Having Everything Right (14 page)

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.

R
IVER
& R
OAD

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.

       
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.

When the moon was right and the tide deep, the man drifted down North Fork of a morning, rode the flood tide up the Siuslaw to the mill by skiff, dressed his lumber into a raft at slack tide, then herded it
downriver on the ebb. The next turn of the tide put him off the mouth of North Fork, and he spent slackwater turning his raft into the North Fork channel. When the next flood tide swung in, he rode his raft by dark up North Fork until he came to his claim. A nice two-story house came out of that one log, with siding left over for the barn, and the man passed on easy ways to his children.

He took the time, he knew the ways. The river did the rest.

The early drift-netters on the Siuslaw suffered under two delusions that sweetened their lives considerably. I talked with Trygve Nordhal, who remembered both. First, it seemed obvious that any motor on the boat would scare off the fish. Second, salmon can see, right? By day, they would surely stay out of any net you laid down. So the word went. So drift boats went by spruce oars only, and by night. You had to know every tree on the dim night-sky horizon, sight them against the starlit clouds to turn and turn, to stay in the channel clear.

Every stretch of good driftwater on the river had a name. There was the Barney Drift, where old Indian Barney once fished. There was the Squaw Drift, and to the side of it, little Papoose Drift, then the Town Drift, Woodpile, Stickpatch, Sandpile, Spruce Point, The Homestead, and Deep Hole Drift where the salmon crowded the deep channel against the north bank. At the Barney Drift, the best of them all as Tryg told it, “We'd go out about twenty oarstrokes, and then we'd lay net, and drift down to what we called The Gap, and pick up the net. Then we'd lay out again, and drift down to what we called The Three Shorts. And that was the end of the ebb-tide drift.”

Talking of fish and the river, Trygve's voice spoke with the rush and ebb of water. There was the turbulent haste of his knowing words, then a milling around at slack, then a drift back down for ebb: “Early in the season, we'd go whenever the tides were right. If it was a minus tide in the evening, we'd fish below the bridge—if it was high tide in the evening, just about dark, why the fish would make it across the
bar, clear up to North Fork before you caught them, and you couldn't catch a fish below the bridge. They never stopped. They came on the tide as far as they could. If it was low water in the evening, for some reason they came in on the morning tide, they flew around, and went back down for a minus tide—low water in the evening, first dark. But if it was high water in the evening, you could not catch a fish below Florence on high water slack. They'd all be up to Barney Drift. They'd catch a hundred fish to the boat up here. You wouldn't catch one below the bridge. They move in cycles like that. And you catch more fish if it wasn't raining. If it was raining, they'd move right up the river. Seemed like they don't go up the river until they have some fresh water.”

The nets were twenty-five meshes deep for the lower river, thirty meshes deep for the upper channel. Meshes ran eight inches for Chinook salmon, six and three-quarters for silverside, six and a quarter for fall steelhead. Fishermen who didn't know the river spent their days mending net they'd trailed into snags. Not only the drift sites had names, but the hidden snags as well. Trygve: “Right off the Town Drift, downstream side, you had to pick up fast. A big spruce tree had fallen in the river there years ago, and it had The Eagle's Nest, they called it. Would just about take your whole net, if you got caught in that.”

In one night with a set net, a farmer on the river could catch enough of the big Chinook to last all winter. One Chinook would fill several gallon jars for salt-fish, and a net could pick forty fish from the river in one night. No one recorded the Siuslaw Indian names for these fishing sites, but with a river so rich, they may have been similar to what Franz Boas recorded for the Kwakiutl candlefish stations way north: “Full in Mouth,” “Fat,” “Eating Straight Down,” “Eating All,” “Eagle Bowl,” “Owning Many,” “Place of Succumbing.” When a Kwakiutl mother bore twins, she knew they were salmon; if they came near water, they might take off their human masks and swim away.

On the Siuslaw, when fall rain failed to fill the river deep, the grocery schooner from San Francisco couldn't make it in across the bar. Then people ate salmon and potatoes three times a day, every day, all winter long. Like the Siuslaw people before them, those pioneers ate the river.

Salmon came up, logs came down. There is one house on Cox Island with no road but the river—the Sanborne house, now windowless and sagging. Mrs. Sanborne told me how she stood by the top window at dusk, and saw her husband float past in a raw December storm, hopping from log to log on a big billowing raft that had broken loose. He glanced once at her lamp-lit shape, waved, and then turned furious to his work and drifted darker downstream west. That time, he lived.

Fred Buss told me how the river took a life. The tug was coming in to dock, and the crowd on shore was as turbulent as the water. People simply jostled Miss Sherman loose from balance, and down she went from the pier. A young man shucked his hat and went in after her, swam under the keel, but came up alone.

Miss Sherman had just become engaged, Fred said, and that softened his way with the story some, but he told it stroke by stroke as an oarsman would who lived by killing the river's fish and knowing its way.

“We watched for her three nights, thinking she'd come to our nets as others had, and every time we pulled in heavy, reached for some silver arm of fish by the lamp-box, it might be her. Fish drown, too, in the net, you know. They come in stiff, cold. And sometimes salmon come to the lamp, up out of the channel, and drop away again. But Miss Sherman stayed down three days.

“Then we were mending net on the dock in the morning. My partner says, ‘We'll see Miss Sherman soon. She ought to be floating by now.' And by God, there she comes, slow past our dock on the ebb, face down, white bump on the water. I was for putting a net out, but these damn fools had to turn her over with an oar. Of course her face was gone. Crabs had eaten that, breasts and all. I said to let her be, but they
would not. Jesus, it made me mad. As she rolled up, her left fist came out of the water. There's her gold ring then, hanging by the fingerbone.”

When they finally paved a road down the north bank of the Siuslaw, Ted Bugbee was foreman. One December morning when the river was ice, he got plain disgusted with the hand-tools he'd been given to use—sledges, picks, and shovels rusted dull, split hickory handles taped but raw with splinters.

“Boys,” he said, “let's pitch our tools into the river, and see if I can't get us a new set from the boss. Ready? All together now—heave ho!” With the shouts and laughter of a good drunk, the boys flung out, and tools went skittering onto the ice but stayed. The ice that day ran too thin to walk on, but too thick to let the tools drop through. Ted had a problem. Should the boss come by, it could be tough to explain how those tools came to lie on the long silver road of the Siuslaw.

“With rocks—sink 'em!” Rocks it was, the ice shattered, and the old tools were gone.

“Break time, boys. Start a fire. I'll be back.” Ted went straight to the boss, just waking in his Mapleton hotel.

“Say, Boss, the boys are in a hell of a fix down there. No tools to speak of, and they're standing idle. Hate to see that. Shall I swing by the hardware for a new set? Fine. Right, Sir. Sorry to wake you, Sir.”

In the city, a hundred miles from the Siuslaw, I wake to the whisper and throb of the freeway—Interstate 5, a lit ribbon one-quarter mile north. Once when I complained of its noise, as I opened the window on a June evening and the freeway roared, my wife's mother said, “Pretend you are hearing the river.”

The river, yes. Her words were wise. I thought I could school my ears to that memory of water's grace. I would hear the whisper of the road, and I would learn to remember one pioneer, drifting down the
Siuslaw in a skiff of split cedar—the man who shot a swimming bear, then dove to the riverbed to pull its sleeping form up by the ear. But my heart was weak. In the night, I burrowed into the seashell of my pillow, but the whisper I heard was not water. I dove for the secret turmoil of dreams. The road's urgent drone, the whine of speed, the growl of trucks gearing down to climb—all that swarm of noise would not soften to a watersound for me. Try midnight, try three before dawn: the same.