https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MS6dhZc6uac
"Background Suspense Music"
Honestly, I promise. I will try to get to some sort point. I don't promise that it will be rational. I think it will help to understand
what sort of place we've gone to.
The Cascade mountains were just the sign of volcanic activity.
We've been going through a very jumbled landscape. Left to itself it
would be mostly juniper and sage brush. The land tends to sweep and roll
with volcanic hills scattered around the county like scars. It has
obviously been pushed around a bit. The farms are mostly raising
alfalfa, cattle and kids. But not as many kids as you might expect.
Every farm has at least one big open metal shed to store alfalfa in. If
it has a wall there will only be one of them on the side the weather
comes from. This time of year they're either empty or they have a small
pile of bales remaining from last year.
The population gets even more interesting if you look closer at the numbers.
https://datacommons.org/place/geoId/41037?utm_medium=explore&mprop=count&popt=Person&hl=en
https://datacommons.org/place/geoId/41037?category=Demographics
The median age is 47.5 years. Only 379 of 3187 counties in the US
have a higher median age. In Oregon we have 10 other counties with a
higher median age. For comparison here in Washington county the median
age is 36.9. These numbers will come back to haunt us.
The numbers there agree with what I saw. There are no Black faces
there. Why would there be? There aren't enough people in any one place
to support a shoe shine stand.
I have a friend who grew up in Lake county a little further down
the road. She's a trans woman whose father wouldn't talk to her for 3
years after she came out. It turned out that he's a deeply closeted gay
man.
What you might call the community of Summer Lake is some widely
scattered building. They have a small store with two gas pumps. It's
just a short walk from there to the Lodge at Summer Lake. They're across
the highway from the shallow ponds that make up the north side of a
shallow lake. They are also surrounded by big ponds of various sizes.
The Oregon department of Fish and Wildlife has a number of buildings on
the east side of the highway and a basic campground, of sorts. There's
very little shade. If you wanted to make baskets the basic materials are growing all around the place.
Besides the restaurant the Lodge has a small motel. One building
is divided into 7 rooms and they had 4 or 5 cabins that looked like they
had been made in a factory. It's the sort of place where the owner was replacing a toilet the first time we saw and was waiting on tables the
next morning. The restaurant is excellent. They cook the food there. It
isn't the sort of stuff that they merely freeze and reheat. It's the
sort of place that every table with a window facing the closest pond had
a nice pair of binoculars. Most likely some of the best from their lost
and found collection. They get a lot of birders out there. Their prices
were incredible. I had the house special--tacos. Beef $1.50 each.
Chicken $2. I had 2 of the beef tacos. My wife had some fancy hamburger
for less that $15. One of the more expensive items on the menu was fish
and chips for $15.
The owners were an older couple who choose the way they wanted to
live about 50 years ago. They had grown up in the neighborhood we live
in now, only it would have been a very different neighborhood back then.
Service had been spotty and slow that evening, but the food was
good and inexpensive so we went back for breakfast. I don't think it's
easy to find restaurant help out there. I had a huge fluffy pancake that
filled my plate for $6 and my wife had some ordinary breakfast for
around $10. While he was waiting on us the owner was telling us he was
working on a new menu and felt bad about it because he had to raise his prices. I didn't tell him I thought his prices were incredibly low. They
have to order everything without knowing if they will get it or how much
it will cost. Then they have to go pick it up.
The owners were nice people, but it always makes me a bit
uncomfortable when I'm waited on by people older than me. I thought
their prices showed a bit of detachment from what's going on in the rest
of the world.
Hey! We're getting down to the horror of the situation. There's a
killer on the loose. I haven't eaten inside a restaurant since the
pandemic started. We're out in the middle of nowhere and, counting the
working people there are about 10 people in a restaurant that looks like
it could easily seat 50 people. The whole time we were there I only saw
one person wearing a mask, and she looked like a tourist.
At dinner I hadn't been very hungry, but that happens frequently
when we're traveling and I didn't think anything of it. The next morning
I ordered a $6 pancake for breakfast that was this big fluffy thing that
filled the plate. I was barely able to nibble at it, but otherwise I
felt OK. We left Summer lake and headed for the Malhuer Wildlife Refuge.
We stopped in Burns about half an hour away from the refuge. By then I
knew we had a problem. After we finished up at the hospital my wife sent
the nice people in Summer lake an email explaining what happened. The
next day we saw a headline that said that Lake county was already in the
top nine counties in Oregon for Covid infections before we got there.
TB
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