Remembering Mel Jenkins
Mel Jenkins in the 1980s
By Donald Jenkins
The hill was a very different place in 1958 when Mel and I first moved here. It was more rural, for one thing: there was an active dairy farm on Old Cornelius Pass Road, several farmers still raised strawberries commercially, and you could buy chicken and rabbit feed at Plainview. Portland seemed far away, and the County couldn’t care less about what you built on the land. Though Skyline School looked more or less the same as it does now, it was the one building in its own school district, and four of the teachers lived in the neighborhood. It was a less diverse community then, and most of the residents either eked out a living from farming, found part-time work such as logging, or were blue-collar laborers who commuted to St Johns or other nearby sites. But there was also a scattering of jobless people who survived, who knows how, in shanties on logged-over land out of sight from the roads.
The Move Back to Oregon
This was just the kind of neighborhood that Mel and I were looking for when we came back to Oregon from two years in Puerto Rico, where we had spent the first two years of their marriage. We wanted a place that would be within commuting distance of Portland yet out of the path of development and where we could raise animals and grow some of our own food. And—even more important—it had to be inexpensive! (To put that in context, you have to know that at least some unimproved land could be purchased at the time for around 100 to 200 dollars an acre.) We had been looking for such a place, in various directions around Portland for nearly two weeks, but to no avail, when they decided to drive out along lower Rock Creek Road. They found nothing along the creek so started climbing up the hill and had almost reached Skyline when they saw a magnificent old maple tree and a driveway leading invitingly past a rundown old house towards an open pasture, and they knew at once that they had found what they were looking for.
Most people would have found the place highly unpromising. The house was a mess. It looked totally abandoned, and it was obvious that no one had been living in it for months. Chipmunks had moved into the attic, and the only piece of furniture was a rusty sink cabinet in the kitchen. A drainpipe was attached to the sink, but no water pipes were connected to the faucets, and there was no evidence that the house had ever had any running water. The only source of drinking water was a silted up spring some 350 feet downhill. An outhouse provided the only toilet.
The rest of the property seemed equally neglected, but there were some Italian plum trees and two magnificent cherry trees behind the house and, further away, the remnants of an old barn. It was clear, however, that it would take a lot of work if anything was to be made of the place. Work and money! Unfortunately, we had little of the latter. We had come back from Puerto Rico with the paltry savings we had managed to accrue from my two years as a professor at a college in Mayaguez. It was enough to make the $500 down payment on the property but not much more. (Note: the sales price for the house and 20 acres was less than $6,000, payable with $500 down and $50 a month.) And what we were hoping to do was to live, as far as possible, by farming the land and selling occasional articles and poems to magazines and newspapers!
Living Under the Stars
We took possession of the property early in July and hit the ground running. Because the house was in such a bad condition, we decided to camp outdoors until we could get it in better shape, and luckily for us, the summer of 1958 turned out to be virtually rainless, so we didn’t have to move indoors until early September. I still remember how we slept out under starry skies every night and cooked our meals over a campfire, which served us well. Mel even tried canning over the fire and had such good luck with her efforts that she wrote a “how-to-do-it” article that was published in The Oregonian and earned her some much-needed money.
Our first priority that summer was to cut a path down to the silted-up spring so we could begin digging it out. We ended up having to dig down five or six feet before we hit sufficient water and then had to line the hole we had excavated with concrete blocks. Mel had never been a fan of hard physical labor but she proved to be an able partner in the project. I built a little springhouse on top of the blocks and installed an old-fashioned hand pump. It would be at least a year and a half before any pipe was laid between the spring and the house, so in the meantime any water that was needed had to be carried up by hand.
It was a busy summer. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine just how we managed to get so much done. Fences had to be rebuilt, a garden plot prepared, and the furniture that Mel had stored with friends while we were in Puerto Rico had to be retrieved and moved into the house. Moreover, with autumn approaching, stoves had to be acquired and firewood cut.
Goats, Pigs, Chickens and "Cow Babe"
And in order to have a farm, we needed to get some livestock. We began with chickens and goats, and when the goats began producing more milk than they could use, we decided to get a couple of weaner pigs to consume the excess.
The pigs grew fast, and before long I had to keep adding to the height of their pen. They were also smart and quickly realized that feeding time was near when I was milking the goats, which I did where they could see me, next to our chicken house, and a couple of times when I was slower than usual, they got so excited that they pushed over their pen, and within moments the goats were bolting from their milking stand and chickens were flying off in every direction.
