We conclude this week’s explorations with a location close to home: Oaks Bottom, a 141 acres nature preserve with a lake, marshland and little streams. Located in SE Portland, with views of downtown and the Willamette, it is home to many birds and other wildlife, in particular scores of herons due to nearby rookeries. Well maintained paths make for easy hiking, and around Christmas the adjacent train tracks are used for a Santa steam engine train which delights children of all ages. The park came into existence because of neighborhood action in the late 1960s when industrial development threatened and was eventually stopped with the city purchasing the area and building the preserve partially on a sanitation landfill.

Between the preserve and the river resides the Oaks Amusement park, one of the oldest in the country. Known as Coney Island on the Willamette it opened on May 30, 1905, 2 days before the Lewis&Clark Exposition.(Short history here:http://www.pdxhistory.com/html/oaks_park.html.) It is a sweet place to visit if you do not mind a high noise level from screaming kids on rollercoasters, loud music from the carousels and lots of voices on the megaphone calling for the next round of fun or lost children. The lead montage is based on a photograph of a little girl dancing there around the pavilion during May festivities.

Today’s painting is the 1916 Merry-Go-Round by Mark Gertler. A letter written by Gertler’s friend D. H. Lawrence in September 1915 mentions wounded soldiers in uniforms enjoying the rowdy entertainment at the fair. Another letter by Lawrence in 1916 describes the painting as “the best modern picture I have seen: I think it is great and true.” This opionion was not widely shared, his work being scolded as modernist and decorative.  The painting is now judged as his reaction to World War I; Gertler was a conscientious objector and quite worried about being conscripted into the British Army.