On the Back Roads (11 page)

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.”

T
he 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.

At 4,900 feet, Lakeview calls itself “the tallest town in Oregon.” Although most of the state's lumber industry spreads along its western side where the trees grow faster, Lakeview has two sawmills. It had more. But this is mostly ranch country now. Sheep were in this valley first. Now it's mostly cattle. During the summer, Lakeview County's 83,000 square miles have many more cows than people. In October, most of them are trucked south to snow-free pastures in California.

A couple of ranchers, Chuck and Treva Kelly, decided years back to share their 8,000-acre catile ranch with RVers. Their Junipers Reservoir RV Resort, on Oregon 140 ten miles west of town, is centered in what is as much a wildlife refuge as a ranch. It is spectacular in its openness and natural beauty. I drove in for one night and stayed seven.

Camped in the tent area nearby were two hang glider pilots from Berkeley, California. Lakeview is popular with hang gliders. The area has good thermals and some high, straight-down places from which to jump, which hang gliders call “foot launching.”

Bradley Ream, a commercial photographer when not clipped to his gull-wing airfoil of aluminum and Dacron, invited me to come along and watch. We drove up a dirt road to a point 2,000 feet above town. While they assembled their gliders, a weather radio in the car repeated information about wind velocity, temperatures, and the like. Bradley has over 3,000 hours in the air, nine of them on one flight.

“The glider is not as flimsy as it looks,” he said. “In fact, it can take more Gs than a 747.” Bradley pulled on his flight suit, strapped on a parachute, and then zipped his upper half into what looked like a mummy-type sleeping bag. Once in the air, he would pull in his legs, wrapping himself up completely.

Bradley said they would fly until they ran out of thermals, their source of lift, probably an hour or two. He expected to land eight or ten miles up the valley. They had hired a local high-school boy as their chase-car driver.

In the air, Bradley carried with him a small oxygen bottle, an altimeter, a two-way radio, and a book. The radio was to
direct the chase car to their landing site. The book was to read until the car arrived.

Strapped to his wing, Bradley ran across the road and silently drifted off the edge. Hanging under the canopy, he swept out a couple of figure eights. Going higher, he caught a good thermal, just what he had come here to find.

Riding back to the Junipers in Bradley's chase car, we drove by Don's Market. Ike's police car was parked in front. So was a mail truck. It was noon.

E
leven candy jars crowd the counter at the Cedarville Grocery. Some open at the top, but the one holding the flat suckers opened on the side. A little hand reached up but couldn't quite get the cover off. So I lent a hand. Out poured the suckers: red, green, orange, transparent, all individually wrapped in slippery cellophane to make them slide out easier. The little hand got what it wanted. I spent my first few minutes in Cedarville repacking a sucker jar. “Why do you stuff it so full?”

“We have to buy in big quantities,” came the reply from someone seated behind three colors of sour twist. “It's all trucked in, you know.”

“No, I don't know. So you crammed the whole truckload in here, is that it?” I tipped the jar on its side, figuring if no one else helped, gravity would.

“That's the trick. Now screw the top on.”

“But it will just happen again to the next guy.” I was trying to be helpful.

“No, it won't. People here know how to do it.”

Dave Hunt came from behind the counter with a handful of gardening gloves. He slid them on a rod protruding next to the fishing bobbers, under the shelf of shaving cream.

This is Surprise Valley, in the northeast corner of California. I was at its crossroads, its only four-way stop.

My morning began in Oregon but soon changed to California somewhere along Highway 395. Before the town of Alturus, a sign pointed to Surprise Valley. The name attracted me, so I took the road eastward toward it. It was a long climb over Cedar Pass, elevation 6,345 feet. On the way down, I decided that I would find another way out. Tomorrow.

Tomorrow, like four others, had come and gone. I am still in Cedarville, population 800. This town, this whole valley, could not be farther from a big city if it were on the moon. It has a solid foundation of self-sufficiency and independence that shows on people faces, the way they talk and conduct business. I love it here.

Cedarville is the largest of four towns, all tied to one road fifty-four miles long that runs the length of the valley. To the north, the road ends at Fort Bidwell, which was the last outpost of the U.S. Cavalry. Continuing southeast, it becomes Nevada 447 and goes on to Reno, 200 miles away. The only other road out that is not gravel is the one over Cedar Pass.

Along the eastern side of this narrow valley lie three shallow lakes heavy with alkali. If they were freshwater lakes, this valley would be a res ort. During drought years, as most of them have been recently, the lakes dry up and become alkali flats. Good for nothing when wet, they are a playground for wind surfers when dry. The rest of the valley is either hay fields or grazing ground for cattle.

Surrounded by mountains, their peaks pocketed with snow well into the summer, this valley is remote. Its very existence was obviously a surprise to those who named it. Some would call it isolated, which it certainly was once, but no place is truly isolated anymore in this country.

Still, the valley's 1,500 people are definitely removed, even divorced, from the state in which they live. Many prefer it that way. The newspaper, delivered here daily, comes from
Klamath Falls, Oregon. California's
Sacramento Bee
is on sale at the drugstore in Cedarville, but few people seem interested enough to buy it. (Sunday's
Bee
was still in the rack on Wednesday.) Television is all cable. Curiously, the system carries not one California station. Local TV-news shows seen here originate in Medford, Klamath Falls, Reno, and Chicago. AM radio is almost nonexistent, except for one Klamath Falls station. People here think nothing of driving 150 miles to shop in Klamath Falls. With no sales tax in Oregon, most prefer it to Reno, another option. No one I found expressed allegiance to California.

In fact, some businessmen, Ed Hunt in particular, would give anything to see the state line moved west fifteen miles, putting them in Nevada. “I spend half my days working for the bureaucrats in Sacramento,” Ed says.

Hometown pride focuses on the whole valley. The letters cut in the mountain over Cedarville are not C but SV. As for state identity, people here feel a kinship more for Nevada or Oregon than California.

In between weighing hay trucks at the public scales, Harold Asherman told me, “Voting in local elections is the worst. We are so cut off from California, we never know who is running or what they're about.” Harold and his wife Ruby came here in 1966 to run the general store in Fort Bidwell. They are now retired, but the store remains one of the longest continuously operating general stores in California.