Oregon Highway Signs Are Pure Visual Bliss To Me

3584

I adore the Oregon state highway shield, as those who know me know, and as those who only read me now know.

I've spent a great deal of my life watching Oregon highway shields go past. The current day design may seem odd ... like a chicken's egg on its point that decided to try become an oval as it got to the top. There's a reason for that. The original Oregon highway shield was adapted from the state's armorially-styled seal which can be found on the front side of the state flag. The word OREGON and the route number were surrounded by the outline of that shield with a silhouette of the eagle, sheaf, and arrows that surmounted it (a lovely photo of a battered old Hwy 99 sign can be found here: https://www.aaroads.com/shields/show.php?image=OR19550993&view=3.

I was born near Hwy 213, have lived most of my life near Hwy 213, live near it now, and will probably die in proximity to it. So it goes.

So to someone else, this might be just a banal roadside marker, but to me?

Visual poetry.

I also just like the way the number 212 looks like in that font that the State uses.

[liff] Don't Panic, Oregonian. They Call It "The Sky".

3489.

Those of you up and out this fine day in the Portland Metropolitan Area may notice a decided change in the environment. The air seems ... brighter, cheerier, more beneficent. There's a luminosity that may seem unfamiliar to you. You may even find yourself expanding and contracting your chest more fully than you did.

DON'T PANIC. What you are seeing isn't some supernatural apparition brought on by the immanentization of the eschaton. It's something we used to have around here in abundance, something they used to call ... sky.

Strange word, sky, isn't it. When you say the word, it's over so quickly that you almost aren't sure you said it at all, but yet, it says so much. Sky. Roll it around the mouthal cavity. It's crisply edged yet rounded and soft at the same time. Sky. But what is this sky, exactly? Well, sit tight, Oregonian, prepare to get your mind blown, in the good way (by the way, that soft blowy stuff is called wind. We'll save that for lesson number two.

Now ... are you sitting down? Good. This may overwhelm you, but look:

No, no, don't panic! Don't cry! Get a grip, friend. Here, put your head under my arm ... okay, better now? Calm down. This is the way things were before. That is called sky. You see, sky is made of white things floating through that delightful color.

Oh ... color. Sorry, I get ahead of myself. Now those white things that look like lint? Those are something called clouds, and they're delightful cool collections of mist made out of water. And that thing the clouds are up in something called blue, and that's a color. 

I know. it's a lot to take in all at once, but you used to do it all the time. Freaks me out too that the air isn't a consistent murky mustard-yellow color (mustard-yellow is another color, and one we don't like so much any more) but remember, this is the way things were all the time not so long ago.

Blue. As a word, it has a lilt to it almost like sky. We like it a lot, now that we're seeing it again.

Now, you're ready for more. Look at this:

Okay, Oregonian, I hear you hyperventilating. Now you're doing it out of mild panic, instead of before, when you were doing it because you couldn't get enough oxygen to breathe. It's okay. You're doing better. I believe in you, okay? Now, there is more cloud and more blue. In the distance you'll see a high mound. We call that a hill. Before, when you were walking and you began huffing and puffing and the ground slanted up but you couldn't quite see why? That was hill before you could see them from a distance. This is what they look like.

The tall green fuzzy things are called trees. Trees kind of help sky by keeping it fresh, when things are like this. Trees like you, they just have a hard time showing it. Be nice to them. They're nice to sit under, now that you can see them.

Once again, tree against sky. This is what majesty looks like, now that you can see it.

Now that you can see them, and you can see they mean you no harm, aren't they nice? You feel the familiarity come back now; I can see you finding your Oregon foot again. It's good to see. Go out. breath the air, enjoy the blue, love the sky, make friends with the trees again.

You're gonna be okay, now things are heading back to the way they were in The Before. 

[maps] Oregon State Offical Map 1971, The Mid- and North Willamette Valley

3479.

This is a further scan from the 1971 Oregon-official state map I've uncovered. The previous map scan was of an inset-map from the back of the map, where city detail thumbnails and lovely state photographs can be found. This particular one is from the front, and is clipped from the main state map.

The ardent reader will by now have noticed the fold-marks, dark areas, and some areas slightly out of focus. All an occupational hazard when scanning maps that have spent the better part of the last twenty years folded and scanned in on a desktop scanner; please excuse the technical difficulty.

