An hour remains before sunrise. The city sleeps, but it’s time for “The Mayor” to get to work. Pulling on a wetsuit, booties and gloves, all still damp from an evening session the night before, Lled Smith heads to the Deschutes River as he does every morning. He has totaled more than 1,000 surf sessions and tracks water flow on his website Greenwave Surf Report. When the water is high enough, he’ll ride the ever-in-motion Green Wave — named for the color of a glassy face on the eternally unbroken crest of river water. Smith won’t be solo for long. With the sun comes the half-dozen before-work, early risers.
They give way to a mid-morning crew, then the brunch club before lunch-breakers arrive. The groms come in a steady stream. From pre-dawn until after dark, there’s constant motion at the lineup. You’re never alone at the Green Wave, and for the community of surfers that exists there, they say that’s a good thing.
Lled Smith
All Are Welcome
“There’s a term in Hawaiian, e komo mai meaning ‘all are welcome,’” said Dave Chun, surfboard shaper and owner of Bend Surf. “Here at our wave it’s, ‘Take your turn, be nice, be kind, surf with aloha‘… that’s the Bend way.”
Smith has been there since the early days. “At first it was a ‘Bro Pit,’ a few guys that had been surfing the ditch [canal] before,” Smith said. While a few came with experience surfing a river wave, most did not and that was just as well: Surfing a standing wave is unlike surfing an ocean wave, so years on a point break don’t translate directly, which creates a camaraderie of learning together.
“It’s easier for me to hold someone’s hand,” Smith said, “than to watch them flop.” There’s a democracy in the line up, too, as everyone tests their patience waiting for their 60 seconds to ride, and inevitably does a lot of swimming when they float downriver after a wipeout. A kind of clockwork and social structure exists, one grounded in equanimity.
A welcoming vibe may be attributed in part to availability. The river flows 365 days a year, and when the flow is up, so is the wave. “The water keeps flowing, and the wave keeps coming,” said Austin Fernand, age 22 (first image on this post and shown above) and a two-time member of the U.S. River Surfing Team. He has surfed on rivers all over the world and said the consistency at Bend’s wave is part of what makes it unique. Compare that availability to the ocean, where scarcity creates anxiety, said Chun. There’s also no hierarchy in the lineup; a surfer’s position or the number of years a person has surfed at a local break don’t matter here. “Even if you got flushed down the river, you know your spot and just get back in line,” noted Smith. At the Green Wave, locals are friendly and check their egos before stepping onto an island where the line to take turns recognizes civility and order.
Poppy Smith
Aaron Smith knows a different experience, having surfed in Santa Cruz—a reef break known for its consistent waves and its localism—since he was 8 years old. At Steamer Lane, enforcers were known to keep the lineup in check, sometimes with a dose of grit. Living in Bend for more than 30 years, and an accomplished professional ski racer and cyclist, he questioned whether to introduce his 12-year-old daughter, Poppy, to surfing at the wave. That was six years ago, and the welcoming encouragement from the river surf community for his daughter contributed to Poppy’s love of surfing: “It’s different here,” Aaron said. Poppy calls him, “the ultimate Surf Dad.” Instead of enforcers, the Green Wave has teachers. It’s not uncommon to see Mr. Pipeline himself, Gerry Lopez, humbly lending a hand or offering tips to newcomers.
The minute you put on a wetsuit, you’re welcome as a surfer at a place engineered by wave shaper Ryan Richard, a river recreation specialist for Bend Park & Recreation District.
Gerry Lopez at the Green Wave
Engineered Stoke
Resembling Jason Momoa, Richard is a different kind of Aqua Man. He controls water levels at the Bend Whitewater Park’s three sections—a still-water habitat, the whitewater channel, and a fish ladder, referred to by some as the“kicks and giggles” lane for floaters. With the touch of a screen, Richard molds the surf waves of the whitewater channel remotely from an iPad, adjusting a series of 26 ramps and bladders positioned beneath the flowing water. At the top of the channel, Eddy’s Wave is the most complicated, with an interconnected structure below and frothy chaos above. Richard likens it to a “kayak rodeo hole,” with only skilled whitewater kayakers able to hold on for no more than a few seconds. Next down the channel, the Green Wave is named for the color of a foamless, consistent face of surfable water. At Jason’s Wave, below it, find kayakers, SUP riders or surfers who paddle in and pop up on a board. Each wave is technically a fish ladder, and surfers spending enough time on the water may see a fish swimming below them. But for Richard, his sights are on another species: the Oregon spotted frog, king of the river.
Dave Chun
Richard is charged with keeping the water levels upstream of the Colorado Bridge optimal for the frogs to breed and rear their young. Once the levels are adjusted for the frogs, calls come in from the surfers describing a wave that may need to change: it might be foamy, crumbly or “boney”—a reference to lower water levels exposing ramp structure, a bed of stones or a particular chicken head-shaped rocky hazard below. Conversely, if the flow is strong enough, Richards may get a call to “put in the rib”—a combination of ramp angles that creates a spine in the wave and simulates a bowl.
With spotted frogs on one side of the equation and up to 250,000 floaters during peak summer months on the other, numbers on the Green Wave island can inflate on a summer day, too, with up to 20 surfers lining up for their water time.
A Tragic Turn
Yet, despite its welcoming name and increasing popularity, the Bend Whitewater Park is not without risk. Although masterfully engineered, the wave channel is still within a dynamic and unpredictable river. On April 30, 2022, the power of the water claimed the life of a beloved member of the surfing community. Ben Murphy, 17 years old, passed away while surfing the wave in an event that deeply affected the immediate and extended surf family. Some would never return to the sport, others paused for an extended time in reverence. A memorial on the surf island invokes his spirit, honors him and is seen by every passerby. Murphy’s life and memory bind the community in ways far beyond recreation.
Island Life
Mary Ann Kruz, age 72, has surfed most of her life and is a regular at the wave.
Mary Ann Kruz
“The Green Wave community,” she said, “is one without barriers of economics, race, age or size.” This ethos carries over into the range of boards under the arm or feet of each rider. From bright pink foamies to custom-made river boards, any board is acceptable here. While traditional lengths are four to five feet, Allie Hofmann brings down her 7’6″ board—a length approaching the span of the wave itself. “At the basic level, it’s more about the rider than the board,” said Chun.
Allie Hofmann
Riders start young. The newly founded Central Oregon Surf Team Association (COSTA) high school league will host its first competition at the wave August 17. Called “Grom Con,” it features not only traditional heats, but one designated for riders on anything not classified as a board. “It’s about having fun,” said Chip Conrad, founder of COSTA, explaining how the competition will draw students from Boise and Chelan to face off against Central Oregon surfers.
