Someone appeared from the snack bar with a handful of paper napkins, and began with loud sighs to mop coffee from the bench. The old lady picked up Abe’s empty cup, turned toward him with a chickadee’s deference, then set the cup on top of the newsstand beside him and retreated. The boy’s pinball game started to ring and jangle, and Abe brought his eyes into focus on me again.
“One time it was about ten degrees and snowing, but I wanted this magpie to come land on my back.” Abe bent down, and let his arms dangle like weeping willow vines. “Magpies are funny. They get it in their mind they won’t come, and stubborn!” Abe suddenly flung his arms outward and let out a screeching magpie oath.
“Skeee! Skeeee!” The old woman, twenty feet away across the lobby, backed two paces to the wall. Abe brought his hands up against his heart, and twisted his neck to face me. “That’s where the empathy comes. I started to feel it. Sweat dropped off my nose to the snow, I wanted it so bad. And ten degrees!” His fingers snapped into a prayer-clench, and his eyes closed. His lips trembled, then suddenly his eyes smiled open.
“There he came! That magpie didn’t want to, but he did. Landed right on my spine and stayed. Hopped around and squalled like he’d hit the Promised Land.” Abe sat down on the sack of birdseed, but immediately they called the Portland bus and he struggled to his feet, swung the sack to his shoulder with a fast wheeze of breath, and ambled toward the gate.
As the bus headed north on Highway 97, headlights punching the dark, most passengers settled in for sleep. Or they pretended to. Abe snorted and leaned across the aisle toward me.
“One time I was down on my belly for hours watching this beetle—little blue fella with knobby antlers. I followed him all afternoon, and must have covered fifty feet in circles and zags. That little guy had to work! Watching him, you get to know what it’s like to flop onto your back and wrestle around trying to get up. I wanted to help him, but I couldn’t. Held a twig out once for him to grab, but then I pulled it away. I wasn’t his guardian, I was him! I forgot everything. Got soaked. Got stiff. Like I dozed, like hypnotized, like born bug! And all of a sudden, this crow lights on my shoulder, jumps down to snatch that beetle, and goes! I heard his beak crunch down, felt I was the one to die. Had a hard time getting up, too.”
Abe got off in Redmond, and I saw him flop his load into the basket of a tricycle with a license plate, and pedal west in the dark. He started slow, but had achieved a steady, rambling rhythm by the time he left the pool of the station’s tungsten light.
It was later I read about this man in the news, talked with his neighbors, began to learn the complex relation he has with the human community as a result of his attention to the wild birds. I learned of his confrontation with the gravel company that wants to scoop rock from under the bird sanctuary he has been informally developing for twenty-five years. A lawyer has donated time to stall the gravel operation. A local car dealership gave the three-wheeled cycle I had seen him ride. So far, the dentist Abe approached has declined to fix his teeth so he can whistle the proper songs to bring in the birds, but community pressure will be on him to do so.
Abe’s work is not ranching or logging or transport or tourists or smoke jumping or any of the other mainstays of the Redmond community at large. His work is feeding the wild birds, diverting water from storm run-off to the trees they nest in, dragging home from the dump old appliances with which to fashion sculptural feed stations that invite the chickadees but keep the sparrows clear. For this, no matter how odd, he is a local saint.
One of his neighbors put it this way. When Abe stands like St. Francis—hands outstretched, a small bird on each palm, and the light of beatitude on his face, saying, “Here bird, here seed, come you little chatterbox”—anyone could see why others run interference for his needs in the world.
Several years after our meeting in Bend, I stepped through the juniper grove that surrounds his shack, calling out to warn him, “Mr. Johnson, are you there? Mr. Johnson, I met you once in Bend. Do you remember?” I stood before the shack, and heard something fumble around inside. The door scraped open a few inches and Abe’s face appeared sideways. Then his hand reached out toward me holding a kettle of urine. He scowled.
“I don’t like the look of that. Way too dark. What do you think?”
“It does look pretty dark,” I said. “Hey, you were going to show me the birds.”
