This week has been Portland's annual Village Building Convergence organized by the visionary organization City Repair. To crudely encapsulate, the Convergence is a 10 day event of multiple hands-on natural-building projects, as well as workshops, lectures, and music. People come from all over to immerse themselves in the idea and practice of what has become known as "city repair" wherein (to encapsulate even more crudely) people build community and transform the physical space of a locale by building, piece by piece, structures such as cob benches, community kiosks, etc, that bring people together in convivial interaction. It fascinates me because it is a movement that is growing literally at the intersection of natural building, permaculture, and the desire for better and more lively communities. I helped out with cobbing at a couple of the work sites this week, and have attended a couple of the evening programs including Starhawk, who gave a fascinating report on her work doing "bioremediation" in the toxically sludged neighborhoods of post-Katrina New Orleans, and led the "spiral dance."
Yesterday, distressingly, Ernie Wisner, who is the site-manager of the School of Natural Building in Coquille and who helped instruct the course I took there 2 weeks ago, got his leg fairly badly broken by an out of control car that hit him at the edge of a cob wall he was working on in SE Portland. It could have been much worse, but nevertheless sucks for one as active, and totally bicycle-transported, as him. Apparently he will have to be at the hospital for a week or more. What a bummer! But he is strong as an ox (looks like a viking plucked out of a 9th century raiding party) and I'm sure he will recover very well.
I have a long rumination on the philosophy of cities and villages that I will save for next time.
I saw a bumper sticker today that said "Oprah for President." Well, why not? Oprah for president as an independent (I would hope.) I would support that. I don't think there is any current mainstream party candidate who can and will say and do what needs to be done. Certainly not Hillary, I'm afraid. She is a very major disappointment. And who else? Al Gore maybe? Not that any president can give us the change we need. We give it to ourselves, in our own lives. The empire is crumbling fast. It will be less and less pretty at the level of conventional economics and politics. Luckily this is also fertile ground for seeds that have been lying dormant. The conventional political labels and non-solution "solutions" are self-evidently bankrupt. This had to happen though for a new "great awakening" and flowering of culture and humanity to take place. It is something to rejoice in, in the particular tasks of our lives.
Despite the hot weather I have spent about 2 hours each afternoon this week digging ditches. Woo-Hooo! For the cob cottage. Let's call it a backyard art studio for official purposes.
One thing they made clear from the very beginning at the cob workshop last week is that in building a cob structure there are 3 things to remember: drainage, drainage, and drainage. Typically you dig a drainage trench which underlies the foundation "stem wall" of the building. The trench has a perforated pipe in the bottom and is packed with gravel. In the case of our site, we are building partly on an old concrete carport foundation so things will be somewhat different. I will probably dig a "curtain trench" around the outside perimeter. So far I've mostly been digging the trench for water pipe from the main house. It's not too hard once you get down below the sod, just slow. Compacted soil gains severalfold in volume when you dig it up and load it into a wheelbarrow.
Advance notice: we'll have the Pedalpalooza t-shirt printing party here at Peninsula Park Commons on Thursday June 1 starting at 5:00PM. Bring a shirt for yourself and several more for the masses.
Now I need to get cracking on preparing the screen with this year's Shawn Granton logo design.
I just returned from a week long cob building workshop outside Coquille, OR. It would be hard to encapsulate the whole week and what it was like except to say that it was very intensive, very well taught, and my fellow participants were a fascinating and enjoyable bunch of people. As you may know, I am imminently undertaking, along with Debbie DeRose and whoever else wants to help, the construction of a modest cob dwelling on Debbie's property in North Portland. Not ever having built a house of any kind before, cob or otherwise, I decided to take a workshop. I chose the Cob Cottage Company and their School of Natural Building in Coquille. CCC's founder Ianto Evans is the man who, along with his wife Linda Smiley, basically invented and introduced modern cob construction in America. In fact they are the people most often credited with coining the very term "natural building." So if you wanna learn it right, go to the source! Ianto is a phenomenal teacher/guru of the trade, and he now shares instruction duties with other teachers, all excellent. The main cob instructor for this workshop was Kirk "Donkey" Mobert, and I can honestly say I have never had a better instructor in any subject. He was perpetually enthusiastic. He and Ianto both have a gift for instructing in the skills but letting their students learn for themselves by really (and literally) digging into the subject and getting an experiential understanding. Ianto also gave us an overview of his fascinating method of intensive organic gardening, a sort of controlled chaos in which many plants grow intermixed and often self-seeding, providing a continuous stream of edible "crop" throughout the season.
Complementary to the great instruction, the other participants were a wonderful group, and it was the interaction with them that really made the knowledge gel. They were from all over the country, including Oklahoma, California, Boston, Michigan, White Salmon, Seattle, three from Kansas, and one a Canadian born resident of Namibia.
The school itself (and its growing cob "village") is located on 30 acres of a 260 acre permaculture/ecoforestry homestead owned by Chip and Clara Boggs.
Last Saturday I played a gig at Concordia Coffeehouse (as Enrique Bronkowski.) I set the show up so that I opened and Ask Irene (all-female string band) played second. Which was fine, since I had about ten folks there to see me specifically and they had about 15 or 20 (plus some overlap.) I was not happy with my performance, though I am my own worst critic, and several people assured me I did fine. But sometimes I do feel like I did well, and this wasn't one of them. Oh well. I was over it by the next day, which for me is quick. I'm overly sensitive, which has its pros and cons, but I've become much better at consciously re-balancing myself and charging forth anew.