Things were difficult our first winter. Though I, too, had managed to sell an article to The Oregonian, we were quickly running out of money. Before our marriage, Mel had worked for the state health department, giving hearing tests to school children, so she was able to find occasional work serving as a substitute audiometrist while I found a variety of odd jobs (none of them having anything to do with writing), and we managed to make it through.
By the next year, our circumstances were beginning to improve. I had begun working part-time at the art museum, where I had worked before our marriage, and we managed to save enough money to buy a cow—a beautiful jersey that we called “Cow Babe.” She gave us two buckets of rich milk a day which we would pour into big stoneware bowls and set aside overnight and find covered with a thick skin of pure cream the next morning. Mel would churn the cream into butter to use in making all kinds of delicious baked goods or whip it into fancy deserts with names like Charlotte Russe and French Chocolate Mousse - all of which she baked in an old wood range. We found it easy to understand how poor European peasants were able to consider themselves rich once they had managed to acquire a cow.
When we first moved up to the hill, most of our friends, many of whom were artists, still lived in town, and it took a while for us to get acquainted with our neighbors, particularly some of the longtime inhabitants, many of whom didn’t quite know what to make of us. But gradually that changed, especially after Mel worked on the 1960 census. Her assignment was to knock on every door within what must have been one of the largest districts assigned to any census taker in Multnomah County, since it took in every residence between highway 30 and the county line to the west and from the northern boundary of the county to just south of Cornelius Pass Road.
A Life-Long Friend
Mel covered every inch of this huge territory in our 1948 Chevrolet pickup, which soon became a familiar sight in the neighborhood. Not being familiar with this part of the county, the census officials kept wondering why it was taking Mel so long to finish her work, and, to be sure, she did take quite a while chatting with the people she was interviewing. An anecdote relayed by one of her oldest friends catches how this tended to play out. As she tells it, she looked out her window one day and wondered what “this hippie” was doing coming up her driveway, but after a few minutes talking with Mel at the door she invited her in, and it was an hour before Mel left but having made a life-long friend in the process.
The 1960s were important years for us. They saw the births of our two daughters, Jennifer in 1960 and Rebecca in 1965, traveling—also in 1965—to Chicago, all pushed together in the cab of our old Chevrolet pickup (with six-month-old Rebecca sleeping on the floor between us), then spending the next nine months in married student housing at The University of Chicago while I taught humanities and worked towards my master’s degree in Japanese art history. It was another period of tight finances, though thankfully we had found a young couple to rent our house, which meant we could keep paying the fifty dollars a month we still owed on our contract.
Paradise Found
When we got back in the late spring of 1966, it felt like rediscovering paradise. We retrieved our cow from the woman who had been boarding her and resumed our rural life with zest. But though the neighborhood seemed much the same as it was when we had left, changes were in the offing, even if we didn’t realize it. The nation’s involvement in Vietnam was increasing, and anti-war sentiment was growing, not just among the young people who were directly impacted because of the draft but in other age groups as well. The anti-war movement was particularly strong in Oregon, as became clear in the 1968 primary election in which Eugene McCarthy, campaigning as the anti-war Democratic candidate for president, won against Robert Kennedy. Mel and I both took part in the McCarthy campaign, but Mel threw herself into it with fervor, often working well into the night at the Portland headquarters. Mel had always been interested in politics and had even spent half a year in Washington, D.C. in a special “Washington Semester” program offered by her college. The McCarthy campaign clearly rekindled that interest.
The anti-war movement coincided with other significant changes that would not only affect Oregon in general but the Hill in particular. In the late 1960s people all across America were turning away from the conventional ideas and satisfaction with the status quo that had characterized popular thinking in the 1950s. They were beginning to realize that the country’s love affair with progress had its downside. Books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which came out in 1962, and Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb were wake up calls that influenced millions and gave rise to a new awareness of the importance of the environment. They had a particularly strong impact in Oregon where people had always felt close to nature and the outdoors, and when the state’s avant-garde embrace of environmental concerns were given colorful expression by Governor Tom McCall in statements like “Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” it gave us national visibility of a sort that we had never had before and, ironically, probably made us more attractive as a place to move to.
