Stale French fries and cigarette smoke have tainted the air of the moving rectangular box. It smells like a sweater after eating at an American café in Oregon before the 2007 ban on smoking in public places. Cold air seeps through the non-sealed part of the folding door to the right of the driver, chilling the passengers and refreshing the scent.

The braided-textured metal seat back cuts into the knees of the heftier riders. Its touch chills through thin jeans.

The windows are framed with a thick, black material, sealing the tinted windows to keep the passengers from air leakage. The scene beyond the glass mirrors is speeding past. Dutch Brothers Coffee. Les Schwab Tires. Mattress Mania. Applebees. Staples. Wendy’s. All big-named chain stores have buildings on this avenue. The economy hasn’t thrown them out of business. Their location on 11^th gives them the edge of accessibility to traffic and parking, ensuring longevity.

A lady in the back of the box coughs. It is the first of fifty coughs she will have before exiting the vehicle. She’s been sick for three months. With no healthcare, she isn’t going to spend the little money she does have to pay for the doctor. She wasn’t eligible for the disability pass to the bus. She’s had to save her money for the monthly pass.

The ride is at a standstill. Fred Meyer lies behind the box. The driver sits and waits for more passengers to hop on. The engine is cut. Silence. A women near the front shifts in her seat. “When is the bus leaving?” No answer. “How long do we have to wait?” she asks. Nothing.

Two minutes later, the driver readjusts in his seat. Putting his book down, he reaches to turn the key in the ignition. Boom, tut, tut. It started.

An aggravating hum comes from the back. The fan dominates the situation, soothing some passengers into submission and tempting the chatty into a louder, more dominant conversation.

The bus turns onto the main road and a passenger pulls the chord. It was not even a block from the station it just left. The passenger could have hoofed it across the parking lot to the other stop. Instead, she sat in her red and black checkered pajama pants and dirty white slippers and read her book.

She slides across the corduroyed seat as the bus pulls to the side of the road. Her sliding and the way hundreds of others have slid across the seat are the reason the seat cushion is wearing thin. The once bright magenta square and rectangle pattern has faded to a light pink.

As the women exits through the front door, another person gets on. It is a regular occurrence in this box. Some stay for five minutes, others ride until the end.

Today the bus has been more restful. With the big game on TV, less people have gone out shopping. A few young lovers have taken a ride to go shopping. The football championship is insignificant to them. Instead, they have planned their days around their time in this rectangular box. It’s Sunday. The box only runs every half an hour.

With the sun darting in and out of sight, it prepares for the final few blocks to its destination point. The bright daylight darts over the people in the box, adding light to a sometimes boring ride.

He isn’t in any hurry. He glides down the sidewalk on his rickety piece of metal. He stops in front of the first house on the Washington cross street. The people have left both their large and small recycling bins out. He peels off the bike and sets the stopper. Bending over the open plastic blue container, he sifts through the recyclables. He grabs a small piece of brown paper bag. He straightens up and places it in the larger recycle bin next to him. It’s unusual; most other scavengers wouldn’t bother to organize the recycling. Bending back down, he finds a bottle worth a nickel. He places it in the orange and white box bungeed behind the seat. Not finding much more, he moves on to the next house.

He circles the first three houses on Washington. He stops at them all, siphoning out the money makers from the goods for Sanipac recycling service.

Working in the chill doesn’t bother him. On his head, we is wearing a beige Army-style helmet. It’s strapped beneath his chin, perfect protection should he lose control and fall of his bike. His hair is hidden beneath the protective article, but his gray beard covers his chin, keeping his face warm.

His legs are cold beneath those faded black jeans, held up by a metallic belt. As he stands there collecting the bottles, the freeze is converting to his legs. He gets back on his bike and moves to the next house to warm up his legs.

His thick black jacket covers his upper half. It looks warm; it resembles the Carhart jackets of an Oregon farmer. It matches the faded black of his jeans. He hasn’t changed his clothes in a while. The durability of the items has kept him alive.

After he looks through the final blue bin of his Washington Street circle, he turns back around. He faces his bike south and checks that both the box of bottles on the back and the thus empty brown basket on the front of his bike are secure. He positions himself back on the bike and moves down the street, in search of more recyclables.

Appleby took over trivia night about a year ago. He had attended trivia for a while with some of the other graduate teaching fellows. It’s one of the activities that helped him adjust to the Pacific Northwest.

When Appleby moved to Oregon six years ago, he didn’t like it. Oregon wasn’t like his town near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. But Appleby adjusted to the Northwest in time. He moved here with his partner and enrolled in the sociology department at the University of Oregon. He earned his masters degree in sociology and began working on his doctoral program in 2004.

