Days of Discovery By Mikael Krummel
Photos by B. Zyrogerg
On the map
To say that Jim Walker, 65, has a penchant for collecting intriguing items might be an understatement. The foyer of his south Eugene home boasts dozens of exquisite mounted butterflies. A floor-to-ceiling display of ancient Asian ceramics dominates the living room. Petrified wood samples of all shapes and sizes rest on shelves, furniture, and floor space all across his home. So, too, do finely crafted dolls posed in period costumes depicting American folk traditions of centuries past.
But then there are Walker’s maps. Some date back more than 500 years, to just after the invention of the printing press. “Maps,” says Walker, “reflect and guide our perceptions and our ambitions. They inform other people where we think we are, and they are also very important in terms of directing us to where we think we are going.”
Walker is quick to admit that back in his 20s, when he purchased his first collectable map for a few dollars, he had little sense of where his fledgling hobby was headed. In fact, he doesn’t even remember what that first map depicted. But he does remember its attraction: “It was very decorative. It had stylistic features. And it had tremendous antiquity.”
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The past 40 years have seen an evolution in Walker’s passionate but studied approach to map collecting. Early fascination with decorative features like sea monsters and camels and interesting portrayals of topography eventually led to probing questions—why certain landforms carried specific names, why cartographic illustrations of humans were rendered only in particular geographic regions.
By the mid-1980s, Walker realized that his growing map collection would be better served if he cultivated more discipline and a narrower focus. His interest in maps of the Western Hemisphere narrowed to maps of North America; North America gave way to the Pacific Northwest; the Northwest necked down to a focus on Northwest explorations and settlement. Today, the heart of Walker’s map collection covers the Oregon territory from the early 1500s through 1860, when Oregon became a state. Thirty-three of Walker’s larger maps were digitally reproduced in high-resolution by PhotOregon and displayed to the public in February, in the capitol building in Salem, as part of the state's sesquicentennial celebration. One map is from the same printing as the map used to plan the Lewis and Clark exploration, showing a virtually blank area from the Mississippi River to the Pacific Ocean.
“As long as we’re interested in history and how we got to where we are,” says Walker with heartfelt sentiment, “there will be a place for collecting, interpreting, and studying historical maps.”
Olympic dreams
Rosen Manolov, then the head coach of the Bulgarian national gymnastics team, headed home to Europe following the 2000 Sydney Olympics, proud that his men’s team had netted a trio of medals. But the trip home also had its downside. Months earlier, nearly all the athletes on Manolov’s Junior National Team had bailed from Bulgaria to chase their dreams in the United States. The exodus left their coach staring at the ugly prospect of rebuilding a depleted, poorly subsidized national gymnastics program inside a corrupt, struggling former Soviet satellite nation.
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In November 2000, at the urging of a Bulgarian colleague in Oregon, Manolov put his career on ice, kissed his wife and two daughters goodbye, and shipped out for the U.S. himself, hopeful that he could secure a piece of the American dream for his family.
In 2000, Clay Skurdal, a successful businessman from Billings, Montana, also moved to Eugene. Hardly a stranger to the American dream, Skurdal enrolled his 10-year-old son, Ian, at a local gymnastics academy, hopeful that Ian would continue to build on skills he’d practiced since first starting gymnastics at age 2. Manolov would shortly hire on as a coach at the gym.
It’s curious how distant paths can sometimes intersect, then find momentum toward a shared destination.
Skurdal and Manolov immediately struck up a budding friendship forged in faith in Ian’s Olympic potential. Two years on, their friendship adjusted course toward something far less anticipated: the creation of the United States Gymnastics Academy in Eugene.
If Skurdal represents the financial and business foundation underpinning the rapid success of the USGA, Manolov (and his wife, Neli, and daughter Rali―both coaches and former gymnasts) provide discipline, passion, and athletic mastery. In the two-plus years since Manolov and Skurdal opened the USGA, enrollment has vaulted from a single student (Ian Skurdal) to 250 fledgling gymnasts.
“If you were to really look at it,” admits Skurdal, “the No. 1 priority was to make sure my son continued to have top-notch coaching. And I wanted him to have a facility to do it in. But the other side was, I guess, a soft spot in my heart for Rosen and his family. They had struggled and gotten to this country, and here was an opportunity to set them up.”
