Tension as Divination

I named this blog after a concept I wasn't sure I understood, but felt: being on a tight line of a spiderweb, riding that thin edge of thought, when the pitfalls of taking a stand for a sentence or opinion seem to make the whole web quiver with danger. I felt I often had to take time to ponder the concept, while standing on that line, trying not to fall off of it either way, trying to reach the far, other side, where certainty might live.

Life rarely seems certain; more often we have to continue edging along the line, hoping the fog will clear before we make an irrevocable choice. Mostly the process is messy and the progress is hard to mark. Mostly I sit full with feelings, to which I must apply my powers of organization and articulation. In other words, I work through my dilemmas by writing, and this seemed like the place I would take a moment to look around and find my direction.

Today's subject is the life of a craftsperson at the OCF. The word *life* is the operating one here. I want to try to point out a few of the issues that continue to make trouble in the greater Fair community, from the perspective of someone who has invested my life in it.

I know all Fair Family tend to think we have invested our lives in Fair, at least during the event each year, but it's tough to value that investment in equal terms over all the roles. Each individual has a scale for that, and there is a time for each when they weigh up, maybe many times. Some people weigh up and leave the community, or at least the role they are presently playing. They lose the magic, or they change the role, or they find the balance won't hold and they quit. There is an occasional craftsperson who quits, finding the family isn't interested, the crafts don't sell, the nights are too loud or the times too changed. Mostly we don't quit.

We evolve. It might be difficult to imagine a life where creative decisions are routinely made, many in a day, and *things* are made from nothing over and over and over. Different each time, perhaps, or within a formula that works, but always adapting the current skills and materials to the current conditions and culture. We get a nice space in OCF to bring traditional crafts that may be found in only a few other places, maybe things we have made for decades, or lost skills that aren't economically or culturally that valuable outside the alternative culture. We have carved out a space for handcrafted items that is precious, diminishing in the world, and still vibrant in our corner. It hasn't been luck.

We've invested our lives, and the point of today is that this is indeed different in some vital ways from the ways volunteers have invested their lives. It's not about money. It's not about time on site. It's not about age, or skill level, or love, or fun, either. Everybody involved holds OCF in our hearts. There are significant ways that we do not differ. We all love it, and hate it, and work on it, and keep that weekend and the weeks and months surrounding it protected so that we can attend. We have a lot of common ground emotionally as well as physically.

Probably every crew has a person or two who are seen as elements who could be pruned out. They aren't reliable enough, they don't pull their weight, but they might be fun or nice or for some reason not easy to take out of the picture. They don't go away, they don't retire to the Elders, they keep showing up, and bringing with them what is viewed as inadequate, troublesome, or in the way of what is seen as necessary to thrive.
Every year they get their pass, and eventually most of them get moved out in some way or another, but there isn't a clear way within policy to ask them to step up or leave. Probably on crews this is handled however well or badly by the coordinators, and by circumstance. It's subjective.

Craftspeople, however, apply and pay, are juried if they are new, or might be grandfathered if they are not. There is some scrutiny by Craft Inventory each open morning, but CI has been pressured to be kind and gentle and artisans have been awarded more flexibility within their craft categories, so largely they feel respected and welcomed each year, and as long as they can come up with the fees, they come *home* to their space, where they might have spent thousands of dollars over the years to meet the demands of the event. They feel a lot of ownership, but more is centered on a small piece of ground and not as much on the whole site. All Fair family feel ownership. That's why we care so much and work so hard.

Longterm booth people put in their money, year after year, and are rewarded with the opportunity to work at Fair for the weekend. We're not invited to stay for a month, even if we have work to do, and we feel largely left out of the family events, which are usually held on weekends, by necessity, when we are, by necessity, retailing. We certainly are Family, we certainly play an essential part, but we definitely feel of a different status. We can be seen as opportunists by some: we drop in, collect our cash, and walk away.

Of course the reality is far from that, from my perspective. I produce massive amounts of stock, of which some 80% is there to support the 20% that might sell. I continually invest in materials, tools, skill-building, production efficiency and adaptation to physical needs, so that in fact my entire life is invested in those items you pick through, to love or reject. A bad Fair could quite literally ruin me.

