lost in timber country

I am hunkered down in a corner table at Camp 18, out on The Sunset Highway near the coast, waiting for a veggie burger. The latest Boards of Canada CD was wrapping itself around my head a little too much while I was driving home from the beach, so I decided to stop off to chill out and eat some dinner. The drive to Portland from the coast at night is a tough one, and it is nearly impossible to maintain a speed on that damned curvy, two lane road that is anywhere near the pace the ass-hole in the pick-up truck behind you wants to go. Wait the fuckers out, i figure.
I drove out to the beach to shoot some footage for a new installation project that I am making for the Affair at the Jupiter Hotel this weekend. I’m not sure if it was the needs of the project that were really motivating me, or if it was the extremely beautiful weather and the whispering voice in the back of my head reminding me that summer is almost over, but either way I figured that since there really is no bad excuse to sit on the beach and watch the sunset, I might as well haul my camera out there and ‘get to work.’

Camp 18, which sits at mile marker 18 on Oregon Highway 26, is a restaurant/road side attraction/logging museum that was built in the early 70’s by a local timber baron. It serves as a tribute to lumber jacks and the timber industry, and celebrates the days when most of the logging was done by hand operated machinery. Reading the history on the back of the menu, it is unclear if this location actually served as a logging camp or not, but the place is littered with so many old logging and milling equipment that it doesn’t seem to matter. Plenty of trees have been chopped down in these parts, that’s for sure, and there are posted signs around the building advising that spitting is prohibited by the health board and is punishable with a large fine.
The place is essentially one giant log cabin, with the main beam holding the place up carved from a single, gigantic old growth tree that must have stood hundreds of feet tall before it was chopped down. Giant chandeliers made of elk antlers hang from the ceiling, and the walls are covered with weathered photographs and mementos of the timber industry’s “good old days.” Each table sports a hefty selection of barbecue sauces and one of those IQ testing games with the pegs and the holes, where the objective is to element all the pegs by jumping one over the other, or something impossibly ridiculous like that. It must be difficult, because the woman at the table next to me is so enthralled in it that she hasn’t spoken to her husband in at least ten minutes. In fact, the game itself boosts that it is a ‘solitary adventure,’ maybe kind of like a stroke or a temporary vegetative state.
It’s an interesting mix of people here tonight, probably about half weekend tourists driving back to the Willamette Valley, with the rest probably locals from the surrounding area (I imagine Camp 18 offers the finest dinning for anyone within a 30 mile radius, since there are literally no towns around here). The couples at the two nearest tables are awkwardly silent. Maybe they noticed me taking pictures and are onto me. “Honey, don’t say a word, that guy over there is writing, and he clearly isn’t one of us…” They are way ahead of me. They know that loud, talkative folks are fodder for us writer/artist types.

You hear a lot about “the good old days” when visiting small towns in logging country. If you stick around long enough, you’ll hear the other half of the sentence: “the good old days, before environmentalists ruined everything.” While not spoken out loud, Camp 18 clearly champions that vibe, “God put those trees here for us to chop down” is the prevailing wisdom, which probably explains the “Earth First, we’ll log the other planets later” bumper stickers you often see stuck on the back of pick-up trucks in these areas. Clearly, these maniacs would lynch me if they knew my political leanings. Hopefully nobody will notice the Jimmy Carter for President bumper sticker and trash my mini-van while I sit in here eating dinner.
Most of the wait staff seems to be high school or college aged kids. I thought I had my waiter pegged as a flamboyant, small town surfer kid; he’s blonde and tan and wears one of those seashell necklaces that seem to never go out of style with the beach-frat contingent. But after chatting a bit when he brought me the bill, it turns out he lives 40 miles inland out in the middle of nowhere, where he brags that he can “be loud and shoot guns all night long.”
“Not being able to shoot guns all night is one of the most intolerable aspects of city life” I stated in agreement with him, figuring that would confuse them just long enough to a allow for a clean get away.