But the growing strength of the anti-war movement and a heightening concern for the environment were not the only developments in the 1960s that would come to have a major effect on life in Oregon and on the Hill. Profound changes were taking place in American society as a whole. Old attitudes were being discarded and experiments in alternative lifestyles were taking place—especially, but not exclusively, among the young. These were the days, remember, of the 1967 “Summer of Love,” when thousands converged on San Francisco initiating what has often been called “the hippie revolution.” In many respects, if it was a revolution, it was one born out of idealism and advocating love, peace and a return to nature. It had its darker side as well, however, and eventually the San Francisco scene went sour and many true believers decided to go north in hopes of a more tolerant environment.
The I Ching and Chicago
In the fall of 1969, just as the effects of all these developments were beginning to be felt, the Jenkins family left the hill for what would become a five-year stay in Chicago. I had been offered a position at the Art Institute as an assistant curator of Asian art in charge of its Japanese print collection. Even though that was too good a position to pass up, we had a difficult time deciding whether I should accept it. I was happy at the Portland Art Museum, and we loved our house and land, which we had worked so hard to shape to our liking. In the end, pragmatism and consulting the Chinese divination book, the I Ching, tipped the balance.
Our decision didn’t mean that we would be giving up our place on the Hill, however, and we managed to find the perfect couple to rent it, Miles and Diana Turner, who, in fact, were better caretakers of the place than we had been. Diana was familiar with the Hill, since her parents, the Stalnakers, lived on Germantown Road.
This time we crossed the country in an early-model Volvo, which was definitely a step up from the old pickup, and we found an apartment in Hyde Park, a neighborhood we were familiar with near the University. Apartment living required quite an adjustment, however. After living on the Hill where we often thought of people two or more miles away as our neighbors, it was difficult to get used to the fact that you might never get to know the people on the floor above you. This particularly bothered Mel, who was raising two young kids at the time and couldn’t leave the apartment that much, whereas I could commute to the Art Institute every day and quickly become involved in the challenges and rewards of my new position.
There were certain aspects of life in Chicago that troubled us both equally, however. One of these had more to do with the city’s sheer size than anything else. In Oregon it had been so much easier to feel connected, to be part of the art community as a whole, for instance, or to feel that you had access to government and decision makers—in short, to feel that you mattered as an individual. This was brought home to us on one of our frequent trips back to Portland when we stopped for lunch at The Carousel, a popular indoor-outdoor hamburger spot of the time, and looked up from eating to see Governor McCall strolling through the room unaccompanied stopping to chat with people at various tables. How different from the occasions when we had seen Mayor Daley making brief appearances at a museum event or in a private club, surrounded by body guards and only speaking with a few of the more “important” people present.
Second Return to Oregon
When we returned to Oregon in the late summer of 1974, we found that many changes had taken place while we were away. Quite a few new people had moved onto the Hill, especially north of Cornelius Pass Road, and among them were artists, veterans from the Vietnam War, and others who were simply called hippies. Though there were differences among these newcomers, most of them had one trait in common: they were all looking for an environment compatible with pursuing alternative life styles, and for that the thick woods and large spaces between houses in our neighborhood, as well as the still relatively low prices for land, proved ideal. Though a few old timers viewed the new residents with skepticism, others, like us, thought that they added a welcome diversity to the community. We felt an affinity with their free thinking and willingness to do without the usual modern comforts. Many of the newcomers eventually left the hill, but some, like Dexter Bacon and the La Morticellas, remained to become major long-time participants in the life of the community.
For Mel the return to Oregon brought about a reawakening of old interests and the discovery of new ones, and as it turned out, one new discovery would be life changing. Mel had always loved knitting, so she was intrigued when, shortly after our return, she stopped by to visit a longtime friend and gifted craftswoman, Marial Wilson, and learned about a nearby yarn shop called Arachne Webworks. She couldn’t wait to see it, and when she did, she was entranced. For even the most ardent knitters it must have seemed like something out of a fairy tale. It certainly did for Mel: yarns of every conceivable color and texture spilled from its shelves or hung in skeins from exposed beams and posts overhead; and the realization that something as simple as wool could take on so many beautiful, diverse forms was an epiphany for her.
