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.
CHAPTER III
Among the Basques with a Scotchman
When we went to visit the Basques in Jordan Valley we stopped in Vale to pick up the judge of Malheur County to take with us as guide and raconteur. Judge David Graham from “Auld Glesca on the Clyde” over forty years ago, and proud of it, is a tall man with a slight stoop and the burriest of Scotch accents. He obligingly changed into riding trousers and boots, took his overcoat and a safety razor and set out with us.
All the way down and back he never stopped talking and we were glad he didn’t. Although Vale, Oregon, lies in the midst of one of those open white patches on the map that I so enjoy looking at, the judge of this remote county had read, apparently, every book of any worth published in English. He began young and has kept at it ever since. As we rode he said, looking off to the right: “When I first came out here from Scotland, just a young laddie tending my uncle’s sheep, I lost Nicholas Nickleby on the ridge between Juntura and Drewsey.” I looked. The “ridge” appeared to be a stretch of some seven rolling hills. “Carrying everything I had in a flour sack,” he said, “those were the days when . . .”
He was off. “When” so many things: Sheep coming in to take the place of cattle; life getting tough in towns like Lakeview; memories of “cat houses” in Ontario run by a cross-eyed blonde named Trixie Bennett, alias Rose Hanley, and her villainous French boy friend. Yarns and more yarns, and swift telling comment on the things we were seeing.
“Old woman lives here. Great rock collector. No children and every day’s the same to her.” Of a man, disappearing with swift slinking motion into a shack beside the road: “Murderer, but we can’t pin it on him. . . . Murdered his partner in a mine fight.” “No, Bob wasn’t immoral, just non-moral; been among livestock all his life and thought nothing of it.” “She’s as holy as Coca-Cola.” “Van Gogh was quite a fellow. He could have painted this country.”
Judge Graham had once been the marrying judge of the county and had many a tale of “indigents and nit-wits” who had come to him for “splicing.” After one particularly stupid pair had left his presence he turned to the witnesses and remarked: “Two hearts that beat as one, two heads that think as none.”
He stopped talking only when we got out to look at the views. He let the wind from vast spaces blow over us and quiet us, and he was always the last one to get into the car—looking back reluctantly over his shoulder— although he has known this country intimately for half a century.
“There’s nothing pretty about eastern Oregon. It just fascinates you, that’s all,” was his opinion; and certainly there is some curiously compelling quality in this land. There are places where it seems to break and flow like vast turbulent waters. In fact this land was once all ocean and it is as though the ocean has left its rhythm here, with tides of hills and mesas, breaking surf of buttes and rocks. In one place there was a beautiful wide view where we stood for many minutes, looking at the long—the singularly long—flat mesas that seemed to move out into space like the prows of ships. Over and over one thinks here of the sea; the same abstract rhythmic sense, the same soothing, yet never dull, monotony.
There was a single farm in a valley I cannot forget, lonely and lovely, with a square of poplars defining the yard and, peering over the buttes that surrounded it, red spears and thrusts and juts of dark solitary rocks. What the moon must do to such a setting comes at once into the mind, and one does not wonder that in such a land people must hold themselves to the earth by collecting its relics in stone and petrified wood. Almost every lonely house along these lonely roads has a yard bristling with weird gardens of onyx, quartz, chromium, jasper, and copper.
Down in Jordan Valley for all their years of solitude the transplanted “Bascos” seem to have little need of devices to keep themselves gay and sane. We put up for the night in a sprawling farmhouse. We found Mama Madariaga, the mother of eleven children—“seven grandchildren; ten by Christmas” (with a hearty poke in the ribs and a big laugh)—putting up some sixty bushels of peaches in a canning shed in the backyard of the old farm. We were late and we were very hungry and there were six of us, but Mama Madariaga was quite unaffected by this sudden incursion of outsiders. Before we had more than time to walk out in the cool evening light as far as the one drugstore for some medicinal whiskey, she had our supper ready for us: food with foreign flavor, old recipes out of the Pyrenees handed down these many years, a tomato soup with clabber in it; little fish, split, boned, dipped in egg and crumbs
