Fugitives And Refugees Part 9

Like everybody, one day he accidentally left a sack lunch on top of his car when he drove to work. That whole commute, people laughed and pointed. After that, he glued a coffee cup to the car roof. And always, people pointed and waved and laughed, trying to get his attention. After that, he glued a coffeemaker, then a waffle iron, then a whole breakfast to his car.

"You've heard of Continental Kits?" he says. "I call this a 'Continental Breakfast Kit.'"

Eventually, the breakfast included real Hostess Twinkies, still wrapped but glued to the car. "I've found a Twinkie will last up to a year if the package isn't breached. And when our neighborhood has an ant problem, they're almost never never on the Twinkies." on the Twinkies."

Since then, he says, "Me? I just love to stick c.r.a.p on cars."

He uses only 100 percent silicone glue. GE and Dap brands are good. Sometimes he drills the car body and bolts things, but in Oregon that means leaks and mildew. "I've caulked the h.e.l.l out of it, and I still get that delightful bas.e.m.e.nt smell." When it comes to cleaning all those toys and appliances and bones and whatnot, well. . . "If you look close enough, you see-I don't. This is Oregon," he says. "Let the sky sky wash them!" Besides, he loves the different "mutations" each kind of plastic baby head or rubber nipple or crucifix goes through-oozing white crud or cracking-when exposed to years of auto exhaust and weather. wash them!" Besides, he loves the different "mutations" each kind of plastic baby head or rubber nipple or crucifix goes through-oozing white crud or cracking-when exposed to years of auto exhaust and weather.

The upside is, "Most people I've talked to with art cars agree: You can get away with more with these cars than you can with a normal car. You can run stoplights. You can park across an intersection. When you reach a four-way stop, hardly anyone ever goes before you."

The downside includes: "Everybody wants to touch and wiggle things." They break off the trophy figures of little gold and silver people bowling, playing baseball, shooting, golfing. "Ninety-nine percent of the reactions are positive, but every once in a while you get a screamer who says, 'I bet that car has AIDS!'" He says, "You can't have a thin skin if you're going to drive these things. You have to expect some vandalism."

Another issue is the bees and hornets attracted to the colors and s.h.i.+ny mirrors so bright they might be a flower garden.

And crows. Chuck has a selection of wild animal lure tapes he got from a hunting store-wild pigs mating, coyotes, crows fighting, bobcats in heat-and he plays them over loudspeakers mounted outside each car. When he plays the crows tape, a flock of crows appears and follows the car like a noisy dark cloud. "I love the speakers," he says, "because you're mutating the environment from two blocks away." If you play the tape called "Red Fox in Distress," every dog in the area barks.

Living in Portland, this sort of acting out just seems natural. The whole city, he says, has a "small man complex."

Adding, "Portland makes up for its small size with its loud and obnoxious behavior."

Instead of animal tapes, he'll play bedwetting hypnosis records from the 1950s: ear-splitting recorded voices that tell every car in the parking lot or freeway, "We love you. We need you. If you wake up and have to go to the bathroom, you'll get up and come back to a nice, clean bed- and then we'll love you even more . . ."

At Christmas he blares mixes of bad Christmas music and calls it "drive-by caroling." Still, all this f.u.c.ks with Chuck's own sense of reality. "Now when I hear crows, I think: 'Are those real real crows?' When I hear a siren, I think: 'Is that a crows?' When I hear a siren, I think: 'Is that a real real cop or just someone like cop or just someone like me?'" me?'"

PETROLIANA.

Glenn Zirkle meant well. His idea was to find one old-time gasoline pump and restore it as a gift for his boss, d.i.c.k d.y.k.e, at WSCO Petroleum. In 1982 he found Ins pump. In 1985 he found another. Since then, his collection of "Petroliana" has pretty much taken over the corporate offices at 2929 NW Twenty-ninth Avenue.

Now called the Historical Museum of Early Oil Days, it has at least one of everything you could possibly remember.

Glenn walks you through the earliest pumps, the "blind fuelers" of the 1910s, then the "visibles" of the 1910s through the 1920s. The earliest visible is a Wayne Pump model 492 "Roman or Greek Column pump" built to look like a fluted white column. It's fancy as h.e.l.l, but any repairs meant rebuilding the whole thing-including the leather gaskets.