Only cities north of 30,000, give or take, are given the dignity of footprints on this map; the yellow-outlined areas are meant to give an idea of the expanse of the incorporated areas of the towns. Still, the were rather out of date at that time; the city limits detailed for Salem are more appropriate for about 1955-60, rather than 1971, which was about the time urban growth in Oregon really picked up steam.

At the time, that inaccuracy infuriated me; now, it's the most charming thing in the world, as is the kind layout, the conservative choices of colors and typefaces (especially for the larger town; the thickness and the squashed aspect ratio of that type has a subtext of cheerfulness, approachability, and friendliness.

A sort of "Oregon nice".

[OR_liff] Portland-Salem Area Map, From ODOT, 1971

3478.

This I'm just posting because it's map, it's dear, it's sweet, it's nostalgic, and it's Oregon.

This is a map of the greater Portland-Salem area, the population and power center of my state, from an offical Oregon state map of 1971, from ODOT:

Everything in this is the landscape of my childhood. Even so, the city boundaries are somewhat out of date, even for them; Salem only had a population of around 68,000 (it's over 160,000 today); Gresham has topped 100K; all the city boundaries have expanded considerably.

But the roads are still largely in the same place. It's still Oregon, that's for sure. 

[Oregon Eclipse 2017] Getting There Was, Actually, Less Than Half The Fun.

3476.

It's not the destination, it's the journey, so they say. Stop and smell the roses is also what they say.

I'd like to find they and give they a swirly or something. Unless they has more constructive things to add, they can keep their lips well buttoned, as far as I'm concerned. They never had to commute to and from a total solar eclipse, did they?

Another thing they said there'd be is a literal car-mageddon. They were wrong, until they were right.

From the 1971 Official Oregon
State Map, published by ODOT

Now, as I've priorly regaled, I am a child of Oregon earth, specifically, that Oregon earth around Silverton. I don't need GPS or really even much of a map if I'm anywhere north of Albany and east of Independence here in the northern Willamette Valley, God's little half-acre, and I'm pretty good at south of that too. And what they were saying was that Monday, August 21st, 2017, was going to be hell-on-wheels, provided those wheels were on an Oregon road in the mid-Willamette Valley.

Still, we went for simplicity in the battle-plan. Head as far south as we could in the time we had. We started out from Out 122nd Way at around 8:15-8:30 AM. From the research I did, I figured if we could get anywhere south of Aurora, or perhaps Mulino if we hit Hwy 213 instead of Hwy 99E, we'd be in line for some worth-it eclipse viewing. As we headed south, I had a tab open to Google Maps traffic as well as TripCheck.org, the ODOT statewide traffic site. It was looking grim then, with notable traffic slowups reporting along 99E between Oregon City and Canby in the gorge stretch of the Willamette River above the Falls, some notable slowing in the area between Canby and Aurora, and at Hubbard. Hwy 213 south of Oregon City was reportedly a long, 2-lane parking lot with an accident, which also affected our Plan C: Beavercreek Road into the backside of Molalla. Hwy 99E looked like the best bet, all things considered, so down the Pacific Highway East we went.

Strange thing, though. By the time we reached Canby and scored some Dutch Bros, it was 9:15 AM and we were a little on-edge, but here's the bizarre thing: there were no real appreciable jams or travails. As a matter of fact, it was pretty clear. In a few minutes, we were almost to Aurora, which is three miles farther down the road:

Highway 99E at Barlow Road. No poblano.

About 3/4ths of a mile beyond the last photo. Just over this
hill is Aurora. Amusingly, the yellow diamond sign
to the right there reads CONGESTION.

Our blithe sojourn into the east side of Woodburn was scant minutes away.

So the trip down went. Happy, casual, relaxed. I had heard that the expected throng at the Oregon Coast was a no-show; could it have been similar to with the mid-Willamette Valley? The signs were promising.

It was a roadside sight
on the way down, now,
we call it home

That promise was actually broken after the event. It was time to go home and everyone left at the same time. Our vantage point was at about Young Avenue and North Pacific Hwy in Woodburn, as previously mentioned. After waiting a few minutes to let the rush of the event abate we too embarked on the northward trek home. We hit the old bumper-to-bumper on before we were even half-a-mile down the road in Woodburn; it was locked and loaded from just north of the Hwy 211/214 junction, just south of the MacLaren Youth Correctional Home, to Hubbard. This two-mile distance took more than 45 minutes to cover.

