The Oregon Experiment (6 page)

“Listen to this,” he said when Naomi came into the kitchen in her robe. “Craft fairs, face painting, solar- and wind-power exhibitions, hemp spinning, music, drumming, African boot dancers. And there’s a lumberjack contest. Splitting, bucksaw, ax throwing, chainsaw, log rolling on the river. What’s ‘slow-chop,’ do you suppose?”

But she wasn’t listening. She was dunking a tea bag in a mug held close to her face, breathing the steam. He could tell she was thinking about motherhood, about doing everything exactly right.

“How’s our little man today?” he asked.

She looked to be considering this, but then said, “I’m going to take this back to bed,” and brushed past him with her tea.

According to Naomi, most people relied primarily on sight to orient
themselves, but for her it had always been smell. Once she lost that sense, she felt constantly dislocated, and their cross-country move would only have compounded her unease. He was fascinated by who she once was, by her dormant genius (for which his own nose was a hack stand-in), and he found himself wondering, should it ever come back, if she’d be more resilient, happier, if she’d need him less.

Gazing back at the towering, page-high photo of last year’s Mr. Douglas, bearded and rugged, an ax over his shoulder, he rubbed the stubble already on his chin. There were two divisions, amateur and semipro, the ad said. Contestants were encouraged to sport Oregon Trail beards, plaid shirts, and logging boots. He had the wrong glasses, the wrong hair, completely the wrong look. But like his anthropologist friend who lived in a Bolivian village in a dirt-floor hut, eating guinea pigs and learning the local dialect, Scanlon was going native.

That night, just before eight, he climbed a flight of stairs that rose steeply from the sidewalk between the Rainy Day Café and the Birkenstock store. The polished wood floor of the Odd Fellows Hall tilted toward the front of the building, where red and yellow yoga mats were stacked in the corner. Pushed back against them were an electric guitar, a drum kit, and a cardboard cutout of Jeff Bridges as the Big Lebowski, Scotch-taped where it had been torn. In the opposite corner, a pair of desert combat boots stood at the base of a waist-high cross, an army helmet placed on top, dog tags dangling below. Floor-to-ceiling palladian windows with green fluted columns looked out over the street. A lot had gone on in this room—an old building for Douglas, built in 1898, according to the facade. Like a frontier hotel or a vaudeville hall, the scrappy elegance had been maintained through the century with glossy paint and floor wax and smears of spackle on the plaster cracks.

By 8:10 the room was getting crowded. Scanlon sat toward the back in a folding chair. He’d anticipated the pot-bellied hippies with wiry gray hair and their twenty-something counterparts—tie-dyed, dreadlocked, slung with infants—but not the waitresses, plumbers, and mechanics of the uniformed working class. He hadn’t expected the blazers and ties either, on men with neatly trimmed hair and starched collars. When two loggers from central casting walked in, he felt ashamed of his three-days’ worth of whiskers. A dozen healthy tan faces chomped green apples and handfuls of
trail mix. There were a few Native Americans and several large bunches of Hispanics, two or three different groups of Asians speaking their own languages—Chinese, Korean, Hmong, he guessed. A black couple with a young son playing his Game Boy. Two headscarves and a turban.

At twenty after—still no urgency about starting the eight-o’clock meeting—conversations around him showed no sign of flagging: kayaking, fly fishing, homeschooling, doulas, the end rot on everyone’s tomatoes, a good chimney man, a phone number for organic mint mulch composted for at least two years, another number for grass-fed beefalo. He decided this was a complete waste of time and was heading for the door when a stocky, bearded man thrust his bear paw in front of him. “Hank Trueblood.”

“Good to meet you.” He shook his hand. “Scanlon Pratt.”

“Haven’t seen you at the meetings before.” Trueblood was in his fifties, drinking black coffee, rocking on the balls of his feet. “New in town?”

“About a week.”

“Where you from?”

“East Coast.”

“What brings you to Douglas?”

“The university.” It was starting to feel like an interrogation. “How about you? Are you from here originally?”

“Born and raised.”

“What do
you
do?”

“Douglas Fire Department. I’m the chief.”

A public-employee secessionist: was this a potential angle for an article?