“Whatever state you’re in, this is the elixir,” said Hofmann. “You can’t help but be soothed by the molecules coming off the water. It’s calming. You have socializing, physical exertion and endorphins—it’s a recipe for joy,” she said. At the Green Wave, there’s always someone there to lend a hand, let you know where your board pops up, and of course to whoop and holler at your success. That’s community. “Having a good day? Surf,” she said. “Having a bad day? Surf. It makes everything better.”
With the swoop of a pen, poet William Blake inspired readers to, “See the world in a grain of sand,” and with their cameras, macro photographers similarly reveal what might otherwise go unnoticed. “There is so much beauty in the small world around us,” said Christian Heeb, founder and owner of Cascade School of Photography in Bend. “You make things visible that people overlook.”
The term macro photography may appear itself a misnomer. Macro is a prefix derived from the Greek word macro, meaning big. But macro photography is not the art of capturing large objects. Instead, it is the art of making small things look grand. To qualify as a true macro image, the subject will be magnified to a larger-than-life equivalent: a drop of water, flower petal or seed now resembles the cosmos or an extraterrestrial form.
To create their art, macro photographers work with dedicated lenses and an understanding of photography techniques. A 1:1 focal-length lens is used, allowing photographers to focus very close to a subject and create compositions at life-sized—or smaller—scales. Digital advances, such as high-resolution sensors and sophisticated post-processing tools, have opened doors to discovering minutiae. Microscope lenses allow vision to go even smaller, still. “It’s more technical than other genres in photography,” said Heeb. Besides a familiarity with issues such as depth of field, macro photographers need a good eye, sense of composition and framing, he said. While an understanding of the difference between visible, ultraviolet and infrared light isn’t required to be a successful macro photographer, this subset of photographers is often versed in the details of optical science as part of the thoughtful and contemplative area in which they work. On a smaller scale, art is revealed in commonly overlooked things. “Revealing something people are unable to see with bare eyes creates a sense of wonder,” said Heeb.
Plus, there’s no need to travel to faraway landscapes to find extraordinary subjects. All that is needed is patience. A backyard, trail or garden may become exotic when the commonplace is elevated through a lens. A drop of water reveals another planet. Spring flowers look like undersea creatures. The allure for many is the genre’s accessibility. To gain access to the miniature world, photographers look for hidden beauty in plain sight or take a class to guide them. The Cascade School of Photography offers workshops, including one on flowers of the Old Mill District this summer, taught by local photographer Barb Gonzalez.
Macro Obsessed in the Pacific Northwest
Photographer Megan Baker came to macro photography as a way to quiet the noise of the world. Having photographed more than 3,000 weddings as a professional based in Maui for almost 20 years, it was the beauty found in a single snowflake that brought her to discoveries through her lens. Nature’s symmetry, or a world that could be gracefully off-center, appealed to her, she explained.
Baker, who spent her early childhood in southern Oregon and had a camera in her hands by age 7, moved to Hawaii in middle school where her family ran a coffee plantation along the flank of Haleakalā Crater. There, her father kept bees, and her mother was versed in the arts of growing things from seed. An appreciation for watching these small miracles was coupled with an early introduction to photography. Baker’s uncle, Stephen Ashley, an aerial photographer, shared his own bird’s eye view by taking images from a plane. On land, a camera provided Baker with a similar “aerial” view of her natural surroundings.
Moving to Bend in 2017 with her husband and two sons, she brought her “dream chaser” spirit to the community. “As an idea person, everything comes down to seeds,” she said. Macro photography was a place for her creativity to grow using a learned economy of scale.
Her image “The Drop” began as a search to capture the microscopic architecture of a snowflake. The fast-melted snow provided something unexpected, though. “I thought I had failed, but in the drop I could see trees, and a bud forming in another world,” she said. In another photograph, a sunflower is less a complete symmetrical form as what she witnessed as an “unfolding.”
With decades of experience as a photographer, Baker is able to use a manual focus in low light to create her images. She prefers what is discovered in the shadows, focusing on the quiet of plants and nature to create art in miniature. With 109 houseplants of her own, she need not go far for natural subjects, though by going small “the lens picks up things your eyes don’t see,” she said.
Looking at worlds hidden by the eye can often appear otherworldly. “I’ve always been drawn to the abstract,” Baker said. “With macro photography I’m really able to express myself.”
See ccophoto.com, @chasing.indigo,mbphotographybend.com.
It’s said a heart makes a home. For Josh and Stephanie Wilhite, they took their time to bring personal touches to a remodel of a West Hills family home when it changed hands for the first time in decades.
Built in 1979, the mid-century rambler on Trenton Street in Bend began as the home of Linda Mork where she raised her son David on the sprawling triple lot replete with stands of cottonwoods, maples and a centennial ponderosas. Having lived around the corner in a Craftsman-style home since 2007, the Wilhites appreciated the neighborhood with its mix of original homeowners and younger families. Every third or fourth house had an original owner, such as the 95-year-old man who lived down the street. “It’s been a fairy tale,” said Stephanie, to live with close proximity to downtown Bend, Josh’s office on Drake Road and the kids’ elementary school down the street. Ready for a change, the timing was excellent when Linda was ready to sell. “You have the energy and know how to take care of it,” Stephanie recalled Linda telling her.
The sunken living room hosts his and her artwork selected by the owners: an abstract painting from Jesús Perea and a landscape by Nelly Van Nieuwenhuijzen.
That may be because Josh is no stranger to building custom homes. As current principal of Copperline Homes, Josh has been in the construction industry since he and Stephanie (a speech pathologist) moved to Bend. His recently-retired father, Mark Wilhite, was the founder of Copperline. However, for Josh to build a home for his family that includes sons Fischer, 11, and Reid, 8, the criteria and goals were different. They sought to create a home unique to their family’s artistic style. Analogous to the family’s love for music, he and Stephanie wanted to wait for the right harmony of elements to come together when they were looking for a house to make their home, then the property on Trenton struck a chord. “I knew immediately,” Stephanie said. The home had both beautiful bones and a history of family, so they knew they could make it their own. “The energy was so good, the light was so good no matter what the time of day; it just felt right to me,” Stephanie said.
The Wilhites bought the home in 2019 and undertook six months of remodeling with an overarching goal to make the home warm, colorful and eclectic to represent the multi-faceted aspects of the family’s personality. They began by reviewing the layout of the house to make changes that updated infrastructure and adapted to contemporary living. Many of the changes were necessary: a new roof, HVAC and floors. The remodeled home creates a visual and livable flow for the active family, as well as for the entertaining they enjoy—their annual Super Bowl party absorbs upwards of sixty people who may mingle through the rambling ranch layout.