There was not only time to stop and smell the roses, there was time to smell the exhaust from other cars, the seething impatience of other drivers, the interiors of other cars (but be polite, always ask first!), to lick the roadsigns and electric fences, to settle down, marry, and start a second family. People would get to Hubbard, park the car, find an apartment and just live there because, hell, they weren't going anywhere anyway. It took so long to get from Woodburn to Hubbard that when we saw this sign, I got out, signed up for lessons, completed them, and by the time the car passed the other end of the property I had three offers for concert bookings.

It took us so long to get from Woodburn to Hubbard that I learned the
piano her. I open at the Keller in December; watch this space

North of the Hwy 551 turnoff the grinder loosened up a bit but it choked back up by the time we got to the east end of Canby. 99E was stop and go from the west end of Canby to just past New Era, then broke open again, choked up a little just as we got to the Oregon City city limit at Canemah, then was stop-and-go but a little less aggravating through Oregon City's adorable-yet-claustrophobic downtown. We stopped at the Shell station by the Arch Bridge for a breather.

The distance from the spot we were, in Woodburn, to the spot we found ourselves in, in Oregon City, is close enough to eighteen miles. We had made that trip in about three hours. Woodburn to Oregon City - at an average of six miles per hour.

If a total solar eclipse is a once-in-a-lifetime event, then so is that traffic. And if I ever get my hands on they, they's got some hard explaining to do.

And so it goes.

[OR_liff] An Oregon Solar Eclipse Journal, 21 August 2017.

3472.

Welcome to a place whose descriptive phrase, the mid-Willamette Valley, cause my heart to sing like a finely-tuned instrument, and a minute many of us have been waiting for for rather a few years was impending.

Work let me go on time at 7:00 AM. We were on the road southbound by 8:15 AM, flying by the seat of our pants, as is our way. A number of plans danced through our heads up until now, but we knew, in our heart, the only practical one was hit the road and get as far south as we could by 10:15 AM, and that was the bones, sinew, and details of the thing. No more, no less.

At 9:40 AM, we found ourselves cruising down the main drag on the east side of Woodburn, Oregon, N. Pacific Hwy. Just north of Young Avenue, where Hwy 214 enters town, there is, wonder of all wonders - an Arctic Circle. We suddenly know where our eclipse brunch is happening. The latitude and longitude pair 45° 8' 15.468'' N, 122° 50' 36.8268'' W is near enough within a few feet where the nose of the old Subaru warhorse was parked in the parking lot, by the front door. Getting down as far as Woodburn was a boon, especially considering the traffic-ocalypse we were promised prior to the apocalypse. We saw many pullouts on our way down: the two weigh stations by the Wilsonville-Hubbard cutoff were neatly but tightly stocked with lookers, and there's a lot that the Hop Festival uses in downtown Hubbard that had happy people arrayed about in lawn chairs, eclipse glasses firmly in place, following faithfully the Horkheimer dictum keep looking up. 

On the 21st of August 2017, Hwy 99E was the place to be.

Once in Woodburn we started looking for a good parking space, which was also no challenge. When the Arctic Circle hove into view, The Wife™ squealed with delight and I found the empty parking lot most welcoming. Our meal, and our vantage, was set.

The remainder of this is a stream of pictures, arranged in the order I took them by the time coded into the metadata. The actual times may vary by several seconds, of course.

09:41 AM PDT

The view north (toward Portland) on N. Pacific Hwy.

... and the view south (toward Salem).

10:09 AM PDT. 

Our own 'pinhole camera': a square of foamcore which projected a little fingernail-shaped sliver of Sun on another white piece of foamcore ... or even the white tabletops outside the Arctic Circle.

10:12 AM PDT.

The Wife™ said she'd seen the sunlight go a little wan. I didn't see it at first, but comparing it with the first photos above, it's now kind of obvious. The sunshine is a bit off, almost imperceptibly, but it's going there. There's a sepia tone to the sunlight and the atmosphere now.

We are now about six minutes out from start of totality.

10:15 AM PDT.

I've just now noticed that the lights in the Arctic Circle's sign have come on.