Just how strong an impression the visit had made on her soon became clear. Though she had done a lot of knitting in the past, she had never been that serious about it and even been content to use commercial yarns. Now she began thinking about producing her own. She bought a spinning wheel and started learning everything she could about different fleeces and how to card, spin and twine. She especially enjoyed spinning, which she found very relaxing once she got into the rhythm of it, and working with Marial and other friends, she soon began turning out workmanlike homespun yarns.
Spinning and Dyeing
This was the beginning of what would become a major focus of her life for much of the next two decades. Already within two or three years of her first visit to the Arachne Webworks, she and Marial were selling yarns and knitted goods at a booth they rented at the Saturday Market. They didn’t make a lot of money doing so, but it was a way to meet other craftspeople and learn what kinds of knitted wares appealed to the public. It also encouraged Mel to expand her knowledge of the fiber arts, and she began learning about the types of wool produced by different breeds of sheep and started her first experiments with dying.
But dying, particularly if you wanted to use only plant dyes, turned out to be more complicated than she imagined. One had to be careful about gathering the plant material at just the right moment, and that was only the first step in what was often a lengthy process of cooking, straining and adding a variety of chemicals to the mix. And, in what seemed the overwhelming majority of the cases, the resulting color attained would be a disappointing tan or a pale yellow. Reds or pinks were rare, and blues were essentially non-existent. If you ended up with a pale green, you would be happy.
But Mel never gave up in her search for new dye materials. Family outings often included stops for unusual plants. I remember two incidents vividly. One was on our walk back to the trailhead from an afternoon at Bagby hotsprings when we came across a scattering of lungwort lichen that had fallen from a tree and settled beside the trail. The other was when we were speeding home on a freeway when Mel caught sight of a thick batch of wild vetch on a bank above the roadside and forced us to a screeching stop in order to harvest it.
Mel’s days at the Saturday market ended after only a few years when Marial decided to move to the coast, though the two women did get together from time to time afterwards to sell their wares at summer fairs. Then from late fall 1982 until the summer of 1983, Mel tried her hand at selling her wares by running a small shop on Northwest 24th Street which she called The Real Ewe. Though she continued to work with wool after closing the shop, and even began to weave as well as knit, everything she made thereafter was essentially for her own pleasure or as gifts for her family and friends.
Brave to the End
By the late 1980s, Mel was beginning to experience a number of health problems, most of them connected with high blood pressure and osteoarthritis. Even earlier she had learned that she was showing the first symptoms of macular degeneration, which especially dismayed her. It was slow to develop, however, which allowed her to grow used to coping with it by finding ever stronger visual aids and adjusting to the disease mentally. Ultimately, though, it reached the point where she could no longer drive, which was a terrible blow for her, of course, but she accepted it bravely.
At about the same time, Mel took another step that showed equal bravery. She had been smoking since her mid teens, and one of her most cherished pleasures was to have a cigarette with a cup of coffee after eating. By her forties, however, she was smoking more than two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, and she knew it was threatening her health. So somehow she mustered the courage to stop “cold turkey.” And she did so in May of 1989, on her sixtieth birthday, after a dinner at her favorite Chinese restaurant to which she had invited some of her closest friends. I was out of town on business at the time, and I always regretted not being there for her. She hadn’t shared her plans with me, and I suspect that she felt the need to pull it off on her own.
As I look back on the last two decades of our life together, I am only too conscious of the many sad developments that Mel had to face in those years. Mel had always loved to cook and did so magnificently, despite the fact that for most of our years on the Hill our kitchen was cramped, dark and inadequate. It was not until 1994, after we had made some money from logging part of our woods, that we finally built a new kitchen—a light and airy one with plenty of cupboards and a splendid sink. Sadly, Mel had only a few years to enjoy it before her arthritis reached the point where she had to spend most of her time in a wheelchair, no longer able to reach the sink or make use of the countertops.
The greatest blow Mel had to face was the result of kidney failure. Starting in early 2003 she had to put up with three-and-a-half hour dialysis sessions three times a week. Yet, thanks to a program called “Dialysis at Sea,” we were still able to go on two cruises, one on the Mediterranean and the other to Hawaii and back. And though Mel did have to undergo open-heart surgery to replace a heart valve and was hospitalized several other times for very serious problems, she still managed to beat all the odds for someone her age on dialysis, and it was only in 2012 that she began to decline. But even then Mel never lost her zest for life, and she remained brave to the end.