"I just started watching for the era of farms with old barns," he says. "They didn't go to town every day, so it was likely they had their own pumps."

"Visibles" provided gas from a ten-gallon, thirty-inch-tall gla.s.s tank perched at the top of the pump. First the fuel was pumped, by hand or power, up into the gla.s.s tank- like a cylindrical gla.s.s fish bowl-which was marked with levels for each gallon. This way the buyer could see the gas. Glenn says, "They'd want to feel like they were getting the amount they were paying for." Then the fuel was gravity-fed down into the car.

Next are the "clock face" pumps from the 1930s. On these, a big hand spins around the face of the pump once for each gallon, and a smaller hand moves slower, keeping track of the total number of gallons. From the 1940s through the 1960s there are the "three-wheel" computer pumps, with three places to record total sale in the days when gas prices ranged from 19 to 30 cents per gallon. After the 1960s higher gas prices led to the "four-wheel" computer pumps.

Besides the pumps, you'll find a h.o.a.rd of drive-away premiums: toys and dishes, most of them painted with the red Mobil Oil Pegasus. Plus countless antique metal signs and rare items like the porcelain scallop sh.e.l.ls that used to sit on each corner of an original Sh.e.l.l gas station roof. A few years ago, Glenn got his best buy when he tracked down a retired worker from the port fuel terminal. This man had taken a load of old service station signs, all of them the baked-porcelain kind that last forever. He'd hauled them up into the mountains around Vernonia to roof a shed with. When Glenn finally found the man, he'd just torn down the old shed and was hauling the antique signs to the dump. "He said, 'You'll pay me for those signs?'" Glenn says, "I wound up buying sixty-three a.s.sorted signs from him."

When visiting, keep in mind part of the building is still offices. WSCO Petroleum is the fuel distributor that owns the local Astro chain of gas stations, originally called "Tricky d.i.c.ky" after president d.i.c.k d.y.k.e. Glenn says, "Nixon got in trouble, and away went that that name." The company's logo, a grinning red-headed kid, is still around town. name." The company's logo, a grinning red-headed kid, is still around town.

THE SPRUCE GOOSE.

This airplane, dubbed a "flying lumberyard" by critics, flew just one time: November 2, 1947. Now Howard Hughes's "Spruce Goose" has been rea.s.sembled outside of Portland. For more details, check out www.sprucegoose. org, or drive by the Evergreen Aviation Museum at 3850 SE Three Mile Lane in McMinnville, Oregon. Phone: 503-434-4180.

STREET-LEGAL DRAG RACING.

If you've got seat belts on your car and a fluid-overflow system for radiator boilovers, you can drag race in Portland. Go to the Portland International Raceway, Wednesday through Friday. For loud cars, up to 103 decibels, races go from 4:00 P.M. to 10:00 P.M. For cars up to 90 decibels, there's late-night racing until 1:00 A.M.

The track is in West Delta Park at 1940 N Victory Boulevard. Phone: 503-823-RACE. Check out the schedule at www.portlandraceway.com.

THE TRAIN YARDS.

Portland and railroads, it never stops. For years Portland boasted the worlds shortest railroad, running the couple miles from Milwaukie to the east end of the Marquam Bridge. It was called Samtrak because d.i.c.k Samuels maintained the rolling stock and his wife, Dawn, was the engineer.

Before that, local kids used to play on an ancient steam locomotive that stood in a flower bed in front of Union Station-until Hollywood property scouts bought the engine and restored it as the "Hooterville Cannonball" for the television series Petticoat Junction. Petticoat Junction.

For a look at vintage trains, take SE Seventeenth Avenue, just north of Holgate Boulevard, and turn east on Center Street. Go one block until the street dead-ends at a railroad crossing. Cross the tracks into a large gravel parking lot filled with trucks. Bearing right (southeast), pa.s.s through the gravel lot until you come to another railroad crossing. Just beyond that is the partial roundhouse with a small white sign that says BROOKLYN. Park along the one-story building adjacent to the roundhouse. A heavy red door right under the BROOKLYN sign lets you inside.

