Pioneer Pride

From my senior year journal:

6-5-82

I won the $300 Ron Hite Memorial Scholarship today and it was a complete shock to me. I know the award had existed but I never applied for it so there was never any anticipation in me when it was announced. The shock and disbelief in me were acute. Then, as I was walking up, it occurred to me that I was damn lucky to get it considering some of the shit I’ve pulled in this school. I gained a new respect for teachers because some of them were willing to forget personalities and stress academics.

Ms. Lechner did not seem particularly overwhelmed at my selection and had kind of a cold staring look but I can forget that now.

Thank you for your support Mr. Winn, without it, I was dead and thank you for two good years. You were the only teacher who really encouraged me to excel. I appreciate it.

Reflections

This is my last journal entry of my high school career and maybe for my life. There is a certain sadness that comes with writing this page because I know that high school is over and I can never relive these days again. High school wasn’t really all that bad; I just tried to convince myself of that. There were times when I could of blown it up but all in all, it was a good atmosphere and excellent place to really start my life.

I’ve made so many dumb mistakes but there have been some good times also. I expect to read this every once and awhile and what I write next is something that I will read and try to follow for the rest of my life:

Be kind, speak no evil of others, think of others and most of all, be thankful for what you have.

The end of part 1 of my life.

Not yet, I’m looking around and I see people I will never see again and that is strange to me.

I feel it is important for me to remain in contact with people. Especially you Mr. Winn. I want to wish you a happy life and a rewarding career always try to be there for high school students who just don’t fit in all the time.

Goodbye Oregon City High School, it has been… interesting. Remember, I will be back, rather it be a movie or a book, I will finish one of the two. I have stories to tell, injustices to expose.

I will return.

As I search my mind for an interesting memory to wind down this memoir and perhaps give it (or at least me) an everlasting point for our unkind, digitized, distracted times, I return to one girl, let’s call her M, who transfixed me briefly during my sophomore year. It was truly remarkable how she danced into my consciousness as I was working on Pioneer Pride. A writer can never explain why a certain person mysteriously emerges when writing about the past, but that’s often what happens. It’s one of the great delights of writing.

That M did emerge is something I take seriously and continue to consider. I am considering it now and offer my thoughts about her for your consideration.

I no longer recall how we met or what precipitated our first date. I must have asked her out, face to face, at school. I do remember it was my first car date, which of course was a big deal, a landmark. I had absolutely no idea what to do on a car date outside of seeing scenes on television or the movies. Everyone knows what those were about. AC-DC wrote a song about it, back seat rhythm and all that.

It was in the late spring, not long after I earned my driver’s license. I picked M up in the Dasher. She lived out in the country. I don’t remember what she was wearing but I remember when she opened the door and I beheld a sprite, with gorgeous, heavily-lidded eyes so round and deep they seemed like tiny Crater Lakes. I dove in.

We got in my car and I drove us to a movie at the Southgate Theater. What we intended to see has escaped me. I was incredibly nervous with M. I had never been in a car alone with a girl. What was protocol?

Here is what I do remember: she turned her head to me as I drove and asked slow, deliberate questions. We were from two different camps at Oregon City High School. Let me amend that. Two different countries.

No girl I had ever liked had asked questions of me. And they weren’t banal ones. She looked me in the eyes and Crater Lake wanted to know the answers. They mattered to her. I think she was a lot smarter than she let on. A lot of girls had to disguise it with boys back then. Maybe that’s still true. I hope not.

As this memoir has shown, I was a quasi-angry, infrequently arrogant kid in high school who swam against the current, but I wasn’t that way with M in the Dasher. She didn’t seem to know or care anything about that.

At some point in the drive to the theater, I stopped at an intersection for a red light and stared at M as we talked. She looked at the light, hesitated a bit, and then said, “Matt, the light’s green.”

And so it was! I have no recollection how I responded to M. We probably laughed. I took my foot off the brake, stepped on the gas, and away the Dasher sputtered.

We may have made out at the movie. My journal from sophomore year records no mention of M. I think I didn’t know how about to write honestly about my feelings for her so why not omit what you can’t explain. The Who sang a great song about that very sentiment.

Or maybe the date didn’t go well and we didn’t kiss.

