by Bill Graves
Item: Foreign fishermen are vacuuming the ocean off the Oregon coast while “our guys sit here.” They can’t compete. “We have in this country the highest standard of living in the world. For shame, we refuse to pay the wages to support it.”
Item: In 1949, Bandon had one policeman and a Ford pickup truck. He shared the truck with the mayor, who used it to read utility meters. One Saturday night a lumberjack, “drunker than a boiled owl” angered the cop. The policeman went to draw his Colt 44, which he had never done before. But it went off before he got it out of the holster and he shot his toe. The lumberjack, somehow, hauled the cop off in the truck to get his toe fixed.
Item: Logging has been banned in much of the Northwest since May 1991. Meanwhile, 7,000 U.S. loggers are unemployed. Bureaucrats and environmentalists balance national priorities: the survival of America’s lumber industry against the possible loss of an owl species. “Whatever happens, the economics of the industry are now skewed forever.”
Item: Settled by Scandinavians and Germans, the immigrants now coming to Coos Bay are from California. They make up about 40 percent of the town’s population.
Item: A sales tax in Oregon? “Never happen!”
Item: This is Tuesday, one of two days a week when the Bandon Cheese Factory hangs out its Curds Today sign. Curds are just-made cheese, fresh from the tub. True curd connoisseurs get them before they have chilled.
At 10:15, I was at the Bandon Cheese Factory. A cart of fresh curds rolled out from behind the glass window that separates the room where they make the cheese from the room where they sell it. A salesgirl wrapped her hands in plastic and bagged the still-warm curds.
Chewy and delicious, curds squeak when you chew them. Hence their nickname: squeakies.
A group of us stood around eating our squeakies like popcorn, right from the bag, as we watched the girl bag more of the pale-yellow chunks. She told us that when the curds age for a couple of days, they lose their squeak. Aged for a few months, the curds become cheddar cheese. Aged for a few years, they become sharp cheddar, which sells for six dollars a pound.
“Now, why is a man like cheese?” she asked us.
We all stopped eating.
“Like cheese?” someone stammered. “Is this a riddle?”
I ate another squeaky, thinking it might give me a clue.
“Give up? They both begin soft and warm, eventually lose their squeak, and with age become sharper and worth more.”
I’d like to think so.
22
This Trucker Hauls His Two-Year-Old
Oregon 140, Eastbound
Only every third vehicle was a car or a pickup. The rest were logging trucks. Those coming at me were loaded, headed for Medford. The others carried the back wheels of the trailers piggyback, atop the rear wheels of the tract ors. The shafts that connected the two telescoped. They extended over the cabs like artillery pieces.
Mt. McLoughlin, its 9,495-foot cone resting on the tops of the trees ahead, shimmered with a massive snowpack. Winter storms, just past, had ended a seven-year drought in the Northwest. The snow line was low for early June. The biting contrast of ice-white against a cloudless sky caused distance to fall away. I knew I was about to feel the chill of the mountain, the remnants of winter.
It didn’t happen. Nature had suckered me again. It turned out Mt. McLoughlin was thirty miles away, deep in the Rogue River National Forest. After a few more miles, I never saw it again.
The scent of cattle and wildflowers fill the air along Oregon 140 where it begins in western Oregon. Leaving Interstate 5, it climbs the southern Cascades on broad shoulders into timber country. A yellow snow zone sign offered a clue to what a winter driver might expect. One with six bull et holes offered another clue.
Still climbing, my side windows were even with the tops of tall fir trees. Down was a long way. The guardrail looked as if it might stop a small car, but it would do little more than tell a search party where to look if I hit it.
After an hour of climbing, my carburetor was sucking thin air. I pulled into a spacious parking area beside a flooded alpine meadow. A Peterbilt truck with a long load of Boise Cascade trestles was there too. Bill Hastings & Son, Wolf Creek, Oregon, was lettered in script on the door of the cab.
