Fifty-three years separate my first trip up Oregon Jack Road and my most recent one.
Fifty-three years. Say it suddenly like that and you wonder what happened to all that time.
It was August of 1971, and our vehicle turned off Highway 1 and began bumping its way up Oregon Jack Road. I was seven, a kid from the suburb of Richmond, and the landscape was like nothing I had ever seen. The yellow grass and pale green sagebrush were so different to what I was used to, and the air through the rolled-down windows of the car was hot and intense and dry, with a bite to it that was something to be savoured once you got used to it.
A wooden sign warned passers-by that "This area patrolled by Ashcroft and District Range Patrol". I never found out who they were or what, exactly, they were patrolling, way out in the middle of nowhere, but somehow that sign attained near-mythic status for me over the years, an indication that I was on the boundary of two worlds, the ordinary and the magical.
For it was magical, back in 1971 and on many subsequent visits. A steady uphill climb through grassland, past a blackened stump in a clearing on the right that — glimpsed out of the corner of my eye — made me think it was a bear. Then into the treeline, and around the bluff overlooking Young Flats, and the ordinary world was far behind, replaced by trees whose leaves trembled in the faintest breeze, beaver ponds half-glimpsed in the undergrowth, the promise of animals watching silently from the woods.
Up we went, back in 1971, turning off the main road onto a deeply-rutted track that wound its way through stands of trees until a cabin came in sight. It was made of chinked logs, built by a prospector back in the 1940s, and was heated by a large and ancient wood stove and lit by kerosene lanterns. Water from the tap came in one temperature — cold — and was piped in from a nearby creek. There were bunkbeds (and sleeping bags! wonderful!) for us kids, and a fire pit outside for roasting marshmallows and listening to shiversome stories of Split-Tooth the Grizzly as the sun went down and a blanket of stars spread out overhead.
In the years to come we spent many a summer weekend in the cabin on Cornwall, and on every trip I drew in huge breaths of sharp, dry air as we turned off the highway, mistook the blackened stump for a bear, scanned Young Flats for any sign of animals. The Ashcroft and District Range Patrol sign sagged more and more on each visit until it finally succumbed to gravity and the years and sank gracefully down into the earth, from whence it had come and to which it gradually returned. We got to know some of the people up there: Trav and Vashti Fisk, Margot Landels, Trevor Parker, Bob Pasco. One summer a young couple named Candy and John Truscott and their two (soon to be three) children were living at the Wunday Ranch until they could start building on a property of their own further up the valley, where we would visit them on subsequent trips, playing with (and envying) their many cats and kittens and dogs.
All these memories, and so many more, came flooding back on my most recent visit up Oregon Jack on July 21. The air smelled of smoke, not sage, and small fires that reminded me of those long-ago campfires danced beside the road. I felt the weight and difference of all those years, but I also felt something of that sense of peace and magic that I had feared might be lost. Young Flats was draped in mist, but untouched by fire; leaves danced on the trees; a beaver pond, half-hidden, slumbered under the trees. For a split-second I thought I saw a bear, but it was just a blackened stump, and for an instant 53 years were condensed into one intense memory. The land endures; we carry on.