“Let’s do it, people!” came calling over the din.

“Hey,” Scanlon said. “I’d love to talk more. Let’s grab a beer.”

“Any time, professor.”

Scanlon returned to his chair. Professor? He was sure he hadn’t mentioned that. The chief was now up front, holding the elbow of a statuesque woman and whispering in her ear. She’d draped a hand over his shoulder and, still listening, slowly turned her head until she was looking directly across the room at Scanlon. She was beautiful. Green eyes, plump lips, a dazzling smile.

Once the room quieted down, she announced, “My name’s Sequoia, for any new people here tonight.” Which got a big laugh. Obviously nobody else was new. “It’s José’s turn to run the meeting again.”

The remaining coffee-klatch energy drained from the room with audible sighs and groans.

“I’ve done a lot of work on the tax question.” José was around Scanlon’s age, wearing a dark suit, a briefcase propped open on his knees. “I’ve composed a set of proposals for discussion involving sales, income, and property tax, import-export duties, casino tax,” and he rambled on in a monotone about percentages and credits and revenues, all of it punishingly boring, without any context, and apparently of no interest to anyone in the room, most people staring at him blankly, fidgeting, knitting, reading, balancing checkbooks.

“So I propose a system whereby—”

“We don’t need a
system
,” someone shouted out. “Systems are the problem!”

“
Eliminate
tariffs. Don’t devise new ones!” A general ruckus was building.

“Eco-regions,” another voice insisted. “Until watersheds determine the political boundaries and—”

“Deirdre, you snake. Everyone in this room knows you just want to log those redwoods!”

“Without Canadian and Pacific Rim trade—”

Complete pandemonium broke out—shouts, accusations, and pleas for calm—until finally an ear-splitting whistle pierced the room. It was the fire chief, two thick fingers in his mouth, cheeks puffed up and red.

Sequoia let the silence resonate, taking a long breath. “We’re caught in an eddy, people. We can’t just keep disagreeing. We have to
do
something.” She held her arms out to her sides.

She was soothing, mesmerizing, but Scanlon still knew the PNSM was hopeless. The man in front of him got up for a fresh cup of coffee, then someone joined him and started crunching on a cookie.

“I want to introduce you to a guest tonight,” Sequoia said, and Scanlon saw his chance to escape before the next sermon.

“He’ll give us a broader overview and ideas for how to proceed.”

He’d stood up and was sidestepping between chairs toward the exit when she said, “He’s a professor of mass movements and radical studies at the university. Scanlon Pratt.”

Sixty people shifted their bodies, chairs squeaking, necks craning.

He cleared his throat.

“What are your thoughts?” she said. “About how we might proceed.”

He was pinned between the knees of Chuck from Chuck’s Plumbing and the back of a chair. Chairs scraped the floor, opening up space around him.

“Well, it seems like you’re on the right path,” he lied, and Sequoia’s smile grew wide and radiant, her eyes on him alone. “It seems like you’re getting things done. I wouldn’t presume to offer advice.”

Heads nodded. Enough said. A self-satisfied bunch. But as the chatter resumed, Sequoia looked away, radiance draining from her as if he’d poked a hole through her skin. He’d disappointed her.

“However,” Scanlon said. He lifted his hand and said it again more loudly, riding over the voices with the opening lecture for his unit on mass movements. “Any mass movement needs to first establish common principles, and those need to be based in a real understanding of social theory.” He paused as Sequoia turned to him. “If you don’t know how things work, you can’t know how to change them. You need to develop a common vision for your new state. Is it a state? Or a nation? How is it governed, et cetera? You need strategies for implementing that vision. And you also need to understand that if you’re serious, if this isn’t just a discussion group with no real intention of actually
doing
anything, then profoundly radical action is required. Unshakable broad coalitions must be forged, and an unflinching commitment to the principles, vision, and strategies is imperative.” He spoke over the heads of everyone in the room, directly to Sequoia, and the more forcefully he spoke, the more her face sparkled.

And he started feeling his genuine belief that a more just system in which humanity could flourish more fully really was possible, and that it began with groups of people like these before him tonight. Yes, the system had us by the throats. Yes, if it wasn’t good for oil companies and the NRA, it would never happen. But he’d learned from Sam Belknap that life was about embracing contradictions, then working toward something that smelled like truth. For Naomi and their baby, for Sam, for himself, he had to try.

