Category: The Applegate Trail

t the entrance to Brad’s Pit is one of Donnie Wicker’s creations. There is nothing artistic about this gate. Just pipes welded together. The dump, excuse me, the Wilbur County Sanitation & Refuse Facility is open from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. according to the sign hanging from the gate. The Wilbur County Commissioners might have high expectations about this “facility”, but it isn’t anything more than a garbage dump.  When I was a kid everybody had a burning barrel in the backyard to dispose of their garbage. Anything that wouldn’t burn had to be hauled to Prineville or Burns. We made that trip once a year and so did just about everyone else in Wilbur County except some of the farmers and ranchers who had their own personal dumpsites on what they referred to as “useless” property. Sometimes this was swamp, sometimes just rocky desert. A couple of years…

he Bradford homestead house is perched up on a rise of land too small to have a name, but higher enough than the flat around that you see the house for miles. Bradley sits up on that mound like an eagle in his aerie. He is surrounded by all the cast-offs of Germaine and Wilbur County. Except for the cast-offs of the Van Bibber Twins. Everyone else hauls their garbage up to Brad’s Pit. The Van Bibbers don’t trust Brad even with their garbage. Vanessa and Vernon burn everything though environmental regulations clearly prohibit it. As long as I can remember, they have burned the garbage in a stone-walled incinerator, which has a chimney as high as a two-story house. Sometimes the smoke from their incinerator can be seen from town four miles away as it rises, a black column of smoke thick with toxic residue that serves to remind…

t can take three hours to drive from Germaine to Joseph. The route is pretty much the way a crow actually flies –five miles one way, three miles back, ten to the right, fifty to the left, circle around, stop for some road-kill. . . Most Germainers don’t consider Joseph a big enough reward to make that journey.  Before Joseph became the art mecca of Eastern Oregon, its main claim to fame was that Walter Brennan had a spread there. Back in the early half of the 20th century, Walter was considered the finest character actor. He appeared in over 200 films, but being Grandpa McCoy on The Real McCoys TV show pretty much overshadowed his previous work. I remember him from that show and because he cut the saddest record of all time, “Old Man Rivers” about an old farmer and his mule. The lyrics weren’t so touching, but…

he buildings in Germaine are like nesting dolls. Open the door to the coffee shop and inside that you will find a bookstore, inside of that a travel agent, inside of her, a doorway to another dimension. Really. Behind the gate of Wicker’s Weld and Repair there is a sculpture garden and a yacht club. Really.  I went over to Wicker’s because I’ve been thinking about putting up a little iron fencing around the family plot. Not anything fancy, just something about two feet high with pointed tips. I wanted to talk to Donnie about it because he is the welder and he’s the one would have to construct it. Wicker’s has a big iron gate and you have to get out of your car, open the gate, drive through –if you want to drop something off that you can’t carry from the street. I didn’t have anything to drop…