Yesterday I charged my way all the way to the top of Table Mountain. Table Mountain is the mountain which rises 3400 vertical feet above the Columbia River just north of Bonneville Dam. Approximately 600 years ago it let loose a collosal landslide from its summit which blanketed and dammed the entire Columbia River, giving rise to the Native American legend of the Bridge of the Gods, and creating (as the river flowed back over the debris and restablished its course) the great rapids known as the Cascades of the Columbia. The mountains rising above the cascades thus came to be known, by early explorers and settlers for whom the river and the treacherous rapids were the only passage through the range, as the Cascade Range, or simply the Cascades. Unfortunately for those of us who love the idea of witnessing the greatest river (by volume) in North America thundering through the hugest set of rapids in North America, Bonneville Dam was completed in 1938, drowning the Columbia's cascades for the forseeable future. The river had other stunning passages as well, such as the Dalles (where the entire volume of the River was channelled through an unfathomably swift and powerful chute all of 50 feet wide; it was said that at the Dalles, the river was "turned sideways) and Celilo Falls, actually a main falls of about 20 feet and several more cascades totalling 83 feet of drop, where from time immemorial Native fishermen built plank platforms to spear salmon leaping up. Celilo was drowned in 1957 behind the Dalles Dam. The destruction of the native American Indian culture of Celilo, and what happens to people when their home and culture are eviscerated by impersonal outside powers, is one of the major underlying themes of Ken Kesey's novel "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest."
Despite all the dams, during the spring snow-melt period the Columbia is sometimes allowed to thunder over the spillways. This was the case yesterday at Bonneville, providing a spectacle, and a noise, which even from a distance was at least an echo of what it must have been like to see the river in its glory. I've been meaning to hike up Table Mountain for 4 years now, but William Sullivan's new edition of his Northwest Oregon hike book gave me the excuse with a "new" route that is only 10 miles round trip, though still 3400 feet of gain. You start from the parking lot of the Bonneville Hot Springs resort (an uninspiring looking place) and follow a series of ancient forest roads through nice if unspectacular woods for a few miles to the Pacific Crest Trail, then after a mile of the PCT, you turn right and head almost vertically up the last 1.3 miles to the summit plateau of the mountain. There are two main viewpoint spots: the first is straight ahead and to the left as you get to the top, with a sweeping view of Saint Helens, Rainier, and Adams. The second is 1/4 mile or more to the right through some woods (still snowy yesterday) and out along a steep meadow to the sudden breathtaking edge of the 1800 foot cliff from which fell the great landslide. Bonneville Dam and the towns of North Bonneville, Cascade Locks, and Stevenson far below like a model train set, Mount Hood rising 11,000 vertical feet above it all, to the south. The sky was utterly clear and deep blue overhead, and there were three sounds: the wind in the treetops, a pair of ravens cawking as they rode the breezes in apparent play, and the deep roar of the Columbia over the Bonneville spillway thousands of feet below.
Saturday I head to Coquille for a one-week cob-building workshop. The other day Debbie DeRose and I cleared the site where we will soon break ground (behind her house in Kenton) and also hauled in a pile of "urbanite", broken concrete chunks that we will use to build the foundation "stem wall" of the cob cottage.
Today was the day of the big immigration-rights and May Day march in downtown Portland (and I'm sure all over the country.) I was working the TriMet job, mainly just helping hold people back as trains went by at 2nd Ave. and then later at Broadway, then waving them along again. Huge masses of people, thousands upon thousands. I think it was bigger than the anti-war rally in March. It was really really cool to see all these Latino/Hispanic people (racially they are mostly Aztec/Inca/Native American) out en masse, whole families of several generations, waving American and Mexican flags, with complete sincerity saying "hey, here we are, we do your grunt work, we want to be United States citizens like you." It was moving actually. How can you say no to these people? What, you don't like eating lettuce, apples, cauliflower, you don't like having your office cleaned after you go home from work? Not that that's *all* the immigrants do, but basically they are hardworking, religious people. It is an interesting historical/cultural phenomenon though, that's for sure. If I have a bias, a predjudice even, I will admit in favor of the cultural legacy of the Northern American version of colonial endeavor (some rich but mostly agrarian hardworking European immigrants who came over and worked as family farmers, tradespeople, artisans, etc. creating their legacy through hard individual and community work, valuing democratic involvement and small-r republicanism); versus either the southern-U.S. legacy (lazy aristocrats gaining and maintaining their riches through the enslavement of Africans, little democratic impulse, willful suppression of rights of the majority;) or the Spanish and Portuguese colonial legacy (aristocratic gold-mad Europeans setting up their entire colonial society as a giant system of looting/silver-mining/extraction and enslavement and subjugation of the Aztec and Incan natives. In the name of God. Not that the natives further north fared any better, in fact worse numerically. The point being, I value the legacy of William Penn, the early American republic, and the New England Trancendentalists (variously,) much more so than slavery, Church-sanctioned looting of entire societies, and Jim Crow. The Mexican and other Latino immigrants today are the descendents of the native peoples who were so thoroughly subjugated by Spanish colonialism (and whose politcal leaders and economic aristocracy "back home" are still mostly minority white Europeans.) They may not have the same experience in "democracy" as we think *we* do, but they are eager for the same things we are: a voice, a chance to do well for their families, freedom to live peacably. You can't say no to that and call yourself an American.