We drove through an amazing landscape, over a man-made causeway that lifts the highway out of the dry bed of an ancient lake. The high mesas above the lake have the same look as the crooked river canyon and the area east of the Ochoco’s from Mitchell to John Day. The eroded walls of the rivers and lakes slope up sharply until the last 20-30 ft before the rim where the rock becomes a crystalline shape that has the look of gnarled and broken teeth.
Just wow.
There were many signs proclaiming caution, falling rocks. The only other place in Oregon I’ve seen that sort of intense rock slide activity is up on Hood, just before you get to the top, you come around a huge bend in the mountain and the rock slides are so severe there that ODOT puts up cement barriers to help contain the chunks of granite that could, potentially, knock your ass off the mountain.
They didn’t have cement barriers at the base of these slides in Lake County. The rocks were bigger. I think that someone at ODOT took a look at these southern Oregon boulders and decided that pretending to protect the public by putting up barriers was just a waste of money. These boulders bounce. It gives me a weird chill/thrill up my spine thinking about it 3 days later.
The air as we left that odd spot was turning a little . . . strange. But the odor Rob and Boo and I kept catching wasn’t strong enough to put your finger on and say, ah ha! That’s it! But it was not normal. Valley Falls was the next squat in the road (boarded up gas/store/café) we passed, here the highway split and Hwy 31 came to an official end – if we turned left we’d be heading back north up Hwy 395 toward Burns, if we continued south we’d be going to Lakeview and the Oregon/California border.
I have to tell you truly, we made a bad choice. We continued south on down to Lakeview. The drive into Lakeview, another 40 or so miles, was pleasant. But then we got there. One word. Ew.
Lakeview, Oregon
From the north approach to Lakeview you can see the remnants of a dried up industrial district including smokestacks for a mill and the warehouses for the mill until you finally reach the official entrance to town. Here stands a goofy looking 15ft tall red and blue cowboy, arms akimbo, bandy legged, hat sat back on his smooth sloping forehead, left had waving at you in that friendly open palm way, with a sign that proclaims Welcome to Lakeview Oregon. Right behind it was a cemetery. Not just any cemetery m’dears, but a dried out, poorly tended, sad but extensive, cemetery.
Goth-girls’ comment: That’s just wrong, Momma.
Do you remember what Prineville looked like right after Hudspeth closed their last mill in late 80’s? It was a sad, dirty, swiftly deteriorating little town. Its population fell in just 10 years from nearly 8000 souls down to just over 3500. This was before Les Schwab saved that town by building their corporate HQ right there at the Bend-Redmond ‘Y’ when you first get to town. That is exactly what Lakeview looked like. We drove around town; it took maybe a ½ hr to see everything from the library, to the hospital, to the combined Forest Service/USDA/State ODOT offices, to the elementary/middle school/high school, to the 15 or 20 empty store fronts. The bar was boarded up, the gas stations were boarded up, and real estate offices were boarded up. The majority of homes we saw were manufactured to mobile homes. The few stick built ran the gamut from paper slap ups from the 20’s and 30’s when cheap mill housing was thrown up to old dilapidated houses that could be very nice indeed with a little love and a lot of cash. Lakeview as a whole was just sad.
We talked about heading on down to the border just so we could say we’d been to California that day but in the end decided that the 3 hrs it would take to get to Burns made the trip south just a little too much. Around came the Scooby and back out of Lakeview, past the dried up and weed choked cemetery we drove. We returned to the same 'Y' in the highway that we'd passed on the way down and this time took that fork in the road. Where the air was a little funky. Not so funky that you could name it yet, but getting funkier by the mile.
Abert Lake, Oregon
The whole darn trip was eminently worth the time, effort and sad cemeteries for the view of Abert Lake. It’s gorgeous. The blue of that lake, ringed by aqua greens, is just so intense that you think it might not be real. The beaches are white-white, the water pristine, and the hills around it alive with blooming rabbit brush and tall sage and colorful spires of mullein. That blue is the intense color that the travel brochures show you have the Caribbean, you know? It’s the cornflower blue of late August skies, all the more vivid for the sand and basalt hills surrounding it. There wasn’t a boat in site on the lake, anywhere, and we didn’t see any people on those pristine beaches either. The day was hot, climbing into the high 80’s even at this elevation, but not one local from Lakeview or Valley Falls was out on the water, skiing, fishing or swimming. The lake was untouched by man. It was breathtaking.
Literally.
Welcome to fourteen miles of stank.
Abert Lake is sitting over a volcanic fault and it has no outlet for its water. Crooked creek flows into the lake, nothing flows out. The sulfur fumes coming off the water were enough in some places, to make your eyes water. Gulls and terns galore inhabit the shores of this body of water. Watching their movements on land and in the air was something I could spend a great deal of time waxing over; but you’ve seen gulls and terns haven’t you? While fun, these are birds most of us have seen. But . . . have you ever seen a partridge?