10:16 AM PDT.

The contrast between the lighted sign and the environment is now more palpable. A sort of duskiness has begun to tone the sky down.

10:17:07 AM PDT.

While still quite light out, the sign lights for the business next door have come on. The dark feels as though it's an actively gathering thing. The sky is deepening to an indigo toward the zenith.

10:17:17 AM PDT.

As above, only moreso. Color is being neutralized from the world around us. There is now a strange tension in the air that I can't describe - or maybe it's just me, keyed up from the expecation.

We are just about one minute out from totality.

10:17:42 AM PDT.

The sky to the west (looking west-northwest over the Arctic Circle) seems to have acquired a delicate pall of darkness. We are  about 35 seconds, give or take, out from totality.

10:18:05 AM PDT.

It might be a subjective thing, again, but the feeling of being borne down on by the arrival of the umbra is a thing that is almost solid in the mind. Anyone who doubted that anything would happen would stop doubting now.

The visual contrast between the still-daylit (but just barely) sky and the now-energized lot lights and building illumination is so discordant that the mind begins to bend a little. On the horizon, in every direction, an orange tinge more appropriate for sunset than mid-morning.

Everything you look at contradicts itself.

10:18:20 AM PDT.

The edge of the umbra arrives at Woodburn, Oregon. The semi-darkness goes from unreal to surreal.

10:18:30 AM PDT. Totality.

It's a peculiar (in the singular way as well as the full-tilt-boogie way) darkness in the heart of the shadow. It's as dark as a moonlit night, but there is something about the darkness that it is imbued with an eerie light rather much unlike that of the full moon: it's a light inside the darkness. The air hushes, then a light breeze goes up. You feel the temperature decrease ever-so-slightly. The orange sunset is a 360-degree thing, anointing all horizons in every directions equally; you are struck with th realization that you are looking outside the shadow, which does a thing to your perceptive POV, and you realize that a mere handful of miles separate you from that area.

10:19:20 AM, PDT.

By my reckoning, we are a little more than halfway through totality. It took a few more precious seconds to find my foot in this fleeting new world than I'd like, because right now the mind is in overdrive, striving to create in the memory an indelible record of everything one is seeing.

Here, by the way, is the star performer:

It's not ideal, but for a snapshot on a digital camera taken without fiddling around with any settings, more than enough to be a lifetime's treasure.

10:19:40 AM PDT.

A tighter shot of the omni-directional sunset. A contrail glows there. The traffic signal at Young Avenue and Pacific Highway is neon in its scintillation.

10:19:49 AM PDT.

The obscured Sun competes with a streetlamp. The streetlamp is winning, for now.

10:20:05 AM PDT.

The eclipse about to do the "diamond ring", the gracenote that heralds the end of totality. We have been in the dark for pretty close to two minutes now.

During the times I wasn't snapping photos, me and The Wife™ were looking directly at the eclipsed Sun. They tell you not to look at the Sun during an eclipse, and that's true in the main. We take it as read that the Sun is incredibly bright; consider that you can have up to 99 per cent of the Sun's disk covered and it's still difficult to tell for sure that any light has been occluded at all. Partial eclipses are cool, but that's still the blinding sun, and it will damage your eyes just as surely as a totally uncovered sun will.

But once the Sun is completely occulted, and only so long as it's completely occulted, you can chance a look. One still must be careful; when you see the diamond ring, it's a few split seconds before you must look away. We watched that bead of light erupt on the rim of that perfect circle and then spread outward from there. We looked away before it got too bright.

Mama always told me not to look into the eyes of the sun,
But Mama ... that's where the fun is.


10:20:36 AM PDT.

The light began to intensify and we're now back at a point where it's just kind of dusky.
That, and our minds are blown.

A once-in-a-lifetime thing. And if you couldn't be there, at least I could show you. It's a personal thing that will remain at the edge of my perception as long as I live now.

The drive down was - you might say - totally worth it. They don't leave total eclipses on your doorstep every week you know.

[OR_liff] Oregon Eclipse Totality at 45° 8' 15.468'' N, 122° 50' 36.8268'' W, 10:18AM, 21 Aug 2017

3471.

Guess where we were today? And what we were looking at?

Here you go:

Woodburn, Oregon, about 90 seconds of totality, 10:18 AM, Monday, 21 August 2017. Not only will I never forget this, I will be having eclipse flashbacks unto, I should hope, my deathbed.

