Arts Vanity: Slouching Towards Roseburg

The tarmac shares a fence with a field of sheep. This I notice as my flight lands at the nearest airport for winter break, still more than an hour’s drive from home. This the sheep do not appear to notice, or maybe they’ve gone deaf. It’s not Bethlehem, but it’ll do this Christmas.

So begins my month in my rural Oregon hometown. Soon, I’ll face the circuit of questions I’ve come to expect: “Harvard! Art history??” “Yes, I’m really sure!” “Have you been to the—” “Douglas County Museum? Oh yes, rather excellent taxidermy!”

But for now, these first few days, it’s my time to reacclimate to my surroundings, to breathe in the petrichor of dense fog and rain on evergreen that Boston just can’t quite imitate. For the sake of things — old times, the person I was when I left for college three years ago, boredom — I decide to take a drive through town. Here is that experience, in which I spend a day where I spent my first 17 years.

“Flee the wrath to come!” scrolls across a church’s digital sign in an imperious Gothic font as I wait at the stoplight. Its blood-red lettering pairs merrily with the over-exuberant green graphic flashing from the dispensary across the street. “Surely the Second Coming is at hand!” echoes the shrill eschatological refrain of a church group preaching from their respective corner, mimed by the flame graphics of their gaudy signs. Maybe they’d be so kind as to offer a light to the man exiting the Emerald Triangle Superstore on the opposite corner — love thy neighbor and all. The centre cannot hold in this joint.

I turn onto a side street near the elementary school that all the cool kids went to. They have a state-of-the-art vestibule now, or so I hear. It’s quieter down this way, and the detour significantly diminishes the likelihood of encountering a non-muffled lifted vehicle or the 70+ crowd clamoring at the doors of the Bi-Mart on Lucky Number Tuesday. I drive past the school district office and try to peer into the boardroom — my old high school haunt. I catch a glimpse of its ’70s-time-capsule interior and make a mental note to check the calendar for upcoming school board meetings. I’ve been dying to know how the district’s other vestibules are working out.

I begin making my way downtown (walkin’ fast, faces pass, and I’m homebound). I’d cue “A Thousand Miles,” but I lack a cassette tape with the track that I could plug into my car’s high-tech cassette player. Procuring such an item feels at the very least egregiously anachronistic and probably somehow sacrilegious to millennials. I settle for humming as I pass several parallel parking spots in pursuit of literally anything else, as per the sage advice of my driver’s ed instructor, Linda, on the day she was supposed to teach us to parallel park. There are only a few opportunities to parallel park in town and always other, different, better, opportunities to not, she’d rightly reasoned. The prospect of leaving town never occurred to anyone.

Having secured a pull-through spot, I get out and walk for a bit. Not much is open. I settle for an exterior tour of ever-so-mildly interesting architecture. I come up on the Episcopal church — violently triangular, with a strangely Tudor-style profile and a jarringly flat, low addition extending in a rectangle behind it. A few minutes more, the Methodist Episcopal — Gothic-inspired, but only if you ask Horace Walpole, and if he had access to an ungodly quantity of baby blanket blue paint. A block over, the Presbyterian — late Gothic revival, brick. An application for the National Register of Historic Places stamped June 1988 names it the “fullest expression of its style” in the area. Much more so than its counterpart, the Methodist Episcopal, it’s quick to note.

Walking back to my car, I pass the studio of my long-time sword-wielding ballet instructor, who remains the coolest person I’ve ever met. A town fixture now in her 56th year of teaching, she’ll tell you this place’s unabridged history in bursts of omniscient narration — like the time in the ’50s the railroad tracks near her house briefly took their leave of the ground beneath when a nearby truck toting explosives, well, exploded. It blew out the stained glass windows of the Presbyterian church. The story always ended with the admonishment that our movements, like the floating tracks, should be governed by such a suspended, weightless quality. I instinctively fix my posture before starting the ignition.

My stomach rumbles with the engine to remind me I still haven’t eaten. I head to the favorite cult bakery just outside of town. No, not cult-favorite. Cult-commune. Their bread is divine, and I have to be careful not to make the pilgrimage too often lest I allow myself to be kneaded into the fold in the name of glutinous gluttony. I ruminate with their ruminants for a bit while I wait for my order, then flee with my loot back to the driveway of my childhood home.

Suddenly there came a tapping, as of someone gently rapping, rapping at my car door. Having forgotten to efficiently exit with my baked delights upon arrival, I’d been detected by the resident flock of turkeys. I sigh and toss some of my bread at the petitioner’s feet. He does not hesitate to inelegantly sprint away with this offering, the other nine members of his posse and several outraged deer hot on his tail.

It’s a rare luxurious life for wildlife in the area, where everyone knows not to schedule anything that conflicts with the opening of deer hunting season. Post-labor day, Roseburg has two rules: Don’t wear white, and know that the burger you’re served at a friend's house likely isn’t beef.

I step inside the house and shrug off my coat. It’s always a weird feeling, I remember as I replace the Christmas ornaments the cats have felled, to have entrenched oneself in two vastly different communities on the opposite sides of the country. Still, this I know: In Roseburg, Oregon, a comically high proportion of the population is in some way a shepherd, and they’ll leave the 99 for the 1 every time. I know somehow I’ll always have a place in the herd, no matter how many times I leave or how long I’m away.

One day soon, I’ll leave again for a very differently paced life on the other coast. But for the time being, there’s something refreshingly unadulterated about Roseburg, a curmudgeonly constant I’ve grown to re-love amidst such dizzying personal and collective change everywhere else.

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Dares slouch towards Roseburg to be born?

—Outgoing Campus Executive and incoming Arts Editor-at-Large Marin E. Gray is probably attending a school board meeting, or curating her secret famous Pinterest account. Call the district office for any urgent inquiries, or find her Pinfluencer persona. For non-urgent communications, she can be reached at marin.gray@thecrimson.com.