“Birds?” His face, still sideways, softened to a toothless grin. “Give me a minute to get my boots on.”
We carried on a shouted conversation through the door for close to a half hour while he sought the boots inside his box house, then he gave a mighty heave against the debris blocking the door, and got it pulled back far enough to slip through. He wore different hats this time, a short-billed hunter’s cap and a tremendous broad-brimmed pilgrim affair on top. His pea-green coat sported six pockets bulging with seed that dribbled out when he twisted or bobbed to peer about. The zipper on his pants had failed, but two belts secured them, and the cuffs were stuffed into a pair of green rubber boots half a dozen sizes too large. Abe’s sour fragrance trailed behind him like a river’s fog, as he drifted through the tall grass before me from one feed station to the next.
“I came down from The Dalles in ’48 to do potato harvest,” he told me over his shoulder, “and stayed.” He paused to smear a dab of peanut butter on the bark of a juniper tree well-darkened by his custom. “Been on this ground since.” He led off again, this time toward a lone apple tree improbably alive among the dry-ground sage. Our path was not a line but a braid. We took the turnings of animals not intent to get somewhere but inquisitive to be everywhere. “There come sunflower.” Abe pointed to a clump of dark green in the blond dead grass of July. “That’s winterfood for chickadee. I haul it water from the river.” We dropped into a ditch that led toward the apple tree. “I dug this ditch to pull the storm-water down off the rim. May lose that tree, though.” The trunk stood on a little ring of flat ground Abe had sculpted for it. It had never been pruned or sprayed, living as Abe did by sheer intensity. There were no apples, and the tree didn’t cast much shade. He put his hand on the trunk. “Woodpeckers starting to favor it. Bad sign.”
The next feed station was an upright, cylindrical water heater laced with rust, with a stack of automobile brake drums on top. He lifted them down one by one, scattered fresh seed from his sack on a pan, then replaced the brake drums.
“These rims keep the sparrows off,” he said, tapping the top brake drum with his fingernail. “They can’t hang upside down and hop inside like a chickadee can. None of your upright birds can get in here. Just chickadees, and snag bird—little wren.”
There was a small wind beside my ear, and a chickadee lighted on Abe’s left shoulder. Instantly, a sunflower seed appeared between his lips. The chickadee snatched it and was gone. The whole move between them had the quick grace of something choreographed many chickadee generations back.
We paused at a dead refrigerator in a juniper tree’s deep shade. The door handle was gone, but Abe thrust his thumb through the rusted hole where the handle had been, and the door popped open. He reached inside to replenish the seed in his pockets, then shut the door with his knee. We climbed the slope, which was jumbled with shards of basalt the size of cars haphazard in a wrecking yard, to the garden. Here Abe had hauled horse manure in sacks on his back to form a level ribbon of soil winding along the slope of lichen-brightened rock. He had planted sunflower, tomato, potato, and corn, and from a cleft behind an old juniper he took a hoe and began to weed.
I sat in the shade and watched. My camera seemed the toy of another century. My hands were too clean to coax leaves from rock, as Abe did. In his hands, a rusted coffee can mended with pitch was Paleolithic. The day went dumb with calm. As he reached up to handle a flower head, his face was Inca. His coat was tree bark a wren searched for stray seed. Here at the place Abe lived, I was like other ungainly citizens of the modern bus ride. In this garden, we were the strange ones. On
this earth, on his home ground, I was apprentice to Abe.
Over on the wet side, mossy deep in the coast range west from Eugene, Tubby Beers lived on Indian Creek with his team of Percherons, and his World War II tank for gypo logging parked in the front yard. The tank’s turret had been removed, and in its place a home-welded boom of steel was hinged for swivel-work yarding logs. Tubby said with that rig he didn’t need roads.
“Long as I’m in second-growth, I go anywhere I want. Course, if I want to be gentle about it, I use the horses. They don’t leave more skid trail than a short-tailed rainstorm.”