Never on the road, on a CB radio, or in person have I encountered an unfriendly long-haul trucker in my travels. I trust them. If nothing else, we have the road and the weather in common. Most truckers work alone. Some travel with their wives or girlfriends. Bill, in the Peterbilt, was the first I had met who traveled with a two-year-old.
Putting aside his logbook, Bill swung open the door of the cab. Jessy James Hastings crawled into his dad’s lap, dropping most of his baloney sandwich between the seats.
“I have custody, so he pretty much goes where I go.” Obviously, Bill liked it that way. “We run from Medford to Salt Lake a couple of times a week.”
Bill climbed down to my level and reached up to the seat to retrieve Jessie. “He’s a great traveler. But there are times!” He addressed Jessie. “It’s tough to sleep with little fingers prying your eyes open.”
Like most over-the-road trucks, Bill’s Peterbilt has a bed behind the seats. Some truckers have TVs, stereos, and VCRs back there.
Bill knew the area well. “Elevation here is 5,100 feet. We are on the Winnemucca-to-the-Sea Highway” (Winnemucca is in northwest Nevada.) Oregon 140 doesn’t really go all the way to the ocean, but another road does. On winter weekends, snowmobilers and cross-country skiers pack this parking lot.
I figured Bill would know why logging trucks are collapsible.
“For a good reason. At the loading dock, back in the woods, there is not a lot of room for a big rig to turn around. So they get the truck pointed out, put the back dolly on the ground, reassemble the reach, and load it up.”
I left Bill to finish his logbook entries and started on the downside of the Cascades. Soon his red Peterbilt filled my side mirror. We chatted on channel 17 and coordinated a place for him to pass.
A big truck is amazingly quiet when it overtakes you. The roll of eighteen wheels makes a low, well-machined purr. Mixed with the wind, it’s a sound of the open road, a reassuring hum heard nowhere else.
The highway rolled out of the mountains and into a meadow. There, the waters of Wocus Bay lapped at the edge of the blacktop. Upper Klamath Lake again. I had come full circle. Though I could see only half of it, the lake was deserted, just as before.
This was a revealing statement about Oregon that figures only hint at. Nearly 97,000 square miles. Only 2.8 million people. Most of them are 300 miles away, circling Portland. Nature’s battle in this millennium may be with man’s ignorance and greed. But there are so few of us around here, nature seems at least to be holding its own.
Parts of Klamath Falls are tiered on a hillside. The industrial part, which shows clear signs of the lumber industry starving to death, surrounds Lake Ewauna, more a river than a lake. Under certain sections of the town are boiling springs, which form a stratum of hot water. Piped through radiators and grids, the water heats homes and offices and melts snow from sidewalks.
I pulled into a commercial campground for the night. This one seemed more carnival than campground. I tagged along behind a “follow-me” vehicle to my numbered campsite. Did they think I would get lost or maybe run down a kid racing to the video games? I am not accustomed to this. Maybe it is a nice touch, though. What next? A chocolate on my pillow?
23
Harley-Davidson vs. Honda
Klamath Falls, Oregon
The new-day sun, filtered by the leaves of old cedar trees, sett led first on the grassy tent area of the campground. Minutes from their flannel wrappings, two men sat there like stone figures. Their eyes were fixed on the hypnotic sparkle of three chrome-loaded Harley-Davidsons and a Honda. A third man stood behind them, slowly peeling a banana.
Another fellow walked into the frame of this otherwise still life. He was doing well with his hands f
ull of topless Styrofoam cups that appeared to be overflowing with coffee. He had no place to set them, so he just stood there waiting for a couple more hands. The banana-peeler went to his aid. The coffee was passed around. A conversation began.
Twenty years in the planning, this was the trip of their lives. They were just three days into it. Two were teachers in the Cali forma prison system. Two others were from Hawaii, one a cowboy and one a musician. They were motoring through the back roads of California, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia.
Harley owner Barry Bongberg carried a cellular phone, just in case someone needed to reach them. “We forget to turn it on when we said we would,” confessed Barry. “At least, that’s our story when we get home.”
