Oregon150

By Lauren Kessler, Oregon Author

I am a first-generation Oregon pioneer. I came across the Oregon Trail - or rather, the late 20th century version of the Oregon Trail (Interstate 80) — in a late 20th century Conestoga wagon (a Dodge van) packed with all my worldly goods. These goods did not include hand-made quilts and pewter flatware but rather a crate of records, a beanbag chair and dog-eared copy of the I Ching. (”It furthers one to cross the great water,” it told me. And so I did: the Mississippi.)

In fact, most of us Oregonians are first-generation pioneers. At a speech I gave a few weeks ago, I asked the audience of 600 to please stand. Then I asked those who were not born in Oregon to sit down. Then I asked those whose parents were not born in Oregon to sit down. Can you guess how many were left standing? Six.

We are immigrants all (or our parents were, or their parents), and we have much in common with the “real” (18th century) pioneers who preceded us. I know I do.

I came west, as they did, for adventure, for opportunity, for a new life in a new land. I came to shed some of who I was and discover who I might be. I came for the big sky, the tall trees and the clean air. I came, like my predecessors, with high hopes, big plans and empty pockets. I came west because west is where you came. I came to Oregon because I had seen “McCabe and Mrs. Miller” (which I found out decades later was actually filmed in Washington) and read Sometimes a Great Notion and because, at college in Illinois, I had a friend named Tom Truesdell.

Tom was one of the hippest people I knew and, at a school with more than its share of poseurs, one of the least pretentious. He knew every Bergman movie by heart (in translation…but still), could name all of Mies van de Rohe’s important buildings and had seen the Grateful Dead when Pig Pen was still alive. And, the thing is, he was humble about it. Low key.

Tom told me he was born and raised in Eugene, Oregon, a town I had never heard of in a state I vaguely understood was somewhere north of California. And yet, he was in the cultural vanguard. The more I got to know Tom, the more I wanted to be surrounded by people just like him: smart but modest about it, astute but relaxed, genuine, both open-minded and open-hearted. Maybe I should venture out to this Eugene, Oregon place, I thought to myself. Perhaps that’s how they grew ‘em out there, like Tom.

It turned out I was right.

Are you a first-generation Oregon pioneer like me? What’s your “overland trail” story? How and why did you come to this great state?

About: Lauren Kessler is the author of five works of narrative nonfiction, including Dancing with Rose, Washington Post bestseller Clever Girl, Los Angeles Times bestseller The Happy Bottom Riding Club, Full Court Press and Oregon Book Award winner Stubborn Twig.  Stubborn Twig was chosen as the book for all Oregon to read in honor of the state’s 2009 sesquicentennial.

Her journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Los Angeles Times Magazine, O Magazine, Salon and The Nation. She is founder and editor of Etude, the online magazine of narrative nonfiction, and directs the graduate program in literary nonfiction at the University of Oregon. She lives in Eugene, Oregon, with her writer husband, Tom Hager, her three brilliant and faultless children and a cat that thinks it’s a dog.

You can learn more about Lauren on her author website: http://laurenkessler.com/

You can learn more about her newest project at www.thinhouse.net