Nathan E. Lewis

Two weeks ago, while I was waiting for a friend at Ava Coffee Shop in Beaverton, I made eye contact with the boyish smile of Zephyr Moore, Salmon Boy. His fist clutched a broken, plastic license plate frame he had just removed from the bumper of a stranger’s car. Zephyr immediately and cheerily started to tell me how I could stop global warming by ripping off all labels from my clothes. He pointed to his Nikes, in good shape but minus the fabric swooshes. He handed me a thin, light leaflet (4×6) printed on both sides. It reads:
“A body is propelled faster, safer, farther after removing functionless mass (Physics) of advertising labels and covers. How much fuel-air is burned to propel useless car dealer ad covers on daily commutes? If all 132,000 cares on 16.09 km of three-lane freeway packed metal covers, 0.454 kg (a pound), the fuel burned to accelerate only covers is 83.3 liters daily! or 30,400 1/year.
Each liter of fuel oxidized adds 2.4 kg of noxious gas to the local atmosphere. The 83.3 1 fossil fuel burned becomes 200 kg carbon dioxide. Excess C02 is linked to Global Warming. What goes us as noxious gas — add rain — comes down. Salmon silently sip dinosaur soup as drivers mindlessly pack advertising. You — with opposables & notochord — can easily unscrew cover from Plate art, but salmon cannot choose where to spawn. Maximum irony. If you breathe, use fuel-roads or pay taxes; you’ll definitely benefit by removing useless mass on-in car and purse. (Vomit-color patch LEVI pants: 2.5 g dry.)
Zephyr reminds us that U.S. Mail postage to move a pound = $4.05, one delivery, one-way! His slogan = “Salmon carry no baggage!” He writes, “Remove baggage today! What other useless mass can you cut?” He suggest that you cut the tags off your underwear as well. He adds, “W.W.S.D.?” which stands for the question, “What would salmon do?”
I had no idea that Zephyr has the potential of causing a tipping point in the Pacific Northwest and perhaps the U.S.A. Bloggers, attorneys, environmentalists, and others are talking about him and spreading his ideas.
The following article is all over the web, but I think it first appeared in The Oregonian several years ago:

Zephyr Thoreau Moore is the man who wears a homemade fish above his head and who bicycles up to cars at stoplights, motions for occupants to roll down their windows and who announces brightly, with widening eyes, that you can save salmon in particular and the Earth in general by simply using a screwdriver…

Just unscrew and remove those metal rectangles with the car dealer’s name, he exclaims, that frame your license plates.

“They weigh a pound!” he says.

With just another few seconds before the lights change, and all in a single breath, he says each extra pound causes extra wear on taxpayers’ roads while burning more fuel and thereby soiling more water and air and raising a moral question.

“What,” he says, “would salmon do?”

By then the lights have changed. He turns self-reflective. He imagines that for a motorist to glance left and to spot a man with a paper fish on his helmet insisting that it only takes a screwdriver to save the Earth — well, he says, that must take a moment to digest. Yet a moment is all he has before the light turns green again. For that reason he has three versions.

He has the four-second version, long enough to hand his explanatory leaflet of symbols and words through the window and to exclaim, “Your license plate has advertising on it!”

If the light has only just turned red, he goes to medium-long: “Did you know your license plate has the Oregon State Douglas fir tree right in the middle” — and he sticks a hand between his eyes to illustrate this tree — “but that the tree is chopped off on the top and the bottom by advertising for — a CAR DEALER!”

When it comes to the best of venues, such as a peak-hour traffic jam, he has a routine that takes as long as you have, or longer.

“If salmon had vocal chords,” he often ends up, “we would be deaf.”

In an era of some conformity, Zephyr Moore, 51, stands out from the crosswalk crowd. He starts with the nearly microscopic — a few ounces and pounds — and he monologues these into matters of global import: dirty air, global warming, toxic streams.

The paper salmon above his helmet symbolizes one of the creatures he sees at risk. In his war against burning extra gas on functionless mass, he takes cosmetic parts out of his old Chevette and the labels out of his clothing. When people ask why, he asks why not. Everything weighs something, he says, so why take it along for the ride?

He pedals around Northeast Portland and elsewhere, dropping into TriMet and the City Council and the Oregon Legislature with a backpack of visual aids. These include a “Safe Sex for Salmon” sticker, scraps of litter scoured from the roads (”If I don’t pick it up, no one will”) and the clipped-off tip of a fishing pole with dangling license frames.

He asks people to hold the pole — go ahead, just hold it. When the subject complies, he likes to note how the jiggly tension of the pole swiftly tires the fingertips, a symptom that says one pound matters after all.

“That,” he says, “is work!”

A 1980 graduate of Oregon State University, he read works by naturalist Henry David Thoreau and changed his first two names to Zephyr Thoreau around that time as a salute to his environmental interests.

Today he lives in a Northeast Portland apartment with help from a disability pension, the result of effects from a nearly fatal motorcycle accident at age 17. He has done volunteer work for environmental causes, sold vitamins, Amway products and a synthetic lubricant for engines. He devotes parts of his bike commutes to his one-man calling: saving the planet a pound at a time through roadside talks with motorists.

“I’m trying to tickle their brains,” he says, “to cause them to think.”

During a recent hitchhiking mission to the Legislature, he papered lawmakers’ aides with his latest written proposal — to tax car dealers for the weights of their metal license-plate frames.

He calls the frames “ad covers” because they advertise a dealership and cover the artwork fringes of the plate. Moore tells motorists and legislators that if every daily commuter car on 10 miles of three-lane freeway carried metal license-plate frames, the fuel burned to propel only the frames would amount to 22 gallons daily with a related production of 440 pounds of global-warming carbon dioxide gas.

“Thank you for enlightening us,” says a legislative aide as he says goodbye, and Moore replies, “I hope you enlighten your car.”

The next step, he says, is for everyone simply to get those dozens of pop cans out of the backs of the car, plus all the other things that if people were pedaling instead, they would not want to pack around.

He says a pound is a pound, and he tells what propels him to try so hard.

“I love oxygen.”

(Zephyr Moore no longer lives in Northeast Portland, but he resides in Beaverton. You may contact him at salmoneedshade@hotmail.com or by phone at 503-641-2798. Write to Zephyr at 13665 SW Larch Place, #19, Beaverton, OR 97005-3760. But if you post a letter to him, count the cost - mail weighs more than you think!)