Culture

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.

He was supposed to be mining for gold, but by the end of the summer, Jimmy Dorsey wasn't up to his knees in riches, but rather sleeping in his truck and listening to the new Arcade Fire record. He was spending his days working for a commercial fishing outfit while also reflecting on the odd series of events that took him from a career as a prominent realtor outside of Portland to an Alaskan gold mine, where he'd somewhat reluctantly become a star of one of cable television's most popular reality programs.