Oregon Dreaming

(Originally published at joecsmolen.com 1/29/22)

It’s four o’clock in the morning and he tells himself again that insomnia is a great opportunity. He doesn’t know why he’s awake. He just is. He goes outside. The still air bites, but all’s so quiet on the bay front. The bridge across the bay is silent: there is no traffic at all and the great, four-lane, half-mile-long concrete and steel structure spanning the bay isn’t thrumming in a gale. There isn’t even the ominous, eighteen-hundred-yard-away roar of the ocean surf. It’s just plain beautifully quiet.  

For about five minutes.

That’s when he realizes he’s just paying enough attention to hear a loaded log truck start from a standing stop at Waldport’s one traffic light where Highway 34 comes from the east and tees into the coast-wise Highway 101.

Heading north, the truck is climbing the grade of the bridge. There is no other sound - just the truck, driven by somebody who got up at 3AM to warm-up the big diesel before it would start pulling.

He can hear the truck clearly as it shifts into second, then third. Because of the 4 AM quiet, like it’s passing right in front of his house, he can hear the huge engine suck deep breaths between fourth and fifth gears. Magnificent power.

The truck is half way up the grade. In the bridge’s lights, he can see the truck well enough now to know the logs are full-length saw logs, not scrubby chip logs headed for the paper mill in Toledo. The truck’s big, chrome exhaust stacks flash in the bridge’s illumination. Like the hot, shining trail of a huge rocket against the night sky, the long, accelerating truck is a relentless mass of blazing, amber marker light.

He hears the transmission move to a ninth gear before the truck disappears into the still-black morning at the north end of the bridge. A marvelous thing to see and hear – a loaded log truck – somebody else’s loaded log truck.

Logging and log trucks are still around, but they’re getting edged-out.

Indians are still around, but they got edged out a long time ago. Sitting in the 4AM dark, he thinks about Indians placing their dead up in the trees that stood almost right where his house does now. Too near where he’s sitting in the dark watching right now, generations of the bones of dead First People used to be laying all over the place, after they fell out of the trees. But somebody new kicked them into piles and burned them back around 1880.

As he sits in the dark and thinks it through, he realizes that yeah, even dead Indians got edged-out.

He remembers a third-grader once told him confidently, “You can’t stop progress.”

He figures people were scared of the Indians. He knows people gave reason to be resented.

People are leary of log trucks. People don’t really know why. People just hear they should be.

Why aren’t people scared of Indians anymore?

In the tire shop over on Highway 34, he remembers eavesdropping on a Tow Truck driver telling somebody, “Yeah. The guy walked in here and told us his car broke down up in the woods. We drove around up there six hours and never found it. GPS shows you the road goes through.”

But Loggers know what GPS doesn’t. Some of them still remember why Death Ridge and Desolation Saddle are called that.

Indians and Loggers. Loggers move alone through the night. Over in Siletz, using fingers with thousands of years of memory, Indians sit patiently and make spruce root baskets. How to make a spruce-root basket isn’t the only thing that is remembered.

He can’t even imagine the questions he might ask over in Siletz on Government Hill – questions like, who lived in Oregon in the time of the first spruce-root basket?

He remembers wandering up in the jungle-like woods of the Coast Range with a rifle and stumbling on little nearly-forgotten cemeteries and graves. Sitting in the dark at 4AM, he realizes he couldn’t find his way back to those head stones even if he was riding in a hired Tow Truck.

Sitting on a Winter’s night in the 4AM dark, he knows he will always be just an ignorant Flat Lander, ignorant of why they’re called toad stools.

That’s when, suddenly, he’s startled awake by someone whacking his shoulder. It’s his wife. “There’s no such thing as night logging,” she tells him. “That’s just you snoring. Wake up and go to sleep!”