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Iconic Inspiration | Infamous Last Words
Heaven on Earth | On the Future of Rapidly Morphing Media
UO Alumni Calendar | A Duck Walks into a Bar . . .
Duck Tales: Moonlight Bivouac
Iconic Inspiration
Teacher develops innovative approach to help students live what they learn.
Icons are all around us—some we admire, others inspire us, and sometimes they come in the form of a sixth-grade teacher.
In her student days at the UO, Maryanne Obersinner ’93 didn’t know much about icons—or that the UO’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, into which she’d sometimes duck to take a peaceful break from her busy schedule, housed an extensive permanent collection of icon artwork and artifacts. Yet, for the past twelve years, icons have played a significant role in her life—and the lives of nearly 600 students that have passed through the O’Hara Catholic School classroom in Eugene where she teaches.
Icons are the centerpiece of Obersinner’s Living Saints Project that connects her students with the University, the community, and perhaps the divine. The idea for the project grew out of a workshop she attended in 1998 where another teacher showed photographs of students dressed up as saints. “My mind just started to light up with ideas,” Obersinner says. She saw how the study of a saint could lend itself perfectly to interdisciplinary learning. Integrating social studies, visual arts, history, religion, and geography, students could learn about the context in which their saint lived—from the culture and politics of the period to the artwork and textiles. And with nearly 10,000 saints (and “blesseds”—those beatified by the Catholic Church) from which to choose, the possible areas of study are nearly endless, circling the globe and extending far back in history.
Students in her sixth-grade class each select a Catholic saint and, for the next three months, immerse themselves in that saint’s world. After thoroughly researching and writing about their subject (which introduces them to skills such as library research and citing references), students are asked to get creative with three art assignments: an ancient map, an illuminated manuscript, and a painted iconic rendering of their saint.
That’s where the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art (JSMA) comes in. The museum’s education and outreach program called ArtsBridge provides stipends to University of Oregon scholars to conduct arts-related workshops and provide professional development to the community. Many of the creative ideas used in the Living Saints curriculum have come directly from these scholars. For instance, one UO scholar taught students how to prepare the paper for their “ancient” map project: apply a special “secret antiquification fluid” (brown tempera paint mixed with water) to tracing paper, allow to dry, crinkle vigorously, then smooth, and, voila, a surface ready for a young cartographer.
“The scholars not only have the knowledge, but they’re also interested in working with kids and sharing their skills,” Obersinner said. “We’re really fortunate that we have ArtsBridge through the University working with us.”
To prepare for the icon-painting assignment, the students took a field trip to the JSMA’s A. Dean and Lucile I. McKenzie Russian Icon Gallery, which features artwork dating from as far back as the fourteenth century. They also heard a classroom talk about icons by A. Dean McKenzie himself, professor emeritus in the School of Architecture and Allied Arts and an expert on the subject.
A local iconographer, Teresa Danovich, volunteers her time to help students learn the sacred art of “writing” an icon. “People speak of ‘writing an icon’ because the sacred icons were intended to tell a story at a time when people often couldn’t read,” Obersinner explains. The paintings are rich with symbolism, so to help people understand the stories of the saints and the scripture, every detail conveys meaning. For instance, Saint Peter holds keys to illustrate the authority given him by Christ; Saint Michael the Archangel carries a spear to signify his position as a warrior. Colors are symbolic, too: black might signify evil, red may denote a martyr, purple robes indicate royalty, and brown clothing represent poverty or a monastic life. Icon artists painted the dark colors first and the lighter colors later to symbolize emerging spirituality. They also honored the spiritual aspect of their work by prayer and fasting.
“Many of the students say that writing an icon is not like any other kind of art they’ve done,” says Obersinner. “They try to be focused and prayerful as they tell this story. It’s pretty amazing.”