Natural wood welcomes
Walking in through the bright front door, visitors are greeted by warm, layered textile art on the wall and a wooden aperture crafted by Ryan DeKay of White’s Fine Woodworking that yawns to give both a screened glimpse of the living areas plus sets the tone for the home’s organic style. The entryway introduces texture, warmth and natural tones with the use of sawn cedar paneling on the walls. Through the wooden portal is a view of the welcoming open-living space. “What sold me on the house was the sunken living room,” Stephanie said. “I walked in, and right away could imagine our family gathering in the space.” It was the first room the Wilhites tackled by removing its yellow carpet and a behemoth wood stove.
The media room evokes a period style with its color palette and wallpaper choice.
Retro-Scandinavian style
The house and many of its original features helped inform the updated ’70s vibe, and for the Wilhites, there was no need to rush to a finish line. Instead, they worked slowly. “We are very intentional about the things that go in our house. I’d rather it be empty than fill it with stuff that doesn’t matter to me.” Stephanie said. To guide the experience, interior designer Traci French helped hone and curate pieces that were gathered over time for a look that she describes as “mid-century Scandinavian.” Exemplifying the collaborative design experience was the inspiration from a vintage table called “Les Yeux,” by a European designer and with a collector’s price tag. Combining Josh’s design capabilities with the woodworking craftsmanship of DeKay, a unique version of the table inspired by the eye-shaped pattern now anchors the sunken living room as a true focal point.
Within the same gathering space, Josh and Stephanie independently selected his and hers art to pair above a circa 1970 sling-back chair. Similar to other elements in the home, the art is highly personal. Josh’s abstract selection from Madrid artist Jesús Perea is linear and represents the way he sees the world, Stephanie said. Stephanie selected a landscape painting by Nelly Van Nieuwenhuijzen depicting a horizon that for Stephanie evokes places and a vantage point she loves. “We go to the Steens and can see 10 miles all around,” she said. While the artwork is different, the pieces work together in a marriage and complement of color and contrast.
The additional of contemporary grasscloth wallpaper in the main bedroom is a nod to the original wallpaper found throughout the house.
Flowing floorplan
Stepping up from the living room, the dining room space is anchored by a teak sideboard from Stephanie’s grandfather where atop it sits the family’s beloved record player—a way to listen to music beyond the Sonos sound system that permeates the entire home. “Music was always important to us,” Stephanie said. She and Josh met in high school and went to college together in Northern California. “Music is how we fell in love and got married,” she said. They use the turntable to punctuate times of day with genres of music ranging from the country music and classic rock they grew up with, to Grateful Dead or singer-songwriter vibes as they sit around the teak dining table purchased ten years ago in Santa Barbara.
Adjacent to the dining space, the kitchen opened up after Josh removed banks of upper cabinets to create a centerpiece of the island with its unique shape that facilitates movement around its sides. Durable quartz countertops were added along with finishes that the Wilhites selected with the assistance of Lucy Roland of Harper House Design. The kitchen flows to what Stephanie describes as the coziest room in the house: a sunny reading nook. Illuminated by natural light from an open courtyard and a Naguchi light fixture, it’s a go-to place for respite all four seasons of the year.
Sunny style continues in a powder room that harnesses natural light from a skylight to give the space a “bright and happy feel.” Traci French brought in bright flowered wallpaper by Swedish company Svendskt Tenn and leather accents to provide a Scandinavian design nod to natural elements.
The original floorplan had no primary bedroom, so that project became a priority for the Wilhites. As an homage to the original wallcoverings found throughout the house, contemporary grasscloth was brought in as a base for personal art. Here, an image of the I-5 Grapevine at dusk provides not only tones of purples and blues, but serves as a reminder of family trips to Yosemite over the years. “Each element of our home has to speak to us,” Stephanie says. In another example of patience, the media room project took time. After an extensive search, a wallpaper from contemporary Transylvanian company Mind the Gap finally hit the right notes with its colors, geometric shapes and “Don Draper-y” feel, said Stephanie.
Finally, the creation of a music room provided a space where each Thursday, the family takes music lessons. “Steph and I are putting together a family band,” Josh said. “We just need to get the boys on board!”
The Wilhite family, from left: Josh, Reid on drums, Stephanie and Fischer.
Heart as home
There was no rush to complete the home. “Over the years we have been able to figure out what the house needs to be and what it wants to be,” Stephanie said. Upon completion of the remodel, the previous owner visited and was, “over the moon that there’s a young family that has breathed new life into the house and preserved some of her touches,” according to Stephanie. In fact, the first picture the Wilhites put up in the house was one gifted to them by the original owner. The figure, drawn in 1978, watches over the family to bridge past and present through art. “The previous owner dreamed of selling the home to a family that had the same ideals and I think she succeeded,” said Josh. “This is the home that our two boys will grow up in.” Stephanie added, “Once you infuse a house with heart, it becomes a home; this house already had a heart, we just brought it to our family.”
Cate Havstad-Casad hopes to start a revolution. While managing 360-acres from the Madras farm she runs with her husband Chris, Havstad founded Range Revolution. She refers to it as the “world’s first regenerative leather luggage and handbag company,” using traceable and regenerative hides to create its designs. Recipient of the Early Stage Award at the 2022 Bend Venture Conference, Havstad spends roughly 70% of her time running Range Revolution while also helping manage Casad Family Farms and creating custom designs for Havstad Hat Company, plus being mother to 19-month-old son Hesston. Here, she tells Bend Magazine more about how design and responsibility don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
What is a range revolution?
The wordplay is for me to conjure a thought process about how we consider rangelands and the people who steward them. Rangelands sometimes get forgotten or left out of the picture when we talk about different ecosystems,but they hold a large percentage of the world’s remaining biodiversity, and they hold the potential to sequester more carbon than even rainforests. Rangelands make up more than 54% of earth’s land mass, these are important ecosystems that are in trouble right now. It’s an important and critical time to shine a lens on them and build supply chains that support their regeneration.
So how did your company Range Revolution begin?
Originally I sought to create a luggage piece for Havstad Hat Company, and I wanted to find leathers that aligned with how I live the rest of my life. I wanted them to be local, to be sustainably raised and from this ecoregion. As soon as I started looking, I realized that a supply chain didn’t exist. All of the hides from mid-sized processors in Oregon are thrown in the trash. Taking it a step further, from my research, I learned more than 5 million hides are thrown in the trash just in the United States. Most leathers that are part of our fashion supply chain can be traced to Brazil and to the deforestation of the rainforests. That’s where things started in 2020, and it has been a journey to rebuild this regenerative, regional leather supply chain for Range Revolution.
People have become more aware of supply chains. Can you explain that part of your business?
What’s unique about our supply chain is that all our leathers have a provenance journey. It means we can trace them back to the ranch that they came from. The ranchers we work with go through Ecological Outcome Monitoring which shows with data that these ranchers are improving the ecosystems they manage. People are just starting to understand what regenerative agriculture means and how cattle play into that system. Range Revolution is uplifting those stories and working to create a value-added marketplace for the raw goods coming from those ranches.