Appleby was not always strongly motivated by academics. He even repeated his sophomore year of high school before dropping out. He says he often had run-ins with the principal after challenging his teachers in American history and civics classes. At 18, he enrolled in a Pennsylvania community college. “In order to get into community college in Pennsylvania, there are two requirements: you have to be 18 and breathing,” he says. In those late teen years between dropping out of college and turning 20, Appleby worked in a graveyard as a groundskeeper and a tuxedo factory, measuring pants.

Appleby’s questioning nature got him into a bit of trouble, and if one wanted to check out the Pennsylvania county court records, they might find that he had a few brushes with the law.

Appleby says he never went to high school. “I couldn’t stand the authoritarian nature of it,” he says. “Of someone kind of dictating what we were going to think and not being able to fquestion anything. I felt like it was indoctrination.” In college, however, Appleby thrived. Being able to think for himself is what led to his ultimate success in academia.

In his early years, Appleby was influenced by Bad Religion , his favorite band. He has always admired Greg Graffin, the band’s vocalist who earned his Ph.D. at Cornell University. After earning his Ph.D. Appleby might consider following Graffin’s example, traveling and doing what he loves. “I’ve thought about doing a traveling trivia show or something like that and maybe integrating standup comedy to that,” he says.

Bad Religion’s whole philosophy is to live life the way you want to. Appleby has accepted this philosophy for his own life.

Appleby took a trip to France this last spring. He went on a whim, literally: Monday he decided to go and on Friday he flew out. He said, “I always wanted to go here, so I’m just going to go.” He raised himself to live the way he wants. “I just wanted a break,” he says. He didn’t know French. The whole trip only cost him about 250 bucks, he says. He had been able to use frequent flyer miles from credit cards.

This way of living has caused a few rifts with people in his past. Appleby rarely sees his mother or brother and has only two friends back in Pennsylvania from his early years.

But Appleby’s work at Villard Street Pub has brought him a multitude of new friends. Many of the regular trivia folks go merely to catch up with their graduate teaching fellows. “That’s one of the things I’m most grateful for trivia night- forming a lot of really great friendships,” Appleby says. Appleby, teaching fellow in the Labor Education and Research Center, meets up with friends from many different departments including English, comparative literature, and German.

Fellow GTFs (Graduate Teaching Fellows) Chet Lisiecki and Jacob Barto enjoy seeing Appleby at trivia night. Lisiecki recently helped Appleby co-host and wrote half of the questions. His best round and the one Lisiecki’s team enjoyed the most, was the one matching fictional characters to their addresses. One member of Barto’s team was ecstatic to match Sirius Black to Number Twelve Grimmauld Place, his place of residence.

Lisiecki’s help with the trivia night makes Appleby’s job much easier. Every Sunday afternoon and Monday afternoon, Appleby watches football and works on trivia questions, checking out Wikipedia and other sites for each round of questions, quickly filling up the end of his weekends.

Appleby’s ultimate trivia goal is to make questions and sell them online. “It’ll kind of be like trivia night in a box,” he says.

Until Appleby’s trivia makes it online, trivia enthusiasts can see him Monday night to hear some great R&B hits and play the six rounds to win Appleby’s coveted candy prizes or gift certificates towards their pub tab.

Keegan Warrington and Tate Koenig get ready to take on Africa.

This past February, two fraternity brothers in the Chi Phi house at Oregon State University got an idea in their heads. They were surfing the internet and found the UK’s Adventurists site. Intrigued, the boys looked into the various activities the Adventurists sponsored. Their favorite was the Africa Rally.

When fraternity brother Conner Deeks first heard his fraternity brothers talking about the Africa Rally, he thought it was a joke.  He was surprised when the guys told him in early February they had already put the deposit down. He couldn’t laugh at the idea anymore, his friends Keegan Warrington and Tate Koenig were now committed to taking a dangerous trip from London to Cameroon. It is a journey likely full of danger and difficulties, but through it, the boys hope to change the world in some way, be it their own worlds or the outlook their friends and family have about the world. This trip is their way to jumpstart their non-profit organization, Citizen of the World, or COW.

Koenig’s mother, Jill Koenig says she was a little apprehensive when her son first called her in February. She had mixed emotions; she felt the way most moms do when their kids call about their newest adventures. She says the phone call was more of a courtesy than a call asking for permission. Tate told her all up front, she says, so she wouldn’t be able to nix it later on. Jill Koenig’s sister-in-law, Jill Van Gordon, had done some missions work in Africa. When she heard about the boys’ plan, she shared her concern which only added to the mother’s original reservations.