The students call her Mrs. O, and her saints project has become legendary at O’Hara School. “On the first day of school they’ll ask me, ‘when do we get to start?’” she says, “it’s not ‘when do we have to start?’” Many students even begin the term with a saint already in mind. “It was something I had looked forward to since first grade,” says former student Ethan Smith, who focused on Saint Sebastian. “I thought it was cool that Saint Sebastian was the patron saint of athletes. . . . I wanted to pick a saint who represented someone who had a similar background [to me] and loves athletics like I do.”
Last spring the Living Saints exhibit—fifty-two sacred icon paintings (acrylic on canvas) created by Mrs. O’s students—hung on the walls of the JSMA. Along with regular museumgoers, about 5,000 schoolchildren viewed the icons. Claire Farrington was one of the proud student-artists whose work was on display. “It was so cool because everybody could see it and schools took field trips to see our artwork,” she says.
Capping each year’s Living Saints Project is a public presentation at O’Hara School. Students dress as their saint and stay in character while fielding questions from nearly a thousand guests who wend their way through the school’s gym and come face to face with personages such as Saint Ignatius of Loyola, dressed in faux chain mail; Blessed Kateri Tekakwitha, a Mohawk-Algonquian woman in traditional Indian attire; or Saint Edith Stein in full habit.
Public speaking can be daunting for a twelve-year-old, but after three months of living and breathing their saints, Obersinner says, not only do her kids know their stuff, they take it very seriously. “One year I had a student that I forgot to call by his saint’s name and he wouldn’t respond to me!” she recalls, laughing.
The Living Saints Project garnered the 2008 Catholic Schools for Tomorrow Award for Innovations in Education in the category of Total Community Involvement, presented by Today’s Catholic Teacher magazine. And in 2009, Obersinner won the Distinguished Teacher Award for the Northwest region given by the National Catholic Educators Association.
She acknowledges that it’s an honor to be recognized, but for Obersinner the true reward comes from her students. “You see these young people as they go through the presentation and it’s like they’ve just grown two feet taller that day,” she says. “They’re so proud of what they’ve done.”
For Marcella Buser, a student in this year’s class who chose to interpret Saint Margaret of Cortona, the project was an edifying experience. “Mrs. O. had us live what we were learning,” she said. “I’m sad that I’m not going to have her as a teacher anymore.”
— Sharleen Nelson ’06
Infamous Last Words
What would you say with your head in a noose?
Robert Elder ’00 was in his mid-twenties and single when he began researching his book, Last Words of the Executed (University of Chicago Press, 2010), a compilation of the final statements of more than 900 convicted criminals who faced death by hanging, firing squad, electric chair, or lethal injections.
By the time he completed the book, he was thirty-three, married, and the father of one-year-old twins.
Getting to the finish line was tough, the Chicago journalist says. “I hadn’t expected to have children during [the writing of the book]. I had to spend time with people who were accused of horrific child murder, molestation, rape, and abuse. My wife, who was researching with me every step of the way, was pregnant with twins. We were having grisly, difficult conversations, and it just wasn’t pleasant.”
Elder, who has written for The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Salon, spent seven years searching through newspaper archives and prison records, reading through more than 6,000 written and oral recordings of executed prisoners’ “last words.” He was motivated by one of journalism’s most esteemed aspirations, to give public voice to the traditionally voiceless.
“These are society’s most dangerous, outcast members,” Elder says. “Why is it a cultural ritual to record what they say? I wanted to have a laser beam focus on that central question.”
For centuries, people’s dying statements have been recorded and revered. “They matter because they can’t be taken back,” Elder says. “Death is an experience each of us has to go through. We all wonder, ‘what does one say on the edge of oblivion?’”
The last words of those about to be executed have a particular resonance, Elder says, not only because of their circumstances but because, unlike most of us, these people know the exact time of their death and that their statements will be recorded. He was “appalled,” he says, when he realized that although these “last words” existed in archives and records, no one had formally compiled them into a book. So he set to work.
Elder chose the book’s entries to reflect a variety of people, regions, periods, ethnic backgrounds, and cultural attitudes. Entries span 350 years, from 1659 to 2009. He also included “words I read that I could not shake, things that stuck with me,” he says.