So what does regenerative agriculture mean?
Regenerative agriculture refers to any sort of management practice that improves the ecological outcomes on the land. That usually means you’ve increased soil organic matter, increased diversity in the landscape and now those soils are healthy and more functional, allowing more water to be infiltrated and held. These lands regenerate, sequester more carbon, hold more water and preserve biodiversity.
Especially in the area of luxury goods, do you sense that understanding where goods originate matters more these days?
The luxury world has always revered beautiful high-quality leathers but the ecological impact of those materials has not been in focus until very recently. Now, the fashion world is waking up to a level of accountability. The demand for regenerative hides is outpacing the supply. It’s a good place to be if you are ahead of it, so the work I started three years ago to secure relationships to procure leather was important. The hoarding worked out!
What is your long-term vision for Range Revolution to invoke change in the fashion industry?
I want to focus my energy on showing people what transparency, traceability and regenerative sourcing look like, because it’s doable. We have just gotten used to a different and extractive way. My vision is that in the next five years, 100% of our supply chain will be sourced from our ecoregion. We’re building the relationships, aggregation and an economic model to do that. It’s important to buildthe blueprints and create relationships to find partners who are able to think at a larger scale, both from a business standpoint and from a humanity standpoint.
Let’s not forget how beautiful Range Revolution designs are.
All of our bags have a heritage look and a timelessness to their design. Some styles are unisex, some more feminine and some more masculine. They’re about letting the natural fiber shine. We’re not hiding the marks that show this is leather.Great design communicates ethos in the most subtle ways. How a certain item makes you feel when you wear it, if you understand the story of the fibers and have a connection to this item, it can make you think about everything around you and about how something is intentionally created. That’s my goal in design. I think revolutions can be beautiful and design can be a force for good.
Editor’s Note: The first part of this post is the printed version of our interview with David James Duncan, found in the March + April issue of Bend Magazine. Following, you will find the full interview.
As sure as waters flow, time marches on. In 2023, rivers and years intersect upon the 40th anniversary of the publication of The River Why, a novel that has become a dog-eared classic in fly boxes of fishermen and in libraries of those who love language, natural resources and life. The book was one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s “20th Century’s 100 Best Books of the American West,” and led to Duncan’s next works—the National Book Award finalist My Story As Told By Water, the bestseller and winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award for nonfiction, God Laughs & Plays and The Brothers K, subject of the 2023 Deschutes Public Library’s “A Novel Idea.” His new novel Sun House will be published in August. Words between Bend Magazine’s editor and David James Duncan had him musing about his work and our larger relationship to rivers and to one another.
Cheryl Parton: It’s been forty years since its publication, and readers carry the image of Gus Orviston eking out those final forty miles to the headwaters of the Tamanawis. Anniversaries, milestones and mileposts equally show us where we are and guide us ahead. What can readers of The River Why learn today as much as from the first time they may have read the novel? Why do you believe it has been so timeless?
David James Duncan: Perhaps the timelessness of rivers rubbed off on the novel. I love Oregon rivers deeply, and stirred in my love for several favorite coast streams as I portrayed the Tamanawis. Rivers, more than any other geophysical feature, make Earth as richly habitable as it is, and if there is anything in my novel I hope readers today might hold on to, it’s that even rivers that have vanished behind dams don’t stay vanished, because no dam is forever. And even rivers that have dried up in the super-drought the West is suffering are the outcome of water’s ability to travel from ocean as saltwater into the sky as freshwater, travel inland, and return to Earth’s surface as rain and snow, every drop and melted flake of which is seized by gravity the instant it encounters a tilted surface, and away it goes! As rivers go on constantly renewing themselves, you can hear their rapids laughing at people who don’t believe in reincarnation! I’ve seen several streams pronounced dead come back to life. Because gravity sometimes sends water underground it also turns up in surprising places in surprising quantities. Central Oregon dwellers know how wonderful it is when hidden rivers like the Metolius, or Fall River, burst up out of the ground in a gorgeous spring. I also love the way water travels through space and, far more often than we can know, descends to Earth as an inexplicable bit of rain. And I was jazzed by the recent moon mission’s discovery of a lake in Clavius Crater! Those participating in Bend’s upcoming “A Novel Idea” might remember that a minor league baseball player in my novel, The Brothers K, claimed that the moon was once a living planet, and sings, “There’s a dead world on the rise,” to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.”
In the end, I’d say a final reason why The River Why continues to be read is that, like Norman Maclean, millions of us are “haunted by waters,” and never more than now, when water feels so threatened, and so precious.
CP: In a way, it’s not only that water feels threatened and precious. It’s as though the challenges of the past several years have also threatened humans and their ability to connect to one another. What more did Gus learn, and teach us?
DJD: Another River Why theme that slowly slips into a timeless dimension is Gus’s trial-and-error obsession with how to get the most profound pleasure out of fishing. This leads him to the ridiculous notion that the number of hours he spends alone, charging around fishing by himself, can be a path to maximum happiness. But solitude and aching loneliness soon reveal that it’s the other beings he encounters on rivers, human and non, who gradually bestow both happiness, and an effort we might call the spiritual search. And here my writing found material I care about deeply.
The day after I graduated from high school, my own spiritual searching led me to stay at a high lake in the Cascades for ten days, fasting for seven of them to try to erase all the useless crap I’d been exposed to in high school—and it worked, leading to a rebirth that probably saved my life by revealing my life’s work.
Speaking of that work: I’ve read countless op-eds calling for a massive change of consciousness if humanity is to survive, but no op-eds that depict what this change of consciousness might feel, taste, sound, smell and live like. Gus’s spiritual search was my first attempt to address this tragic void. My new novel, Sun House, devotes 357,000 words to what changes of consciousness feel, taste, sound, smell and live like as they lead more than a few people to a viable contemplative life. One such greenhorn is a comically over-enthusiastic young man named Grady who becomes smitten by mountains, feels they have profound things to teach him, and speaks of his need to launch a high elevation quest in this whacko phone call to his girlfriend:
“Come to terms with your Mortal Nobodyness, strip yourself down to your Ancient Animal Body and Ancienter Spirit Self, converse ye with the trees, weather, hoot owls, and desolation angels in their language not yours, and even you, Grady, can catch a whiff of the Old Ways and figure out who the Living World’s asking you to be.”
I consider Sun House’s Grady a sort of heir to The River Why’s Gus.
CP: Similarly, we are heirs of the Earth.The River Why and the awareness it brought to the impact of humans on beloved rivers illustrates the idea of how we can use our unique talents to affect change. For you, has that been through writing?
