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Where My Obsession with Oregon Rain Began: Lost Lake

by Matt Love, October 29, 2013 10:00 AM
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.




Books mentioned in this post

Instant Replay The Green Bay Diary of Jerry Kramer

Jerry Kramer

Of Walking in Rain

Matt Love

Sometimes a Great Notion

Ken Kesey
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One Response to "Where My Obsession with Oregon Rain Began: Lost Lake"

Kirsten Bolles August 21, 2014 at 04:23 AM
Being the granddaughter of the paragon of capable and exceptional women that was Katie Green, I can't begin to relate how flattered and completely befuddled she would have been to be remembered in such a way. Though she passed away recently, it is finding little gems of her life in unexpected places that reminds me how much even a casual weekend can end up factoring into someone's worldview. Another good argument for being conscious of the energy and attitude that we project to the world around us, I think. I would far rather have any eventual remembrances of me, be it by name or just vague recollection of 'a person' be of a positive sort, rather than the person that added that proverbial straw to the camel we all carry around with us. I am honored on her behalf that Matt has such strong memories of the weekend spent in what must have been an amazingly fragrant fifth-wheel (if it wasn't the smell of the campers, there was never a lack of wonderful food anywhere Katie went, roughing it or no). Thank you for sharing such a vivid, and soggy glimpse back!

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