A week before I summited Spencer Butte for the first time on Thanksgiving Day 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas, while riding in a motorcade with his wife Jacqueline. I was almost four years old and not especially well tuned into national crises, but my mom and dad were, especially since they were endeavoring to raise four boys in unsettled times. While the nation’s psyche steeped aggressively in a brew of fear, grief, and shock, my parents searched for a foothold of stability, an anchor from which to assemble a safe haven from moral decay, communist threat, conspiracy theories, and a generation gap so wide you could send a rocket to the moon and not reconcile.
Mom and Dad found their footholds in the wild corners near our home, green spaces and rocky outcroppings filled with sword ferns and bugs, old growth Douglas firs, and spring fed oases nestled in shaded creases of nearby hills. Even well-behaved and clean-cut park spaces in the City of Eugene were toeholds against societal anxiety in ways not made clear to me until years later when I raised my own family in Eugene.
But on that brisk morning in 1963, my parents bundled us up in jeans, sturdy shoes, zipped up canvas jackets over our wool sweaters, and tossed us in the back seats of our brown and white Chevy Bel Air station wagon for what was to become a family tradition every Thanksgiving—hike Spencer Butte. The weather didn’t matter and it’s likely my dad wanted to instill a sense of grit into his young sons. So if it happened to pour down buckets of rain and sleet during our excursions, so much the better. My parents wanted the wild corners of our region to imprint their leafy doctrines upon us to buttress against the extortions of coming of age in the time of social tumult, and this was their best strategy.
My first climb to the top in my stubby almost four-year-old legs took me first through thick fog that fastened itself to tree trunks and limbs, coating everything with a layer of mist so thick you could lick it. Next came the hint of sunshine above, wisps of blue sky, then a glorious chorus of celestial radiance urging us upward. After more than an hour of scaling abrupt muddy trails and slick basalt boulders etched with bright green and turquoise-hued lichens, our six-person crew reaches the crest of Spencer Butte in brilliant sunlight. I gulp in buckets of wintry air, absorbing the verdant patchwork of fields nestled against the outskirts of Springfield, Creswell, and Pleasant Hill. Further east I see snow topped Three Sisters, Mount Jefferson, and Mount Hood to the north. A black and white photo catches a moment of joy—me in a knit hat with a pompom, my brothers’ sunlit faces, smiling, surrounding and protecting me against all comers in the cradle of a grey basalt boulder the size of a pickup truck.
Later, in decidedly more temperate months, University Park provided hours of outside fun with its battleship grey concrete wading pool filled with shrieking children, mostly because they were freezing off their lower legs in water the temperature of snowmelt. Days of no sunscreen, avoiding e-coli pestilences, vast chunks of unsupervised time, squirt gun fights and running from older kids playing tag, were enduring their influence atop us, accruing somehow lessons of persistence and resolve derived from spontaneous play and sunburns. Social comparisons were made in the moment under the July sun, and self-esteem propped itself up on elbows bent in the grass while looking for four-leaf clovers.
The wild spaces have always called to us, albeit ears have hardened to the presence of wind, water, and earth, and to circadian habits of creatures. In our attempts to prop ourselves against social turbulences sometimes we lose our bearings, confuse our heading with noise that is not borne of wind, water, or earth. Instead, a digitalized tsunami of inputs overtakes our senses, replacing with a sense of fear, grief, and shock. Psychologists describe the effects of too much screen time as a probable factor in burgeoning adolescent depression, anxiety and delayed social development. Too much detachment from trees, rocks and dirt isn’t good for us, it seems.
In the age of budget cuts and public services curtailments, how can a person make the case of increasing our wild spaces and the more civilized city parks? I ask myself that question daily. Part of my answer is held in the black and white photograph that my mother snapped of her four young boys with rosy cheeks and muddy knees at the top of Spencer Butte in 1963. In a nation perched on the precipice of uncertainty, with America’s future hanging in the balance, there on the pinnacle of rock on the edge of Eugene, the underpinnings of resilience and determination were forming under a crisp fall sunny morning.
Whether it’s the top of Spencer Butte or a neighborhood park, open spaces in Eugene are important substructures for our community’s health. Unplowed and undeveloped green spaces allow opportunities to set aside screens and seek serenity and reconnect in ways that can’t be easily explained by science. Tranquility amid turbulence is right outside our door.
The Eugene Parks Foundation is in the business of increasing accessible wild places and exceptional parks in our community, in partnership with the City of Eugene. If you have been impacted positively by our parks and open spaces, and are interested in supporting places that nurture humans, please consider affirming your delight with a donation to the Eugene Parks Foundation.
Kevin Alltucker
By Kevin Alltucker