Last night there were a couple fiberglass-rattling downpours but the temperatures outside are very mild. Recently we have been in unseasonably warm weather in Eugene, Florence, Remote and Lakeside and the cool weather here is joyous to me. Peggy wears a coat.
We have recently been dazzled by driving up Oregon’s gorgeous river valleys and, even though Peggy and I both lived here back in the Pleistocene, we decided to drive up some of the valleys in the Coos River watershed. When I was young and erroneously believed I was Invisible, invulnerable, talented and handsome, I worked for Weyerhauser in the logging industry and drove either up one or the other river road every weekday for almost 10 years. Back then, I could tell you what every approaching corner looked like and the maximum possible speed for successfully rounding it.
Today was my chance to affirm my firm belief that my memory of these roads was absolutely crystal-clear and I would be able to regale Peggy with tales of who lived where, which corners were tight and the location of former good friends’ mishaps into the rivers. We had barely started up the Allegany side of the river when I noted that a considerable amount of the scenery seemed very pretty but mostly unfamiliar. Further explorations reinforced my new belief that I can remember a puny fraction of the places I passed through hundreds of times in the past although there is the caveat that the trees and brush are now 35 years older. So are the houses that are still standing. We drove up both the Allegany (north side of the Coos River) and the Dellwood roads to the gravel where we turned around. We spotted some turkeys. On the Allegany side, we also spotted some enormous fields of high-grade marijuana growing with little happy men tending them. The smell downwind, where we were, was luscious. There certainly wasn’t this much bud stock growing in plain sight when I lived here. It was illegal then but since then the clever Oregonians took care of that problem by making it not illegal.
When I was working on the Dellwood side and was a logging newbie, I was sitting next to a guy named Jay Scanlon on the crew bus (an ordinary conventional school bus but with no discernible suspension system and referred to as a “crummy” in logger parlance) as we watched the sharp rocks of the immediately adjacent road cuts pass within inches of the side of the crummy. Scanlon commented that the driver was really talented to round round the narrow curves without grinding the crummy against the dense sandstone. Right then, there was a massive bang and subsequent horrible scraping, giving all the passengers a quick re-seating along the green vinyl schoolchild benches lining the left side of the crummy. It was only after we got off and told the driver to continue without us that we noted as the crummy drove away that there was plainly a problem with the rear suspension making the vehicle crab to the right. The river was coming up on the right so we were happy to catch the next crummy to town.
Weyco abandoned ship here about 25 years ago. Their facilities along Coos Bay, in addition to a 200,000 acre timber farm east of town, were a credit union, an administrative building, an infirmary, a 3/4 mile long sawmill, a big plywood mill, bay side wharves and a bark-burning steam powerhouse which used to emit massive columns of suspiciously pinkish steam around the clock. The land where Weyerhauser used to have their massive bay side sawmill in town was ceded to the local Indians and they razed the mill and built the RV park where we are currently camped. A small remaining part of the former Weyco plywood mill sits across the parking lot from The Mill Casino, Hotel and Tower which stand where most of the plywood mill and powerhouse used to engage in vigorous commerce.
The afternoon weather started looking ominous so we took the long way back to our park and hunkered down inside the Barbarian Invader. Peggy is making soup as I write and the savory odors coming from the stove are quite distracting. The End
We got some photos, including the reefer, that you can see if you click here