Inside are steam locomotives as big as houses, being restored by volunteers who love them.

This is the home of the American Freedom Train, engine number SP4449, built in May 1941. It crossed the country as part of the Bicentennial in 1975-76, and it's still red, white, and blue. Come by on a Monday or Wednesday afternoon and look for Harvey Rosener, the man who built the first high-speed graphics card for a network PC and who works on the engine with his fellow "Friends of the 4449." Also, check out the engines latest trips across the Pacific Northwest on www.4449.com.

The last day I visited, the steam engine for the Spokane, Portland, and Seattle Railroad was also parked in the roundhouse, a double-expansion engine that uses the steam twice. The wheels of these monsters. .h.i.t most people at chin height. The stock changes but also look for engines from the old Nickel Plate Road, plus European pa.s.senger cars and more.

WESTERN ANTIQUE POWERLAND.

Larry Leek points out a pile of huge cast-iron columns from the Oregon state capitol building that burned in 1935. Dark and cracked from the heat of the fire, they're here to become part of the Oregon Fire Service Museum. For most of the twentieth century the columns and their fancy cast-iron capitals and bases had been dumped into a local creek as landfill material. "Whatever people don't know what to do with, it comes here. Sometimes it's good. Sometimes it's not so good." The field behind the trolley barn is an organized mix of decaying trolley cars and railroad parts on pallets. Pointing at a trolley car, all splintered wood and peeling paint, Larry says, "If somebody wants to give you a hundred-year-old car, it's hard to say no."

Take Interstate 5 south from Portland to exit 263, just north of Salem. Turn right at the stop sign and then right again a quarter mile later at the sign for Western Antique Powerland, and you'll be traveling back in time. Here are sixty-two acres of history, a gra.s.sroots collection of museums and historical re-creations built and maintained by a half dozen different volunteer groups.

"I started with an old tractor I brought out, and I've been here ever since," Larry says, now the group's president. "I'm basically what you'd call a scrounger-I like it all."

Here's the Willow Creek Railroad, a miniature railway with over a mile and a half of track. And the original 1870 Southern Pacific depot moved here from Brooks, Oregon.

Here's the Oregon Electric Railway Museum, a band of two hundred members busy restoring trains from around the world. Walk through an open-air car from Australia. A double-decker car with cramped, five-foot-ten ceilings from Hong Kong. Cars from Los Angeles and San Francisco. They have the two original 1904 trolley cars that ran to the amus.e.m.e.nt park on top of Council Crest, still with the original hand-painted signs for Jantzen swimwear. Jack Norton, the superintendent of operations, says how the museum's been around since the 1950s. Their car barn holds nine restored cars, and overhead wires allow them to drive out onto the museum's network of tracks around the grounds. Another barn holds nothing but tractors, including the oldest operating steam tractor in the country, built in 1880. Their newest steam tractor is from 1929, with most built between 1895 and 1915. Ask Larry to show you the creepy 1900 steam engine that a murderer spent his whole life insanely cutting into tiny pieces with a hand hacksaw.

The museum of stationary engines could be a Stephen King nightmare of the Industrial Revolution. Row after row of huge engines loom over you, all of them big thras.h.i.+ng monsters of iron, bra.s.s, and steel. Here, Larry can show you a stationary engine that runs on hot air, turning the flywheel to work a Rube Goldberg-looking system of pistons and rods.

Next door is the antique car and truck museum with everything from a very antique hea.r.s.e to snowplows and the world's biggest monkey wrench collection-more than 1,006 unique monkey wrenches. Be sure to check out the before-and-after photos of the vehicles. They're unbelievable. The first one will be some rusty skeleton in a pile of weeds. The second, showroom quality.

Don't miss the restored 1907 steam-powered sawmill, with the kind of huge spinning blade you'd use to kill a silent movie heroine tied to a log. It's powered by the engine from the abandoned b.u.mble Bee Tuna Cannery in Astoria. Next to it is the twelve-foot-tall drive wheel of the restored engine from the old B. P. Johns furniture factory that became the John's Landing shopping mall. Next to that is a working blacksmith shop.

