What's the Cache?

This bridge has a secret.  Nearly every GroveAtopian knows exactly where this bridge is and exactly where this picture was taken.  So that's not the secret.  The bridge's secret is something else.

To find this secret you have to enjoy hunting.  But not the kind of hunting that uses guns or other weapons.  The only weapons you need for this hunt are patience and your phone.

People who try to discover this bridge's secret will look a bit odd while they are trying to figure it out.  They may walk slowly one way, then turn and walk the other.  They may cross the street and wander seemingly without reason along the the other side.  People who recognize you and wave to you as they go into the feed store will tell you as they come out,  "you don't seem to be making much progress on your walk."

"It's not a walk," you tell them as you smile at each other knowing the next time you see them they are going to ask you what you were doing.

Back and forth you walk across the bridge, your had slowly tracing across both the top and bottom railing while you check every nook and cranny.  Before now you never realized how many there were on this bridge.

You check under the bridge.  Maybe the secret is there.  But no!  Oh dear!  Is someone living under there?  Now you are kind of sorry you looked because that is something you didn't want to know.  Plus there's more garbage down there than you care to admit.

But still you look.  In the tree branches that hang near the railing?  Is the the secret there?  You really can't believe it's even possible the secret would be in the branches.  There are so many of them, it would be downright cruel to hide a secret there.

Looking at your phone, you try to decipher the hints.  Some of them mock you by telling you how easy it is to find the secret.  How could they be so mean?

Finally, the most tenacious one in your group finds the secret and it is so very small and rather cleverly hidden.  It turns out it's pretty much right where the hints said it would be.  And many others have found it before us.

How do we know?  Because when you find the secret, it tells you so.

Trucks use River

We already know that GroveAtopia is a little bit magic what with talk of fairies who occasionally appear to help us out when our story needs some help moving forward.

Apparently they are at work again, but this time they've communicated with us directly.  They've left us a sign in a very busy spot over by the Woodson Bridge.  They've told trucks to swim.  Or float.  No roads for them, because, as the sign says, "Trucks Use River."

Now some may wonder if this is a description of something that's already happening - just letting everyone know:  Trucks Use River, so be careful.  In that case the next sign might say "Cars Use Road." And the next could say, "Bicycles Use Sky" or "Pedestrians Use Trees."  But now we are just being silly.

Maybe the sign is a command. "Hey Trucks!  Use River!"  In that case the next sign would say "Not Road!" because most trucks would assume they could use the road.  But not here.  Not in this place were trucks use the River because the fairies told them to.

Prison Gardeners

Some time ago we established that GroveAtopia continues whether we write about it or not so there is no need to address the fact that we've been absent for over 3 years.  That's longer than any written excuse can handle, so let's just skip it.

That said, over the years, writing and reading about GroveAtopia has been in the back of our minds, hasn't it?  Some have even asked where it has been.  That was surprising.   The truth is that it been in the place where writing is before it hits the screen, wherever that is.  Imagination?  Fantasy?  Some part of the brain called "time crunch?"  In any case it has not been here.

But the other day, driving by City Hall an unusual gardening occurance was taking place and frankly, there is no better place to share it than here.  It was so unusual that it took several awkward drive by attempts to photograph it, so please excuse the poor results.   One plus of poor results is that people sometimes stick around for the explanation.  Let's see if that is the case here.

Here is the first picture.

 See?  You were warned.  It's not very good.  So let's explain.  The guy in the stripped suit.  What is he doing?  Why is he wearing what looks like prison garb straight from a cartoon?

Because he is a prisoner in the GroveAtopia jail.  Yep, GroveAtopian prisoners have to wear cartoon clothes while they serve their time.

Now seeing a prisoner out and about on a pleasant Saturday afternoon might give one pause, but only if you don't realize that the brown door in the background of this picture leads directly to the police department.  So given the combination of cartoon prisoner garb and proximity to the police department, this guy is probably not up to anything we should be worried about. 

Actually, it turns out he's up to something that makes us happy in that mixed up kind of way you feel when you see a good thing being done by someone who is accused of having done something bad.   At the very least you drive around the block and have another look.

And when you do, this is what you see.  TWO guys in cartoon prison garb pulling weeds in the little patch of flowers between the police department, jail, city hall and the Territorial Seed call center - all right there on Main St.

Lest you think this is a common site here in GroveAtopia, well, it's not.  We've seen prisoners washing patrol cars a few times before, so we know they are put to work.  

But we've never seen them gardening, so when you drive by and the words "prison gardeners" pop into your mind, you simply have to tell someone about it.  

