There was rafting without cops on the Clackamas River, something I never experienced although I was asked to join in. There were Dazed and Confused seduction scenes on the boats launched at Clackamette Park, where beer was beer and jean cutoffs, tube tops and the occasional macrame garment reigned, and big combs and chew canisters fitted tight in back pockets, and the high school boys all looked like cross country runners, even most of the football players. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was that one senior prank where\nsomeone somehow sprayed deer scent into the radiators of the old\nbuilding of the high school and the smell was ghastly for days. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n
There was music. In junior high I\nlistened mostly to soul and funk music: Brothers Johnson, Commodores,\nEarth Wind and Fire, Ohio Players and Stevie Wonder. How I came to\ndiscover this genre is lost to me now. I surely must have heard some\nof the songs on Top 40 radio stations when they crossed over to the\npop charts, but certainly not on KGON. I never listened to KGON.\nOregon City had no record store so I would ride Tri-Met #33 alone to\ndowntown Portland and shop at the groovy, incense-filled Crystal Ship\ntucked inside a secret corner of the Galleria. It was surely there\nwhere I bought the 12-inch single of \u201cRapper’s Delight\u201d by The\nSugarhill Gang and then put it on my little Hitachi stereo’s\nturntable and listened in my room, perhaps even with Tex the beagle.\nLater, I got somewhat into rock, and the Rolling Stones’ double album\nHot Rocks<\/em> certainly captured my attention. It was pretty much\nthe soundtrack for our tennis teams.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was that time when the school’s\nstar athlete stole my math book and vandalized the cover with the\nmisspelled words \u201cfuk\u201d and \u201cshitt.\u201d It was so absurd that I\nknew one day I would use the incident in a book and here I am doing\nso. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There were times in junior high when a\npebble tossed against my bedroom window around midnight would\ninterrupt my solitude. That pebble sound was wonderful and always\nunexpected. How did we set them up? They weren’t set up! \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was being a godless preacher’s\nkid and living in the preacher’s house across the parking lot from\nOregon City Church of Christ and it’s football field-shaped front\nlawn where my dad played football with my grade school friends and\ntaught me how to go long and run the sideline route. There was\ninviting my friends for sleepovers in the basement of the church and\ntrying to make coffee in a gigantic percolator and playing tackle\nfootball on the carpet and chipping plastic golf balls into the\nbaptismal. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was the berry bus picking up the\nlast generation of white Oregon kids and teens who would pick (or\nthrow) berries in the dusty fields or cull berries on conveyor belts\nin a jam factory. I don’t have a berry bus or berry picking story\nbecause I lasted exactly one day. I couldn’t hack it. Many others\ndid, every summer, all day during the picking season. They had a sack\nlunch and a thermos of Kool-Aid and that was it. Child labor! And\nbarely any supervision. I have no idea how kids were signed up. I\nrecall getting paid by bringing something over to be weighed. Pennies\na pound. You didn’t pick, you didn’t get paid. There is great Oregon\nnovel titled The Berry Bus<\/em> waiting to be written. It needs to\nbe written. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was one summer afternoon in 1975\nor 1976 when a naked woman sunbathing in Rivercrest Park, our\npark<\/em>, sent titillation rippling through the neighborhoods and had\nus spying on her with toy binoculars we usually reserved for glassing\nimaginary Panzer divisions massing in the ruins of a demolished city\nthat actually was an old miniature golf course gone to seed and\nrubble and our own little private Stalingrad. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was walking to elementary and\njunior high school in hard rain. There was seeing Apocalypse Now<\/em>\nin the Oregon City Drive-In with three buddies and me being the only\none who knew it was a lot more than a war movie. I think when I\nrealized that, I might have become a writer right there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was the whiffle ball field we\nsculpted out of a vacant lot (complete with plywood home run fence)\nand the league we invented, and the statistics I kept with a golf\npencil in a spiral notebook.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was endless days of playing army\nin the woods along Coffee Creek, and in the marshes of a wetland now\nburied in asphalt. We were never home and took along sack lunches. We\nmade campfires and roasted hot dogs. We built forts, bunkers and\npillboxes. We climbed trees and constructed dams. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was Saturday Night Fever<\/em>\nin seventh grade, in the front row of the Southgate Theater, with a\nseventh-grade girl with a royal biblical name, wearing a silky\nfloral-print blouse and blue jeans while John Travolta danced\nonscreen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was Portland Wrestling<\/em> in\nchannel 12 on Saturday nights and the Tom Peterson ads. I never\nmissed it but I never went to a card in the flesh. What a fool!<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was the first McDonald’s opening\nand everyone going crazy and it being cool to work there, like the\nmall in Fast Times at Ridgemont High<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was the foos ball craze in junior\nhigh and foos tables in the cafeteria and brooding boys who wore foos\nball gloves in the back pockets of their jeans all day. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was a smoking area. For students!\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was driving to the Eastgate\nTheater to see Raging Bull<\/em> by myself and then taking a date to\nKurosawa’s Kagemusha<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was hoping that \u201cHotel\nCalifornia\u201d would or would not<\/em> come on at a junior high\ndance depending on whom you were dancing with right before it did\ncome on. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was home construction class that\nbuilt a new home every year, and art classes and pottery wheels and\nkilns and home ec with sewing and cooking, and auto, wood and metal\nshops and boys taking five periods of shop a day and then graduating\nwith skills that employed them with a middle-class living for the\nrest of their working lives and skills they taught their children\nthat served those children the rest of their lives when they went on\nto do home improvement or fix a car. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n And there was the darkroom and all the\ndarkroom shenanigans. Darkroom Shenanigans would have been a great\nname for a rock band in 1981. Sadly, I don’t have a darkroom story.\nMany do. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was getting lost finding the prom\nvenue (Holiday Inn off I-5) and walking into a cover band with a\nfemale live singer butchering \u201cStart Me Up\u201d but later nailing\n\u201cPrivate Eyes.\u201d I got lost trying to find my senior prom! It was\nawesome. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n There was never touching a single\ncomputer in my public education, but the Apples and IBMS were there\nat the very end, gaining a quiet foothold with a certain kind of kid.\n<\/p>\n\n\n\n (Note to reader: It is my wish that the\nreader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride<\/em> is a \u201cbook.\u201d\nIt is also my wish that the reader consider \u201cbuying\u201d the book as\nit rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and\nfuture literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look\nto the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other\narrangements.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There was rafting without cops on the Clackamas River, something I never experienced although I was asked to join in. There were Dazed and Confused seduction scenes on the boats launched at Clackamette Park, where beer was beer and jean cutoffs, tube tops and the occasional macrame garment reigned, and big combs and chew canisters […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5849,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,942],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5915","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-meditations","category-oregon-city","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5915","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5915"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5915\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5917,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5915\/revisions\/5917"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5915"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5915"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nestuccaspitpress.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5915"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}