Coast Range

by Nick Neely

  Rattlesnake Ridge had no name, in reality. Only a number on certain maps. But one of the first residents called it Rattlesnake after he rode his mountain bike fast down the jeep trail along its spine and noticed that a lot of sticks seemed to be kicking up into his rubber tires. These were rattlers, he later realized, striking at his spokes as he whirred by. But there was no recent memory of rattlesnakes in the meadow, though a dusty jar of rattles, those glorified scales, rested on the kitchen sill of the Boyden’s upper cabin. We saw only those ophidians that emerged from the tarps, and once a delicate ring-necked snake, slate green-gray with a fiery collar and belly. It corkscrewed its tail as we lifted it, bluffing toxicity.

  You couldn’t see the upper cabin from the lower, so it felt as if this view was wholly ours. We couldn’t refuse it. I spent many hours on the porch staring into the ample space, keeping time with the trees, which moved at the meadow’s edge as if caressing each other. The tan oaks were especially mobile, anemones: “daughters of the wind.” But also the fir and the madrones. All moved in a slow swirl so that areas of a single tree circulated variously—some sections pushed, others rebounding—and, looking at them, you could rarely discern the nature, the direction, of the breeze.

  The porch was our fulcrum. Sarah set up a drawing table on one side; I read and wrote in a rocker on the other. There were also two patio chairs, a glass coffee table, a hammock, and a listless smoker, which was simply two rusty buckets welded together with vents in their sides. An unsteady plywood table was propped against the cabin wall, and on it, specimens: a cup of brass .22 shells from a recent poet who, for solitary entertainment, liked to take potshots at a snag over the garden; a ponderosa pinecone, enormous and tan; an antler the color of dry grass; a baby blue kerosene lamp with a pollen-dusted globe; and a paperback dictionary, abandoned, on the verge of collapse.

  When you hang a hummingbird feeder in the wilderness, it’s like building a McDonald’s on a faraway mountain, only the customers are so zealous they try to bar the door and defend the place from all others. Ours was classic: plastic ruby-red with yellow florets. Without a doubt, it was the most garish object for twenty miles. The birds arrived within hours and began to parry each other’s jousts. They didn’t intuit that this well of sugar water would be bottomless for the season, though I suppose they, or even we, couldn’t be sure we wouldn’t walk into the woods and never return.

  These were rufous hummingbirds, and one iridescent male in particular dominated the porch and our attention. We called him Ru, but the name stood for them all in the way that, for us, most individual animals, wild at least, more or less represent the species. Sometimes I would sit in the rocking chair, scarcely seven or eight feet from the feeder, and make them giant through the spotting scope I had brought. Every feather, I could see, almost every barbule. Ru was all ruddy—rufous—with a green back and crown, and a hammered-copper gorget that flared to a gleaming razor’s edge. He was a gorgeous tyrant. He would dive in, with a metallic slur, and drive away the less showy males; or he would display for a female, cornering her and forcing her to sit on the porch’s wire railing while he fanatically waved, thrusted, his loud tail.

  A clothesline ran from one side of the porch to a pole above the old smokehouse turned chicken coop, turned blackberry rest. When we went to Grants Pass, we would haul our clothes wet from the laundromat across from Safeway—we shopped while they agitated—and once we returned to the canyon, we’d string them out using a pulley. They looked like the tattered prayer flags some former resident had hung in the porch’s rafters. Ru and company utilized this line also, perching there in the sun—sometimes two or three at a time, if they were feeling amicable—above this low corner of meadow. They loved clothes. When Sarah or I wore a bright T-shirt, they’d startle us with their investigations.

  We would rise, not too early, shovel coffee into a plastic cone, and listen to the river percolate in the windless distance. I would head to the porch, my station. Like a lookout, I felt compelled to survey, to see what had changed in the meadow overnight. Maybe today there would be a bear, or a tree might have fallen, or the weather would signal. I spent countless hours in the rocker, sometimes with my laptop, until I had to set it aside to train the spotting scope on a western tanager or lazuli bunting, or a fawn in the hoof steps of its original home. In the heat of the day, I might retreat to the creaky Route 66 chair and fewer distractions.

