Art Found

There is a boat permanently moored and half-destroyed in the yard and a metal tree snaking up the side of the chimney. Standing on the front porch is a metal man sawing on the fiddle and in the back yard are Japanese faces painted on side sections of cut logs, propped among the bushes and glaring down.

The Benavidez property is anything but typical; David and Carolyn have made it a reflection of themselves.

“We can’t help but make it ours,” Carolyn says of her unique yard and its decorations. “We love sculpture, and in a way our home is an extension of that.”

All over the yard and within the house are things taken from nature and incorporated artistically in the design and layout of the Benavidez living space.

“We like to take things from nature and put our touch on it,” Carolyn, who has been living with her husband in Colton for the past nine years, says.

One such piece is a rock, about the size of a misshapen basketball that sits on a pedestal on the way to the front door. It is a rock that they found beside a lake in their travels through Canada.

“If you want to talk about adventure, talk about bringing that rock out of there in a little CB plane,” Carolyn says. “It is special in its formation, and it doesn’t look like it weighs much, but that thing must be over 100 pounds.”

David is an artist and a professional arborist while Carolyn focuses solely on art and occasionally shows her work at the Indigo Gallery in Joseph, Oregon. She grew up in Oregon City, and has been practicing art for 50 years, although recently she has slowed down a little.

“I have been kind of on sabbatical for nine years,” Carolyn says.

Many of the features on the Benavidez property are creations of their own, but some are pieces from others.

“We sometimes trade with other artists,” Carolyn says.

One of the most distinctive aspects of the Benavidez yard is the large sardine boat that sits perched on a shallow grassy mound next to the front driveway. The large boat has its backside crumpled in a splintering of wooden planks jutting out in various stages of rot and decay.

“We saw the boat on a trip once and brought it back because we were going to repair it,” Carolyn says. “We never got around to it. We have kind of enjoyed watching it fall apart slowly. We will have to have a little marshmallow roast if we ever decide to burn it down.”

Letting their living space be molded and shaped by the processes of the natural world around them—like letting a boat rot away in their front yard and using fallen limbs in art work—is something that has shaped the progression of their yard decoration and landscape.

“I love to recycle what nature gives us,” Carolyn says.

Even when nature has not given them something to work with, its inspiration is enough. Coursing its way up the chimney in the side of the house is a metallic tree that David worked on for about a month. It starts with a root system and goes all of the way up into branches with a quarter moon sitting on top—all done in Cor-Ten, or weathering, steel. It is a type of metal that changes color without losing structural integrity due to the rusting process.

With things like a boat rotting in the yard and a metal tree clinging to the chimney, the Benavidez house is not a run of the mill place, it is an extension of David and Carolyn’s creativity and they would not have it any other way.

"We enjoy it, and people enjoy coming over,” Carolyn says.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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Learning the Ropes

When I first began my job as the sports editor at the Molalla Pioneer I was more concerned with writing than taking photographs. I just felt less comfortable with the clicking of a shutter than the clacking of a keyboard.

I have been writing ever since I can remember.

Little stories about marooned boys finding treasure on an island full of magic and pirates—normal preteen stuff I guess.

So when I covered my first game the piece of equipment with flashing bulbs and whirring focus sounds scared the crap out of me.

It was a Colton boys basketball game and my main concern was just getting a photo that would pass in the printed page.

Something that would not be blurry, have a face in it and not have too many limbs cut off and floating outside of the pane of the picture—aside from the poor composition it would cause the aspect of floating phantom limbs terrified me.

However, as time passed and I messed up with crappy lighting and blurry action I became more comfortable with the workings of photography. The intricacies of choosing the correct speed, ISO and aperture settings began to settle in on my brain I became better. Sure I failed, but I started to make some progress.

Suddenly I was going into events with shots already framed in my head, planes of focus that I wanted to nail down—moments in the action that would best tell a story.
I am not saying that I am some sort of expert photographer now. There is plenty more for me to learn. But it has struck me how many things in life are the same as my process of learning how to take pictures.

At first you just want to get through it. Just hope that you don’t screw anything up too badly.

However that passes, and if you become comfortable with the thing that were so new before, you are no longer strictly concerned with how to survive, and more concerned with how you can go about the best way to thrive.

To be stuck in the comfortable, the routine, is like pulling out a camera and fearing the clicking sound it makes just hoping that you get something right so you can move onto the clacking of the keyboard.

If you can break out though, if you can experiment and pick yourself up from a fall then you might be able to be concerned with something else, you might be able to put your stamp on something.

The love you give comes back in the end.

Look to the Cookie

In most towns and cities across the country there are a few obligatory landmarks. There is always a post office, always a bank and always food from around the world.

It doesn’t matter if you are in the smallest town in America I would bet good money that they will have a little taco joint, a Chinese buffet, a coffee stand or at least a neighbor who knows how to fry up a good Pad Thai.

We, as Americans, are global citizens whether we like it or not, and it has been that way since we first learned how to pinch pieces of chicken between two sticks.

There is an increasingly heated debate growing up in our nation over issues on immigration. It is the type of hot-button topic that you can only ignore if you close your eyes real tight, clasp your hands over you ears and choose to not get out of bed in the morning.

International influences have seeped into our everyday, and it is not a new occurrence. Unless you are a full-blooded Native American Indian you are an immigrant, and somewhere back in your lineage you were the foreigner.

For many immigrants to our country May 1 has become a day to protest how things are, a day to bring the country’s attention to the fact that there are nearly 12 million foreign souls living within our borders and contributing to who we are and yet feel like they are not being recognized.

Look around you and you will see that the typical image of an American—tow-headed with eyes like the sky—simply is not the norm.
Among our ranks of laborers, workers and student populations is a rising proportion of diversity, and it is growing with each year.

Don’t believe me? When is the last time you baked an apple pie? I bet that you have had 100 more cappuccinos in the last couple months than apple pie.

Maybe we should change the saying to “as American as a tall non-fat double cappuccino.”
Securing our borders from illegal crossing and addressing the high proportion of illegal immigrants in our country, while being related, should be dealt with in completely different manners.

It is one thing to deny a person entrance to the country in the first place, but revoking them residence in our country once they are already established is a completely different thing.
It is different because they are no longer who they were when they came. They are us, and in turn we become a little bit of them. Immigrants to our country invest time, effort and love into their new lives and that is felt from the tangible to the completely intangible.

It is illegal to issue a license to an illegal immigrant, but it is not illegal to provide them insurance. And so insurance companies, with the almighty dollar in mind, have complied and are now providing insurance to anyone who cares to pay for it. And so, in the strictly nuts and bolts manner of thinking, immigrants are contributing to our country, to our economy and to our livelihood.

Then there is the effect immigrants have on our nation that can’t be sliced and diced in clean numbers. The benefit of fresh perspectives and new ways of thinking, the infusion of new talents and skills—and then there is the food.

Foreign food is everywhere, and we love it. While I don’t know the right answer to the immigration issue, to who we should let stay and who we should send packing, I know what our taste buds think. We order pizza for the big game and we drink wine with fancy dinners. Our gullets have always been open, now if we could just do something about our minds.

The love you give comes back in the end.
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