by Chris Duffin
In difficult times, we may not be able to fall back on comfort. When times are hard and we long for something better, perseverance may be the only thing we can fall back on. All we can do is resist the temptation to give in and reach out in search of charity, figure out how to make our situation better, and then do the work that will ultimately bring us success. In the darkest times, perseverance is an indispensable ally.
Rebuilding Our Lives in Paulina
When my family first left La Pine, Pat succeeded in securing a job logging timber in the Ochoco Mountains. These mountains are around three hours’ drive from La Pine, which is located in the central corridor of Oregon. As we traveled east, away from the mountains and the sea, some regions of mountainous terrain rose out of the desert. The Ochoco Mountains is one of these.
It was summer when we moved. We set up our camping trailer in the mountains, and Pat went out logging while my mom and us kids explored the area. Before long, I noticed that when Pat arrived home, he was exhausted and in a lot of pain. I saw that he strapped up his wrist with a brace before he left for work every morning. I asked what was wrong and he admitted that he was finding it difficult to keep up with the younger men with whom he was working. “I can out cut them,” he said, “but keeping up with them around the hillsides is proving a real challenge.” Pat’s boss was all over him for his lack of speed and, within a few weeks, he was let go.
Shortly after he lost the logging job, Pat told me that his arm was broken. He broke it before I was born, perhaps ten or fifteen years earlier. He had been living in California, working for a private contractor digging out swimming pools. The firm built pools located in tight spaces, where it was impossible to bring in excavators, so Pat and his coworkers were responsible for digging these pools by hand with shovels.
While he was doing this job, he broke his arm at the wrist. Although he went to a hospital and had his arm placed in a cast, he needed to get back to work as soon as possible. He waited until he thought the arm was healed, cut the cast off, and went back to work. Unfortunately, the bones in his arm had not fully mended. They moved back and forth as he worked, wearing a gap between the ends of the two fractured bones.
He could hardly have picked a worse profession to grit his teeth and power through with a broken wrist. The chain saw he used for logging required a lot of strength and sent painful vibrations through his arm while he worked. He did it because he needed to make a living and take care of his family. Unfortunately, the state of his arm gradually became untenable. In the Ochocos, it became obvious that he couldn’t continue to work in logging.
Pat losing his job was our cue to make a move out of the Ochocos. Initially, we headed into the nearby town of Paulina, located about an hour further east of Prineville. Prineville had a population in the region of five thousand. Paulina consisted of a small general store, a one-room schoolhouse, and little else. To reach our favorite resource, the public library, we needed to make the hour’s journey into Prineville.
When we realized that the area was rich in semiprecious gemstones, we began educating ourselves on the subject. The region had a rich geological history and had been home to rich agate beds, along with deposits of petrified wood, jasper, thunder eggs, and fossils. Most of these were mined or removed decades before our arrival, but we used to enjoy wandering a short distance out of town and picking up the few shards we could find.
While the pickings were minimal, our location piqued my parents’ interest in geology. With a library in the area, they took the opportunity to research the local geology and learn about the extensive deposits of semiprecious minerals close to our home. Pat and my mom loved to read and were always researching some new interest. The combination of living in Paulina and having access to a lot of information about the geology of the area sparked their curiosity into life. They learned about agate, jasper, and thunder eggs—the state rock of Oregon.
Thunder eggs were formed when Oregon was an underwater seabed. Volcanic vents bubbled beneath the surface, infusing the mud and clay of the sea floor with bubbles of air. Over time, these bubbles filled with a rocky substance named rhyolite, which formed the thunder egg’s outer core. Then, agate and other minerals leeched into the “egg,” filling the hollow center and creating the thunder eggs that would be discovered around Prineville millions of years later. Janis and my mom continue to mine them to this day.
As our interest in geology grew, we took advantage of the warm weather to relocate up into the Ochocos. We spent most of that summer researching, hiking, and digging. Most of the dig sites near Paulina and the Ochocos were exhausted in the 1960s and ‘70s, so there wasn’t much for us to excavate. With Pat unable to work in logging, our income was minimal.
Geographically, Paulina was an interesting area. It was a plateau, surrounded by valleys. In the valleys, perhaps a thousand feet below the plateau, were rivers, grassland, and a ranching community. The uncultivated land was mostly sagebrush.
Like Hyampom, Paulina was barely a town. It consisted of a general store, a rarely used community hall, and a two-room schoolhouse. It was a place where ranchers and their families could pick up supplies without needing to drive an additional hour into Prineville, and for kids up to eighth grade to go to school and get an education. The ranching community was spread far and wide across the grassland, so although the population was small, Paulina served people from far afield.
The owner of the general store offered to rent us a small house behind the store, which became our home base. One of the areas we liked to dig was in the Ochoco Mountains called Whistler Springs, which was an old thunder egg dig site. The site had already undergone decades of digging, mostly by day diggers. This meant that there were still numerous treasures to be mined at a deeper level.