  Sarah would venture forth most days and endeavor to bring order to the visual disorder that is the forest as you continue to stare: the landscape alternately shifting from chaos to symmetry, an oscillation without beginning or end; the trees comfortably nestled from afar, a jumble closer in; radially balanced up their trunks, but each branch perfectly irregular. For her, the canvas was a backcountry of its own, and she had to come to her plein air survival skills by trial and error, and color. And always by trees, her passion.

  The same for me, and I was not only in search of technique and style, and rhythm. I had come with a project, one set in Rhode Island, but staring across the meadow to Rattlesnake Ridge, the vastness of the continent was palpable. The clouds drifted away slowly, like an Oregon Trail in reverse, billowy covered wagons. At the same time, I was hesitant to write about the homestead. More experienced writers than me had called it home. Several books had been written about this slant of ground, this meadow scar. What territory was left to cover, and was it mine?

  Homesteading, of course, has a storied history in Oregon. In 1850, Congress passed the Oregon Donation Land Law, which lifted more dust on the braided trail westward. This was when Oregon was all of the Northwest, Ouragun, apparently a Native name for the region’s one great river, now known as the Columbia. Under the act, 320 acres were “granted to every white settler or occupant of the public lands, American half-breed Indians included, above the age of eighteen years, being a citizen of the United States, or having made a declaration according to law of his intention to become a citizen.” Not just “half-breeds” and immigrants, but also the wives of settlers, one of the first times in U.S. history that women were allowed property.

  It was a progressive law, in this light. Together, a couple could claim 640 acres, a full square mile. You had to live and improve upon the land for four years to gain legal title. After 1850, portions were halved, and after 1855, each acre cost a dollar and a quarter. So people were encouraged into the territories. They were given their shot at self-reliance while extending the reach and clout of the nation. To a small degree, this was also our contract on the Rogue. For two seasons, we were given property and shelter, and inspiration, and in return we would help defend and reclaim the meadow from the encroaching woods. We would be caretakers.

  Three times a week, Sarah and I would break in the afternoon to spend at least an hour on some chore, our only requirement. The list, in the resident’s manual we inherited from Bradley, was considerable: Sweep needles from all roofs. Pull thistle. Rake leaves away from cabins, and out from under them. Mow the road and its shoulders. Mow a perimeter around the cabins for a fire buffer. Prune the two rows of grapevines. Weed the garden’s strawberry patch, that unlikely island of delectableness. Spray poison oak—eradicate it. Weed the pond’s edges. Shore up and improve the drainage ditches on the road. Keep the trails clear. Check the springhouse for leaks and dead mice . . .

  Sometimes we would split up, but if the work was arduous or involved covering ground, we worked together. Or nearby. I remember hearing Sarah scrape at the moss on the upper cabin’s tarpaper roof as I uprooted those furtive saplings in the cloud forest of ferns below Dutch Henry’s apples, and enjoying the rasp of her effort, the two-step of my shovel. It was true that the chores brought us closer to the homestead, made it feel like a home rather than a visitation. We had invested not only our time, but also modest labor in the land, and in doing the work, we learned more of its corners. Earned them. Western skinks swam in electric blue though the oak leaves, as did alligator lizards with a more menacing visage and bite. Fo
r a week, grasshoppers fled in waves before our steps like the crackling of fire. The birds descended to feast on their horned bodies.

  Below our cabin, a feeble pole-and-shake barn with cedar shingles stood that once had kept Bill Graiff’s mules. Later in our tenure, we found a ladder and raked the heavy mat of needle from its bowed, tenuous eaves. All we could reach, anyway. There was no climbing onto those wings. We had to leave one patch at center, which we hoped in time would slide down instead of becoming a planter for young fir. Under this picturesque roof was nothing much: stacks of scrap lumber and tarped equipment, the rusted albatross of the rototiller; but everything is potentially useful when you’re that far gone.

