Morton in Southwest Washington sits in a long green valley in the foothills of the Cascades. It’s a lumber town that came into being in the 1870s to exploit the vast fir-covered mountains that extend in all directions. Unlike many mill towns, Morton has hung on to two mills, not great, but still less than many such towns.

 Timber towns give a twinge to anyone who sees  boarded up businesses,  houses for sale and the generally dispirited atmosphere. But  more than many, Morton has a  possibility of remaking itself.  It’s open to new ideas, with lots of public-spirited people and a sense that tourism and the arts may be part of its future.

Downtown Morton begins and ends at forested mountains.

When to Come: I don’t usually recommend coming to a town during a festival or civic celebration.  Inevitably these are fun and often reflect the spirit of the place, but they also displace the rhythm and character of  the town.  An exception would be the Morton Loggers’ Jubilee, which takes place on the second weekend in August.  It’s a celebration of logging skills, some practiced a century ago, when the woods were deeper and darker and the tools for cutting down a tree were big, sharp and awkward.  Some of the skills they display include felling and bucking using “misery whips” and axes, log rolling and speed climbing eighty-foot  trees. Newer technologies are also on display, such as bucking large logs using modified chainsaws. There’s also a sizable flea market set up on the edge of town, a parade and a lawnmower race.  And anyone with a taste for small town celebration should attend the Annual Queen Coronation in the Morton High School glymnasium  when four young women compete before a sizable audience to become Jubilee Queen.

 What’s Happening? On the same weekend in August   that the Jubilee was held, Shakespeare’s “Twelfth Night” was presented by Centralia College East and the Fire Mountain Arts Council downtown in the Roxy Theater.  The Roxy is one of many strategies hatched in Morton to bring energize the town, and possibly bring in tourists, which could give the town another economic leg to stand on. t attraction.  It was the local Fire Mountain Arts Council, formed in 2003, that led the drive  to purchase and renovate the theater, which was built in 1925 on Main Avenue, but had been closed and deteriorating since 1982.  The project cost $3.25 million in money and in-kind services, and the theater opened in 2006.   They also raised $80,000 to buy the   the old Masonic Hall next door – a fine, 9,600 square foot building.  In cooperation with  Centralia College East, the Arts Council has produced twelve major shows including Oklahoma, Music Man,  Annie, Fiddler on the Roof  and Showboat.

The Roxy Theater had been boarded up for years when a Morton theater group bought it and turned it into a performing arts center.

 Local people, mostly grade school and high school students handle everything: lighting, costuming, sets and acting. Carl Ericksen, former president of the Arts Council, says the theater becomes a leveler that lets kids escape from school cliques and pigeonholing “We take kids who are disenfranchised,” he says. “My kids aren’t the sports kids or the popular kids. But we get them out on stage and a change comes over them.

Take a Break: The Bucksnort Pub on Main Avenue has the best name for a bar in the Northwest. The customers mostly appear to be millworkers having a few drinks after a shift. Most mill town bars are men only, by practice, if not policy. Bucksnort looks about 70/30. It hasn’t got a great jukebox or bar menu, but it’s cheery and friendly.

The Bucksnort Pub downtown draws workers from the nearby mills for an afternoon drink and conversation.

A Meat Market:  Meat markets have gotten hard to come by in cities, so it’s a pleasure to see a good example of the vanishing species on Main Street. The company is Morton Meat Company,  and its  clients are mostly local farmers who need a cow, a pig or a lamb slaughtered and cut up into steaks, chops and roasts. They also process wild game and smoke fish and meat. The retail market is something of a sideline, and the meat for sale there isn’t locally produced. Still, it must be a pleasure to run downtown–a minute or so from any point in town–and buy a huge,

The Tilton River flows on Morton’s northern edge.

fresh steak that isn’t wrapped in plastic.

Eatonville from above

Eatonville in the Mount Rainier foothills is a quietly attractive place known for its good schools, but it’s mostly passed through by crowds on their way to the mountain or to the farm museum and the wildlife park outside town .  Nearby, are reminders of what it might have become. The town of Yelm is  a state of the arts place in the design of new brightly painted mini malls. With more than twice Eatonville’s population, it has none of its character. South of Eatonville is Morton, a two-fisted lumber town that still boasts three mills and a tavern, the Bullsnorter, where off work millworkers belt down brews.

History: Eatonville traces its history to 1889 when an Indian guide, Indian Henry by name, led Thomas C. Van Eaton to the site and said “This good place. Not much snow.” Van Eaton was sold and wound up owning a store, a pack team, a livery stable and serving in the Washington Legislature.  A log cabin where he resided for a time is a symbolic center of the town’s history and culture and stands on a low hill to which it was moved.