And opening soon will be the Oregon Fire Service Museum.

The best time to see everything up and running is the last weekend in July and the first weekend in August, at the annual Great Oregon Steam-Up. For more information, call 503-393-2424.

From trains to tractors to trucks, if you think it's gone-it's here. But keep that under your hat. As Larry says, "OSHA [the Occupational Safety and Health Administration] would have a heart attack if they saw us running all this stuff."

WILLAMETTE Sh.o.r.e TROLLEY.

Ride a century-old, double-decker electric trolley car from downtown Portland, south to Lake Oswego, through some of the area's best scenery. This is the old 1887 line that runs between the RiverPlace development on the Portland waterfront and downtown Lake Oswego, pa.s.sing through the forested private estates of Dunthorpe, a tunnel, and skirting along the cliffs high above the Willamette River and Elk Rock Island.

Beginning in April, the trolley runs every weekend, adding Thursday and Friday in May. Regular service runs through October. The best runs include the Fourth of July trips that let you watch fireworks launched from Oakes Amus.e.m.e.nt Park. Also, the December runs follow the fleet of lighted Christmas s.h.i.+ps that cruise the river. And the Valentine s Day trips are also very popular. Reservations are very recommended; call 503-697-7436 or 503-222-2226. The southern trolley depot is at 311 N State Street in Lake Oswego; this end of the route has free parking.

U.S.S. BLUEBACK BLUEBACK.

Launched May 16, 1959, the U.S.S. Blueback Blueback is a diesel-powered, Barbel-cla.s.s submarine that was home to a crew of eighty-five men for its thirty-one years in service. In Vietnam it dropped Navy SEALs and mined harbors. It arrived in Portland in 1994, decommissioned, after being used in the film is a diesel-powered, Barbel-cla.s.s submarine that was home to a crew of eighty-five men for its thirty-one years in service. In Vietnam it dropped Navy SEALs and mined harbors. It arrived in Portland in 1994, decommissioned, after being used in the film The Hunt for Red October. The Hunt for Red October.

Look for RG Walker, the submarine manager, who says, "The effect we're going for is as if the crew's just left and gone on sh.o.r.e for the day." Food still sits on plates. Dirty dishes are piled in the sink. Razors and personal items lie where they've been dropped on bunks. RG will show you the pull-down screen where they showed movies during each two-month tour at sea. A former submariner, RG says, "On some tour of duty, we went out with just one movie- West Side Story. West Side Story. By the time we got back into port, everyone knew every song. They'd all be dancing around, singing, 'I'm a shark! I'm a jet!'" By the time we got back into port, everyone knew every song. They'd all be dancing around, singing, 'I'm a shark! I'm a jet!'"

Really, the best tour is the "Techno Tour," given only on the first Sunday of each month. It's limited to eight people and led by an ex-submariner who has no problems lingering over the most obscure detail. Officially, it's two hours but can last up to four or six if the group is that curious. Buy your $15 tickets early at the front desk. The Techno Tour starts at 10:00 in the morning.

Licensed ham radio operators can broadcast from the on-board radio station.

The Blueback Blueback resides at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), at 1945 SE Water Avenue. resides at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), at 1945 SE Water Avenue.

(a postcard from 1996)

One side of NE Multnomah Boulevard is Lined with Portland police officers in full SWAT gear, Kevlar face s.h.i.+elds, and body armor, holding black riot sticks.

The other side of the street is lined with Santa Clauses in red velvet suits and big, white beards. It's the thin blue line versus the fat red line.

This is Portland SantaCon '96. Aka the Red Tide. Aka Santa Rampage. Every year, members of different Cacophony Societies flock to a host city. From Germany, Australia, Ireland, and every state in the U.S., they're here in almost identical Santa suits. All using the name Santa. No one's male or female. No one's young or old. Black or white. This is some 450 Santa Clauses in town for seventy-two hours of special events. From karaoke to roller skating. Political protests to street theater. Strip clubs to Christmas caroling. They jingle sleigh bells and carry spray bottles of Windex, blue window cleaner they use to squirt each other in the mouth.