One of the things Jill Koenig mourns the most is that Koenig will not be home for his 20^th birthday. Koenig is the youngest of three kids. Traditionally, on the kids’ birthdays, Jill will put up Mylar balloons and take them cake in the morning. But Koenig will be somewhere in Europe or Africa on this 27^th of December. Jill jokes that the cake will be sitting around for a while as she awaits his return.

Jill says Koenig, “always has these great ideas,” but that oftentimes the ideas don’t come to fruition. But as for the Africa Rally, she says, “this one didn’t blow over.” Koenig “lives for the moment,” she says. When Jill told her friends about Koenig’s upcoming adventure, one of them said, “This is so Tate.” His mother says he lives by the rule that it’s there, I can do it. Jill is pretty sure none of them know what they’re getting into. Warrington has done more traveling, she says and Koenig has always served as the entertainment on trips. But the wild of Africa is still an unknown. Jill wants the boys to tell her about their crazy adventures after they’ve done them. Don’t call to tell me you’re going to do it, she cries, call me when you’re safe. Jill knows that Koenig is her baby. He always will be. She cringes that the boys only bought one-way tickets to London. She’d at least like to know where they’ll be flying home from.

But the boys’ journey is still unknown. They already sent their Suzuki Samurai over to London with their short list of supplies. Their whole packing list fit on a sheet of white college-ruled lined paper. It didn’t even fill the whole paper, either. The boys joke that all they need are two pairs of underwear, a t-shirt and their 100 Cliff bars. But they took camping gear: a tent, sleeping pads, mosquito netting, and some duct tape.

Koenig is the mechanic for the journey. After the boys bought their vehicle on Craig’s List, they wrangled up some replacement parts for the journey: an alternator, a starter, and a fuel filter. Koenig grew up on a farm out in Canby, where he learned how to work on tractors and other equipment. His time on the farm had nothing to do with naming their organization COW, says Koenig. It was just handy to have Citizen of the World stand for something, as long as you drop “the” Warrington adds.

COW is a self-proclaimed student-operated non-profit organization. Its mission: to inspire awareness of the need for global sustainability and to raise money for real world projects. The boys hope that the Africa Rally will encourage their friends and fellow students to become involved in global philanthropic enterprises.

Warrington took a political philosophy class from a Professor Joseph Roscoe that led him to his focus for COW. “If we have the opportunity and the ability to help somebody, then we should do it.” These are the words Warrington brought back from Roscoe’s class. He recalls the analogy of the lake, whether or not he would jump in the lake to save someone. Of course he would, he says. But if the girl was drowning on the other side of the lake and it was guaranteed to be tough and he could likely face danger, would he still do it? He says yes. He wants to be of service and he knows that COW is an opportunity for him to give back to the world.

Koenig calls their trip an act of voluntourism. Team COW makes up one of 75 teams throughout the world signed up for the rally this year. One of four U.S. teams, Koenig and Warrington are also the youngest team.

Team Cow will be able to see parts of the world they haven’t visited yet, and the boys will be volunteering their time at the end of the journey as well as donating money to the charities the Africa Rally supports. The three African charities Rally goers are supporting this year are the Rain Forest Foundation, Ape Action Africa, and Send a Cow. When the boys finish the rally in Kribi, Cameroon, they hope to volunteer for at least two weeks at the local orphanage. This roughly would bring them back to America in mid-February. The rally could take anywhere from 6 to 8 weeks. They plan to spend time with the people in Cameroon before heading home where they will inevitably enjoy a warm shower and face a little culture shock.

Both boys have experience with world travel. Koenig has gone to Nicaragua a few times for mission trips, but Warrington spent an entire year traveling around Asia. Warrington’s mom, Debbie Hennessy, is very excited for the Africa Rally. She feels incredibly proud while scared for her son’s safety. She realizes that this is a great opportunity, but reading about a group at last year’s rally has left her feeling a bit frightened. Knowing that two boys ended up stranded in a Nigerian prison doesn’t help a mother’s nerves. The fact that they were released from prison might help a bit, but Warrington and Koenig’s slight figures alone bring Hennessy a little anxiety. She wishes the guys were burlier. What mother wouldn’t? If the guys were a little bigger, maybe she wouldn’t be as worried about the trials ahead. Her faith is what’s encouraging her to let it go. She wants her four kids to grow, to see the world and learn from other cultures. That said, she still wakes up at two in the morning on occasion, wondering where her kids are and how they are doing.