Early entries are often last words of individuals hanged for religious reasons, such as Quakers in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. “Yea, I have been in Paradise several days and now I am about to enter eternal happiness,” were the final words of Mary Dyer, executed in 1660 for disobeying a banishment decree. Wayward soldiers are also represented. “I have been among drawn swords, flying bullets, roaring cannons, amidst all which, I knew not what Fear meant: but now I have appreciations of the dreadful wrath of God, in the other World, which I am going into, my soul within me, is amazed at it,” said an unnamed military ring leader, executed in 1673 for treason and mutiny.
Most of the entries are from individuals whose names are known only to history, to specific geographical areas, or to those affected by the crimes, but some famous names made the cut, including accused witch Sarah Good, hung in the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1692: “I am no more a witch than you are a wizard, and if you take away my life, God will give you blood to drink.” Ted Bundy, executed by the electric chair in 1989, is also present: “I’d like you to give my love to my family and friends.” Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, executed in Indiana by lethal injection in 2001, didn’t leave any words of his own but left behind the poem “Invictus” by William Ernest Henley: “It matters not how strait the gate/How charged with punishments the scroll/ I am the master of my fate/I am the captain of my soul.”
Oral historian Studs Terkel, who wrote the book’s foreword, commented that what he would remember best about the book “is its poetry—the actual poetry in the speech of people at the most traumatic moment of their lives.”
Elder says he did not intend the book to take a stand on the issue of capital punishment. However, many of the soon-to-be executed used their last words to proclaim their innocence and at least one was innocent of the murder for which he was put to death. In recent years, many used their last words to rail against capital punishment and plead for the practice to be abolished.
But brief descriptions of the crimes for which each of the speakers was put to death provide essential context for their often-desperate words. Some of the crimes were the result of impulse, passion, mental illness, greed, or revenge. But others were cold-blooded and grisly: Frank Rose, executed by a Utah firing squad in 1904, shot his wife on Christmas Day and left his two-year-old son, without food or water, with his mother’s body for two days. Gordon Northcott, executed by hanging in 1930, admitted to torturing, molesting, and killing twenty young men and boys. Jason Massey, killed by lethal injection in Texas in 2001, raped, stabbed, disemboweled, decapitated, and mutilated a thirteen-year-old girl.
Initially, Elder wasn’t going to include descriptions of the crimes because he didn’t want them to divert attention from the focus of the book. But eventually, he says, “I was convinced by my wife and a couple of editors that it would give the book greater context, depth, and resonance. You can feel empathy for the person speaking, but when put in the context of the crime, it makes you feel conflicted. It creates emotional and cognitive dissonance with the reader.”
Elder visited Salem, Massachusetts, while on a recent tour promoting the book. Although the town has erected a memorial reminding people of the town’s intolerant past, the actual site where nineteen people were executed for witchcraft, Gallows Hill, is now a playground. “I was stunned it was not more of a memorial, but at least the area is going to good use,” he says. “And I like it that they don’t call it something else.”
In order to lighten his mood while writing Last Words, Elder, who has been a film critic, embarked on a second book based on interviews with thirty directors discussing the movies that made them want to be a director. Working on the book was a life saver, he says. “You can’t spend that much time on such a dark subject and keep your perspective and sanity.”
Last year, Elder was laid off from his decade-long reporting job at the Chicago Tribune, which gave him time to address ideas that had been languishing in his back pocket for years. He set up two websites asking people to send in their stories of relationship beginnings and endings. “I just wanted to do something fun, frivolous, and light as air,” he says. He is apparently graced with a journalist’s Midas touch—both ItWasOverWhen.com and ItWasLoveWhen.com went viral, and he signed a contract for two books based on the collected stories. He is now a regional editor for AOL’s Patch.com, a local news website covering eleven states.
Elder has been named the School of Journalism and Communication’s 2010 Eric Allen Outstanding Young Alumnus. He will be honored during the school’s Hall of Achievement dinner and reception in November 2010.
