2006 summer session june 26-august 18

INFLUX
FLUX
Editor in Chief
Kristin Bartus
T
he School of Journalism and
Communication is pleased to
announce the opening of its George S.
Turnbull Portland Center.
The Turnbull Center offers workshops,
seminars, for-credit classes, and Senior
Experience, a unique experience
combining half-day paid internships
with late-afternoon classes for our
undergraduates. Graduate-level,
for-credit seminars in strategic
communication will be offered
beginning fall 2006.
Serving students and working
professionals, exploring contemporary
issues in journalism, and creating new
opportunities in the state's media
center, the Turnbull Center will draw
on the school's strengths in all
professional areas.
For more information:
jcomm.uoregon.edu
SCHOOL OF JOURNALISM
AND COMMUNICATION
University of Oregon
Managing Editor
Richard Gould
Copy Editor
Matt Tiffany
Assistant Copy Editor
Cassie DeFillipo
Senior Associate Editor
Meg Krugel
Associate Editors
Sena Christian
Dave Constantin
Research Editor
Ursula Evans-Heritage
Associate Research Editors
Maresa Giovannini
Brittany McGrath
Lucas Pollock
Art Director
Catherine Ryan
Creative Director
Sam Karp
Art Associates
Alexis Chicoye
Krystal Hilliker
Molly Horton
Caitie McCurdy
Caitlin McNamara
Carrie Sutton
Art Interns
Melissa Reader
Faith Stafford
Photo Editor
Kate Horton
Senior Photographers
Alex Pajunas
Kai-Huei Yau
Photographers
Nicole Barker
Brett Crosse
Cory Eldridge
Katie Gleason
Shaina Sullivan
Production Manager
Lindsay Monroe
Production Assistant
Megan Gilgen
Production Intern/
Marketing Illustrator
Emily Davis
Business Manager
Sarah Davis
Marketing Director
Kellee Kauftheil
Marketing Art Associate
Mia Leidelmeyer
Editor
Margaret McGladrey
Associate Editors
Jennifer Felli
Allyson Goldstein
Kendal Richards
Art Director
Paul Weinert
Art Associates
Molly Cooney-Mesker
Sabrina Gowette
Joe Mansfield
Andrew Maser
Erin McKenzie
Adviser
Skipper McFarlane
SPECIAL THANKS
American Apparel
Carol Ann Bassett
James Boyd
Ryan Bruss
Andre Chinn
Jessica Evicia
JR Gaddis
Sally Garner
Sarah Giffrow
Tim Gleason
Greater Goods
Tommy Hannam
Greg Kerber
Koke Printing Company
Dave Koranda
Tom Lundberg
Max Studio
Dan Miller
Zanne Miller
Dan Morrison
Mount Pisgah Arboretum
Julianne Newton
Grayson Revoir
Beth Ripley
Stephanie Risbrough
John Russial
Ryan Stasel
Alan Stavitsky
Sweet Potato Pie
Sue Varani
Tom Wheeler
Marketing Intern
Matt Heath
Advisers
Mark Blaine
Bill Ryan
Jan Ryan
FLUX • 01
Plan your summer now
2006 SUMMER SESSION
Earn credit in a variety of formats: fourweek courses as well as shorter workshops
and seminars are available throughout
the summer to suit your needs. Formal
admission to the university is not required.
Satisfy your curiosity and expand your
world. Take a weeklong seminar just
because the subject
fascinates you. Or,
if you can't wait
to finish college
and start shaking
up the world,
satisfy a major
requirement with
a four-week course
and graduate early
with a competitive
edge. Whether
you're advancing
professional goals
or personal growth,
summer session has
something for you.
JUNE 26-AUGUST 18
Immerse yourself in art workshops,
languages, environmental studies,
computer science, journalism, marine
biology, or music.
Take advantage of innovative, summer-only
courses. Earn credit for an archaeological
dig or a photography workshop while
enjoying the
dazzling Oregon
summer.
Being a staff member of Flux isn't just a job, it's an
adventure. Over the last couple of months Flux staffers
have had some exciting experiences in the line of duty.
One writer communed with nineteen pit bulls.
Another spent weeks trying to chase down the
University of Oregon's latest track phenom. Out
in the wilds of the Willamette National Forest,
a couple of petite, yet intrepid, Fluxers '
attempted to split a I DO-foot log into
planks using only a wooden mallet and a
wedge. And then there were those irascible
bees, which seemed to think our photographer was after their honey when all he
wanted to do was get a good shot of them
in action. At least they were thoughtful
enough to give him a matching set of
stings - one under each eye.
More than fifty students have played a role
in creating Flux, and these highly talented
individuals have thrown themselves into
whatever circumstances were necessary to
get the stories we offer in this issue. This year
in Flux, we feature many pieces about people
whose everyday lives are an adventure.
Summer session
course offerings
are listed on our
website, http://
uosummer
.uoregon.edu.
Or, to order a
2006 Summer
Session Catalog,
call (541)
346-3475 or
toll free (800)
Grand Ronde tribal member Don Day puts sweat
and soul into reviving the centuries-old practice of
traditionallonghouse building, which he hopes will
bring back the forgotten cultural and spiritual life of tribal
ancestors. Pit bull advocate Amanda Gribben faces constant
criticism as she rescues maligned dogs and attempts to turn
them into upstanding canine citizens. Forester Mike Newton
spends his days trying to track down the elusive mountain
beaver, a tiny furball that threatens the ecology of the northwestern Oregon woods.
524-2404.
Kristin Bartus
Editor in Chief
I hope all of these stories make as much of an impression on
you as they have on us. Welcome to Flux.
http://uosummer.uoregon.edu
Ja006 ~U»VMrS'cktfule
First four-week session: June 26-July 21
Second four-week session: July 24-August 18
Eight-week session: June 26-August 18
Eleven-week session: June 26-September 8
o
I
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
FLUX • 03
6 Today in Flux
32
Rebuilding Tradition
One Grand Ronde tribal member leads an effort
to reconstruct tribal culture through traditional
longhouse building.
by Sena Christian • photos by Kate Horton
Courting the Future
New courthouse could cure urban blandness
Said
The latest lowdown on American English
Seen
Contemporary twists on age-old extracurriculars
40 Ambassador of the
Bad Breed
Amanda Gribben rescues pit bulls to keep them
from getting the short end of the bone.
by Robin Munro • photos by Katie Gleason
and Shaina Sullivan
10 Smoking in Palestine
The comfort of a nicotine fix helps an American
deal with the stress of a stay in the West Bank.
by Cory Eldridge • composite illustration
by Kai-Huei Yau and Cory Eldridge
46 Quest for Glory
A photo essay shows how an Oregon training
facility turns talented athletes into ultimate
fighting champions.
photos and story by Alex Pajunas
12 Eco Chic
Organic clothing breaks into the mainstream
and makes it stylish to save the environment.
by Erin Lynne Pentis • photos by Kai-Huei Yau
52
16 Becoming Cree Gordon
A beekeeper's son shares stories of the secret life
of beekeeping and why the industry is at risk.
by Joe Hansen • photos by Alex Pajunas
A young man's days on the streets of the
French Quarter leave him with HIV and the
conviction to educate his peers.
by Darrick Meneken • photos by Cory Eldridge
58
22 Back in Black
Classic burle~ . 'e re-emerges with a gothic flair
that tantalizes fans and pushes the envelope.
by Adrienne van der Valk • photos by Nicole Barker
Tales from the Hive
Rodents of
Unusual Surprises
Protecting forests from mischievous mountain
beavers puts a scientist's life in danger.
story and photos by Dave Constantin
Cover Notes
Front cover: Tribal elder Don
Day splits a 40-foot-long cedar
log, which will be used in the
construction of a Kalapuyastyle long house on the
Confederated Tribes of the
Grand Ronde reservation.
Back cover: Volunteer
Michael Michelle rests on an
old-growth western red cedar,
considered the tree of life by
the Grand Ronde people.
04 • FLUX
26 Learning through Labor
A photo essay portrays a prison jobs program
that encourages contributions to society.
photos by Shaina Sullivan • introduction
by Tim O'Rourke
64 Back Talk
Bible Belted
A Bible salesman deals with an unfortunate
on-the-job encounter with a fist.
by Richard Gould • illustration by Lindsay Monroe
Flux, the University of Oregon School of Journalism and
Communication magazine, is planned, written, edited,
designed, and produced by students. InFlux, the online
version of Flux, is available at influx.uoregon.edu/2006.
Today in FLUX
W
ithout a strong architectural monument to define it,
Eugene, Oregon, suffers the
blandness of many small American
cities. Low-slung modernist boxes
populate a downtown fed by asphalt
arteries and surrounded by sprawling
suburbs. But just over the bridge into
town a colossus is emerging, wrapped
in a cloak of steel and promise.
STORY: MATT CHABAN COMPOSITE ILLUSTRATION: ALEXIS CHICOYE & BRETT CROSSE
06 • FLUX
In just more than two years, the Wayne
Morse Federal Courthouse has sprung
from the earth with an architectural
gravitas Eugene has never known. The
building may not yet be complete, but
it still looks stunning, a diamond waiting to emerge from the rough. In October, the doors will open to a building
that could bring the community back
into the legal process, anchor the city's
plans to redevelop downtown and the
riverfront, and inspire future projects.
The new courthouse's design is pushing
the paradigm of how courthouse
architecture is conceptualized, says
Thorn Mayne, founder of Morphosis,
the firm behind the design, and a
Pritzker Prize winner (architecture's
Nobel). Mayne's judicial liaison, federal
judge Michael Hogan, at first resisted
his progressive vision - until Mayne
wooed him with a few thousand
architectural slides.
Now, Hogan even talks like an architect. "One of the design strategies is to
do away with the artificial distinction
between what's outside and what's
inside the building - making it the
same, a shared space," he says. Access,
however, is limited because the same
bridge that gives the courthouse its
grand introduction severs it from the
rest of downtown. City planners
have vowed to address this problem,
and Mayne's design offers plenty
of incentive.
Swathed in seven undulating stainless
steel ribbons that enfold six courtrooms, the fas:ade draws the eye into
the heart of the building. These ribbons sit upon a two-story glass plinth
that exposes the guts of the judicial
process. Emphasizing the interplay
between inside and out, one of the
ribbons juts into the lobby. It terminates halfway and hangs suspended,
like magic.
The Wayne Morse Federal
Courthouse, the progressive
vision of the Morphosis
architecture firm, will be
completed in October 2006.
"Everything is really quite performance-driven in the design," Mayne
says. "Everything is where it needs to
be and does what it has to do." (I
Hear more from Judge Hogan and
check out architectural renderings at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
FLUX • 07
seen • Today in FLUX
Today in FLUX • said
Strictly Ballroom
Modern English
uring the 2004 engagement of a certain pop princess,
Weekly splashed the headline "Britney, The
Bridezilla!" across its cover, circulating the snarky term
among millions of readers. In 2005, bridezilla made its
debut in the most recent edition of the New Oxford
American Dictionary, defined as "an overzealous brideto-be who acts irrationally or causes offense." Along with
bridezilla, the 2,000 latest entries in the dictionary include
Texas Hold 'em, prairie-dogging, fake bake, and supersize.
They also tossed out a handful of words, such as information
superhighway. Why so much mutation? "Because it is a living
language, and like all living things, languages are constantly
growing and changing," says Spike Gildea, head of the
Department of Linguistics at the University of Oregon.
DUs
According to Paul 11 Payack, founder of the Global
Language Monitor, the English language produces some
10,000 words per month. "Smaller dictionaries have to take
words out to make room for newer, more useful words," says
Erin McKean, editor in chief of U.S. dicti~naries for Oxford
University Press. Gildea agrees. "I imagine bling-bling is
probably plenty more common these days than some older,
archaic words that are still in there," he says. There will be
an update of the online version of the dictionary this
summer, including the 2005 "word of the year": podcast.
Gildea's suggestion: "I would like to see 'word' in there in
its new use as a one-word sentence indicating emphatic
agreement. 'Isn't it cool that bling-bling made the
dictionary?' 'Word.'" -Brittany McGrath
MCs do the SATs
Running Man
HIP-HOP BEATS HELP TEENS EXPAND VOCABULARIES
OREGON PHENOM TAKES TRAINING HIGH TECH
R
G
emember the days in high
school English class when,
fretfully twiddling your pencil,
you made absolutely sure to
avoid your teacher's gaze in an
attempt to circumvent the humiliation of defining vocabulary
words in front of the entire class?
The trusty flash cards you
used the night before helped a
little, but when the teacher
arbitrarily demanded explanations for beguile, paradigm,
clairvoyant, or commodious your memory somehow became
a barren wasteland.
Alex Rappaport and Blake Harrison
have joined forces to help today's
generation avoid these terrors. They
compose hip-hop music for use in
the classroom. These two twentysomething entrepreneurs have become
the Manhattan-based hip-hop group
Flocabulary. Their didactic-styled
hip-hop accompanies a series of study
aids and SAT prep workbooks designed
to improve vocabulary comprehension
for high school students.
They've taken Schoolhouse Rock to the
next level. Flocabulary's educational
materials can now be found at Borders
bookstores shelved right alongside The
Princeton Review guides. "When you
put music in a voice that kids can relate
to, they can internalize it," says
Harrison. "Our goal is to get students
to feel like they own the info."
Rappaport combines catchy beats and
funky bass undertones with melodic
instrumental phrasing. While steering
clear of vulgarities, Harrison, a.k.a.
Emcee Escher, keeps communication
limpid/ not too complex/ and clearer
than a window thatjust got Windexed.
His lyrics are cool and clean, easy for
kids to relate to, and user-friendly
for teachers.
Students and teachers like Flocabulary
so much, they're inviting the duo to
perform in classrooms and assembly
halls across the country. In April,
Flocabulary embarked on its nationwide "Shakespeare is Hip-Hop" school
tour. The group is planning another
tour for next winter, which will focus
on teaching history.
The guys in Flocabulary are achieving
success, and so is their audience.
Betty Williams, an eighth grade teacher
at Martin De Porres School in Queens,
New York, tried Flocabulary's materials
on her class. Shortly afterward, her
students received the highest grades on
their report cards all year, and the kids
began using words like loquacious in
their everyday speech. In one instance,
she reprimanded a student for
making a wisecrack in class. The student quipped, "I was just being cogent."
-L. Jordon Frauen
hen it comes to social ballroom
dancing today, there are those
who hunt and those who are hunted.
The·vultures begin their hunt, the
rabbits stand in the shadows, and a few
good men mentally check their dance
cards. Vultures circle their prey, waiting
to pounce as soon as a lass falls away
from the pack. Rabbits dart out from
darkened corners, and then back again,
usually too skittish to invite a beauty to
dance. But for the few good men, the
roles are reversed. Instead of hunting
for a dance partner, women hunt them
for their passion and expertise. Popularized by the recent hit show Dancing
With the Stars, the centuries-old
tradition of ballroom dancing flourishes
again. Young and old attend weekly
dances at the University of Oregon.
As in days of yore, today's enthusiasts
practice ballroom according to the
rules, which provides a peculiar kind of
freedom. Proper ballroom etiquette
requires that one says yes whenever asked
to dance, giving all revelers a chance to
step outside of their normal lives and
into ballroom bliss. -Jennifer Felli
W
alen Rupp is going against the
current - but only because
he's running on an underwater
treadmill. Its jets provide just the
right resistance as he jogs through
the water, part of the low-impact
rehabilitation for his injured foot.
In all other respects, Rupp is on
track with a rich tradition at the
University of Oregon.
The university has borne
witness to the evolution of
American distance running. The
trails of Eugene, Oregon, are the
birthplace of Nike and the
stomping grounds of the late,
legendary Steve Prefontaine.
