Poverty isn't what you think

My dad's log cabin. Copyright (c) 2012 Wendee Nicole

"If there is among you a poor man of your brethren, within any of the gates in your land which the Lord your God is giving you, you shall not harden your heart nor shut your hand from your poor brother, but you shall open your hand wide to him and willingly lend him sufficient for his need, whatever he needs. Beware lest there be a wicked thought in your heart, saying, 'The seventh year, the year of release, is at hand,' and your eye be evil against your poor brother and you give him nothing, and he cry out to the Lord against you, and it become sin among you. You shall surely give to him, and your heart should not be grieved when you give to him, because for this thing the Lord your God will bless you in all your works and in all to which you put your hand. For the poor will never cease from the land; therefore I command you, saying, “You shall open your hand wide to your brother, to your poor and your needy, in your land.” Deuteronomy 15: 7-11

During election season, there was a lot of stereotyping of Democrats as people who - in the hilarious sardonic humor of The Daily Show's Jon Stewart - are "thing stuff takers." He was making fun of how Bill O'Reilly had posited, post-election, that Obama won because people on the left wanted things, and stuff. It was a thinly veiled insult of people of color, morphing them with people of poverty without really saying that. It's a sentiment echoed by the likes of Mitt Romney a couple days later, when he came out of hiding, and said Obama won the election because of the "gifts" he gave to specific interest groups. During all the immediate post-election Facebook rambling, a friend of mine posted something that led me to post the following, which I'll post below almost verbatim.

But poverty isn't always what you think it is. I am someone who has directly benefitted from the use of food stamps and welfare. Let me tell you the story of my childhood. I am the first in my extended family to ever go to college. EVER. Neither my parents or grandparents had more than a high school education. My dad didn't graduate from h.s. (but got a GED), yet he is the most intelligent, articulate, and intellectual man I know. After his divorce from my mom he moved to Oregon and built a very simple log cabin on 24 acres, grew his food, totally back to the land. It was an awesome pioneer way to live, and to grow up that way was extremely influential to who I became as an adult.

Dad had a biz making log cabins for others and at one point his partner took off with the businesses money, leaving him a heavy burden financially. So during a period of my youth we had food stamps and at one point he was on welfare. He overcame that, and went on to work for many years for the Oregon food bank, doing social work and giving back. He was and is an incredibly hard working man - both when he was on welfare and after - and at his retirement last year was granted the very award that he established for those at the Oregon Food Bank who had a lifetime of service. (I am getting tears in my eyes writing this - I love and am so proud of my dad!). I also, as mentioned in my recent blog post "freelancing does not suck" that I had applied for food stamps during ~09 when times were incredibly hard for me, and I thought I might have to sell my house.

I'm a single mom and I work incredibly hard, and I sure as hell was not getting an "entitlement" or a handout. I never ended up getting on food stamps - long story - but I would have gladly taken them, and I have no qualms or shame about it. It's damn hard to be a single mom and support oneself, even when you get some child support (I got - and still get - a fraction of what I'm legally entitled to). Anyway... social welfare is there to help people when times get tough. I hope that you never have to know what it is to be poor and genuinely need help. There are people who really do need help, and who use it and get off of it, and are not just "lazy" as the Right often characterizes people on welfare. My dear precious daughter, a brilliant young woman who is a National Merit Scholar Semifinalist and in the Top 10 of a class of more than 700, and an amazing human being is a product of welfare. As am I - I earned a M.S. and am a PhD candidate (on leave of absence...) and have built an incredibly successful freelance writing career. So there you go. That's what welfare gets you.

Oregon coast is paradise!

Sunset this evening, through my window at the Salishan Spa & Golf Resort, Gleneden Beach, OR
All photos copyright (c) 2011 Wendee Holtcamp

I've been in Oregon since Thursday and I want to share all my photos of my trip so far (including visiting my dad's Crackerbox Palace - aka log cabin in the woods) and a gathering of writers in Portland and seeing my 7th grade BFF but first, I'm going to share the images of the beautiful Central Oregon coast because I spent the last half of today exploring and photographing and it's freshest on my mind -so this is 'live and in person'! Right now, I'm sitting in an incredible hotel room complete with a gas fireplace, couch, King-sized bed, massive bathroom - and a view you see above...

The natural beauty of Oregon inspires me. Yes, I'm from here, and yes my visit is hosted by the Central Oregon Coast Association or COCA but I'm not just saying that because COCA is sponsoring my trip. Anyone who has been to the Oregon coast will pretty much say the same thing! It rains a lot and there are often clouds, but the entire coast (that I have seen before - and more this trip) has absolutely breathtaking scenery.