For window cleaner it tastes just Like Bombay Sapphire gin-and-tonic.

This Sat.u.r.day night the plan is to meet at the Lloyd Center shopping mall and join hands around the huge ice-skating rink. There, the Santas will chant and sing in an effort to manifest the spirit of bad-girl Olympic figure skater Tonya Harding.

It hardly matters that Tonya is still alive.

It does does matter that the police got here first. matter that the police got here first.

It's a stalemate, the police forming a line along the southern edge of the Lloyd Center-the Santas are facing them across the street, hand-in-hand, in a line along the north edge of Holliday Park. Other Santas have snuck into the mall dressed as shoppers but carrying their red suits and beards in shopping bags. Still, when they duck into fitting rooms and restrooms to change clothes, mall security guards nab and evict them.

Now the line of Santas chant: "Ho, ho, ho! We won't go!"

They do the wave, back and forth from one end of the block to the other, chanting, "Being Santa is not a crime!"

Through a bullhorn, the police say that the Lloyd Center is private property and any Santas who cross the street will go to jail.

And the Santas chant, "One, two, three ... Merry Christmas!"

Above the police line parents and kids line the railings of the parking garages. It's only six in the evening, but already it's dark and cold enough to see everyone's breath. Cars in the street slow to gridlock, so open-mouthed with surprise that no one honks.

The kids are waiting. The police and Santas are all waiting.

Me, I'm here somewhere, buried inside padding and red velvet. My name is Santa and I've been absorbed. Santa-to-Santa our marching orders come down the line in a gin-scented whisper.

A light-rail train pulls into the station next to the park.

The police lower their Kevlar face s.h.i.+elds.

At the signal the herd of Santas breaks rank and starts running. A flood of red headed for the train. To escape for downtown. For drinking and caroling and Chinese food.

And right behind them-behind us-the police give chase.

Animal Acts: When You're Sick of People-Watching

THE DAY I SPENT with Portland elephant keeper Jeb Barsh, he compared the city to a zoo. Comparing the city government to zookeepers, Jeb said, essentially their job is the same: to keep a population as happy as possible inside a confined area. Portland's size is limited by the Urban Growth Boundary-our cage, so to speak-and somehow we've all got to coexist within this limited s.p.a.ce. Here's a look inside the other zoo, plus a few more animal-related events.

THE ELEPHANT MEN.

"Working with elephants is an obsession," says Jeb Barsh. "It sucks you in. Dealing with their psyches is such an honor."

In keeping with Katherine Dunn's theory that every Portlander has three lives, Jeb's an elephant keeper, a writer of songs, fiction, and poetry, and a father to his two-year-old son. He went to Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where he wanted to write a children's book about elephants. For research he went to the local zoo to volunteer. That was eleven years ago.

Portlands status as an elephant factory Jeb calls "an accident of nature." In the late 1950s the zoo bought Thonglaw, a highly s.e.xual bull, and four fertile cows, including Belle, who gave birth to Packy in 1962, the first elephant to be born and survive in captivity in forty-three years. Until then, no one knew much about an elephant's pregnancy.

Tom Nelsen, a volunteer in the Elephant House, says, "The veterinarian sat here for three months because we didn't know how long an elephant's gestation period would be."

Thonglaw sired fifteen calves before dying at the age of thirty. The first, Packy, has sired seven, including Rama, the zoo's twenty-year-old bull.

"Elephants are in a crisis on earth," Jeb says. "They're running out of habitat. In the wild an Asian elephant only lives twenty-one years out of a possible seventy." He says, "My job isn't to phantom a perfect world for them. My job is to take where they are and make the best of it. I have to do today what I can do right now."

Jeb has a scar running through his top lip, near the right corner. Movie star handsome, he has longish hair curling over each ear and resting on his collar. He has gray eyes and a rough two-day start to a goatee. Maybe it's his shorts or his muscular legs from hiking and rock climbing, but every couple of seconds a different woman steps up to ask him something.

Between questions, he says, "There's a tendency among those of us who work with animals to disappear into our animals. That's why I like to keep one foot out here among people. To continue to spread the word to people about the mystery and joy of elephants. It's an honor to be here."