Wii can work it out
It’s not like you can’t find needlepoint circles and lively games of canasta around Lane County anymore. But video game technology—particularly the Nintendo Wii system—has generated a tsunami of popularity that’s pulling local seniors into a world of high-definition digital golf, tennis, baseball, downhill skiing, and even log rolling.
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Bowling, it seems, is the most widely embraced of the so-called Wii Sports favored by local seniors. Why? Many seniors know bowling from their younger years; they find the video version fun and relatively easy. According to Diane Sconce, supervisor of Peterson Barn Community Center, Wii bowling is especially suited to friendly—and spirited—group competition.
These days you can find grey-haired Wii fans hefting colorful virtual bowling balls down polished virtual hardwood alleys in retirement homes, rec centers, assisted-living facilities, and rehab clinics scattered across our local landscape.
“There are residents who haven’t been able to bowl for a long time because they can’t pick up a ball—too heavy!” notes April Sisk, activity director at Solvang Retirement Community. “Or they’re afraid of falling down because they might slip and slide with those funny shoes on.” Sisk says Wii provides modest exercise without the heavy lifting, and it encourages hand-eye coordination. “It’s also really good for people who tend to be a little confused,” she says. “They have to figure out when to let go of the ball, when to push the controller buttons.”
Kim O’Grady, an occupational therapist at Eugene Rehab and Specialty Care, suggests that Wii’s recreational popularity might actually be surpassed by its potential as a rehabilitation tool. She has used the Wii to motivate and treat geriatric patients with serious physical disabilities, including amputated limbs. Wii Fit software, for example, uses a floor pad as the device controller for personal workout sessions incorporating stretching, strength, balance, and aerobic activities. She says Wii is also being used to treat military vets suffering war injuries.
“I’m seeing more and more stuff about Wii in trade journals,” says O’Grady. “A lot of reports are anecdotal,” she adds, but Wii-habiliation really does appear to work.
Duck Tales Racing towards wellness at UO By Aaron Ragan-Fore
Illustrations by Dan Pegoda
Running the numbers
The Eugene 08 Olympic Trials may have ended a year ago, but the excitement hasn’t ended for some folks stationed at the University of Oregon’s Hayward Field. In fact, the Bowerman Sports Science Clinic, a new initiative of the UO Human Physiology department and located in the Bowerman Building alongside the northwest corner of the track, is just beginning to stretch its legs.
The clinic, founded last year with the support of a gift from Nike, supports Duck athletes, as well as the Oregon Track Club, by providing a range of high-tech performance and endurance tests. The facility’s namesake, legendary UO track coach Bill Bowerman, passed away a decade ago this year.
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Besides building Oregon into the track and field powerhouse it has become, Bowerman popularized jogging as a health activity, and by extension, the idea of physical fitness for average Americans who wouldn’t consider themselves athletes. Bowerman even developed a training regimen for athletes to adjust to high-altitude performance in preparation for the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, a strategy that paid off with Olympic gold.
Bowerman’s spirit “is a large part of our vision” at the facility that bears his name, says UO associate professor and interim clinic director John Halliwill. Available tests include maximal oxygen consumption, cholesterol screening, and aerobic fitness. The cardiovascular testing area houses a high-speed treadmill, stationary bike, and metabolic cart. Future plans for the clinic call for an underwater weighing tank and a 60-foot lane of force plates to measure the strength of a patient’s stride.
The clinic even features an impressive full-body scanner to measure body fat and lean muscle mass, a device, according to Halliwill, that looks “kind of like Star Trek.” Together, the various testing apparatuses add up to a multi-faceted view of athlete health and performance. “We’re trying to have as many ways of looking at the human body as we can,” remarks Halliwill.
Not all those methods are high-tech, however. Halliwill indicates a large electric icemaker in the corner, the type seen in hotels, and quips that ice “is one of the best drugs in the world” for sore muscles.
