My unique and eccentric relationship to Oregon rain began, I think, in the summer of 1973 or 1974 at the Lost Lake campground in the Mount Hood National Forest when a family friend, Katie Green, matriarch of a gyppo logging outfit, Green Brothers Logging from Hood River, the kind of hearty woman Hank Stamper should have married instead of Viv in
Sometimes a Great Notion, a woman who was married to a logger named Melvin, the Hank Stamper of Oregon's share of the Cascade Range, a rugged yet gentle man who once saved my life by chasing off a charging Doberman pinscher with an ax, yes, it was Katie who took my family camping with her in a fifth-wheel trailer, no, not the fancy behemoths you see today, with preposterous names like Arctic Fox or Vortex Traveler, but a little rounded one made of metal and wood, yes wood, that slept four although there were five of us on the trip, including my older sister, and we ventured there for three days to hike, wander, bushwhack, swim, skip stones, fish, split wood, boat, build forts, pick huckleberries, sit around a campfire, and roast marshmallows, and it rained every minute of every hour, of every day, and I mean a hard rain that fell so hard that it dented the trailer and permeated the branches of the gigantic conifers, the towering green trees the Green Brothers didn't get around to clear-cutting, a record amount of rain for the middle of August, the wildfire season, something like 5.6 inches (I looked it up on the Internet), an amount so utterly astonishing that it chased away all the campers — except us — and we virtually never left the trailer and did nothing but listen to Katie tell these fantastic forest stories (one of them about her rock-solid belief in Bigfoot), play a combination card and board game called Tripoley, piece together the same puzzle, a medieval castle on the Rhine River, I think, and read, read, read, because there was no radio, tape player, guitar, harmonica, telephone, television, or electronic devices, and I read military history and sports biographies, including, I think,
Instant Replay, a football memoir by Jerry Kramer, the great Green Bay Packer pulling guard who helped the perpetually hungover golden boy Paul Hornung run to daylight, and I can recall only one line of dialogue from this entire noncamping camping adventure and it was something I started saying before each new round of Tripoley, "Ante in before you rain out," a phrase I must have uttered a thousand times in those dank 72 hours when we played for matchsticks and candy, butterscotch, I think.
We never camped again.