Life under the volcanoes

Press, 18 April 1981, Page 15

Life under the volcanoes

A few years before my father was born, a stranger came into his town and got his first — and last — taste of civilisation. Someone shot the bear as it came out of the. pines, crossed the river and headed for the desert. It had stumbled across the outskirts of a new settlement, and the settlers were having none of that.

Things haven’t changed all that much in Bend, Oregon. It wasn’t many years ago that someone had ’to coax a bear out of a suburban tree. Most likely the bear came down streets that had never been paved to get there. Bend was famous for those.

We went back to that high country town last summer, prepared to scowl and fuss over the way modern times had messed it up. Homecomings can be hard tO.take. Nothing seems right about'a place. You try to focus memory pictures with What is actually seen, and it’s a jarring experience. So we’ve heard.

■ Bend was different, maybe because it had always been coloured by fantasies and photographs’ from old picture boxes. . It had always been a place of lava floods, shield volcanoes, rain shadow, quick water. Somehow,. it had stayed close to the fantasy. In the early 1900 s, when Bend was still aspiring to some kind of desert glory, the railhead was 90 miles north at Shaniko. ' We came down from that direction, along the old stage route, dodging road-building machines the way stagecoach drivers had dodged sagebrush and'jackrabbits..

Befor the rail lines' went further south, they had tried an auto stage through the rough country. It lasted three weeks. It was the largest automobile in the United States in 1905, had four engines and might have been better, described as a road train. •

It carried passengers and freight across Shaniko Flats and down Cow Canyon, over 15 miles of built road at the start

,y' There was so much jostling and jolting that the contraption soon came unhinged. The freight and luggage trailer were airborne over the bumps most of the time.,Passengers didn’t fare much better.

The auto stage • had air brakes and an air whistle. It would have needed an aircushioned ride to stay in business. x Shaniko is still on a main road, but it doesn't have • much kick left anymore. It's people are mostly dead, and the town is sinking fast unless someone revives it as a tourist trap. Strung out in a long line, Shaniko’s early buildings had that grand Front Street look common to railway towns. It was a wide-open street, no trees, nothing to get in the way of thirsty cowhands out for a whoop.

By the 19605, Shaniko had been long since bypassed bv the main rail line. Some old Sle lived in rail waggons up as shacks, while most retired ranch workers district shuffled away their lives on the boardwalk beside the brick hotel. The place became an old folks’ home, though you could' still get a pretty good hot meal in the cafe.

By this summer, even the hotel was empty, its fittings taken out, waiting for tenants with more energy for whooping it up. There are more trees now among the few buildings left, with hardly anybody to look at them.

Bend’s first white visitors came from the east, across the Great Sandy Desert, in small waggon trains, instead of south across the Shaniko plateau from the Columbia River’Basin. ’

The Clark’ party; in. 1851, had been shot up by Indians on the Snake River in Idaho, and they kept a look-out across the sagebrush for three white mountains and a low red butte as their westward guide. . . They finally reached the Deschutes River — River of the Falls — where it swirled into a meadow between canyons. There, at Pioneer • Park, they camped in the pine and juniper trees and had ro thoughts of lingering. The wet part of Oregon, across one of several mountain passes between the’volcanoes, was going to be home, not this mostly , dry spot with no, trace of civilisation. , •. , ■ x ’ ' Pioneer . Park' is ..on .the • campsite now, alongside < river dammed to make.deef water. Swans go up aric down, cadging snacks from the big riverside homes. Water sprays constantly to keep the grass green.- A motel beside the park has 2 'earning, covered pool and i

jucuzzi bubble tub. The Clark party should come back.

That red outcropping they homed in on across the desert is a cinder cone now called Pilot Butte, and it is one of the tamer reminders of this country's uproarious past.

