Thank goodness for local writers! I read them wherever I live. When I moved to Eugene I read the local writers I knew about, Ken Kesey and Richard Brautigan, both heroes of the counterculture I swam with in my student days in the ’60’s and ’70’s — a counterculture still thriving in Eugene over 50 years later.
One of the current crop of Eugene writers I admire is novelist Dan Armstrong. His 2019 novel, Blake College, is set in the Eugene of 1970, two years before Armstrong landed here as a long-haired hippie student activist fresh out of Princeton. He introduces Eugene in in the Prologue: “Backpackers with bedrolls, hippies jammed into wildly painted Volkswagen buses, college dropouts, bicycle enthusiasts, war veterans, war protesters, were all part of the crowd that filtered through the small college town at the south end of the Willamette Valley.”
It was the time of the birth of the Saturday Market and the Oregon Country Fair: welcome to a tie-dyed counterculture of protest and liberation, peace and the New Age, the Whole Earth Catalogue and Woodstock, communes and the environment, pot and mushrooms, sex and nudity. Life was a celebration — though there was a dark side to it, too.
Armstrong came to Eugene and stayed. The culture felt right, and he wanted to write. He studied the moment he was in, and took notes. He claims the characters in the trilogy are based on real people, and its many plots reflect real events. He worked on the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project — “an effort to rebuild the western Oregon food system through the increased production of organic, locally grown and consumed staple crops.”
He created his Mud City Press to publish that guide and other local work, then started writing novels himself. Blake College is his 10th, and the first in the Eugene Trilogy. Quicksand (2022) and Stella (2024) follow the same characters through the ’70s and ’80s. Stella, the baby born at the end of Blake College, and Travis, the high-school detective from Quicksand, fall in love in Stella, 18 years later.
All three books begin with a mystery to solve. In Blake College it’s “Who bombed the University of Oregon’s ROTC building?” There follow realistic stories about teachers and students, workers, farmers and craftsmen, communes of all kinds, hippies and activists of every stripe, left and right, and a couple of middle-class post-hippie families whose kids will eventually fall in love. But there are a lot of conflicts in the mythical Eugene of 1970.
After establishing the main plot of an experimental hippie college (there really was a Blake College), the novel introduces two guys — Spikes, a roughhouse Vietnam vet trying to break into Eugene’s student rental market, and Ray, a college dropout recently arrived from the East Coast. They have to disassemble a couple of WW II Quonset huts and rebuild them somewhere in Spikes’ rental empire.
These two guys are way different, but way alike, a fascinating friendship. It’s amazing how complicated and difficult the Quonset hut job turns out to be. You’ll believe from the writing that Armstrong must have done this terrible job himself. (He did.)
Many chapters later, the same team, Spikes and Ray, will move a large house across town, pretty much by themselves; we’ll learn how that’s done, too, in amazing detail, and we learn a lot about the two characters along the way. There are dozens of episodes like this in the three novels: How do you save a doe with a dead fawn already breeched? How do you engineer a passive solar greenhouse? Armstrong seems to know everything, and everything feels relevant.
To add to the pleasure, local readers will recognize Eugene’s streets and alleys, houses, stores, restaurants, bars, farms and forests. It makes a surprising difference, when you read a novel, to know the settings. Quicksand and Stella star a bunch of kids from South Eugene High School.
I stress the books’ realism because as they progress, a second reality is gradually introduced, a New Age fantasy of an alternate universe, a universal consciousness and an inter-galaxy rescue mission! Good grief! Armstrong calls this unexpected plot “psy-fy,” but I call it magical realism, as in the great novels of the period, 100 Years of Solitude and Midnight’s Children. It seems totally right for the Eugene setting. The deepest meanings of the Eugene Trilogy are to be found in this crazy-but–wonderful psychedelic fantasy set into a tough real-world narrative.
Quicksand doesn’t spend much time with the fantasy plot. Armstrong calls it “a Hardy Boys mystery written for a mature audience.” The kids from South take on the mystery of three girls’ suicides, suspecting they’re linked somehow. They’re horrified by what they discover, and readers will be horrified, too. [Trigger warning: some scenes may be disturbing.]
On the other hand, several chapters are taken up with Little League baseball. Armstrong was a sportswriter in one phase of his wanderings; he can call a baseball game like a pro. It’s delightful and surprising, set in stark contrast to the grim turns of the mystery plot.
So we have detailed descriptions of life in the Eugene of 50 years ago; but Armstrong thinks of the novels as explorations of consciousness and the future of humanity, how to live in full harmony with Nature — with a little help from the mushrooms, of course. Stella is actually subtitled “The Mushroom Girl from Outer Space.”
In Stella, the third novel, the mystery plot has to do with an accidental killing — a gun-toting half-wit from an End-Times commune kills an old hippie in a bar out in Cheshire, with a random pistol shot, and all present, including a biker gang, vow to hush it up. Where’s the body? The kids from South, including Travis and Stella, are on the case. It’s a hippie dreamscape utopia coming to its inevitable end, and Armstrong somehow makes it all very moving. The trilogy ends with the most beautiful and innocent sex scene I’ve ever read — a supernatural/spiritual downbeat/upbeat for sure. I might be crazy, but it might make you cry.
If you’re old enough to remember those decades in Eugene, and even if you’re not, I certainly recommend Armstrong’s Eugene Trilogy.
Find Eugene Trilogy at MudCityPress.com or at the Artists and Authors Book and Crafts Sale at the Fairgrounds Dec. 14.