Vernonia

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out your door. You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you may be swept off to."
Bilbo Baggins

Vernonia

posted 11/04/05
There are a lot of ways to cross the Coast Range of Oregon. Some, like highway 26 are a series of gentle swoops and curves that belie the power that created them. A close examination reveals that those gentle hills are the result of blasting the tops off of mountains and bulldozing them into valleys. Tons of explosives and mega gallons of diesel fuel lay in every mile of every curve. It's a pleasant ride now that the smoke has cleared, the rocks fallen from the sky and the asphalt cooled. But it's a mindless and soothing road with homogenized cafes and the more interesting bones of the old road only occasionally visible in a deeper valley, a sharper curve.

There are several roads like this that hurry you across the range. They let you think that you've experienced the mountains and the scenery is nice. They get you from the Willamette valley to the beach but they aren't the real Coast Range roads. The real roads don't go east west in gentle curves. The real roads aren't about travel from the valley to the coast. These roads are the ones that connect the dots within the range. Dots called Alsea, Mist, Jewel, and Vernonia. These are the small towns that are so isolated that a Wal-Mart in Hillsboro has little effect on the general store in the town. Some are so small as to be only a few houses around an intersection but a few are centers, villages in the classic way with a sense of place and traditions. These roads don't gently curve, they twist and turn, climb and drop in a way that tells you that no modern traffic engineer had anything to do with their design Hwy. 202 is one of these coast range roads. It runs from Astoria to Hwy 26 west of Portland. Not even a Blue Highway on the map, it is mostly a county road and in some places, 2 lanes only if you're facing another car. Make it a logging truck you meet and the 2 lanes becomes something less. Much less!

And there are logging trucks. The spotted owl may have put many loggers out of business in the old growth areas of the country but this is the Oregon coast range. The old growth was logged a historical age ago. The larger second growth was consumed during the huge Tillamook burn during the Depression. What's being logged today is third and fourth growth. It's still valuable though and very sustainable under the allowances of the today's forestry practices. The road starts at tidewater southeast of Astoria and runs along the riverbank with a flat, broad valley below. This valley quickly narrows as it starts to rise and the smooth pavement of suburban Astoria soon gives way to the steep stream valleys that Kesey described so well in his epic logging tale: "Sometimes a Great Notion". This is a road whose course was never surveyed for ease of travel. Instead, existing elk trails were widened for wagons. Wagons gave way to Model T's. The temporary logging camps became permanent settlements, the settlements became towns and because they were so isolated, some remain.

When I was a kid, we'd whisk right by these roads on Highway 26 on our way to the beach but as we sped by, I wondered at the town names on the signs. Mist and Jewel are always together on the same sign and I was a in my 20's before I realized that they were 2 separate communities and not a single place named "Mist Jewel" too bad really as that is a perfect name for a community in the heart of the Coast Range's gentle rain. All my life I'd roamed many of these roads but somewhow, never 202 and Hwy 47 that it connects too. I'd always envisioned Mist swathed in fog but never been there. Today we were heading southwest to find these names on the map.

The road didn't disappoint. The smooth road at the mouth of the stream soon gave way to tight turns and hills. Hills on a human scale though. Not intimidating mountains like the cascades or Rockies. These hills were meant to be lived in, logged, planted, fished, hunted, and farmed. Human evidence of all of these things was scattered throughout the woods. On some turns we'd get glimpse a huge cedar stumps in the brush by the side of the road. The notches in them would tell a tale of wiry loggers with hobnailed boots, axes, and crosscut saws. Along the wider stream valleys there would be farms and old orchards. Barns were built to last of old cedar the same as the natives used for their coastal longhouses.

Small streams shape the land, not the roads

At Jewel there was an elk viewing station and a meadow with 80 elk bedded down for the day. All along the road, I'd been wishing for a motorcycle or My Fearless Wife's convertible but these huge animals made me rethink that! A deer hitting your car is hard on the car. But an elk won't damage a car, it will destroy it! I didn't even want to think what they would do to a motorcycle! I'd seen the "Elk Crossing" signs all along the road. They had new meaning after this view.

You don't want to meet the elk on the highway!

Past Jewel and into Mist but the community was only a group of houses. No businesses survived the 21st Century but I had hopes for Vernonia as it was a larger dot on the map and I knew that it had a high school.