With an old school work ethic
and some astounding innovations
in conditioning technology,
sophomore Rupp is poised to carry
the torch as America's next great
distance runner.
An Olympic prospect for 2008,
the nineteen-year-old holds the
fastest times ever by an American
junior in the 3,000-, 5,000-, and
10,000-meter events. "He's already
running at an international level,"
says Olympian and personal coach
Alberto Salazar.
In many ways, Rupp's training
is indicative of the technological
progress athletic conditioning has
achieved in the past decade. In
addition to training on the underwater treadmill, he's been known
to sleep in an acclimatized tent in
his bedroom to enrich the oxygen
content in his red blood cells.
More oxygen in his blood
means Rupp's muscles sustain
themselves longer while running.
Rupp will also recover faster after
training sessions.
"You've got to do a lot of mileage
and hard workouts, too. There's
no shortcut to training well, but
the fine-tuning comes in with the
supplemental stuff:" says Rupp.
"It's that little stuff that separates
the good from the great."
Other"supplemental stuff'
includes wearing an oxygen mask
to simulate a high altitude
environment during treadmill
workouts. Without training in
high altitude, which many of his
African counterparts grow up with,
it is difficult to be a competitive
distance runner today. Rupp also
runs through the latest plyometric
drills before and after his workouts.
Runners use these calisthenics to
improve power and explosiveness
in their gait.
But Rupp already possesses the
most important traits of a great
runner: a drive to win and the
discipline to log obscene numbers
of miles. Rupp knows that achieving success comes down to how
badly he wants it. -Lucas Pollock
OPPOSITE: Illustration by
LindsayMonroe
LEFT: University of Oregon
speedster Galen Rupp takes
advantage of the tools
available to him to stay on
track. Photo by Kai-Huei Yau
BELOW: Acouple of
modern-day ballroom
aficionados demonstrate
all the right moves during
aFriday night dance at the
University of Oregon.
Photo by Kate Horton
the smoke, but my hands stopped
quivering.
STORY: CORY ELDRIDGE
COMPOSITE ILLUSTRATIONS:
KAI-HUEI YAU & CORY ELDRIDGE
Amid conflict and violence, the certainty of a simple act is a treasure to cling to
only smoke when I'm drunk
or in the West Bank. The
daily regimen of passing
through Israeli checkpoints
amid disgruntled Palestinians
and skittish soldiers, mosque
loudspeakers blaring Hamas sermons,
and a ceaseless cringe from anticipated
violence injects a persistent flow of
stress that only nicotine cures. Dangerous events are rare, but the everyday
uncertainty makes me chew my cheek
like gum. I prefer smoke to blood in
my mouth.
Normally a pack lasts me a week.
Leaning against the room's wall and
peering out the window, I dragged out
the cigarette - my third in fifteen
minutes. Jordan, my travel companion,
stood across from me fumbling with a
lighter to kindle his second-ever smoke.
The snap, snap, snap of failed ignitions
distracted me from the sounds outside.
Mer his sixth attempt I grabbed the
cigarette, breathed out to steady my
hands, and touched the unlit cigarette
to the other's smoldering end.
As I handed it to Jordan, another
Kalashnikov rifle sounded - chungchung-chung - and we dropped the
cigarette. Another rush of adrenaline
filled my body and sent my head to the
place it goes before a 400-meter dash
or during an orgasm. A second later
the rush plunged into my stomach and
burst. Bile burned my throat as I
swallowed it baCK down.
An hour earlier, a still night greeted us
as we entered Jenin, a northern West
Bank town within five miles of Israel.
Though Jordan is an Ohio boy, his
roots lie in Palestine, and we came to
visit his two doctor-uncles and their
families. We arrived late, so tea and
talk passed quickly and we were soon
shown to our beds. Our room, a guest
quarters atop the families' private
hospital that connects to their homes,
provided a view ofJenin and most of
the local Palestinian refugee camp,
which after several decades of
development had melded to the town.
The machine guns started firing as I
unpacked. The bangs echoed off the
hills and made the shooting seem both
a block and a mile away simultaneously.
We scurried to the window, leaned out,
and looked toward the sound of the
shooting - the refugee camp.
"What gun is that?" Jordan asked.
'~K-47, maybe. It's Palestinians shooting; they would have that gun," I said.
The shooting came sporadically,
sometimes close, sometimes distant.
Sometimes several guns fired at once. I
looked for muzzle flashes, tracers,
explosions even, but the moonlight
only revealed a warren of narrow roads
and winding alleyways that hid the
innards of the refugee camp.
Then, suddenly, as if in reply, another
sound joined, higher-pitched and
faster, and the shooting speeded up.
"I think that's an M-16," I said.
"It must be a fight. A militia must be
fighting the Israelis," Jordan said.
. My heart raced and I dug through my
bag for a cigarette. "Just breathe deep,
you don't need the cigarettes," my
lungs said. "You're not in danger; stop
being a pussy."
"Fuck that," my heart said. "Calm me
down. Now."
I singed my thumb twice with the
lighter and snorted when I smelled
The shooting kept up for thirty
minutes. The Kalashnikovs rumbled
- chung-chung-chung - and the
M-16s shrieked their response.kak-kak-kak. We imagined the noise
was tomorrow's news: "Three Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed
when Palestinian militants from Jenin
attacked an Israeli checkpoint."
As Jordan exhaled the last of the smoke
from his cigarette, a red tracer arced
across the sky, flying from the refugee
camp into a cluster of lights inside
Israel. The shooting slowed but didn't
die till dawn.
or breakfast, Jordan's aunt,
Manar, cooked eggs and
squeezed orange juice. As we
ate, his three young cousins
told us about their week at school,
who the cute boys liked, and their field
trip to Jericho. Mer breakfast, Manar
took the three girls to buy ingredients
for dinner, and we wandered around
the neighborhood. The bombed-out
Palestinian Authority buildings lay a
few blocks from the families' home. So
did the square named for Al-Muhandis,
Hamas' top suicide bomb belt-maker
until a booby-trapped cell phone
exploded in his ear.
We returned to the hospital, where
the front door lacked a "no smoking"
decal. Instead, a "no machine guns"
sticker, complete with a silhouetted
Kalashnikov, decorated the glass. "Jenin
has a gun problem," a nurse told me.
Back in my room, I napped. Guns
woke me.
Just a few shots sounded at first. A
second later more staggered in,
unloading a cacophonous popping of
rounds. The machine guns fired from
within the refugee camp, just blocks
away. Desperate to see the violence, we
ran out of our room and onto the root
leaning over a waist-high wall to look
down the street.
Suddenly, a caravan of cars peeled
around a corner, sped down the road
below us, and entered the camp. When
their brakes stopped screeching, the
firing grew and drowned all other noise.
"Shit, I think the Israelis invaded the
camp," Jordan said. "Those were
reinforcements."
A few moments passed and the cars
restarted. The caravan rushed back
toward us and the shooting accompanied it. As they pointed guns out every
car window like a porcupine's quills,
the fighters fired into the air. I leaned
farther over the wall as the cars passed
below and saw the red muzzle flashes
from the AK-47s and M-16s. Jordan
threw himself to the ground.
"Hey, they have M-16s, too, like the
Israelis," I said over the firing.
"Get down. You're going to get shot,"
Jordan yelled.
I turned around, stared down.the barrel
of a gun twenty feet below, saw it fire,
pushed myself backward, and fell on
the ground. I grabbed my cigarettes,
lit two, and as the cars and blasts faded
away I drew from both before handing
one to Jordan.
The machine guns 'fired from wi,thin'
the refugee camp, just blocks away.
Still shaking, we went downstairs to eat
dinner with the family. We told Manar
and the three girls what happened
and asked what they knew about it.
Nervous and jittery, we asked if
anyone died.
Nour, Jordan's little cousin, smiled at
us. "You mean all the shooting. that
just happened? There was a wedding
in the camp," she said. "They were
celebrating."
Mer dinner I returned to the roof
and lit another cigarette - my sixth
in twenty-four hours. I find repose in
the certainty of some things, cigarettes
for instance. Unlike weddings, I expect
them to kill me. (I
Find out more about the West Bank
through interactive maps and
commentary from the author at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
Cory Eldridge and Kai-Huei
Yau created these
composite photo
illustrations from
multiple images they took
in Palestine and Oregon.
They melded the different
images using Adobe
Photoshop. For adiscussion
of the ethics and creation of
these composites, visit
. influx.uoregon.edu/2006.
hen Elizabeth Thompson
first started selling clothes,
it was out of the back of
her van at Grateful Dead
concerts. She peddled all-natural wares
- made of mostly hemp and organic
cotton - to throngs of Deadheads.
After a few years, she settled in Eugene,
Oregon, where she opened an organic
clothing store called Sweet Potato Pie
in 1997. "When
I first opened, my
customers were
who you would
stereotypically
think ot" says
Thompson.
W
Initially, Thompson's customers
were often hippies
and natural types
- the kind of
folks who tended
to be involved
in eco-friendly
causes. In the
past few years,
however, a more
eclectic clientele
has become fond
of Sweet Potato
Pie's all-natural
frocks. "They
are all different
ages, races, sizes,
and styles," says
Thompson.
PHOTOS: Models James
Boyd, Jessica Evicia,
Sarah Giffrow, and
Tommy Hannam were
photographed wearing
eco-friendly clothing
courtesy of American
Apparel, Greater Goods,
Max Studio, and Sweet
Potato Pie at Mount
Pisgah Arboretum in
Eugene, Oregon.
She has adapted
to her changing
customer base, which includes college
students and professionals, by
increasing the variety of styles she
carries. She has also started selling a
more diverse array of organic materials
and trendier creations.
Apparently, hemp isn't just for
hippies anymore.
And the growing popularity of
organic clothing reaches beyond the
boundaries of progressive Eugene.
Green fashion is trickling into the
mainstream. More and more companies are creating clothing using organic
fabrics woven from hemp, soybean,
bamboo, organic cotton, and wool, as
well as corn products.
ccording to the Organic Trade
Association, there was a 22.7
percent increase in organic
clothing sales from 2002 tQ 2003. And
that number is rising. The Organic
A
14 • FLUX
Exchange, a nonprofit organization
that focuses on boosting the production and use of organically grown
fibers, reports that the number of U.S.
brands using organic materials has
increased from 100 in 2002 to more
than 250 today. The organization also
says that demand for organic cotton
has increased by more than 300
percent in the last three years.
Word about the negative effects of
traditional cotton is getting around.
The Environmental Protection Agency
reports that five of the nine pesticides
used to facilitate the growth of cotton
are proven cancer-causers and contribute to major water pollution, chronic
illness in farm workers, and disease
among wildlife. During the production
of clothing, more chemicals are added.
The Organic Trade Association and the
Organic Exchange are just a couple of
the environmental organizations that
have been working to promote the
benefits of organic goods. Since 1994,
the Sustainable Cotton Project has
joined growers, manufacturers, and
consumers in the fight to use organic
cotton. The project enlisted the help
of Nike to raise awareness. Nike has
committed to using 10 percent organic
cotton in its basic logo T-shirts and
shoes by 2010.
New York City-based nonprofit Earth
Pledge went to some other heavy
hitters to push the sustainable fashion
Edition" line. These u.S. Department
ofAgriculture--eertified organic cotton
versions of popular styles are available
in the company's 125 stores worldwide.
In the next three years, the company
plans to make its entire line organic.
"Our organic line is continuing to
expand as the demand grows for
organic fashion," says Erika Martinez,
representative for American Apparel's
Sustainable Edition. "We expect the
line to continue to grow, and we will
be able to introduce more fashionforward styles."
Max Studio, a Southern Californiabased clothing brand marketed toward
twenty- and thirty-something working
women, brings even more eco-friendly
materials to the fashion scene. The
company now uses bamboo and soybean fabrics in its clothing. Bamboo,
which is the fastest-growing plant in
the world, is easily replenishable and
yields a softer-than-cotton fabric. Soybean, another popular choice among
designers because it can be woven into
a material that resembles silk, produces
a soft, cashmere-like byproduct with
amino acids that nourish the skin.
The Max Studio fall 2005 collection included track jackets, T-shirts,
sweaters, and yoga pants made out of
these organic materials. "Customers
really appreciate our organic line," says
Andrea Hellebuyck, assistant manager
and organic clothing specialist at Max
Demand for organic cotton has increased by more
than 300 percent in the last three years.
agenda. Last year during Fashion Week,
Earth Pledge launched its FutureFashion initiative. The organization
asked twenty-eight top designers to
create and manufacture an outfit for
the runway using only "renewable,
reusable, and nonpolluting fabrics."
Oscar de la Renta designed a stunning ivory ball gown out of hemp and
Ingeo (a corn fiber). He later joined
FutureFashion's board of advisors.
s tales of eco-friendly chicness
began to spread among New
York's high-rolling fashionistas,
Los Angeles-based American Apparel
was doing its part to bring organic
materials in clothing to a new level.
An up-and-coming brand that marries
comfort with fresh design, American
Apparel created the "Sustainable
A
Studio in the California Bay Area.
"They come in and want to know all
about it."
And this growing market is making its
way to fashion schools, too. The
California College of the Arts and
Academy of Art University in the Bay
Area already offer courses in green
design, giving fashion studentscreators of trends to come - the
power to show style devotees of the
future that going green is tres chic.
From a peace-loving subculture to the
runway to the mainstream, organic
clothing is putting its stamp on fashion.
See behind the scenes of the
eco-fashion photo shoot for this story
at influx.uoregon.edu/2006
(I
From the bayous of his untamed past,
a young man emerges to a life of HIV advocacy
STORY: DARRICK MENEKEN
PHOTOS: CORY ELDRIDGE
z is probably the most popular dance club in New Orleans. It's certainly the most
popular gay dance club. In the Big Easy, where bars go all night, Oz never closes
its doors. Customers dance topless and go-go boys gyrate above the crowd. This
is where our story begins, in the French Quarter, before Katrina, a place where Cree Gordon
spent three months drifting like jazz music through the humid air. In tight pants and tiny
tops, he became a regular at clubs such as Oz. "Men wanted me because they thought I was
cute," he says. His voice is sassy and a slight Southern drawl has all but vanished since he
moved to the West Coast more than a year ago. He's biracial, with caramel skin a soft mix of
coffee and cream. When he smiles, his face stretches like silly putty, collecting at the lips as if
invisible hands were pulling on his cheeks.
Cree hails from the sultry sugarcane
country between Lafayette and Baton
Rouge in southern Louisiana. Born
Christopher Gordon, his nickname
Cree stuck by the time he was a junior
in high school. His thin features border
on gaunt, and on any given day you
never know what color his hair will be.
He's nothing if not effusive in speech
and eccentric in dress. He often ends
sentences with "it's whatever" or "it
happens" and enjoys wearing pastel
pink and purple T-shirts printed with
acerbic messages. One reads: rou
don't know my name but your
boyfriend does.
In New Orleans, his slender silhouette
and impish charm made it easy to grab
men's attention. "I was a smart ho," he
says. "I knew how to work it." And
indeed, he was working. When the
nights got late, Cree ran his fingers up
his slim thighs, threw back his long
hair, and stepped out onto steamy
sidewalks that stretch beneath iron lace
balconies. On his best nights he made
$200. He doesn't call it prostitution,
preferring the term "survival sex." He
was homeless; a place to stay or a hot
meal was sometimes his only fee. He's
not sure how many men he slept with
during this time - at least forty - but
after three months, he quit. He'd fallen
in love with a man from Eugene,
Oregon, and headed west.
