ghost towns, stonehenge, and crazy panda robots

My old pal Jenn Keyser has been in town visiting from Chicago. She lived in Portland for several years, and during that time we were in bands together, helped each other with various art projects, and served as a general spark-plug for each other’s creative ventures. So naturally I decided that we should pack up my mini van and head east in search of ghost towns and other adventures.
We headed east following the Columbia River, and made our first stop in The Dalles to pay a visit to the Salvation Army Thrift Store. Jenn is a first rate thrift store shopper who always has good luck. She pretty much taught me how to thrift back in the day, and since then has taken it pro. Jenn’s good luck held, immediately finding an arm-full of vintage dresses while I found not one, not two, but thirty-three crazy robotic panda bears. We bought the place out of pandas and got back on the road, pondering the name “The Dalles” and wondering if there are any other US cities whose name starts with “The”. It’s really kind of awkward, especially when you realize that there is also a “West The Dalles” (wouldn’t “The West Dalles” be easier to say?). Apparently, The Dalles was named by French-Canadian trappers and meant ‘flagstone’, but in the vernacular the meaning is closer to “a place where water is confined by rocks,” and clearly is in reference to the physical terrain of the area and how the Columbia Gorge becomes noticeably steeper at that point. The area was first referred to as The Dalles (though I suppose it was probably Le Dalles??) but then it became Fort Dalles in the mid 1800s. After a couple more name changes, it went back to being The Dalles 1860.

From The Dalles we continued east and crossed the Columbia over to the Washington side of the gorge. We stopped in and took a tour of the Maryhill Museum, an art museum out in the middle of nowhere that is housed in a giant stone mansion built in the early 1900s by business tycoon Sam Hill. Hill always intended to live in the mansion with his family, but his crazy life style kept him moving around so much that they never moved in. In the 1920s he decided to turn the empty mansion into an art museum, and his friend and fellow art collector Queen Marie of Romania donated much of her art collection to the new museum. Down the road from the museum is the even more peculiar full-scale replica of Stone Henge that Hill built as a monument to soldiers killed in World War I. Hill was a Quaker and a pacifist, and at the time he held the popular (though incorrect) notion that the original Stone Henge was an ancient sacrificial site, and his idea was that a full-scale model of Stone Henge would serve as a reminder that “humanity is still being sacrificed to the god of war.”


(jenn + matt with sam hill)
The ‘Henge’ seemed like a good launching point to go find ghost towns, so we veered off the back roads and on to the back-back roads and began searching. Thunderclouds rolled in just as we found a beautiful old abandoned gas station, making the sky dark and dramatic. After shooting a few feet of film we continued driving around admiring the dramatic sky that was now showering us with rain and occasionally lightning bolts. I had to slam on the brakes when a deer jumped out into the road just in front of us. Luckily we missed the deer and didn’t drive off the road, but the thirty-three boxes of panda robots that had been stacked in the back where now scattered throughout the van. It was as if there was an eruption of pandas and they were now finding refuge in every nook and cranny of the vehicle.
We continued driving along, admiring a particularly striking bunching of clouds on the horizon, and as if a stroke of Jenn Keyser thrift-store luck hit us, we both noticed what looked like an incredible old abandoned structure out on the distant horizon. There is no way we would have noticed this old place had the crazy sky not drawn our attention to that particular point on the horizon, so in a double take we quickly pulled the van to the side of the road and busted out the binoculars. Sure enough it was an old two story pioneer home, and it was about half a mile away on the other side of a barbed wire fence with ‘no trespassing’ signs posted all over it. The sky was dark and lighting was flashing all around us, so we took that as a sign that we had no choice but to grab the camera and tripod and hop the fence to go investigate. I am not the type who would usually volunteer to walk through a field holding a metal tripod during a lightning storm, but when the light is just right it is hard not to go with it. Hollywood productions spend millions of dollars to try to recreate what we had directly in front of us, but light changes quickly so we had to grab it while we could. Plus I can now say that I have put my life on the line for my silly art project.

(view from the road)

(and then a little bit closer)
That is the thing about wandering around with a camera. Light and weather change an environment so much that settings change on a daily basis. I have been walking underneath the east side of the Fremont Bridge on nearly a daily basis for the past decade, and I still notice new things about it each time. That underpass is in just about every movie I have ever made, and it probably will be in at least a few more. Some of these ghost towns are the same. I have been out there so many times that now it’s just about seeing what happens… waiting for the perfect light and creating opportunities to be surprised. It’s all about taking the time to look at things, which really does take a lot of time.
The next day back in Portland we were excited to get batteries and fire up the pandas. We weren’t really sure what was going to happen and once we got the batteries inserted the panda’s eyes lit up green and they started mulling around the boat house. It was like a scene out of Gremlins, only real! I’m not sure what is going to happen with the pandas, but it is sure to be interesting.