The Eugene in My Head

Ferry Street Bridge viaduct, looking south (Google Streetview)

 

My parents drove me down to Eugene to drop me off for my first year at the University of Oregon in September of 1980. I remember crossing the Ferry Street Bridge, then the viaduct, and seeing Eugene’s modest downtown skyline ahead of us. As we crested the viaduct at the end of our eight-hour drive, my hungry father spotted Hoots (the old 24-hour diner at 8th and Mill) and decided that was where we would have a late lunch. Nothing about that moment was dramatic or postcard-worthy; its ordinariness is exactly what fixed it in my memory.
 
At the time, I had no reason to think that Hoots would eventually disappear, or that a massive student housing development would occupy its site decades later. I sometimes wonder what my 20-year-old self would think if I could somehow put him back in the same place today. He might be surprised by the new luxury student housing towers that now punctuate the vista, or by the downtown riverfront transformation (once EWEB’s utility operations yard, now becoming an active and accessible new neighborhood and park). Still, I suspect he would recognize Eugene immediately. If anything, he would be surprised that, years later, the city would become his permanent home.
 
My first Eugene was actually a very small place. I didn't have a car, so I got around by bicycle. I lived at the University Inn (now Barnhart Hall) on Patterson Street and spent most of my time on campus or in the West University neighborhood. The pedestrian-scaled stretch of 13th Avenue was part of that early orbit, although it has since been razed twice, first for Sacred Heart Hospital and more recently for a new student housing development. I considered anything beyond that vicinity relatively remote. Once classes began, I had few reasons to leave the immediate area. Visiting far corners of the city, or even downtown, felt like traveling to another planet.
 
I left in 1983 following graduation and eventually returned in 1988. By then I had been back to Vancouver, gone to UCLA, worked in Los Angeles, returned to Canada, married, and accumulated enough intervening life that I might reasonably have expected Eugene to feel like a place I only had once known. Instead, I felt like I'd never left. I went back to work, settled into a house, and resumed spending time around the University. It felt less like returning to a former home than continuing something that had merely been interrupted.
 
I don't remember a particular moment when Eugene began to feel like where I truly belonged. It happened gradually, and I think I first noticed it after one of my visits to Vancouver: I remember returning to Eugene and being struck by how calm the traffic seemed. What counted as rush hour in Eugene would barely have registered in Vancouver, where driving could often be a white-knuckle exercise. At some point, without thinking about it consciously, I had come to appreciate Eugene's relative quiet and smallness. What had initially seemed somewhat underwhelming had become familiar, and familiarity had gradually become attachment.
 
Lynne and I have lived in the same house since 1989, and the street we’re on has changed very little. The most obvious change is the maple tree in our front yard that was barely more than a sapling when we moved in. Today it is a substantial tree with a broad canopy. The house and the street have remained almost unchanged while the tree has recorded the passage of time. Obviously, the city has changed. Buildings have come and gone, the population has grown, and places that were part of my early Eugene have disappeared while others have been altered beyond recognition. Traffic is heavier, and some of the city’s problems are more visible than they once were. Yet, to me, the city doesn't feel fundamentally different.
 
I think that has something to do with the mental map I formed in 1980. It has never really been replaced; it has simply been added to. New buildings and businesses have become new layers on top of the old map. Streets have acquired different buildings, businesses have disappeared, neighborhoods have changed, and new places have become familiar, but the underlying sense of where things are has remained remarkably persistent. Willamette Street, for example, still feels central to me, much as it did when it was the “Gut” back in the day. That doesn't mean I know every corner of the city. After all these years, Lynne and I recently found ourselves driving Goodpasture Loop for the first time simply because we'd never bothered to see where it went. It turned out to be a pleasant discovery.
 
Vancouver has taught me something similar, although in a somewhat stranger way. I have been away from it since 1988, and the city has changed enormously since then, yet whenever I return, I still experience the odd sensation of being home. In recent years, Lynne hasn't accompanied me on my trips north, which makes the sensation even more pronounced. For a few days, I seem to slip back into another version of my life, one in which Vancouver is where I live and Eugene is somewhere else. Then I return to Eugene and the arrangement reverses itself. It is almost as though I occupy two alternate universes, each of which feels completely real while I'm in it.
 
That may be part of what makes a place familiar. The Eugene I first met at twenty is not the Eugene that exists today, nor am I exactly the person I was then. But neither feels entirely separate from what I remember. The years have accumulated, the city has changed, and the earlier Eugene is still there in the way I experience the place. Maybe that's why, after all these years, the Eugene in my head still feels so much like the place I first saw from the Ferry Street Bridge.