Shopping Around: For families with children, the first stops will be the Northwest Trek Wildlife Park and the Pioneer Farm Museum and Ohop Indian Village. The latter displays recreated buildings and people going about the business on a farm in the 19^th Century. Kids can dress up like farmers or Native Americans and pretend to card wool, milk cows, and other labors.

At Wildlife Park, sight-seeing trams wander through 435 acres of meadows, woods, and lakes for views of bison, elk, moose, bighorn sheep, mountain goats and other wildlife native to the Pacific Northwest.  Adults, however, may prefer shopping in Eatonville and environs. The area is thick with artists, artisans and entrepreneurs who hole up in the countryside. Most welcome visitors, although it’s best to call working craftspeople ahead.

First drop by Terry Van Eaton’s Founding Families Antiques on Lynch Creek Road on the edge of town, which is something between a museum and a crammed second hand store. He’ll show you through a densely packed cottage filled with one of a kind pieces, many of them early American. His house itself is an antique, built in the center of town in 1905. Van Eaton had it carted up like one of his antiques and moved to his property, where he has embellished its living area with magnificent Honduran mahogany paneling from another house. Van Eaton talks with quiet erudition about Eatonville  history  and his antiques.

John Adams oversees a small empire of wine and lavender at Stringtown Lavender Farm outside Eatonville.

Next, drive out to see John Adams at Stringtown Lavender Farm and Winery on Stringtown Road where he sells locally made soaps, oils and sachets, and nine varieties of u-cut lavender. He also sells wines that he makes from grapes grown on his property and other vineyards in Eastern Washington, his favorite being his Farmhouse Red, which regularly sells out. He doesn’t charge for sips in his tasting room, and he’ll talk knowledgeably about wine, building, and virtually anything else connected to his burgeoning little empire in the green-choked valley.

From Stringtown Road, head out about ten miles north of the lavender farm to Terry Carson’s blacksmith shop, Tlc Forge & Farm.

Terry Carson fashions steel seahorses, dragonflies and plants at his blacksmith shop, Tlc Forge & Farm outside Eatonville.

Carson started as a kid grinding knives and quickly learned he could forge them. He took a job at Boeing that paid the bills, and when he got home late at night, he heated up the forge and worked until early morning. Retired now, and freed from the grind, he’s consumed with smithing as art.  He’ll start with a piece of steel and an orange-hot forge, and from this emerge seahorses, dragonflies and plants. Carson also makes an apple cider wine that he will haul out without much prompting.

The Basics: The Chop Stix serves excellent Vietnamese-inspired Chinese food, and Bruno’s serves burgers, steaks and seafood. Both are on Center Street. The only place to stay in town is the Mill Village Motel, which is modern, clean and comfortable

Concrete, on the Columbia River Highway about forty miles south of the Canadian border must contend with its name, which suggests smokestacks and big ugly buildings.  And in fact the first sign of the town on SR 20 heading east is a fortress-like cluster of concrete silos that used to hold cement powder for aging by the long-closed Superior Portland Cement plant.  The words “Welcome to Concrete” are emblazoned across it in big red letters, but these hospitable words were added when the town was used as a location for a 1993 film, This Boy’s Life, a dreary tale about a boy growing up in an industrial town where he was mistreated by his stepfather.

A silo built to age cement is now abandoned on the edge of Concrete

 It all sounds like a place to speed past, especially if you are traveling east and some of the most glorious scenery in the United States lies just ahead. And Concrete is in truth an odd little place, combining small town atmosphere with big deeds and big ambitions. Even now  with the concrete and timber industries folded, it’s got pride and heart. 

It’s physical setting could hardly be lovelier. The Baker River pours into the Skagit here, and just a few miles east, hundreds of bald eagles gather on the Skagit from November into early March to feed on spawned chum salmon. Deep green forest presses around the town, and a few miles away, Shannon and Baker Lakes change in color and light with the seasons from misty gray-green to sharp blues and greens in summer. 

Forested mountains surround Concrete

History: Concrete has its origins in a man named Peg Leg Everett, one of the area’s earliest settlers.  Everett was looking for gold, but instead found on his property large deposits of limestone, clay, gravel and sand, the crucial ingredients for concrete, which might be considered gold of another sort in a nation that was building roads, bridges and dams. 

The Concrete cement plant  supplied half the cement needed for Grand Coulee Dam, and many others. Discharge from the cement plant rained on the city depositing a film of cement powder that in the wet winters turned to something like concrete. Automobile owners were said to clean their vehicles of the brittle mess with hydrochloric acid and housewives fought unsuccessfully to keep the powder from slipping inside their homes. 