At any rate, this morning I left my dad's place and headed south of Portland and when I got near Corvallis, headed coast-ward up and over the mountains to Newport, a small town right near the coast. There I met up with the Executive Director of COCA who is driving me around (we are meeting up with a couple others tomorrow). We have only had half a day on the coast so far but I've taken so many pictures already that I wanted to upload them or I'll never be able to catch up when I get home. So here are some images to whet your appetite! Most of these I took with my Android phone, which has some apps that allow me to create cool-looking images, but others are from my Canon SLR.

First we went to the Depoe Bay Whale Watching Center (run by Oregon State Parks - and free to the public). Gray whales can be spotted here year-round. Right now they are migrating northward, and just minutes before we got there a mother and calf swam by but we didn't see any. Bummer! Orcas, seals and sea lions can also be spotted. We saw a couple of sea lions on the jetty (visible with the multiple pairs of binoculars provided at the center).

We drove a mile up the road to Boiler Bay where we thought maybe we would spot the mother and calf, but no luck. However it was beautiful! Notice the waterfall on the right.

Next we stopped in at Alder House III - the "oldest glassblowing studio in the Pacific NW."
Buzz Williams, owner of Alderhouse, shows us how he creates glassware.

ome glass balls (floats) in the studio.

Loved the look of all the colorful glass artwork!
Funky tilt lens effect on a St. Francis statuette.

I had hardly eaten all day so was very excited about dinner. We ate at the 3-star Bay House Restaurant in Lincoln City. I had the Alaskan halibut with cucumber, baby bok choy, coriander, meyer lemon, celeriac, and micro-arugula. It was tender, flavorful, and beautifully presented.

Owner Stephen Wilson sat and chatted with us for a while. They use as much locally farmed veggies and meat as possible and did so way before it became popular to. I also got a lesson in what it means to be 3, 4, and 5 star. Wow! They have to jump through hoops to get those stars! Interesting stuff.

Holy yumness, the truffles were gorgeously presented and freaking delicious. In fact I nibbled two halves, then took the rest back to my hotel room where I had them in front of the fireplace with a cup of coffee!

There was a guy catching sand shrimp out the window as we ate - can you see him on the right?These shrimp are apparently bait for catching halibut. While we ate, the sun peeped out of the clouds and then it gradually cleared up! Sun on the Oregon coast - I couldn't ask for more! The forecast had called for rain all week so I'm very happy. I thought this image was Boiler Bay but it turns out it's actually Siletz Bay that the Bay House overlooks.

The sun through the clouds over Siletz Bay near Lincoln City (where the Bay House sets). And you know what? My stepdad's parents lived here for many years, and I spent one Thanksgiving there as a kid. We are going to go visit their house on the trip. My stepdad's dad passed away many years ago and his mom moved to Sequim, WA but now she lives near them in Dallas.

After dinner we walked down to the bay/beach and I accidentally shot this with my phone. I thought it looked totally surreal and beautiful. I want to start a website with accidental photos!

This is my room at The Salishan Spa & Golf Resort. The room is huge, and decorated in ranch style luxury. This pic doesn't do it justice!
And that brings us to... the sunset over the bay!

But before I leave you for tonight I wanted to give you a taste of the images I shot at my dad's log cabin, aka the Crackerbox Palace as he calls it. This is a window of the bathroom from the outside.

And the cabin itself. Very small, quaint, rustic. Home! I spent every summer here and lived with my dad here for two years when I was 8 through 10.

hippie log cabin memories

I ate a lot of dog food as a kid. I am listening to the Eagles Hotel California and it's bringing a lot of memories of life with my dad in the log cabin in Oregon. I've written about it in so many venues, but honestly I'm not sure about on this blog?! In about 1972 or '73, Dad moved from L.A. to Oregon and bought 24 acres of land where he built his own log cabin (the image to the left is a photo of it when it got a rare snow). My parents had gotten divorced when I was 1 and Mom moved to Eugene with her twin sister and my cousin. Eugene was a few hours away from Dad's cabin which is about 20 miles from the blink-and-miss-it town of Deer Island - on Meissner Mountain. My dad was a hippie who wanted that back-to-the-land lifestyle, and he grew his own food in a huge veggie garden and also had chickens from which we got eggs and, well, chicken. (though I would never eat the chickens he killed for meat!).

