Home - or Something Like it

Between moving away from Lakeshire (near St. Louis) in December of 1961 and arriving in Eugene (Oregon) in October of 1972 I lived a lot of different places. (Twenty-one addresses in three countries to be exact. But who's counting?) ... And none of them ever felt like "home". But Eugene did - and it's hard to explain exactly why. So I'll just throw out some observations and hope that (taken together) they paint the picture...

Back in 1972 Eugene was an ultra-liberal college town, with a number of "hippie" communes in the surrounding countryside. It was kind of magnet for "alternative thinkers" and "new age" types... And even thought the population was close to 100,000, it still had a "small town" feel. The majority of the residents were unpretentious, casual, laid-back and friendly - you got a smile and a greeting from almost everyone you encountered... And, whereas teenagers and young adults in most places tended to be extremely conscious of their "image" (clothes, hair, makeup), the younger crowd in Eugene didn't much seem to care. There was a de-facto "uniform" worn by both genders: bib overalls with either a plaid shirt or a sweatshirt. (You saw people dressed like that everywhere.) The girls tended to have long straight hair and very little (if any) makeup... And I actually found that to be rather sexy... (Yes - my tastes had changed significantly since my high school days.)

Aside: I've visited Eugene many times over the years, and at some point the place got overrun with pretentious douches... I think they were mostly refugees from the Bay Area who flooded north after the passage of "Prop 13" - bringing their home equity money, BMWs, bad driving habits and snobbish "hipper than thou" attitude with them. (I could go on a lengthy rant here, but I won't) ... But Oregon hasn't been the same since :-)

Then there was the climate... A quick recap: Since leaving Germany (which had a climate similar to the Willamette Valley) we spent two winters in Winnipeg where it was insanely cold, one and a half in Southern California where it was always "short sleeve weather", and two in Texas where the average high in January was almost 60°... The point being that I was looking forward to a winter that felt like winter but wasn't brutally cold. And the climate in Eugene pretty much fit the bill. In an average year the temperature might drop into the mid 20s a few times, but highs are typically somewhere in the 40s - chilly, but not that cold.

Another aside:  In a strange twist of fate, the overnight low temperature on December 8th, 1972 (less than 2 months after we got there) reached -12°F. That was (and still is) the all time record low for Eugene - and pretty darn frigid even by Winnipeg standards... Yeah - we were miserable. The baseboard heaters in our apartment weren't designed for that kind of cold and we had to stay bundled up for days... Then for weeks afterward the classifieds were full of ads for really nice cars with cracked engine blocks - like a low mileage '69 Z-28 for $800... Yeah - if I'd had any money at all :-)

Yet another aside: A lot of people would be surprised to know that every major city on the east coast gets more rain (in inches, not days) than Portland or Eugene... So when people from out of town ask me about "all that Oregon rain" I tell them: "Yes... It does rain a lot of the time here - but it's a dry rain" :-)

But none of that explains what I liked so much about the "feel" of Eugene in the winter...  I guess it was all the evergreens (I'd never lived anywhere that stayed so green in the winter), the smell of "nature" (enhanced by the earthy aroma of barkdust from the mill in Springfield), the fog, the mist ... the almost constant drizzle - and the dew that covered everything... It seemed to envelop and "embrace" you... Yeah - I know that's not everybody's "cup of tea" - but I loved it.

So, all in all, it was "bitter sweet" - being in a place where I felt so at home ... yet nothing had really changed... We were still broke - and I still couldn't find a job - or afford to go to school... And I couldn't see how that was ever going to change.