The hill was a very different place in 1958 when Mel and I first moved here. It was more rural, for one thing: there was an active dairy farm on Old Cornelius Pass Road, several farmers still raised strawberries commercially, and you could buy chicken and rabbit feed at Plainview. Portland seemed far away, and the County couldn’t care less about what you built on the land. Though Skyline School looked more or less the same as it does now, it was the one building in its own school district, and four of the teachers lived in the neighborhood. It was a less diverse community then, and most of the residents either eked out a living from farming, found part-time work such as logging, or were blue-collar laborers who commuted to St Johns or other nearby sites. But there was also a scattering of jobless people who survived, who knows how, in shanties on logged-over land out of sight from the roads.
The Move Back to Oregon
This was just the kind of neighborhood that Mel and I were looking for when we came back to Oregon from two years in Puerto Rico, where we had spent the first two years of their marriage. We wanted a place that would be within commuting distance of Portland yet out of the path of development and where we could raise animals and grow some of our own food. And—even more important—it had to be inexpensive! (To put that in context, you have to know that at least some unimproved land could be purchased at the time for around 100 to 200 dollars an acre.) We had been looking for such a place, in various directions around Portland for nearly two weeks, but to no avail, when they decided to drive out along lower Rock Creek Road. They found nothing along the creek so started climbing up the hill and had almost reached Skyline when they saw a magnificent old maple tree and a driveway leading invitingly past a rundown old house towards an open pasture, and they knew at once that they had found what they were looking for.
Most people would have found the place highly unpromising. The house was a mess. It looked totally abandoned, and it was obvious that no one had been living in it for months. Chipmunks had moved into the attic, and the only piece of furniture was a rusty sink cabinet in the kitchen. A drainpipe was attached to the sink, but no water pipes were connected to the faucets, and there was no evidence that the house had ever had any running water. The only source of drinking water was a silted up spring some 350 feet downhill. An outhouse provided the only toilet.
The rest of the property seemed equally neglected, but there were some Italian plum trees and two magnificent cherry trees behind the house and, further away, the remnants of an old barn. It was clear, however, that it would take a lot of work if anything was to be made of the place. Work and money! Unfortunately, we had little of the latter. We had come back from Puerto Rico with the paltry savings we had managed to accrue from my two years as a professor at a college in Mayaguez. It was enough to make the $500 down payment on the property but not much more. (Note: the sales price for the house and 20 acres was less than $6,000, payable with $500 down and $50 a month.) And what we were hoping to do was to live, as far as possible, by farming the land and selling occasional articles and poems to magazines and newspapers!
Living Under the Stars
We took possession of the property early in July and hit the ground running. Because the house was in such a bad condition, we decided to camp outdoors until we could get it in better shape, and luckily for us, the summer of 1958 turned out to be virtually rainless, so we didn’t have to move indoors until early September. I still remember how we slept out under starry skies every night and cooked our meals over a campfire, which served us well. Mel even tried canning over the fire and had such good luck with her efforts that she wrote a “how-to-do-it” article that was published in The Oregonian and earned her some much-needed money.
Our first priority that summer was to cut a path down to the silted-up spring so we could begin digging it out. We ended up having to dig down five or six feet before we hit sufficient water and then had to line the hole we had excavated with concrete blocks. Mel had never been a fan of hard physical labor but she proved to be an able partner in the project. I built a little springhouse on top of the blocks and installed an old-fashioned hand pump. It would be at least a year and a half before any pipe was laid between the spring and the house, so in the meantime any water that was needed had to be carried up by hand.
It was a busy summer. In retrospect, it’s hard to imagine just how we managed to get so much done. Fences had to be rebuilt, a garden plot prepared, and the furniture that Mel had stored with friends while we were in Puerto Rico had to be retrieved and moved into the house. Moreover, with autumn approaching, stoves had to be acquired and firewood cut.
Goats, Pigs, Chickens and "Cow Babe"
And in order to have a farm, we needed to get some livestock. We began with chickens and goats, and when the goats began producing more milk than they could use, we decided to get a couple of weaner pigs to consume the excess.
The pigs grew fast, and before long I had to keep adding to the height of their pen. They were also smart and quickly realized that feeding time was near when I was milking the goats, which I did where they could see me, next to our chicken house, and a couple of times when I was slower than usual, they got so excited that they pushed over their pen, and within moments the goats were bolting from their milking stand and chickens were flying off in every direction.