Today, Cree works as a volunteer
speaker at HIV Alliance, an awareness
and outreach center near the University
of Oregon. He talks at various high
school and college conferences about
the seriousness of HIV/AIDS and how
to best prevent transmission. "This kid
is really going places," says Niki Martin,
director of HIV Alliance's youth
program. Martin believes Cree will
have a future as a public face. "All these
things that he's experienced make him
such a dynamic presenter," she says.
Human Immunodeficiency Virus causes
AIDS, more fully known as Acquired
Immune Deficiency Syndrome, an
incurable disease that destroys the
OPPOSITE: Cree Gordon,
at acrossroad in his life,
has forged anew path as a
University of Oregon
student and activist,
devoting much of his time
to volunteering with
HIV Alliance.
FLUX • 17
the then nineteen-year-old Cree, just a
month removed from his hustling days.
"Sometimes it's hard to elicit
information about risky behavior,"
she says. "But with Cree it didn't take
long for him to open up. There was
less shame." Moore administered the
oral swab test and told Cree he could
receive his results - and the ten
dollars - in two weeks.
ecilia, Louisiana, is little more
than a gathering of houses at
the intersection of three state
highways, a Piggly Wiggly grocery
store, and incessant acres of sugarcane.
The locals, at least the white ones, take
pride in the Confederate general buried
in their cemetery. This is where Cree
grew up and where, at fourteen, he
announced he was gay. His dad, by
then long divorced from his mom,
didn't take it well.
C
"My father stopped doing stuff for
me when I came out," Cree says,
pushing specifics aside. As a child, Cree
changed homes with the regularity of
the sugarcane harvest. He says that he
was "tossed around" and that his
parents never showed him unconditionallove. In turn, he has trouble
moving forward with any type of
relationship with them today. He now
calls his parents by their first names.
"I don't have that respect for them,"
he explains. "I don't like either one of
them." Then he backpedals. "I need
to let go of all those negative things. I
might write them a letter."
ABOVE: Cree takes the
opportunity to round out
his college education with
an African dance class.
immune system and eventually leads
to death. Unprotected sex and shared
intravenous needles are the two most
common ways the virus spreads. But
chatting about this stuff with a room
full of teenagers isn't easy. For relief:
Cree swings a giant red dildo in front
of the crowd and demonstrates the
proper way to unfurl a condom. He
also shows off things such as dental
dams and finger condoms. Kids laugh
- and learn. Later, when he asks
audience members if they can tell by
looking whether or not someone is
HIV-positive, some say yes. When he
asks what they think about him, the
same people guess no.
T
o get from New Orleans to
Eugene, Cree rode a bus for
two and a half days. It was
18 • FLUX
raining when he arrived, and morning
fog clung to the wet one-way streets
that grid downtown. Aside from a sore
back and two days of missed sleep, he
felt good. It was to be a fleeting feeling.
"He's a closet case," Cree now declares
of the man he moved more than 2,000
miles to be with. "He didn't want his
roommate to find out he was gay."
Homeless again, Cree moved into a
recovery house and lived on food
stamps. He hung out at a drop-in
center for homeless youth. When HIV
Alliance's Kelly Moore came to the
shelter and offered him ten bucks to
take an HIV test, he agreed.
Moore, a soft-spoken woman with large
eyes and a morose expression, is the
counseling and testing director for HIV
Alliance. In Cree, she found a young
man with a passionate personality.
"I was impressed with him," she says of
During his junior year in high school
he moved out and attended a boarding
school for gifted teens across the state.
Once, a man asked him out to the
movie Ali and later invited him home.
From there the details abate. Cree
thinks he was drugged. "I remember
him giving me something to drink,"
he recalls. "I remember lying down in
the bed and him taking off my clothes.
And then I kind of passed out." He
woke up naked and pinned stomachdown with the man forcing himself on
him. The following day it hurt to walk.
In the bathroom, he found blood in his
stool. Like that, Cree lost his virginity.
"I don't count it," he says. "I didn't tell
anybody. I didn't think about it. I tried
to be like it wasn't true."
One good memory from back home is
senior prom. Cree slipped into silver
high heels and a dress of red sequins.
His hair, uncut for two years, draped to
his back, and his date, a girl, donned a
tuxedo and top hat. Before their arrival
they got drunk. Through half-blurry
eyes Cree recognized his decorated
high school gym - the same place he
sat through PE classes afraid to break
a sweat. Before the night ended, an
upbeat tune spilled over the floor and
he danced with the prom king.
A few months later he enrolled at
Xavier University in New Orleans
and dove into the city's happening
gay scene. He ambitiously celebrated
Mardi Gras in the French Quarter,
openly twirling his ... well, you know
... in the street. "I said, 'OK, I'm going
to snag me three different dudes and
they're going to be from three different
states.'" He doubled the goal. "Most of
the time I just did it for the attention,"
he says. He wasn't yet charging.
Despite parental conflicts, Cree was
back in Cecilia soon after Mardi Gras.
By April, just a year after senior prom,
he'd dropped out of Xavier and was
home cooking meals, cleaning house,
and longing for the French Quarter.
He told everyone he was going for a
visit, packed a single bag, and bought
a one-way ticket. By day, he snoozed
under leafy trees on the banks of the
Mississippi River, a modern-day Huck
Finn hiding from his past. But unlike
Huck, Cree didn't free a slave as much
as he enslaved himself "I'd pretend for
a night or a weekend or whatev~r that
the person I would go home with cared
about me," he says. As for condoms,
only some men used them.
A year later - just eight days before
his twentieth birthday - Cree arrived
at HIV Alliance in Eugene to get his
results. Inside, Moore prepared to
deliver the news. "That's definitely
the hardest part of the job," she says,
"telling somebody that they have HI~"
Cree responded with shock, and a
few tears after the news set in. It was,
however, not a complete surprise. "He
told me that he had had a dream that
he'd come in to meet with me and that
I'd given him his result," Moore recalls.
"That it was positive."
The dream was prophetic in another
way, too. "My dream kind of skipped,"
Cree remembers, "and I was speaking
in schools."
ree began attending the
University of Oregon in winter
2006 and hopes to earn a family
and human services degree. He still
receives food stamps and now lives in a
sparsely furnished two-bedroom apartment paid for by the Oregon HOME
Tenant-Based Assistance program. He's
an active member of the Black Student
Union and the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual,
Transgender, Queer Alliance.
C
"You know when you're friends with
someone and you can't remember the
one thing that made you friends?
I think he just kind of has that
personality that makes you think
you've known him forever," says Felecia
Wheatfall, who met Cree through
the Black Student Union. "He's really
active and really involved in trying to
make a change."
Of 330,000 Lane County residents,
Cree is one of the 200 to 300 the
HIV Alliance estimates are living with
HIV/AIDS. Before testing positive, he
had unprotected sex with two males
in Eugene - the thirty-something
man he left New Orleans for and a
seventeen-year-old boy. Both have since
tested negative.
Cree hasn't yet begun taking the drug
cocktails that extend life for many
HIV and AIDS patients. Highly Active
Antiretroviral Therapy, also known as
HAART, was introduced in the
mid-1990s and has altered the
perception ofAIDS as a death sentence.
Previously, the average lifespan from
original HIV infection to death was
ten and a half years. With HAART,
the average lifespan is seventeen years,
meaning Cree will probably die before
his fortieth birthday. "He'll feel better
some days than others," Martin says.
"(But) he's not going to get over this."
Cree won't begin a HAART regimen
until his doctor says so. There are some
intense side effects, and for now, based
on his comparatively healthy viral load
and cell count, waiting seems wise.
Wheatfall, who as an elementary school
student watched AIDS kill one of her
aunts, is pleased with Cree's robust
and active pursuit of his goals. "He's
planning for his future just like anyone
else," she says.
ABOVE: Cree now resides in
atwo-bedroom apartment
- amarked improvement
over his homeless life as
ateenager.
In early May, Cree was awarded
The Pride Foundation's James and
Colin Lee Wozumi Scholarship, given
to select HIV-positive students who
focus on the virus' treatment and
eradication. The $1,200 award was
accompanied by a $1,000 Phil Sullivan
Scholarship for students with significant
financial need, also delivered by
The Pride Foundation.
FLUX • 19
Spent too much money during
Spring Break in Cancun.
Your rent is a week late.
Fender bender on your way
back from the airport.
ABOVE: On the one-year
anniversary of his arrival
in Eugene, Cree screams
with fellow demonstrators
at the Day of Silence rally
to protest the bullying and
harassment of gay,
bisexual, and transgender
people nationwide.
oday, Cree is twenty-one years
old and remains sexually active.
"I always let them know," he
says. As he talks, a small collection of
colorful awareness bracelets rings his
lower arm: blue for Don't Hate,
rainbow for Gay Pride, and red for
AIDS Awareness. "If you care about
somebody, that kind of stuff doesn't
matter," he says. "It's just going to be
there." His days of unprotected sex,
however, are somewhere in a land
called Oz.
T
the door at HIV Alliance. "I was like,
(OK Cree, you can do one of two
things: You can dwell on a bad
situation and make it worse, or you can
educate yourself and find something
good about it.' So, that's what I did."
ree primps himself on a stage
erected inside a ballroom on the
UO campus. Students and
community members stream through
the doors and find seats among long
rows of chairs lined
up on a large
"The thing is, I made a choice. I don't want hardwood floor.
hundred
somebody to feel sorry for me, because I'm Eight
people come to the
not going to feel sorry for myself:' drag show. Electric
rock plays overhead
as performers
apply makeup. Men turn into women,
There's no way to know who gave
women into men. They're letting it all
him HI~ Based on his viral load, he
hang out. Steamy renditions of "Save
can only say, with tragic irony, that
a Horse, Ride a Cowboy"; "Man in
he contracted it while using survival
the Mirror"; and Queen's "Princes of
sex. Asked if he has any regrets, he
the Universe" kick off the night. Then
shakes his head. "The thing is, I made
comes "Be Without You" by Mary
a choice. I don't want somebody to feel
J. Blige. Cree prances on stage in a
sorry for me, because I'm not going to
silky, brown body suit and kitten heel
feel sorry for mysel£" Two days after
sandals. His hair is much shorter than
receiving his test results, he reopened
20 • FLUX
C
Trip to the vet because
Sparky swallowed the remote
while you were away.
it was in New Orleans and he wears
it pinned back in a shock of bright
orange dye. "We love you, Cree,"
someone yells from the crowd as he
begins lip synching. He swings his arms
wide on the high notes, like a cross,
and as the music ends he ducks behind
the curtain to loud applause.
A few weeks later he makes a more
quiet statement. As part of the Day of
Silence, an annual event that mimics
the silent fear faced by gay, bisexual,
and transgender youth, he places a
strip of red tape across his mouth and
refuses to speak. At five o'clock that
evening he joins others who had done
the same in the student union plaza.
In chorus, the high school and college
students tear the tape from their
mouths and release a long overdue
scream into a warm spring night.
"He's somebody that you kind of have
a sense that he's a survivor," Moore
says. (Md he will be a survivor no
matter what." (I
It happens. That's why we offer Book Buyback.
At the University of Oregon Bookstore, we want to make it easier for you to save money. Go online
to UOBookstore.com/coursebooks/CCRA and check current buyback prices for your books. Use
our online classifieds to sell or find textbooks that other students are offering and receive email alerts
when we are conducting our buybacks.
UNIVERSITY OF OREGON
Experience how Cree Gordon breaks
the silence at an LGBT rally at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
UOBookstore.com/coursebooks/CCRA
BOOKSTORE
895 E. 13th • UOBookstore.com
Burlesque is reborn, this time with a tattooed edge
STORY: ADRIENNE VAN DER VALK
PHOTOS: NICOLE BARKER
D
ahlia Black has spent eight hours under a tattoo artist's
needle. Her body has holes in twelve places that weren't
there when she was born. Her hair is short and black,
unless she's wearing waist-length blue hair extensions. She is
no stranger to adorning her body, but when she steps behind
the back-lit curtain during one of her performances, Black
disappears and so does all the dye, ink, and stainless steel. She
becomes Sasha, "Queen of the Screen," a sensuous silhouette
removing her clothing one piece at a time.
Sasha is one of the performance
personas Black, twenty-five, adopts
when headlining Black Rose Burlesque,
a variety show she co-owns and manages.
No stranger to the stage, she started out
doffing her duds two years ago when
she spied an ad soliciting dancers for a
"Broadway Review" to be held at John
Henry's, a bar in Eugene, Oregon.
"They did a strip-oft and I got up there
and did my thing. Afterward, I decided
to give them a call," Black says, tucking
her striped stockings under a lacy black
crinoline skirt.
Black began her career in sex work as
a "cam girl" at twenty, doing live Web
camera shows on the Internet and
working as a phone-sex operator.
"Eventually I got tired of doing that
stuff I got married, and my husband
was the only guy or girl I was interested
in gratifying sexually. I had been into
burlesque, and I have always been a
huge fan of people like Betty Paige and
Ducky DooLittle. I wanted to do something that was funny and sexy," she says.
After trying out her pasties at John
Henry's, Black and her friend, Rose,
decided to start their own troupe
- classic erotic performance with a
modern, gothic edge. They combined
their names and debuted in August
2005 as Black Rose Burlesque.
"Alterna-porn," as some social commentators have dubbed acts such as Black
Rose, has made a recent splash; in
cities such as San Francisco and New
York, large, commercially successful
burlesque troupes have shimmied their
way into the pocketbooks of newly
OPPOSITE: Dahlia Black,
co-founder of Black Rose
Burlesque, strikes aclassic
pinup girl pose.
FLUX • 23
as an art form distinct from mainstream pornography.
Americas relationship with raunch
is a gold mine of tantalizing material
for contemporary artists exploring
sexual media. Burlesque high-kicked
its way across the pond from England
in the 1840s and enjoyed more than a
century of sinful popularity before the
shock value became dated. Originally,
burlesque performers entertained with
the goal of mocking or "burlesquing"
stuffy upper-class operas and plays,
providing both arousal and social
commentary on an increasingly stratified socioeconomic system. During
World War II, pinup photography
gained mainstream distinction from
"smut" when well-known movie
actresses did bathing suit photo shoots
to boost the flagging spirits of
American GIs. The pinup girl became
frozen in time, her iconic one-piece
bathing suit and conical brassiere
maintaining their staying power until
sex visionaries such as Suicide Girls
co-founder Selena Mooney resurrected
and redressed her in studded collars
and leather G-strings.
Modern artists such as Black and
Mooney find themselves juggling the
task of reinventing naughty art forms
in an era when images of women have
typically been tailored for men. By
widening the intended audience to
include anyone with a taste for tassels,
alterna-pornographers hope to rescue
erotica by re-establishing it as a less
stigmatized forum for self-expression.
porn-tolerant urban hipsters. The
Portland-based Suicide Girls have
flaunted their inked and bejeweled
"Burlesque is an art. That's how
we see it. It is not a strip show:'
bodies online and onstage since 2001.
Even Playboy is representing a friskier,
more punk-rock aesthetic among its
airbrushed centerfolds. Suddenly, if the
24 • FLUX
nudity is partial and the girls look as if
they would just as soon kick your ass
as sleep with you, alterna-porn projects
find themselves in a financially
lucrative niche market and earning
respect in the progressive community
for being "artistic" and "empowering."
But as stylized nudity unapologetically
stomps its way into the public eye
wearing stiletto heels, anti-porn critics
resist the notion that alterna-porn
has legitimately earned its reputation
Black seeks inspiration for her variety
show from the work of modern
revivalist dancers like Ducky DooLittle
or Dita Von Teese. In one of Black
Rose's sets, a dancer balances a sword
on her head while gyrating to Rob
Zombie. In another, a woman twirls
her pasties to techno and strobe lights.