DJD:You ask if my activism has been through writing. Mostly yes, but I consider it vitally important for us to find ways to interact with rivers and streams, or soil and plants, or moss and sweetgrass like the wonderful Robin Wall-Kimmerer, in a hands-on, physical, loving way, so that intimacy and love inform our activism. It’s activism, for instance, that when I went fishing on my home Montana river one day and came upon the strewn garbage and forty-three empty beer bottles of what must have been a hell of a party, I did what I always feel called to do: spend fishing time packing the mess off to my truck to restore my house of worship’s beauty.
Another kind of “love and intimacy activism”: when West Coast streams drop after the high waters of spring, side channels become disconnected pools doomed to evaporate, leaving large numbers of salmon and steelhead fingerlings doomed. On the streams I have frequented, rather than feel helplessly depressed by this part of the natural cycle, I long ago purchased a long-handled minnow net and eight gallon plastic bucket, began enlisting the help of a local child or two, or child-like adult friends, and sought out these channels. My friends and I then stand at opposite ends of the long but narrow pools, and one team member hazes and herds the fingerlings the length of the pool, where the other teammate waits, net and bucket at the ready. After some scoopin’ and whoopin’ it’s incredibly satisfying to release a gob of marooned fingerlings back into their natal river, knowing a lucky few will return as salmon and steelhead the size of sleek silver dogs whose only leg, their tail, works better in water than any number of legs!
CP: “Love and intimacy activism,” and a bit of an adventure! You take readers along on the adventure through The River Why and The Brothers K, so we highly anticipate the release of Sun House this summer.Are there themes you continue? What should we pack in our “reader’s fly box?”
DJD: I’m more interested, these days, in the icons on my altar than the contents of my fly boxes. An unusual through-line in my life ever since I was twenty has been friendships with wonderfully wise older women. Feminine expressions of wisdom abound on my altar, from the first great female author in English history, Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “Just as God is our Father, so is God also our Mother,” to Muscogee Nation songbird and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, who wrote, “Remember the earth whose skin you are.” These voices escort us away from the toxic masculinity that has spewed its poisons over the Earth, its populace, and our politics. In reaction to that toxicity, one thing I very consciously do in Sun House is exclude the internet sub-realities and mind-traps that give voice to poison. I’m incredibly fortunate to be close to many women and some great but unsung men whose lives embody a depth of love and truth you seldom find referenced in mass media. That closeness leads me to believe there is a vital shift going on that grows ever more capable of addressing our biological and spiritual crises with the love and justice they demand. In Sun House, I pull out every stop I could get my heart and hands on in support of this shift.
CP: Is there something from your writing and/or life that you hope readers can learn by reading your novels?
DJD: My wise friend Barry Lopez felt that the great questions have no lasting answers, and if we confine ourselves to the limited powers of reason, I agree. But as an unreasoning but water-loving boy I began to find the Unanswerable to be a reminder that I was born lost, but in creeks and rivers began to be found. Watersheds remain a place of pilgrimage, rivers prayer wheels, wild salmon an interior compass, dammed or industrially-wounded rivers blues tunes, diminishing bird species dark prophets, and wild lives as unassuming as weeds blooming in the cracks of city sidewalks a momentary home.
Being alert to what our mother, this Earth, is serving up daily enables me to defy worry (which is just praying for what we don’t want) and refuse to be paralyzed by fear. In my fiction, I’ve tried my best to heed what the Earth and her “skin” are bestowing upon us. And it is unspeakably worth the effort when moments of attention on my part, or anyone’s part, unexpectedly explode, as they still sometimes do, into moments of inexplicable joy.
The above article was printed in the March + April issue of Bend Magazine. Below is the full interview if you would like to continue reading. – Cheryl Parton, Editor in Chief of Bend Magazine.
FULL INTERVIEW
What the River Says
A conversation with David James Duncan
As sure as waters flow, time marches on. In 2023, rivers and years intersect upon the 40th anniversary of the publication of The River Why, a novel that has become a dog-eared classic in fly boxes of fishermen and in libraries of those who love language, natural resources and life. The book was one of the San Francisco Chronicle’s “20th Century’s 100 Best Books of the American West,” and led to Duncan’s next works—the National Book Award finalist My Story As Told By Water, the bestseller and winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award for nonfiction, God Laughs & Plays and The Brothers K, subject of the 2023 Deschutes Public Library’s “A Novel Idea.” His new novel Sun House will be published in August. Words between Bend Magazine’s editor and David James Duncan had him musing about his work and our larger relationship to rivers and to one another.
Cheryl Parton (Bend Magazine): It’s been forty years since its publication, and readers carry the image of Gus Orviston eking out those final forty miles to the headwaters of the Tamanawis. Anniversaries, milestones and mileposts equally show us where we are and guide us ahead. What can readers of The River Why learn today as much as from the first time they may have read the novel? Why do you believe it has been so timeless?
David James Duncan: Perhaps the timelessness of rivers rubbed off on the novel. I love Oregon rivers deeply, and stirred in my love for several favorite coast streams as I portrayed the Tamanawis. Rivers, more than any other geophysical feature, make Earth as richly habitable as it is, and if there is anything in my novel I hope readers today might hold on to, it’s that even rivers that have vanished behind dams don’t stay vanished, because no dam is forever. And even rivers that have dried up in the super-drought the West is suffering are the outcome of water’s ability to travel from ocean as saltwater into the sky as freshwater, travel inland, and return to Earth’s surface as rain and snow, every drop and melted flake of which is seized by gravity the instant it encounters a tilted surface, and away it goes! As rivers go on constantly renewing themselves, you can hear their rapids laughing at people who don’t believe in reincarnation! I’ve seen several streams pronounced dead come back to life. Because gravity sometimes sends water underground it also turns up in surprising places in surprising quantities. Central Oregon dwellers know how wonderful it is when hidden rivers like the Metolius, or Fall River, burst up out of the ground in a gorgeous spring. I also love the way water travels through space and, far more often than we can know, descends to Earth as an inexplicable bit of rain. And I was jazzed by the recent moon mission’s discovery of a lake in Clavius Crater! Those participating in Bend’s upcoming “A Novel Idea” might remember that a minor league baseball player in my novel, The Brothers K, claimed that the moon was once a living planet, and sings, “There’s a dead world on the rise,” to the tune of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon Rising.”
In the end, I’d say a final reason why The River Why continues to be read is that, like Norman Maclean, millions of us are “haunted by waters,” and never more than now, when water feels so threatened, and so precious.
CP: In a way, it’s not only that water feels threatened and precious. It’s as though the challenges of the past several years have also threatened humans and their ability to connect to one another. What more did Gus learn, and teach us?
