The ones who walked away from the 7/11 near Reed College
Bent-top Doug Firs
Eight months of rain, or more,
Hippie, beat and bohemian worlds,
Students bicycling home,
to their collective houses
at one or two in the morning
after living another day, night and life
in Reed's library
hanging with friends,
learning and thinking.
Is Reed's culture closing 30 years later?
This is Oregon, this is a stop
on the hippie trail ...
not from Edinburgh, Scotland,
across Europe and the Middle East to
Kerala, India, or to Tibet, ...
but sleeping in Reed's Student Union,
whomever you are,
on your way from there to here {where?},
may be no more.
Reed's doors are locked,
Community Safety Officers
are visible,
and this didn't happen in the 1980s
at Reed.
Yet the current students I've met
are still vibrant,
and Reed seems still a dream,
a life of the mind,
a haven for hippies and thinkers,
who are students and young.
Reedies reveled in the '60s and '70s
which ripples wound
their ways into the 1980s
when I, a student,
found freedom of mind here.
I just saw my old Plant Evolution professor
yesterday; I studied Pilobolus in this course,
a fungus which pops its cap to propagate ...
Douglas-fir, Western Hemlock and Western Red Cedar forests,
are the dominant species here
in Western Oregon,
yielding only to commerce,
and profit, but within
Pacific Northwest sociality,
which is also 1960s-informed
and environmentally conscious.
What happened to alternative culture here?
Cathedral Forest Action Group
taking nonviolent direct action
in protest
to preserve the less than 1%
of remaining forest majesty ...
Cooperatives as sensible business practices,
in the resistance
to destructivenesses of modernity.
At the 7/11 little chain grocery store,
with fairly low prices,
near Reed College,
which stands out like sore thumb,
almost grotesquely -
and that's what makes it interesting
as a space bubble of modern
crass commercialism -
we got two packs of playing cards -
Kai, Chloe, Lexi and I -
and played Wizard at Lexi's,
right next to this 7/11 place of Americana,
with its unnatural garish neon lights,
its packaging that could make
an anthropologist come
alive with fascination,
but not me.
What is the culture that produced this,
so far from the natural, so far from woodcraft?
Not open from dawn to sunset,
in oneness with the winds, waves and waters,
of the Oregon coast,
7/11 corporation turns a profit from 7am to 11pm
and thus takes its name.
So be it. We shopped there, bought there -
I bought the playing cards, with my credit card,
and Chloe bought the "Souper Ramen Noodles,"
in the big sealable paper bowl -
and went next door to Lexi's
to play the card game "Wizard,"
around Lexi's wooden kitchen table ...
Like good folks gathered around the table,
to plan organizing in unions
down at the Willamette river,
or with the Wobblies,
in radical Portland fighting for social justice,
we connected, talking and sharing and playing.
I took at Taoist, not-win strategy,
and Kai won this card game.
Upon leaving Lexi's
and crossing 28th Street,
I talked with my friend Kai,
whom I love for her hippie
radiance and wonder and smarts,
and whom I know from Reed
from the 80s as co-student,
{and who has also been to Harbin and loved it}
and her daughter, Chloe,
wondering where have gone all the
Bent-top Doug Firs?
Not Le Guin's "The ones who walked away from Omelas" ~
Eight months of rain, or more,
Hippie, beat and bohemian worlds,
Students bicycling home
at one or two in the morning
after living another day, night and life
in Reed's library,
as Portland, the city of fragrant roses,
and Reed, grow through time,
and Kai's daughter says Reed's
mind expanding explorations
are still 'ahappening.
*
...