Concrete and environs, however possessed another industry more valuable than cement, and that was hydroelectric energy. The Baker River flows from snows deposited on Mount Baker and Mount Shuksan and in 1925, the company that is now Puget Sound Energy completed a 285-foot-high, 550-foot-long concrete dam within the city limits of Concrete that at the time that was the highest concrete hydroelectric dam in the world. In 1959, Upper Baker Dam was completed, at 312 feet in height. The two dams generate enough power to supply total power needed of 60,000 households. 

Lower Baker Dam, inside Concrete city limits

Concrete’s fortunes began to fail in 1968 when the cement plant closed and was demolished. Later, the lumber mills in the area also shut down. And so in the midst of these scenic and earthen riches, Concrete hangs on, filled with community spirit but lacking a secure wage base.     

What to Do: Town promoters waggishly have devised a list of “62 Fun things to do in and around Concrete. Among them is, “Stop at State Bank of Concrete’s new cash machine before your Main Street Shopping Spree.”  But there’s more than this, and it doesn’t take long to search it out. Fred West, a yacht broker, and his wife, Valerie Stafford, a hospital executive , moved back to Concrete a few years ago and bought the Concrete Theater where they show first run movies on weekends.  Up the street, The Hub is a lively place, with a great big pool tables, a long bar and loud music from Credence Clearwater days. Across the street from the Hub is the Hi Lo Country Café, and down the street the Hi Lo Country Hotel. The town also has a monthly newspaper, the Concrete Herald,  an airport, and a dam inside city limits.    The dam, which resembles a small version of Hoover Dam on the Nevada-Arizona  border, shouldn’t be missed. 

Very quickly in Concrete visitor can learn the politics of the place. One suggestion is to visit a city council meeting on the second and fourth Mondays of every month. It’s a good place to take in what’s going on in town, and little bits of gossip like the person who doesn’t keep up their plot in the community gardens and as a result its going to seed, which then infects neighboring plots. This may sound minor, but it’s nice to be reminded sometimes that things like this are what real life is really about.     

Eat and Stay:  The Hi Lo Country Café serves good breakfasts and the recently renovated  Hi Lo Country Hotel just a few doors down is an excellent value. The best dinner in town is served at Annie’s Pizza, about a mile beyond the city center on SR 20. Owner Anne Bussiere came to town in the 1960s as “a hippie wannabee” and worked for weekly newspapers until she and her husband bought a pizza business.  They also serve calzone, pasta and sandwiches.

Anne Bussiere owns Annie’s Pizza, a popular restaurant on SR 20 outside Concrete.

Cashmere, a little town on the Wenatchee River, is overshadowed by the faux Bavarian town of Leavenworth to the north, and by Wenatchee to the southi. But   with a population of only 3,075, it has a fine museum, a good barbecue joint and its own candy manufacturer.  The latter, curious to note, is probably more famous than the museum.  The town’s setting on the banks of a surging river in a fertile valley drew settlers for thousands of years, first Native Americans, and then Catholic missionaries. Originally the town was named Mission, or Old Mission, but the name was so common that it led to confusion, and in 1904 it was renamed Cashmere an Anglicization of the Vale of Kashmir in India. 

Wenatchee River, seen from Peshastin Pinnacles State Park near Cashmere

Sweets: Cashmere is the birthplace of Aplets and Cotlets, a jelly candy concocted with fruit concentrate, walnuts, pectin and a secret ingredient that is a secret no longer. Especially  if children are along, a visit to the factory is the first thing to do when arriving in town. Free candy is there for the taking, and brief tours offer a visit to a place where candy is everything and everywhere. Candy-greedy children love it. The confection was invented, or at least  adapted in 1920 by two Armenian immigrants, Armen Tertsagian and Mark Balaban. They had moved to Cashmere after several business failures in Seattle, but their new home in one of the premier fruit-growing regions of the Northwest, sparked their entrepreneurial talents. It occurred to them that they could use the plentiful fruit to make a version of locoum, a popular Middle Eastern candy. 

Aplets and Cotlets are sorted in the company's factory in Cashmere

A View: To experience the valley, drive a few miles west on U.S. 97, preferably in the early morning, to Peshastin Pinnacles State Park and climb the hill to the sandstone slabs and spires. Below, the river, supple and muscular, winds through the valley, watering the densely planted fruit orchards that spread across the valley floor and up into the forested hills. From town, the canyons that burrow into the Cascade foothills can also be explored. A few of them are Nahahum, Mission Creek and Brender. 