The boys have been working to raise $20,000 for the Africa Rally. Some of this goes straight to the charities. Other chunks go towards their gas and a little bit goes with them in the car along with a few cartons of cigarettes the boys will use to bribe border patrol to let them through. “We don’t smoke,” Warrington says, but they have been told that cigarettes can go a long way to get travelers out of sticky situations. “If someone chooses to rob us, it’s almost safer for them to just kill us and take our stuff rather than to hold us at gunpoint and take our stuff. That part is kind of spooky,” Warrington says. The boys joke that they didn’t buy plane tickets home because quite frankly, they could never make it home, a joke their mothers would likely disapprove of.

As the boys prepare for their departure from Portland International Airport, they are racing to take their finals early and finish any last minute trip plans. They have their map, their car is in London, and their plane tickets to London are set. The rest is still pretty much unknown. “Our route’s still not finalized. We just kind of go with the flow that works. We can’t really plan a route out,” Koenig says. “We don’t even know what roads are actually there.” And with those plans, these boys are heading out to the unknowns of Africa.

Kari Karr has learned to live with cystic fibrosis

At nine months old, Kari was diagnosed with cystic fibrosis, a genetic disease that causes mucus to build up and clog some of the organs in the body, usually the lungs and the pancreas. Kari, however, experienced other organ failure. At age 14, she underwent a liver transplant. During that year, which would have been a monumental freshman year of high school, Kari spent most of her time in hospitals and at home recovering. When she returned to high school, she was considered the sick kid, a name that stuck to her for all four years of high school. But as she approached age 18, the brink of adulthood, Kari was asked to forget about her illness and focus on her last childhood wish.

Children with life-threatening medical conditions have been referred to the Make-A-Wish-Foundation since the first wish was granted in 1980. When Kari’s doctors first talked to her about the wish, she thought it was unnecessary. She felt blessed with a great family and friends, but when the Foundation pursued her as a Make-A-Wish child, Kari agreed to let them grant her a wish.

Kari’s first thought was to give her wish away, to the family of the 4-year-old boy whose liver had extended her life. Unable to locate the donor family, Kari had to come up with a new wish. After much contemplation, she decided that she wanted to meet a fashion designer in New York, Catherine Malandrino. So began her four days in heaven.

The first surprise came during a layover on the way to New York. She received a call inviting her to ring the opening bell for the New York Stock Exchange. She was excited but nervous. Kari describes herself as a shy person. She felt pressure from the TV cameras and the crowd and was intimidated. The process of bell ringing wasn’t complicated, but the crowd seemed a bit daunting. “There’s this panel of buttons and you’re only allowed to push the big red one, you know, the one you think you shouldn’t touch.” People warned her she would be booed if she did it wrong, but when she stood smiling on the platform, preparing to push the red button, she was cheered. The bell clanged repeatedly before her brother, Dylan gave her a high-five.

When they weren’t stationed in front of the press at the New York Stock Exchange, Kari, Dylan, and their parents, Rick and Kelly toured around New York City in a limousine. From the shops on Fifth Avenue to the Gershwin Theater to see Wicked, the family toured the city worry free.

For one of the four days, Kari got to hang out with Catherine Malandrino. As a freshman at Oregon State University, Kari was hoping to major in apparel design. Kari didn’t know much about the designer until she was planning for her trip. But Kari was fascinated by Malandrino’s technique: pairing ruffles and chains in the same piece. Kari describes the style as “feminine with an edge to it.” To Kari, Malandrino “takes the European French woman and the business class woman of the United States and puts them together.” While they were hanging out at Malandrino’s warehouse, Kari and Kelly tried on many of Malandrino’s dresses.

But it wasn’t her day with Malandrino or her morning with the New York Stock Exchange that makes Kari cherish her New York experience more than any other trip. It was that none of the people treated her like a sick kid. “Everybody knew that I was there as a Make-A-Wish Child. But not one person asked me what was wrong with me.” For those four days, “I wasn’t sick. I was just like a normal person.”

Kari has never allowed herself to dwell on her illness. She does her best to live life in the most typical way possible. As a sophomore at Oregon State University, she’s living in the Courtyard, a Christian Co-Ed Cooperative with a group of friends she refers to as her brothers and sisters. When she comes home for one or two weekends a month, she and her brother, Dylan, sit in the same room and study together. They both have work to do, she says, but they find comfort in staying close to one another. 

Kari, her brother Dylan, and her mom Kelly, travel together for Kari's medical trips.

She watches him play golf, and he sticks with her when she’s fighting for her health. This past week, Kari ended up in the hospital. She was suffering another case of liver rejection. Instead of leaving on a planned vacation, her parents drove Kari down to Stanford, to a hospital she has frequented enough to make it a second home. This was just one of the five times Kari has been hospitalized in the past year.