All I do know is that we agreed to another date, a tennis lesson taught by me—my first date on the tennis court!

M showed up in a crop top that she must have scissored herself and terry cloth shorts. She wore Keds without socks.

As she took to the court, I watched her glide around before the lesson began. I struck me she was barely clothed. I had never seen anything like this before. M moved liked a ballet dancer, light on the feet, lithe, graceful, twirling. Not jerky tennis movements at all.

We stood near each other and I showed her how to hit a forehand, turn the body, straight arm, follow through. She practiced the stroke a few times and all looked good. She was smiling and asking questions.

I positioned M at the back line of the court and walked over to the other side of the net where I had a bucket of balls. I hit a soft arcing shot to her forehand. She swung and missed by a mile. I hit another one and she missed that one, too. She fanned it again and again and kept apologizing. I came around the net and went through the forehand again, this time holding her arm from behind and demonstrating the stroke deliberately. I could feel her heat against me and could barely concentrate on instruction.

A minute later I was on the other side of the net and hit her another soft ball to her forehand.

Nothing. Another whiff. More whiffs. It seemed impossible for someone who moved so gracefully to miss the ball. I mean she didn’t even nick it with the frame! The hand and eye coordination simply wasn’t there and you can’t teach that. It should have been funny to me but I think I got upset. I could teach anyone tennis!

But not her.

I no longer recall how the lesson ended, but we never went out again. That was my fault.

So why end this memoir with M? I don’t really know. Perhaps it’s because 40 years after that nervous car date and ludicrous tennis lesson, her style of conversation with me now feels almost totally unique and the type I want more of in my life. Indeed, it might serve as a model for how people should converse with each other, particularly in the days of text messaging and social media posts and whatever hasty communication platform comes next, and we all know another one is coming.

My unique relationship to the Followers began in grade school, at Mt Pleasant. They were some of my classmates, including one, Gina Crone, my first crush. I think it was second or third grade when I first met Gina. She had long, straight, brown hair and wore nothing but homemade dresses. She was a whirling dervish at recess and very, very outspoken, almost brash.

We instantly clashed. We were always getting into tussles at recess and always played four square or tether ball together. We touched and pushed each other a lot and hurled insults back and forth. She particularly gave it to me hard over my last name. If I had known the meaning of the word “crone” in those days, I would have given it to her as equally hard. We were in love and hate. Go back to your elementary days. There was always someone like that for everyone.

There was never a furtive kiss. There was, once, one furtive look between us. I think we both knew anything else was taboo.

After grade school, formal and public socialization between Follower and non-Follower children permanently ended. The lines of separation became clear in junior high. Boys could not approach Kisser girls. Girls could not approach Kisser boys. Many years later, a friend of mine who attended another junior high in Oregon City in the 70s told me she once flirted with a Kisser boy at school. It took all of one day for three Kisser girls to confront her after school and threaten to beat her up if she ever messed with the boy again. She didn’t.

There was no mixing and no little Romeo and Juliet scenarios ever unfolded that I knew about, but that didn’t mean I didn’t worship the Kisser girls from afar. I wasn’t the only one. They were otherworldly beautiful but totally unapproachable, let alone obtainable. What a strange feeling it was to walk among them in the hallways or sit next to them in classrooms and know any interaction with them was impossible, even academic interaction.

In junior high and high school, the girls prepped for being a wife and mother. They took as many home ec classes as were offered and took them over and over again. The boys prepped to be working class men. They took all the shop classes and took them over and over again. Neither the boys or girls went out for sports or rally or anything like that. They moved together as one throwback social unit that was practically invisible to outsiders except for matters pertaining to dress or speech.

Besides Gina, I have many vivid recollections of Kissers in my youth, but two stand out. They involve sports and muscle cars.

Kisser boys were the greatest natural athletes in Oregon City history. How do I know that? I watched them play. Had they gone out for football, basketball and track and field, Oregon City would have built the greatest high school sports dynasty in state history. It would still be going on!

But of course they didn’t go out for sports because they wouldn’t see a doctor to obtain the physical clearance the state required for participation.

None of them were ever coached. They never came to the high school games. Today, I wonder if they ever talked about how much better they were than the star players.