Things were difficult our first winter. Though I, too, had managed to sell an article to The Oregonian, we were quickly running out of money. Before our marriage, Mel had worked for the state health department, giving hearing tests to school children, so she was able to find occasional work serving as a substitute audiometrist while I found a variety of odd jobs (none of them having anything to do with writing), and we managed to make it through.
By the next year, our circumstances were beginning to improve. I had begun working part-time at the art museum, where I had worked before our marriage, and we managed to save enough money to buy a cow—a beautiful jersey that we called “Cow Babe.” She gave us two buckets of rich milk a day which we would pour into big stoneware bowls and set aside overnight and find covered with a thick skin of pure cream the next morning. Mel would churn the cream into butter to use in making all kinds of delicious baked goods or whip it into fancy deserts with names like Charlotte Russe and French Chocolate Mousse - all of which she baked in an old wood range. We found it easy to understand how poor European peasants were able to consider themselves rich once they had managed to acquire a cow.
When we first moved up to the hill, most of our friends, many of whom were artists, still lived in town, and it took a while for us to get acquainted with our neighbors, particularly some of the longtime inhabitants, many of whom didn’t quite know what to make of us. But gradually that changed, especially after Mel worked on the 1960 census. Her assignment was to knock on every door within what must have been one of the largest districts assigned to any census taker in Multnomah County, since it took in every residence between highway 30 and the county line to the west and from the northern boundary of the county to just south of Cornelius Pass Road.
A Life-Long Friend
Mel covered every inch of this huge territory in our 1948 Chevrolet pickup, which soon became a familiar sight in the neighborhood. Not being familiar with this part of the county, the census officials kept wondering why it was taking Mel so long to finish her work, and, to be sure, she did take quite a while chatting with the people she was interviewing. An anecdote relayed by one of her oldest friends catches how this tended to play out. As she tells it, she looked out her window one day and wondered what “this hippie” was doing coming up her driveway, but after a few minutes talking with Mel at the door she invited her in, and it was an hour before Mel left but having made a life-long friend in the process.
The 1960s were important years for us. They saw the births of our two daughters, Jennifer in 1960 and Rebecca in 1965, traveling—also in 1965—to Chicago, all pushed together in the cab of our old Chevrolet pickup (with six-month-old Rebecca sleeping on the floor between us), then spending the next nine months in married student housing at The University of Chicago while I taught humanities and worked towards my master’s degree in Japanese art history. It was another period of tight finances, though thankfully we had found a young couple to rent our house, which meant we could keep paying the fifty dollars a month we still owed on our contract.
Paradise Found
When we got back in the late spring of 1966, it felt like rediscovering paradise. We retrieved our cow from the woman who had been boarding her and resumed our rural life with zest. But though the neighborhood seemed much the same as it was when we had left, changes were in the offing, even if we didn’t realize it. The nation’s involvement in Vietnam was increasing, and anti-war sentiment was growing, not just among the young people who were directly impacted because of the draft but in other age groups as well. The anti-war movement was particularly strong in Oregon, as became clear in the 1968 primary election in which Eugene McCarthy, campaigning as the anti-war Democratic candidate for president, won against Robert Kennedy. Mel and I both took part in the McCarthy campaign, but Mel threw herself into it with fervor, often working well into the night at the Portland headquarters. Mel had always been interested in politics and had even spent half a year in Washington, D.C. in a special “Washington Semester” program offered by her college. The McCarthy campaign clearly rekindled that interest.
The anti-war movement coincided with other significant changes that would not only affect Oregon in general but the Hill in particular. In the late 1960s people all across America were turning away from the conventional ideas and satisfaction with the status quo that had characterized popular thinking in the 1950s. They were beginning to realize that the country’s love affair with progress had its downside. Books like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which came out in 1962, and Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 The Population Bomb were wake up calls that influenced millions and gave rise to a new awareness of the importance of the environment. They had a particularly strong impact in Oregon where people had always felt close to nature and the outdoors, and when the state’s avant-garde embrace of environmental concerns were given colorful expression by Governor Tom McCall in statements like “Come visit us again and again. This is a state of excitement. But for heaven’s sake, don’t come here to live.” it gave us national visibility of a sort that we had never had before and, ironically, probably made us more attractive as a place to move to.