More on Hot Stoves

What a surprise to read this in today's Register Guard:

Efficient stove solution

International visitors attend a workshop in Cottage Grove to see how stoves can help impoverished areas

BY BOB KEEFER

The Register-Guard

Published: Monday, Jan 24, 2011 05:01AM

COTTAGE GROVE — Here’s one way to look at it: The folks at Aprovecho Research Center want to save the world, one small stove at a time.

And, from the looks of things on Sunday, they may be slowly succeeding — with help from the United Nations.

“In Africa and in Asia, in rural areas, the issue of energy is one of the biggest problems,” said Valentine Ndibalema, one of about 20 people who assembled at a former hog-processing plant on the edge of Cottage Grove this weekend for Aprovecho’s 2011 Winter Stove Workshop.

“We need to find a way to reduce consumption. We are quite interested in seeing how things are done here.”

Ndibalema, a Tanzanian, is a senior environmental coordinator for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Geneva, Switzerland.

He came to Cottage Grove last week, as did people from Sudan, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Kenya, to spend five days exploring how to build a better stove. The workshop is being put on for staff from the U.N. World Food Programme.

The word “stove,” by the way, means something quite different here from your typical kitchen range. We are talking about the kind of small wood-burning stoves that are in common use by very poor people throughout the world, whether they live in a remote Latin American village or in a crowded refugee camp in Sudan.

Ndibalema works with displaced persons camps, where people cook using whatever fuels they can scrounge and where having a better stove can make a huge difference.

“There is a growing understanding that there is a suite of issues that need to be addressed that have to do with how people cook their food in the developing world,” explained Tom Skeele, the center’s corporate operations officer.

“This relates to air pollution, indoors and out. To safety — people getting burned, especially kids. To lung disease. To deforestation. In refugee and displaced persons camps, women are going outside the camps to find fuel and they are being raped. If we can increase the effectiveness of stoves, then more time can be put into getting a woman or her children an education. Or getting a job.”

The research center focuses on stove design and construction, creating stoves for single-family use (these are about the size of a five-gallon bucket) or for institutional cooking (think 55-gallon oil drum). Aprovecho has even designed a wood-fired autoclave for sterilizing hospital instruments. A small family stove costs about $14.

Outside next to a small garden, Fred Colgan, who is co-director of Aprovecho’s Institutional Stove Project, put his ungloved hand on the bare metal chimney of a big green stove that was boiling a kettle of water in the open air. (It was Colgan’s meeting with Ndibalema in Rome last year, while on his way back from Nigeria, that brought the U.N. staffers here to Oregon.)

“This doesn’t burn you,” he said. “It’s safe to touch anywhere even while the stove is burning.”

That’s because the stove, which is literally built from a 55-gallon drum, is so efficient that the heat goes into boiling water, not making the outside of the stove hot.

“This stove will boil 30 liters of water in 22 minutes using just 1,200 grams of fuel,” Colgan said proudly.

(For the metrically challenged, that means it will bring about 8 gallons of water to a boil using just about 2.5 pounds of firewood.)

The heat is conserved by, for example, designing the stove to wrap around not only the bottom but also the sides of a 60-liter cooking kettle, so that the stove’s intense heat blasts nearly the entire surface of the kettle. As a result, the institutional stoves are up to 90 percent more efficient than stoves generally in use, Colgan said.

While that big stove burned away in the open air, a smaller, family-style Aprovecho stove was boiling its own smaller pot of water atop a concrete pad inside a closed room.

Amit Singh, an officer with the U.N. World Food Programme in Darfur, was standing right next to the stove, just as a cook might. But he was monitoring the air quality in the room with a variety of sensors.

Despite the unvented stove, the air was tangy, but not choking by any means.

Singh is working with Aprovecho to bring 200 of its institutional stoves to Darfur, paid for by the world food program. “We will give them to the schools there,” he said. “We are feeding kids there when they go to school.”

Another participant in the conference is Habib Iddrisu. He grew up in a small village in Ghana, but came to the United States and married a Eugene woman.

Iddrisu wanted to see about bringing Aprovecho stoves back to Ghana.

“People use open fires to cook on,” he said. “I didn’t realize just how bad that was until I came here. I went back there with my wife and family this summer. We realized how much this stove technology could benefit life in Ghana.”

The conference continues through Wednesday.

Warning: Hot Stove!

Depending on your point of view, the objects in this picture may look really interesting or they may look just the opposite.  But whatever you think about the objects themselves, as is so often the case, the story behind them is interesting, no matter what your point of view.

So let's start with the obvious question.  What are they?  

