The Oregon Experiment Read Online Free Page A

birth—who delivered well-worn but clean bundles of receiving blankets, PJs, and onesies. They’d been getting a little supplementary money from Naomi’s parents over the last few years, though mostly Scanlon had tried not to spend it, trying to squirrel it away for times like this. Her parents had put up most of the down payment for the house, too. But now that Scanlon was on a regular salary and they wouldn’t be moving every year, all those extra expenses would settle out. Edmund was right: a couple of young people making it. Well, thirty-six and thirty-nine, but making it.
    Scanlon had ended up here by accident—by luck, really. The Pacific Northwest was the true front line of radicalism in America—environmental demonstrators, anarchists, survivalists, anti-globalists. Seattle erupted when the WTO came to town, not Boston or New York or D.C. Scanlon had traveled across the country to Seattle—partly for research and partly to show his solidarity—and he’d felt an excitement in the streets like nothinghe’d known from the tweedy, Volvo radicals back east. In Oregon his research could be more hands-on, in touch with the players, inside their heads. That’s what was missing from radical and mass movement studies in the East—an understanding of what was happening on the ground. Many of his colleagues at Binghamton and Brandeis wrote exclusively about the sixties, or the forties, or the thirties. They did research in response to other research. Scanlon knew an anthropologist who was a leading scholar on Quechua Indians but didn’t speak Quechua. From a hot-springs resort in Ecuador, on a Fulbright, she did her research by interviewing tourists and watching the TV news from Quito. Scanlon had lost a Georgetown appointment to a man who’d written a highly regarded book about American and French farmers’ attempts to shape national policy. Every few years, over crop subsidies or tariffs, all the farmers in France drove tractors to Paris and parked the length of the Champs-Élysées, holding the street hostage until they got what they wanted. The thought of it made Scanlon’s heart race, but this guy—now two years from tenure at Georgetown—had never bothered even to go to France.
    Scanlon, on the other hand, was jumping right into the chaos. Primary material would fuel everything he did. Spending eight years working in five departments, learning the various methods of all the scholars in his field, he’d now landed in the middle of every source he’d need. Their baby was a month away, his job was tenure-track, and he’d bought his first house. His life was beginning. A new life.
    With a handful of berries he wandered along the back side of the yard toward the blueberry bushes, drawn by an earthy smell like mulch or woodchips but sweeter, more like compost or, he realized with another step, pot. He stopped and, peering ahead through the fog, made out the shapes of two bushes and a standing figure. Suddenly, an ember glowed bright red and Scanlon froze. After a moment, he heard a hissing release of air. The mover.
    Clay held out the joint.
    “No thanks,” Scanlon said. “Want a berry?”
    “I hate fruit.” As Clay put the joint to his lips, Scanlon spotted, on the underside of his forearm, a tattooed Circle-A—an A for anarchy inside an O for order, meaning anarchy
is
order. This was exactly what he’d expected of the Pacific Northwest: the second person he meets is an anarchist. A primary source smoking dope right in his backyard.
    “How do you like living around here?” Scanlon asked.
    The mover rolled his eyes, then took another hit and held it in his lungs.
    Scanlon ate a berry. “I mean, what do you do for kicks?”
    “You a professor?”
    “Yeah,” Scanlon said, apologetically.
    “You have a PhD or something?”
    Scanlon nodded.
    “Where’d you go to college for that?”
    “NYU.”
    “New York?”
    “That’s right.”
    “You know what pisses me off?” the mover said. He leaned