs, and rock ’n roll. Farmers markets, organic foods, and crafts fairs also took root in the back-to-the-land movement, along with renewable energy and sustainable land use. In the early ’70s, Oregon’s rural economy still relied heavily on logging, fishing, and farming. The spotted owl debate was still a decade away. But environmental awareness was growing. And increasingly, young people saw big cities as a source of society’s ills and rural areas as places where balance might be restored.
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A DREAM O
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OF THE ’70s Margot Voorhies Thompson is a painter and calligrapher who incorporates her own secret language into her work. In 1972, she and her husband, George, bought a dilapidated dairy barn on the old coastal highway between Neskowin and Otis, just over the ridge from Cascade Head, and turned it into an alternative school. Like Frank and Jane, Margot and George were just starting a family. The two families quickly became close friends, and Sitka and the Neskowin Valley School formed the nucleus for a fledgling artistic community. Although George had a teaching degree, the couple had no experience running a school and no idea where they’d find students. “We had so much optimism. We thought if we built the school, people would show up,” Margot recalls. “The day we had the open house for registration, there were people waiting outside the door with their kids. They came from Lincoln City. They came from the Tillamook area. We started out with a preschool and added a grade every year or two. It just kind of grew.” Enrollment at the school fluctuated over the years, along with the coastal economy. “There used to be a lot more jobs out here,” Margot says. “Even if you didn’t really think of yourself as a logger or a fisherman or a handyman or a motel worker, you’d do it for a period of time when your children were young to give them a certain kind of life.” The Neskowin Valley School offered a different kind of educational experience in which students were encouraged to pursue their passions. There also was a lot of crosspollination with the Sitka Center, including arts classes, film series, and concerts. More than forty years later, Margot believes that Sitka and the Neskowin Valley School—and the ideals they stand for—are more relevant than ever. “There are a lot of people who are returning to the land now. They just need to be encouraged, like people encouraged us. “I’ve thought a lot about those times,” she continues. “I think they were very optimistic in the sense that what manifested was a powerful dedication to some sort of utopian ideal… We definitely had the feeling that if we can stop a war, we can do cool new things, too. And we would make our mark in the world by doing something positive.” P
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Everything Happens Before your Eyes By early 1972, Frank, Jane, and baby Ian had settled into the old
ranch house down by the Salmon River. They ran Sitka in the summer and, like many of their friends, patched together odd jobs in the winter to make ends meet. Jane played music and later taught math and French in the public schools. As ranch caretaker, Frank maintained the water system and cleared the roads after windstorms. He also monitored the chemistry in the new swimming pool. “The pool was either full of algae or when you jumped in, you were bleached white,” he laughs. “It wasn’t a successful pairing of my talents.”
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The camera could be as simple as a cardboard box with a tiny hole poked in one end.
Sitka still consumed much of their time and creative energy, though Frank and Jane were never paid a salary. They recruited some of Frank’s former college students as teachers, but needed someone to help them plan and manage the program.
Jim Shull was teaching art to prospective primary school teachers at Mt. Angel College near Silverton. He had published a little manual on pinhole photography and left a few copies at Rich’s Cigar Shop in Portland. A friend found the book and passed it along to Frank, who decided to pay Jim a visit. At first glance, Frank impressed Jim as a “bundle of energy. Too many ideas happening all at once. Talked like crazy.” But Jim liked the sound of what Frank and Jane were creating at Sitka. “It had a kind of rugged, primitive appeal,” he says. He agreed to join them that summer. Pinhole photography fit right in with what Frank and Jane wanted to do at Sitka. It didn’t require any fancy equipment. The camera could be as simple as a cardboard box with a tiny hole poked in one end. Images could be developed in the darkroom using a few basic chemicals. There was no mystery to the process, Jim says. “Everything happens before your eyes.” Jim also had been experimenting with teaching kids to make pottery without the need for an expensive, time-consuming kiln. The process basically involved digging a small trench into a hillside, lining it with bricks and dried grass, and lighting a fire at one end. The kids could mold the clay, fire their pots, and take them home the same day. “Those kinds of immediate and understandable activities are what really counted as far as Frank and Jane were concerned,” Jim says. They were a big hit with the kids as well. Jane recalls one camper who made a miniature pinhole camera out of a film canister and took a picture of his own molar.
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Like a child drawing in the sand, for Frank, the artistic impulse is about curiosity and discovery, inseparable from everyday life.