While the clinic’s primary mission is keeping Ducks in a row, check-up appointments are also available to the general public, at rates Halliwill describes as “heavily subsidized.” Testing packages are available at varying price structures based on the athlete’s level of competition and training, or individual tests can be ordered à la carte. Profits from the testing packages support expenses such as travel to academic conferences for the clinic’s graduate student staff, a program, Halliwill explains, that “beats having bake sales in front of the bookstore.”
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Making the clinic available to the runners, cyclists, skiers, and other athletes of the community “is all based on the idea of getting us out of the ivory tower” of academia, says Halliwill. The wheels of scientific research turn slowly, he explains, and it can often take 15 to 20 years for lab discoveries to help patients directly. “We want to make this knowledge base available,” says Halliwill. “This is something I can do immediately, so I can help someone today.”
Sprint on over to bssc.uoregon.edu to learn more.
Imperiled paradise
Counting hundreds of sea turtle eggs on a beach, bushwhacking for feral goat paths up the side of a forested volcano, and camping out with a colony of waved albatrosses might not sound like the usual beat for a journalist, but it’s all in a day’s work for UO journalism associate professor Carol Ann Bassett.
Bassett teaches a summer course called “Environmental Writing in the Galapagos,” in which she escorts a group of student—mostly journalism and environmental studies majors—around the equatorial archipelago to help them develop story ideas. Students write about the intersection of human civilization and the natural world, and their projects have ranged in topic from recycling and conservation, to tourism and education. One standout project even investigated the Galapagos surfing culture.
Basset herself first visited the Galapagos almost 20 years ago, on assignment to write about the national parks of Ecuador, and quickly fell in love with the landscape. “It’s one of the most extraordinary natural laboratories on the planet,” Bassett says of the islands made famous by Darwin’s 1830s voyage. “These are islands that are ruled by reptiles, not mammals,” she adds, “so it’s like stepping into the Mesozoic.”
Last summer Bassett wrapped up almost a year of living on Santa Cruz Island, researching her new book, Galapagos at the Crossroads, profiling both the people who cause environmental problems for the islands and those who solve them. “My carbon footprint was almost non-existent,” Bassett says of her rustic cabin in the town of Puerto Ayora. Now she’s back on campus at UO, and though Bassett keeps one foot planted in each world, the focus on sustainability remains constant, whatever her location.
“Tread softly,” says Bassett, summing up her primary message. “We do have an impact.”
Track Carol Ann Bassett’s adventures at carolannbassett.com.
Telling it like it is
Are your language skills sort of naff? Does your lack of knowledge of the latest slang make you feel like a beaker?
That’s sort of how UO associate professor Eric Pederson felt, too. He’d attempt to cite an example of current slang speech in one of his linguistics classes, only to have his students smirk at him. “They’d roll their eyes and say, No one says that anymore!” he laughs. Pederson did find a workaround, of sorts: “I ride the bus, and I eavesdrop constantly.” How else could he indulge his professional curiosity on pop culture expressions?
But in 2000, all that changed. Pederson and some of his colleagues were funded with a grant to develop a repository of slang expressions. The students of Linguistics 101—“an army” of fieldworkers, Pederson calls them—gather the expressions as a class assignment, enter them into a searchable online database, and provide a brief description of the speech community from which each term derives. “Twice a year, we have 40 to 100 students going out,” explains Pederson. “Ideally, students are working with a speech community the don’t know well.”
In addition to providing an educational experience for students and raw data for linguists and academics, the database is also used by the general public, just for fun. The online record also helps the curriculum go green, serving as an early-adopted example of a paperless assignment.
And what sort of slang does Pederson himself employ? As an American partly raised in Britain, who has lived in India and the Netherlands and is married to a French citizen, Pederson’s idioms are specific to whichever nationality he’s currently engaging. “In a way,” he says, “I belong to a speech community less than most.”
Using the Slang Dictionary to explore speech communities can even help you prepare for your next cocktail party. Letting loose with a couple of new terms just might make you the most akamai person in the room!
The foyer of his south Eugene home boasts dozens of exquisite mounted butterflies. A floor-to-ceiling display of ancient Asian ceramics dominates the living room. Petrified wood samples of all shapes and sizes rest on shelves, furniture, and floor space all across his home. So, too, do finely crafted dolls posed in period costumes depicting American folk traditions of centuries past.
