The play's the thing

Between the laid-back urbanity of Portland and the edgier urbanity of San Francisco lie two long rural and agricultural valleys -- the Sacramento valley in California and the Willamette valley in Oregon. These valleys are separated by the Siskiyou mountains, which straddle the border between the two states.

Roughly halfway between the cities, on the northern edge of the Siskiyous, lies the town of Ashland, Oregon, population about 22,000. Back in the day, a southern branch of the Oregon Trail brought settlers through this area, on their way north to fertile Willamette valley farmlands; the direction of migration reversed after 1849, when the Gold Rush lured Oregon prospectors south to California. In 1887, Ashland became a stop on the original Southern Pacific route between Portland and San Francisco.

The discovery of lithia (Li₂O) in a nearby source of water attracted health seekers, and plans were made to develop Ashland as a health spa. The spa never materialized, but the town's hope of becoming a resort encouraged intelligent preservation of the tiny river that runs through the center of town. Lithia creek became the center piece of today's attractive Lithia Park, designed by the architect of San Francisco's Golden Gate park.

All of this tedious padding is but preface to my observation that today's Ashland is a shining example of small town civilization, a mini-Athens rising above its rural setting, a rural setting that, while beautiful, is "cultivated" only in an agricultural sense.

Ashland's a cool place to visit.

Ashland's transformation from being merely a pretty little town, railway whistle stop and source of lithia water began in 1935 with the local staging of Twelfth Night and The Merchant of Venice, supported by a city appropriation of "not to exceed" $400. Today, the Oregon Shakespeare Festival performs eleven plays (only four of which this year are Shakespearean) in repertory each year from February through October. The plays are performed on three attractive stages adjacent to Lithia Park. One stage is an authentic Elizabethan theater in which, this summer and fall, three of the plays (all Shakespearean) will be performed.

The festival today is one of Ashland's largest employers, second only to Southern Oregon University (another town asset, which like the festival also contributes to the youthful electricity, and eccentricity, sensed by even the most casual visitor).

This little travelogue has been prompted by my return yesterday from a four-day visit to Ashland. I met up with Jim B., a friend from grad school whom I last hung out with two years ago during a prior visit to Ashland. Jim was once more seeking ways and means of constructing the perfect bicycle from scratch -- taking advantage of a local expert who offers two-week, hands-on courses on the subject -- and appeared happy to take a break mid-way through his studies to catch up on our friendship.

We spent our days hiking in the hills surrounding Ashland, and our evenings enjoying the local theater. Of our three day-hikes (one of them unexpectedly a couple of miles through snow in tennis shoes), the one that most appealed to me was a seven mile round trip trek on the Rogue River National Recreation Trail. The narrow trail is cut -- a bit precariously at times -- into the cliff far above the river. Our path was liberally ornamented on each side with shiny poison oak bushes, but we apparently escaped unscathed. The trail runs downstream for 40 miles, but we had lunch and turned around at Whiskey Creek, where the trail descended to a sandy boat landing. We were greeted by a number of rafters who came ashore for a break as we basked in the noonday sun. The scenery -- pine and fir, with deciduous trees coming into leaf, and with breathtaking views of the river far below -- was memorable, and the hike just vigorous enough to energize us without leaving us comatose during the evening's performance.

We had advance tickets for two of the festival's plays -- a dramatization of Pride and Prejudice, and a performance, in a modern setting, of Hamlet. Hamlet began unconventionally, with Prince Hamlet -- dressed in a dark suit and tie and wearing dark glasses -- sitting alone on stage, staring at his father's coffin, during the entire time that the audience was filtering into the theater and finding seats. The palace guards were armed with automatic rifles; the "play within a play" was performed in hip-hop. While I have qualms about such attempts at making classical plays "relevant," the acting was outstanding and the "modernization" less intrusive than I feared. In fact, it was the most captivating performance of Hamlet I've ever watched.