They're cookstoves.  They're fueled by wood or charcoal and they were developed right here in GroveAtopia at the Aprovecho Research Center.  

Now I'm pretty sure you don't know what the word aprovecho means but oddly enough, there are two places called Aprovecho in GroveAtopia, so it's probably worth taking a moment to at least explain what it means.  Both Aprovechos used to be related, but now they're not.  We'll talk about that in another post.  For now suffice it to say in GroveAtopia we know there is "stove Aprovecho" and "sustainable living Aprovecho."  Clearly we are talking here about "stove Aprovecho."

As for what aprovecho means - don't worry, you aren't alone, because that's the first thing most people ask when you start talking about it - aprovecho means "to make the best use of."  

So what you have in the picture is the main product of "stove Aprovecho."  It's called a StoveTec and it's a low-cost, low-emission cookstove designed for use wherever people do most of their cooking over an open fire.

If you think about it for about a nano-second you realize that quite a lot of the rest of the world cooks over an open flame - sometimes outdoors, sometimes indoors.  But you probably didn't think about it much more than that.  

If you did though, and the people at Aprovecho most certainly did - in great detail for many years - you would realize that cooking over an open flame presents problems.  One is that it's basically not healthy for the people and air they breath - especially if they are cooking indoors.  The other is that it can be hard to find fuel.  Especially if you live in the same place for a long time.  Eventually you run out.

So for the past 29 years, the folks at Aprovecho have been working to solve this problem.  Their solutions keep getting better and better, and as they do they keep getting noticed more and more.  If you clicked on the link to their website you know they have won an award from none other than Prince Charles, been featured in the New Yorker and even made an appearance on Martha Stewart.  

And here's a scoop, tomorrow morning, NPR will be here to do a story on them.  

This is all pretty heady stuff for our little town.  Imagine international notoriety for doing good around the world.   We in GroveAtopia don't have to imagine it though because it's already being done.

Our naked bridge

Imagine what it was like to drive downtown the other day and find our most iconic bridge standing there, right in public, stark naked.   Quite simply, it was a shock.

It wasn't the kind of shock you want the the little children to turn their heads away from, because this was not that kind of nudity.  This was the kind of shock you feel when something utterly familiar has suddenly changed.  In fact you didn't even know just how familiar it was to you until it changed.  Overnight.  Just like that.

This naked little bridge is known as Centennial Bridge because it was constructed in 1997, the year GroveAtopia turned 100.  It is not a "genuine" covered bridge because covered bridge purists like to see the bridges where they originally stood, and preferably still carrying traffic.  But it was constructed from timbers salvaged from two covered bridges that were taken down, so that gives it some genuiness, now doesn't it?

Genuine or not, the Centennial Bridge is probably the most photographed of our bridges because it is right downtown and because it is a pedestrian bridge.  It's smaller than covered bridges that were built for vehicles, and in some ways that makes it even more genuine than its bigger cousins in the surrounding countryside, because nearly everyone sees this bridge every day and most have probably walked across it at least once.  Okay, I just met someone who has lived here all his life and has never walked across it, but I'm sure he's the only one.

So just what is our bridge doing standing there naked in the coldest part of winter?  

Well it's actually good news.  The bridge was looking worse for the wear, so the Lions Club went in one Saturday and took off the siding.  It will be replaced by new siding, and the lights inside and out will be upgraded.  Plus the little window boxes full of flowers that originally hung outside each little window will be returned too.

The whole project is supposed to be completed by the end of February.  

In the meantime here is your chance to see the outside of the bridge's insides.  In case you wanted to know, when you look at the bridge now, what you are seeing are its Howe Trusses.  

And you can still walk across it even though it's stark naked.

The elusive winter egg

We all know that it has been a very long time since you've heard anything from GroveAtopia.  But as you know, that does not mean we have not been here.  We didn't disappear or cease to exist, we just stopped writing about it for what turned out to be quite a while.

I'm going to spare you the promises, vows and commitments you are expecting to hear.  You know the ones where I talk about how I will post more regularly and not let so much time lapse between postings.

But let's be honest.  Let's not set ourselves up for disappointment, self criticism or guilt.  Let's just enjoy what we have right now - another post from our favorite place - GroveAtopia.   Whether we post regularly or not, GroveAtopia can take it.  So let's just jump right in, shall we?

It's winter in GroveAtopia and as if rain, occasional snow, and the particularly menacing sounding freezing fog we experience during this dark season were not enough, we must also endure an egg shortage.

I know, it doesn't sound right, does it?  Why not just go to the store and get a dozen?  The stores have plenty.

