Into the Valley

Dateline--Sweet Home, Oregon.

I'm very pleased with today's shoot, as my DP Terence and I grabbed a lot of good imagery for the video-telling of A Marvelous Paranoia, my memoir of growing up in this town (9,000 pop.) at the eastern edge of the Willamette Valley.

In Millersburg, just off Interstate 5 north of Albany, we concentrated on the massive--what else--mills that dot the landscape and jut into the sky like great, grey concrete monuments to a fading, yet surviving industrial age.

A few minutes later, searching for the house where my mother lived for many years after I left the Valley for adventures in New England and California, we drove through a maze of impoverishment, effectively creating a drastic counterpoint to our earlier view.  The rundown neighborhood was dominated by a trashy, dilapidated mobile home park that looked like meth central for the entire region.

The contrast between Albany's industrial well-being and its hopelessness was a reminder of the resounding imbalance that rules today's America.

We drove on to Lebanon, which has a charming Main Street in spots.  Terence and I walked the length of the old retail section, rolled tape and revealed a community fighting off the influence of the big box stores situated at the edge of town.

We grabbed shots of the farm country between Lebanon and Sweet Home before checking into our motel for a brief respite.  Then we were off to the offices of the New Era, the weekly community newspaper where I worked  when I was a teenager.   Terence photographed me searching the newspaper's archives for the first published stories I wrote in the late sixties.

As we were wrapping up those scenes, Scott Swanson, the co-publisher and editor of the paper, asked Terence and I to return to his office tomorrow.

I guess he plans on interviewing us for a story in his newspaper.  I can't think of a pair of more deserving guys.

From there we visited my parents' graves at Gilliland Cemetery in the hills on the east side of town.  It was sad up there, but beautiful.

A good day.  Time to rest and plan for tomorrow's shoot in the Cascade Mountains.


TS