Читать книгу Farthest Reach - Nancy Wilson Ross - Страница 13

CHAPTER II

Farewell Bend

Bend isn’t a typical Oregon town—if there is such a thing as a typical Oregon town—and yet it is a town which only the Pacific Northwest—perhaps even only Oregon—could produce. Its citizens range from the distinguished and handsome Mr. Sawyer, with his Harvard accent, who publishes the Bend Bulletin, to Klondike Kate, a “convent-bred” lady now well on in years who was once the diamond-bedecked toast of Dawson. Klondike Kate is married now to an Alaskan sourdough named Matson who admired her from a distance for thirty years. She came to reside in Bend because she saw some pictures of it in a movie travelogue and liked the look of it.

Bend does have a nice look. Although it is a mill town, living off lumber, its streets are clean, charming, well laid out along a little park where water fêtes are given annually on an artificial lake. All around Bend lies a famous recreation area of lakes, rivers, and mountains, ski slopes, trout streams, geologic riddles to confound scientists. Regional planning councils give Bend just about ten more years before its adjacent lumber supply is exhausted—unless it adopts some “sustained yield” program to save the timber resources. Will it turn to pulp for salvation, as many similar Northwestern communities have done; or to something newer like rayon? Will it discover mineral resources? Will it die slowly and become a ghost community? . . . When such questions confront a town as lively as Bend one comes suddenly and sharply to an understanding of the dark problems that this whole Northwest region poses.

Many Easterners have been identified with Bend; notably, however, not many of those who trekked through here on their way to the fertile Willamette in the fifties and sixties of the last century. These travelers looked back with recorded reluctance at the green stretch beside the river and named the place somewhat whimsically, Farewell Bend, because of the curve the river made there. But these weary folk were tired of barren hills. They wanted green slopes and verdant valleys, damp underfoot; so they pushed on, and it was not until the late nineteenth century that Bend became a town.

In the early 1900s irrigation came, and shortly afterward the lumber interests found the place. Tom Shevlin, the football hero from Yale, came in 1915 to build the Shevlin-Hixon sawmill. George Palmer Putnam came to edit the paper. People in Bend are fond of telling how Mrs. Putnam tried to break her husband of the habit of dropping his clothes on the floor wherever he stepped out of them. (I’m sure Bend didn’t have in those days, and hasn’t now, any human creature you could conceivably call a servant.) Mrs. Putnam, it is related, would take hammer and nail and pound George’s clothes into the boards wherever she happened to find them lying.

Out of experience in the pine forests around the town, Paul Hosmer got the material for his book Now We’re Loggin, which paints, with the exaggeration and gusty humor proper to logging vocabularies, a picture of the various types of jobs and human beings which keep the lumber industry going. I can’t resist Mr. Hosmer’s theory on the decline of the old-time lumberjack:

“A few years ago one could always tell a real lumberjack at a glance. There never was much room for doubt about him. If, through error, you should mistake him for an actor, a farmer or what have you, it was his playful habit to correct you at once by pulling your hat down over your eyes with his left hand and rapping you smartly on the chin with his right, after which he would carelessly toss you into the log pond before proceeding on his more important business of depleting the available liquor supply, which always seemed to pile up on him during his enforced stay in the woods through the winter. He was garbed in raiment peculiar to his calling—stagged pants, a little round hat from which the bloom of youth had long since departed, and a noisy, passionate shirt of many checks and colors. The shirt was always worn outside the trousers, like a Chinese laundryman. It was a half an inch thick and so scratchy that the ordinary human began to itch all over the minute he got into the same room with it. Lastly, he had on a pair of logger’s shoes with half-inch caulks in the soles—‘corks’ in the woods—the most devastating thing in the line of footwear ever devised by man. Corked shoes were to the lumberjack what a tail is to a monkey; in other words, without them he wouldn’t be much of anything and couldn’t go any place. They served two or three purposes. For one thing they enabled our hero to earn an honest livelihood by spending fourteen or sixteen hours a day on the quarter deck of a short log while said log was resting uneasily on the bosom of a river. If you have ever tried to balance yourself on a log while wearing a pair of store shoes you will understand at once why a cat has claws. The old-time lumberjack was wont to spend several weeks each spring in bringing down the drive. During this time he practically lived on a log, although now and then he found time in which to dash ashore and curl up in a wet blanket for an hour or so of much needed sleep.

“The real purpose of the lumberjack’s corks . . . only came to light when the drive was ‘in’ and the veteran had retired to the nearest saloon to celebrate his return. Here it was you could see the deadly skill with which the lumberjack, as he entered the door, was wont to set his heel down firmly on the pine floor, twist his foot dexterously, and rip out an entire board without batting an eye. After a couple of hearty jolts of bottled sunshine, one snort of which has been known to blow a man’s collar buttons a distance of forty feet, it was his custom to kick a two-foot splinter out of the wooden bar rail just to hear it crack. Every kind of hardwood obtainable has been tried out in backwoods saloons for bar rails and floors, but nothing grows that can withstand the joyful ravages of a lumberjack on vacation. Some years ago an American genius retired to the seclusion of his laboratory, and when he came up for air he had the plans and specifications of an entirely new thing in that line. He had invented the modem brass bar rail which cannot be splintered, and it is my personal opinion that the decline and fall of the old-time lumberjack dates from this event. The brass bar has done more to tame the lumberjack and cramp his style than any other one thing, including prohibition. It practically ruined him. If you’re a logger there’s no use in getting drunk if you can’t break something.