  Take a Break: As the sun begins its descent behind the Cascades, it’s probably a good time to have a drink at Club Crow on Cottage Avenue, identified by a Crow hanging upside down. The building was constructed in 1916, but a bar didn’t open until Prohibition was repealed in 1933  Inside, it’s cavernous space, with a bar, said to be the longest in the state of Washington.  Like any successful bar, it’s judged by its drinks, its music and the company it keeps. The last two categories seem to blend. The regulars can be seen mostly in the early evening. Drunkenness and boisterous talk aren’t in style here. Conversation is heard as a smoothly orchestrated, musical hum, punctuated by muffled laughter.  The place is well-known for its live blues nights. 

A quiet night at Club Crow

Don’t Miss This: Proceeding from cocktails to culture, requires a visit to the Cashmere Museum. The locals call it a community treasure, and in this case, they are right. Whereas most small town museums are based in cramped storefronts and drafty warehouses, the Cashmere Museum occupies a modern,13,000 square foot building, specially built for the purpose. The focus here is Native American artifacts. Its collection of Columbia Basin Native American artifacts ranges in age  from approximately 9,000 years to a few hundred and includes beads, knives, mortars for processing fish, spear points and virtually everything durable produced by early inhabitants. It was collected by a physician, Dr. Richard T. Congdon, who began serious collecting in 1910. Outside, a pioneer village has been erected, which includes 20 original structures brought in from the local area. 

The Cashmere Museum includes a collection of buildings and cabins from the 19th and early 20th centuries

Eat Here: Several options exist for dinner, but the best known is Country Boy’s Southern Style BBQ, just a few blocks from Cottage Avenue. It does have the feel of a southern establishment. For dinner, try a half slab of baby back ribs, and choose from beans, coleslaw, ribbon fries, potato salad or corn bread. 

Al fresco dining at Country Boy's Southern BBQ in Cashmere

The Oregon side of the Columbia Gorge towers over Stevenson across the river

 The town: Highway strip downtowns can become dispirited and worn. Stevenson’s is right on Washington 14,  but it’s a real place where people shop and exchange the days’ news. Many of the businesses angle to tourists, but there’s also a grocery, an auto parts shop, a florist, a barber and a bank. It also benefits from the Skamania County Courthouse, which anchors the street. The building  isn’t old or atmospheric, but its straightforward, simple lines express the gravity of its purpose.  The area down the hill from the highway and across the railroad tracks was once Whiskey Flats, named for the seven saloons that flourished there. The saloons are mostly gone, and now it’s a park, a place to launch kite boards, a boat launch and a cruise ship landing. There’s also a curious work of public art, a kinetic sculpture, Galaxy by Seattle sculptor Andrew Carson, that spins and revolves and appears to play with the wind rather than the other way around. 

Downtown Stevenson

 Look this person up: If there’s one person who personifies the current spirit of the place, it’s probably Bob Craig, founder of  Walking Man Brewing.  Afternoons, he can often be found at the brewpub, one street down from Main Street.  He’s not hard to recognize: a lean guy with a bushy white goatee. He had brewed beer at home for years, when it occurred to him to brew it for a profit and create a place in Stevenson where he could hang out. He found a big house and created a pub downstairs with an outdoor terrace for rare sunny days.  He succeeded on both counts. He loves sipping beer and talking with customers who come from all over the world. And a beer appreciation website, ratebeer.com., named Walking Man one of the best of the world in 2010. His own favorite brew? He likes Knuckle Dragger, a strong pale ale. “We are not afraid of flavor or alcohol,” he says. “We believe in flavorful beers – big, in your face beers.” 

Brewer Bob Craig

 City of Celebration:  Just about every small town in the Northwest likes to celebrate itself, both for profit and fun, and Stevenson is always up to something. Two of the best are Christmas in the Gorge in early December and the Gorge Brews and Blues Festival in June.  The Christmas event starts with a Starlight Firetruck Parade, which is an exciting event for kids and fun for adults.  Saturday, several downtown shops offer free cookies, coffee and cocoa.  My favorite event is the Methodist Church Luncheon, held from 11:30 until 1 p.m. as a benefit for United Methodist Women in Missions. A hundred or more people attend who are a mix of generations and occupations.  They have their fill of the casserole of the year, wear mostly red and support the propositiion that there is no finer place on earth to spend Christmas than the Columbia Gorge. The Blues Festival brings in blues artists to sing and brewers to pour. It’s a lively summer event, and the location, on the edge of Rock Cove with grand views of the Columbia River Gorge, is the finest backdrop any blues player could wish for. 

Sleep, eat and drink: The Riverside Lodge is a cozy place to stay. They leave earplugs in the rooms to muffle the roar of trains that run past it. An inexpensive alternative is the Econolodge on the east end of town, which is clean and comfortable. Naturally, Walking Man is a good place for a drink, the Rio Mexican Cafe has an intimate bar and serves food, and the are several other places including the 130 Bar & Grill, The Crossing and The Big River Grill.