DJD: Another River Why theme that slowly slips into a timeless dimension is Gus’s trial-and-error obsession with how to get the most profound pleasure out of fishing. This leads him to the ridiculous notion that the number of hours he spends alone, charging around fishing by himself, can be a path to maximum happiness. But solitude and aching loneliness soon reveal that it’s the other beings he encounters on rivers, human and non, who gradually bestow both happiness, and an effort we might call the spiritual search. And here my writing found material I care about deeply.
The day after I graduated from high school, my own spiritual searching led me to stay at a high lake in the Cascades for ten days, fasting for seven of them to try to erase all the useless crap I’d been exposed to in high school—and it worked, leading to a rebirth that probably saved my life by revealing my life’s work.
Speaking of that work: I’ve read countless op-eds calling for a massive change of consciousness if humanity is to survive, but no op-eds that depict what this change of consciousness might feel, taste, sound, smell and live like. Gus’s spiritual search was my first attempt to address this tragic void. My new novel, Sun House, devotes 357,000 words to what changes of consciousness feel, taste, sound, smell and live like as they lead more than a few people to a viable contemplative life. One such greenhorn is a comically over-enthusiastic young man named Grady who becomes smitten by mountains, feels they have profound things to teach him, and speaks of his need to launch a high elevation quest in this whacko phone call to his girlfriend:
“Come to terms with your Mortal Nobodyness, strip yourself down to your Ancient Animal Body and Ancienter Spirit Self, converse ye with the trees, weather, hoot owls, and desolation angels in their language not yours, and even you, Grady, can catch a whiff of the Old Ways and figure out who the Living World’s asking you to be.”
I consider Sun House’s Grady a sort of heir to The River Why’s Gus.
CP: Similarly, we are heirs of the Earth. The River Why and the awareness it brought to the impact of humans on beloved rivers illustrates the idea of how we can use our unique talents to affect change. For you, has that been through writing?
DJD: You ask if my activism has been through writing. Mostly yes, but I consider it vitally important for us to find ways to interact with rivers and streams, or soil and plants, or moss and sweetgrass like the wonderful Robin Wall-Kimmerer, in a hands-on, physical, loving way, so that intimacy and love inform our activism. It’s activism, for instance, that when I went fishing on my home Montana river one day and came upon the strewn garbage and forty-three empty beer bottles of what must have been a hell of a party, I did what I always feel called to do: spend fishing time packing the mess off to my truck to restore my house of worship’s beauty.
Another kind of “love and intimacy activism”: when West Coast streams drop after the high waters of spring, side channels become disconnected pools doomed to evaporate, leaving large numbers of salmon and steelhead fingerlings doomed. On the streams I have frequented, rather than feel helplessly depressed by this part of the natural cycle, I long ago purchased a long-handled minnow net and eight gallon plastic bucket, began enlisting the help of a local child or two, or child-like adult friends, and sought out these channels. My friends and I then stand at opposite ends of the long but narrow pools, and one team member hazes and herds the fingerlings the length of the pool, where the other teammate waits, net and bucket at the ready. After some scoopin’ and whoopin’ it’s incredibly satisfying to release a gob of marooned fingerlings back into their natal river, knowing a lucky few will return as salmon and steelhead the size of sleek silver dogs whose only leg, their tail, works better in water than any number of legs!
CP: So did your writer’s life lead to a life of activism? Or perhaps the question is what came first?
DJD: For me there’s a huge difference between my fiction and nonfiction. In all three of my novels I’ve taken pains to avoid “Activist Speak,” because activism so often seduces its writers into intractable stances and volatile language. An intractable screed by an unknown did not strike me as a career-starter, so in The River Why I created theater instead, by having a foul-mouthed bait-fishing ranch brat, Ma, fall in love with an effete British fly fishing snob, H20, spawning a family for whom the way in which one chose to adorn one’s fish hook is a life-and-death matter. My aim was to make intractable stances and volatile language so absurd they were comical, so that readers traumatized as kids by the political or religious warfare of their parents began to see this warfare, too, as absurd. Laughter over the “The Great Izaak Walton Controversy” then placed Gus’s childhood madhouse in the same genre as the great diplomats known as stand-up comedians.
After Gus leaves the madhouse for an Oregon Coast cabin my methods changed dramatically as he encountered the longest-lived source of food and spirituality the west coast of North America has ever known: the rivers that allow marine protein to travel as far as 900 miles inland up into the mountains in the form of wild salmon, steelhead, and other edible anadromous species. The species that saved the Lewis and Clark expedition not once but twice. That species has been driven to extinction in a huge portion of its range in a single generation, leaving the indigenous people of those watersheds without their Eucharist, robbed of their chief source of wealth. To my mind this injustice rivals the deliberate slaughter of buffalo to destroy the tribes of the Great Plains.
The obliteration of wild salmon and steelhead left me highly sensitive to everything that diminishes rivers and those who love them. Not many know that two-thirds of the rivers on Earth have now been dammed, destroying the biological diversity and fecundity of river valleys, exiling the mostly poor but culturally rich human populations of those valleys. The World Wildlife Fund reports that 160,000 miles of Earth’s riparians are now underwater. Those lost lands provided the most fertile ground for diverse plants, creatures and humans we have. Those lands were also a Commons accessible to millions. When a bureaucracy or totalitarian regime replaces a Commons with a slackwater reservoir, they obliterate cultures and languages and commit themselves to lying forever that hydro-electricity is clean, green, and harmless, when it is nothing of the sort.
In relation to this problem, The River Why is dated. But it does portray the greatest salmon mecca in human history—the Columbia River’s Celilo Falls—before a dam drowned it. This is autobiographical. I got to watch tribal salmon fishers in heartbroken action at Celilo when I was four years old. That experience planted the seed that caused Ma Orviston to be the first character in American literature to watch salmon and steelhead destroying their beautiful bodies trying to pass an Oregon high desert dam with no fish ladder, and in defiance of what, in the long term, has become the most disastrous idea Franklin D. Roosevelt ever had, mutter, “God damn dams!”
CP: You’ve been able to share these portrayals through your writing of fiction and nonfiction. Do you have advice for readers on how they can affect change in their own, unique ways?
DJD: I’ll answer this by describing the three most satisfying tasks of my activist career, because these tasks illustrate some important concepts. All three projects began with me working alone, or with a very small handful of allies—but in all three cases a huge number of diverse and passionate people eventually got involved. Important concept: be on the lookout in your particular regions or watersheds for protests with a groundswell of emotion and integrity and, if you possibly can, involve yourself in these good struggles.
My favorite groundswell engagements were these:
Helping start a fly fishing and river restoration school for teens in the Bellingham (and Nooksack tribal) area in honor of Liam Wood, an excellent young fly fisher who died, while fishing, in the 1999 pipeline explosion that seemed to kill Whatcom Creek, the much loved stream that flows through the city. The Liam Wood Fly Fishers and River Guardians still thrives a quarter century later, and an ambitious new film about the amazing recovery of Whatcom Creek, and the place it still holds in the culture of Bellinghamsters and others, this Montanan included, is moving forward full steam ahead.