'Bend is a meeting place of the lava flows. Explosions filled the canyons with ash. Over thousands of years, all the blowing, and flowing stuff hardened into layers of pink and red and black. When it came time to build a town, lava barriers poking through the surface made it expensive to put in straight streets and foundations. Some streets veered to avoid the obstacles instead of trying to go through them. Not all the rock was a nuisance, since it made good building blocks for the more substantial structures — schools, courthouses, banks — that a town needed to prove its worth. Bend’s lava underpinnings w-ere also used as a handy hiding place for sewage. Even though sewer pipes were needed, they led to drill holes bored through the rod: and kept the cost down. The earth was the treatmen. : plant. Now the town, growing ■ quickly for recreatioi. reasons that its founders. never _ suspected, ponders $5O million bill for a moder:, i sewer system. Some years ago, a drilling rig found what might be ai_ underground river, flowing over lava ledges down there. Does the sewage somehow get into that, then into thu Deschutes somewhere downstream?. No-one wants that and it could force the treatment issue. Such financial worrie. were far from the minds o_ the writers of a 1911 promotional book. Bend was purity, sunshine, a place to get away from it all, yet it had all the conveniences.

The railway was coming south, so the pine forests, could be used by lumber mills. That public relations book said the high country had the pine forests of Michigan, the power of Niagara, the scenery of Switzerland. Bend's first electric power came in 1910, a year after my father was born, from a dam built across the Deschutes. That dam and later ones replaced the water wheels that can still be found in some mountain rivers.

The town's first house was built in 1900, a log cabin, naturally. The cabin was actually a mountain lodge, about a mile downstream from the Farewell Bend ranch founded by my greatgrandfather at a time of roving cattle bosses.

•John Y. Todd had a fireplace chimney that was 35 miles thick, they used to say. His ranch house backed on to a ridge that went alb the way to the mountains.

Todd was a good cattleman. the no-fence variety, but he ran hard up against the worst kind of luck in the 1880 s. Cattle drives far to the east were still necessary, and he led one that made it all right to Wyoming. But when the cattle were sent on further east for fattening, most of them broke through Platte River ice and drowned.

Farewell Bend was sold so that Todd could get a new stake. He was a squatter at Squaw Prairie, one . of his camps below the mountains, before he could put together a new herd. < A man named Sisemore bought the ranch, still years before anyone had thought of a. town, and built a hotel there. He had competitior from a nearby roadhouse rut. by a man named Staats. As they vied for the travellers and anyone living 'nearby, and -as they tried t< £ become the centre of thing g in a country that tended to ■

operate without' centres,Sisemore started a school. Staats had a thriving vegetable garden used by locals from miles around. Sisemore started an orchard, although it didn't take. Then he built a bridge across the river, the first in that vicinity. One day, his riders came across a man downstream building a lodge. Civilisation had arrived. The lodge had lanterns, oriental rugs and a bathtub.

They wondered for a time what to call the place that was to have a Post Office. Lenark suited some, a combination of Lewis and Clark, the North-west explorers. Some wanted Staats. Others wanted Oreopolis.

The most suitable name seemed to be Farewell Bend, after the pioneer ranch. That name was too long for Post •Office officials, so it was shortened. Bend had its first towr election in 1904. One mayoral contender was a man whe had sold rifles to Soutt American rebellions. He war defeated, and took to the streets with a shotgun anc pockets loaded with pistols. Strangely enough, at a time

when guns were even more the rage than now, he didn’ shoot at anything or anyone.' He left town quietly. The town grew fast enoug'. to force some of its new comers into tents for a while It resembled a spread o little settlements until th< middle parts were filled ii and the lava ridges gnawei through. Boardwalks rolle over the contours to connec buildings scattered amon. the pines. Meanwhile, two things tha would keep my family i. jobs for many years wer' coming south toward th town — the railway line am sawmilling equipment. Railroad Day was in 1911 with all the ceremony of tb j

golden spike. Two big mills moved in. and started to tear into the pine forests. Because the forests are still so magnificent. you sometimes have to look close to see what they did. From the names of his class-mates alone, it seems that my father graduated from high school and headed for the log pond among a good cross-section of America at that time. He had wandered those school halls with the likes of Ella

Pickle. Willard Houston, Maybelle Winslow, Bessie Howard, Donovan O’Leary, Lola Plott, Elwood McKnight, Ragnar Johnson, Huldah Thom, Edna Ogle, Marie.Peetz, Barney Brink, Alvin Kleinfeldt and

America Rhinehart. Dad took his schooling, out to the-log ponds before he finally took it to universitv, while my mother took her learning into a secretary's office at one of the big mills. Some of the photographs from that time make it all seem a Huckleberry Finn existence, with my father and his brother in overalls ■and skinhead haircuts; leaning against a back porch screen door.