The festival obviously has effects on Ashland that go beyond its economic impact. The entire city seems alive to theater. Posters advertising a number of non-festival dramas were seen everywhere. Jim and I occupied the one evening that we had free by attending Ashland high school's student performance of The Importance of Being Earnest. The acting by 16 to 18 year old students was phenomenal. The plot is farcical in nature, but requires crisp delivery of lines, in a British accent; portrayal of highly eccentric characters in a consistent manner; and excellent stage presence and movement. The kids carried it off flawlessly. I'm embarrassed to contrast their performance with the plays that my own high school proved itself capable of performing.

Ashland makes an excellent overnight stop while driving between the Bay Area and either Seattle or Portland. I recommend the stop. I recommend a walk around town and through Lithia Park, luxuriating in the human ambience of creativity, intelligence and good humor. And I recommend checking out the festival's website to see which plays have tickets available during your stay.

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Afterthought: As a courtesy to the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, which provided me such an enjoyable weekend, I'll list this year's plays. The three plays marked with an (*) are to be performed in the Elizabethan theater (which I have yet to visit): Hamlet, Pride and Prejudice, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, She Loves Me, Well, Ruined, Twelfth Night,* Henry IV (Part One),* The Merchant of Venice,* American Night, Throne of Blood.

"Swift as a shadow, short as any dream ..."

"If only I could spend a year in Paris," you sometimes think. "I should have found a cheap apartment in Manhattan, right after college graduation," I've often told myself. Or, the ever popular: "A week at the beach just isn't enough!"

Sometimes, however, the most intense experiences are those compressed into an extremely short period of time. It's over before you know it, but you are left with memories that remain vivid for years to come.

Jim B., a good friend I hadn't seen for years who teaches at Purdue, is spending two weeks in Ashland, Oregon, studying how to fashion and weld titanium tubing into bicycle frames. Only an idiot would drive eight hours from Seattle to Ashland on a Friday, and drive eight hours back on Sunday, leaving only Saturday for a visit. So you might think. Idiocy is a vice, however, to which I cheerfully confess.

First of all, the drive itself, while long and tiring, was beautiful. I left behind Seattle's recent climate (see prior post). South of Portland, the weather changed to warm, sunny, delightful. The Willamette valley is green, agricultural, full of orchards. The last part of the drive climbed over a series of low mountain passes, craggy and forested. By the time I arrived in Ashland, Friday evening, I was tired but happy, and ready for a beer. And Ashland was ready for me. A string of cafés line tiny Ashland Creek, which runs through the middle of town, each equipped with outdoor tables, giving off southern European vibes of dolce vita. I downed a local ale from Oregon's own Deschutes Brewery

Ashland is known for the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. Several plays, not all Elizabethan, are showing at any given time in Ashland's Lithia Park. As a result, the town is packed with tourists of a literary bent, as well as with many young people, some attending the local college, and with members of what appears to be a final redoubt of the hippie culture. Everyone -- locals and visitors alike -- appears happy and laid back, in full enjoyment of a town that's blessedly far removed from foreign wars, terrorist threats, and the grosser forms of Washington political infighting. Everyone tactfully and tacitly assumes that you have the good taste to support Obama, unless you care to insist otherwise

We had tickets to A Midsummer's Night Dream, for Saturday night. We spent all day Saturday warming up for the experience by setting out on a nine-mile hike to and from Wagner's Butte, a high crag overlooking the Rogue River Valley and the towns of Medford and Ashland. The climb was exhilarating -- initially through thick fir and pine forests, and then breaking out into open gorse and wildflowers. From the butte, Ashland appears as one small outpost of civilization, nestled in a vast sea of mountains and forests.

The performance that night was entertaining -- true to Shakespeare's text, but, according to the program, set in the mid-1950's. The play, which Shakepeare had placed in ancient Greece, opened on a pimped-out set with Theseus and his lover Hippolyta, lounging on what appeared to be a pair of gigantic white leather thrones, and hectoring each other in urban street accents. Oberon, the king of the fairies, was attended at all times by his quartet of fairy attendants, young men clad in leather shorts who sang and danced their lines in the manner of disco entertainers in a rather louche gay bar. The audience frequently interrupted with laughter and applause, which is certainly more than the usual high school production can hope for.