Their coffee was gone in no time, so I walked over with a fresh pot. We sat around and let the sun start to warm things.
“I know there is some grand mystique.” I was searching for the right words. “Really, what is it about a Harley?”
“Oh! The sound! The vibration! But mostly the rumble. Bet you didn’t know that ‘Harley Davidson’ is the most popular tattoo in America.”
“I would have guessed a girlfriend’s name, or maybe ‘mother.’”
As a worker in a men’s prison, Barry is probably the best-qualified authority on tattoos that I will ever meet.
“No, ‘mother’ went out long ago,” Barry explained. “Then there are those that guys got in Vietnam. Really bizarre, like daggers and snakes and some military insignias. But ‘Harley’ is still big.”
The fellow who brought the coffee said that the Harley is really the only motorcycle made. Everything else is a toy. He was baiting his buddy who owned the Honda.
The Honda owner was not to be put down. He addressed me exclusively. “Did you know that Harley Davidson is really a T-shirt and belt-buckle company? It’s true. Their bikes are just a merchandising gimmick that they ship in here from Mexico.”
We finished the coffee and kidded around for half an hour. Then they suited up, loaded their gear, and rumbled off.
Out here on the road is the only place you will find guys like these. Barry and each of his companions have happy lives where they work and live, but I bet they are not the same people there. People change out here. They take on a freer spirit. Or maybe it’s just how they look at things. Life becomes simpler. Laughter comes easier. Yesterdays are quickly forgotten because they don’t matter.
24
A White-Circle Town
Bly, Oregon
Back on Oregon 140, I turned east. KWFA, “your nostalgia station,” - was playing “Near You.” A sign read five miles to Olene.
Olene is nothing more than a general store, like thousands of America’s mini-towns, those tiny, white circles on road maps. Each store evolves into what the locals want from it. But the stores have one thing in common these days: they all rent videos.
Quite often in America’s backcountry, there is no broadcast TV at all. Many homes now have satellite dishes. But for everyone else, videotapes are the primary source of entertainment. Like TV itself, they have become a what-did-we-do-before necessity.
Another road sign, this one understated: Abrupt Edge. This highway, which yesterday had paved shoulders wide enough to camp on, was now a slender, precarious piece of aerial roadway running hills and grassy chasms with bravado.
I stopped at Bly, another white-circle town, in front of a district office of the U.S. Forest Service. Painters blocked the visitor’s door. Directed to another one, I instantly found my self in the office of two chatty civil servants, who apparently had little happening today but were full of news.
With timber sales on public land almost down to zero, the Forest Service are now in the mushroom business. Thr new enterprise sprouted earlier this spring because of last year’s Robins on Spring Fire, they told me. Mushrooms thrive the first year or so in areas swept by forest fires. Although the public may harvest two gallons of morel mushrooms per person free on the north side of the highway, the Forest Service is banking money from commercial mushroomers who work the south side.
“The Indians can pick all the mushrooms they want,” one lady said, “but they must be for subsistence only. That is, they must eat, not sell them.”
The other lady corrected her. “Native Americans, you mean.”
“I keep forgetting. Old ways die hard. I can’t keep track of it all.” She laughed. “Whatever is politically correct is what we go by.”
“You know, the Indians came here from someplace else, too,” I said, “just like my ancestors.”
“Tell that to my boss.”
25
Independence Comes With Living Close to the Land
Lakeview, Oregon
The people in Lakeview have not had a lake to view for the better part of a century. No one especially cares. It’s so long, nobody remembers when Goose Lake covered nearly a quarter-million acres and lapped the southern edge of this Oregon town.
But they had reason to care last summer. The lake disappeared completely, and its talcum-dry bottom blew into town on the wind. It was one gray-dust storm After another. The storms made the air so dense, the town disappeared more than once. Pulverized alkali settled everywhere. Even brewed coffee took on a strange flavor, they say.