The campers also made hot air balloons out of tissue paper, then watched them crash into the trees. They rowed across the river to the secluded beach, where they peered into tide pools brimming with sea stars, sea anemones, and other exotic creatures. They staged elaborate dramas on the sand, tracing giant shadow figures that vanished with the incoming tide. For Frank, the idea of combining art and science had always come naturally. It was simply the bifocal lens through which he viewed the world. His mother, Margery Davis Boyden, had studied zoology at Smith College. She also was a skilled watercolor painter and avid outdoors woman who shared her passions with her three sons. When the boys were little, Margery bought an old mining claim on a remote stretch of the Rogue River in southern Oregon. Frank and his brothers grew up fishing, hunting, and whitewater rafting in the river’s canyons and at the coast. In 1992, the brothers created a yearlong writer’s residency on the Rogue River property named for their mother, who died in 2010. Margery’s father was a plant geneticist and former head of the botany department at the University of Michigan. He moved to Portland when Frank was five years old. Though retired from the university, “he was still working on certain aspects of the genetics of the evening primrose,” Frank recalls. Together, they set up a laboratory and collected specimens from nearby ponds—amoebas, paramecia, hydras, and single-eyed dinoflagellates, which Frank related to the mythical Cyclops from The Odyssey. Frank would watch the creatures for hours under his grandfather’s microscopes. “He had all the fantastic tools of a biologist, and he taught me how to use these things.… . It was really magical.” At the same time, Frank was drawing the things he observed and developing
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his skills as a draftsman. As he matured as an artist, he incorporated images of animals, weather, and natural phenomena into his work. At the University of New Mexico, ceramics artist Jenny Lind opened Frank’s eyes to the possibilities of carving his imagery onto clay pots and copper printing plates. It wasn’t enough simply to draw a picture of a bird or fish. Frank wanted to know how the bones articulate, how the fins help fish move through water and feathers promote flight. “I’m interested in surfaces, but I am more interested in how those surfaces open up, or are opened up, to reveal the mystery of what is inside,” he once told an interviewer. Like a child drawing in the sand, for Frank, the artistic impulse is about curiosity and discovery, inseparable from everyday life. “Sometimes I go down to my river and draw in the water with a stick, or I take my knife and open the water up with its sharp blade. It’s all the same thing,” he said. “Paper, copper, clay, water. The act is the same. The result is different. Whatever it is, it’s always a thrill, and you get a line that is as natural as the world will allow.” P
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HAPPY AS A CLAM 20
Bradley Boyden is the youngest of the three Boyden brothers. A former high school biology teacher, he looks like a neater, more compact version of his big brother Frank. Same balding hairline and reading glasses propped on the forehead. Same whiskey voice and wicked sense of humor. Bradley is the professor to Frank’s mad scientist. Together—and occasionally with their brother Allen—Bradley and Frank have been leading a Sitka workshop on edible shellfish for more years than either can remember. On a balmy June evening, the class gathers outside the Boyden Studio. The students are a mix of experienced and novice diggers, among them a Salem artist and her nineyear-old grandson, a pioneer of the Oregon brewpub and hospitality industry, and a Portland wine importer who arrives with a case of premium bottles on ice in his trunk. The students paid more than $200 each for the privilege of digging in the mud for two days. The workshop invariably sells out. After running through some basic invertebrate biology, shellfish regulations, and a list of necessary equipment, Bradley and Frank instruct the class to meet at the designated
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digging spot promptly at 6:30 a.m. “Tide waits for no man,” Bradley warns, noting that the weekend’s “minus” tides offer ideal conditions. “It ain’t good clamming in the water.” When the group arrives at Tillamook Bay, the mud flats are already pocked by diggers in rubber boots and hip waders toting shovels, rakes, and sheetrock buckets. The students poke around tentatively, turning up rocks and empty shells. Frank sinks his shovel and immediately hits pay dirt. “There you are, partner,” he says, stepping aside to make room for the kid. “I think we can make a killing here.” After a lunch of freshly shucked oysters (the wine importer pours a crisp sauvignon blanc) the class reconvenes at Sitka to clean its catch. On Sunday morning, Frank and Bradley give a hands-on lesson in intertidal ecology before leading the group to a secluded salt marsh to dig for softshell clams. While the students pause to admire a blue heron and bald eagle, their boots sink ankle deep in the black ooze. The brothers take this opportunity to discuss the “thixotropic effect,” the tendency of certain viscous substances (such as mud) to liquefy when disturbed. The local term is the “clutch zone.” Soon the wine distributor is submerged to the hips and must be dug out. Thankfully, the day ends on a positive note. Frank and Bradley have prepared a feast of clam chowder and oyster stew. Students bring appetizers, salads, and desserts. The brothers lead the group in singing bawdy sea chanteys, including all fourteen verses of a John Baily song about Harry Herman, a clam digger who drowns while attempting to impress his beloved. The wine importer, still a bit shaken from the morning, uncorks another bottle. The guests of honor end up in the pot. But maybe the life of a bivalve isn’t so bad after all, Bradley muses. “How do you think they came up with the saying happy as a clam?” Bradley asks, ladling another bowl. “They just sit there all day and squirt.”
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