By Anne Duquennois

I arrived in Coquille at a crucial moment in the development of the Riverwalk and it has opened the possibility for me to explore many of my personal and professional interests in what I hope will become a great asset to the City of Coquille and the Coquille River Valley as a whole. The first week of my arrival in Coquille, the city and county had come to an agreement to extend the proposed Riverwalk trail from downtown Coquille to Johnson Mill Pond County Park approximately 2.5 miles upriver. The expansion of the Riverwalk would not only provide excellent walking trails to the residents of Coquille but the length of the newly proposed Riverwalk made the trail eligible to be a regional attraction.

With this agreement, I began assisting on a series of grant applications to help fund different components of the proposed project – including a several grants for interpretive signs along the trail. With my background as a media artist I started exploring different concepts of how to create a memorable educational experience of the trail through alternative models of interpretive signs. My position as a RARE volunteer here in Coquille, allows for a certain degree of freedom that other city employees do not have. I am not paid hourly and my labor comes at such an affordable rate that the scrutiny of task performance is replaced by an expectation for outside the box thinking and experimentation. As such, I proposed the idea of creating interactive audio walking tours to complement the interpretive signs we got funded through grant.

The concept of the audio-walking tour is not new. They have existed in Museums for a while through portable listening devices. With the advent of smart-phone technology, audio tours are not freed from the walls of museums and have been emerging in cities as tools for urban exploration and revealing hidden facts of our day to day environments. Coming from large cities, this gave me the idea to create something similar here in Coquille on the Riverwalk. The benefit of using an online platform is its low cost to develop and maintain and its ability to incrementally expand if more interviews, stories, and facts are desired.

As I was researching the history of the area when I first arrived, I realized that despite its rich and colorful history little is recorded for this particular valley. Most of the knowledge of the area is generalized over the entire south coast of Oregon and the local history is passed down through stories amongst the local characters. The audio tour world provides a platform to capture not only some of the stories but also the voice of the characters in the valley and reveal to walkers some of the little known history of the area as well as preserve it for future generations.

Although I haven’t yet started recording interviews for the Riverwalk, the word about the project has already started to spread. During my regular duties at the Community Building, I have had several locals come visit me and share their stories about the area expressing interest and excitement to participate in the project. Just yesterday, a man came into my office and shared songs that he wrote about the town and the river valley. He had heard about my proposal and was intrigued by the project. He was excited to share his story and suggested several other locals that would be good to interview. I have no doubt there will be a wealth of material to make this project into something great for Coquille and something I can be proud of both personally and professionally.

I applied to the RARE position as I ended grad school from a non-traditional program and I was looking for jobs that would allow me to apply my eclectic set of skills and ideas. Although the city and community of Coquille is that of little means and resources, the willingness of the city staff to experiment with different ideas allowed me to explore projects that would be difficult to envision with such support elsewhere. There are many reasons why RARE is a great program. The job market out there for young adults is rough and finding a position that you can use as a springboard for opening doors in the workforce is becoming sparse. Perhaps this makes RARE well deserving of its name.

Anne Duquennois

Anne received her bachelor’s degree in Urban Planning and Sustainability and in Film Production from the University of Colorado, and she received her master’s degree in Design and Urban Ecology from Parsons: The New School for Design. Between her degrees, Anne worked as a Research Associate for the Rockford Region Vital Signs in Rockford, IL, where she developed databases and created online interactive data visuals. During graduate school, Anne worked as a Videographer and Workshop Instructor through the Parsons School of Design Strategies. During her year with RARE AmeriCorps – Resource Assistance for Rural Environments, Anne hopes to take advantage of both her planning and her design backgrounds in order to take a multidisciplinary approach to her resource management and community planning projects. Anne hopes that the program will help her transition back into the professional world as she applies the knowledge gained through her year with RARE to her future practice.