The acts are distinctly crafted to express the personalities of the performers, although Black and her partner
maintain some creative boundaries to
ensure that the show adheres to their
standards of taste and artistic merit.
Like Black Rose, the Web site Gods
Girls follows in the steps of an increasing number of enterprises owned and
operated by women, being one of the
newest sites to spring from the recent
punk-porn style explosion.
"It all comes down to taste. Different
strokes for different folks -literally!"
jokes Gabrielle, nineteen, one of the
most active models in the Gods Girls
scene and an art photographer in her
own right. "It's not sugar-coated. It's
not fake. The site asks you to be real."
Gabrielle is a classic Gods Girls beauty:
dark haired and sharp-featured with an
abstract ink pattern winding around
her arms, legs, and torso. She did a
variety of modeling gigs before Gods
Girls and has an opinion of what
the site provides an alternative to. "I
couldn't do it with anything less than
the best. It is an opportunity to get
involved in modeling and participate
in something that is quality," she says.
"A lot of sites out there are cheap and
tacky. You can take the first thing that
comes along, or you can wait for
something like Gods Girls."
But what does "something like Gods
Girls" actually mean? Do tattoos and
a female manager make some porn
okay, while the general depiction of
a sex act harms women and society
at large? Pornography's traditional
critics refuse to draw the distinction.
Those who verbalize their uneasiness
about porn-positive developments
express concerns ranging from personal
squeamishness to global fear for the
welfare of women. Feminist dialogue
is especially heated. Anti-pornography
activists such as Catharine MacKinnon
and the late Andrea Dworkin have
asserted that pornography's effects
are tangibly harmful - enough to
justify civil claims of sex discrimination
against its producers in some cases.
While others take a less extreme view,
the alterna-porn debate often includes
the argument that the welfare of
women in front of the camera cannot
be the only consideration when sex
goes up for sale. If looking at naked
women does create a culture of objectification, it ceases to matter if the model
felt empowered when the shutter
snapped shut.
Annie Sprinkle has borne the brunt
of anti-pornography criticism since
she starred in her first blue movie at
eighteen. A self-described "post-porn
modernist," Sprinkle theorizes that by
lumping all sex work together, society
is denied the opportunity to learn
more about the positive and artistic
properties of sex.
"It is what you bring to it. There
are many different genres of pinup
modeling, different ways of doing it,"
she says. "But trying to totally stop or
repress the freedom of creative sexual
expression in art, entertainment, and
Black's promotional efforts have paid
off The site generated 339 "friends"
and recently attracted the attention of
one of the women responsible for
"Experimental, sexually oriented work is a chance to explore our
bodies, our sexuality, our culture, and put it out there for everyone
to talk about and look at and ponder:'
the media is when you get into even
more trouble." In Sprinkle's mind, the
ability to maintain personal power is
really up to the individual who puts
her sexuality on the market.
For Black, starting her own dance
troupe meant drawing clear boundaries
around a beloved art form with regard
to public nudity. "I really, really, really
make sure my girls go by the code of
the old time: girls wearing pasties, no
nipples showing. Burlesque is an art.
That's how we see it. It is not a strip
show. If you call something burlesque
and it's not, that can be harmful,"
she says.
Black flirted with the allure of becoming a Suicide Girl and was literally
on her way to meet Mooney when
she changed her mind. "I knew a lot
of girls in Portland who were Suicide
Girls, and I backed out because of the
way they were treated on the street. On
a Web site, you can't say what you are
trying to do. On a stage, you can
explain to people. I always do that at
the beginning of a show. There was a
time when these guys started yelling
at us, 'When do the whores take their
clothes offi'" she says. "I stopped the
show and came out and told them if
they wanted to see that, they should go
to a strip club; that's not what we do.
They didn't give us any trouble after that."
This conversation is exactly what
Sprinkle hopes the evolution of sexual
entertainment can promote. "Experimental, sexually oriented work is a
chance to explore our bodies, our
sexuality, our culture, and put it out
there for everyone to talk about and
look at and ponder."
Black set up an account at MySpace.
com to publicize Black Rose and keep
the digital world abreast of its latest
gigs and changes to the act. They
recently added a new troupe member
and have plans to dance in a Portlandbased show called "Creepy Cabaret."
keeping burlesque alive in the twentyfirst century.
"Ducky DooLittle is one of my heroes,
and she wrote to me! She's coming
to Portland and she wants to see the
show," Black says.
Black lights a celebratory cigarette and
reminds herself to make an appointment to have her hair extensions
re-braided before performing for the
woman who has inspired her for almost
a decade. "Of course she can come to
the show," she says. "She can come for
free. I'm going to buy her a drink." (I
Take a tour of the history of burlesque
in American culture at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
OPPOSITE: Azooming,
long-exposure photo
captures Black Rose
Burlesque performer
Morgan Lynn as she
fluidly mimics the motions
of her steel dancing partner
-a sword.
BELOW: Dancing to
"I Alone" by Live, Black
Rose Burlesque member
Julie unapologetically
sashays across the bar at
Samurai Duck in Eugene.
"Not only do I run
everything in the furniture
factory, for the most part
the only difference between
me and my boss is that he
wears agreen shirt and
goes home at night:'
-Tom Adair, Oregon State
Penitentiary
PREVIOUS: Tom Adair
serves as the furniture
factory foreman.
RIGHT: Transfer inmates
march into Pendleton
State Penitentiary.
BELOW: An inmate at
Oregon State Penitentiary
sprays furniture that will
be distributed
throughout the state.
"The older members train incoming people in math, software, and computer mapping processes. The greatest benefit of this program
is that the continuing knowledge is passed on from inmate to inmate:'-Kevin Roper, Oregon State Correctional Institution
ABOVE: Eastern Oregon
Correctional Institution
inmate Michael Newton
tailors Prison Blues jeans
to be sold worldwide.
LEFT: Candida Rodriguez,
an inmate at Coffee Creek
Correctional Facility, sits
among furniture and a
toilet constructed by
male inmates.
FLUX • 29
"Stainless steel is avery hightechnical type of welding; it takes
alot of finesse. It's the top end of
the business. That's gratifying."
-James L. Garrick,
Oregon State Penitentiary
RIGHT: Michael Wheeler,
an inmate at Oregon State
Penitentiary, grinds a
stainless steel bed frame.
BELOW: Helena Allee
embroiders shirts for local
companies at Coffee Creek
Correctional Facility.
OPPOSITE: The tight quarters
of Cell Block Aare home to
nearly 25 percent
of the inmates at
Oregon State Penitentiary.
Hear the voices of these inmates at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
30 • FLUX
Grand Ronde tribal member Don Day
strives to restore culture
through traditionallonghouse construction
STORY: SENA CHRISTIAN
on Day's favorite wooden
mallet is broken. A large
chunk of its head has fallen
off, and Day knows the thing is
a lost cause, but he still looks up
hopefully and jokes, "Maybe duct
tape will fix it."
He tosses it into a pile of discarded
mallets and wedges hiding beneath
the shade of old-growth western
red cedar logs, all between 200
and 400 years old, killed in the
1910 Tillamook fire. The trees lie
in wait on the reservation of the
Confederated Tribes of the Grand
Ronde, which is located thirtyfive miles west of Salem, Oregon,
underneath the shadow of the sacred
Spirit Mountain. The warm April
sun beats down on Day and Michael
Michelle, his one-man crew for
PHOTOS: KATE HORTON
the afternoon, and the men sweat
continuously.
Day picks up another mallet and
inserts a wooden wedge into a
crevice on top of a forty-foot log. He
strikes the wedge a half dozen times,
attempting to split the log down the
middle. Each time the split widens,
Day moves to another section of
it, inserts the wedge, and strikes it
with the thirty-pound mallet. The
tools and plank-splitting technique
are reminiscent of the technology
the tribe used the last time it built a
longhouse in the valley more than 150
years ago. Day repositions himsel£
the four diamond studs in his left ear
catching the sunlight as he bends his
legs for strength, and strikes a blow.
Nothing happens. Or so it seems.
FLUX • 33
and canoes. The soft red-brown
timber, resistant to decay, is also used
in outdoor construction - typically in
the building of longhouses.
Day, a Grand Ronde tribal elder
and University of Oregon graduate
student, and his crew are revitalizing
the vanishing Native American
practice of traditionallonghouse
building throughout the Pacific
Northwest. For Day's master's
project, he is building a Kalapuyastyle longhouse on the Grand Ronde
reservation, involving tribal members
in the process. However, the tribe's
tumultuous past and conflicted
present make traditional plank
splitting and the construction of a
longhouse an arduous task. A history
of oppression, violent conflict, and
forced removal from native lands, a
tribal council with divided interests,
and apathetic tribal members make
every plank splitting a struggle.
On a warm spring day, the snow
freshly melted, Day and his
girlfriend, Delva, venture just north
of the Willamette National Forest to
Breitenbush to split out planks from a
100-foot red cedar. Rot has eaten away
at the tree, estimated to be about 600
years old, breaking the five-foot thick
trunk completely from its roots. Day
gets right to work, using a chain saw to
smooth out a rough edge. He dislikes
the rare but necessary times when he
uses the modern tool.
"All manner of needs are brought to
the longhouse, and elders provide
instruction to individuals and
families," says Gordon Bettles,
Klamath tribal member and interim
steward of the UO Many Nations
Longhouse. "It's a place of dialogue. A
place to bring your problems and have
them decided in a traditional way."
Day strikes the log again, and it
crackles loudly.
"It's time for hot dogs," says Delva
three hours later. Day will be just a
Although longhouses are built in
several different styles, entrance doors
"It's talking to us," Michelle says.
When a western red cedar talks, the
men listen, pausing to allow the log
to work on its own. The log splits ten
feet and stops.
Range in western Oregon. Day waits
for men traveling from their homes in
Salem, Eugene, or Albany to arrive at
his house in Stayton so they can embark
on an eight-hour day of recovering
fallen timber in the forest. When Day's
tired of waiting, he goes alone.
Longhouses have a deep historical
and cultural significance. They are
spiritually blessed places where
members privately gather to
participate in sacred ceremonies,
dances, and rites of passage.
"We've forgotten many things. We're becoming
more distant from our past and there is not a lot
being done to preserve our culture."
At this rate, they should be done by dark.
ay rarely rushes, moving
instead within his own
timeframe. His typical style
of baggy jeans and a T-shirt
mixed with a leather vest and a long
ponytail of curly grayish-black hair
illustrates the cultural transitions that
concern him.
"How fast are we going and what
have we forgotten?" asks Day.
"We've forgotten many things. We're
becoming more distant from our past
and there is not a lot being done to
preserve our culture."
Although notorious for never being
on time to class, for allowing tractors
to pass him on his 1-5 commute, and
for his long-winded conversational
manner, Day does not always take
things slow. When it comes to the
revival of traditionallonghouse
building - integral to the lives of
Oregon's Native American people for
thousands of years before the arrival
of white settlers - he says there is no
time to waste.
Often, though, Day must wait. He
waits for the snow to melt so he and
his crew can drive to the Willamette
National Forest, which extends along
the western slopes of the Cascade
second. Ten minutes later, he grills
up a hot dog at the campfire. Three
minutes after that, Day is back on top
of the log, splitting another plank.
Delva extinguishes the campfire. It's
time to go, she says for the fifth time.
He just needs a couple of minutes,
he responds, which turn into thirty.
Finally, Day picks up the first of
twenty planks to load into his truck.
Heavy with water, the planks weigh
on his shoulders, but he does not ask
for help.
always face east toward the rising sun,
which goes up and across the sky,
witnessing everything down below.
Tribal members bring food to cook
in the fireplace or prepare in the
kitchen, as ceremonies often last
several days and usually go all night.
Longhouses are also ideal places for
storytelling. Currently, when tribal
members gather on the Grand Ronde
reservation for storytelling events,
they find themselves sitting in a
school gymnasium.
When a western red cedar falls to the
forest floor, the U.S. Forest Service calls
Day to see if he is interested, issues
him a permit to recover the wood for
cultural purposes, then basically hands
him a map and points him in the right
direction. It's not exactly as simple as
going to a lumberyard, but the Forest
Service's debris is Day's gold mine.
Once complete, the longhouse will
accommodate between 300 and 400
people. Tribal members will no longer
have to travel fifty-five miles south to
the reservation of the Confederated
Tribes of the Siletz for funerals, or
host cultural events in gymnasiums.
Besides the community center,
wellness center, housing authority
offices, library, education building,
and recently built housing for elders,
tribal members will have one more
reason to visit Grand Ronde.
The Grand Ronde consider the
western red cedar the tree of life,
having supported Native American
tribes in the Pacific Northwest for
thousands of years. Tribal members
utilize every part of the coniferous
evergreen tree, stripping and
harvesting the bark to make rope,
basketry, and clothing, and splitting
the wood to make totem poles, tools,
"The project is pulling the people
together at the reservation," says Day.
Day never needed any help being
pulled back to his community.
Although he did not grow up on the
Grand Ronde reservation, as is the
PREVIOUS: After splitting
planks out of alOO-foot
western red cedar,
Don Day assesses the
afternoon's work.
OPPOSITE: Day splits a
fallen old-growth tree in
the Willamette National
Forest, an hour east of
Salem, Oregon. That
afternoon, he split twenty
planks for the planned
longhouse.
FLUX • 35
ABOVE: longhouse project
volunteer Michael Michelle
forces open asplit log on the
Grand Ronde reservation.
case with most living tribal members,
he always keeps one foot on the
land. Before returning to school,
he worked as an archaeological
site monitor for the tribe. Actively
involved with tribal affairs, he serves
in an appointed position on the
Cultural Committee, an advisory
group to the tribal council and other
departments. He also acts as the de
facto foreman for the construction
of the longhouse, a role he was at
first reluctant to fill. Day wants the
longhouse to be built by and for the
people. He does not want it to be
seen as "The Don Day Project."
Day cultivated his interest in plank
splitting a few years ago when he
8,000 years ago
18405 and '50s
Ancestors of the presentday Grand Ronde enter
the Willamette Valley.
Massive migration of
white settlers to Oregon
along the Oregon Trail.
36 • FLUX
I
:
I
The government
establishes the Grand
Ronde reservation
through treaty
arrangements and,
later, through the
Executive Order of
June 30, 1857.
took an undergraduate course in
traditional technologies at the UO.
As a flintknapper, he already had
some traditional technology down,
manually manufacturing arrowheads
and blade points out of obsidian. For
his term project, he split a block of
wood using a wooden wedge as the
whole class stood watching at the
south end of Condon Hall on the
UO campus. Now he splits logs much
longer and thousands of pounds heavier.
"You look at the logs and you
can't imagine that you can use
this technology to do this, but
he does," says Jon Erlandson,
UO anthropology professor and
Day's graduate adviser. "He's just
unstoppable. He's like a force of
nature. He gets something in his
mind and nothing is going to stop
him. I'm convinced the guy could
do anything."
Once he learned the basics of plank
splitting, Day knew right away that
he needed to bring this knowledge
back with him to the reservation. He
saw the use of a forgotten practice as
a way to reawaken tribal members'
connection to their past. Day and
the Grand Ronde Tribal Council,
however, didn't quite see eye-toeye. He wanted permission and
funding to construct a longhouse
using traditional plank-splitting
techniques, but some council
1856
1872
February 8, 1887
The United States
removes numerous
tribes from their laonds
in the Willamette Valley
and surrounding areas
and relocates them
to the Grand Ronde
reservation.
Farm plots on the
Grand Ronde reservation
are allotted to individual
Native American families,
who immediately
fence and clear their
land allotments to
build homes.