Nevertheless, the humor of the settings and costumes and of the actors' accents were superficial pleasures. The story and the lines of Shakespeare's play were easily transplanted from ancient Athens to 1957 (or was it 1977?) Brooklyn without damage. Their appeal is universal, regardless of how they are packaged.

I was on my way home before I knew it, but I'd had a great hike, enjoyed a wonderful interpretation of Shakespeare, and had an opportunity to catch up with recent events in the life of a friend.

Also, I learned that Linn County, Oregon, is the "Grass Seed Capital of the World," and that, as we were informed by the teenager who pumped our gas (self-service gas pumps being illegal in Oregon), the Ashland area grows the best pears outside France. As they say, travel is broadening.

Even when it's over in a flash.

"Hooray for Capt. Spaulding!"

Oregon is a somewhat puzzling state.  For non-residents, it may seem simply connective tissue -- with I-5 being its artery -- lying between the latte culture of Puget Sound and the dreamworld/nightmare that is California.  Recently, the nation has awakened to the wonderful peculiarities of Portland ("Portlandia"), but Portland is a small cosmopolitan oasis in the northwest corner of a large state.  The rest of the state seems empty and, east of the Cascades, endlessly bleak.

But down near the California border, straddling I-5 and roughly midway between Portland and San Francisco, is the cultural oasis of Ashland.
But hark!  I've already described the town and its history for you -- in an essay two years ago!  You can go read it.

And so, two years later, my college friend Jim B. returns once again to Ashland, again taking a hands-on class in bicycle construction and repair.  And, again, I drove down to meet him, talk over old times, view together with alarm the present state of the nation and the future course of mankind, do some local explorations, and take in a couple of plays at Ashland's "Oregon Shakespeare Festival."

We started off with a production of a Broadway musical -- Animal Crackers -- a musical that originally -- of course -- starred the Marx Brothers: Groucho as Captain Spaulding, Chico as Emanuel Ravelli, Harpo as "The Professor," and Zeppo as Horatio Jamison.  The Broadway show opened in 1928, but the production is better known to most of us through the 1930 Marx Brothers movie.

The Ashland cast has come up with an incredible set of Marx Brothers clones.  The plot itself is inconsequential.  The musical was merely a platform for Marx Brothers gags, antics, mugging, acrobatics, and ad libbing -- combined with occasional forays down off the stage to delight and humiliate members of the audience.  Harpo was resplendent in fright wig and bicycle horns.  Chico was played by a young Japanese-American who -- after the first few sentences of broken Italo-English -- was totally believable as an Italian immigrant.  Groucho was simply Groucho -- he could have hosted quite convincingly a half-hour of "You Bet Your Life."

A highly recommended evening of sheer, mindless entertainment, if any of my readers plans to pass through Ashland this year.  "Hooray for Captain Spaulding!"

The other show was a production of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet.  For reasons not apparent to me, the production was set not in Renaissance Verona, Italy, but in 1840's "Verona," California.  The Montagues and Capulets are two Spanish hidalgo families.  Shakespeare's Prince of Verona becomes "General Prince, U.S. Commander of Verona."  Aside from a few minor translations of "Farewell" and "Good evening" to "Adios" and "Buenas Noches," the script remains true to the original.  My mind took only a couple of minutes to ignore the "updating" of the setting, which seemed to neither add nor subtract a thing from the significance of the play.

I'm not sure why they bothered.

But the acting was excellent.  Romeo and Juliet were played by unusually youthful-appearing actors -- appropriately so, since Shakespeare's Juliet was only 13 and Romeo not much older.  They spoke convincingly their Elizabethan lines to each other, while their facial expressions and body language were those of any two young American teenagers overwhelmed by the wonder of first love.  Their skillful interpretation of Shakespeare did far more to make the play relevant to Sunday night's unusually young audience than did any transposition of the setting from Italy to California.