  In June, however, the barn became the meadow’s center of life, the focus of our attention: Three gray fox kits emerged. Inside the barn, under one of those stacks, was a den, a warm, uric hold. They had short snouts and charcoal masks that grew bolder over time and gave them a scoundrelly appearance. Around the barn, they ran, wagging and yipping softly. Up woodpiles and off. We watched them wrestle in, and with, the tufted grass. We watched all this through the scope, our handy portal to the greater meadow. The porch couldn’t have been a better observation deck: just far enough from the barn that they couldn’t see us, could hardly smell us.

  There was no male, just a mother. She was silvered as pine bark and sometimes, somehow sensing us, she would stand extraordinarily still, statuesque, staring in our general direction or just slant. Whole mornings the kits were hidden and silent, and then she would return, giving a soft bark on approach. The eager kits would emerge, and we would emerge to watch, and they would surround her, dog-piling to nurse as she stood vigilant. One day the mother returned with her eye swollen shut; she had injured it somehow, a branch maybe, and we wondered what this meant for her hunting and the kits. But it healed. The kits played under those eaves as if the barn had been built for them. They kept to the rear mostly, until suddenly two would spill from behind, scamper and tumble, and race back. Inside the barn, tendrils of fur and scat covered the swept ground. They grew bigger. Then they were gone.

  We knew the bears were coming. The garden was perhaps the most fortified in Oregon: steel posts far thicker than my arm, strung with barbwire. An electric wire traced the perimeter. It looked like a prison for tomatoes. The solar-powered charge box for the wire, set on a post inside the garden like a birdhouse, produced a quiet tick as we weeded the strawberries. From the wire, you could hang a matchbook-sized tray with a sinister dab of peanut butter, but Sarah and I are softies. In fact, I thought about putting my hand to the wire also, to feel what might course through that great wet nose, tightening the muscles and the mind, but I never worked up the nerve for that, either.

  One of the chores Bradley left us was to add a layer of six-foot deer fence along the base of the existing garden fence, so the bears couldn’t dig under. Their habit was to raid the garden and gorge on the resident’s hopes and dreams, namely apples. You think of bears as expert climbers, but they excavate just as well. For grubs, those claws will tear open a log in seconds flat; we’d seen the shredded evidence in the woods. We tied the new fence length into the existing, fastening it with wire, and bent it at a right angle along the ground. Our fingers grew sore from the twisting. On a vice in the shed, I then bent rebar into U-shaped stakes and, with a maul, we drove these into the meadow, tamping down the skirt that the grass would soon devour.

  A third of the way to river, past the trail’s steepest grades, was the “love grove”: a knoll with large firs, named by the Boydens for familial history. Now the main attraction was a beer cache dug into the ground. The pit had been lined loosely with brick, and another resident had fashioned a plywood hatch with hinges. Yellow-legged centipedes crawled at bottom. If there was enough daylight and the mosquitoes weren’t thirsty, Sarah and I might stop and share a cold one; semi-cold. Maybe a Rogue Dead Guy Ale or a Sierra Nevada. It made the rest of the climb harder, but made it easier, too. We added to the well’s refrigeration before we left by pouring a sip from our water bottles.

  I mention the cache because, once, when we hadn’t stopped in a while, Sarah and I discovered the hatch had been flipped off to the side. The beers were jostled, knocked about. Claw marks ran across one label. We toasted to this unexpected visitor, drank that pawed ale with a flourish, and gave the empty bottle a place of honor on our kitchen sill, among many Rogue-sculpted knots of wood known, for their incisor shape, as river teeth. Each morning, those long scratches on the bottle glowed amber, like a phrase etched in the glass itself; the bear was invited in to that extent.

  If there were no pressing chores, we headed for the river. The trail was its own animal: a seven-hundred-foot descent in three-quarters of a mile; the switchbacks shorter and steeper higher up, longer and easier where the Rogue came to the ear and began to flicker through the windows of madrone and oak draped with Spanish moss. But none of it was easy. The north side of the canyon, our side, caught the light and had a rich diversity of trees, while the southern slope was sunless, primeval green, a tapestry of conifer. Walking fast, I could make the downhill in ten minutes, the uphill in thirteen. A relaxed pace was twenty.