The General Allotment
Act becomes law,
splitting up 33,000
acres of the Grande
Ronde reservation into
270 tracts for individual
Native Americans.
members were confused as to why
they couldn't just buy finished
boards from a lumberyard. Day
persuaded the council to let him
build the longhouse traditionally
with the help of a UO architecture
student to draw up plans and
tribal members to build the future
community cornerstone.
"By invoking tribal members in the
process, he is teaching them how to
get back in touch with the history
of their people," says Erlandson. "A
lot of people are really excited about
what he's doing."
hen not working on
the Grand Ronde
longhouse project, Day
travels throughout the
Pacific Northwest, conducting planksplitting demonstrations for crowds
of eager learners at the Cow Creek
tribal headquarters in Roseburg, for
the Coquille in Coos Bay, and for the
Haida people on the Queen Charlotte
Islands, British Columbia. In the
world according to Day, splitting logs
is easy, something anyone can do. He
just needs to supply tribal members
with the appropriate wooden tools and
demonstrate their use.
The support of the tribal council,
however, still goes in waves.
On a drizzly Saturday afternoon,
against the backdrop of a mural of
1954
The Indian
Reorganization Act
allows the Grand Ronde
to purchase land to
provide homes for
its people.
Congress passes the
Termination Act,
dissolving the Grand
Ronde's status as atribe
and effectively severing
the trust between the
government and the
Grand Ronde.
I
I
Tribal leaders begin
the laborious task of
re-establishing the
Confederated Tribes of
the Grand Ronde.
W
November 22, 1983
September 9, 1988
Congress passes the
Grand Ronde Restoration
Act, which restores
the trust between the
government and the
tribe. The act reverses
most ofthe 1954
Termination Act's effects.
President Reagan
signs the Grand Ronde
Reservation Act, giving
9,811 acres of original
reservation land back to
the tribe.
the South Umpqua Falls, more than
thirty people gather in a room at the
Cow Creek reservation administration
building. Lewis LaChance, the softspoken Umpqua tribal elder who
organized the event, leads the group
in prayer. Then Day steps aside as his
three trusted volunteers create a small
cleft in the eight-foot red cedar and
insert a large wooden wedge into the
space. One volunteer picks up an oak
mallet and strikes the wedge four times
before a plank splits oft freeing itself
from the rest of the log. Soon a woman
from the audience wants to try. By the
end of the demonstration, volunteers
have split twelve planks, which they
will eventually manicure and add to
ABOVE: Day, an
interdisciplinary master's
student in anthropology,
archaeology, geology, and
linguistics at the University
of Oregon, hopes to
complete the longhouse by
the end of the summer.
2000
The Grand Ronde
acquire a10,300-acre
reservation consisting
mostly of timber land
near the Polk County
city of Grand Ronde.
The Grand Ronde
begin construction of
the Spirit Mountain
Casino, which is owned
and operated by Spirit
Mountain Development
Corporation, an entity of
the Grand Ronde.
The casino earns $63
million in profits for the
Confederated Tribes of
the Grand Ronde. It is
the most-visited tourist
destination in Oregon.
FLUX • 37
the stockpile of finished boards on the
Grand Ronde reservation.
"When I have all the material gathered,
then it will be an invitation to the
people to build the house," says Day to
the group. "The people will build the
house. I'm not building the house."
"When I have all the material gathered,
then it will be an invitation to the people
to build the house. The people will build
the house. I'm not building the house:'
During the Cow Creek demonstration,
Day often comments on the
importance of history, but he does not
dwell on the negative aspects of the
past, instead focusing on his hope for
the future. He does not mention the
year 1857, when a treaty arrangement
and executive order by the United
States government removed more
than twenty Native American tribes
and bands from western Oregon and
northern California, relegating them to
a reservation located on the eastern side
of the coastal range on the headwaters
of the South Yamhill River. He does
not mention the Rogue River Wars of
the mid-1850s, when the U.S. army
and local militias violently displaced
the Rogue River Indians of southern
Oregon. He does not mention the
130 years when the U.S.-established
Confederated Tribes of the Grand
Ronde was left landless on its own
land. Nor does Day mention how tribal
members lost their sovereign rights
to water and salmon fishing, and the
right to sustain a cultural base. Native
people had no choice but to disperse,
doing what was needed to survive.
Maintaining culture was not a priority.
(~er the split up of the tribes,
traditional technologies died out and
went by the wayside," says LaChance.
"There were few things left, few things
in our memory, and few things written
down. Everyone was just trying to
survive after Rogue River. We are just
now waking up."
ABOVE: Day uses
handmade tools, such as
this oak mallet, to craft
the materials for the
longhouse. Depending on
the length and thickness
of the log, he and his crew
may go through as many
as five mallets and thirty
wedges in aday's work.
38 • FLUX
During the Cow Creek demonstration,
Day chooses not to discuss how
white colonizers, recognizing the
importance of central rallying places
for tribal members, destroyed dozens
of longhouses and killed the headmen
who were in positions to rally the rest
of the tribe against intruders. When the
colonizers destroyed the longhouses, it
was one more way they decimated the
spirit of a people who no longer had
the will or ability to resist the takeover
of their lands, which forced them to
abandon traditional ways of life.
During the demonstration, however,
Day does mention the year 1954,
when, with the stroke of a pen,
the U.S. government passed initial
legislation terminating the Grand
Ronde tribe and reservation, and
after a two-year process of adding and
subtracting members from tribal rolls,
completed the termination.
In 1983, with the passage of the
Grand Ronde Restoration Act, tribal
members began the difficult task of
re-establishing not only their
reservation but also the cultural
knowledge once housed there.
raditional plank spl.itting,
it turns out, takes tIme.
The tribal council pressures
Day to finish the longhouse
project quickly, often asking him why
it's taking so long. But a traditional
longhouse, just like a reservation, won't
be built overnight.
T
While the council supports the project,
it directs the majority of its attention
elsewhere. Some tribal members accuse
the council of being too consumed with
the Spirit Mountain Casino, which
the tribe has operated for the last ten
years. Although revenue generated by
the casino helps create jobs and develop
economic and social services, some say
the casino's presence has taken its toll in
other areas.
"Everyone seems to be so casino-crazy,"
says David Lewis, Grand Ronde tribal
member and a UO Ph.D. student in
anthropology. "Everything is going
into the casino, and there isn't a
corresponding development of culture.
We're not really running a tribal
nation; we're running a business."
Additionally, the council focuses on
resolving controversial enrollment
policies, recently creating a committee
to address the issue. Native American
tribes issue their own enrollment cards
and establish their own requirements for
proving ances~ Currently, just under
5,000 people are enrolled in the Grand
Ronde, but strict requirements prevent
many others from enrolling with the tribe.
Day remains largely unbothered by
tribal council politics or historical
conflict. He is too concerned with how
to get tribal members, both enrolled
and unenrolled, back to the reservation.
He sees the longhouse project as part of
the answer, but he struggles to maintain
involvement. For the first several
months, the project only attracted a
few volunteers. After Day advertised
in Smoke Signals, the tribe's newsletter,
many tribal members stepped forward,
and a crew of about twenty volunteers,
primarily men, assembled.
Even with the crew, Day sometimes
has to work alone.
"It's really hard to sustain involvement
when there are people saying it's
unnecessary," says Lewis.
Day agrees that the longhouse project
would go faster with the council's
full support and funding to pay the
crew. Then again, the structure would
also be built sooner if Day purchased
finished boards from a lumberyard.
But completing the project quickly
is not the point. And so Day carries
on, hoping to obtain enough timber,
split enough planks, and maintain
enough volunteers to complete the
Grand Ronde longhouse by its fastapproaching August deadline. If he
misses the deadline, so be it. The
longhouse will eventually be built
and, in the meantime, the satisfaction
of sharing traditional plank splitting
knowledge with the technology's other
rightful owners keeps Day going.
"It's a gift," says Day. "I can't keep it.
I have to give it back."
B
ack at the reservation, the
sun has started its descent.
The heat subsides but the
plank splitting does not.
Bark flies off wooden mallets as Day
and Michelle work next to each other
on top of the log, striking the wedges.
"We look like we know what we're
doing," jokes Day.
"The tree's cooperating today,"
says Michelle.
The red cedar's water-soaked end
troubles the men. Michelle gives the
log a few solid kicks. Suddenly, the log
tears apart, exposing its moist inner
core, allowing the light wind to spread
the wood's rich fragrance. Although
slightly rotted at one end, the log will
produce at least twenty planks. Two
hours earlier, the split log was nothing
more than a fire-killed red cedar
recovered from the forest floor.
ABOVE: Day rests after a
long afternoon of plank
splitting with Michelle.
Sometimes, up to twenty
volunteers step forward to
help and Day will randomly
select avolunteer to serve
as the boss.
"It looks good," says Day. "I'm
pleased with it. That's a page of
history right there." (I
See photos and hear the photographer's
impressions of a plank-splitting
demonstration with Don Day at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
FLUX • 39
Amanda Gribben rescues America's most condemned
dogs because no one else will
STORY: ROBIN MUNRO
PHOTOS: KATIE GLEASON & SHAINA SULLIVAN
verything about the Multnomah County pound is cold. Cold
metal. Cold concrete. Cold bars. Cold skin-slicing air. It could
be a meatpacking plant. In a sense, it is. This is where the county
stores unwanted animals - strays, discards, rabies threats, bite threats
- neglected and abused, homeless animals.
Amanda Gribben, pit bull advocate, needs no
direction or permission. Preoccupied with a
dog intake, the receptionist ignores the
slender, heavily pierced redhead who moves
directly to the cages. From narrow pens
divided by concrete walls, dogs bark hysterically.
Little red Chows with lioness faces twinkle,
wooing passersby. Middle-aged behemoths
balance on hind legs, bellowing. Some dogs
barely make eye contact. Others look sick,
lonely, dejected, and old. They sit behind signs
that read "Senior - Half Price" or "Beauty is
only skin deep." Amanda points at one dulleyed Am Staff mix pacing from kennel craze.
"1 give that one two weeks," she says. "He's
given up." She bends down to meet a little
black pit bull at eye level. "This one's got great
focus," she says, running her finger back and
forth in front of his eyes as though delivering
a sobriety test. "I'd walk this one." Amanda is
easily mistaken as an employee at the shelters.
At least ten keys hang from her belt loop and
her presence is commanding.
Amanda directs Pawsitively Pit Bull, the only
no-kill pit bull sanctuary and adoption
nonprofit in the United States, just an hour
north of Portland, Oregon. Along with
40 • FLUX
co-founder Darren Linder, a roster of ninetyone volunteers, and a five-member board,
Amanda rehabilitates, trains, boards, and
adopts out pit bulls rescued from euthanasia
C\t shelters in Oregon and Washington. Today,
we're scouting shelters for pit bulls with high
potential for rehabilitation.
Yes, pit bulls. The dogs bred to fight. The dogs
featured on the evening news for attacking
small children. Dog of choice for wife beaters,
drug dealers, and scabrous street thugs
nationwide. Short and squat and muscular
and mean. Pit bulls.
"How can you want to save aggressive dogs?"
Amanda hears that a lot, usually prefaced by,
"Hey, you stupid bitch." But the thirty-yearold activist has always been a bit of a rebel.
After getting the hell out of her 402-student
high school in upstate New York, she moved
to Eugene and enrolled at the University of
Oregon at seventeen. She studied Marxism.
She chained herself to trees slated for removal
in downtown Eugene and got pepper-sprayed
and arrested. She worked for ShelterCare, a
nonprofit emergency homeless shelter in Lane
County. A flower-powered eighteen-year-old
OPPOSITE: Lucky to
be alive, Jolly
frolics at Amanda
Gribben's sanctuary,
Pawsitively Pit Bull.
FLUX • 41
in flowing skirts, Amanda managed
200-pound men on mescaline, prostitutes on heroin, and angry drunks
wandering the halls throughout the
night. She weighs 122 pounds. She
earned $10 an hour.
These days, Amanda makes $12.50
an hour as a veterinary technician at
a clinic in Portland. "I've gone full
circle," she says. "1 was raised poor. For
a while, 1 had a good job, new car, new
clothes. I'm back to [barely] making
ends meet." The first female staff
member to work with teenage sex
offenders at one facility, Amanda
worked in mental health for thirteen
years. "When other staff would burn
out, they would call Amanda because
she's got that way with patients,"
says Darren, who met Amanda while
working in mental health. But after
getting a call at 2:00 a.m. to identify
the body of a twenty-four-year-old
paranoid schizophrenic she'd seen only
twenty hours before - the latest in a
string of suicides at the facility - she'd
had enough. "1 think I'm done," she
thought. "1 don't think 1 can do this
anymore." So she cashed in her retirement and started rescuing pit bulls
- creatures that don't commit suicide.
BELOW: Amanda Gribben
snuggles with the deaf
six-year-old pit bull that
started it all. The first pit she
ever adopted, Fleece,
so impressed Amanda
that she created a
sanctuary for the breed.
42 • FLUX
She took home her first pit bull in
2000. While volunteering at the
pound, she met Fleece, her inaugural
adoptee. With artichoke-shaped ears
that register no sound, Fleece
languished for months at the shelter.
On lunch breaks, Amanda taught
Fleece hand signals using books on
how to train deaf dogs. No one
adopted him. So she did.
She rescued Squiggle, a squirmy black
and white pit bull/whippet mix with a
square-inch benign tumor in his chest.
She rescued K-Bear, a three-year-old
dark brown female with a limp from
an untreated broken leg. She rescued
Lava, an abused, over-bred Am Staff
Web sites than explain yet again that
pit bull jaws, unlike alligator jaws, do
not lock. She's tired of explaining that
pit bulls "seem mean because they're
treated mean," and that she's seen
people slip a homeless man a twenty
to sneak up on their dog and beat it
while the dog is chained to a fence post
in the backyard. "Why would anyone
do that?" they ask. To make it a "guard
dog," of course. To make it mean.
"I'm like a pit bull. I'm loyal, I'm smart, I love
to snuggle, and I've got a little bit of a temper:'
found caught in a barbed wire fence by
Animal Control. Malnourished, pregnant, twenty-five pounds underweight
with a gaping wound on her side,
Lava sat unclaimed in quarantine until
Amanda brought her home to deliver
eleven healthy puppies. Too aggressive for adoption, Lava was scheduled
for euthanasia. Too attached, Amanda
couldn't let this happen; because of
Lava, her emerging rescue operation
became a no-kill sanctuary for pit bulls.
"1 thought, 'OK, 1 love pit bulls. 1
think 1 have a niche here. No one has
a sanctuary for pit bulls - they're the
bad dog. This is a challenge. 1 like
challenges. 1 can handle this,»' Amanda
recites methodically, as though she's
repeated these lines to disbelievers and
naysayers countless times. She seems
wearied of dispelling myths and would
rather refer these same naysayers to
Pit bulls are not inherently humanaggressive, but because of their intense
loyalty to their owners and high
tolerance for pain, they are regularly
trained as fighting dogs.
t the clinic, 1 watch as
Amanda deftly extracts
blood from sick cats and
- clips puppies' toenails. She
calls the animals "kiddo" or "sweetie,"
talking to them like a pediatrician
would to a small child receiving his
first shots. "OK, a little cold, kiddo,"
she says as she swabs a black eat's leg.
"Hi, sweetie. Hi. Just lick your lips
and you won't notice," she advises
a white rat named Nick as another
technician scrapes off skin cells with a
razor blade.
With feathery reddish-blond hair
scrunched in a poof-ball ponytail, ears
rimmed with silver rings and another
piercing her nose, she doesn't look
thirty. Nor does she dress thirty. She's
wearing tight stretch jeans with little
rhinestones and turquoise swirls on the
back pockets. They could fit a pre-teen.