—Alice Tallmadge ’87
Oregon has never executed a woman, as Diane Goeres-Gardner ’71, MA ’83, found in researching her second book, Murder, Morality and Madness (Caxton Press, 2009). The book delves into the background of all eighteen Oregon women accused of murder from the mid-1800s to the mid-1900s. Goeres-Gardner combed through archives of newspapers, court documents, and police arrest records to discover the context of the women’s crimes, the judicial process the women went through, and the living conditions convicted women endured in prison.
Goeres-Gardner’s research exposed the time’s contradictory attitude toward women. The prevailing Victorian view was that women were too weak and frail of mind to vote, much less carry out such a dastardly deed as murder. On the other hand, the press and the public didn’t hesitate to excoriate some of the women before they were tried. And if a woman was sent to prison, the conditions she faced were stark and isolating. “I thought I would find women had been discriminated against,” Goeres-Gardner said, “but not how badly they were discriminated against. How cold-blooded it could be at times, how blatant and how vicious.”
And how exploitive. During that period Portland was known for being a “mecca for vice and sin.” The 1880 census listed fifty-eight prostitutes living and working in Portland. By 1912 there were more than 400 houses of prostitution on Portland’s west side. Prostitution was prosecuted, but only to a degree. Fines and payoffs to police paid for a major portion of the civic government operating in the city. Economically, bawdy houses were “a source of income to the police, the politicians, the physicians, the liquor dealers, and the municipality.”
—AT
Heaven on Earth
The Willamette meteorite and its twin in orbit
A deeply pitted, bell-shaped fiberglass rock about the size of a VW Bug sits outside the UO’s Museum of Natural and Cultural History. On a recent afternoon, a woman in a turquoise cardigan and matching sun visor walked right past it. Several cyclists in shorts and flip-flops pedaled on by. A UO law student running to class mentioned that she sees the rock every day. “I think it’s an abstract sculpture,” she says.
In fact, the object is a replica of the Willamette meteorite. According to UO geology professor emeritus William Orr, the real meteorite has a “fascinating history from the time it arrived on Earth to the present.”
Indians celebrated it. Farmers hijacked it. Then it was exhibited at the 1905 Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland. Immediately thereafter, New York City’s American Museum of Natural History acquired it. More than 100 years later, it’s still on display, but in a slightly smaller form. Curators sawed off a twenty-eight-pound lump in 1998 and traded it for a meteorite from Mars.
Dick Pugh, a member of the Cascadia Meteorite Laboratory at Portland State University, believes the Willamette meteorite was part of a planet, which was created in the asteroid belts between Mars and Jupiter shortly after our solar system’s formation. Asteroid collisions shattered the planet, creating fragments that circled the Earth for billions of years. Further collisions knocked at least one fragment out of its celestial holding pattern and onto a crash course with Earth.
Scientists agree that the Willamette meteorite’s impact, which occurred some 15,000 years ago, must have been spectacular—essentially an iron and nickel bullet weighing more than fifteen tons slamming into Earth at supersonic speed. Orr believes the meteorite would have penetrated the Earth’s surface by tens of meters.
During the next few thousand years, it got engulfed by an iceberg. At least 12,000 years ago, the Missoula Floods sent the meteorite-bearing iceberg through Idaho and Washington down the Columbia Gorge, past the present site of Portland and into the northern Willamette Valley. When the iceberg melted, the meteorite became stranded on a ridge near the confluence of the Willamette and Tualatin rivers—not far south of Portland near the city of West Linn.
Pugh says that forests eventually grew up around the rock. “Birds and squirrels crapped on it. Leaves fell on it.” Five tons rusted away over the millennia before it was discovered.