Paragliding above the Palouse

Try to arrive in Colfax in late Spring or early summer when the wheat fields, deep green at this time of year,  billow across the landscape  like green velvet  comforters. In late afternoon, provided it’s not raining, drive out a few miles toward Spokane, and turn right at the sign that says Steptoe Butte. It’s a few miles down the road, a cone that looks volcanic, but isn’t. It rises 3,612 feet and offers one most stirring views in the northwest. Looking down from the heights, the hills stretc hgreen and lush in all directions and as you wind up the hill, you’ll see them from every angle. If there’s a breeze, you may see paragliders who spread their parafoils on the ground near the top of the mountain and wait for a breeze to lift them several thousand feet above the rolling fields. 

Main Street, Colfax

The Town: 

Colfax is a wheat town in the Palouse, the wheat basket of southeastern Washington, which produces huge crops of wheat and also lentils, chickpeas (garbanzo beans), green peas and barley. Its population has remained at or near 3,000 for years, and its fortunes go the way of the crops. Prices are relatively high now and the town feels if not prosperous, at least safe and comfortable. White settlers arrrived here in the late 1860s, and the town was incorporated in 1873 and became the county seat. For a small town, it has everything: a modern hospital, a weekly newspaper, good schools, two motels, one Mexican and two Chinese restaurants and six banks. 

Getting There: From Portland, take Interstate 84 east to where Washington 730brahcnes off near Boardman. Continue and proceed on Washi8ngton 12. 

Manning-Rye railroad bridge

A Drive in the Country: 

The countryside here is deceptive. It seems only wheat fields stretching to the horizon, but intriguing canyons appear unexpectedly;. Take Green Hollow Road out of town and turn left onto a dirt road that rises to a point overlooking the Palouse River, cutting through a lovely Valley. Spanning the river is the abandoned Manning-Rye railroad bridge, which is on the National Register of Historic Places. 

The Codger Pole

Things to Do: 

Main Street allows for a pleasant stroll, and for a break, stop at the Whitman County Library where the staff treats you as a valued customer and even offers coffee. Also on the street, you will see a 65-foot wooden shaft carved with the faces of older men. They call it the Codger Pole, and it’s a memorial to a football game , played in 1988 as a rematch by the same players who faced each other in a 1938 game. This is a public-spirited town, andanother way to spend an hour or so is to drop by a public meeting, such as Rotary or the Historic Preservation Commission. The weekly newspaper, the Whitman County Gazette, carries listings of the week’s happenings. You might also make an excursion to Palouse, 19 miles away, which is becoming an arts center. 

Pete Koerner at the Top Notch

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For breakfast or lunch, you’ll want to stop at the Top Notch on Main Street. It’s a friendly little cafe that hasn’t changed much since it was founded in 1938. The current owner, who only recently arrived, is Pete Koerner, a hearty man who greets customers as they walk in , provided he can look up from the grill. He makes his hash browns by boiling potatoes until they are cooked but still firm, lets them sit for a day to dry out, and then fries them in a butter blend oil. 

Where to Stay: The Best Western Wheatland Inn is comfortable. The Siesta Motel is less polished but clean and much less expensive.

Republic,  the seat of Ferry County, inhabits a valley near the confluence of Granite Creek and the San Poil River in the Kettle mountains of northeastern Washington. On Clark Street are two motels, two bars, a grocery, a hardware store and some antiques shops.

Immaculate Conception Catholic Church

Deer appear everywhere, grazing on the Ferry County Courthouse lawn, ambling around the Catholic church, approaching strangers for a handout. There are dozens of them, treated like town pets, and no flower garden is safe. 

The Past: Republic has a history –let’s say 44 million years or so. It sits on the southern end of what was a vast Eocene lake. Fossils of plants and animals buried in the lake bed can be dug up at the Boot Hill fossil site at the edge of town. A simple dig can yield clear specimens of sycamore, cedar, sassafras and much else. It’s said to be one of the top 10 fossil leaf beds in the world.

Lawns offer deer good grazing

Digging in the soft, layered rock is surprisingly easy. Dedicated rockhounds and academics often labor at the site and generously advise neophytes where to dig. Tip: Dig in the narrow, not the thick layers, which are the result of a large event that deposited lots of material –say a volcanic eruption. Specimens are less likely to be preserved there. Five dollars pays for a day’s digging, which is cheap considering that a half-hour dig can yield specimens suitable for paperweights or framing. Before digging, stop by the Stonerose Interpretive Center, a short walk from the fossil site. It’s a well-organized small museum, exhibiting some superb fossils that were excavated there.