But her eyes tell a different age. Smart
and scrutinizing, cobalt blue, Amanda's
eyes have seen it all. They've seen
sickness. At twenty-six, Amanda had
cervical cancer. They've seen poverty.
She lived on welfare with her mom in
the New Jersey projects before moving
to her grandfather's farm. They've seen
abuse. "My first husband pushed me
down the stairs when 1 was pregnant at
seventeen." They've seen homelessness.
To escape her husband, Amanda slept
between classes in her car. Completely
full, the homeless shelter where she
worked couldn't offer refuge. So she'd
drive to the coast and back at night,
her three rescue dogs steaming the
ABOVE: Asweet-hearted
pit bull, K-Bear (short
for Kissy Bear) gives a
warm reception to
Pawsitively Pit Bull
co-founder Darren Linder.
LEFT: When Jolly arrived
at the sanctuary, he was
mangy and ill-behaved.
After months of herbal and
traditional treatments, as
well as behavior training,
he's furry, well-mannered,
and ready for adoption.
FLUX • 43
Britain, Germany, China, and three
U.S. cities: Denver, Miami, and
Cincinnati. Incredulous, I ask: Why
pit bulls? Again, the answer comes
well prepared: Because shelters have
way too many. According to Mike
Oswald, director of animal services for
Multnomah County, pit bulls made up
about a third of the dogs that entered
the shelter in 2005. The increased
popularity of pit bulls and greater
breeding activity has dramatically
increased the number of pit bulls in
shelters over the last twenty years,
before which only 6 percent of
Multnomah County shelter dogs
were pit bulls.
ABOVE: With some
help from Amanda,
BusterSamson launches
himself at alength
of rope for some rough
and tumble fun in agame
of springpole.
windows of her car. ''A lot of people
get into the mental health field to solve
their own problems," she says. "It's a
lot easier to tell other people how to fix
their lives than to fix your own."
She's friendly, but there's an edge. I
worry about saying the wrong thing
- like how some dogs are fine, so long
as you don't touch their ears or paws
or whatever sets them off. "I'm like a
pit bull," Amanda says. "I'm loyal, I'm
/l1'm a rogue at everything I do.
And I'm opinionated:'
smart, I love to snuggle, and I've got a
little bit of a temper."
Little bit of a temper? According to a
study in the Journal ofthe American
veterinary Medical Association, pit
bulls and Rottweilers were involved in
more than half of the fatal attacks on
people nationwide between 1979 and
1989. Pit bulls are banned in Ontario,
Canada, the Netherlands, France,
44 • FLUX
When her tech shift ends, Amanda
walks to her car, boisterous but
intent, as though just unlatched from
a very short leash. "I'm a rogue at
everything I do. And I'm opinionated,"
she announces as we reach her
dirt-crusted 1989 Ford Taurus station
wagon. The car smells of wet dog and
dry kibble, 1,800 pounds of which
Amanda recently hauled to the sanctuary. Her phone buzzes and beeps,
sending messages to three full voicemail
boxes. Volunteers took the messages for
a while, but they burned out quickly
from hearing too much hate mail "a pit bull attacked my child and you
should be euthanized, too" - or even
more disheartening, requests to take
a dog because its family redecorated
and it no longer matches the furniture. Amanda gets about ninety-eight
requests per week to take dogs. Her
sanctuary will only accommodate
twenty-five.
"If I were to take ninety-eight dogs
per week, I would be way overrun
because we don't adopt them out that
fast and I wouldn't adopt them out
that fast," she explains. We're flying
down the fast lane, her cell phone
buzzing, her cigarette smoke leaking
out the window. "I'm not about warehousing dogs, sending them out to fail.
I'm about improving quality of life,
training them, making them ambassadors of the breed."
What makes a pit bull an ambassador?
''An ambassador is a dog I'm 110
percent confident will only take steps
forward for the breed. Do they bite?
Do they bark? Do they get along with
cats and dogs and children?"
And then what? ''And then we find
them a forever home. Not a home
that says two weeks later, 'I'm
moving, can you take this dog?' It's a
family member."
t's an icy February morning when
I meet Amanda's family: nineteen
pit bulls and the three non-pits
that steamed her windows on
midnight drives to the coast. Pumpkin,
Peanut, and Flower stampede out the
door as though running with the bulls
in Pamplona. Two buildings, a trailer,
an old VW van, and a couple of ponds
cover the well-fenced sanctuary
property. A muscular guy bounds up
the hill. Blond curly ringlets sprout
from his head and the tip of his goatee
juts at a devilish point.
Darren laughs easily, flexes a paw print
tattoo on his bicep, and confesses he'd
never met a pit bull until his early
twenties. He grew up with poodles
- the little ones with bows. On
display inside the house are pictures
of Darren on skiing expeditions with
at-risk youth from Friends of the
Children, which employs mentors to
work with children from kindergarten
through high school graduation.
"Darren's more the PR guy," Amanda
insists. "I prefer to stay out of the
limelight, but I'll do it for them." She'll
speak publicly for the pit bulls, which
she has done in news segments on
dangerous dogs.
"She's a good spokesperson for our
cause," Darren says. "She's eloquent
and heartfelt ... I've always thought
it was kinda cool that she's a petite
woman. You might think someone
who wrestles pit bulls all day would be
a hulking, 200-pound beast, but even
she can control these dogs."
We walk down to the "out building"
- the doghouse - and a little white
pit named Thumper greets us with a
feral bark. His hind legs drag behind
him because of a birth defect. He
wobbles like a drunk, moving sideways
when he wants to move forward, often
whacking himself into walls. Following
months of hydrotherapy in a doggy life
jacket, Thumper has made progress.
With prodding from Amanda and
Darren - "Come on Thumper, you
can do it buddy" - and intense
concentration, his resolve builds and
his body runs where he wants it to go.
Then he'll stumble, belly up, panting
but happy like a child fallen in the snow.
Next I meet Pig. "Let Pig approach
you," Amanda advises. This makes
me nervous, even though she's assured
me her dogs don't bite: "I don't have
any human-aggressive dogs. I dont
believe they should be saved. Only a
very small percentage of them actually
turn it around. Would I trust that dog
to adopt it out under my organization
and my name? No."
There's a scuffle and a brief interlude
before this hairless, tan, golem-like
creature streaks out the door toward
us. Unlike Thumper's direction, Pig's
is flawless. She runs directly between
us and off into the yard. We follow Pig
to a tree, where she's hanging by her
teeth from a knotted rope, trying to
climb higher without letting go. "This
is called springpole," Darren tells me.
"Some people think it makes them
more aggressive, but it actually releases
their energy, and it's great exercise."
Pig's body writhes in circles as she
gnaws at the rope. "Do the hula, Pig,
hula," Amanda encourages, her voice
as sweet as a new mother cajoling her
baby to do something cute.
Amanda's partial to the girls. "Yeah, I
have favorites," she says with a laugh,
drawing out the words as though
confessing a bad habit. She strokes
Lava, whose nipples, over-suckled by
puppies, stick out like inflated fingers
on a blown-up surgical glove.
I meet Jolly, Squiggle, and Drunken
Noodle, a deaf Dalmatian mix with
poor depth perception from a neurological disorder. I meet Maui,
K-Bear, BusterSamson, and Cone.
They slobber and snort and pant and
dash around the yard, occasionally
stopping to pee or sniff Some of them
bark, stick their heads in my crotch,
and then lick my hand. Others ignore
me. They respond when called, sit
when asked, and lumber home without
hesitation. These are just dogs. Dogs
that love to snuggle. Ambassadors of
their breed.
As for the others, the "half-priced"
seniors shivering on concrete floors and
the dogs trained so humanaggressive they'll never turn their
behavior around, Amanda sighs. "Some
dogs need to go to the next plane and
come back another time," she says, her
voice softening. Unlike some rescue
groups, she knows she can't save every
dog and won't ruffle feathers at
Animal Control because she can't
meet the "quarantine babies" awaiting
certain death.
ABOVE: Amanda connects
with Henry, atwo-year-old
male. Henry was rescued \
in New Orleans where he
was found wandering the
streets in the aftermath of
Hurricane Katrina.
Amanda stands silhouetted against the
late-afternoon sun, her hair on fire, her
eyes all iris. She is like a pit bull. Like
Squiggle, she's been sick. Like Lava,
she's been abused. Like K-Bear, she's
been homeless. Like Fleece, she's been
misunderstood. But she understands.
Before quarantine was closed to the
public, she'd visit the death row dogs,
give them treats, and say, "It's all right.
Yeah, your time is limited, but you are
loved." One ugly one, so scarred and
mangled from a fight, compelled her to
stop and tell him, "'You are beautiful,'
because inside," she says, "this dog was.
It was totally beautiful." (I
See and hear the pit bulls in action at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
FLUX • 45
QUEST for
A Portland area training facility is a mecca
for athletes aspiring to be ultimate fighters
PHOTOS & STORY: ALEX PAJUNAS
ABOVE: The crowd at the Roseland Theatre
in Portland reacts to the eXciting conclusion
of afight during Rumble at the Roseland XXI.
OPPOSITE: Team Quest's Zach Ross delivers
apounding to his opponent, Kyle Prather,
who would later recover and win
by referee stoppage in the second round.
46 • FLUX
he air that fills Team Quest's red-and-blue padded room is thick and stale
with sweat. Under the bright fluorescent lights of the Gresham, Oregon,
training center, pairs of fighters perform a strange dance, throwing punches
and combinations at each other. While some are there solely as Ultimate Fighting
Championship (UFC) fans looking to stay in shape, others have higher goals of
competing in the increasingly popular sport.
T
Founded in 1993, the UFC brings
fighters with different martial arts
backgrounds and specialties together
to compete inside an octagon-shaped
ring surrounded by a chain link fence.
There are typically three five-minute
rounds in which almost anything goes.
Hits to the back of the head, spine, and
groin, along with eye-gouging, biting,
and other "dirty" moves are outlawed.
The moves that are allowed come
from a combination of boxing,
kickboxing, wrestling, and jiu-jitsu,
known as mixed martial arts.
Comparing a boxer to a mixed martial
artist is like comparing a sprinter to a
decathlete. In order to win inside the
cage, the competitor has to be skilled
in multiple fighting styles.
OPPOSITE: Greg Thompson demonstrates ground-and-pound techniques on John Krohn in an advanced mixed martial arts kickboxing class instructed by Ed Herman (right). Herman is a
contestant in the UFC's reality show The Ultimate Fighter. CLOCKWISE FROM TOP LEFT: Mike Sixel gets his face lubed up with Vaseline to prevent dry skin, which can lead to cuts and abrasions
during afight. Head coach Robert Follis tapes up afighter's hands and wrists to prevent sprains before the gloves go on. Ian Loveland (left) helps Teammate Sixel warm up and shake off afew
jitters before Sixel's first appearance inside the ring, afight at Sportfight Proving Ground II at Mt. Hood Community College. Elijah Fey pulls his hood over his eyes while trying to visualize his
match in the locker room before Sportfight Proving Ground II.
FLUX • 49
eam Quest is one facility that
has embraced the new sport.
The opportunity to learn
fighting techniques from coaches who
are professional fighters has attracted
more than 300 UFC fans to the gym.
However, it hasn't always been that
way. The training center started
humbly as an empty garage in the
back of a used car lot. The space was
used as a training area for wrestlers
trying to make the 2000 Olympic
team, including UFC champion Randy
Couture. Believing Team Quest could
be improved, president and head coach
Robert Follis helped persuade Couture
and the other fighters to open the
gym to non-fighters in 2000 and run
it more as a business instead of just a
place to train.
T
Now most people come to Team Quest
wanting to emulate their favorite
fighters after witnessing a UFC fight in
person or on television. Spike TV and
pay-per-view are the best stations to see
what the UFC has to offer, and a third
season of The Ultimate Fighter reality
show, complete with two members of
Team Quest, is under way.
As interest in ultimate fighting
continues to grow, Team Quest plans
to open franchises allover the world.
The franchises will join the many
regional mixed martial arts organizations forming around the United
States that promote matches and give
skilled amateur fighters a place to prove
themselves before trying to compete
at the highest level in the UFC. With
its reputation for producing fighters
through intense training and team
camaraderie, Team Quest will likely
continue to stand out from other gyms
and bring solid competitors to the
UFC ring. (,
OPPOSITE: Scott "The
Schoolteacher" Trayhorn
climbs the cage to celebrate
a13-second first-round
knockout in the main event
of Rumble at the Roseland
XXI. He earned his nickname because he teaches
at an elementary school in
Troutdale, Oregon.
ABOVE: Former UFC World
Champion Randy Couture,
who recently retired at
forty-three, signs an
autograph during an
intermission at Sportfight
Proving Ground II.
Find out more about the next
generation of ultimate fighters at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
FLUX • 51
hen bees are happy they
fly, filling the air with a
healthy buzz that makes
the air vibrate as they
eagerly go about their
business gathering pollen, water, or
anything else the hive needs. When
bees are angry, though, they tend to
crawl up your pant legs, through gaps
in the buttons on your shirt, anywhere
they can to find an exposed bit of flesh
and drive a stinger into it.
As the son of a professional beekeeper,
I learned at an early age that it's very
important to always keep your cool
when working with bees. Incredibly
attuned to body language, they react
violently to aggressive gestures. Jerky
movements or angry muttering will
cause a cloud of otherwise placid bees
to change their opinion of you quickly.
Then their buzzing rises an octave or
two, and the individual bees become a
well-oiled stinging machine.
My dad taught me everything I know
about bees. But the most valuable
lessons I've learned come from just
watching the way he moves around
them. It's not exactly slow-motion,
just relaxed-motion, as if he's moving
through air that's slightly thicker than
normal. My dad can walk up to a beehive in jeans and a T-shirt, without any
protective gear at all, open up the hive,
and take a look around. No stings.
I have heard insect experts claim that
human beings have an irrational fear
of bees. I disagree; fear of honeybees
is perfectly rational. Although you're
far more likely to get hit by a bus than
killed by bees, when they sting it
hurts like hell and causes uncomfortable swelling.
I once saw a 250-pound truck driver
reduced to running around in circles,
flailing his arms, and screeching like a
banshee because a few bees were
buzzing around his head. The ironic
thing is that this insect capable of
inspiring such fear in even the manliest
of men is, in fact, a fragile species in
deep trouble. The cause of the trouble
is an even meaner organism: a bloodsucking, pinhead-sized parasite called
the Varroa mite.
t first glance, the Varroa mite
doesn't look like a killer. It vaguely
resembles a tick, deep red in color
and typically a couple of millimeters in
diameter. Basically, what this malevolent little creature does is hop onto the
backs of bees - where the head meets
the torso - and starts gnawing on
them. Afflicted bees have the distinct
appearance of having been chewed up
and spit out, with misshapen bodies and
tattered wings. To add to the trouble,
the Varroa carries many viruses that
easily jump to bee populations, so
A
the beekeepers go out of business,
agriculture at large is in big trouble. We
can import honey, but we can't import
pollination," Burgett says.
Pollination doesn't just happen. The
natural insect population cannot
adequately pollinate the densely packed
crops planted by farmers. So cultivators of certain crops - almonds, pears,
apples, and cherries are major ones
- rent hives from beekeepers during
the bloom. The bees are placed directly
in the fields and orchards where they
gather pollen by buzzing from one tree
to the next, thus mixing different
pollen strains. This genetic commingling increases the health and yield of
the crop.
