CATEGORY: HIGHSCHOOL
PHOTO: MORO OREGON COURTHOUSE

(This is the first part of a novel I was going to write when I was in high school, but only got this far.  Later I turned it in as a descriptive assignment in a college writing course, and it was put in the college yearly literary magazine.  The town was Moro.)

The tourists who traveled the few highways through central Oregon in the 1940’s usually didn’t remember Lancaster.  If they did remember, it was probably because the motel at the east edge of town was the Lancaster Motel, or the hotel and hotel coffee shop in the center of town were called the Lancaster Hotel and the Lancaster Hotel Coffee Shop.  Just a little further along was the Tshamakain Auto Court and Service Station, and a few who wouldn’t ordinarily give Lancaster a second thought remembered it because they couldn’t pronounce Tshimakain and stopped out of curiosity to ask the proprietor, Jake Hansen, just what that meant anyway.  He always obliged with varied and imaginative tales about Indians and massacres that were hair raising but seldom true.  In fact it was so good for business that Jake bought up and leased out another service station in Colton, thirty miles away, changing its name from Al’s Jiffy Service to Similkameen and adding a wigwam and a pet bear since that proprietor was not as good at story telling as Jake was.  Besides Jake’s place, which is what the townspeople called it, there was a huge grain elevator that stood as a landmark for some miles in either direction and was difficult for anyone to overlook, and a sign at each end of town that said, ENTERING LANCASTER, POPULATION 331.  There were some, too, who would remember the place, not as a town, but as a greenness, a shadiness, set like an island in an auburn ocean of wind waved wheat where draws mounded with silver poplars, their dark bottoms trimmed flat by reaching cattle, hung like spangled thunderheads shadow dappling the ever moving swells.

For the most part, however, people didn’t remember Lancaster at all and to the inhabitants this was a blessing.  It personalized the town and made it theirs, a place where ranchers and farmers came on Saturdays to drink beer at Biff’s tavern and stand in little groups on shady street corners speaking in low slow voices about prices and the weather, while their wives shopped for groceries and got the latest gossip from old Mrs. Brown who ran the hotel.  It was a place for hair cuts and car repairs, movies and mail, shaving cream and Saturday night dances.

It was a place for sameness too.  Harvest time brought extra workers to the ranches, and hunters came for ducks and grain-fed deer in the fall.  Now and then someone new moved there and sometimes someone left, but the main body of the population fluctuated little, being made up of generations of the same families that had lived there since their forefathers homesteaded the land and started planting wheat and raising cattle.  The town itself had been the site of one of these original homesteads but, partly because of accessibility and mostly because a garrulous homesteader, Joseph Lancaster, took advantage of his nature and the geographical location and put up the first store, it gradually became the busy center of trade for a large area–that is, as busy as a town can get that centers some two thousand square miles inhabited by only eight hundred people.

Students came from all over the county to the big high school on the hill above town, and there was a court house and a fairground that also served the county, this being the county seat.  There were two churches.  One was Baptist, but was attended by all protestants of the area.  It was laughingly called the Olsen Johnson church after the two prominent citizens who formed its right and left wing of doctrine and management.  There had even been talk of erecting a new church so that Olsen and Johnson could have their own separate stages and, despite considerable agitation over which group would be privileged to use the new building, plans were made and would have been completed had not the elder Mr. Ragland of the Hay Creek Raglands, who had a philosophical nature and considerable influence in the church, decided that things would be pretty dull without some conflict.  The other church was a small catholic structure, unused except once or twice a year when a priest came over from Portland.  The main street was bordered by one story buildings of various odd sizes and shapes.  There were two garages, a hardware store, a large grocery store that also handled dry goods, shirts, socks, blankets, blouses, shoes, belts, hats and baskets, and still owned and operated by a Lancaster, third generation, Henry.  There was a post office and a bank, the hotel (two stories) and coffee shop, and Biff’s tavern.

At the top of the long rise east of town was a government experiment farm and weather station.  Rows of young trees and square plots of experimental wheat and grasses bowed down before the high silver weather tower with ritual care.  It signified that the Great God Weather still existed here as a tangible part of daily life.  Lancaster lived for the elements.  The weather was cursed, blessed, prayed for, talked about and accepted.  In winter there was snow off and on from December to March, and though it got very cold it was usually clear because the wind blew.  In spring it rained and the wind blew.  In summer the sun covered the earth and when the wind blew then, which it usually did, it was a hot dry wind.  But around the last of August and on into October, this wind-wakened land enjoyed a genuine Indian summer when the earth stretched out in peace and slept, and only little breezes stirred.  These were the yellow honey days when the skimmed fields lay stubble buff and brown and meadow lark still.  They were warm, poignant days; the nights were cool, the mornings clear and invigorating.

It was on just such a morning as this…………………