On the Back Roads (10 page)

The drizzle blowing in from the ocean now became heavy. The logger offered me some smelt as I turned to leave. “Take some. Ten of these make a good meal.”

“Thanks, but I'm going to treat myself and eat out tonight.”

Getting wet didn't seem to bother him. He continued to pull in fish as I dashed for my dry motor home.

With “reservations recommended,” Harp's Restaurant has the feel and soft music of a shirt-and-tie place. But owner Michael Harpster, a transplant from Riverside, California, greets guests in jeans and shirttail. Tonight, he is maitre d', busboy, and wine steward. The success of Michael's fine, dinner-only restaurant tells something of the sophistication of Bandon-by-the-Sea. It also says that a few more bucks come into this coastal community than meets the eye.

That night, the wind came in over the Coast Range and blew the sky so clean it looked distilled.

At Ballards Beach State Park, I walked from my motor home to where sandpipers ran at the ocean's edge, poking their bills in the sand after every wave. With the sun just coming up, the blue Pacific shot silver all the way to the horizon.

The nearby lighthouse competes with Face Rock, on the other side of town, as the most photographed landmark in Bandon. One or the other usually adorns the cover of the local telephone book. Built in 1896, its light went out in 1939 when it was hit by a ship—a distinction hard to come by for a light house.

A young couple hunting agates were the only others this morning on this long, beautiful expanse of sand. I remembered the logger's words about another place: “where you have to take a number to get on the beach.” The couple tent-camped in the park last night. Yesterday they found a large glass ball being tossed about in the surf. Coveted by beachcombers as an artifact from a foreign land, it had gotten loose from a fishing net. Japanese fishermen, operating in deep waters off the coast, use them as floats on their tuna nets. When the tide went out, the couple searched for sand dollars. They claimed these creatures collected gold for ballast.

I too started a search: for a newspaper, a place to read it, and a cup of coffee. It was easy to find the
Coos Bay World,
but I had to ask to find Lloyd's.

Some call Lloyd's a typical logger's café. Coffee is ready by six, as are hot biscuits, which are made fresh every hour. It's in Old-Town Bandon, surrounded by shops rigged out in macramé, perfumed candles, stained-glass mobiles, and Snoopy beach towels. Two arches over the street label Old-Town Bandon with Welcome on one side and Come Again on the other. They appear as facades to the synthetic world of tourism. But Bandon is not a synthetic place. Neither is Lloyd's.

I sat at Lloyd's counter midst a local longshoreman, a cranberry grower, a retired postal worker, a sheep rancher, and a man who rents crabbing rings to tourists. The
Coos Bay World,
how ever, was superfluous.

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.

O
nly 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?

T
he 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 full 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.

B
ack 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.