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- Paradise Camp |
McKenzie River: Sights Along the RiverAnother day we drove up the McKenzie Highway to the Christmas store. The drive up was beautiful, of course, but also full of interesting sights. Housing along the way is extremely varied, some working farms, some double-wides, some fishing shacks, some McMansions, some right-out-of-Kentucky-blue-grass horse farms, some elegant mountain A-frames. It's an unusual mix in land-use-conscious Oregon. Of course, many of the places were here before rural zoning became the law of the land.The yard decor shows a broad range of tastes too. There might be a mural on the side of a barn--a giant cougar with mountains and a lake in the background; or maybe one of those silhouettes of a cowboy, long and lean, lounging against a post, or an elaborate chain-saw carving of young bear emerging from a tree stump, or ancient rusted farm machinery, clearly arranged for display. Quite close to Bea's there's an old, old flat-bed Ford in the middle of a field with a life-sized diorama of a scarecrow person contemplating his flower beds with a few pumpkins artistically placed here and there. The name of the truck is "Old Red," but you can't see much color any more. There's also a grand barn in the neighborhood; it's the other direction, but this is good place to mention it. It's the traditional barn shape and apparently made of board and batten (or maybe it's metal, but that vertical varied surface shape). The "boards" are a traditional bright red barn color. And the "battens" are pure, clean white. So what you get is a candy-striped barn.  Very fetching. Oh, and I forgot the chia boy with a fishing pole and a dog. Might be called topiary when it's in the yard, but it's small, maybe 2/3 life size (but how can you tell with a boy and a dog?). Right now it's just brownish vegetation, so I'm just assuming it greens up in the spring. Oh, and that sign that I thought identified the Pi-Bit Farm. I haven't figured out how to get the internet to do that character, but you remember the one from geometry--a Roman numeral two but with no bottom bar and the top wavy. Well, of course, as it turns out, it's really the Two-Bit Farm, with the Roman numeral, and the bottom was just kind of faded. Ah, once a math major, always a math major.For quite a ways, the McKenzie Highway runs along the Leaburg Canal, maintained by EWEB (Eugene Water and Electric Board) as part of their hydro-electrical generation system. It diverts water from Leaburg Lake into generators somewhere. This is a quiet body of water, as canals are, but pretty and also lined with homes of various sorts in some places. But part of the way, it's above the highway level maybe 50 feet with a steep sloping side covered with brush and weeds. On this day it was also covered with goats! We saw probably 200 goats inside their temporary electric fence just munching away, tended at least by the goatherd's trailer, he must have been around somewhere. Not much like I visualized when I read "Heidi" but the goats were good. Later on we read in the paper that it was part of EWEB's non-chemical weed control program. The paper said 600 goats, but we're sure there weren't that many. We saw them three days in a row and then on Saturday they were gone. So we figure 200 goats for 3 days and then they don't work on the week-end... You know how those big-city reporters can be fooled out here in the country. As we drove on up we also noticed that the higher we went, the more Bush signs gave way to Kerry signs, until Kerry was clearly in the majority. This is a section of environmentalists and enthusiastic fisherman, organic gardeners and middle-class retirees. So my information is just like the other, more scientific polls -- subject to any darned interpretation you want to put on it. At least our sample was all "likely voters," I bet. Who knows about the cell phone count. Oops, getting too long, the Christmas shop will have to wait until next installment. |
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