Tubby himself had to step sideways through some doors, and it’s hard to believe he ever died. He seemed too vibrant to slip through the frame of a grave and be gone.
Inside the house that day, when a big laugh closed his eyes and I could frankly glance around, my gaze swept the world map taped to the ceiling; the fiddle, mandolin, and guitar hung handy on the wall; the eight stuffed animals crouching hospitably at eye-level on the living room shelf: bear, skunk, weasel, and related kin. The tribe of the wild lived inside Tubby’s mind.
“There were seven men there that day,” he began in a rush, “and they’re all dead and my daddy told me and I’m the only one that knows.” In the wake of those words could be the story of Tubby’s Uncle Mike riding with Jesse James. Or Uncle Frank serving as Teddy Roosevelt’s personal bodyguard in the battle of San Juan Hill. Or the Beers family fife and drum corps parting the sea of buffalo as they crossed the plains by wagon. Or a tale of Tubby’s own shenanigans at rodeos and logging shows, and other lively celebrations, of Saturday nights riding his horse and roaring wild up-canyon from the Indianola Bar, blasting the sky with his guns for joy.
This time it was none of those. It was the tale of Madera’s Grave, the story of a strange and crazy man who was saint in this place before Tubby was born. Lyman Madera built his cabin without a door, as Tubby told it, and had to climb in through a hole in the roof each night to sleep. He lost his son, he prayed, he died with a mountain named for him. That was all. After the story, Tubby plucked his guitar from the wall and prepared to sing.
“Don’t write this down,” he said, tuning up. “I just want you listening.” The song was a terrible fervent thing about the Japs and honor and the flag and our young people today. His tear-filled eyes held mine.
Tubby lived alone, and all his love of things old or musical or wild showed around the house and yard: the five pair of cowboy boots muddy around the stove to dry—all his; the saddle flung over the porch rail; the Percherons sidling eagerly into harnessing position when he stepped toward them. His great hands grabbed the tail of each and pulled. They tensed, but stood unmoved.
Besides his long stories and songs and asides, up a little side canyon Tubby kept a secret for us all. He got quiet and led me out the door and away through the trees to a hidden barn. Inside, he had kept oiled and polished ready for work an entire set of horse-drawn farm machinery. It was a museum in a barn that no one knew but the few he led there. He was historian for the primitive life. He was scholar with no degree or say-so but what he knew was crucial.
“They’re all dead and I’m the only one that knows.”
Farther west, just over the dunes from the Pacific, Marge Severy kept her home alone. The first time I stopped by, she had mushrooms spread fragrant on the kitchen table to dry—the Japanese pine mushroom that grows only on the slopes of Mount Fuji and on this coast, she said to me.
As one of the last of the local Siuslaw Indian people, she was the original character of the valley. We were the odd ones, the eccentric citizens of this landscape—with our motorized processions and neon fantasies strung out along Highway 101. When a low fog hung over the river and fir trees bowed down with rain, when old swans called from the south dunes and cormorants came winging low over town, I saw her walking. She was a part of those proper customs by fog and bird song. She was with the place, and we were strangers to it. We might one day belong as she had always.
She sat on an overturned boat one Sunday afternoon, watching the university archeologist dig out bones and beads and slender shells, fragile as ash, from a grave at the heart of town. Someone, digging a sewer line, had found the grave. Now it was being removed and labeled for study. The man worked in the shade of his pit, and Marge, the sun behind her, wore the halo light of the old and the quiet. There was coherence in the earth. The man with the trowel and screen laid a ruler in the grave, and numbered everything he took away.
We met again at the Indian cemetery Marge cared for, across from her house up North Fork. I found her leaning on a hoe among the wooden markers and indistinct plots in the sand. Fog rolled down over a tremendous dune above us.
“Soon that will be here,” she said, gesturing toward the dune. “Pretty soon I won’t be watching over these old graves. That will be kind of a relief, you know, because then nobody can dig them up to study them, like they do to our people.”