The USDA currently estimates the
value ofcommercial pollination to
agriculture at large to be $10 billion
annually. So when beekeepers suffer,
so do farmers.
n a clear February day near
Oakdale, California, I'm
driving along a dirt road, winding
through endless, rolling cow pastures
and almond orchards. I crest a low
rise and am greeted with a spectacular
sight. Sitting in a gravel holding yard,
nestled among neatly lined rows of
almond trees and farm equipment, are
several thousand bee hives. Because
the weather is
nice, the bees
You won't catch
Jllf the beekeepers go out of business, agriculture at large is in big fill the air in a
me doing that.
thick cloud as
Maybe I just
trouble. We can import honey, but we can't import pollination:' they whiz out
lack the innate
in every
talent, but I
possible direction, doing the job they've
mite-infested bees are being eaten
doubt it. I think it takes decades of
been brought here to do: pollinate
inside and out.
experience to master bee-friendly
the almonds.
motion, and people who have the
The U.S. Department of Agriculture
ability usually don't even realize it. For
The colonies belong to my dad and a
(USDA) estimates that since it was first
my dad, it's second-nature, and both
couple of other beekeepers, and they've
introduced to the United States from
he and my mom have told me that
its
native
Asia
circa
1986,
the
Varroa
been arriving over the last few days
it's all mental. For my mom's part, she
mite has wiped out roughly 80 percent
on the backs of eighteen-wheelers.
says she imagines that she is in a happy
of wild honeybees and has either killed
The hives sit on pallets, four colonies
place while around bees. More than
or severely weakened 50 percent of
apiece, which have been unldaged with
once, as I was covered in crawling,
commercially owned hives like my dad's.
forklifts and arranged in geometric
stinging honeybees, I've wondered just
clusters of six or nine. These bees are
where the hell that place is and why I
This isn't just a problem for beekeepers. well-traveled: some have come from
can never find it.
Michael Burgett is a professor emeritus
Oregon, others from Montana, and
of entomology and director of the Bee
still others from Texas.
It's like a grizzled, unsympathetic Texas
Lab at Oregon State University (OSU).
beekeeper once told me: "I don't give a
Burgett has spent the better part of
As I park the truck and get ready to go
damn if your girlfriend did just dump
to work - mite treatments are today's
two decades working on agricultural
you, Joe. You'd better get over it before
task - I know similar scenes are
extension projects for OSU, and he has
you go to work on bees today." It's
out around the region as beeplaying
seen
firsthand
the
need
for
honeytrue. When working with bees, leave
keepers
from as far north as
bees
to
pollinate
numerous
crops.
"If
your troubles at home.
O
PREVIOUS: Pavel Mordvinov
checks the health of one of
George Hansen's beehives
at Foothills Honey in
Colton, Oregon.
LEFT: Ethan Benne, an
employee ofWild Harvest
Honey outside Corvallis,
Oregon, weighs bees for
sale. Beekeepers who want
to start anew colony or
augment aweakened hive
can purchase a
three-pound load of bees
with aqueen, acan of
syrup to feed them, and a
cage for $61.
FLUX • 55
Minnesota and as far east as Florida are
dropping off their bees. Once the hives
are shipped in, the bees will be fed and
given mite treatments before being
loaded onto smaller trucks and shuttled
out to individual farmers' orchards.
The California almond crop requires
more than one million beehives to be
properly pollinated. While local beekeepers used to do the job, now more
than half of the hives are imported
from out of state.
The process of moving beehives around
on this scale is absolutely nervewracking. Pallets are loaded onto trucks
with forklifts in a gut-wrenching highwire act, with hives tottering twenty
feet off the ground.
beekeepers. They take over the hotels,
cafes, and bars; traffic is clogged with
rumbling bee trucks. Almond growing
is an integral part of the economy here,
and beekeeping is an integral part of
growing almonds. So everybody in
town knows a lot about both.
I remember going in for a haircut in
Oakdale one day and getting grilled
on our Varroa treatment methods by
a nineteen-year-old hairstylist who
looked as if she had just come from
prom. Another time I was picking up a
shipment of queen bees from the post
office and a man approached me with
tips on how to keep bees healthy with
an all-organic diet. Assuming he was a
beekeeper, I asked where he was from
and how many colonies he ran. "Oh,
they inevitably intermingle, as some
bees become disoriented and wander
into the wrong hive. This means that
parasites also intermix, as Varroa hop
from the back of one bee to another. In
a holding yard like that, parasites can
spread like wildfire. When the almond
bloom is finished, the bees are shipped
back to the four corners of the country,
carrying the Varroa with them. Beekeepers are unwittingly giving the pest
a free ride into new breeding grounds.
first caught up with Kenny Williams,
owner of Wild Harvest Honey, on
a beautiful August day in 2005,
outside Corvallis, Oregon, but
unfortunately I couldn't enjoy the day
because I was wearing thick jeans,
heavy boots, three shirts,
leather gloves, and a hat
I've witnessed a pallet of
Even efficacious treatments only buy the
and veil to keep out the
bees tumble to the ground.
I remember thinking it
thousands of honeybees
beekeeper afew months' reprieve;
looked like some sort of
filling the air. I was spendbomb being dropped,
Varroa populations rebound that quickly.
ing the day with Williams
releasing a living shrapnel
as he was harvesting honey
of angry honeybees that
in one of his bee yards
I'm not a beekeeper, I'm a traveling
immediately located the nearest living
in the Oregon countryside, amid the
rolling hills and green fields of the rural
creature - the beekeeper - and
salesman," he responded.
Northwest, the Oregon Coast Range
stung the hell out of it. This is the job,
looming in the distance.
though, and beekeepers are willing to
There's no question that pollination on
do it because it's so profitable. In 2006,
the scale of the California almonds is
Williams is a member of the old
the going rate for pollination stretched
the future of beekeeping. But in a way,
guard of beekeepers: in his late fifties,
to $150 per hive, up from $100 the
it may also be its downfall. This occurs
rail-thin with scruffy hair and an easy
year before.
to me every time I go to a holding-yard
smile. He seems to be thoughtful about
like the one near Oakdale.
everything he does; his movements
So for two months out of every year,
When that many hives are in one place
are slow and deliberate, every word
towns like Oakdale are inundated with
I
carefully chosen. He is careful with his
beekeeping methods as well, and after
twenty-eight years in the business,
Williams knows what he is doing.
He also knows how much the art of
beekeeping has changed.
"It used to be that all you had to do
with bees was feed them in the winter.
Now that has changed because of
parasitic mite infestation and other
things," Williams says, shaking his
head slowly. "We now have half as
many beekeepers in the U.S. as we had
in the'50s. The demand for pollination is much greater, though. So there
is definitely a need for this profession."
I wanted to know how Williams was
doing with the Varroa mite, but asking
him what kind of losses he had suffered seemed rude somehow. I danced
around the question, but he was surprisingly candid. His losses had been
between 12 and 15 percent that year,
a respectable figure for any beekeeper
trying to keep bees alive through the
dark, wet Pacific Northwest winter.
But that was 2005. When I talked to
Williams during winter 2006, he
admitted his losses had been much
worse, around 30 percent. That's the
kind of year that makes beekeepers
cringe. Solid beekeepers can weather
one year like that, but two or three
could very well put them out of
business. Why the bad year?
"I suspect it was the mites and
probably the viruses vectored by them,"
Williams says matter-of-factly.
Bee Venom Therapy
For centuries, people all over the world have
been getting stung by honeybees - on
purpose. Apitherapy, also known as bee
veno therapy, treats infla matory diseases
such arthritis, carpal tun el, and tendo ·tis
- e
multiple sclerosis. Although
apitherapy is not cons· red an official
medical treatment by s e, many people
swear by the healing power of the stinger.
Years ago, Pat Wagner, now a board member
of the American Apitherapy Society, was
bedridden with multiple sclerosis at the
age of twenty-five. "She decided to try bee
venom therapy, and within a year, she was
back on her feet;' says Ina Abercrombie,
fellow board member of the AAS and owner
of Dancing Bee Acres in Irrigon, Oregon.
mbie administers bee venom
apy as a free service to first-time
patients. Once patients have com mitted to
the therapy, they purchase a "bee condo" to
house a batch of honeybees they'll use to
sting themselves up to twenty times a week.
When it's time for a sting, the patient places
a bee directly on the afflicted area. Without
much coaxing, the bee will sting, injecting
venom that contains traces of melittin, a
natural anti-inflammatory. W·
mmation reduced temporarily, t body has
time to repair itself. But for the
apy to
work, patients must endure
i
stings
throughout the day or week. S e people
are healed after just a few trea m
r, the b
for others, like Pat Wa
becomes a permanent fixture. -
There are chemical treatments for
the Varroa mite, such as Apistan and
Coumophos. They are costly to buy
and implement, but some can kill
up to 97 percent of the parasites in a
given hive. Unfortunately, the resilient
3 percent that survive then form the
gene pool for the next generation, and
so treatments become less effective
over time. Even efficacious treatments
only buy the beekeeper a few months'
reprieve; Varroa populations rebound
that quickly.
For this reason, most beekeepers use
a variety of treatments, throwing a
chemical cocktail at the mites. This
doesn't solve the problem, though, it
only contains it. To date, there is no
realistic way of eliminating the pest.
This unwanted immigrant is here to stay.
B
ack in the holding-yard near
Oakdale, I step out of the truck,
into the swirling clouds of busy
bees, and sigh at the magnitude of the
task ahead. It will take days to open all
the lids, throw strips coated with
mite-killing chemicals into each one,
and close everything. I walk down the
rows of hives, popping the waxencrusted wooden lids off the boxes
and pumping smoke into each hive.
This momentarily confuses the bees
and gives me a chance to work.
But wayward bees ricochet off me, and
it takes only a few moments for one
to crawl up my pant-leg and sting my
ankle. The bees don't know that the
medicated pads I'm placing in each
hive will keep the colony healthy and
vibrant. I'm doing them a favor, but
they treat me the same way they would
treat a grizzly bear trying to steal
their honey.
That's how it is with bees. And it's
why most people probably don't see
the problem with a shrinking bee
population. To the average American,
bees are nothing more than pests. They
rudely land in your beer or lemonade,
ruin picnics, and frighten children, not
to mention truck drivers. And if you
try to shoo them away, they sting you.
Bees are right up there with ants and
mosquitoes as being a gigantic pain
in the ass. But the people involved in
agriculture know bees are vital to
their industry.
Once, years ago, I asked my dad why
he had decided to become a beekeeper
in the first place. He didn't answer the
question directly. Instead, he talked
about how he had spent some time
teaching Russian at a public high
school - he speaks the language
fluently, the result of a Stanford
education and hiring Russian-speaking
employees - and had become disenchanted with the bureaucracies and
politics of modern life. He summed it
up with: "Well, Joe, I just have a real
problem with working for idiots."
ABOVE: George Hansen,
the author's father, finishes
loading hives onto atrailer
headed to ablueberry field
in Forest Grove, Oregon.
This explains why he might want to
become an entrepreneur in an industry
outside of mainstream culture, but why
bees? I asked Williams the same question and he gave me what I thought
was a thoughtful and honest answer.
"Well," he says, after pausing for a
moment to think. "This is a job I can
feel good about. What bees do is to
increase things in people's lives, by
pollinating crops and making honey.
I can be proud of being a beekeeper."
So the next time you take a bite out of
that juicy apple or swallow a ripe blackberry, spare a thought for the bees and
their keepers who made such things
possible. Without them, that produce
might never have made it to your
mouth. And the way things are going
in North America, bees and beekeepers
both are becoming dying breeds. (I
Find out what really happens
when a bee stings at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
FLUX • 57
The elusive mountain beaver is
not just a bane to foresters;
its fleas could kill you
STORY & PHOTOS:
DAVE CONSTANTIN
D
eep beneath the earth, the
creature sits in total darkness.
The tiny tremors it felt earlier,
maybe from the footsteps of a hungry
coyote prowling the damp, nighttime
chill above, have ceased. Now it can
surface, collect what it needs, and
quickly return to the safety of its
burrow. Gripping the slick, muddy
walls of the tunnel with stiletto-tipped,
finger-like claws, it makes its way
toward the surface. As it pushes
through a cluster of sword fern blocking the tunnel entrance, its head
brushes two concealed wires, releasing
the lethal mechanism. Steel crossbars
snap shut, breaking the mountain
beaver's spine in two places, killing it
instantly. Nestled in the animal's fur,
the giant flea lies unscathed. As it feels
its food source slowly growing cold
beneath its spindly legs, instinct compels it to move. But for now, all it can
do is wait. A new source of heat and
food will arrive shortly.
n the morning ofJuly 22,
2002, Mike Newton knew
something had invaded his
body. His head hurt, his skin felt
sensitive, he had racking chills, and he
was sweating profusely - a "bad, big
sweat," as his wife, Jane, remembers
it. Newton was scheduled to do a field
study in Alaska the following week
with a team from Oregon State
University where, for nearly four
O
OPPOSITE: Aholding pen at the
National Wildlife Research Center in
Olympia, Washington, offers arare
glimpse of alive mountain beaver.
Hiding in amakeshift nest of straw,
the animal awaits study.
58 • FLUX
decades, he had worked as a forest
ecologist and professor of ecology and
silviculture. Although he formally
retired in 1999, he'd remained on
board to volunteer his expertise in the
field. He definitely didn't want to feel
subpar during a trip into brown bear
territory. But there he was, running a
10 I-degree temperature and experiencing a host of strange symptoms
that would only worsen as the day
progressed.
That night, Newton went to bed feeling awful and awoke the next morning
on fire with a fever of 102.8. When his
temperature suddenly plummeted to
97.2, Jane persuaded him to go to the
emergency room.
Seventy-three-year-old Newton stands
six feet two with a powerful build,
sharp eyes, deeply etched features, and
white hair kept short and spiky. He
describes himself as "rugged" and has
spent most of his life successfully
cultivating that image. He doesn't seem
the type, in other words, to check into
an emergency room unless there's a
damn good reason. But on this
occasion, he didn't hesitate to follow
his wife's advice.
Doctors at the emergency room were
stumped. They drew blood samples,
ran some tests, and tried like hell to
figure out the cause of Newtons illness.
Then he told them about his frequent
extensively since 2001. "We're trying
to help the timber industry understand the mountain beaver," she says.
Even Arjo concedes that, as of now,
lethal trapping remains the only viable
control method. The other options
- excavating burrows to set non-lethal
box traps or fencing individual saplings
- are both economically and logistically unfeasible. "The only way to stop
them is to run a fence at least seven feet
below ground," says Arjo. "But they
can chew through the fences, too."
ABOVE: Wendy Arjo
(right) and colleague
Julie Harper perform an
equipment check before
heading into aclear-cut in
western Washington to do
aradio telemetry search for
amissing mountain beaver.
dealings with an obscure, flea-ridden
rodent in the remote woods of northwestern Oregon. And that changed
everything.
manage pests such as the mountain
beaver, which sneak around at night
eating other people's trees, is with a
good steel trap.
The previous week, Newton had been
measuring tree growth on a series of
university-owned forest research plots
about thirty miles east of Astoria in
an area known as the Blodgett Tract.
Along the way, he had also been dropping some deadly housewarming gifts
into the burrows of his least favorite
animal: Aplodontia rufa, commonly
known as the mountain beaver or
"boomer." A beaver in name only, A.
rufa bears no genetic similarity to the
familiar, flat-tailed variety, or, in fact, to
Sharing Newton's sentiment is the
timber industry, which competes with
the mountain beaver for much of the
same real estate. Timber companies lose
countless new saplings every year to the
animal's ruthless incisors. In response,
they hire professional trappers to help
thin out the population. For Newton,
whose controlled studies often yield
data used in determining regulations
for tree harvesting practices, trapping
mountain beavers simply comes with
the territory, and he's always done it
It must have been in one of those routine
moments that the mountain beaver,
resourceful even in death, took its revenge.
any other member of the rodent family.