I did. I saw a family of them sitting up on a big ol boulder, surrounded by sage and looking down on the road. Such fun birds! Their feathers were still mostly summer brown but there were gray/white flecks to them and they had that sleek little head with the crown that calls them out as something other than a prairie chicken. That is another bird to add to my life list.
The beaches are mineral residue, with water sitting in this same place, over an active volcanic fault, without appreciable movement for centuries; the water has leached all kinds of mineral salts to the surface. Then the lake evaporates freezes, fills up again and moves those now solid salts around to the edges, creating those nifty beaches. On the shoreline we saw geese and ducks, gulls and terns, and fat and sassy little plovers, there were also plenty of birds of prey sitting on the rim above the lake looking down on the water fowl, no doubt considering lunch.
That’s just reminded me of something from earlier in the trip that I forgot to tell you about. As we entered Paisley, sitting up on the rim rock to our right were a grouping of birds. I don’t know what you call a dozen turkey vultures sitting on the rock, looking down on the land, but their they were. Black and brooding and huge and gloriously creepy, like a coven of evil black cloaked harridans; I asked Rob if he knew what they were called when in a group together like that. He allowed as how he had never heard the word, if there was one.
The Boo chimed in that she knew the word.
Disturbing.
We laughed and went on into Paisley
The trip around the lake was simply perfect. The day, the sun, the water, the wildlife all came together to create a moment of serenity and clarity for me. Please do go explore the links to the lake, I found a different set of pictures and info for every mention of the word Abert in this blog. They are very interesting and offer many beautiful pics, sans the smell. By the by, Boo complained the whole way about the smell; moms are good at selective hearing. Where do you think our kids learn it from?
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7 comments:
Very interesting Cuppa. I had to put my lunch aside, take out a map to trace your route.
Your description of Albert Lake drew me into it. I sure hope to visit there one of these days.
what was for lunch? hehe, i'm glad the smell didn't translate well enough to interfere with the enjoymnet of your food!
Ah lunch was simple, just hummus, crackers and some cheese :) but I was so drawn into your description of Albert Lake that I had to check it out, and forgot about my lunch ultimately! :)
Btw, you know, as an outsider who just moved here not long ago, I've to admit that it's hard to imagine a dying Prineville before Les Schwab. Bend must have had its "bad" days in the past too. The Bulletin sometimes had great stories about the old simple days. It's fascinating to read, and though I can't imagine it, I appreciate it. Really.
Your comment made me really think for a minute about Bend's history. We have die backs, it's true, but its never been so drastic that we saw negative population growth over an appreciable length of time. We have the community college, we have a large tourism industry and this little town saw some pretty steady growth for it's first 80 years due to the lumber mills. We moved here from Prineville when I was 5 because my dad could make better money working for Brooks-Scanlon than for the any of the mills in Prineville.
Prineville has always been a 'one note' town. Now it survives not on in it's own economic structure so much as for being a bedroom community to Bend/Redmond. Locals consider driving 30 miles for commute outrageous. Ppl from out of the area don't think of a 1/2hr to 60 min commute as anything to sniv about. From experience I would say that very few native Prinevillians work outside of that town but almost all of the non-natives work outside that town. I dunno for absolute surety. But my sources are my native Prinevillian relatives and non-native friends.
Did you know that Brooks Resources is what's left of the Brooks-Scanlon Mill company? That's another story for another day. This town, like any small town in the US, has it's tales to tell. Some are fun, some are outrageous and some are boring repeats you could hear from any local of any small town in America.
But tell me Hennie, did you grow up in a small town and then travel the big old world? Or did you come from a fantastically huge city with small neighborhood microcosms that felt like their own little towns within the whole?
Oh fascinating! I only went through Prineville a few times, and sometimes husband and friends would go to Prineville to play golf, because it's cheaper than Bend :)
John Day is another one that never "recovered". I did think of volunteering at John Day to translate the Chinese text left by the Chinese "doc" to English. But never got around to it yet. One of these days I would, hopefully :)
I grew up in a really beautiful island called Penang (Malaysia) before tourism and factories like Intel destroyed it. The city is called Georgetown - so you can tell that it was one of the first few places the Brit colonized. The Brit had it as a duty-free trading port for years, as a result, it was always vibrant and busy, not as big as LA or SF, but more like Irvine or Newport (CA) type of "big" and vibrant.
There were small neighborhoods all over the island, but because of the size of the island (you could tour the whole island in just a few hours), there wasn't any special identity within the neighborhoods so to speak, except the usual good and bad parts of town.
Then my family moved to Singapore (while I was going to school in Illinois). Singapore is again an island, a tiny fishing village in the 50s but now a top destination in Asia with some 4.5 million people crammed into a tiny little island.
In many ways, because I came from both Penang and Singapore where double-digit growth had been recorded in the past 30+ years, I had not yet witnessed a dying town, not even during the worst Asian Financial Crisis. (I've to pause for a second and thank the man upstairs, for I really have had a good life!)
But I'm sure across Asia, many young people would leave their small towns in search for a city life.
The courage to step out and search for a better life must have hard coded in our DNA, for we have not stopped doing that for millions of years.