That is not as macabre a thought as you'd think. I have more pictures, they are to follow. 

[OR_liff] Bill Hall Nails The Tao of Tom McCall With McCallandia

3448.

The Wife™ has informed me that seeing local things with the grammatic form -landia appended has become tiresome. I'm beginning to agree. If you see anythinglandia in Portland or the environs these days, it's long since lost its punch.

The upside to this is that when something is given the rubric and deserves it, it wears it so very well. I have just met with such a thing.

Bill Hall is a man of much ilk who has been involved in Oregon politics for a while; he is currently a county commissioner in Lincoln County, down on the coast. As a younger fellow, he volunteered to help elect Oregon's then-quondam governor, Tom McCall, to a hoped-for third non-consecutive term. Old Moe Mentum had swung the other way by then, and it was not to be, but clearly it left the seed of a story that eventually demanded to be told.

Oregon politics and politicos are strange things. At once parochial and world-aware, we tend to have a laser-like focus on the local that tends to obscure the fact that, in the back of our minds, we have a solid idea of how it connects to the world around us. I fancy they are a breed unto themselves. From the late 1960s through the mid 1970s, that breed of human was crystallized into a 6' 5" man from Massachusetts by way of central Oregon who taught us … and is still, by his legacy, teaching us … how to Oregon better than many natives. McCall is a legend in Oregon politics for good, solid reasons, leaving us a legacy of logical, sensible land-use planning and a way of cherishing the environment and our natural treasures that acknowledges that if Oregon's special because of them, Oregon will no longer be special if she sells them out as wealth and plunder.

But he was also a man of seeming contradictions, because as progressive as he was in many important ways, in other ways, he was your standard-issue 1970s Republican. Author Hall has taken the measure of the man, all in all, and given us a romp of a utopian novel in McCallandia, published by Matt Love's Nestucca Spit Press. The book imagines what would have happened if, instead of elevating Gerald Ford to the vice-presidency on Agnew's resignation in 1973, Nixon instead chose The Man From Oregon as an unexpected safe chair-warmer. Of course, Watergate happened after that. And after that … President McCall. And The Oregon Story goes national.

This is, as the tagline in the upper right corner of book has it, a utopian novel, and those who would say that what happened in the book couldn't possibly happen in reality would be well-advised to look up that word and understand what it means. Because a book in which the Bottle Bill and the Beach Bill went national, the President temporarily heads the EPA, Vortex II happens on the National Mall, and Barry Commoner becomes vice president couldn't possibly happen in reality. Being a utopian alternative history, though, allows you to kick out all the stops.

Where this book really clicked for me, though, whas the way Hall made everything work. By his authorial pen, McCall achieves full measure as an Oregonized sort of Lyndon Johnson, who had one foot in tradition and one foot in daring to do the right thing against any and all odds. All the positivity and even the hope for change that McCall represented to many of us was captured utterly. The novel is saturated in all the Oregon you could ever want to read about; no less than James Cloutier contributed a Hugh Wetshoe cartoon as one of the opening gambits.

Hall's McCall fairly strides though the novel, which is set up as a series of episodes interspersed with narratives from other supporting characters and 'what might have been' media pieces. The life of President McCall doesn't deviate from the actual history of the times; "Squeaky" Fromme makes an attempt on his life in Sacramento in 1975, Vic Atiyeh still triumphs over Robert Straub to become Oregon's last GOP governor; McCall still succumbs to cancer in January of 1983. What also impresses is the way Hall weaves the facts of what actually happened with the idea of a McCall presidency and makes it all seem as though, if McCall had actually gotten into the White House, this all might actually have happened.

And any Oregon political novel that has Ken Kesey as a character? That name-checks Callenbach's Ecotopia? Whose roll-call of Oregon political names rings down the Capitol corridors like animating spirits? Whose second chapter is a notional Rolling Stone piece that channels Hunter S. Thompson? How could I not say yes to that?

The book is a wonder and a romp  and a manic bit of fun and as Oregon as it gets and a decided anti-depressant to the current times we're in, and if anyone ever wonders why McCall was revered by Oregonians Of A Certain Age and why he should be even now, you'll find the answers here.

