Culture Features

For most of the year, my encounters with Central Oregon's homeless population are limited to seeing them on street corners, in parks and at Mirror Pond Plaza. Sometimes I give them a bit of change or say hello, but for the most part, I look away. While I'm ashamed to admit this, I know I'm not the only one.
But last Thursday, I couldn't look away. I spent the day at the One Night Homeless Count, which serves as a sort of snapshot of how many of our neighbors have slipped through the safety net. Each year during the last week of January, more than 40 organizations band together to count as many homeless people as they can in one day. While it's not a completely comprehensive count, the 2,000 or so homeless who complete the homeless count survey allows Central Oregon to receive funding from HUD (U.S. Department of Housing and Development) for transitional housing. It also puts a number, if not a face, on the region's growing problem of homelessness, which has more than doubled in the past five years as a result of the recession.

The drive to chainsaw sculptor J. Chester “Skip” Armstrong's house and studio in Sisters is rural, to say the least. Armstrong's home, where he lives with his wife, singer-songwriter Anastacia Beth Scott, is located beyond Sisters Middle School on a dirt road off of another dirt road. When I visited him during the second week of January, it was unplowed and covered in a thick layer of ice. While many might find the location isolating, it provides him with a connection to nature and, as he says, it's as close to urban sprawl as he'll ever be comfortable with.

As rattlesnakes and scorpions slumbered, Greg Willitts and his Honda CRF-450X motorcycle hauled ass beneath the pale moonlight, racing across remote miles of Mexican desert during the brutal Baja 1000 off-road event.
“It’s a trip. I saw distant taillights winking red in the fog and dust. You worry about breaking down and letting your teammates down,” Willitts recalled, relaxing beside a roaring fire at FivePine Lodge, the rustic inn in Sisters owned by his family.

It was necessity, the mother of all inventions, that led Londi Palmisano to come up with a better way to stretch. A former massage therapist for 10 years, Palmisano was working in Austin in the 1990s when she started noticing how many of her clients were complaining of back pain and tightness. Palmisano knew the answer was better stretching, primarily in a backward direction. Even bending down to touch your toes requires a certain degree of flexibility, and certainly bending in a backward direction with ease was nearly impossible.
So Palmisano began to imagine a simple device that would put her clients in the right position and allow them to stretch in a backward direction comfortably and effectively. After talking to a builder, friend Palmisano sketched the outline of her idea.

Cate O'Hagan has a personal connection to the long ago silenced Celilo Falls, the once-roaring river passage on the Columbia river that sustained countless generations of Native Americans who plucked migrating salmon by the dozens from its churning waters.