Plus I have to haul enough stuff out there to set up a complete shop, home, and home for my workers and their families. I spend around a thousand bucks each year assuring access and comfort and a healthy and safe experience for those I need to bring with me to meet the demands of what has become a giant Fair. It has gotten harder and more expensive every year, just like everything else in life. I observe that the organizational direction is to continue to grow, so I don't see my investment getting any smaller, or my job any easier.

As I age I have to dial things in or I will be overcome. We all have to do this, streamline our expenses and possessions and options so that we will be able to continue. Any kind of retirement plan, health plan, or random plan is generated by me. Noone else is in place to do it. I am on my own.

I chose it, I will do it, but it comes with me to Fair. I bring my whole life there: my vulnerability, my health, my ability to progress, and my stuff, which represents my life investment. It's as if I bring my whole life there, rest it in place for a weekend, and then haul it all home. My image is of a snail with a shell that is large, awkward, and in danger of being crushed.

I might appear slow, with one foot still in my hippie past. I might not appear as vulnerable as I feel, with my big showy shell. I might be defensive if things start to move more quickly than I can go, which of course they do.

So whenever the concept of *revitalizing* the crafts at Fair comes up, I feel the danger. I don't hear this coming from my fellow craftspeople, who are in the continual process of revitalizing, every day, but from observers who see artisans who don't excite them. This veers into the subjective right away, and I could write many blogs about leather belts and the market for them, types of pottery, shirts people like or don't wear anymore, and on and on. For every booth at Fair there is a roster of fans and detractors. It's a messy concept, evaluating others.

Those who want to explore it struggle for respectful phrases, and at core the desire is to ensure that the life of the handcrafting artisan is protected, as well as the life of our event. The public can be fickle. If the public gets tired of what the event offers, they won't buy their tickets. Talk about investment! While I have my little life invested, the collective investment, with our tracts of land, our vehicles and buildings, our paid staff, our insurance bills, our legal issues, and so on, the Fair Family does have a deep collective vulnerability.

Every piece of that vulnerability needs to be examined, and there are those who work hard on visions for keeping us thriving and important enough to keep it all alive. I'm not so much a visionary, but more of one of those who hang on, resisting change, until it is apparent I have to give something up. Without some other people having visions, I wouldn't have made it, because it does take more than determination and hard work to succeed in the larger realms.

But I'm willing to do the hard work, so I started volunteering, on Scribe Tribe and Craft Committee. Immediately as I start to work together with these other hard workers, with those who are visionary and those who need some enlightenment, with those who have wide, or limited ranges of skills, I see that there is far more commonality than difference among us. It's usually only one or two steps back from our positions to see our commonality.

So in this discussion of revitalizing, or more correctly, continuing to be vital, since we never stopped, we have to step back time and time again to our commonality. We all love the Fair, and in that, we all feel a terrible vulnerability. We all fear we could lose what we have built, or watch it erode.

So the creative problem-solvers look to fix something, something that isn't working as well as it possibly could. There are a small number of booths, fewer than ten, in which the craftsperson, for many reasons, appears to not be doing all that they might to ensure this vital event. They're not keeping up, or they're using the Fair for selfish goals without giving enough back, in the perception of some observer. Possibly many observers.

We've all heard this, about Fair and Saturday Market as well, that the offerings are boring and nothing ever changes. I submit, that whomever the observer who is saying this is, THEY ARE WRONG.

Or at least there is enough doubt in the situation, enough subjectivity, that we can't act on it. Just as Joe Schmoe can't be kicked off Traffic because he is always ten minutes late (Fair time, heh heh) for his shifts, there just isn't enough information available to "weed out" a craftsperson who looks like an opportunist. As an observer you just have no idea what the reasons are for what the person offers at Fair. All you can do is make sure they follow the Fair guidelines, encourage (maybe with your dollars) those you observe doing things your "Fair way," or figure out why you are bored with the lives of these members of your community.