I wholeheartedly recommend that anyone interested in Oregon get a copy of this book. It may well turn out to be one of the best-remembered and cogent books on the Oregon scene ever written.

It certainly nailed the McCall I remember.

[or_liff] The Road To Boston Begins In Newport

3431.

This in over the transom: there is now a sign up on West Olive Street near downtown Newport, down on the Oregon Coast. And people may not know this up to now, but the longest continuous road in America begins here, and doesn't let up until it's gone through 12 states, and three thousand, three hundred and sixty-five miles.

That road is U.S. Highway 20, and after traversing all those states, strikes out across the heart of Oregon from the Idaho border at Ontario, pausing at places with names like Vale, Juntura, Burns, Hines, Brothers (a 'town' that goes on the market now and again), Bend, Sisters, Sweet Home, Lebanon, Albany, Corvallis, Blodgett, Burnt Woods, and finally Newport.

In Oregon it has enough adventure and terrain for the rest of the road, but it's awesome enough to go the rest of the way.

Today, The Oregonian posted a picture of the sign. It reads US 20 East, Boston MA, 3,365 Miles. A nifty picture and a short article are at the end of this link which can be viewed. An invitation to adventure, to tank up and go, or just to dream.

And, very soon, in downtown Boston, it's said, a sign will go up reading US 20 West, Newport OR, 3,365 Miles. 

US 20 is like the Force; it binds the Nation together.

At least the part that goes between Oregon and Massachusetts.

[liff in Cascadia] The Wind, This Time

3400.

It won't be Columbus Day Storm (1962) bad. It won't be Hannukah Eve (1993) bad. It probably won't be Tree-Falls-In-Our-Yard Night (2014) bad. But, hail Eris, who can tell until it gets here?

Via http://earth.nullschool.net, a full-planet live rendering of atmospheric conditions:

The small bright teal circle is the approximate location of Portland, Oregon.

ETA? About 2 hours from the time of this post.

Mount Hood not visible from 122nd Avenue at this time. 

[liff in OR] Portland In The Time Of Flood

3245.

The counter on the Acu-Rite weather droid for rain, while I do love this little guy, is flawed. It doesn't reset itself after the water year ends. It also appears to top out at 99.99 inches. After I snapped this, I cleared the totals … you can only clear all … so we're starting out again. This was the view on Tuesday morning:

It defines rain 'events' differently than our weather broadcasters do, and it's a little inscrutable, but over this historic weekend, when sewage gouted out manhole covers in The Pearl, when Johnson Creek rose 1.6 feet in one hour on Monday morning, when Detroit Reservoir rose 17 feet in a single day, we saw 6.04 inches of rain at the Chez ZehnKatzen.

With 8.7 inches we are now statistically over the rainfall we'd expect to get in a December, and I call the rain to a halt for this month. It can all go straight to the mountains as snow.

I have spoken.

[liff] This Is The Week That Is, Oregon, The 4th Week of July 2015

3207.

After seeing the news and still enduring the weather this week in lower south Cascadia, this is all I can see; this is us, in a nutshell:

Now, how do we get out of this nutshell?

[teh_funnay] How One Sometimes Feels When Watching The News Out Of Salem

3198.

Tomorrow's another day, Jake.

[Liff In OR] Where some Oregonians come from

3169.

Spotted in passing a few weeks back, a refreshing take on the now-tired (and a little oversharing) practice of iconically displaying one's family unit on the rear window:

Hadn't though of this one. Nicely done. A Californian marries a Texan and moves her to create two little Oregonians.

No matter what you think of Californians and Texans, you have to salute the good taste they had to come here just to do that. My hat's off to you, whoever you are.

[PDX] 36 Pit Wildfire Morning From Portland

3142.

Over the past several days, something has come to the west side of the Cascades that not many of us would ever have thought to see: A wildfire.

They're calling it the 36 Pit Fire for reasons I'm hoping they'll eventually explain (on the edit: a commenter in my GooglePlus stream, +Merrilee Gilley, posted a link to a KOIN 6 News report explaining just how this wildfire-and others-got their name), and during the last few days, the prevailings have been blowing it down into the Willamette Valley, casting a dull pall from Portland down to past Salem. It's located, more or less, just east of the end of the North Fork Reservoir, which is about 5 miles southeast of the town of Estacada, which is about 30 miles southeast of the city center of Portland.

