I like Lakeview

In south central Oregon, Lake Abert is big and lonely, and you drive miles along the eastern side and see no people or boats but thousands of shore birds clustered on the beach and in the shallows. Up from the road looms a long, dark escarpment, 2500 feet above and parallel to the lake. In between is sagebrush and millions of small volcanic boulders.

The late sun was near the western horizon across the lake, heading for the tan, round hills…. At the northern end of the lake the escarpment petered out, and the shallow water gave way to a couple miles of gray flats, sprinkled with patches of green where a few tiny streams straggled towards the smooth, unruffled lake. I couldn’t figure where they came from, those slow, winding seeps. The land all about was dry and dusty, rolling hills, the occasional outcropping of rock on a ridge, and everywhere the pale sagebrush. Occasionally a jackrabbit ran across the road and darted into the bushes and disappeared….

The evening before I had left Susanville and driven north an hour or so to Willow Creek campground, in Modoc National Forest. None of the eight sites was taken, though it was a Saturday, and none looked like they been occupied for a long time. I’d stayed at the same place last year after visiting Stan, and there was no one about then either…. In the morning, over the first hour of driving north I saw only three cars.

In the town of Alturas (pop. 2827) everything was closed. Sunday…. I did the short Auto Tour route at nearby Modoc National Wildlife Refuge, and took a walk around a couple of the ponds. I’d left my binoculars in Boise before coming away, which was a mistake. Lots of shorebirds along the muddy verges of the ponds and in the shallows, including black-necked stilts and whitefaced ibises, the latter striking for their long-curved beaks. I could hear sandhill cranes cronking in the deep grass nearby but spotted only one pair, moving slow and long-legged and poking at the ground with their beaks. Two mule deer waded across a bay in one of the ponds.

The air was still, the sun still low, but already the morning was hot, and the day would get much hotter yet…. Instead of continuing north, I headed east twenty miles over the Warner Mountains to the town of Cedarville (pop. 514 ) because on the map it seemed to be a sort of geographic dead-end. You wouldn’t pass through Cedarville on the way to somewhere else. Not far beyond, the pavement gave way to gravel and dirt roads, which headed out into the high desert where there were no more towns, up to southern Oregon and over to western Nevada.

Several restaurants lined the short main street (one was in the midst of a Sunday breakfast to raise money for the school), and a couple small stores too, though most were closed. I stopped at a thrift/junk/antique store called “Good Things” and rummaged through old stuff and cast-offs. The old woman in charge wore an oxygen tub in her nose, and over her ears, and I asked which of the dirt roads to the north, going back over the mountains, was the best to take. She said, “I don’t know, I’ve only been her ten years.” But just then another woman came in, in substantial make-up and big sunglasses and a nice Sunday pants suit, and she said, “Take Fandango Pass, the other’s kind of rough.” She looked at the other woman, “I’ve been here seventy years, so I guess I can say,” and then they laughed.

The road up to Fandango was pretty good but steep, and the van just crawled along the switchbacks. This was the route gold seekers took in the California gold rush of 1849. When they got to the top, they would do a jig or dance or fandango, to celebrate the accomplishment….

I got back on U.S. 395 and rode into the town of Lakeview, Oregon. In 1984, I was hitchhiking through the town and two cops stopped me and ran my license then told me to move along; it was night so I walked out of town and threw down my sleeping bag in a just-cut hayfield. A couple years ago the librarian at the town library was helpful and friendly and let me use the internet for much longer than the allotted one hour.

I drove through the town several times, scouting possibilities; I planned to stay for the afternoon and wait out the worst of the day’s heat. I spotted a Safeway, but there was no Starbuck’s inside; no other coffee shops in town either, none open anyway. I settled for the Burger Queen. Inside the walls were red, the curved formica benches of the booths orange.  I had a burger and fries, no Coke, Pepsi….

I stayed for three or four hours, reading and writing, watching the locals come in for ice cream, big families with broods of pale, tow-headed kids, the boys’ hair all close-cropped, the girls’ hair all long and well-cared for. The children took giant swigs of soda then gasped for breath, their eyes glittering….

On the way out of town I couldn’t help myself and stopped at the I.O.O.F. Cemetery and looked at every one of the hundreds of gravestones. My favorite names were Waltine Barber and Vevay Boone. One large monument, dated 1901, was for fifteen-year-old Fred Snelling, “the brave young hero who lost his life attempting the rescue of a drowning comrade.”

Lake Abert wasn’t far north of town, and beyond the lake was a big and open and dry land, tan and gold, and only a rare ranch road off to some distant cattle operation or to a small reservoir not for recreation but for the cows…. A low-slung badger appeared on the shoulder, wanting to cross the road, but he thought better of the timing and moved quickly back into the brush as I passed…. I drove along with the windows down and air swirling loud and fast inside the van, through the hot evening as the light faded away, and I wanted to take each road and go off into the sagebrush and see what there was to see….

Instead I looked for a good place to park for the night, and it took a while, till just before dark, before I found an open patch to the right of the road, a dis-used staging area for road maintenance crews. In the middle of the moonlit night I sat up to look about and spotted something large and black thirty yards off, where there had been nothing of that sort when I’d gone to sleep. A strange 2001: A Space Odyssey moment of fear and confusion…. But then I recognized the large, blocky object as a cow. Further off, behind, were another dozen or two of the black cows, back along the edge of the sagebrush. Okay, I thought, I guess I don’t mind sharing my night’s home with you, and I went back to sleep.