Airing it out…Butts on the Butte
I have just stepped off the Lufthansa flight from Venice to Portland via Frankfurt after fifeteen days of peddling a bike in, over, down, around and damn near under the Dolomites…as fast as was possible. I certainely spent many a day there feeling washed up, wrung out and in having been hung out to dry.
In my mind I am mostly still in Italy, wending my way from one tiny alpine village to another, listening to a myriad church bells marking the passage of time, drinking in the sights and smells of meadows now choked with the autumn crocus and noting the cracks in limestone walls sprouting tiny cyclamen. People appear industrious and gainfully employed in these pastoral settings. Much too busy to be petty.
Awaiting me at home is a mountainous pile of mostly junk mail and unread newspapers. Better it all should be tossed into the recycling bin. In the doing so I catch an article on the front page of the WSJ dated 9/18 and begin to read further. Perhaps it is because I have just spent fifeteen days washing my cycling kit every night and hanging it out to dry from various hotel windows and balconies from Castelfranco to Cles to Cortina d’Ampezzo and many another lovely village, that my attention is captured.
Growing up in the UK I well remember the mountains of washing my mother had to peg on the clothes lines in our garden. Four kids and two adults produce a fair amount of laundry. There were barely washing machines then and certainely no dryers of note. Even in the UK, in the Beatle’s filled days of the 60’s there were clothes lines, sunshine, steady winds and many a dash into the garden to retrieve the clothes from the periodic rains. Dry diapers were a very precious commodity! Every house, every garden was similarly festooned at some point during the week. It remains so today in the picture postcard villages of the Dolomites. Oh how those garments and bed clothes smell and feel. They soak in sunshine and breezes and take absolutely nothing away from the environment. If you have never felt fabrics so dried you are missing one of lifes treasured pleasures. One of those quietly smug and emminently “green” satisfactions.
Barely one hundred and fifty miles to the south east of Portand,OR one finds the community of Bend perched upon the high desert, dotted with lattice barked Ponderosa Pines and watered by the trout filled Deschutes. Even in my relatively short history here in the state it has been viewed as a practical place. A home to loggers and ranchers working far flung outposts and to people that could ski, ride and fish. It was even unflatteringly called a cow town by a would be governor not more than a couple decades ago. A comment that placed a burr under a few sadlles! It is no longer a practical place apparently as the Wrangler and Danner Boot crowd has given way to gentrification and to “interior designers”…living in one of the nations greatest “exteriors” whose senses can’t tolerate nature’s drying of clothes as at the same time they don’t pop a button at the fact the nations clothes dryers soak up 6% of a households total energy consumption. Imagine, paying for a job that nature does for nowt! Right up there with paying for bottled water when the real stuff out of your tap is as good as free and more often than not…better for you and most definitely better for our environment!
Awbrey Butte… now how toney does that sound? Sounds like a place a cowboy might have camped and hung out his long-johns to dry once upon a time. Apparently Susan felt the same about her bed sheets just recently and rode smack dab into a barrage of unevenly imposed CCR flack within the Butte. Urban blight, a decrease in property values, an inference that a clothes line equates to ones impoverishment and ones lack of pride in your “exclusive” ‘hood. All this spouting from a community that undoubtedly considers itself green and caring. After all that is all part of living in and around Bend. OR today. There is in my opinion a clear statement of values in making use of natures blessings, in stringing up a clothes line and getting the breeze to dry your boxers. To keep within the confines of your “exclusive” home, listening to buttons and belt buckles rattle around the dryer drum, to empty lint traps all the while soaking up man made energy and thus wasting the spoils of Bonneville dam or helping heap more coal into the furnace over at Boardman…ridiculous and hypocritical.
But wait, what is all the flap about? Maybe the butt over at the butte can claim she pays for wind generated energy from the enormous wind farms over by Milton Freewater and therefore her clothes dryer really is a kind of clothes line after all! I wonder what her opinion of those monstrous wind turbines is vis a vis a clothes line when it comes to a visual blight?
Susan, I hope you don’t give up on your solar powered “clothes drying apparatus”. After all there are so many different and very cool clothes pins to seek out and collect as one travels the world. As an aside…as a kid I used to love pegging the clothes to the line and then propping the line up with a long pole with a notch cut in its end. I would then eagerly await a strong wind gust to flop the whole thing over. Childhood memories and pleasures. The only time there would be discord in the ‘hood would be when a certain Mr. Baines would have a bonfire of old leaves, tree trimmings and such on wash day and the clothes would be “cured” along with being dried.
As for Awbrey Butte…If Bend were indeed a cow town I can only imagine what that Governor would have to say about your “exclusive community” today. It would not be flattering and more than likely along the lines of your not being able to smell the reality for all that rarified high desert air. In case you have not heard our environment needs all the lifelines it can catch. A clothes line makes a good one!