According to a Google Map-based estimate, the nearest part of the sprawling fire is about 27 miles from Home Base's front doorstep.

What residents there are in that area are being evacuated, and people in the town of Estacada itself are feeling a bit nervous. The Governor has invoked the Emergency Conflagration Act, which allows the State Fire Marshal to draft more structural firefighters to help. So, yeah … shizz has gotten real up at the end of State Hwy 224.

Down here, in the valley, at a safe remove, we who have healthy lungs and are out at just the right time get a show. Sunrise today was exquisite …

These were taken with the Canon simply pointing in the direction of the light.

The only processing was done to bring them into a size more appropriate for posting.

It's like shining a very bright light through nacre. And, if things stay lucky, there's not too much of this left to go.

So, if I can be allowed a soft'n'corny sentiment, I wish those who fight the fire and those who have property in harm's way well. 

[pdx] KOPB Open House, Complete With Celebrity Sightings!!!

3080.

I am a kid of the TV generation. This is true, and relevant.

I was born in Silverton, Oregon and spent a lot of time watching the boob tube. It would not be wholly incorrect to say that the TV signals not only sent me news, information, fun, and a ton of daytime game shows, but also kind of pulled me north from my ancestral home. TV has always had a sort of magic … strange action at a distance, that made a kid on the country-fied margin of a mid-Willamette Valley town feel like he was just another Portlander.

Newscasters were amongst my first idols. Ivan Smith, Rick Meyers, Ted Bryant, Jim Bosley, Mike Donahue … if you grew up in Oregon during the 70s, you knew these names too.

Our granfallon, but not a bad thing.

So, now that I've been a resident of Portland for more than fifty percent of my life now, it seems a bit strange that the idea of a visit to a TV station would still excite me. As Oregonians go, I'm pretty jaded about some things. But when The Wife™ told me that we could hit KOPB TV during an open house, there was no question about whether or not I was going to be there.

So, we hit Clackamas Town Center for watch batteries; I must not enter a TV station in Portland, it ought be written, without my Tom Peterson Watch strapped on. A totem, if you will. The building and equipment will at once note this, and accept me as one of their own. Or, at least, an elucidating conversation shall ensue.

KOPB's main studio, where all the TV magic pertains, is a building along SW Macadam Avenue in the southern reaches of Portland's Johns Landing area, that flat area between the river and the hills south of the South Waterfront Condo Newtown, where the addresses on the cross-streets begin with the number 0. KOPB's building is located in the space-post continuum at 7140 SW Macadam Avenue; the entry is on the west side of the street and is at the cross of SW Nevada Street. Let there be no mistake, though, despite there being a parking lot at the studio building, there was to be no chance of getting a space there; Oregon Public Broadcasting is that popular. We parked about two blocks north on a side street, which gave for a nice little walk, which is no mean thing, as the Johns Landing nabe is almost too cute for adequate description.

Balloons, pop up tents, free swag just for showing up … we got two great Oregon Field Guide DVDs and an Oregon Experience about the nation's first female cop, who happened here in Portland, and met two very famous celebrities. But I'm getting ahead of myself. We are about to enter the TV zone, and signs and wonders are to start portending all over the place. Please, step inside the doors …

Just inside the doors and behind the wonderful architecture of the reception desk is a lobby with history. Wonderful stuff. Before digital TV and remote-control cameras, this is the way they did it back in the day …

KOAC was one of the two original stations in the OPB network. That was the one in Corvallis: KOAP was the Portland half. And, before there was .MP4 files and digital audio, this is how you rocked it on remote:

During the 80s, the OPB Network expanded with the addition of KVDO, Salem's former independent Channel 3, which was eventually moved to Bend, and the 13 was the LaGrande channel, nailing down NE Oregon and providing OPB with, if not world domination, overwhelming command of the state of Oregon.

OPB world domination is scheduled sometime in the future perhaps. I can think of worse things.

The classic symbol of broadcasting seems to be the microphone, and here are some classics from OPB's history, complete with call-signs:

Sadly, not too much paper ephemera, though I found this matchbook cover cosmically hilarious …

Wise eyes may have watched Channel 10. Wise mouths have moved on from the cigarette. Of course, wise mouths will always be with us, won't they?

