Good-bye to Crater Lake, and a Motor Trip to Bend
Uncle Billy was as good as his word the next morning. At half-past four
he shook Bennie and Spider, and he had to shake them hard, too. Then all
three of them went into the other tent, and rolled Mr. Stone and
Dumplin’ upside down in their sleeping bags. It was still cold, and the
sun was not yet up over the snowy crags of Garfield. In the still,
crystal-clear air, the water of the lake was without a ripple, and every
rock and tree on the rim was perfectly reflected in the blue mirror.
“Take a good long look, boys,” said the doctor. “It’s good-bye to Crater
Lake as soon as we can load the cars.”
“I hate to leave it,” Spider said. “I don’t believe I’ll ever see
anything so grand again, or have such a good time.”
“I hate to leave it, too,” said Bennie. “But I bet we’ll have a lot more
good times. I guess old Oregon is full of ’em.”
“I am satisfied with Oregon,” Dumplin’ began to sing, in a high falsetto
voice to the tune of “Glory, glory, hallelujah.”
“Shut up, do you want to wake everybody else on the rim, just because
you’re up?” his father cautioned.
“Time they got up,” Dumplin’ laughed. “Early to bed and early to rise,
makes a man dopy with sleep in his eyes.”
“Gosh, if he can’t sing, he makes up poetry,” Bennie groaned. “Give him
a flapjack, quick.”
As soon as breakfast was over, Mr. Stone and the doctor tinkered the
cars for the trip, while the boys struck the tents, deflated and rolled
up the sleeping bags, packed their dunnage sacks, and then began to stow
the luggage in the cars. It was after seven when everything was at last
packed aboard, and Uncle Billy gave the order to start. The engines
turned over, reluctant to start after their long idleness, but at last
the explosions came, the exhausts spit smoke, and the cars moved out
over dry ground, where a week ago had been a snow-drift, headed toward
the road.
“Good-bye, old lake!” cried Bennie.
“Au revoir, for me. _I’m_ coming back some day,” said Spider.
“And now where, Uncle Billy?” Bennie added.
“Bend,” said his uncle. “I wish we could go back home on the Sky Line
Trail that some day Oregon is going to build into a highway right up
along the spine of the Cascades. But at present it is only a ranger’s
trail, and it takes weeks to travel it, with an expensive pack train. So
we are going by motor up the east side of the range to the town of Bend,
and we’ll get a pack train there and go in and sample a bit of the Sky
Line Trail, to say we’ve ridden it, and maybe climb a snow mountain.”
“Are we going in on horseback?” Bennie demanded.
“We are, if we go at all,” said his uncle.
“Hooray! I never rode horseback!”
“You’ll have plenty of chance to learn, then,” Uncle Billy smiled.
“About the first night, you’ll wish you hadn’t tried to learn, too.”
“Bet I won’t!” Bennie retorted. “How far is it to Bend?”
“Oh, a hundred miles, I guess. Maybe more.”
“Seven-thirty now—twenty-five miles an hour, that means we get there at
noon.”
“You are my idea of an optimist, Bennie,” said the doctor. “This is an
eastern Oregon road we are going to travel on. If we should travel
twenty-five miles an hour, we wouldn’t get there at all.”
For many miles, the road out of the park took them in a southerly
direction, down the Anna Creek valley, through a noble forest of yellow
pines, a tree the boys had never seen before, which has great flat
scales of bark which looks almost like copper, and past the deep cañon
the creek has cut in the lava, with sides fantastically carved into
giant columns. Finally, they reached the gate of the park, were checked
up by the gateman, and went on, swinging eastward now.
Bennie, as soon as they were off the government road, very soon realized
why they wouldn’t make Bend at noon. In eastern Oregon, a country “dirt”
road, which in the East is usually quite decent in summer isn’t a dirt
road at all, really, because there isn’t any dirt. All the soil is
powdered volcanic ash and pumice, no doubt deposited there by Mount
Mazama ages ago. This volcanic soil looks almost gray-white in color,
and a road made on it, without any macadam, is very quickly pounded, in
dry weather, into a layer of dust inches thick, which rises like a smoke
screen behind the car, and gets kicked out of holes in the road by the
passing tires till the holes deepen more and more, making the road one
endless series of bumps.
