I go to college in Eugene, Oregon, directly adjacent to my hometown of Springfield, Oregon. Despite my long-term occupancy, however, there are still pockets of Eugene I have barely explored. It’s a relatively small college town, so it’s not like there are infinite hidey-holes and crevices tucked away. Instead, I think the unexplored nooks are due to our tendency to take the familiar, the local, for granted. I decided to take active measures to counter this tendency. A brief venture to the Whiteaker neighborhood in Eugene was my first effort.
I’ve mostly gone to the Whiteaker for Papa’s Soul Food Kitchen or Sweet Life Patisserie. Or sometimes both, which dangerously taxes my stomach capacity. Recently, though, for whatever reason, I was reading a discussion forum on whether or not it’s a good idea to move to Eugene, Oregon. Most of the “cons” described Eugene’s lack of diversity (guilty). One comment called Eugene “no bohemian paradise,” but praised the bohemian vibes in the Whiteaker. Eager to track down these vibes, I elected to check out the weekly Whiteaker Community Market.
The Whiteaker Market proved to be an alternative to the Eugene Saturday Market for those looking for a more intimate, slower-tempo gathering. A handful of booths ringed a gravel lot at the intersection of 5th Alley and Blair. One table featured bars of goat milk soap in scents such as lime patchouli. The business cards stacked on the table proclaimed “Inner Child Studios,” emblazoned with rainbows, the pile paper-weighted by a crustal. A man sold hand-painted portraits done in unusual colors, turquoise hair and scarlet faces. When asked if he paints people he knows, he says the portraits are based on old yearbook photos. “Mostly from the 30s, because I like the short hair, no smiles.”
A band plays songs that mention rain, a bluesy tune about driving from the airport in the rain melting into Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Have You Ever Seen the Rain?” And older man sits at a table listening and reading “Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind.” A wagon of fresh plants, an assortment of lacy overalls, a painting of a whale divided into its musculoskeletal, epidermal, and intestinal layers entitled “Orchanical Apparition.” These sensory details backgrounded by a mural of some kind of tree sprite lying under the night sky, her body festooned in flowers, wrapped in a snake spouting two flowers in place of its forked tongue.
The street art in the Whiteaker is beautiful. As I left the market down the Blair Boulevard, a smoke shop bore mushrooms bear-hugged by a praying mantis against a rainbow background. A woman wearing a wolf head smiled from above a dumpster and canisters of frying oil outside a restaurant.
The restaurants are another reason to love the Whiteaker. I ate at Pizza Research that evening, ordering a pizza complete with pesto, potatoes, and pears. A note on the menu thanked customers for NOT tipping, citing the establishment’s “egalitarian equanimity model of restaurant service” as providing all employees with “a living wage or better. The cost of providing these wages are built into the menu,” a set-up I had never encountered before. Other menu items I tried were the lavender dry soda (too dry, not enough lavender) and my boyfriend’s much better choice of the strawberry honey lemonade, full of crushed strawberries and delicious flavor.
Overall, the trip was a success and more than enough motivation to make it down to the Whiteaker more often. Explore your home community. You might be surprised by what you overlook!