It is a unique species. But to a forest
ecologist like Newton, the mountain
beaver is just a two-pound, ten-inch
firestorm of fur and teeth that can cut
through foliage like a riding mower.
With almost a half-century of scientific
experience under his belt, Newton has
developed, among other things, an
unabashed distaste for what he refers
to as the "nature-knows-best types."
He believes a healthy forest is a wellmanaged forest, and the best way to
60 • FLUX
himself But he's selective. He estimates
he's removed maybe a couple hundred
"problem boomers" from the Blodgett
Tract in ten years of trapping. Still,
with science and industry pressing in
on both sides and a formidable list
of natural predators always ready to
pounce, the mountain beaver doesn't
seem to have many friends.
That's where Wendy Arjo comes in.
Arjo, a federal wildlife biologist based
in Olympia, Washington, has been
studying the mountain beaver
The abundance of clear-cut timberland
in the Pacific Northwest presents an
interesting quandary. Clear-cuts can
trigger sudden population explosions
in terrestrial herbivores such as deer,
elk, white-footed deer mice, meadow
voles, and, of course, mountain
beavers. The irony is, even as the
timber companies are combating the
beavers, their clear-cutting practices
lead to an increase in the animal's
numbers. Kind of like that multiplying
broom scene in Disney's Fantasia.
But that hasn't stopped Newton from
trying to protect his research plots.
So that week in July 2002, as usual,
he was setting traps in every burrow
entrance in his path, and collecting the
spent ones he'd set previously. When
he would come across a full trap, he'd
remove the carcass and toss it aside to
get "recycled" by scavenging animals.
Then he'd set another trap in its place.
It must have been during one of these
routine moments when the mountain
beaver, resourceful even in death, took
its revenge.
hat happened next puts
Newton in a rare category indeed. Outside the
scientific community, most people
don't even know the mountain beaver
exists. First of all, it's endemic to the
Pacific Northwest, ranging only from
lower British Columbia, Canada, down
to the northern tip of Point Reyes,
California. Particular about its habitat,
it prefers the high, open forests of the
western Cascades (especially clear-cuts)
and certain spots along the coast, but
not many places in between. And
although it's rather easy to locate the
mountain beaver's six-inch wide
burrow entrances - often marked by
neat little "haystacks" of clipped foliage
that lie like sacred offerings across the
W
forest floor - it's nearly impossible to
catch a glimpse of a live one.
Skittish and vulnerable, the mountain beaver spends most of its life
underground inside well-worn tunnel
networks that can run anywhere from a
few inches to ten- or twelve-feet deep.
But even though individuals keep to
themselves, separate burrows are often
linked by what some scientists refer to
as "1-5 corridors," after the major interstate connecting Washington, Oregon,
and California. "You sometimes can
hear them because they have runways
that go right under the surface of the
ground," says Newton. "That's why
they call them boomers, I think."
Considering its contentious relationship with humans, it's a wonder the
mountain beaver hasn't already gone
the way of the dodo. Although the
animal itself may be elusive, its population seems to be, well, booming. Of
the seven different subspecies of
mountain beaver that share this slim
Pacific Northwest-range, only one, the
Point Arena variety (A. rufa nigra), is
on the federal endangered species list.
Maybe that's because the story of this
animal's success predates the human
intrusion by eons.
Fossil records indicate that the mountain beaver, for reasons unknown, has
remained virtually unchanged since
the Miocene (five million to twentythree million years ago), earning it the
dramatic nickname "living fossiL" As is
the case with sharks and crocodiles, this
could mean the mountain beaver had
its ecological niche figured out a very
long time ago. But alas, evolutionary
stagnation has come with a price.
For one thing, primitive kidneys
demand constant hydration, requiring that the beaver drink water at least
once every twenty-four hours to stay
alive. Then there's the lack of stress
tolerance. When a mountain beaver
gets upset, it secretes a white substance
from its eyes that can render it blind
for a day or more. Arjo speculates that
this substance may have something
to do with keeping the rodent's eyes
free of dirt. But nobody knows why it
happens in response to stress. Then,
of course, there are the fleas. Giant,
boomer-loving, scientist-biting fleas.
At some point in its long history, the
mountain beaver, like most warm-
blooded animals, came in contact
with the common flea. But these fleas
made themselves comfortable and soon
settled in as permanent houseguests.
Eventually, for some reason, they began
to grow larger and more genetically
distinct. By the time Newton picked
up one of those occupied traps in the
woods outside Astoria in July 2002, a
flea vastly different from the familiar barnyard variety made a smooth
and quiet transition from boomer to
scientist. "I didn't see the flea, and I
didn't actually know that it had bitten
me," says Newton. Normally though,
at roughly one-third of an inch long,
Hystricopsylla schefferi would be hard to
miss. It is the largest flea species in the
BELOW: Mike Newton
takes ameasurement of a
Douglas-fir in the Blodgett
Tract, the same stretch of
woods where, in 2002, he
received afleabite that
nearly killed him.
world, and it lives only in the fur of the
mountain beaver.
But like its rat-riding cousin, Hschefferi
sometimes carries a nasty bacterium
known as Rickettsia with a long history
of death and destruction to its credit.
Not exactly the bubonic plague, but no
The mountain beaver may be shy,
but it can be vicious when cornered.
picnic in the park either. "Mike almost
died," insists Mark Gourley, a longtime
friend and colleague of Newton's.
Gourley, a forester employed by Starker
Forests, Inc., has supervised mountain
beaver trapping on timberlands for
twenty-seven years, so he's no stranger
to the giant fleas the beaver carries.
Still, Newton is the only person he
knows of who has ever gotten sick
this way.
BELOW: Newton
demonstrates the lethal
mechanics of amountain
beaver trap.
Even Arjo has managed to stay healthy,
and she's been nearly elbow-deep in the
fleas. Arjo's work is unique in her field,
earning her the reputation of foremost
mountain beaver expert. It was Arjo
who confirmed, for instance, that
mountain beavers have unusually high
levels of copper in their system. And
that they prefer sloped terrain because
it facilitates "indoor plumbing," a
reference to the constant flow of fresh
water she often finds running through
excavated burrows. Arjo also noticed
that, despite their mud-slicked habitat,
the beavers always seem to keep
themselves and their nesting material
miraculously clean and dry. But from a
strictly scientific standpoint, the most
useful data on this animal has come
from Arjo's radio-collaring technique,
which she adapted from her previous
experience with coyotes. The first thing
she learned is that it's not easy to collar
a mountain beaver.
"They don't have a very well-defined
neck," she says. So just keeping the
collar from falling oft or worse,
strangling the animal, takes some skill.
"We've come up with a very good
method that avoids any unnecessary
stress," she says. For one thing, they've
eliminated the use of tranquilizers,
which is good for the animal but bad
for the scientist. The mountain beaver
may be shy, but it can be vicious when
cornered. Like all rodents, this one
must chew incessantly to wear down
its constantly growing incisors. If a
scientist's intruding finger happens to
get in the way, it's just one more
opportunity for dental maintenance.
"I've gotten bit once or twice," says
Arjo. Luckily, she's managed to keep
all her digits and, at the same time,
avoid Newton's unfortunate fate.
A
fter Newton's trip to the
emergency room and a
treatment of broad-spectrum
antibiotics, his misery continued
unabated. "I really felt like I could die
at that point," he says. Desperate, he
went to see Troy Garrett at Samaritan
Family Medicine, his long-time family
physician. "I certainly had never seen
anything like that before," Garrett says.
"It was the sort of thing where I had to
just look it up in the textbooks." The
textbooks pointed to Murine typhus, a
Rickettsial strain normally just associated with rat fleas. But the diagnosis fit
all the symptoms.
Garrett sent some blood samples to a
commercial lab, and later samples were
sent to the state and to the Centers
for Disease Control and Prevention in
Atlanta, Georgia - on account of the
disease's bizarre source. Oddly enough,
the results from the commercial lab
came back positive for Murine typhus,
whereas the CDC's results came back
negative. But Newton's health had
already begun to turn around. The
antibiotic cocktail seemed to have
found its mark, which indicated
Murine typhus was probably the right
diagnosis anyway. Newton would live,
but the experience didn't do much
to improve his relationship with the
mountain beaver.
t's mid-March 2006, three and a
half years after his bout with Murine
typhus, and Newton has returned
to the Blodgett Tract, where he stands
fiddling with the release latch on a
mountain beaver trap. He bends down
to replace the old one that now sits
triggered but unoccupied, hidden
among sword fern just inside the
burrow entrance at his feet. As he
pulls the trap out of the hole and gives
it a closer look, he notices a few wet
clumps of tan hair still clinging to
the steel bars, the last vestiges of an
unlucky mountain beaver long ago
scavenged by animals, or maybe just
dissolved into the seething biomass of
the forest floor. "That's what I like to
see," says Newton, almost to himsel£
"That's a good sign." He pockets the
trap and heads off into the forest. The
vibrations from his receding footsteps
penetrate deep into the earth, bouncing
down a dark, wet tunnel and passing
beneath the claws of a hungry rodent
that waits patiently for the footsteps
above to fade away. (I
I
See what it's like inside a mountain
beaver burrow at
influx.uoregon.edu/2006
THEY WERE FINISHED, BUT THEN WHAT?
THEY NEEDED SOAfETHING,
THEY NEEDED AfO~E: ..
.....--------WHY, JAN?
WHY DOES IT
HA VE TO END?'
BACK talk
e UO offers over 11 0 study abroadprofTams
Being a door-to-door salesman is hard;
getting slugged by a customer doesn't help
STORY: RICHARD GOULD
y wire-rimmed glasses flew
off my face and landed in
a weed-filled flowerbed.
Getting blindsided with a punch to
the side of the head feels pretty weird.
I always figured it would hurt like
crazy, but it didn't. It actually took me
a second to realize that this wild-eyed,
M
scruffy little guy'd hit me. When you're
six feet seven and selling Bibles doorto-door, you don't expect to get sucker
punched. Especially not by a scrawny
guy who might be five feet eight on his
tiptoes. "What the hell was that?" was
all I could think to say.
He turned around and bolted up the
steps, across his rotting porch, and
through his front door, slamming it
shut behind him. I heard several deadbolts click and a chain slide into place.
Dazed, I just stared at the door until I
heard him yell, in his thick Tennessee
accent, "I'm gonna call tha po-Ieese!"
I'd had enough. "Make sure you do!"
I y~lled back. 'Md make sure you tell
'em you just assaulted me!" He didn't
64 • ·FLUX
ILLUSTRATION: LINDSAY MONROE
respond. I couldn't think of anything
else to say either. After a couple more
minutes of staring at his front door, I
decided to quit for the day.
I drove back to the trailer in the
cornfield near 1-40 that I rented for
$108 a month and sat on the front
porch. I listened to the interstate
traffic, ate some raw corn pilfered
from the field, and drank·a six-pack of
beer. That trailer was nasty. The stove
was broken and the fridge was just
a place to put your Little Debbies if
you wanted to make the ants work a
little harder to get them. Most nights
I'd wake up to find a huge cockroach
scurrying across my bare chest. I'd grab
the little sucker and fling it across the
room. Then I'd try to roll over. But
Tennessee's summers are plenty hot,
and my sweaty back was always getting
stuck to the lime green vinyl couch I
slept on. I'd peel the cushion off: roll
over, and sleep until the next roach
woke me up.
In some ways that trailer wasn't all
that different from the one in Florida
where I grew up, a place where the
nearest paved road was a mile off and
the closest McDonald's was a half-hour
drive away. We were in the Baptist
church every time it opened its doors,
and I lived in constant terror of the
rapture. My father outlawed movies,
dancing, and rock'n' roll in our home.
My exposure to the wider world was
limited to what I read in books and
the thousands of Marvel comics I kept
under my bed.
After a couple years of attending Jerry
Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia,
I needed to earn some tuition money.
I knew a guy who knew a guy who'd
made a lot of money selling Bibles.
I'd always liked books, so I signed
up to spend a summer selling Bibles
for Thomas Nelson, Inc. in Decatur
County, Tennessee - home to 11,650
of the state's finest residents.
I drove to Nashville and paid $100
to attend Thomas Nelson's weeklong
sales school, where they taught us some
effective stuff. For instance, always,
always knock at the informal side
door like a friend or neighbor, not the
formal front door like a peddler. They
taught us how far back from the door
to stand while we waited for the
occupant to open it. Closer for girls
and little guys; much farther for big
galoots like me. Basically, they taught
us how to coerce timid rural people
into letting us into their homes.
If you want to sell a Bible, you've got
to get inside the house to do it. I don't
know why, but no one buys a Bible on
a porch. Here's another trick: When
the occupant answers the door, tell
her it'll just take a minute of her time
to see what you've got. Then put your
head down, grab your case, and start
wiping your feet vigorously as though
you've already been invited in. You'll
usually be pretty far from the welcome
mat, but that doesn't matter. Just bend
over, look at the ground, and grind
your feet into the grass, dirt, sidewalk
- whatever you happen to be standing
on - until they submit and let you in.
They will. They don't want to be rude.
in more than 70 countries and more than 140 internships in
50 countries
Facts About VO Overseas Programs:
•
•
•
•
•
Earn UO credit ("in residence") in all approved
programs and internships
Use UO financial aid funds, with a budget tailored
to your program costs
Apply for special scholarships reserved for study
abroad students
Enjoy excellent on-campus and overseas resources,
including thorough orientation
Gain valuable professional experience and rapid
personal development
Featured Program
Combined Study/Internship Program in London
• Choose from fall, winter, and spring terms (any
combination)
• Enjoy wonderful excursions to all the major sites in
London and longer trips around England
• Earn 16 to 21 credits per term, at a fixed cost
• Select from courses in literature, art history, political science, history, theater arts, and more.
• Complete a custom-tailored, half-time internship (20 hours per week, for 7 UO credits) in any major and any
professional field
• Journalism students have interned in PR, advertising, editing, photojournalism, and other specializations
• Easily combined with other European programs, for a two-term or full-year adventure
• Apply early: program is first-come, first-served
Options in lournalism*
Ecuador. Three-week environmental writing program in the Galapagos
Islands.
Finland: Innovative subjects like multicultural reporting, political
propaganda, and transnational media. Independent study also possible.
Ghana: 8-credit summer program in Accra: 4 credits course work, 4 credit
internship.
IE] Global Internships: Assorted position openings in the Americas, Asia, and
Europe.
Italy: Study advertising, graphic design and photography in Paderno del
Grappa.
Singapore: Study in the Communications and New Media Programme at the
National University of Singapore.
I tried to remember if assault had ever
been covered in Thomas Nelson sales
school. I'm pretty sure they neglected
to mention it. They did say that if
someone comes out in a rage, you stop
talking, open the sample bag, and
pull out a random book. Hold it up
and say, "I'm selling these. Do you
want one?" They'll say no, cuss you
out, and go back inside. A lot of these
guys will assume you're a bill
collector or a lawyer until you prove
them wrong.
That's what I was trying to do when
that guy punched me. He didn't give
me a chance to say or show him much
of anything. I really don't blame him.
Trying to get poor people to buy
overpriced stuff they can't afford in the
name of God isn't much of a job. I'm
proud to say I wasn't very good at it. (I
*AII of these options have courses taught in English.
To pick up hard copies of brochures and applications:
Visit 330 Oregon Hall, 8 am to 5 pm weekdays, except
UO holidays
INTERNATIONAL PROGRAMS
University of Oregon
Information: http://studyabroad.uoregon.edu
Advising appointment: (541) 346-3207