The Clackamas Indians called the meteorite Tomanowos, according to June Olson, writing in a 1999 article for Smoke Signals, the newspaper of the Confederated Tribes of the Grande Ronde. She explained that it belonged to tribal healers, and they believed it came from the moon. Young warriors washed their faces and dipped their arrowheads in the water that collected in the rock’s pitted surface. “The water had special healing properties and was used by Native doctors to cure friends and relatives.” By the 1850s, the U.S. government not only moved the Clackamas tribe to the Grande Ronde reservation—more than fifty miles away—but also prohibited Native religious ceremonies. “ . . . The Clackamas people went no more to the site of Tomanowos,” Olson wrote.
Owners of the Oregon Iron and Steel Company unknowingly became its new guardians when they bought land under the deposited rock. According to Pugh, neighboring farmers Ellis Hughes and Bill Dale found the meteorite during the autumn of 1902 while chopping wood for a local schoolhouse. Hughes threw a stone against it and it rang like a bell. Recognizing his target as a meteorite, Hughes tried to buy the land, but Oregon Iron and Steel refused his offer. So he stole it.
Hughes cut roads from his property through heavily forested terrain to the meteorite. With the help of a specially built, heavy-duty horse-drawn wagon, as well as winches, cables, and his stepson’s back, he hauled the object away undetected. He enclosed it in a shed and charged the public ten cents per peek. The curiosity drew journalists from The Oregonian and Scientific American—and a lawyer from the Oregon Iron and Steel Company, who, by tracing the cart’s tracks back to the hole the rock left in the ground, concluded it belonged to his employer.
Court battles ensued, and the company eventually prevailed. The meteorite then reversed its earlier path and journeyed down the Willamette River to Portland for the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition. As celebrations were coming to a close and Oregon Iron and Steel put it up for sale, Oregon politicians scrambled to find money to buy it.
They could not raise funds quickly enough, so the company sold it for $26,000 to a wealthy New York socialite, who immediately donated it to the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. The meteorite made its final terrestrial migration by train—from Portland to Chicago, then eastward. A team of draft horses completed the meteorite’s journey, hauling it from a New York City train station to the museum.
In 1990, nearly 40,000 Oregon and Washington schoolchildren signed a petition to repatriate the meteorite back to Oregon. Nine years after those efforts failed, the Confederated Tribes of Grande Ronde began legal maneuvers to return the meteorite to Oregon. But by then, it had become the centerpiece of the museum’s newly opened Rose Center for Earth and Space. There was no earthly way to get it out of the building. The Grande Ronde Tribes and museum agreed that the Willamette meteorite would stay in New York City, but the museum would call it Tomanowos, describe its significance to the Clackamas Tribe, and allow members special access for spiritual ceremonies.
Like the real meteorite, the replica has led a transient life, though more obscure. In 1908, the Oregon Iron and Steel Company donated a plaster of Paris replica to the Condon Museum of Natural Science, which at the time was housed in the UO’s Villard Hall. Seven years later, the museum relocated to the newly opened Johnson Hall, but the replica was relegated to a deserted corner in Villard Hall due to lack of exhibition space in the new gallery. In 1930, the replica was sent to the porch of McClure Hall, the site of the chemistry department. Professor O.F. Stafford told a Daily Emerald reporter that it would remain on the porch permanently.
But McClure Hall was razed in the early 1950s to make way for Allen Hall; it’s not clear what happened to the plaster replica at that time. However, it re-appeared outside the Onyx Bridge building, which opened in 1962, and became the new home of the Museum of Natural History. Keith Richard, University archivist emeritus, says the replica was not permanently fixed in place, and it made frequent, early-morning appearances around campus and in front of the president’s house. Students even painted it.
When the UO moved the natural history museum (now called the Museum of Natural and Cultural History and celebrating its seventy-fifth anniversary this year) from Onyx Bridge to its present location on East 15th Avenue in 1987, the meteorite moved with it. In 1993, artist Pete Helzer used the plaster cast’s original framework to make the fiberglass model now on display. Curators also decided to end its days as the object of fraternity house pranks by making it a permanent fixture in the museum’s Glen Starlin Native Plant Courtyard.