“Even with all of that,” he continued, “your chances of achieving even the most token sort of secession from the state of Oregon or the United States of America is beyond remote. And I’d add,” he said, “that if you researched successful secessionist groups, you’d know you don’t have much working for you. First you need lots of money. You also need a
leader. I don’t see how you can possibly do anything by the consensus of whichever sixty people happen to show up on a given night. You need to elect a leader and a council, give them real authority and then respect and support it. A successful movement will have a coalition of at least eighty percent of the population in the secessionist region. You’re no coalition at all, just sixty individuals. You need to broaden your appeal with good leadership and, again, clearly defined principles and all the rest. But most importantly, at this stage you need publicity and public relations, starting with a decent name. The best ones evoke a martyr or some event that arouses passion. At any rate, a name with a little jing. PNSM, I don’t know, it sounds like a regional association of podiatrists.”

The beams overhead were massive, milled in an age when Oregon Douglas firs grew to the size of redwoods. Filbert’s occupied an old warehouse—the loft constructed around a two-story stainless steel tank where they brewed the beer Scanlon was drinking.

“There’s dozens of groups working for secession in the Pacific Northwest,” Hank Trueblood was saying. “Every scenario—separate nation, fifty-first state, aligning with BC. It makes so much goddamn sense, is the thing.” He took a long draft on his IPA. They were on their second beer, having sought each other out after the meeting. Scanlon wished that Naomi could have heard Hank extolling the rain that keeps everything green, the pals he floats the Rogue River with each summer, another bunch who camp together in the Wallowas, friends who smoke salmon, distill gin, and produce biodiesel in their backyards. Last March he skied in powder to his knees at nine thousand feet, mountain biked the next day through old-growth forest on the edge of town and, a day later, in sixty-five degrees and full sun, was eating oysters on the coast.

Scanlon liked him and felt he possessed secret knowledge about keeping life in balance. Full of energy and drive but low-key about it. He was all to the point—no bullshit. “Is that
really
your first name?” he’d asked right off the bat. Scanlon laughed, then explained it was a family name and that his friends called him Pratt. Hank was as surprised as Clay that the university would have anybody teaching anarchy, and Scanlon told him that his research was on radical action and mass movements, but his bread and butter were the American politics core classes for majors. He then quickly steered the conversation back to tonight’s meeting.

“Secession can only make us better off,” Hank said. “And I mean
our
bread and butter.”

Sipping the golden ale, aged in a pinot noir barrel, Scanlon tasted the wine suffusing the beer but could barely pick out the fragrance. He’d try to describe it for Naomi when he got home.

“Year after year,” Hank said, “Oregon ranks near the top of the hunger stats, and there’s just no excuse. The taxes that Nike alone sends to Washington could feed them all. Never mind our other resources—the water we’d control, the agriculture and fishing, not to mention green technology.”

“Why don’t you work with one of the more established groups?” Scanlon asked. “Some of them have been going for decades, right?”

“More than a century for the State of Liberty folks down south of here. I
did
work with them for a while. It was a distance, but I’d drive down for meetings and help out however I could.”

“And they’ve had some real success,” Scanlon said. “Declared independence. Elected a governor.”

“But that was 1941, and only a handful of counties on either side of the Oregon-California border. In Yreka, their capital, bears on leashes led a torchlight parade to the inauguration. Men with hunting rifles set up roadblocks on the highway, handing out copies of their declaration along with State of Liberty windshield stickers. The roads were dotted with State of Liberty signs. It was a national spectacle—the
whole world
took notice—with all the events captured on newsreels and scheduled to play in theaters around the globe on December eighth. But then December seventh came, and the only story was Pearl Harbor, so they abandoned their secession for the sake of national unity.”

“But aren’t they still active?”

He shook his head. “They’re living in the past. It’s all about the
mythic
State of Liberty now. The independent state of mind. There’s a State of Liberty National Scenic Byway. The Feds named it, for God’s sake, and put up the road signs. They’ve become a quaint bit of Old West history.”