The Gold Rush: Closer to the present, the history of white settlement dates to 1896, when, over the protests of local Native Americans, the northern half of the Colville Indian Reservation was opened to mineral exploration. Prospectors flooded in, and a rich gold deposit was discovered at Eureka Gulch. The gold camp’s population exploded, and soon a town was created and named Republic after the most productive mine. By 1900, the town offered more than 20 saloons, seven hotels and nine general stores, not to mention lawyers, doctors, prostitutes and hundreds of miners. Mining activity ebbed and flowed but most of the Eureka Gulch mines had reopened by the mid-1930s.

The most important of these was the Knob Hill Mine, which became the largest producer of gold in the state. Production halted in 1995, but gold fever still flares up. A new gold mine at Buckhorn Mountain, a remote peak just south of the Canadian border, means jobs and business for Republic .

A log cabin north of Republic

The mining boom transformed the region. Remnants of boom days can be toured on the Highland Historic Loop Drive, a 152-mile route that passes through lovely scenery ,  atmospheric small towns and occasional log cabins that appear intact after a century.

Henry Ford Slept Here: Consider Curlew, a rough-looking village where the sweat and whiskey atmosphere of a mining town still hangs in the air.The old Curlew General Store operates about the same as it did a century ago, selling everything from hardware to snacks and much in between. On the shelf one day was a box identified as containing baby rattlesnakes. Up the street, the old Ansorge Hotel, now a museum, hasn’t changed much since it was built in 1903. Miners and mining bosses stayed in its nine upstairs rooms. Auto magnate Henry Ford signed the guest register July 1, 1917. The lobby looks as plain as it did 100 years ago. The Regina Hexaphone, a turn-of-the-century, coin-operated phonograph using cylinders, can still play scratchy versions of “Simple Melody,” “Casey Jones” and several other selections.

Night Life: Back in Republic for the night, the downtown doesn’t resound with horses’ hooves and drunken carousing as it did a century ago, nor has fine dining arrived. The Mexican restaurant looks good but in this town of ghostly miners, wild tales and wild dreams, the best places to imbibe the spirit of the place is at the Sportsmen Roost or the Madonna Bar and Grill. Both serve decent steaks and baked potatoes in full view of the bar, where the town’s remaining imbibers spend evenings drinking and wisecracking. At the end of the evening, the Prospector Inn down the street is a lot more comfortable than the Ansorge.

John Day River

Spray, a place named for a man and not a splash of water, lies in a valley dotted with irrigated fields and groves of pine, poplar and locust. The John Day River flows through it, shimmery and shallow, making a curve that wraps the town’s edge. This is rimrock country, and the underlying stone of the surrounding hills  turns burnished gold in the early morning and late afternoon sun. Oregon 19 connects it to other small towns, including Service Creek, Fossil, Condon and Arlington, but it’s still a jaunt to reach another outpost. At night about the only sound is the river’s silvery rush and the wind in the poplars. The town isn’t prettied up much because the river lends all the romance, variety and beauty it needs. It’s a place that definitely recalls another era—let’s say 75 years ago at least. Elderly men gather on the porch of the general store and exchange memories and observations.  Everyone knows everybody else and a good many are related. About 80 students attend the local school, and the young people are spoken of with affectionate approval. Spray has little serious crime, and small wonder because it’s hard to go unnoticed in a town of 160. “You do anything and people talk about it” says Judy Simmons, manager of the River Bend Motel.

 History: The town’s namesake, John Spray, came here in 1900 and helped establish a post office, then a ferry, and then laid out the town. Two sawmills once provided an economic spine, but those are long gone.

Spray Pioneer Museum

The Spray Pioneer Museum occupies a recycled 1912 Baptist Church and displays a variety of artifacts from the town’s past.

Not to miss:  For a visitor, Spray is probably most hospitable from late spring to mid-summer when the river is low enough to be safe and high enough to speed a raft downstream. J & Z Shuttles offers shuttle service for boaters and rafters and will deliver your car to your destination. (541-468-2182 or 468-2447).  (cq) Rafts also can be rented 12 miles away at Service Creek, which also offers shuttle service on the river. (541-468-3331; www.servicecreek.com).  And if this sounds like too much work, there are several places in and near Spray to swim and fish.