After a drought-busting winter in the Northwest, Goose Lake is back, but nowhere near where the town’s Irish settlers found it in 1876. And it probably never will be. It’s been shrinking, some years more than others, since it last overflowed in 1890. It fluctuates so drastically, Lake County statistic-keepers will only talk numbers in terms of averages. It’s a big lake, usually thirty miles long and ten miles wide. Give or take a few, its shoreline averages eighty-two miles. It covers 124,000 acres, with 65 percent of them in California. Now, this figure explains why Goose Lake ebbs and flows like a tidepool: it doesn’t go deeper than eight feet. With water spread that shallow, it does not have to lose much to shrink the shoreline. When it’s low, people walk or wade across it, just to say they did.
As the crow flies east, Lakeview {population 2,600} is the last town in southern Oregon. Between it and the Idaho line is 200 miles of high desert and low mountains.
A hundred miles west is Klamath Falls, where most things come from. The Red Ball Stage Line round-trips a van there twice a day, hauling newspapers, mail, passengers, and whatever. Not just its name, its mere existence is reminiscent of an Old-West stagecoach and underscores what people here say they like most about Lakeview: “We’re isolated, nobody bothers us, and we do what we damn please.”
Scattered in front of Don’s Market is horse tack, hay-rake seats, a couple of sleds, a holster for an M-1 rifle, and other rusty antiques usually found hanging or maybe buried in old barns. They are John Bach’s display. John has more inside.
For a couple of years, John made a living {enough for a bachelor} selling groceries here on the edge of Lakeview. That business dried up when the Safeway in town became a round-the-clock operation. So he diversified. Mixed in now with racks of Wheat Thins and Frito-Lay cheese dip are his “collectibles”: rocks, bottles, bells, clocks, a wind-up train, and the like.
I spy a table made of lamp-oil boxes. “Classic. Depression: primitive style,” said John
I sat on a high stool. Duct tape holds the vinyl seat cover in place. Half-listening to Rush Limbaugh on the radio, I watched John. At the counter, he unwrapped a towel from a Civil-War bayonet. A customer, as close to the countertop as a 300-pounder could get, bowed at the waist to have a closer look at it.
They both turned to greet someone. It was the postman. “I know who gets this before I see the address,” he said, handing John a gun catalog. Then he stepped to the cooler, pulled out a pint of milk and a container of potato salad, dragged a stool around, sat down, and ate lunch
John, age forty-six, was born in Lakeview. So was everyone else who came in the store that hour. Like Ike Wells, the sergeant with the six-man Lakeview Police Department. He was one of John’s classmates.
Ike buoyantly recounted the highlights of yesterday. “Four miles over scab-rock flat, down a slippery cow path a mile. And would you believe, somebody had been there first? It ruined our day, until we caught a dinner’s-worth of rainbows. Along with fresh-picked mushrooms and stuff, we fried ‘em up within spittin’ distance of the creek.”
John turned to me. “It’s our passion. Fishing and hunting is what we do up here.” He shook his index finger. “Except for one lady,” he laughed and pulled on the visor of his Ducks Unlimited cap. “She was from California, and I hope to God she still is. Chewed me out royally for being a hunter. Came up to watch deer, she said. I asked her, “Did ya see any?’ She said “Yes.’ I told her, “You can thank me for that.’ Ohhh! That really unscrewed her. I told her that the hunting-and-fishing license fees I pay go for wildlife management and conservation. And still, deer starve to death here every winter. If you are looking for a shame, that’s a shame, I told her.”
John began sorting through his mail. A small box with a hand-lettered address required a pocketknife to open it. It contained three strings of Indian beads.
“You know,” he looked out the door and pulled on his cap visor again, “we are fiercely independent up here. Comes from living close to the land.” John ran the beads through his fingers. “We are not afraid of much, but if we fear anything, it’s people like that. They are great at imposing their ideology, their values, on other people. They pull that crap around here, there will be a problem, I’ll tell ya.”
I looked at Ike, the cop. Ike gave a nodding endorsement.
The big city has its men’s club with its two-martini lunches and its power dinners. Lakeview has Don’s Market, an old-time general store without a potbellied stove, like Cheers without a bar.
