One day in Oregon

I stayed in Grants Pass with my hostess Lauren--in the green Malibou shirt--and her housemates. The guy in the picture is her friend Dave from Pennsylvania. He's been WOOFing and was on his way to another project down in California. He's been vegan for seven years and doesn't smile much. He had some crazy stories about WOOFing in the spring, although he didn't seem to know how interesting those stories were. He told me he squatted with friends in San Francisco for a few weeks while waiting for another WOOFing job. Apparently the situation is not very simple, and it's even more difficult for volunteers when they don't have their own transportation. He hitchhiked down to the Cali. place the day I left the house.



People at various stages of life were at the glass doors of the Good Will. The store opened at 10 a.m. When the doors opened, we all rushed inside. There were boxes large enough to have delivered washing machines and inside these boxes were clothes of many sizes and styles; a mishmash of adults and childrens' and underwear and fancywear.

I began picking through an untouched box as the sounds of others digging through shoes, books, appliances and other clothes, tumbled around me. A woman with her child joined my box and she started tossing armloads of clothing into the empty wooden pen beside the box. "This makes it easier," she told me, "So you don't keep looking at the same stuff."

"Do a lot of people come here?" I asked.

"Yeah, a lot of times people buy here and then sell again later."

"What are you looking for?"

"I'm looking for anything leather."

"I think I saw--" I said, reaching back into the box.

"No, it was fake," she said, moving on to another box.

An older guy moved great heaping piled of clothes faster than I could sift through them. Many fell onto the floor. "I only come here for the Levis," he said. I wasn't sure if he meant the jeans of the name brand.

I brought my 5 or 6 girl shirts to the counter, wondering if I'd have enough money to pay for it all. The price was 70 cents a pound. "Two eighty-seven," the woman said, after weighing my new clothes. That would have cost me at least $20 at Salvation Army, or $60 at Marshalls.