A river goes through a flood plain that’s been tamed. The hills are still pretty with patches of unlogged Douglas Fir, but when you look down from them you see a small town that’s mostly a strip development designed to support 50,000 people. Welcome to Springfield.
This is the Springfield that inspired the Simpsons, only instead of a nuke plant, it’s a pulp and cardboard plant. Other major industries include factories for the making of charcoal briquettes and some plywood glue distilleries. In doing more campaign work, I’m assigned a solidly middle class neighborhood on the lower side. My candidate is running against the Mayor for county commissioner. The Mayor has resembled “Diamond Joe” Quimby with his inflated ego and questionable but perfectly legal real estate deals. But he doesn’t say, “chowdah” that I know of.
The Pioneer Father is in Eugene, as is Max’s Tavern. But the rest of the town is pretty much the way Matt Groening envisioned it. The arterial street one block south of Main Street has traffic lights that have been programmed for the easy transport of logging trucks carrying their single slice of old growth timber, but the last giant was logged many years ago. You pass by the abandoned car dealers and wood products plants, and you notice the strip clubs and porno shops more, intermingled with the nondescript pizza joints, discount supermarkets, and one man chain saw repair shops.
I have very little real contact with the residents around 35th and Redwood. I say my short script (as brief as possible) and I hand them the pamphlet. A lot of the time no one’s home, and when people do answer the door, they’re suspicious – peeking behind slits of an opening or standing with wary eyes. With this gig, I could be a cat burglar or psycho waiting to destroy their home. Things like that are reported on TV enough, even if it rarely happens. And it isn’t easy handing out any kind of political literature this year. There are times when the whole country is suffering from media poisoning, and this is one of them.
But there are people who still exhibit small town values. I knocked on one door that was ajar, and a man’s voice told me to come in. In a sparsely furnished living room, there was a slightly overweight man reclining in a Barcalounger. He was stripped to the waist, and he was watching TV under a sun lamp, but his body was spotted like a leopard. I said my spiel and did not inquire about his medical condition.
Another time, a middle-aged lady answers the door, but a gaggle of elderly voices call me inside. I walk in to find two ladies and a man, all in their 90s. The ladies are in the kitchen, and the man is sitting on his couch. The room is a shade of powder blue that was popular in the 1950s, and there are mementos on shelves and a coffee table. Although the candidate is running in a nonpartisan race, the first question they ask is what party she’s really with. I say, “Democrat,” and we wind up having a wonderful conversation about FDR. It doesn’t hurt that my candidate’s a woman.
In the rest of my walk I encounter many Democrats and perhaps only two Republicans. One angry man asks what party she’s for, and I give him the answer he’s not looking for. He yells an epithet about Obama, and he slams the door. The other is a woman living in an immaculate house with a perfect lawn. She listens attentively to what I say, and then says that she’ll think very carefully about what I’ve said and who she’ll vote for. I believe her.
There are plenty of signs of unemployment, but only one two bedroom ranch house is an empty shell sitting forlornly in a lot overgrown with dead weeds that come up to my knees. No one screams, “I’m unemployed!” except perhaps for the man who yelled at me, and he didn’t say that. Instead unemployment comes to me by way of subliminal clues. Too many men and women are home at a time when they should be out working. There’s too much cigarette smoking and beer drinking. Too many downturned eyes. To much ennui and sadness about when the next paycheck will show up. Too much desperation at the end of the month wondering about how you’re going to feed the kids. None of this is advertised, but you can feel it, and you can smell it. That’s why I don’t spend too much time at each door.
Of course things aren’t like that everywhere. In my neighborhood there are poor people. To some extent, I am. But when you’re a diminished aristocrat, you’re still an aristocrat. It’s fall and the college kids are coming back to town. The lady from Brazil used to live next door in the 1970s bungalow that could blend in comfortably on Mulholland Drive in Hollywood. But she got Alzheimer’s disease, and so her son has rented it out to college kids.
I see the tasteful red Jaguar sedan in the driveway, and I’m curious. I see the tall, lanky, good looking kid standing in front of the house, and I go over to introduce myself.
“Hi, I’m Karl.”
“I’m Tom.”
“So, you’re going to the U of O?” He nods his head. “What are you majoring in?”
“Econ and mathematics.”
I think for a nanosecond. “So you’re going to be the next trillionaire?”
“Either that, or the cause of the next recession.”
Karl Eysenbach | Contributor
Karl Eysenbach is a retired government administrator and teacher. He is the author of a novel,The Story of the Century, and he lives in Eugene, Oregon and middle Baja California. Watch for his blogging as old new lefty at open.salon.com.
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