But here in GroveAtopia, we do it differently.  We only go to the store to buy eggs as a last resort.  We'd rather get our eggs from our neighbor because in the GroveAtopian countryside chances are our neighbor has chickens and those chickens are not shy about producing plenty of eggs.  In spring, summer and fall that is.  Not in winter.

Before I came to GroveAtopia I didn't know this, and maybe you don't either, but it turns out chickens need a certain amount of light to lay eggs.  So right around about Halloween, the chickens start laying fewer and fewer eggs until by Christmas, finding a farm egg in GroveAtopia can be nearly impossible.

For awhile I could get them at the Old Mill Feed Store.  Then their source stopped laying.  Then I could get them at Scott's farm stand.  Then those chickens succumbed to winter.  Then there were the terrible few weeks where I had to buy them at the store.  Let's not dwell on that difficult time.

Lately I've been able to get them at Farmhand Feed.  You are limited to one dozen per week - but last week I got lucky and got a dozen and a half.   Jackpot!  I'm so happy to find a reliable source of winter eggs I'm not even going to ask Mary, who runs Farmhand Feed, where she gets them.

It may not be convenient, but when you think about it, maybe that's how it should be.  When you eat an egg, you should think about the chicken, or if you don't know the chicken well enough to think about it, at least think about the fact that a chicken was involved.  Your GroveAtopian farm egg may not come from a chicken you know personally, but someone you know probably does.

So when I have my dozen winter eggs in my refrigerator, I feel happy.  And if I have enough to hard-boil, well that's just a bonus.

What a contrast to the summer months, when there is plenty of light and there are plenty of eggs.  So many in fact that I had dozens stacked in the refrigerator.  But until those days return, I'll cherish my elusive winter eggs.

Hope

The weather has been on the minds of many GroveAtopians lately.

That's because, even though we had a few days where we thought the Lovely Season was here, it turns out we were wrong.  Those few days turned out to be just that: a few days.  What we've been experiencing since then is anything but Lovely.

Usually by now, we are wearing our summer clothes, the sun is shining most days and we are basking in its warmth.  We are as busy as the bees buzzing around our yards, puttering here and there, and usually have our garden pretty much planted by now.  Even the warm weather plants.

But this year is turning out to be very different.  It has rained nearly every day in June.  And not just a little rain.  A lot of rain.  Sometimes buckets and buckets of rain fall from the sky for most of the day.   Sometimes it just drizzles.  Sometimes we have a day of so-called "sun breaks" - but between the breaks is rain.

We are known for rain here in GroveAtopia, but even we have our limits.  And so do our gardens.  See the tomatoes and cucumbers in the picture?  They were planted just last week.  See the soaker hose?  Won't be needing that for awhile.

The rain has really made nature even more crazy than it usually is during this time of year.  It's great for leaves, but not so great for fruit and vegetables.  The strawberries are still green, running the race between mold, mildew and rot and ripening.  The garlic is waist high, but are the bulbs forming?

The slugs and snails are happy though.  Those little cucumbers were planted with the complete expectation that they would lose the battle with the slugs, but now,  a week later, amazingly they are still there.  It's a completely different story with the broccoli though.  It will have to be replaced.

The grass likes it too.  The mighty grass of GroveAtopia is mightier than ever.  And the pollen has been tolerable.

But despite all the weather oddities, we persevere.  We keep planting.   But as each plant is put in the ground, we bid it good luck.

Then we hope.  Because really that's about all we can do - hope our little plants make it until the real GroveAtopian weather returns.

Burgerville: Still perfect

We know Burgerville is perfect fast food.  We already said so, remember?      Well guess what?  Now they are even perfecter.

It had been some time since we visited our nearest Burgerville, which sadly, is about 60 miles away in Albany.  There are a few in Portland and the outlying areas, but it's really Washington that's the lucky one.  There are Burgervilles off just about every exit along I-5 from Vancouver to Olympia.

So when we were there today, we wondered if it was still as good as we remembered it.

Yep.  It's even better.

They've always served their drinks with compostable straws but now they come in compostable cups too.  They are serving fried asparagus spears - the nerve!  And there's a new coho salmon sandwich on the menu that's delicious.

But the real piece of perfection is the receipt.  Usually you take the receipt and shove it in your pocket, purse or in some crevice in your car and don't think twice about it.  But for some reason this time we did think twice about it.  We had a closer look and there they were.  Nutrition facts.

But it wasn't just the usual nutrition facts.  It was nutrition facts customized to your order.  So you could tell exactly how many calories, and how much fat, carbs and fiber were in the items you ordered.