I saw them play basketball in junior and high school PE classes and during lunchtime ratball sessions. I will never forget Kisser boys dunking in ratball and knowing most members of the varsity team couldn’t even touch the rim. They weren’t all that accomplished as long-range shooters and rarely shot intermediate jumpers. They wanted to drive hard to the hoop and challenge. The only defense they played was in the air, at the rim.

They played football on Saturday afternoons at Rivercrest Park—rain on shine—almost year round. I was there watching many times. These were full on, full field, full speed, 11-on-11 (sometimes more) tackle affairs and displayed some of the most brutal headhunting I have ever seen in football, in person or in cinema, straight out of the Jack Tatum/Oakland Raiders playbook, circa 1977. They perfected the clothesline and didn’t help each other off the ground.

I never saw a single player injured, nor a fight break out.

The tackling was vicious, but in contrast, I also witnessed the most skillful and artful pickup football I have ever seen played: long bombs, double and triple reverses, laterals. I remember crazy leg kickoff returns, stiff arms made from steel, and athletes who could have played at the then Pac-8 level.

Kisser girls never played any sports that I ever observed. PE was segregated by gender in those days so I never saw them participate. I might have lost my mind had they been running around me playing floor hockey, badminton or dodge ball. And what about hackey sack? Oh to have seen that!

The girls liked to watch the boys play football. They would sit inside or on the hoods of their boyfriends’ muscle cars, smoking, listening to rock and roll on the radio, and raise a cheer or two. They were sort of early period Bruce Springsteen characters in that way. They were, however, not born to run. They never left Clackamas County.

It was immediately after those Saturday gridiron sessions, when the muscle cars were leaving the park, that my friends and I would scream “Kissers!” as loud as we could and then run. The cars would rip, roar and burn out toward our general direction and the chase was on.

They never caught us. I don’t think they ever tried.

I never saw a Kisser girl drive a muscle car. Oh to have seen that!

A long while back, after hearing that Gina had passed away, I went to the Carus Cemetery in hope of revisiting her, and perhaps myself when I was a kid. I really had no idea if she was interred there, but most of the Followers are, including all the babies with no first names who were buried in secrecy until one day it wasn’t a secret anymore.

I found her. She had died in her late 40s, prematurely, no doubt from some disease caused by genetic abnormalities associated with interbreeding. A half century of interbreeding in Oregon City led to this. It’s still going on. The Kissers are going extinct and writing their story as a biological and religious extinction sounds almost like writing a science fiction novel. In a way, the Kissers were science fiction, but not in the future, the past.

We were born in 1964. I sat down next to Gina’s grave and tried to remember her face, voice and movements from 45 years ago.

It was easy.

I’ll never forget the last time I talked to Gina. After grade school, she went to a different junior high and I didn’t see her again until high school, my sophomore year, a three-year absence. I was sitting outside, on a bench, eating my lunch alone as usual. She suddenly appeared and sat down next to me. She greeted me and smiled. I think we even shook hands.

She looked almost exactly the same as that final day of sixth grade.

We talked but I don’t recall what about. We didn’t have a class together so there was nothing to compare. We obviously never ran in the same circles. We didn’t have any mutual interests—except liking and disliking each other intensely in grade school—and that was a million years ago.

Still, the bond was there. I can still feel it.

The bell rang and she stood up to leave.

Then she said the only thing I remember from our conversation.

“You turned out different.”

“I guess I did,” I said, not really understanding how I was different.

If I don’t write the Story, I would dishonor that unique moment in my life, her keen intuition about me, and Gina would just be buried in a disheveled rural cemetery and just another Follower, Kisser, an obscure (somewhat) unwitting victim of modern religious superstition, unknown to a wider world that should have got to know her feisty spirit. She was different, too, but never had a chance to be different.

Gina said goodbye and I never saw her again. I have no idea if she ever graduated. I guess I could dig out my yearbook from senior year, wherever that is. Part of me doesn’t want to know.

Speaking of graduation, I remember mine. I think I sat next to a Kisser boy. He had the short hair, lean, blue collar, classic look of them. He had rough hands. We were a class of 400 or so and I had never seen him before. He had never seen me before. We laughed about that It was the only time I ever remember seeing a Kisser laugh.

