Where Angels Fear

Greg and Linda came to Oakridge right after the crash of ’09, thinking they’d had enough of corporate America and figuring that a small town already in collapse can’t get any worse.  They also fell in love with fog and trees, and the fact that they could buy a house and business here for a song and a loan and a few dollars.  They bought the Arbor Inn and RV Park and settled into the Oregon woods like two escapees from Pasadena those forty years ago, who uprooted their lives to plant corn in the hills of middle Tennessee.  

Oakridge was reeling before the crash, but Greg and Linda believed the pundits when they said that with the right PR, Oakridge could reinvent itself as the Mountain Biking Capitol of some great region.  The recession would end, and the town would birth as many bicyclists as it lost loggers.  They now know that the recession was not only worse than anybody expected in ‘09, but its effect on bicycling was even worse.  Room prices fell all over town to some twenty dollars a night in winter, and with it, my coming. 

Linda is one of those giddy women with rosy glasses.  Someday I’ll return to Oakridge and she’ll be running a café by herself in addition to the motel.  But for now she and Greg are trying to make money off the railroad workers who have come for a few days to put new ties under the rails and do other repairs.  As she, I, and her yellow lab, talk, she has little time for my questions about the dead logging culture, but says, “Why don’t you go to the Moose Lodge, if you want to talk to old loggers.  It’s where they hang out in the evening.”  I know what you’re thinking: All Moose are men, and not all men are Moose.  She read my face.  “Greg is a member.  Just say that Greg sent you from the Arbor Inn.  Besides, they even let railroad workers in these days.”

Last evening I walked to the Moose Lodge and found the door locked.  I peeked in the window and saw men lined up at the bar and a bartender fixing a drink.  A little sign said, “Push button for entry.”  So I pushed it and nothing happened.  I pushed it again and heard a small click.  I tried the door and it opened.

One thing I have learned from many days of riding a loaded bicycle across the continent is that benefits come to a spectacle.  In small towns, where farmers know their grocers and the mailman knows everyone, a brightly attired stranger, riding into town loaded front and rear, dismounting at the café, brings gazes from windows and windshields.  Having bicycled some twenty thousand miles, carrying all my needed belongs and some just for comfort, after riding some four hundred days and stopping at as many cafes, I’ve come to enjoy being a spectacle.  I have often struck out for a town which seemed to lay hundreds of miles across a vacant lot, and when I reached it and sat in its café, some farmer would say, “I passed you five miles back.  Traveling far?”  Sometimes, I could not have drawn more attention if fireworks were spouting from my handlebars.  I used to worry when a pickup would slow beside me and a man in coveralls would ask if I needed a lift, worried about his intent, worried that he might do it without asking.  Out there all alone on a bike, nobody would find him out.  I took that risk on the theory that risk should increase with age.  After years without rape, without robbery, without truck tires bearing down on my prone body, tossed by a bumper like a football, worry has nearly ended.  These things I have dreamed, but never felt.

The sensation of being a spectacle returned when I walked through the door of the Moose Lodge.  I faced the backs of men at the bar, and I think every one of them turned and looked.  Every conversation seemed to stop.  I sauntered toward an empty bar stool, nodding with a slight grin for the fans, convinced it was just another café in another small town and everything would be fine.  

“Can I help you,” the bartender said without smiling. 

“Greg sent me from the Arbor Inn.”

“I haven’t seen him here tonight.”

“He and Linda are pretty busy with all the railroad men in town.  The motel is full.”

“Is Greg coming later?”

“I doubt it.  He’s pretty busy tonight.”

“You know it’s a private club—members and guests only.”

I looked around and recognized a couple faces from the Trailhead Café.  I looked in my purse as if dredging up evidence, but really just trying to think of a good line.  Finally I gave the bartender a smile and walked out.

Linda has more guts than I; she would have kept talking.

The railroad made this town successful with its arrival in 1910, and Union Pacific men are still “workin’ on the railroad all the live-long day.”  They remove old rotten wood ties and put in new ones.  A machine runs along the track, yanking them out from under the rails, pushing in new ties and leveling the rails as it goes.  Two hundred transient railroad men are in town, away from their homes, saying, “Out with the old, in with the new,” at the rate of about ten miles a day.  They will sleep in Oakridge until another town becomes closer to their work.  “No Vacancy” signs have sprung up on all the motels.  I came to meet old loggers, not these kind of men.  Can it be that the bartender is more of a friend than I know?

The railroad men did not like the name of this town when they arrived in 1910, so they changed it from Hazel Dell   to Oakridge.  How can a railroad executive just change the name of a town?  I asked Del Spencer at the museum.  “The way a gorilla can sit in any chair he wants,” he said.

But the funniest story I heard from the early days concerns a square white building the railroad men built by the tracks, shown in an old photograph.  It had four windows on each of its four sides.  Two men owned it jointly, and they could not agree.  So one of them sawed the building in half with a hand saw and moved his half, board by board, to the other side of the tracks.  And there in another photograph is a rectangular building with two windows on one side and four on the other.