I constantly hear volunteers who brag about staying out of the eight completely, yet the eight is where the whole Fair exists, for me, so I feel rejected. My life expression is boring? I was taught that if you are bored, it is your problem. Look within. If I'm defensive, it is because you are actually attacking me? Are you being defensive because of your own vulnerability? Is there a different way to have the conversation to get around opening up these pools of fears?

The messiness is ours, and we have to work through it. Together. We have to articulate our fears so we can get around them. We absolutely have to understand each other's experiences. We have to stand on our common ground.

So step back, and move more slowly for us snail people. The giant spinning peach is heavy and we are already carrying a huge load. When the fears come up, even if they come up masked in anger, we have to address them.

This has gotten too long and I am still on the wire, not having reached clarity, and not feeling like I've even taken a step forward. What can the Fair organization do to keep the crafts vital and relevant? Is there a way to have evaluation without vulnerability? No, I don't think so.

However, there is a way to work through it. Policy is our protection, guidelines are our tools. Standards have to be spelled out in words; measurement and evaluation have to have concrete metrics. Let's acknowledge our fears, get our vulnerabilities on the table long enough to set them aside, and work together on our common goals. It's a huge and messy task, so we're going to have to do it in little but coherent pieces. We have to have the discussions, but the little hurts and the big fears they bring up don't have to defeat us.

We are stronger than we think. Let's continue to try to do our best, with every piece of stuff we make, every policy we try to craft, every letter we try to write. We have an excellent record, so there is no reason to think we will not find the elegant solutions.

Silver Thaw

The skylight has been covered for days and the dim light is different...we had about a foot of snow complicated by several layers of icy drizzle. I shoveled the walks the first few times until the ice coated the bottom layer and made it easier just to walk on the snow. It just kept coming down. Seems like the drizzle last night finished it off but it may continue today.

Got out my cross country skiis and cruised around the neighborhood a bit; the powder was perfect for it on the first day, but it might be too slippery this morning. I may go try again anyway. It's so rare to be able to ski off the back porch, and pretty darned fun. What I really should do is get the snow off the shop roof before it starts to leak but that would be far too dangerous. Every little thing, including my ladder, is covered with a sheet of ice that will remain until it melts.

Eugene is barely moving this morning, everything cancelled and everyone snowed in. I've been so immersed in the time of the pioneers this seems normal, except being able to walk down to the library and store yesterday before it got too bad. You wouldn't walk far in snow in pioneer days, without knowing a forecast, without the kind of snow gear we now have, unless you had to, or unless you got used to it. I know my Mom walked and rode horses to school in snow in Nebraska, many times, even though one of her actual relatives was lost in a blizzard in 1888. You would certainly rely on the weather knowledge of the old folks, who would know what stage of a storm you were in, and what was likely to come. My young relative and his parents apparently were too new to the country to understand that balminess and sunny weather often foretell a productive storm approaching from the south.

So maybe this thaw we are having means more snow. And this, friends of the Market, is why we don't sell in the winter months. The Fairgrounds has been closed up (tried to ski over there, but no) so not the mess of slipping vehicles and joyriders we had in December. Presumably most of them have tried heading up the mountains.

The pioneers would likely have been more worried about what will happen when all of this snow thaws. The rivers and creeks often overflowed and carried away bridges, houses, livestock, and people, who had of course settled down right next to the waterways for transportation and water supply. It took awhile to get used to the patterns of the landscape. The Davises took claims right along the Willamette, between it and the River Road, which was one of the few trails that were well-used then. That and the County Road, which is now 8th St and heads off on Blair to the northwest, which Huddleston settled on. His property went from the County Road to the Amazon canal, so he had transport on one side and water on the other. Ideal piece of land. One wonders if he knew how valuable it would become as the town was settled. Probably that was what he hoped. I don't think he was really a farmer at heart.