When a visitor from Minnesota lingered in the sunny courtyard recently, taking in the replica, she remarked to her husband, “It’s kinda cool.”
—Michele Taylor, MS ’03, ’10
On the Future of Rapidly Morphing Media
Expert panel discusses where we are, where we are headed.
It’s no surprise that people pay attention when UO alum Mike Jones ’97 talks—he’s the president of MySpace, an online social networking site with 120 million users worldwide. Jones recently joined six other UO alumni—all movers and shakers in Hollywood—at the stately Jonathan Club in downtown Los Angeles for “LA Confidential: UO Alumni on Media Mashups and Digital Dreams,” a dynamic panel discussion on the rapidly changing landscape of journalism and media in the age of Facebook and Twitter.
More than ninety Southern California Ducks attended the event hosted by the UO Alumni Association and the School of Journalism and Communication.
Writer-producer Bryce Zabel ’76 (Lois and Clark, and Pandemic) artfully guided the panel through a wide range of topics from the impact of social media on daily business practices to the role of ethics in the world of digital media.
Oregon’s Tim Gleason, dean of the J school, joined the panel and shared his insights on the challenges of educating new generations of communicators at a time when students are often ahead of their instructors on the technology curve. Zabel noted that Gleason came to the event well-equipped with the latest technology—a hip new iPad. For Gleason that’s a reflection of the school’s efforts to enhance traditional journalistic storytelling with emerging technologies.
Branding is the word, according to panelist Barbara Blangiardi ’79, a senior vice president at NBC Universal. Everything is a brand—from major television networks like NBC to individual television programs. Successful branding, she said, is key to attracting and retaining an audience that, in turn, attracts the advertisers who want to use your brand to sell their brand, and that’s how money is made in Hollywood.
Glenn Cole ’92 is the cofounder and creative director of 72andSunny, an international advertising and marketing company whose clients have included Xbox 360, Nike, Discovery Channel, and Quiksilver. He said companies need new media to expand their brands, but cautioned that if anybody tells you they know exactly what they are doing with it, they’re lying to you. He admitted assigning his own company’s Twitter and Facebook duties to younger staff members.
In television, knowing your audience is paramount. As executive vice president and co-owner of 44 Blue Productions, Stephanie Drachkovitch ’79 is a leading producer of nonfiction television programming, including MSNBC’s critically acclaimed Lockup franchise. Drachkovitch says social media has revolutionized the way producers learn what audiences think about specific programs. Gone are the days of small focus groups in remote television markets that dictate the viewing options for the entire country. Today there is instantaneous feedback online. This kind of immediate audience research has even generated support for successful program spinoffs, she said.
Neil Everett ’84, an ESPN SportsCenter anchor, provided the comic relief for the evening. Sporting Oregon Duckwear at the exclusive social club, Everett was nearly denied entry due to its unlike-L.A. dress code. “Am I the only one here who feels over-dressed?” he quipped. Asked if he uses social media or writes a sports blog to promote his on-air program, he replied wryly: “Only when I’m required to.”
Do people still read newspapers? Drex Heikes ’75, editor of LA Weekly, the nation’s largest alternative weekly newspaper, offered his thoughts on the challenges facing publishers in a digital world that demands instant access to information and ever more online content. The publishing industry struggles to remain relevant as the average age of readers skews higher and fewer young people turn to the printed page.
Jones—the youngest Duck on the panel—was seated center stage and frequently found himself the center of attention. He took on a major challenge earlier this year when he became president of MySpace. The company’s fortunes have faltered and Jones believes the company lost sight of its mission and diluted its brand. But he’s confident he can revitalize the social network. A great deal rides on his leadership as MySpace launches a reboot this fall.
Jones showed early signs of the success that was in his future. When he graduated from the UO he was named Student Entrepreneur of the Year, having established his first web-consulting business during his junior year.
