CATEGORY: MRS. ANDERSON

In late May, 1972, Bob and I took a canoe trip on the Owyhee Reservoir in southeastern Oregon.  I had seen pictures of the Owyhee River and the Grand Canyon-like country surrounding it and I was excited at the prospect of seeing it in person.  We drove what seemed like fifty miles from Ontario on a dirt road and put our canoe in on the west side half way down the long, long reservoir.

My vocabulary is not adequate to describe the wonders of this part of Oregon. The water was bluer than blue.  Off to our left were the Mahogany Mountains: perfectly named, being just the color of raw mahogany.  To our right were pile upon pile of orange and gray rim rocks.

I had expected spectacular scenery, but what I had not expected was the heat.  Form the moment we got in the water, in order to be cool enough, we had to keep all our clothing wet, our hair wet and a wet kerchief over our heads under our hats.

The only blots on the landscape were created by man. The BLM had allowed people to build homes along the shore.  Since there were no roads except the one to the dam far to the north and the one we had used, the only way to get building materials to the sites was by boat. The easiest and lightest material that could be towed on a raft was corrugated aluminum, so that was the material of choice.  I remembered a quote from Frank Lloyd Wrignt: “Man takes a part in creation whenever he builds anything under the sun.”  I had always thought it an ego-rant, but I was forced to reconsider. These “homes” looked like gasoline cans, or portable tin ovens, that had been washed up on the beach, and I am sure that inside they were as hot as ovens: hot enough to broil steaks and bake biscuits.   Some of them had ramps for launching boats.  None of them had trees or any other kind of shade. They were just starkly, shinily sitting there in the hot sun. It made us feel like burnt toast just looking at them.  I decided that Wright was right. These blights on the landscape were a part of creation because they would be there as long as either of us would be alive.

I always had a bird on my list that I most wanted to see next.  For this trip it was a Golden Eagle.  I was gazing dreamily at the Mahogany Mountains when Bob said, “What’s that up ahead”?  Before I even turned my head I cried, “It’s a Golden Eagle!”  To my surprise, it actually was!!  It was sitting on a rock outcropping fifteen feet or so above the water.  We beached the canoe and walked around behind and then out onto the outcropping.  The eagle didn’t move.  It did not yet have either a white or golden head, indicating that it was immature.  When Bob got within three feet; it raised its wings but did not fly.  Its white wing patches indicated it was a young Golden.  It was the right time of year for it to be newly fledged.  We had been told that fledgling eagles are often bigger than their parents, because they are so well fed in the nest.  This was certainly the largest bird I had ever seen up close.  It was immense!  Bob photographed it and we left it sitting there.

At another point we were able to guide the canoe up to a whole cliff full of Cliff Swallow nests, close enough to touch them.  My worst memory of that trip is that, stupidly, I did touch one, and its mud side broke open and a baby bird fell out.  I was able to catch it before it hit the water and place it on a flat piece of the cliff hoping its parents would feed it.  It was almost fledging size, so there was some hope.  I was infinitely repentant.

We managed to keep paddling all day long with mid-morning, mid-afternoon and lunch breaks.  I do not remember how long it took us to get to the end of the reservoir.  When we did get there, we pulled the canoe up beyond the first rapids on the river and there we made camp.  We were so extremely over heated that, after dunking ourselves and a blanket in the water, we lay on the wet blanket in the shade and panted.  As I lay there, I was hit by what seemed to be a tiny black rock falling from the sky.  Then others fell.  Then they started pelting down like hail stones.  They were little black beetles the size and shape of lady bugs only all black.  We looked down the lake and saw two black clouds approaching, one behind the other. The first was the beetles.  The second was probably a mile of swallows following the beetles and gobbling them up as fast as they could.  Our blanket was literally covered with black beetles.

Our camp was on a flat, grassy place under a tree.  It was next to the site of an old homestead with an ancient orchard and a twelve foot high water wheel on a side creek.  After we unloaded our gear and had rested in the shade awhile, Bob wanted to take the canoe up around the next bend to see what was there, but I was too hot to move, so he went alone.  He came back a little later and reported that there was a ranch a short distance up the river.  People lived there, but no one was home.  He was eager to show it to me, so slowly, dazedly, I unwound and somehow managed to stand up.  I went with him.  When we got to the first swing of a big curve, he said the river made a peninsula, and it would be closer to walk.  We walked.  It was like moving through hot mud.  It wasn’t very far; in fact we could see the ranch buildings from where we left the canoe.  I have never experienced such heat.  It was not just coming from the sun; it was coming up from the ground.  It was like walking over an open oven door.  I know that, if I had not been wearing shoes, I would have burned my feet.

It was a pretty ranch, and as always when I saw a farm or ranch, I started imagining what it would be like to live there.  One outstanding thing was that I saw a Says Phoebe sitting on a corral post.  I had never seen one before.  Like the eagle, it was so tame that I got to within a few feet of it.

Early the next morning, I went walking through a grove of Black Locust trees near our camp. There were Oriole nests in the trees.  I was looking up so I did not at first see that I was not alone.  Suddenly there was a cowboy on a horse riding at a brisk pace through the same grove. This place must have had a hole in the sky: first the black beetles and now this surrealistic apparition.

He was intently headed across the grove in front of me at a fast trot and had not seen me.  I said Hello, and he almost jumped out of his saddle.  He stopped and we chatted for a few minutes.  I told him we had gone up river and seen the ranch.  I asked him if that was where he had come from.  He said yes, it was his family ranch, but that they had another ranch up out of the canyon where they moved during the hot part of the year.  He said, “It’s too hot for the cows down here.”  I replied, “Cows and people.”

When I returned to our camp and told Bob I had seen a cowboy riding a horse through the old homestead, he tilted his head back looking at me through narrowed eyes.  He asked, “Where is he now”?  I said he was gone. There was a long silence.  He said, “Where was he going?”  I said I didn’t know.  Longer silence.  I said, “He just appeared out of nowhere.”  He looked at me for a long time.  He felt my head to see if I had a fever.  Then he said “Hm-m.”

The next day we returned to our car.  Then we traversed the same dusty road back to Ontario. Just before we got there a sudden wind came up that turned into near cyclone force.  It became a dust bowl dust storm.  The dust was so thick we could not see the highway, and Bob stopped the car. As suddenly as it had come it stopped, and then it rained!  It was like Niagara Falls coming out of that hole in the sky.  Water was pouring over the road.  When we got to Ontario there was mud all over the streets.  It seemed cool after the rain and after the heat we had experienced, but when we checked the temperature in the shade of a service station, it was 115°.  We could only imagine what the temperature had been in the Owyhee canyon.