Working in Eugene...written a couple of years ago

Another day in paradise begins as I wake up to the sound of my wife’s dry, hacking cough. Everyone in the family has been suffering the same allergy for the last two weeks as pollen accumulated in yellow drifts on our second story deck overlooking the Wayne Morse ranch. The drifts are slowly turning into yellow rivulets, heading toward the gutter as an Oregon mist shrouds the view, now all green and gray. According to the paper, the high temperature for the last twenty-four hours is a good 12 degrees below normal for this time of year.
What “normal” means in Eugene though, is the subject of debate on many parameters. Normal Eugene weather is patently oxymoronic but, conversely, it is normal here for some of the best art in the area to take refuge in a “Salon de Refuse,” having been refused the comfy confines of the Jacobs. Just not enough room for all the good art here, eh?
My new canoe, purchased six weeks ago with high hopes of warm, pleasant water excursions and high-lake fishing trips sits under the tall Doug Fir in the side yard, bottom up and cold, waiting through another weekend for the promise of warmer weather to come. In the same way, the underground art culture quietly awaits discovery by the local media and “the guy on the street.”
What compels us to live in a place where the weather may be the least predictable on the planet? Why do we continue to stay in “The Valley of Sickness,” (as the Native Americans who once populated the Willamette Valley labeled the Eugene area) and how can so many of us gladly live and produce art in a place that either ignores us or takes us for granted? It is absurd when a local graphic artist gets his biggest local contract through…his agent in Chicago! Yes, that actually happened to local graphic artist Mike Backus, who, by some twist in fate, was also the very first local artist to be commissioned for the Bach festival poster in its entire 30-year history. The festival has sought artistic talent from as far away as Brazil in past years but not until a few years back has it chosen a native son (or daughter) to draw the poster.
Perhaps this phenomenon is not so unusual or outrageous. The exotic, lilting Australian drawl, for example, that sounds so wonderfully curious to our ear, is no more than “just how they talk” in the outback, I suppose. And what we perceive as exciting “primitive art” is sometimes no more than the abstract whittling of another culture’s drunken social outcasts. In the same way, we local artists become the exotic in other locales, but remain obscure and uninteresting in our own venue.
As a community though, aren’t we missing something when we overlook the powerful influence of a predominate thread in the fabric of our local culture? The first and longest running Saturday Market in the entire nation was started right here in Eugene. There are clones of the Saturday Market in every state in the union, yet the local community at large looks upon our Market as some sort of cute departure. Because of that perception and other factors, many professional artists who live here are compelled to market outside of the area. In so doing, incidentally, they may contribute more heavily than might be expected to the local economy by directly importing out-of-area cash. Not millions, perhaps, but certainly many hundreds of thousands.
It would be nice to bridge the gap in our community by exposing and exploring the overlooked thread in our fabric. I solicit your thought provoking commentary.