Zabel asked the panelists what they thought was the most important skill that new graduates will need to successfully navigate the rapidly changing world of journalism and multimedia entertainment. The group almost universally agreed on an answer: the ability to write well and tell good stories—a timeless truism regardless of changes in technology. But Jones demurred—the only exception on the panel. While he agreed that the ability to write and tell stories is important, he believes that success lies in the ability to learn and use the tools that help you reach your audience.
Certainly nobody on the panel could disagree. Telling good stories is clearly the art and craft of their trade, but the ability to share those stories and connect with audiences will always be the key to their success.
—Eric A. Stillwell ’85
UO Alumni Calendar
Go to uoalumni.com/events for detailed information
November 26
Football watch parties
Various locations
December 4
Civil War watch parties
Various locations
December 8
Alumni holiday party,
scholarship fundraiser
Washington, DC
Postseason football
pep rally, tailgate
TBD
January 18
Duck biz lunch
Seattle, Washington
February 16
Duck biz lunch
Bellevue, Washington
March 3
President’s reception
Washington, DC
A Duck Walks into a Bar . . .
Oregon faithful—and one especially fluffy fan—gather in SF.
There’s a place on San Francisco’s Sutter Street where he regularly appears in full feather. Webbed feet flop forward, waist wobbles, Jack-in-the-box-sized head balances an Oregon beanie.
Yes, him.
The Duck has been a staple of R Bar since the friendly neighborhood watering hole opened in March 2003. Owner Chris Fogarty ’98 acquired the mascot’s uniform from . . . well . . . let’s just say he acquired it—and he and his patrons have been cheering madly for Oregon ever since. On football Saturdays, with six large-screen televisions tuned to the pregame festivities, an R Bar regular cues the Oregon fight song on the jukebox. Former UO cheerleader Ariel Ungerleider ’05 is often on hand to help rally the room’s shoulder-to-shoulder fans for the bar’s adopted home team. Then the big moment, the much-loved Duck makes his grand waddlesome entrance. Cheers and whoops. Many customers reach for their cameras.
“A lot of [patrons] don’t expect it,” says co-owner Tod Alsman. “He’ll come around the corner, and those people are like, ‘What the . . . ?’”
During one game, drink orders were rushing in so fast that R Bar’s de facto manager Will Presley was pressed into service as a backup barkeeper—in the Duck suit. “It was very hard to grab bottles, fruit, and straws with the gloves on,” he says. “But I don’t think the fans cared it was taking me a little longer to mix the drinks—they were excited [that] they came for the mascot.”
Many locals consider the R Bar the world’s second-best spot to watch Ducks football.
“I mean, what bar that is not actually in your college town has the mascot appear and has the fight song on the jukebox?” says Rebecca Nally ’97. “Everyone is so fired up . . . you can hear the crowd roaring from down the street. Other than Autzen, I wouldn’t want to watch a game anywhere else.”
And she’s not alone in that feeling. R Bar management is expecting standing room only for the December 4 Civil War clash.
“Those are the kind of games where you are getting beer and champagne poured all over you and you’re hugging complete strangers,” says hardcore Duck fan Jacquie Bischoff ’99, who works for the San Francisco Business Times. “It’s awesome.”
—Andrew Pentis
Are Ducks flocking together in your area to cheer on the team? Find out by clicking here.
Moonlight Bivouac
Unplanned bivouacs—sleeping outside without a tent or sleeping bag—aren’t fun because, generally, something has gone wrong on your outdoor adventure. You are lost, often without a light, and sometimes needing rescue. You suffer the cold and sleepless night, working out just where, exactly, you went wrong. I’ve made a few accidental bivouacs, some pretty awful, but last August was my first in a perfectly functional truck, just yards from a busy state highway.
The trouble began in the late afternoon as I stood on the shoulder of Highway 126 east of Eugene with my thumb in the air. I’d just ridden the top fifteen miles of Oregon’s McKenzie River Trail, one of the nation’s best mountain bike rides, with my cousin Hans and our two dogs, and I was trying to hitchhike back to our truck. Hundreds of vehicles passed me standing there, at least one each minute, but no one stopped. A short guy in a bike helmet and dorky jersey plastered with logos, I was hardly threatening. Surely, someone could give a cyclist a fifteen-minute ride in the same direction they were heading.