Bruce Gray

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 Newcomers aren’t exactly pouring into town—the population has stayed the same for several years. The people who do move here or to Mitchell or John Day are mostly retirees or people with a vivid, independent stripe. An example of the latter is Bruce Gray who came to town in 2006 with his wife, Beki, and opened a gunsmithing business, Grayguns, two miles outside town. He’s a master gunsmith and grand master practical shooting competitor who brings a Zen point of view to his discipline. His company specializes in firearms instruction, industry consulting services and high grade pistolsmithing. He’ll take your M1911 pistol or SIGARMS P-Series —or whatever handgun you own—and customize it just the way you like it. He also instructs in practical shooting, a term for shooting quickly and accurately at multiple targets. In his spare time, he also serves as a Wheeler County Deputy Sheriff.  He welcomes visitors to his shop but asks that you call first; (www.grayguns.com; 541-468-3840).

 Getting there: The easy way is to take Interstate 84 from Portland136 miles to Arlington and then turn south on Oregon 19. More of an adventure is to take US 26 east, continuing through Madras, Prineville and Mitchell. About eight miles past Mitchell, look for Waterman Road on the left. It’s 27 miles from there to Spray, and the road is mostly dirt, but it’s well maintained and passes through some pretty country that not everyone sees.

Where to stay: The River Bend Motel offers units in the downtown area and a two-bedroom house with deck near the river. (541-468-2053; www.riverbendmotel.com).

Dining and nightlife:  Neither of the town’s two restaurants offer high cuisine, but the service is good-natured and the food will fill you up. The Lone Elk Café is in the back of the grocery store downtown; (541-468-2443).  The River Bend Bar and Grill is up the street and serves daily lunch and dinner specials including prime rib on Friday and Saturday nights, (541-468-2222). Spray can get along without a scintillating social scene, since the night sky is really all it needs. Without a strong artificial light source for miles, the sky is silver-spangled blackness.

More information: Information about the town can be obtained at Spray City Hall at 300 Park Ave. The city also maintains a helpful website. (541-468-2069; www.sprayoregon.us

Main Street, Fossil

Fossil can feel icy gray on a winter afternoon.  It had been two years since my last visit. That was a spring evening  in 2008, and the Fossil Players were performing Noel Coward’s  “Blithe Spirit” in the school auditorium. After the performance, which I thought was as good as I could see in New York or London, some friends and I walked over to the Shamrock Tavern for a drink.

I could hardly recreate that buoyant evening on a dim December day but I could retrace my steps and check out a couple of favorite landmarks. First stop was the Shamrock for a bowl of hot chili in its dim, cheerful depths.

 But the Shamrock looked like no one had opened the door for a couple of months, and the window was a dead eye onto the street. A lousy turn of events. That meant no scotch and soda that night, no steak, no jukebox, no time spent reading its pungent and often ribald graffiti. It’s the only bar I know of where graffiti is inscribed on the tavern walls instead of the men’s room, and with about the same content and spirit.

 I turned right on Main Street, the heart of the downtown. Wright Chevrolet was still in business. Good. So was Fossil Mercantile Co., one of Oregon’s last true general stores and a local landmark since 1883.

Woolly Mammoth Sculpture

I continued down the street, searching for an object that should have been easy to spot: a 14-foot-high sculpture of a woolly mammoth, crafted of steel and sheathed in tendrils of rusting metal that suggested the beast’s ragged coat. It stood on loan for a few years outside a bed and breakfast, the Bridge Creek Flora Inn. It belonged to no one in town, yet it belonged to everyone, and since the town was named for fossils dug up on a nearby ranch, it was a true icon. I later learned that no one could come up with its $55,000 price, and it was returned to the sculptor, Dixie Jewett, in Dayton.

 More than ever, I needed something to warm me up.

 At the Big Timber Family Restaurant, June Rollins  brought me a bowl of chili and a pile of crackers. I asked what had happened to the Shamrock.

 “They just couldn’t make a go of it, and we’re beginning to wonder if we can,” she said.

 Fossil without the Big Timber? Unthinkable. This is a place where people plan, gossip and relax over lunch, dinner, coffee or a piece of pie.

 I started feeling bad for Fossil. So why would anyone get worked up about the precarious state of a little town in Central Oregon? Start with its location in folds of hills covered with juniper and sagebrush. For a town of about 470 people, it has big-town civic structure. It’s got a museum to inspect, a general store to browse and a Baptist church on a hill where people sing hymns in a setting that takes you back a century. There are five other churches in town, the car dealership, a bank branch, several bed and breakfasts a motel and two restaurants. Fossil School District educates about 100 students, kindergarten through 12^th Grade. I don’t have a count for the number of clubs in town—a dozen or more I think—but I know of three book clubs, an arts society and an international food club. A library serves the reading public and the Wheeler County Courthouse, built in 1901, reminds everyone that the law is on their side.

Fossil

But is Fossil dying?

 Not exactly as it turns out.