Wanderlust is built into us. I could speculate about that for a while, the adult kid getting away from the parental influence and making their own stand, the need to see what's on the other side of the hill, the adventure -- but I think I'll just call it migration.
Small towns spring up briefly, usually due to the ability to exploit a natural resource, then they die back severely to the basic infrastructure of a community when the resource has disappeared. Silver and Gold towns spring to mind. Ranches and farms don't need a large city/town to support them and the people who work them spend nearly all day every day taking care of their land/animals so a several hour trip to a large city/town for supplies isn't really an inconvienence.
In this new century I don't think we will see as many boom towns based on resources grow out of nothing overnight. We'll see towns like Bend, or other smallish towns (20,000 ppl?) spring up because of an economic/industrial circumstance. Very much like your home town/island. I think the US isn't as crowded because birth rates are dropping in direct proportion to educational opportunities.
I haven't seen any statistics on birth rates in Asia beyond the usual -- such and such city is expected to double in size in 20 yrs and they already have so many million ppl. So I wonder, are their ghost towns? Is that a peculiar habit of this continent? I can't really name any ghost towns in Europe either, I know there must be, but I believe we call those 'ruins', lol. The US isn't old enough to attach such a noble moniker to our abandoned buildings.
Russia has ghost towns due to the failed communist regime, yes? Africa . . . ya know that enourmous place still remains the unknown dark continent to me, so looking at the phenomenom of ghost towns is harder to compare globally. Bend will have a die back. It'll go on for the next 5 or so years but for every family to leave, a new family will arrive by and by. We won't loose a lot of population, maybe 10k? But in ten years we will have regrown that population loss and added to it. By the time of the next census we'll be nearing 90k.
We have a lot of city counselours who never bothered to really learn the history and historic economy of the town. All of their numbers have been based on the past decade and very few of those numbers have been slow and steady. They've been eradict and unpredictable. Based on a resource that was perceived, not real. Very much like someone mining a vein of gold. When the miners began they couldn't see the end of the vein because it disappeared into the earth, so to them, the vein was as long as their imaginations could make it. When it turned out that the vein only reached a few feet into the ground, the miners told the towns that depended on that resource, 'don't worry, if there's one strike, there'll be another, be patient, stick around, we'll be making money again soon!' The smart folks with a sense of history left as soon as the strike petered out and didn't wait for the next one to be found, they new it was done and got out while the getting was good. Those that stayed had invested too much in the unproven potential of that strike. They had put all they owned and hoped to earn in the future into the mear hope of that strike continuing indefinitely. These type of folks bolster each other over and over and the spread rumours in the community that keep the town going on nothing but hope for a bit longer.
The very first sign that a town's boom is over and done and about to commit a financial disaster on the inhabitants is when the banks fail. When you look at ghost town histories and the timeline of the death -- first the resource dries up -- the middle class see the wind change and wisely prepare for it, either changing course or leaving town (farmers/ranchers/doctors/teachers -- the valuable people infrastructure) -- the banks that overcommited to the very wealthy that are about to be poorer due to over investment in unreal resources and the poor that were supposed to be making it to the next class structure (bad loans on homes) have over taxed the banks own resources and the bank has to get out now, usually by closing their doors.
Once banks close what's left of the 'real' resources go with them. That's where Bend is sitting right now, our two local community banks have taken hard and deep hits to their real value, because they too were operating on the unreal percieved value of a resource that they refused to believe could have an end.
I read the local blogs -- especially those business owners that are speculating on the down turn in our economy. Both sides of the argument are spending time arguing about the current evaporation of resources but very few of them have the guts to just say, oops Bend built badly, it's gonna die back, watch your tail feathers. Except that fellow that needs charts, numbers, and other nonsense to 'prove' this point. Bah. Those that refuse to learn their history are doomed to repeat it. And a large chunk of Bend is populated by ppl that never opened a history book.
Well just see how it goes. This turned into part rant/part history lecture. I'm sorry Hennie. We should change the subject to something less depressing. I'd be lying if I said that seeing eastern oregon again didn't remind me of what can happen to central oregon.
This is a very good discussion subject and I thought about what you said a lot while hiking this morning. You are absolutely right on the resources and the banks.
What Bend really needs is a good plan for the future to ensure its sustainability. It is no secret that Asia won't be Asia today without very solid plans. Many of the Asian countries know exactly what industries they are going to grow in 10/20/50 years time, and they allocate resources to lay the right infrastructures, nurture the right talents (in the case of Singapore, we hire foreign talents in plane loads), and build the right hardware. --- I knew, Noni, for I did a fair share of country level planning back in Asia --- but Bend lacks that, even Oregon as a whole lacks that. I attended the Bend 2010 plan (or something like that) a few times, but I gave up attending because it is quite amateurish... you don't sustain a town by having just a "dream", and bagging the businesses to champion your dreams.
My hope is, as the world gets smaller, the next generation of Americans will be stepping out to learn from other countries (name a few, Singapore, Finland, Taiwan), then they will be back here to build a stronger town, a stronger state, and a stronger country.
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