“. . . If a man had gone into the woods early in the fall and worked right through on the job he sometimes had as much as $150 in the spring, $149 of which he immediately spent for rum. The remaining dollar was sometimes used in the purchase of a new hat.

“If he was a good, careful buyer and a conservative drinker his winter wages sometimes lasted three or four days, but most of the boys were not conservative. They were, on the other hand, astonishingly willing, not to say eager, carousers, and it was not unusual for the old-timer to wake up without a dime the day after he was paid off, to find himself in a very poorly equipped jail, where he usually spent the summer.

“When our hero started on a spree he did it in a wholehearted manner that left no room for doubt in the minds of the citizenry as to where he was going. The police force never had any doubts about the matter, either, although it was the custom of the local gendarmes to leave the city when the drive struck town so as not to get involved in anything. Experienced lumberjacks usually confined themselves to misdemeanors and the lighter crimes—not counting manslaughter, as this wasn’t considered much of a crime—in the hope that they could get out of jail in time to go to work in the fall, but now and then even an old-timer was apt to overestimate his capacity and get a little too rough with the mayor or some other personage of power, with the result that he got nicked for six months. This was usually disastrous, as by the time he got out all the good jobs were gone and he would be forced to ship out as a bullcook for the winter and make the last ten miles into camp on snowshoes.”

People in Bend are glad to tell the inquiring visitor that Clark Gable once worked in a mill here, and that Don Blanding was a cashier in one of the banks. The third time I heard this last item I ventured to remark (it was in the library, a charming building of native woods, suited admirably to the land out of which it rises) that Mr. Blanding might better have remained behind the bars of a cashier’s cage instead of fluttering middle-aged ladies with his romantic banalities. This sentiment seemed to endear me to the member of the library staff to whom I spoke. We fell at once into intimate conversation and she offered to telephone Klondike Kate and ask if I might come to call. Unfortunately “Aunt” Kate was not in town, but I learned some further details about her. Aunt Kate, it seems, is the firemen’s friend. Whenever a fire siren sounds in Bend she puts on the coffeepot, knowing that her pals will come past when the blaze is out. The firemen’s brass band, in return for this service, meets her at the station whenever she returns from any junkets to the world outside. She loves stories about herself and frequently visits the library to inquire if anything new has appeared about her.

Bend’s outstanding landmark is the isolated bit of mountain called Pilot Butte, from which the local hotel has taken its name. The Pilot Butte Inn is one of the most comfortable and pleasant hotels in all this eastern Oregon land. The food is good, really good, and there is a genial air of comfort and even of a sort of bourgeois, bad-taste, expansive luxury which soothes the spirit at the end of a long day of naked open spaces. The building itself rambles pleasantly across a green lawn. It is built fittingly of local stone and wood. Inside are rooms full of comfortable soft furniture and some really fearful and wonderful “art.” There is a very handsome large piece in one of the foyers, setting forth, as the clerk told me—not without a certain embarrassment—The Temptation of Hercules. Hercules—foreshortened in a manner that might well breed envy in Picasso—gazes at his own face in a mirror held by a buxom blonde. What there might have been tempting to Hercules in his own face is a subject I did not take up with the clerk; but his club and the aggressive draping of his tiger skin indicate that he is not going to linger in spite of lures. In the dining room there is also A Large Picture. This is of a lady, in flowing white garments, with her head resting on the base of an organ and a broken flute at her feet. This is St. Cecilia, symbolically represented as forsaking worldly music (the flute) for celestial music (the organ). I hope with all my heart that neither of these fanciful conceits is ever removed from the walls.

Bend has some very conservative inhabitants who live along the river and if you meet them and no others, visit the library, and stay at the Pilot Butte Inn, you may never see the other face of Bend’s coin. But it does have another face. I sat for several hours beside GILBRIDES PASTIME— MIXERS, HOT DOGS, COFFEE and saw this other side. Old drunks held rambling conversations bristling with non sequiturs; making shrewd lewd comments about a recent drowning in a nearby lake. A young woman in a fetching get-up of pink cotton slacks and black cowboy hat with a cord under the chin went by on mysterious errands. At the end of one of her brief journeys she entered Gilbrides and took a great many heavy clinking silver dollars out of a cigar box. A synthetic cowboy, with incomparable languorous grief, sang (Drop in a nickel for this one!) “You left me in sorrow, you drifted away.” All Gilbrides’ habitués found this a most moving sentiment presumably. I heard nothing else in the time I sat at the curb.