In L.A., my dad had delivered candy and toys to those little .25-cent trinket machines (then, they were 1-, 5- and 10-cent machines). He was a working class man. He also raced motorcycles and had a band called Homegrown in L.A. He played bass guitar, and I have many memories of my childhood listening to him and his brother Pat, his girlfriend Celeta, and some others have incredibly loud jam sessions in the log cabin - and if you can sleep through that, you learn to sleep through anything, anywhere!! I also fell asleep at many a party in my childhood. Lots of pot smoking, drinking, music, and generally good times. I'm not condoning drugs, don't get me wrong - this was just what I experienced growing up. The attitudes of Oregonians with respect to marijuana is very different than in, say, Texas. Of course this was also the early 1970s, coming off the hippie era, but I would say things haven't changed too much since then in Oregon. However I will also say (in case you are wondering) I haven't touched a drug since I was 20 years old. OK maybe I did eat those brownies one time... heh heh. Kidding! Seriously I barely take tylenol! I hate any medication!

So anyway when Dad got to Oregon, at first he made money by logging here and there, and then got into a business of building log cabins. The log cabin of his own was very humble. It was one large open room with an upstairs loft that took up half the cabin space. That is where his bedroom was, and eventually I had a small room up there also when I lived with him. Before that, my brother and I just slept in sleeping bags on the floor.

One time, while sleeping, I fell off the loft all the way to the downstairs which was very far below! Lucky for me, the couch was right underneath and I landed on it. Dad woke up and came down to make sure I was ok, but the funny thing is that in the morning I woke up and was like "Why am I on the couch?!" And he was like, "You fell! Don't you remember?!" Nope, I didn't remember a thing.

At first Dad didn't have electricity and we used kerosene lanterns for light, and of course we had two wood stoves - Gandalf was the cook stove, and Smaug was the potbelly stove used to heat the house. Dad didn't have running water. Gandalf looked identical to this stove except it was all black. We cooked everything from scratch. I mean EVERYTHING. We had huge glass mayonnaise jars filled with dried beans, flour, salt, etc which he bought in bulk. We grinded our own peanut butter. We even "made" our own honey! Dad had a few bee hives and I remember him putting on this all-white bee suit including the head-covering which allowed you to see but had mesh (our hives and the suit look pretty much identical to the photo below).

However, needless to say, for a kid who can't exactly start up the stove on their own there were many times when I was hungry, and went hungry. Dry dog food pellets are actually pretty tasty when you're really hungry, and I had many a dog food pellet snack. Dad left me alone a lot because he had work to do, and well there really weren't people anywhere nearby. I often got scared, especially when he was late coming home - which he often was - and would concoct all these thoughts in my head about what had happened to him or what I would do. I also would spend hours listening to his amazing record album collection, and reading the liners. He has about 1000+ albums, including many bootlegs of bands like Cream, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin - some of the concerts he attended. They're probably worth a lot of money! But for me, they are my memories. Music is such a huge part of my life because of growing up constantly listening to music, this really great classic rock-n-roll music as well as a lot of funk like Bootsy Collins and Rick James.

Since we didn't have running water, we would drive several miles away to a freshwater spring and fill up several large Igloo containers with drinking water which we'd then use until it was gone. For bathing and washing though, we collected rainwater in big 50-gallon drums. We did not have a bathtub but Dad had made a makeshift shower by putting a 10-gallon bucket hanging underneath the loft, and made a spigot coming out the bottom. So we'd heat water on the wood stove, mix it with cool water until you got the right temperature and then pour some into the bucket. We had a shower curtain for privacy but there was not enough water in the bucket to have a full-length shower. You'd have to get wet, turn the water off, lather up your body and hair, then turn the water back on to rinse. In winter it was sooo cold and then I'd wrap up and go stand by Smaug until I was toasty warm. It was very Laura Ingalls Wylder Little House in the Big Woods pioneer-like.

Oh and of course we had an outhouse which had several locations through the years but was typically quite a ways away from the house, so in the middle of the night I would just go pee in the yard. It was kind of scary because I would hear coyotes howling!!! At one point Celeta got me a "pee pot" which is what the women used in the old times, and you emptied it in the woods in the morning.

There's a hilarious story of when I moved back with my mom in 5th grade. She lived in Dallas suburbia and I'd gone to bed at like 7 or 8pm and she happened to stay up that night to watch the 10 o'clock news, which she normally didn't. Well it was a good thing because I got up and started going out the front door. She asked me where I was going, and I said I was going to the bathroom. She said it took her a while to convince me that the bathroom was down the hall! I apparently was sleepwalking because I didn't remember in the morning but I assume I was going to go pee in the front lawn. ROFLOL!

Well more stories will have to wait, I have to get some writing done on an article about the Gulf Dead Zone, which is really depressing me as a matter of fact! We are destroying our oceans and killing the life within...