Moving along past an even older version of portable camera than before …

… there come the radio studios. On the right as you proceed down the hall, there's the KOPB radio studio, on the air with the Saturday edition of Think Out Loud. 

The crown jewel of the building, the TV production studio, is at the south end of the building. The entry level turns out to be upstairs, and at the end of the corridor is a overlook to the studio floor. Oregon Art Beat was taping a performance of the U of O's women's a capella group, Divisi. 

The studio level was downstairs. A classic view beside the door:

Despite the notes of classic broadcasting history one can see everywhere, make no mistake, OPB is thoroughly, almost disconcertingly modern.  Stepping into the master control center was a little like stepping into the bridge of the J.J. Abrams version of the bridge of the USS Enterprise. 
 

Guided through by a technician who knew just everything about everything, he told us all the steps required to get shows out of the aether and on the are. It's computers, of course, all the way down; the only physical tape storage was the archives, which seem to be a large cabinet resembling a vending machine and about the size of two very large refrigerators. They contain tapes holding about 1 TB each; requests make their way to the system, which extracts the files from tape and places them on the server for later broadcast. It's a world of digital transmission and computer files there, and it's very quiet and efficient with beautiful lights and test patterns.

Not for the first time, I realized that I had missed one of those various callings I just wasn't clever enough to get into. Video transmission kind of does it to me. being in this room, knowing that the programs seen on the small monitors are instantly going to every corner of the state that has a computer or a TV, there's an amazing feeling of having one's finger on the pulse of modern times. The tech guide opined that it was never too late to start, but I wonder. The idea of that ship having sailed is a hard one to divorce from.

At this time, the information being dished out to Oregonians was dispensed through the minor gods of Christopher Kimball and Lidia Bastianich. Suitably, for Portland, it was cooking shows.

I always thought it was strange. All those shows about cooking, not one about washing up. Anyway.

All is not digital there, not yet … as long as there is analog legacy media, they'll need to convert, and that's one of the jobs this lumbering artoo unit does :

There were still video tape decks and legacy technology, but it was chiefly devoted to the conversion of analog technology to digital as needed. It's not dead, but it is fading away.

Back upstairs and toward the exit to the building, across the corridor from the KOPB radio studio was the one for the local legendary listener-supported jazz station, KMHD-FM.

KMHD is a uniquely local thing. Housed at the campus of Mount Hood Community College until about 2008, it's been broadcasting jazz, commercial-free, to Portlandia and surrounds for between thirty and forty years. It's never been a part of the Mount Hood CC curriculum, but MHCC does own the station; from 2009 OPB has been running it in partnership with MHCC, which is the license holder and station owner.

So for those of you who love listening to KMHD, there's the magic happening, right in front of you.

So much broadcasting in such a small space, so close to each other. This never ceases to amaze me. Broadcasting is magic, kinda.

Back out to the sun/rain/sun, we stopped again to chat with our celebrities. I present to you Steve Amen and Eric Cain, and if you don't know these names, you should. If there was an Oregon citizenship test, they'd be on it.

Steve Amen (l), Eric Cain (r). Local broadcast gods.

Steve Amen, of course, is the affable face of the legendary Oregon Field Guide. Eric Cain produced the equally-legendary Oregon Exprerience series. If it's Oregon, the history,  the culture, the important faces in Oregon history, the geography, travel, those two programs very nearly have it covered. They're passionate about Oregon, this special place and we have nothing but admiration for their creative energies, every one of which counts large.

They are also incredibly friendly guys who it's terribly easy to fall into a deep chat about the subjects they cover. I recently saw the Oregon Experience about Ken Kesey, an author whose works I've never read but a man whose life is utterly fascinating, and was immensely pleased to hear Eric talk about it.

If you never heard of the awesomeness these guys produce (not to mention the third member of the triumvirate, Oregon Art Beat) then it's time to bone up, cowboys. A lot of past OFGs are available for viewing any time at http://www.opb.org/programs/ofg/; similarly for Oregon Experience the site is http://www.opb.org/television/programs/oregonexperience/. For history both natural and human nothing else can compare, in the video stream, and for those who wish to properly know how to Oregon, which is a lifelong study even for us natives, it's continuing education.

It's free to all, whether or not you can contribute. At least we should be grateful to have it. 

We have history. But broadcasting? No mystery.