Sometimes before first light, when I stand behind my house in the city to listen, those hermit names come easy to my mouth. I will be one of them. For I would live their code of poverty and imagination in a door-less patchwork house guarded by a ferocious goose. I would live by the miracles of the uninsured. I would walk only, I would speak for days only with the birds, I would sing, and tend my village with a hoe.
Maybe it’s jail by now for Gypsy Slim. Maybe it’s death. Maybe it’s a campsite, somewhere in my life.
RIVER & ROAD
An early Oregon law named each navigable river an official state highway. Among these was the Siuslaw, running west from the coast range into the sea. Where the river curved and shouldered against bluffs, a road was impossible in the early days, and traffic went by water—up from Florence at the coast, to Mapleton near the head of tide-water, fifteen miles inland. There was a kind of road threading along the ridge above the north bank, but locals called it The Goat Trail, and it was a shocker compared to the easy glide of flat water. The river was there; a real road might someday be made. Houses faced the water.
The river made a lot of sense, and a pioneer could make sense too, by figuring out the river. Salmon came up the river, logs came down. The best farmland was right against the water. Every morning, the milk boat came by, then the fish boat, then the school boat, then the mail boat, and now and again, the schooner from San Francisco. Before wildcat logging clogged the channel with silt, two-masted schooners could float all fifteen miles inland to Mapleton. If you weren’t on the river with a dock in good repair, you just weren’t part of modern life.
Rain, a glory of rain made the river the natural ribbon that bound everything up like a purse-seine slung across the hills. The river was everywhere—not a place, but a way of happening. Charlie Camp told me how the two happy tourist ladies from California stopped to talk. They got on the subject of rain.
“How much rain do you get here, Mr. Camp?”
“Oh,” he said, “we get about eight foot a year. That’s common, but I’ve seen more.”
“Now, sir,” said one of the ladies, “just because we come from California, we don’t need to believe that.” They liked their old Oregon man.
“Ladies,” he said, “you see that elderberry bush down there by the barn? That’s eight foot tall. If we took our year’s fall of rain in a day, that bush would be under the flood.”
Was he right? He was. Mapleton, Oregon, right up against the west jump of the coast range, combs off ninety-six inches of rain in a common year. That’s nothing compared to the twenty feet of rain that falls on the west slick of the Olympic Peninsula to the north, but it’s wet. Charlie told me you know you’re in Oregon when you can stand on the porch and grab a salmon fighting its way up through the thick tumble of the rain. That turned into a song as I drove home:
Step to the porch, a salmon flies by —
Hook him in out of the rain.
You’re pretty far gone, pretty far gone:
You’re clear out here in Oregon.
&nb
sp; When a baby is born, as everyone knows,
There’s moss in its fingers, webs in its toes.
It’s pretty far gone, pretty far gone —
It’s clear out in Oregon.
There is the chill glory of baptism by rain every day of winter when you step outside. So why not use that water for a road?
One well-schooled pioneer played a little dance with the river out of sheer practicality. He staked his homestead claim on the good farmland up North Fork, but when he came to look for timber up to his high standard, he found nothing close by. Seeking the tree, he cruised four miles down North Fork to the Siuslaw channel, then a good twelve miles upriver to Mapleton, then another mile south up Knowles Creek. There he stood, a good fifteen miles from home as the crow flies, but the tree he found was too straight and the water too handy to do it any other way. He felled the tree parallel to the creek, and bucked out one good forty-foot log, five-foot through at the little end. He rolled that log to the bank of Knowles Creek with the help of a logging jack, a tool that stood about knee-high and asked for patience. Then he carved his brand on the butt end of the log, left instructions at the sawmill downstream, and went home to his tent.
When high water came in the spring, Knowles Creek rose, picked up his log sweet as you please, and carried it a mile down to the main channel of the Siuslaw at Mapleton. From there, the log made its own way downstream to the mill above Point Terrace, where it was identified, barked, slabbed off, and run through the saws. The mill filled the order matched to the brand, took its own percentage of lumber out for the trouble, and stacked what was left on the riverbank.
Having Everything Right Page 12