 The Shamrock has closed and it’s too bad, but just down the street, a new bar and restaurant RJ’s, has opened and already it feels like it’s been there 40 years or so.  At the little industrial park on the edge of town, Painted Hills Natural Beef has built a new headquarters building.  It’s not an international food conglomerate, but it’s a good match for Fossil.

 “I think that’s really indicative of the way our economy is doing,” said Lyn Craig, owner of the Bridge Creek Flora Inn. “In larger towns in Oregon you see downtown stores boarded up. We just don’t have that here. We have a nice steady economy, and Fossil just keeps going along.”

For tourists, there may be more ways to spend time now than there were 10 years ago. You can still dig for fossils behind Wheeler High School and if you’re lucky, take in a performance of the Fossil Players. But now you can also tour the Paleo Lands Institute, a non-profit  environmental education organization with headquarters in Fossil, which offers day hikes and adventure trips. Also, the town is seeking a grant to finance a network of trails in and around Fossil, which will give a new dimension to a weekend there.

 The same people won’t always greet you in Fossil—it’s a real place. People move in and move out. They’re born and they die. But is Fossil dying? I don’t think so, and that’s true of most Oregon small towns. These are not boom towns, that unpack and fold up in a night. People work hard and have realistic expectations.  They love their friends and neighbors and all they have given to the town, and they love their surroundings,  whether they are desert, ocean, forest or wheat fields. Nothing will take that away.

Canyonville, population 1800, is 200 miles south of Portland on Interstate 5. You’ll know you’ve arrived when the sprawling Seven Feathers Casino appears on the east side of the highway. Canyonville is really two towns. There’s the casino, a bright, jangly place of slots and lounge singers. Then there’s the real town, best reflected in the business district a mile or so down the road from the casino. It’s threadbare and wizened, but for all that, like an old logger, it’s still a spunky kind of place. At this writing, there are two antiques shops, a bead shop couple of cafes and a natural foods store. For my money, the browsing in this part of town is better than at the casino, but judging from the casino parking lot, I’m in the minority.

History: Jesse and Lindsay Applegate camped here in 1846 on their way south to scout what became the Applegate Trail. The trail avoided the treacherous passage down the Columbia River near the end of the Oregon Trail, but it also forced settlers to struggle, wet and exhausted for days, through the rocky Umpqua Canyon. By 1851, a small log cabin was built to sell tobacco, whiskey and other essentials to the settlers. The past is on display at the Pioneer & Indian Museum, located on the west side of the freeway at 521 W. 5^th St. Its location, in what looks like a warehouse, is modest, but its got a collection that includes gowns, children’s toys, and the contents  of a physician’s bag.  The most moving item is a flag sewn by Canyonville women in 1862. It appears to be linen, 20 feet long by 9 feet by 10 inches wide. The 34 stars are irregular, like real stars, cut by hand.  May of the women who made this flag probably endured the terrible journey through the canyon.

Shop ‘til you Reach the End of the Street: Like many small freeway towns, Canyonville attracts antiques dealers and two of them have established shops on Main Street. Serious shopping can also be pursued at South Umpqua Valley Arts (or SUVA) and Bead Mecca that inhabit two connecting shops. The bead shop stocks a huge inventory of beads used for jewellery and crafts. The SUVA store serves as a cooperative gallery for the artists and craftspeople that hole up in the town and in the lovely surrounding countryside. The work includes textiles, pottery glass, wood, photography and jewellery.

Meet This Man: Down the street from SUVA and the bead shop is Promise Natural Foods and Bakery owned by Javelin Ormond. He’s a beefy, avuncular guy, the very picture of the small town baker that he is. His store gives off an unmistakable hippie vibe, not unusual in southern Oregon. Hippies flocked to Oregon in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s, settling in places like Takilma and Wolf Creek farther south. Ormond recalls hitchhiking from Los Angeles to Canada in 1971 and stopping at the store. He bought it in 1986. Baking became his love, his life, his career, his release and his refuge.  All his breads and pastries are natural grain, and he goes light on the sugar.  During holiday season, he will make 500 or so cookies a day as well as holiday breads like panettone. He admits that for the latter, he breaks his whole grain rule and uses white flour.  Like most hippies, who settled into a life of familoy and entrepreneurship, Ormond has become a pillar of the community.

“For a long time, I was just a crazy hippy on the corner,” he says. “But now I’m mainstream.”

Stay and Eat: No question, the Seven Feathers Hotel offers the best rooms and best value in town, but if you are here to soak in the atmosphere of a little Oregon town, this place is like staying in Reno. The Valley View Motel and the Riverside Lodge, both not far from the casino, will do in a pinch, but the rooms are small and showing their age. There’s also a Best Western and in the downtown, the Leisure Inn.  The latter offers nicely remodelled rooms and a sense that you are really in Canyonville.