But the growing strength of the anti-war movement and a heightening concern for the environment were not the only developments in the 1960s that would come to have a major effect on life in Oregon and on the Hill. Profound changes were taking place in American society as a whole. Old attitudes were being discarded and experiments in alternative lifestyles were taking place—especially, but not exclusively, among the young. These were the days, remember, of the 1967 “Summer of Love,” when thousands converged on San Francisco initiating what has often been called “the hippie revolution.” In many respects, if it was a revolution, it was one born out of idealism and advocating love, peace and a return to nature. It had its darker side as well, however, and eventually the San Francisco scene went sour and many true believers decided to go north in hopes of a more tolerant environment.
The I Ching and Chicago
In the fall of 1969, just as the effects of all these developments were beginning to be felt, the Jenkins family left the hill for what would become a five-year stay in Chicago. I had been offered a position at the Art Institute as an assistant curator of Asian art in charge of its Japanese print collection. Even though that was too good a position to pass up, we had a difficult time deciding whether I should accept it. I was happy at the Portland Art Museum, and we loved our house and land, which we had worked so hard to shape to our liking. In the end, pragmatism and consulting the Chinese divination book, the I Ching, tipped the balance.
Our decision didn’t mean that we would be giving up our place on the Hill, however, and we managed to find the perfect couple to rent it, Miles and Diana Turner, who, in fact, were better caretakers of the place than we had been. Diana was familiar with the Hill, since her parents, the Stalnakers, lived on Germantown Road.
This time we crossed the country in an early-model Volvo, which was definitely a step up from the old pickup, and we found an apartment in Hyde Park, a neighborhood we were familiar with near the University. Apartment living required quite an adjustment, however. After living on the Hill where we often thought of people two or more miles away as our neighbors, it was difficult to get used to the fact that you might never get to know the people on the floor above you. This particularly bothered Mel, who was raising two young kids at the time and couldn’t leave the apartment that much, whereas I could commute to the Art Institute every day and quickly become involved in the challenges and rewards of my new position.
There were certain aspects of life in Chicago that troubled us both equally, however. One of these had more to do with the city’s sheer size than anything else. In Oregon it had been so much easier to feel connected, to be part of the art community as a whole, for instance, or to feel that you had access to government and decision makers—in short, to feel that you mattered as an individual. This was brought home to us on one of our frequent trips back to Portland when we stopped for lunch at The Carousel, a popular indoor-outdoor hamburger spot of the time, and looked up from eating to see Governor McCall strolling through the room unaccompanied stopping to chat with people at various tables. How different from the occasions when we had seen Mayor Daley making brief appearances at a museum event or in a private club, surrounded by body guards and only speaking with a few of the more “important” people present.
Second Return to Oregon
When we returned to Oregon in the late summer of 1974, we found that many changes had taken place while we were away. Quite a few new people had moved onto the Hill, especially north of Cornelius Pass Road, and among them were artists, veterans from the Vietnam War, and others who were simply called hippies. Though there were differences among these newcomers, most of them had one trait in common: they were all looking for an environment compatible with pursuing alternative life styles, and for that the thick woods and large spaces between houses in our neighborhood, as well as the still relatively low prices for land, proved ideal. Though a few old timers viewed the new residents with skepticism, others, like us, thought that they added a welcome diversity to the community. We felt an affinity with their free thinking and willingness to do without the usual modern comforts. Many of the newcomers eventually left the hill, but some, like Dexter Bacon and the La Morticellas, remained to become major long-time participants in the life of the community.
For Mel the return to Oregon brought about a reawakening of old interests and the discovery of new ones, and as it turned out, one new discovery would be life changing. Mel had always loved knitting, so she was intrigued when, shortly after our return, she stopped by to visit a longtime friend and gifted craftswoman, Marial Wilson, and learned about a nearby yarn shop called Arachne Webworks. She couldn’t wait to see it, and when she did, she was entranced. For even the most ardent knitters it must have seemed like something out of a fairy tale. It certainly did for Mel: yarns of every conceivable color and texture spilled from its shelves or hung in skeins from exposed beams and posts overhead; and the realization that something as simple as wool could take on so many beautiful, diverse forms was an epiphany for her.
