On the Back Roads (9 page)

P
ulling off the highway to skim the surface of the little town of Chiloquin, I crossed the railroad tracks. Westbound Amtrak trains come through here on the way to Seattle.

In the late 1800s, trains of Pullman cars stopped here, full of anxious fishermen. The Pullmans were parked on a siding for a week while passengers fished the Williamson and other rivers. This was all Indian country then. In fact, Chiloquin claims to be the first town incorporated on an Indian reservation. That happened in 1926.

A sign on the door of city hall said Closed, but the door was not locked. John Hall, head of public works, and Lillian Headly, city recorder, were wrapping up their day yet seemed inclined to share a little of it with a stranger.

John told me that he never takes the keys out of his car. “Nobody steals things here. We all have guns. It's a city ordinance.”

“What? Never heard of such a thing.”

“That's right! It's the law. If you are going to live in Chiloquin, you are going to have a gun.”

Lillian reached into a drawer of her desk and pulled out a two-page copy of the ordinance dated June 14, 1982. Sure enough, “every head of household … is required to maintain a firearm, together with ammunition therefor.” The only ones exempt are those too disabled to use a gun, those whose religion prohibits it, and convicted felons.

“I suppose what's important is that the word gets around that Chiloquin is an armed camp,” I said.

John grinned, “I don't think of this town as any “armed camp”, but if the bad guys want to think that, that's OK.”

I stopped for the night at the Waterwheel Campground, which is right on the river. Ray Poteet and his dog Maddie met me at the door of the log home that he and his wife Kerry built in 1991. They live upstairs. Downstairs is the campground office and recreation room.

That Ray and Kerry should run a campground—they have always spent most of their free time in an RV—is the realization of a dream at its finest. Now in their mid-30s, both had good jobs in the San Francisco area. They gave all that up in 1989 to live life on their terms in the outback of southern Oregon.

Their log house, surrounded by wooded hills, seems a perfect fit for the Poteets. Made of machine-turned lodge-pole pine, it is obviously Ray's pride and joy. A woodstove heats their 1,800-square-foot house. “The logs act like storage batteries, picking up the heat when I have the stove going,” Ray explained. “Then they radiates it the rest of the time. Once the logs get cold, it takes a few days to charge them up again.”

That night it snowed. Ray warned me that it would dip into the twenties by dawn, so I drained my water hose.

As soon as there was light, I stepped outside into the fresh snow. With each step, the frozen grass crunched with a sound like breaking glass. It was so loud, I feared it would wake my neighbors. Just a dusting of snow, but it was everywhere. Steam rising from the river trans formed the frozen air into something lacy and ethereal.

I call this the “fairy-tale feat ure” of nomadic life. A new view from the window eve ry morning. An early walk in a place where I have never been. I love it out here. I really do.

Overhead was a wild, clamorous sound that cut even the chill. High in the April darkness flew skeins of snow geese, honking northward in undulating V-formations across the dark sky. Necks stretched toward Canada, their white bellies cast an eerie glow as if reflecting the white of the new snow. Absolute trust in their instinct, it pulled them north into a new season.

W
alking around the parking lot behind the Crook County Courthouse, I tried to line up a picture.

“What're ya looking at?” came a voice from the driver's window of a little gray pickup.

“I want to get a picture of the clock tower, but the sun isn't right.”

“How long ya going to be here?”

“Not long enough for the sun to be on the front.”

“Sun's never on the front. Ya wanta go up in the tower?”

I didn't know why I should see the tower from the inside. Obviously, this experience was to be had by invitation only.

“Sure,” I replied.

“Come on back around three-thirty.”

He sped away. I gave up on the picture.

My first day here and I was already on the good side of Fred Farrish, the maintenance man for the most important and tallest building in Crook County's biggest and most important city: Prineville, population 6,000.

Killing time until three-thirty, I picked up a copy of last week's Central Oregonian. A section called the “Law Enforcement Log”
reported a sixteen-year-old male cited for “minor-in-possession of tobacco.” I read it again. It said exactly that.