Our modus operandi was to find an old, disused hole and dig down further than anyone had previously gone. Alternatively, we looked for trees or tree stumps and dug close to the roots, where fewer people had dug previously. The first fifteen or twenty feet were overfill—dirt that had been moved from hole to hole over the years. Below that depth, we had a real chance of finding thunder eggs. We spent a month out in Whistler Springs, digging deeply into the ground and pulling out thunder eggs to sell.
Unfortunately, Pat had another accident. He was twenty-five feet down in a hole, digging for thunder eggs, when he hit a hollow one with his pickax. The thunder egg exploded into flames, filling the entire hole with thick, acrid smoke as it burned out. We’ll never know exactly what was in the center of the thunder egg. Whatever it was, Pat climbed out of the hole hacking and wheezing, and spent the next week shaking and sweating in bed. After that, we closed our digging season and returned to Paulina. We settled in for the winter and I returned to school.
Pat remained sick for months. Although he went to see the doctor numerous times, we never understood exactly what was in the smoke he had inhaled. The effects, however, were permanent. Pat sustained permanent damage to his lungs, to the extent that any physical activity made it hard for him to breathe. He became asthmatic and began using an inhaler.
Despite Pat’s diminished physical condition, life in Paulina was initially relatively comfortable. We had electricity, television, and heating. Admittedly, the TV could only receive one station, and even then, the picture was sketchy. To watch Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy, we had to adjust the antenna to precisely the right position to reduce the snowy screen.
As we were in a ranching area, stalls housing cattle surrounded our little home on three sides. This meant that we lived with the constant stench of cattle dung and made us vulnerable to infestations of horseflies. Nonetheless, we were quite happy. We were warm, dry, and the property was incredibly cheap.
Battling the Cold
Out on the plateaus of eastern Oregon, it doesn’t snow much; the clouds dump all their precipitation before traveling so far inland. Our first winter in Paulina, we saw about an inch of snow. It does, however,
get incredibly cold.
Prior to Christmas, I went to school in dirty clothes, with my shoes so worn that they were falling off my feet. I typically picked shoes at Goodwill and wore them until my toes poked through the deteriorating leather.
Everyone in the community knew that we were dirt poor, so several people got together to present my parents with boxes of food. I think some people even donated cash. I loved their thoughtfulness. My parents, however, were extremely upset. They said that we could get along on our own and that they didn’t want our family to accept charity. We didn’t ask for the food or money, so they found the whole thing insulting and returned the donations.
They may have made it harder to get by, but they wanted to feel that they were working for whatever they had. Even so, we did access some level of government support in the form of food stamps and other programs. Without that, we would have been unable to survive at times.
Over Christmas break, the temperature was so low that the oil inside our oil tank froze. This tank contained the oil we used to power the oil heater that warmed our house. For it to freeze, the temperature must have dropped as low as -40 or -50 degrees. Our landlord brought over an electric blower heater to thaw out the oil heater, and still it took about a week before the oil thawed enough for us to turn on the heat. We were without heat for approximately three weeks in -40-degree weather.
While we waited for our oil heater to become usable again, I went out to look for tiny pieces of wood we could burn. Pat was still incapacitated from his illness, so it was down to me to do what I could to provide the house with heat. With hardly a tree or shrub to be seen on the grassland surrounding Paulina, I resorted to seeking out old fence posts and chipping them into tiny pieces.
There was a small gap in the front of the oil heater, intended for people to reach in and light it. We stuffed these tiny chips of wood into the heater, lit them, and used them as our only source of heat. In effect, we jerry-rigged the oil heater to serve as a wood-burning stove.
During the weeks our oil heater was out of commission, the temperature inside the house was probably below zero. This meant that the water lines were also frozen. The temperature was so low that, after Christmas, when it warmed up to -7 degrees, it felt warm to me. The sun was out, there were no clouds, and I went out on my bike and rode around in short sleeves.
When my sisters and I played outside during the winter, we didn’t have appropriate clothing. We played in the snow in jeans. Sometimes we went up into the mountains and did some sledding, wearing no more than jeans and tennis shoes. We used socks as gloves. By the time we finished playing, our fingers and toes were completely numb, but we didn’t think anything of it. It seemed normal.
As winter faded away and spring began, grass began to sprout in the yard. It grew quickly; soon it was roughly a foot tall. We had no lawnmower, so I improvised. I found an old, two-handled scythe and chopped down the grass on our half-acre of lawn by hand. Again, it seemed normal. I got the job done and got a good workout. It was only later in life, looking back, that I realized how unusual my experience of childhood was.
Making a Living without Being Part of the World
As our first winter in Paulina passed and spring began to roll around, my parents continued to research the geography of the area. They discovered more places close to home that had the potential to yield valuable minerals. They both became quite passionate about this hobby and possible income stream, especially my mother, who was the primary driving force in the relationship. I think she enjoyed being on the right side of the law. She didn’t need to grow weed to make ends meet. Instead, she was engaged in something she liked and attempting to turn it into a small business.
Like most of my childhood, our time in Paulina was undoubtedly a time of financial insecurity. However, it was also a time of optimism. We were putting in the groundwork to develop a sustainable source of income. Over spring break, we set up camp and tarps and dug for agate. We also began hunting for fossils and petrified trees.