In another photo, Dad sits in a wooden rocker, built for a boy, and reads a book. His hair is longer, slicked down and parted near the middle. The railway tracks figure prominently in some of the snapshpts, going off into the pines across a meadow that looks ready-made for sheep. It wasn’t always easy for sheepmen, even in the early 1900 s, because the old feuds with cattle ranchers continued. The secret Crook County Sheepshooters’ Association carried on with range wars until 1906 over the claim that cattle wouldn’t graze where sheep had torn out the grass. Sheep boundary “deadlines” were drawn, and more than 110,000 sheep were killed by raiding shooters over four years. Masked, men sometimes drove them over cliffs, killing the herders when they could, and burying them where they fell. Haystacks were also burned in the back-and-forth fighting. Hay burning has never really died out as a means, of retribution. One photograph is larger than the rest; it looks like a posed boxing match between brothers, with big gloves. They are wearing kneelength trousers, high-topped shoes and ties neatly knotted at the collars of baggy woollen shirts. It is a friendly match, all smiles, and Dad must have remembered that kind of thing years later, when he had his owq young sons rush at each other across the back yard, charging wildly, arms flailing with the fat gloves on, banging each other down from the impact of hitting square on, not from the impact of fists. ' In the background of the Bend match are the sickly

grass and dusty ground that were the town’s trademark. The walks are on their own, as if laid across swampy ground.

There is a white-colon-naided house across the street, in a rough setting. There are few fences between houses. Dirt streets held on into the 19605. Main streets were covered with cinders at first, cinders' taken from Pilot Butte, the most convenient place. That practice was stopped, but not before the red cone had a big scrape in its side.

There is a road out of Bend called Century Drive. It is about 100 miles long if you complete the circuit, into the mountains and back to town from the southern plateau. .. That road also used to be dirt; yet hasgone quite modern .over the years, especially spurred on by a moneyspinning skifield on the side of one volcano.

Dutchman’s Flat, below the Sisters, volcanoes, used to

be much like a waggon trail, with tracks everywhere across the old lakebed. The highway cuts straight across now, but at least the flats are protected. There are old photos taken at Elk Lake, far into the mountains, where one of Dad’s friends, George Brick, had a log cabin. George had a cocky lean to him. He was older than Dad, and they' worked together for a while on the log pond, spending their breaks talking philosophy. Mostly discussions about Plato, it seems. George was handy with things. He built fine telscopes, and ended up as an electrician with Douglas Aircraft in Los Angeles in his later years.

You come to the lake after passing through a. cutting through the volcanic rock. The cutting is wider than before — in the old days, you had your picture taken partway into the rocks, on a rock shaped like a chair. It was called the Devil’s Chair, and when you sat there, he was

watching from somewhere nearby. You could never Hirn fast enough to see him. Further on past the lake is forest • country where the Deschutes River starts. All around there, the underground lava sponge holds water and rations it out to lakes at the river's head.

The water takes the long way out of the mountains, down through meadows and through Bend, where it guaranteed the town a future of more than temporary desert campsites.

Bend has a strip now, the usual American line-up of neon lights, motels, drive-in shopping .centres, restaurants and car sales yards.. At first, the glitter made some of the locals wonder what the place was coming to, but at least it has lured tacky developments away from the town centre, which can be restored at leisure now.

The river curves through the part of town, slowed down by dams that have drowned some of its canyons

and formed two lovely lakes with grass running down to them. One — the Mirror Pond — is a landmark of Bend country, and on one bank is. the Pine Tavern, an z old restaurant that used to ' have lemon pie as one speciality — made by Hattie Todd, my grandmother. They used to say the front porch was a thing of the past, -with cars in command ' and no need for the citizenry to roam their own neighbourhoods on foot anymore, .chatting up the front porch stalwarts.

Those who stayed at home generally retreated to back yard barbecues and patios.

In places like Bend, the front porch may have gone into a decline, but at least the porches are still there/ With the. nostalgia trend showing no sign of slowing down, they could make ai comeback. i

That would have pleased Dad, George Brick, Grampy Todd and a lot of others.