That intrigued me enough to look up Russ Miller, the managing editor of the newspaper. Russ was in his office. “The experts call tobacco a ‘gateway drug.' They say it precedes drug and alcohol use,” Russ explained. “So the town has an active campaign to cite kids when they catch them with it, which is often. It isn't just cigarettes. Chewing tobacco is a bigger problem because it's a ‘cowboy thing.' Kids see a lot of that being used around here.” Russ went on to say that the people of Prineville have the largest percentage of church affiliation of any city in Oregon—something like 80 percent.

The north edge of town is where the nineteen miles of Prineville's railway starts. It's proof that the gutsy pioneers of the American West were still running things here in the early 1900s. It seems that they could not persuade the mainline railroad to come to them. So they built their own railroad to the main line.

It was a cattle town then. Farmers and ranchers from a hundred miles around came here for their supplies and entertainment. All Prineville needed to secure its future was a railroad. So in 1916, the town voted 358 to 1 to build it for an estimated $100,000. Despite volunteer labor and food and wagons provided free by farmers, the cost of construction tripled. Still, they got it done. Freight and passenger service was running by 1918.

Then came the motorcar and the Great Depression. Had it been privately owned, the railroad probably would have gone under. But the town continued to back it, confident that someday sawmills would be built here to tap the area's timber, one of the largest stands of ponderosa pine in the country.

They were right. The rail line became very successful. So successful that Prineville was called “The City of No City Taxes.” Railroad profits paid for everything governmental, including a new city hall. The line still operates every day, makes jobs for people here, and makes money for the town. It is the oldest municipally-owned and operated rail system in the country.

Jerry Price is the general manager of the railroad now.

“On weekends we operate dinner trains that can be mystery-theater or maybe western-hoedown trains. Sunday mornings we have a champagne-brunch train. During the week, we haul freight, timber products almost exclusively. Outbound, it's all wood chips that move to mainl ine paper mills.”

“Wood chips?”

“Ya, like what's left after you cut trees into boards.”

“But I thought trees here are like endangered species and cutting them is prohibited.”

“You are partially right.”

Then I got a course in the facts of life and real-world economics in the lumber business. It seems that the sawmills in this Oregon town—in America's vast Northwest with millions of acres of standing timber—are importing trees from faraway Mexico, Chile, New Zealand, wherever they can be bought. It's is not that foreign timber is cheaper than trees cut locally. That would be easy enough to understand. It's that special interest groups in our country, protecting owls and other things, have been able to prohibit tree cutting in vast areas of the Northwest. Instead, as Jerry put it, “The sawmills do what they have to do to stay in business.”

At the corner of Third and Main Street is Prineville's rotating-time-and-temperature building, the Bank of the Cascades. Across from it is Bank Drug, which once was a bank. And across from it is the Bowman Museum, which was once two banks. First it was the Prineville Bank, later the Bank of Prineville, or vice versa. No one was too sure.

Behind the counter of the Bowman Museum, I found one of those important and dedicated ladies to whom we back-road dawdlers are indebted. What would the museums of small-town America do without them, these unselfish volunteers who open thousands of museums for us every day? They all seem to share deep feelings for their heritage and an out-and-out disgust for daytime TV Built in 1910, the interior of this building is like new. The teller cages are marble and mahogany, the windows faced with thin bars of bronze. When
I was told that it's made of the same black/gray basalt as the courthouse, I looked at my watch. It was 3:20.

Fred was waiting for me. We rode the elevator to the third floor of the courthouse.

“When there is a jury trial going on, I don't even come up here to wind the clock. Too many people. It will run six days. I wind it on Mondays and Fridays,” Fred told me.

I followed him up some steep wooden stairs to the attic, which had a floor of rock-wool insulation. Filling one of the eight windows was a rain-stained piece of plywood. “Window got blown out by the wind,” Fred said. He seemed in no hurry to replace it.

More steep stairs. I used the handrail.