As we approached the town's edge there was a "speed limit ahead" warning. This was a good sign as any self respecting town worth its salt has to have a speed limit. No speed limit and you aren't a town, only a typographical memory on a map. I remember the time I rode to Pyst Washington just to see what I town with such a name would be like. According to my map, it was located on Highway 112 hard on the Straits of Juan De Fuca on the Olympic peninsula. This was on a motorcycle trip with another couple and they indulged me as we were just wandering anyway and I'd made the name sound worth seeing. When we got to the location indicated on the map, the speed sign said "50mph". I knew that I was in trouble. No limit, no town. Sure enough, there was only one, count 'em, one deserted house in the designated spot. Where had the town gone? The name said it all, Pyst! But Vernonia was still looking promising. More houses showed up though still no business section.

We had been paralleling the Newhalem River and noticed that some houses were built up on high foundations to survive floods and some of the work looked fairly recent. Not a good place to build a business but I had more hope when the road crossed the river and headed up a small hill. There were the businesses! NAPA, Shell, and the schools too. We stopped at the NAPA store to buy some windshield washer fluid and the woman behind the till asked, "Where are you coming from?"

"You've never heard of it. It's a town called Friday Harbor and it's on an island north of Seattle.

She grinned, "My roomate in college went to school there. Did you ever know Maleka Hartman?"

"I'll be damned! I sure do! I was her science teacher. Her Dad is still a good friend of mine."

We traded more stories and as we were doing this, one of the locals allowed as how the Vernonia wrestling team went to Friday Harbor for a match many years ago. I remembered that and said that I believed that their mascot was the loggers? Yup. Now why did I remember that? The mysteries of senility I guess. Two blocks up the street was the business district in the classic Mainstreet mode with everything packed into 4 blocks and residential houses only one block back. I spotted a coffee shop and stopped for a snack and re-caffination therapy.

The shop was being run by a couple of high school age girls so I asked about the local school.

"How large are your graduating classes?"

"About 50."

"So there's about 200 in the school?"

"More like 400."

I must have looked puzzled because she quickly explained, "A lot of kids drop out of school here. Not me. I'm a senior this year and I want to go to college."

It turned out that she was also a very good student, a cheerleader, and interesting to talk to. I asked her my Fantasy Question next. I always do this whenever I'm in a small town and chatting up the locals.

"So do they need any science teachers at the school?"

"Not this year but they might next year. Our principal is retiring and the science teacher wants to take his place."

Now that got me thinking "what if?" as I always do when I'm talking to people in small towns during my travels. What if I lived here? How would I get along with the locals my first year? Would I have enough time as a resident to make the kind of friends that I have in FH? I looked at the young girl as she rang up my snack and I wondered what she would be like to teach as a student. Many dropped out she'd said. Very different from FHHS. 70% of our students go on to College or trade School. But Vernonia is a blue collar-logging town and fixing your truck may be more important to some kids than learning about the postmodern movement in film. Still, I bet that I could connect with them too. I like to shoot and that would be a connection with the hunters in the group and my mechanical skills could also be a bridge to their world. The motorcycles are always a draw to the guys.

I kept my fantasy going as we walked around the town and looked at the homes for-sale in the local real estate office. The most expensive home came in well below our median. If I sold my Frida Harbor home, I could retire to Vernonia, buy the local equivalent of a mansion and bank the majority of the money! Really, living below your income isn't a bad idea. The San Juan's are expensive and I wonder if I'll be able to stay. Better to move while I can still get a job and grow into the community. People who move when they're so old that their next home is the rest home seen disconnected and lonely at best.

But then there is my Fearless Wife. There is no quilt shop in Vernonia! Also, she takes years to make friends. I take minutes; once I get over my shyness of course: We've joked about that. Drop me in a strange town with only $10 in my pocket and within 24 hours I'd have a job, a place to live and 10 new friends, 5 of whom would be women that she wouldn't approve of! Also, our favorite house cat absolutely HATES car trips! The first time we took him in a car it was to the vet to get fixed� and he wasn't even broken! He hasn't forgiven or forgotten that incident. But in my dreams, I'm still life's eternal drifter. A young man riding into town to defeat the Forces of Evil and rescuing damsels in distress. I bet that pretty young cheerleader at the coffee shop had a pretty young mother. And they had drug dealers living next door and they needed help! Hmm, I've seen that storyline in a hundred hollywood movies so it's gotta be true� right? But my fantasy lasts about as long as it takes to realize that I'm a 50 - something, married, Old Squid not a 20 something, single drifter. And besides, drifters have a bad reputation now and that's too bad because it wasn't always so. In the westerns of my flamed out youth, it was always the drifters who rode in just in time to save the townfolk from the outlaws. Then, of course, they rode off into the sunset.

As we left Vernonia, the leaves were turning yellow and starting to fall on the road. In the rear view mirror I watched as they scattered, swirled and then settled into landscape. To the locals and the leaves, I was just a momentary disturbance that passed through.

- The Old Squid

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