Drama aside, Jim and I had a great visit together.  We spent a day visiting the Oregon Caves, a national monument I'd been wanting to tour since  childhood.  The caves are not as huge or dramatic as more famous ones such as Mammoth Cave, perhaps, but their geology and diversity are very interesting.  Props to the young geology graduate who works for the Park Service as a volunteer guide.  He has a true talent for sharing his love of geology.

Jim has lived in Indiana for most of his adult life, and I insisted that we drive on to the coast in Crescent City, just across the California border, to remind him of the ocean and his younger years in Seattle.  A beautiful coastal landscape, shaped by steady winds off the ocean and presided over by a still functioning light house.

A climb to the top of a strange mesa formation -- Table Rock -- near Medford, just north of Ashland, occupied part of another day.  The flat table top was originally the surface of a solidified lake of volcanic lava that covered the entire area.  Most of the lava and the soft substrata eventually eroded away, leaving only a few flat-topped formations like Table Rock looming over the agricultural valley.  We finished up the day renting mountain bikes and spending a couple of hours touring the area in and around Ashland.

A highly enjoyable long weekend.  Next on my to-do list is rental of the original film of Animal Crackers.  Were the real Marx Brothers as funny as their imitators in Ashland?

Timing belts, and such

"You know, Don," Jim casually remarked, as I paid for my oil change, "I wonder if your engine has ever had it's timing belt replaced?"

"Huh?" I alertly responded, as my brain's search engines did a quick scan of my memory banks, seeking fruitlessly for data about "timing belts."

"Yas, yas," he drawled, or words to that effect.  "Your car has 97,000 miles on it."  (Not bad for a '96 Corolla, I remark to myself.)  "The timing belt really needs to be changed every 60,000 miles."

Now I bought the car ten years ago, when it had about 49,000 miles, before a timing belt change would have been performed.  And I'm sure no one's ever muttered the words  "timing belt" in my presence during any of the servicing I've had done since that time.

"So, do you think the belt needs changing?"

"Well, there's no way to tell until we take the engine apart.  And by that time, actually changing the belt will be the least of your expense."

Somehow I don't like the way this is going.  "Well, what happens if I don't get it done?"

"Wrecks the engine, or at least badly damages it."  (Possible "irreparable engine damage," as Wikipedia put it, when I later looked up the topic.)

"Will it be expensive?"  Jim gets that compassionate look on his face that repairmen get when they're about to lower the boom.  He gives me an estimate.

I'm not going to tell you the amount of the estimate.  You'd only leave comments on my blog telling me how your Uncle Randy, a renowned auto mechanic, would have done it for a quarter of that price.  Let's just say that the ground seemed to tremble, the service station seemed to swirl about me, and tears flooded my eyes.

"I'll think it over," I stammered, as I staggered over to my car and gunned it out of the station.  That was a week ago.  I'm driving down to Ashland in a couple of weeks to meet an old friend and snag a couple of plays at the Ashland Shakespeare Festival.  That's 460 miles each way.  I contemplated the vision of my engine's exploding before my startled eyes somewhere around Eugene.

Luckily, we consumers now have access to the internet.  I don't have to rely solely on Jim's word that such a thing as a timing belt even exists.  Unfortunately, it does.  It connects the cam shaft to the crankshaft.  Of course.  How else is the cam shaft going to turn?  How did I think those little valvey things would pop open and shut if the cam shaft weren't spinning?  More to the point, several on-line articles also confirmed both the fact that the timing belt needs to be changed every 60,000 miles and the full extent of engine carnage that could easily result if it wasn't.

Resignedly, I phoned the station.  I made the arrangements.  I took the car in this morning.  Its engine probably is being disassembled right now, even as I type.  Jim's son can now rest assured that his old man will be able to pay for his Harvard tuition.

I wonder if my life would have been happier if I'd never heard about the threat posed by a failing timing belt.  Just as I sometimes wonder whether I really need the doctor to tell me about my blood pressure.  Which -- at the moment -- almost certainly is elevated.