F.G. Vaughan was a farmer though. One of the only newspaper mentions I can find of him is that he brought some watermelons to the newspaper office one day in 1880, and one of them weighed 39 pounds. That's some good farming. James Huddleston was famous for his shooting, though. He was a member of the Eugene Sportsmen Club and they had matches with each other and the Creswell club fairly often. He shot a hawk and some ducks in one. You got points for each type of game you killed, from eagles to cougars to swans, and most animals were fair game. He was later interested in a bill passed by the legislature establishing hunting seasons, according to a letter in his file. Hard to say whether he was a conservationist or interested in it because it might restrict his activities.

There were quite a few mentions of Huddleston in the paper. I think we have some class differences in these people I'm studying, and still more to find out about the stories behind their mentions. Samantha Davis Huddleston left her fortune to the WCTU Children's Home in Corvallis, and it amounted to somewhere between $20-70,000. One of the Evans kid contested her will, so there may have been some public embarrassment surrounding her death. I think she was one of the oldest original pioneers in 1927, and I don't know who was helping her at the end, if anyone. Her son died a year before she did, so that must have been a hard year for her.

F.G. Vaughan died the same year as she did. Instead of my original thought that these people did not know each other, because of their political and class differences, I now think they all knew each other, at least nominally. When Huddleston ran the trading post in the early 1850's, everyone in the area would have stopped in there, including the Vaughans, who were out in Coburg then. I think nearly all of the first transactions of my property were between contemporaries who knew each other, and were sometimes connected by family ties.

And why not? Land transfers were mostly handled within families if possible, to keep the wealth close. I think the Vaughans used the gold they brought back from California to buy land, and that was how they got these west-side properties, farms for the sons who couldn't make it on the one section the father claimed. The Vaughans and the Davises took up adjacent claims with their brothers and sons. They also would have followed the population and the resources. The original Vaughan claims were on land that is now being mined for sand and gravel, and they were farmers, so they would have traded up for better farmland. When F.G. started the dairy, he may not have expected the town to grow up around it so quickly. I haven't yet pinned down the years of his dairy farm at 12th and Van Buren, but by the time my piece was purchased, in 1908, it was probably looking like farming was over in this part of town. Even though streets weren't paved here, it must have been apparent that streets would be coming soon as people flocked to Eugene City to make money. Between 1900 and 1910 the population tripled.

I think both Floyd's dairy farm and Henry Huddleston's bike shop (around 1902) were part of this transition period, when the early residents were trying to keep their footing in the rapid growth of the town, trying to stay alive surrounded by later opportunists, keen to catch some of the riches divided up by the earlier opportunists.

But class issues, racism, and carpet-bagging are probably not going to be themes I will be able to explore in my book. Framing things from our perspective isn't really that fair, which is one reason I'm trying to read a lot of newspapers and primary source material from the time. I think the "characters" did evolve over time (they are characters to me, since they have been gone so long) and I think the combination of Samantha, coming from her Quaker parents Benjamin and Catherine, who seemed to be revered, and James, who came from Virginia, seemed to be comfortable with wealth, and was probably an early racist, is intriguing. I'm fascinated with the items that survived from their lives, each one with some reason for being saved from the scrap pile. Now I wonder if her nephew Evans could have been the person who saved and donated the items. More research!

I didn't get the grant I applied for, which is okay, since I am not that close to publication and it wasn't a polished application with solid theories yet. I am enjoying the research so much I don't care about the eventual publication of it. I stumbled on the concepts of my target audience and the relevance of the research to local history. There could be reasons these folks were somewhat forgotten--maybe I am digging up things that shouldn't see that much light. However, I am persistent, and will keep digging. I have begun looking back at my many journals on the building project, and that is some historical research too.

So let it snow. I have plenty to keep me occupied until I can get back over to the UO to look at the newspapers that aren't online. Have some great books to read on other subjects, too. The stories in The Moth (from the radio program) and in the book We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler are wonderfully compelling. Juggling that great writing with the scrawlings of the diaries from the Meek cutoff wagon train and the letters in the Huddleston file makes me glad I live in a time of excellent writing. I think I would have made a terrible Victorian.

However, I think I would have made a fantastic pioneer. I probably would have been one of those who dressed as a man and kept my secret until they went to bury me. Call me Dan.