Apparently not. After an hour and a half of inhaling exhaust, I began thinking bad thoughts, mean thoughts, about the people passing me up. Cars with empty seats. Pickup trucks with empty beds. Eventually, I didn’t even bother to stick my thumb out when RVs appeared, denying them the chance to blow me off. (Nothing erodes dignity like refusal of a plea for help.) Spelling me, Hans had no better luck. Finally, with darkness approaching, I knew I’d better get on my bike.
I rode angrily, frustrated that our plan to save gas by bringing a single car had backfired. It took three hours to grind my way up the steep 2,000-foot hill. I wobbled through the last two miles in darkness without a light, cringing as each eighteen-wheeler blasted past, hoping they’d spotted me teetering along the white line. It was nine o’clock by the time I finally returned with the truck, but upon arriving, Hans told me that his dog, Beatrice, had run off into the woods not ten minutes earlier.
We called her name for two hours, walking up and down the road in the dark. Hans allowed, eventually, that she’d done this once before when he’d lost his temper. When I’d been gone so long, he finally lost his cool, hurling random expletives into the air, and she slinked off, alarmed. He’d probably made it worse by yelling at her to come back, he said. The other time, she’d stayed away all night.
So, there it is, I thought. Might as well get comfortable. We pulled the truck off onto a side road and reclined the seats. I ate a little trail mix and pulled my wool hat down as low as it would go. I’ve never been one to sleep on airplanes or buses, so was irritated that I’d be lying awake all night, recycling thoughts. I thought about how Hans, even as a kid, had a temper. At summer camp, he’d get frustrated with a task and then start yelling and kicking things. Not that I could talk—just that afternoon, when Hans had relieved me at hanging a hopeless thumb over the blacktop, I’d thrown my bicycle onto the road in a tantrum and broken the rear wheel lever. “Dogs, they hold a mirror right up to you,” Hans said, rustling around in the driver’s seat.
Eventually, sometime after midnight, tired of stewing, I decided to get up and walk around. The McKenzie River, after all, is my favorite watershed in the world. The moon was nearly full and the old-growth fir and spruce towered around me, closing in a circle above my head. I walked to a bridge over the river with my dog trotting along beside. “Why don’t you go find Beatrice?” I said. She just stood there looking up at me. The moonlight shone on the galloping rapid below the bridge, and it occurred to me that a lot of people would love to be standing right where I was just then. I have a friend in Eugene who makes a ritual of hiking on full moon nights every month, whatever the weather.
There was a hot spring twenty yards downstream. I used the screen on my phone to light my way as I stumbled down to the pool, separated from the river by a circle of stones. I piled my clothes on a rock and slipped in. The spring was just a little above body temperature, and shallow, but it was a natural hot spring in a beautiful forest, and I had it all to myself. As I lay in the warm water, looking out at the river rushing by, I realized that someday I’d remember not the feelings of aggravation caused by the mistakes that led me here, but rather the spectacular situation I found myself in. If that’s how I’ll remember it, I thought, then why not enjoy the present as well? Isn’t the point of adventure the thrill of the new and unique, and the profit of perspective? If so, I’d succeeded wildly. My mistakes had guided me to precisely where I needed to be. I floated in the spring and listened to the sounds of my dog happily snorting around in the woods nearby.
Relaxed, I returned to the truck and was able to get a few hours of sleep. In the morning, after another hour of calling for the dog, we drove to the ranger station to post signs for her. As soon as we got cell service, Hans got a message that Beatrice had been picked up not a quarter mile from where we’d spent the night, and was in safe keeping. I was glad that the one who really needed the ride had been the one to get it.
Frederick Reimers is the former editor of Canoe and Kayak magazine and has written for Outside, Men’s Journal, Skiing, and Powder. He and his cousin remain friends.
