Wagon Wheel Park
I stopped at Wagon Wheel Park off Highway 213 on the Mollala River to eat breakfast before meeting a farmer in Mulino engaged in a unique history project for Oregon. He contacted me and asked for my editorial assistance and I was happy to oblige.
It was 8:30 on a Thursday morning in July. Sun shined as I parked and took a short path through the brush to the river's edge.
Several signs alerted visitors to the potential for drowning. The signs also reported six people had died in this well known swimming hole. As I neared the river, I noticed several white crosses nailed to some trees with names and dates written on them. Someone had drowned here last month.
The river came into a view and a tan bird dog resting on the gravel barked at me. His owner, a young bearded man fishing from the bank, told the dog to be quiet and the dog complied. I made my way around the dog and walked toward the water. I passed a dozen choice cuts of beaverwood and various fire pits and cairns. I found a flat rock to sit down upon, eat, admire the river, and watch the man fish.
Thirty yards away, across the river, two men captured my attention. The one wearing a black hoodie was fishing. The other man, shirtless, was knee deep in the channel holding a large multi-branched piece of driftwood. He was trying to lodge it in the mud in a way that suggested a sculpture of some kind. Several other such “sculptures” stood nearby.
I put both men in their 50s or 60s.
It was clear from the stuff around them that they were camping out and illegally, because it was no campground. They had apparently hacked a trail off Highway 213 down an embankment through blackberries. Part of their encampment was situated under the bridge across the river. So in other words, these two men were a kind of homeless trolls and one of them was fishing for salmon and the other one was making art with what I presumed was beaverwood.
As a deranged meth freak named Todd told me decades ago along a tributary of the Clackamas River, “It don't get no more Oregon than that!”
No, I think not Todd. Not on this summer morning in Wagon Wheel Park.
A couple of years ago, I would considered the sight of two older homeless men living under a bridge alongside a salmon bearing river, one fishing, one making art, both probably addled, as something bizarre and inexplicable to behold. Not anymore.
As I ate my breakfast, it occurred to me: this scene is unfolding daily on every comparable watercourse in Oregon. Everywhere. From Burns to Brookings. From Astoria to Ashland. From Mollala to Medford.
It's also going on a half mile from where I reside in Portland, in three different directions, and I get the idea it's not going to end in my lifetime.