Through it all, Kari remains positive. She feels very blessed in life. Her family has been her biggest support group. Her faith and her church family have helped get her through the toughest times. She says that her church family helps her see the power of prayer. Friends from the Courtyard have become like another family while she stays in Corvallis. The people and relationships in her life make her grateful. Even without her dream trip to New York, Kari believes she’s a lucky girl.

But those four days in New York were nothing short of ideal. The Make-A-Wish Foundation helped Kari feel like a celebrity. Her family was there to enjoy the ride without any stress, simply being happy together as the Make-A-Wish people rolled out the red carpet for Kari.

On October 21, the Eugene City Council, the mayor, and others met at a City Council Work Session to search for new ways to encourage people to come downtown; parking was one of their main focuses. Many Eugene City Council Members, including Councilor Taylor, said that if parking were free, people would go downtown.

Credit card parking meters were placed on Broadway from Lincoln to Willamette to accommodate more people. The theory is that more people will drive downtown if they don’t have to worry about change for the parking meter. The credit card meters are part of a 90-day trial after which the city will determine whether or not to invest in the convenient machines.

This summer, the city piloted a free-parking program. Street parking was free along downtown Broadway for July through September. Council Member Mike Clark reported that during the month of free parking, the number of people downtown multiplied by three.

The city continues to look for solutions to downtown parking, including a 90-day trial for credit card parking meters on Broadway from Lincoln to Willamette.  

Parking is one of the city’s four project areas for downtown. The other three are public safety, attractions and amenities, and jobs and redevelopment.

Public safety concerns keep people from downtown. Councilor Taylor believes in the possibility of working more closely with social services to “redirect the energies of the young people.” City Council President Alan Zelenka said the vacant store fronts are what bring about some of the public safety issues. Without traffic in and out of buildings, vagrants congregate in front of the buildings, causing issues in public safety, he said

This summer, Eugene Police worked to clear up the loitering in front of Eugene Public Library and around Eugene Station. Eugene Police tried to get a handle on public safety by adding four police officers to the downtown district. For the summer, six officers patrolled the downtown area on bicycles.

City Councilor Chris Pryor was concerned with the city’s plan for building the downtown economy. He believes in investing in the foundation of downtown. Temporary help won’t provide longevity. When the economy picks up again, the city should be proud of improvements to building structures and filling vacant lots, he said. He does not believe loaning money to help startup businesses is appropriate. Helping individual business owners is not his goal. Instead, he would like to work on buildings downtown so businesses will have better places to grow once they find their own financial backing.

At the meeting, the City Council passed the motion to continue with the downtown strategies with a vote of 5 to 2. The two opposing votes came from Councilor Taylor and Councilor George Brown. Councilor Brown wants the city to hone their efforts to the problem areas on Broadway and Willamette. Councilor Taylor’s main concern is parking; she was not satisfied with the motion on the table and voiced her concern.

Mayor Kitty Piercy said that the City Council has always been dedicated to investing in the downtown. Councilor Clark compared the community to a house, the peoples’ house. He said that downtown should be the living room, not the bathroom.

McDonald was on trial for failure to appear in court. This case stemmed from the original case from late 2007, a felony for car theft. When McDonald didn’t show up for his sentencing a warrant was issued.  

With a criminal record dating back to 2003, McDonald has dealt with Deputy District Attorney David Montgomery before. He has been charged with possession of a methamphetamine, two counts of unauthorized use of a vehicle, possession of burglary tools, possession of a stolen vehicle and eight counts of failure to appear.

McDonald was cuffed at the hands and feet. His face held no expression beneath the stubble on his chin. He sat still and silent during the sentencing of another inmate. He said nothing until the judge gave him his turn.   

 McDonald was sentenced to 3 years probation with 30 days time served. But Montgomery said that should McDonald violate his probation, he will automatically serve 16 to 18 months in prison.

McDonald’s attorney said that McDonald is ready to become a responsible veteran, just ten years after he served in the U.S. Army in Kosovo. McDonald’s attorney claims that when released, McDonald wants to go to work and that McDonald also understands what will happen if he violates his probation.

As the case came to a close, McDonald smiled for the first time, lighting up his roughly shaven, long, sunken face.

Plants were gathered up and placed in a truck.

Thursday night, police busted up a marijuana grow on Old Lorane Road just outside city limits. Nine people on site were interviewed when the police overtook the property. Police had known about the operation since August of this year but have been gathering evidence for the warrant. The operation had grown substantial from the initial information according to Captain Chuck Tilby. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Tilby of the 48 10-foot-wide plants which averaged 8 to 10 feet in height. The property was being rented. Tilby mentioned that firearms, crossbows and baseball bats were positioned around the property for easy access in case the property was searched.