Petrification happens when, over millions of years, all the organic material is replaced by minerals. While the main body of a tree will become petrified, cracks and crevices in the branches may be filled with silica that eventually solidifies into agate—a translucent variety of microcrystalline quartz that forms in a range of attractive colors. This process is known as a limb cast and produces some stunning agate specimens. At first glance, they appear clear. In a certain light, however, they reveal a pink hue.
Inside the agate, dendrites—a mineral formation that looks like a black exploding star—sometimes forms. Other specimens may contain moss agate, which occurs when cracks in the stone are filled with other minerals. Moss agate gets its name because it looks as though multicolored moss is growing inside the stone. When it’s cut open, it can be used to produce gorgeous jewelry.
On one occasion, we found an entire petrified tree laying out in the wild, with branches sprouting off it. We pulled off the pieces we wanted, then buried it again to save the rest of it for the next season.
Although we didn’t have the tools to process any of the stones we found, we began to collect them. My mom picked up a buffing wheel that she used to start polishing what we had, and we made friends with a miner who worked up in the mountains. He cut up some of what we brought back from our excursions. Ultimately, my mom’s goal was to make and sell jewelry. We weren’t sure how we’d reach that goal, but we took every practical step we could afford toward making it a reality.
I loved looking for limb casts. The area where we found the best minerals was close to a river that cut through the land, running through some rolling hills that provided relief from the flat of the plains. The spring was the best time to go and look for new pieces of agate. The fresh rain softened up the land and stripped a layer from the ground, making it easier to see what minerals might be lying just below the surface.
I went out for an entire day at a time, roaming the hills with my backpack in search of cool pieces. Once I found a giant block of agate, perhaps ten or fifteen feet around, surrounded by a clay structure that had hardened into concrete. The petrified tree limbs running through it had an outer core of agate and a solid, black, mineral inner core. The inner core had agatized a little around the edges, so I was able to break a few of them off. In later years, I turned some of them into art pieces.
Hunting and Foraging
While we lived in the Paulina area, we spent our summers camping out in the Ochocos. As we did in Hyampom, we foraged for mushrooms as a fun and cheap way of locating food. One of my favorites was a variety named shaggy mane, which grew abundantly in gravelly areas by the side of the road. We often kept a cooler in the truck and, when we spotted a patch of shaggy mane, we jumped out, harvested them, and threw them in the cooler. They tasted delicious fried. We ate them as a side dish almost every day.
Another of my favorites was the puffball. These mushrooms came in two varieties: the regular puffball and the pineapple puffball. The pineapple puffball had a split in the top and a series of grooves down the side, making it look similar to a pineapple. Both usually grew within a hundred yards of a stream, and they could reach up to a foot in diameter. As their name suggests, puffballs were prone to exploding. If we attempted to harvest them too late, they popped open in a haze of dust and spores. The trick was to catch them when they were big enough to eat, but not so large that they were ready to explode. We sliced them up, picked out the bugs—certain types of beetle loved burrowing into puffballs—and fried them, either plain or breaded. The fried slices were almost as big as a pancake.
One of my regular morning activities was to head out into the fields to catch grasshoppers. Then, I went down to a stream, fed them onto a hook, and used them for fishing. My favored section of stream was a couple of miles long. It meandered through a valley named Bear Creek, where we frequently camped. Although it was only a couple of feet wide, there were places where trees had falle
n across the stream, creating natural dams. This led to the formation of large pools of water.
The water was so clear that fish could easily see me as I cast my line into the stream. To avoid spooking them, I used to hide behind a tree or bush close to the bank. Alternatively, I would cast upstream to one of the pools, allowing the current to suck my bait downstream where the fish gathered. I spent many long summer days walking and fishing, starting at one end of the stream and working my way down through the valley. By the end of the day, I usually succeeded in catching at least half a dozen brook trout, sometimes as many as a dozen. I gutted them, skinned them, and took them home so we could eat them for dinner.
Although I was still a little young to hunt, I occasionally went out with Pat while he poached a deer. My task was to help him gut the deer rapidly, so that we could get out of the woods before the forest service or the police caught up with us. After Pat shot the animal, we gutted it, skinned it, butchered it, and buried the innards right where we were. Then we wrapped the chunks of meat, tossed them into a backpack, and threw the backpack in the back of our truck. This was a rare occurrence because it was so risky, but there were times when we needed to get some bigger meat on the table, and we didn’t have the money to buy any.
In between these sporadic deer hunts, we shot rabbits and pheasants. Both were prevalent in the area and provided good eating. I developed a huge collection of lucky rabbits’ feet, souvenirs of dozens of successful hunts. Another animal that made its way onto our table was porcupine. They’re slow-moving creatures, generally found in trees, so they were easy to corner. What we didn’t realize, until we tried to kill one, was that porcupines are incredibly resilient animals. The first time we shot and injured a porcupine, it refused to die. A slug from our .22 rifle wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the skull of a porcupine. We found that the only way we could see them off was to club them to death.