Instead of traveling at twenty-five miles an hour, the doctor held the
car down to fifteen, and very often had to go slower than that.
And it was hot down here below the range, hot and close. The yellow
pines, and then endless acres of ugly lodge-pole pines, lined the road
on both sides, shutting out wind and view. Only now and then did they
catch a glimpse of Scott’s Peak, and later of Thielsen. They were in the
dry country, too, for almost no rain ever falls on the east side of the
Cascades. So they passed no brooks, after leaving Anna Creek. Choked
with dust, the boys sampled the canteens frequently, and rejoiced that
they weren’t in the second car, which was following far behind, to keep
out of the dust as much as possible.
It was almost noon when they reached a stream at last, coming down from
the snow-fields—and they were only half-way on their journey! Here they
stopped for lunch. The doctor had insisted on saving out two cans of
peaches for this occasion, and now they understood why. It was a job to
worry the dry bread and the bacon down their parched throats, but how
those cool peaches, and the juice they were canned in, did go to the
spot!
The trip was resumed, and they went on and on northward, through endless
forests of yellow pines, one of the few trees that will flourish in this
dry region, till at last they came into the tiny little town of
Crescent.
It was Bennie who spied a sign, “Soda” over the one store. He gave a
yell, and hoisted his feet over the car door, ready to jump.
The soda turned out to be the bottled variety, and it hadn’t been kept
on ice. In fact, there was no ice in the place. But even that didn’t
prevent the five tourists from leaving behind ten empty bottles when
they departed again.
The road through the endless yellow pine forest began to get better now.
It had been straightened out and rock ballasted in places, and Uncle
Billy stepped on the gas. He was traveling along at twenty-five miles or
more, leaving a cloud of dust behind, when Bennie suddenly cried, “Say,
I believe we just went through a town. Golly, I wonder if there was a
soda there. Let’s go back.”
“This car doesn’t know how to turn around,” said Uncle Billy. “That was
the town of La Pine. I know the man who used to own most of it.”
“What happened? Did he lose it out of his pocket?” said Bennie.
“I guess it crawled under a pine needle and hid from him,” said Spider.
It wasn’t long now before the car rolled out of the yellow pine forests
into a great clearing, where every tree had been cut down as far as the
eye could see, and a fire had followed, burning up all young stuff and
making the ground dry, naked ashes.
“That’s what the lumbermen do to us!” Uncle Billy cried. “It’s worse
than what they do to you in the East, because the fire does so much more
damage in this dry country. I wonder how long it will be before we wake
up and make them lumber properly? I hope you Boy Scouts will always work
for conservation and proper forest laws.”
“If they’d left one old tree to the acre for cone bearers, and kept the
fire out, I should think the forest would almost start itself again,”
said Spider. “But they haven’t left a single tree.”
“They are hogs,” Uncle Billy exclaimed, angrily. “It makes my blood boil
every time I go through country like this, and think that the voters of
the State let ’em do it.”
The road was hard now, the car went faster, and in a short time they
began to see the houses of a town. They swung under a railroad, rolled
on to asphalt pavement, and found themselves in the middle of Bend, a
brisk, clean little city of 5,000 people.
“Well, what do you know about this!” Bennie laughed. “It just pops right
up here in the desert, like a toadstool. And, oh, boy, there’s a soda
fountain—and a movie theatre!”
Spider and Uncle Billy laughed. “He’s a great wilderness scout, he is,”
said the doctor. “He’s gladder to see a movie theatre than he was to see
Crater Lake.”
Bennie grinned a little sheepishly. “No, it isn’t that,” he said, “but
as long as we got to be in a town, might as well have something to do.”
“The first thing I’ll do is to get a bath,” the doctor laughed, as he
drove right past the drug store, and stopped in front of the hotel.
The other car rolled up behind them, Mr. Stone’s and Dumplin’s clothes
and faces covered thick with dust, and the car looking gray-white all
over. The boys got out the dunnage bags and carried them into the lobby,
while the cars were taken to a garage. As soon as the doctor and Mr.
Stone came back, they got three rooms, one for Bennie and Spider, one
for Dumplin’ and his father, and one for the doctor. Off came their
clothes, and from three bathtubs came the sounds of splashing.
They were a much cleaner and more civilized looking outfit when they
came down to dinner.