I also strongly recommend Whatcom Creek for Personhood Status, since malfeasant oil industry buffoons now possessing this Status unleashed this nightmare upon tens of thousands lacking that status. This legal absurdity has to end, but all I know to do is quote Wendell Berry saying, “Some things you just raise hell about and hope somebody smarter than you can fix it.” Calling all brilliant legal minds smarter than me or Wendell!!
Also in the 1990’s, the Blackfoot River in Montana, Norman Maclean’s river, was threatened by a Canadian mining company’s plan to build a gigantic cyanide heap-leach gold mine on its banks. I broke that story with the research help of a Harvard grad appropriately named Gus, in an essay first published in Sierra Magazine, then in my nonfiction book, My Story as Told by Water, a National Book Award finalist. Journalist Richard Manning’s wonderful book, One Round River, also broadcast the threat, and again, an incredibly diverse bunch of people came together. In the end Montana activists and voters not only stopped the mine, we got cyanide heap-leach mines banned statewide. The Blackfoot is now one of the most skillfully protected rivers in the country, remains a dream to fish—and alert readers already know I’m about to recommend the Blackfoot for Personhood Status. And let’s add to the Personhood List every stream and river in the vast tapestry of salmon streams in Bristol Bay, the greatest wild salmon sanctuary left on Earth, threatened by a sickeningly dangerous mine.
In 2010, my friend, Oregon’s own John Larison published a review in Outside that began, “At this moment, Big Oil is turning America’s holiest fishing grounds—the Columbia and Norman Maclean’s Montana—into a terrifying industrial corridor. With the help of oil-drunk politicians, ExxonMobil’s trucks are towing megaloads—230 feet long, 24 feet wide, and half a million pounds—over the two lane roads and wooden bridges that bisect the very rivers you dream of someday fishing. And if they succeed in delivering their loads to Alberta’s Tar Sands, they plan to construct a vascular system of pipelines across the continent—pipelines with a history of catastrophic rupture. A war has begun to stop them. And Rick Bass and David James Duncan, with the help of a few talented friends, have crafted a manifesto to inspire us to join them in battle.”
My contribution to that battle, Cheryl, was a beautifully illustrated 130-page essay titled “The Heart of the Monster,” which is the name of the Nez Perce people’s creation site and the title of the myth that describes it (used with permission). Rick meanwhile wrote an illustrated novella, “A Short History of Montana” that was not a big favorite among oil-drunk politicos. Combining our efforts in a book also titled The Heart of the Monster, our literary Paul Revere ride met up with a diverse and emotional swarm of people including a great Idaho activist group called “Fighting Goliath,” a crowd of mega load-blocking Missoula grandmothers the police were humiliated to arrest, a crowd of Nez Perce megaload blockers just as shamefully arrested on their own land on the Idaho side, and scores more activists generated national news headlines. Two wise judges, on federal, one in Montana, then sent ExxonMobil packing and left our iconic rivers intact.
CP: “Love and intimacy activism,” and a bit of an adventure. You take readers along on the adventure through The River Why and The Brothers K, so we highly anticipate the release of Sun House this summer. Are there themes you continue? What should we pack in our “reader’s fly box?”
DJD: I’m more interested, these days, in the icons on my altar than the contents of my fly boxes. An unusual through-line in my life ever since I was twenty has been friendships with wonderfully wise older women. Feminine expressions of wisdom abound on my altar, from the first great female author in English history, Julian of Norwich, who wrote, “Just as God is our Father, so is God also our Mother,” to Muscogee Nation songbird and former U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo, who wrote, “Remember the earth whose skin you are.” These voices escort us away from the toxic masculinity that has spewed its poisons over the Earth, its populace, and our politics. In reaction to that toxicity, one thing I very consciously do in Sun House is exclude the internet sub-realities and mind-traps that give voice to poison. I’m incredibly fortunate to be close to many women and some great but unsung men whose lives embody a depth of love and truth you seldom find referenced in mass media. That closeness leads me to believe there is a vital shift going on that grows ever more capable of addressing our biological and spiritual crises with the love and justice they demand. In Sun House, I pull out every stop I could get my heart and hands on in support of this shift.
CP: Is there something from your writing and/or life that you hope readers can learn by reading your novels?
DJD: My wise friend Barry Lopez felt that the great questions have no lasting answers, and if we confine ourselves to the limited powers of reason, I agree. But as an unreasoning but water-loving boy I began to find the Unanswerable to be a reminder that I was born lost, but in creeks and rivers began to be found. Watersheds remain a place of pilgrimage, rivers prayer wheels, wild salmon an interior compass, dammed or industrially-wounded rivers blues tunes, diminishing bird species, dark prophets, and wild lives as unassuming as weeds blooming in the cracks of city sidewalks a momentary home. Being alert to what our mother, this Earth, is serving up daily enables me to defy worry (which is just praying for what we don’t want) and refuse to be paralyzed by fear. In my fiction, I’ve tried my best to heed what the Earth and her “skin” are bestowing upon us. And it is unspeakably worth the effort when moments of attention on my part, or anyone’s part, unexpectedly explode, as they still sometimes do, into moments of inexplicable joy.
Angelina Swanson is a natural. From her athletic lifestyle, to the planet-conscious, Bend-based aos (Angelina Organic Skincare) business she created, she embodies her brand as more than a namesake. Starting in 1997 from her kitchen lab, aos now occupies a Bond Street storefront, with a spa sited above it to take customers from a retail experience to a journey to wellness with treatments, such as facials and massage, all using Angelina’s signature, personally-formulated skin care line. We asked Angelina about what inspired her to action.
When did you develop an interest in skincare products?
Growing up in Arizona, I was obsessed with getting to know the plants around me and how they were useful. My mom had a catering business, and I grew up cooking with her. She was incredibly creative, as are all the women in my family, and I loved fostering an intimate relationship with each ingredient. This has carried over into formulating skin care.
What was it like to be a budding botanist in the harsh climate of the Sonoran desert in Arizona?
Wandering in the desert preserve adjacent to our home, I was fascinated by the unique plants and began learning everything I could about how to use them. I studied botany and advanced biology in high school and completed the Master Gardener training, with my botany teacher—so geeky—the summer after graduation.
How did aos get started?