For example, we usually ask for no mayo on our orders.  Hey, that knocks 100 calories off your meal.  What if you order mustard?  It'll cost you 20 calories.   And the salmon sandwich?  You knew it had a lot of calories with that lemon aioli on it.  You were right.  That sandwich is 500 calories.  But they are such yummy calories.

The so-called smart receipt is made possible by a company called Nutricate.  What a simple solution to a big problem - how to find out how many calories are in the food you eat in restaurants.

Even with the typical nutrition chart you receive at major restaurants - usually upon request only - there is a certain amount of guess work, particularly if you order something that's not exactly as it appears on the menu.  But the smart receipt takes care of that because it reflects exactly what you ordered.

So as before, the question remains, if Burgerville can do it, why can't the others?

One more thing

About the museum exhibit opening - you saw one teeny tiny photo with yesterday's post.  To see more photos look at Julie and Brinsley's great website.

Julie and Brinsley are GroveAtopia's best photographers.  In fact while you are at their website looking at the museum photos, check out some of their others.  One look and it will be immediately clear you are looking at something beyond the usual.  We are fortunate to have them here in GroveAtopia.

A crowd

Here is a crowd of people.

We have our share of crowd gatherings in GroveAtopia, but what is noteworthy about this crowd is that it is in a place where there hasn't been a crowd for a long, long time.

That's because there has been nothing here for a crowd to gather for in a long, long time.  So what's everyone gathered for?

A few days ago you read our museum, the one that is so full of old stuff that it in essence serves as GroveAtopia's attic, was getting some much needed attention.  A couple of teachers from Dorena school spend the last 9 months laboriously going through items big and small, pristine and rusty, identifiable and unidentifiable and piecing them all together into something most museums have.  It's called an exhibit.

Everyone is gathered here for the opening of that exhibit.  There was even a ribbon cutting, complete with giant scissors.

There were somewhere between 50-75 people at the exhibit opening.  The mayor was there.  A few city councilors were there.  The museum board was there.  So was the Historical Society.  And just regular GroveAtopains were there too.

You see, the museum is smack dab in the middle of GroveAtopia's very first and most historic neighborhood, so its neighbors are the homes of regular GroveAtopians.  Curious about the unusually large gathering in their neighborhood, many of them simply walked over to see what was up.  Plus there was barbecue from Big Stuff.  Even if you hate museums, you'd come for that alone.

Now our museum is really a museum.  It has a real live exhibit, just like the grown-up museums have.  We can now proudly take our place along with other small town museums and you simply must take the time to see it.

Not kaput

Yes.  It has been awhile.  A long while.  But even though nothing has been posted here in quite some time, GroveAtopia continues on.  Like a good book where the characters seem to carry on even when you close the it, GroveAtopia is here whether we read and write about it or not.  It is not kaput.

In fact, the Lovely Season has arrived and once again all is green, fluffy, mild and moist.  The air is soft.  The birds are busy.  And the flowers we somehow manage to forget about every year have returned.

In a way it is a blessing that we forget because then every year we get to be surprised again at how lovely it all is.  If you ever sigh with boredom at the reappearance of the Lovely Season, then something is seriously wrong.  Consider seeing a doctor.

But for now, let's turn our attention to some of the many many many things that have happened while we haven't been writing about them.

One of them is the new exhibit at our museum.

We talked about it when it needed painting, then again when it got painted, and now it's getting a new exhibit.  It's a big deal, because for a very long time the museum was, well, a museum, but not in the best sense of the word.  It was really GroveAtopia's attic, chock full of things that people had left on the doorstep, or that relatives had brought by thinking the museum should have them simply because they were old.

Apparently the museum very rarely said no, and the result was a tremendous mish-mash of old stuff.  There was so much of it, it was stored in the neighboring annex building.  There was so much of it that the annex building was rarely opened.  There was so much of it that no one could make any sense of it without a personal tour.  Even then the stuff in there was, well stuff.  It told snippets of unrelated stories about GroveAtopia's past, but no one had ever put it together into a coherent exhibit that told a coherent story about our town's past.

Until now.  Through a series of fortunate events, two teachers from one of GroveAtopia's small schools were awarded a Teaching American History grant to do just that - teach american history.  They decided to teach GroveAtopia's piece of american history by developing a series of small exhibits that depict life in Cottage Grove as it was in the late 19th and early 20th century.

The exhibit is called "Living Our History" and it opens this weekend.  You can read about it here.

If you are lucky you can come to the opening, enjoy the exhibit and enjoy some food from Big Stuff BBQ. If not, perhaps you can drop by sometime when the museum is open.  And by the way, the museum is open from 1-4, not 10-3 like it says in the newspaper.