Just how strong an impression the visit had made on her soon became clear. Though she had done a lot of knitting in the past, she had never been that serious about it and even been content to use commercial yarns. Now she began thinking about producing her own. She bought a spinning wheel and started learning everything she could about different fleeces and how to card, spin and twine. She especially enjoyed spinning, which she found very relaxing once she got into the rhythm of it, and working with Marial and other friends, she soon began turning out workmanlike homespun yarns.
Spinning and Dyeing
This was the beginning of what would become a major focus of her life for much of the next two decades. Already within two or three years of her first visit to the Arachne Webworks, she and Marial were selling yarns and knitted goods at a booth they rented at the Saturday Market. They didn’t make a lot of money doing so, but it was a way to meet other craftspeople and learn what kinds of knitted wares appealed to the public. It also encouraged Mel to expand her knowledge of the fiber arts, and she began learning about the types of wool produced by different breeds of sheep and started her first experiments with dying.
But dying, particularly if you wanted to use only plant dyes, turned out to be more complicated than she imagined. One had to be careful about gathering the plant material at just the right moment, and that was only the first step in what was often a lengthy process of cooking, straining and adding a variety of chemicals to the mix. And, in what seemed the overwhelming majority of the cases, the resulting color attained would be a disappointing tan or a pale yellow. Reds or pinks were rare, and blues were essentially non-existent. If you ended up with a pale green, you would be happy.
But Mel never gave up in her search for new dye materials. Family outings often included stops for unusual plants. I remember two incidents vividly. One was on our walk back to the trailhead from an afternoon at Bagby hotsprings when we came across a scattering of lungwort lichen that had fallen from a tree and settled beside the trail. The other was when we were speeding home on a freeway when Mel caught sight of a thick batch of wild vetch on a bank above the roadside and forced us to a screeching stop in order to harvest it.
Mel’s days at the Saturday market ended after only a few years when Marial decided to move to the coast, though the two women did get together from time to time afterwards to sell their wares at summer fairs. Then from late fall 1982 until the summer of 1983, Mel tried her hand at selling her wares by running a small shop on Northwest 24th Street which she called The Real Ewe. Though she continued to work with wool after closing the shop, and even began to weave as well as knit, everything she made thereafter was essentially for her own pleasure or as gifts for her family and friends.
Brave to the End
By the late 1980s, Mel was beginning to experience a number of health problems, most of them connected with high blood pressure and osteoarthritis. Even earlier she had learned that she was showing the first symptoms of macular degeneration, which especially dismayed her. It was slow to develop, however, which allowed her to grow used to coping with it by finding ever stronger visual aids and adjusting to the disease mentally. Ultimately, though, it reached the point where she could no longer drive, which was a terrible blow for her, of course, but she accepted it bravely.
At about the same time, Mel took another step that showed equal bravery. She had been smoking since her mid teens, and one of her most cherished pleasures was to have a cigarette with a cup of coffee after eating. By her forties, however, she was smoking more than two packs of unfiltered cigarettes a day, and she knew it was threatening her health. So somehow she mustered the courage to stop “cold turkey.” And she did so in May of 1989, on her sixtieth birthday, after a dinner at her favorite Chinese restaurant to which she had invited some of her closest friends. I was out of town on business at the time, and I always regretted not being there for her. She hadn’t shared her plans with me, and I suspect that she felt the need to pull it off on her own.
As I look back on the last two decades of our life together, I am only too conscious of the many sad developments that Mel had to face in those years. Mel had always loved to cook and did so magnificently, despite the fact that for most of our years on the Hill our kitchen was cramped, dark and inadequate. It was not until 1994, after we had made some money from logging part of our woods, that we finally built a new kitchen—a light and airy one with plenty of cupboards and a splendid sink. Sadly, Mel had only a few years to enjoy it before her arthritis reached the point where she had to spend most of her time in a wheelchair, no longer able to reach the sink or make use of the countertops.
The greatest blow Mel had to face was the result of kidney failure. Starting in early 2003 she had to put up with three-and-a-half hour dialysis sessions three times a week. Yet, thanks to a program called “Dialysis at Sea,” we were still able to go on two cruises, one on the Mediterranean and the other to Hawaii and back. And though Mel did have to undergo open-heart surgery to replace a heart valve and was hospitalized several other times for very serious problems, she still managed to beat all the odds for someone her age on dialysis, and it was only in 2012 that she began to decline. But even then Mel never lost her zest for life, and she remained brave to the end.