Like many small businesses, it began as a hobby. I was making products, like [best-selling] Skin Doctor Salve, for my family and friends. I started creating labels when I got tired of rattling off every ingredient, or handwriting it on a little slip of paper for the recipient. I think my first labels were on Microsoft Word and I cut them out with scissors. In the early 2000s, I was in massage school and didn’t like using the standard lotions full of chemicals and petroleum, so I began making my own massage butter. A few years later, two local spas called and said their massage therapists were “sneaking in” their own massage butter to use on clients, and they liked it so much, they wanted to buy it by the gallon! They kept asking for more products, massage lotion, oils, sugar scrubs and eventually face products. I wasn’t confident in formulating skin care yet, and since I was studying Ayurveda [Indian folk medicine] at the time, I decided to travel to India and talk with some of their Ayurvedic skin care specialists in Kerala. I returned armed with new knowledge and passion and began experimenting with the help of the estheticians at Sage Springs Spa.
What is the creation story behind your first product, Skin Doctor Salve?
I’ve always wanted to be outside as much as possible. In college, I earned extra money running river rafting and rock climbing expeditions on the weekends. The constant exposure to the harsh elements put my sensitive skin to the test and left my hands and feet painfully dry and cracked. I tried everything I could find, from Bag Balm to salves, but nothing really worked. I had taken a salve making workshop and decided to experiment in my kitchen with ingredients I found at the natural foods store where I worked.This experience inspired my first plant-based product, Skin Doctor Salve, which now three decades later, is still hailed as the ultimate healing salve by doctors, outdoor enthusiasts and devoted fans around the world.
I was intrigued to read about your idea of “Full-Circle Beauty,” can you explain what it means?
We strive to create more beauty in everything we touch, from our products to the communities that grow our ingredients. We call this concept “Full-Circle Beauty.” From choosing ingredients that are sustainably grown and harvested to suppliers who pay living wages and support their own communities, choosing alternative energy sources, riding bikes to work, buying recycled copy paper and long-life light bulbs, we work to create more beauty in the world with every facet of the business.
You have been a long-time supporter of local nonprofits, why is this important to you and aos?
The U.S. government doesn’t create the same kind of social safety nets that many other countries have, so we rely heavily on nonprofits to take care of our communities. I think it’s important to support them as much as we can because they provide so many necessities and valuable resources.
Finally, will you tell us about that cash register?
Oh yes, the cash register! I have a strong affinity for analog tools and machines. When I opened my first store, I searched for a beautiful, non-electric cash register. I don’t like surrounding myself with plastic, electrical things. Many antique machines were artfully crafted, and I like to weave that beauty into my life.
Eddie Swisher has a corner in Bend, Oregon where not only is he greeted on a first-name basis by his customers, but he makes a point of knowingtheir names as well. A “secondhand store that sells antiques,” his Iron Horse store celebrates fifty years in 2022, and will close its doors on the Congress Street location it has called home for thirty five of those years. Iron Horse will move to a new location on First Street and carry on. We talked to Eddie about where he started and what’s next for this local tradition.
Tell us about how the Iron Horse began?
It started in 1972 when my dad had a little secondhand store in Newport, Oregon called The Country Store. He had been selling at a flea market there first, and then we ended up renting up a whole block for the store for a couple hundred bucks. My dad had bought and sold for a long time, and he got me started. I had been a mechanic before that. In 1982, I moved the store to Bend. There were several places called Country Store and I wanted something that sounded a bit western to fit Central Oregon, so the name became Iron Horse. Longtime customers will remember our first store on Greenwood that burned down in the mid 80s, then we moved to Congress Street. I have spent thirty five years in this building—half my life.
What is your approach to procurement?
We find things everywhere we can—at estate sales, or when we get a call to come take a look at something in a person’s home. People will pull up to the front door and bring something to us in the back of their truck.
How do you recognize what people want?
In the 70s and 80s, when I started, people wanted antiques. Today, a piece of mid-century modern furniture may only last a few hours. People used to collect things, too, like depression glass and pottery. Today, fewer people have the hobby of collecting and we’ve adjusted to that. People are sometimes looking for items that fit a need.Not being a 100 percent antique store, we can sell a lot of other things. Today, younger people are maybe looking for different things, too, things that remind them of their own childhood.
How do you recognize value to price things in the resale world?
We may not always get it right, but having a great manager [Colleen Jones] is a big help. A lot of prices are subjective and pricing just comes with experience. If we do get a deal on something, we will pass the deal on to a customer and sell it for less. We want to have a reputation for getting you the best deal and we work to maintain that reputation with our customers. For this same reason, we sell to other dealers in Central Oregon. We try to move a volume of stuff versus trying to get the last dollar.
How has the reseller market changed and evolved over the years?
I was reluctant to have vendors for the longest time but realized they have a finger on the pulse of what people want. Now, we have eighteen vendors and the vendors know what their customers want and what to look for.
Is there a business model for the reseller space?
Rarely can a business be successful for fifty years without help or support from others. In my case, I have relied on suppliers and vendors. I work at cultivating and maintaining loyal customers. I have hundreds of local customers who shopped at the [original] Greenwood location or people who shopped with us on the coast.
How have online sites affected the reseller business?
They have actually been a good thing. Some of the vendors share their items online, so it is a marketing tool. It’s a plus for us, since a lot of our customers still want to see and touch stuff.
What is one of the most unusual items you have procured?
We had a skeleton in a casket for awhile. It was very old—a railroad worker in a handmade pine box that a person brought us. Someone thought the police should know so they came down, and we showed documentation [the skeleton was approved to be used for a “medical” or“scientific” use]. The police said, “We would appreciate you not keeping it here…we don’t want to have to come down again.” We eventually found a home for it.
On leaving the Congress Street location:
Many of our customers are really sentimental about this building, but I’m very optimistic about creating a new experience. Bringing in old fixtures will help create an atmosphere that is special—people aren’t coming to grab something quickly, it’s about the experience.
Is there a treasure you hunt for personally?
I like old store fixtures. I should have found something I like that is smaller.
Traveling to Milan, Italy and displaying his work at SaloneSatellite 2022, a showcase for designers under the age of thirty-five, helped emerging Bend furniture designer Jacob Riggle take his work from a home studio to the international stage. Riggle, a professional graphic designer by trade, made his first piece of furniture in 2010 as part of a 3D design class. The geometry of his work was informed by his explorations of engineering as an original career path. In his current work, Riggle combines sculptural elements with functional form using clean lines and angles. Riggle’s first design prototype was for the “Piixel” [sic]—a shelving unit with stair steps, in an interpretation of shape in the same way images are seen on a computer screen. “I wanted to take it out of a digital context into a furniture form using stairs,” Riggle said.His most current prototype “Sllat” [sic] is a patio loveseat that emphasizes form with a repeat of a design element—in this case, slats of wood. A self-taught furniture maker, Riggle said the international showcase was an opportunity to get out of his comfort zone and have both the exposure to potential manufacturers and the education from the company of other designers. The showcase was part of Salone del Mobile di Milano, one of the world’s largest furniture fairs. Now back in Central Oregon, Riggle plans to continue to update and refine his work. See jacobriggle.com.