The next level had floor-to-ceiling windows that were open to the wind and framed with ornate iron bars.

“Someone told me the jail was up here,” I remarked. “Now I know why people would say that.”

“Ya, people think it. Even still, some believe it. If they would come up here and look, they would know better. But people believe what they want to believe. How do ya change that?” The higher we climbed in the tower, the wiser and more philosophical Fred be came.

We climbed the last flight of stairs. “This is where flies come to die, because it's warm.” Fred observed. “In the summer when I sweep, I can get a whole bucketful.”

It appeared to me more like a giant fly trap, but Fred knows best.

This was the top. A three-story clock tower atop a three-story courthouse. The clock ticked away on a platform in the center of the room. Some rather simple gears turned four shafts that turned the hands on four giant clock faces, the four translucent walls of the room.

In the corner rest a wooden box with “The E. Howard Clock Co., Boston” printed on the side.

“That's what the clock came in,” Fred explained. “I suppose it's out of warranty now. Maybe we can throw the box away.”

Using both hands, he turned a crank on the clock. Up came a wooden box of dusty rocks through a hole in the floor. “It runs like a cuckoo clock. The rocks are the weight that keeps this town on time.

“When I bring schoolkids up here, some are surprised to see that the clock has four sides. It makes you wonder. They must look at the clock from different places around town, but in their heads, they think of it as having just one face. Makes you wonder, doesn't it? Does me!”

T
here are more trees than anything else in Oregon. Since they line the state's 350-mile coastline, it is no surprise that some end up in the ocean. But why do so many pile up on the beaches near Bandon? So many, in fact, they have made this little coastal town the driftwood capital of Oregon, perhaps the world.

Driven by furious winter storms, the logs pile up beyond the high-water line. This is not casual driftwood of which lamps and clock faces are made, but gigantic timbers and stumps measuring ten feet in diameter and weighing tons. These are the tailings of lumbering operations in the mountains east of here, along with those nature has cast into the Coquille River, which empties into the ocean at Bandon. I am told that there is a lot of exotic wood in there too: mahogany, yew, teak, redwood, and bamboo. Driftwood collect ors here won't guess—and don't want to know—where it comes from. They say the beauty of driftwood lies in the mystery of its origin: “Nobody knows from where or whence it came.”

Tossed by enormous energy, the timber collects in colossal, haphazard heaps. Giant trees balance crosswise on the rock jetties that form Bandon's small-boat harbor. Tourists on scavenger
hunts rummage through the piles, looking for something to take home. Local kids dig and crawl, routing out secret hideaways. They gather on summer afternoons to eat peanut-butter sandwiches deep in the twisted timbers.

To be driftwood, a sun-bleached, gnarled log is not enough. It must first wash ashore. This qualifying process can be spectacular, even terrifying.

From miles around, in their rubber boots and yellow slickers, the dedicated come to watch. They have formed a group called the Storm Watchers.

Ruth Ball is one. “Gale winds at high tide make for some awesome weather,” Ruth said. “The water has such force and power, yet it's so grand and graceful. It gently lifts huge logs and then drops them, sends them rolling and crashing all over the place. Oh, we have beautiful storms.”

Bandon wants to be called Bandon-by-the-Sea. Why they cite the obvious and put a tourist spin on a perfectly fine Irish name is, unfortunately, what people do now. The economic focus of the coastal towns of Oregon is U.S. 101. It runs through all of them like a feeder tube. Forming a two-lane edge of the state from top to bottom, it flows with tourist dollars from Washington and points north. Even more dollars flow from the south, particulary from southern California.

Although locals love the dollars from southern California, they would do well to tolerate those who bring them.

“I don't know what happens to people down around LA. I think they teach arrogance in the public schools,” an out-of-work logger told me as he pulled in smelt, two and three at a time, off a dock in the boat bas in. “I guess when you see the world every day through blackened windshields and barred windows, it warps ya, like watching too much news. They come here on vacation and complain because their cellular phones don't work. I'd be glad, if I were them, on vacation and all.”