The Followers built their own separate, utterly isolated cultural and economic community within Oregon City and its environs. This was known around town but never became an issue because the Followers were totally apolitical and went about their work and religion in relative quiet. The men worked blue collar trades and the women stayed at home, raised the children, and expertly practiced the domestic arts. Almost none went to college. The Followers had their own Follower plumber, contractor, roofer, electrician, hardware store, grocery store, auto repair shop, etc. They even had their own cemetery, in Carus, ten or so miles outside of Oregon City.

And of course they had their own church. Everything came back to their church. You didn’t go against the church. If you transgressed, you got shunned. I have no idea what amounted to a transgression back then or today. There’s a whole book on that subject alone but shunned people typically don’t write books.

Of course there were closeted rebels within the church, but they weren’t organized in cells or part of any movement. My older sister befriended one in high school, in the drama program. He was a Kisser and who wanted to be an actor, an avocation or profession inconceivable in the church. You poured concrete and sewed clothes. You fathered children and bore children.

I never met a single secret Kisser rebel in grade school or junior high, but I secretly longed to. In high school, one of the girls somehow ended up on our newspaper staff, sold ads, and that was it. No writing at all. She was gorgeous, smart, sexy and mysterious and probably was being the person she always wanted to be—at least for 45 minutes a day, five days a week, and eight months out of one year.

The Followers spent their money within themselves. They socialized only with each other. They exclusively married within their community, cousins and all that. A vast majority of their last names were Crone, Dotsun, Edwards, Hickman, Eels, Smith and White. They were all related to one another in some way.

As I look back on it now, I find it incredible that the Followers didn’t create their own private school system right out of the church, particularly when so many other Christian sects did exactly that in the 80s and 90s. But they never did. They sent their children to Oregon City public schools for the barest minimum of legally mandated education and then the children got the hell out.

Since the Followers didn’t believe in doctors, I don’t know how their children attended school without immunizations back then. Perhaps there were religious exemptions in those days (are there now?). This is all very interesting to pursue, but I don’t want to pursue it. It’s not the Story.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)

There was Conde McCullough, Oregon’s master bridge builder’s first elegant arch bridge, an Art Deco masterpiece, completed in 1922, spanning the Willamette River, connecting Oregon City to our despised nemesis West Linn. Before the new Oregon City High School campus opened in 2003, this bridge conveyed the players and coaches to the oldest continuous high school football rivalry west of the Mississippi River. Oregon City and West Linn are right across the Willamette River from each other. For a century or so, because of where the schools were located, perched on high ground, students, if they had binoculars, could actually see each other from a secret spot on each others’ campuses. We had binoculars and we knew the secret spot and we spied on the Lions, or rather, lionesses, whenever we had nothing to do at school on a clear day, which was pretty much all the time.

The schools were so close to each other, a stunning and probably unprecedented intimacy between rival cities and schools, that whenever the annual Friday Big Game under the lights occurred, the away team’s marching band, accompanied by cheerleaders and other students on foot or following in muscle cars, would march in what was essentially a patchwork parade, to the rival’s stadium. Usually in the rain! And to get there, they had to march across Conde’s bridge, a bridge that probably facilitated more acts of drunkenness, violence, vandalism, lust, gridiron lore, and daredevilry related to a high school football rivalry than any other bridge in American history. That bridge, with its seductive concrete arch pitched at such a low angle, tempted you to walk right up and over it. Many men and some women did exactly that in those anonymous daredevil days. I heard someone even rode a motorcycle over the arch and lived to seed a legend.

I think it was my freshmen year when the night before the big game, a bunch of Oregon City varsity football players raided the West Linn campus at midnight and painted red and white the testicles of the golden lion statue that graced their main entrance. West Linn played at Oregon City that year and beat us 50-0.

And my favorite rivalry story comes from 1974. Some Oregon City football players procured hydrochloric acid and used it to dislodge the lion statue from its pedestal. They somehow (drunkenly) hauled the lion to the bridge, tied a noose around its neck, secured the other end of the rope around a girder, and threw it over the side. A hanging. They left it there and fled.

(Note to reader: It is my wish that the reader will support the idea that Pioneer Pride is a “book.” It is also my wish that the reader consider “buying” the book as it rolls out in installments. A purchase supports an author and future literary endeavors by Nestucca Spit Press. To purchase, look to the right on the blog to use Paypal or contact me to make other arrangements.)