  We would join the official Rogue River Trail discreetly, to keep the route to the meadow and the cabins a secret. It was not uncommon to find bandana-clad backpackers or, especially, sunbaked rafters. Sometimes we would enjoy their rubber hoots, their shouts and paddle wars, as they drifted in the heat. Sometimes, naively, we wished this wilderness was only ours. In any case, we’d wave. Near the homestead’s trail was a popular pullout and campsite below a lone pine. When we appeared, backpackers always wondered—even in how they looked us up and down—why we weren’t crusted in sweat and dust, and packing a heavier load. We always said that we’d made camp nearby and left our stuff, which was basically the truth.

  The banks of the river were summer-parched, but its tributaries were tunnels of fern. These side creeks were the Rogue’s lifeblood and our resting places. Past that lone pine, soon the Rogue River Trail crossed a creek, the homestead’s runoff, and I knew there must have been Native people living just here, where salmon used to linger in the frigid influx and backpackers now tent. In small numbers, the Shasta Costa Band of the Tututni tribe had lived in the Rogue Canyon to Grave Creek, where the territory of the Takelma began, extending east into the broad Rogue Valley toward Crater Lake.

  They made their villages of four or five families on flat ground where streams joined the Rogue and created favorable microclimates, warmer in winter, cooler in summer. They relied on acorns, especially black oak, and on venison and salmon. Each family lived in a rectangular pit-house with its floor dug out several feet. Upright corner posts, crossbeams, a gable roof. Siding was hewn pine or, for the less well-off, rough bark—not very different from the pole-and-shake cabins of miners or the homestead’s rickety barn. Smoke from the fire vented through the rafters, and the entrance was a low round hole that served several functions: A guest must bow in respect as he enters; a bear is too large to be a guest; and an enemy is unable to pass with his weapons lifted.

  Our regular cove was just above the mouth of our home creek, with a view up-canyon a few miles to Rattlesnake Ridge. The river was dark olive, perhaps fifty feet wide, a swirling glass. Across it, an osprey nest leaned out in a fir, far too high to see inside of. It was an abandoned cabin, this year, but we saw them fishing and wheeling, and once harassing a bald eagle that dwarfed them. Dippers bobbed on the margins with nictitating eyelids and ran underwater, carrying the river on their slate shoulders. We saw otters several times, their svelte bodies like rogue waves. Red-breasted mergansers trailed the edges with their silent, precocious young. And once I flushed a spotted sandpiper from its nest under an eave of rock and grass: four pale eggs, speckled and tapered.

  We would read and daydream in camp chairs rooted in the sand. Some days we would pack dinner in Tupperware, maybe pesto pasta and cucumber salad. We swam right off the beach, and several times I stroke
d across the heavy, slow-boiling current to climb out and plunge into the white funnel of a wave train. Sometimes we would float holding our sandals and, before the first rapid, swim to shore and scramble back. The bank’s stone was burnished and black, slippery and dangerous when wet. There were potholes where it looked as if someone long ago had pounded a pestle to grind acorns. Some giant, must have been. But these cavities were the work of other stones, some of them still resting in their mortars, which had swirled and bore in vortices powered by higher water. Sometimes I found moths floating in them. Sometimes my own reflection.

  The first Europeans in the Rogue country came for fur, before the other variety of fir came to be more valuable. A Hudson’s Bay Company expedition led by Peter Skene Ogden crossed these mountains, the Siskiyous, to the broad Rogue Valley in 1827. They had no desire to call it home, but instead were intent on beaver, those fine-haired pelts most luxurious in winter, that “soft gold.” He was among the French who gave this place its name: La Rivière aux Coquins, the River of Rogues.

  There may have been some incidence of petty theft at the root of that moniker. But at least in English, a “rogue” was first an idle vagrant, and that’s how the French saw the Shasta Costa and Takelma, who in summer left their modest plank villages along the river for the thawed mountains. There they gathered and hunted, sometimes stalking the meadows in an antlered disguise, and lived in shelters of brush or boughs. This is what home looked like in Oregon until the middle of the nineteenth century, but the French did not recognize it.