MEMORIES OF GREEN…

For two months now I’ve traveled with my newly acquired Casita trailer. Most of this time has been spent in the company of friends and cordial strangers. I’ve camped along the Pacific shores and Redwood trees of Northern California, enjoying the gestalt of grey skies and emerald forests, so different from the Southwest deserts that I love.

A few days ago I set back out on the road, heading north towards Oregon and Washington. Traveling first to visit an old friend Eugene, I made a night stop at Sunny Valley in southern Oregon. This is a wide spot in the road that would be easily missed by most travelers. But I have history in this place dating back over a half century.

On a road trip to Canada in 1968 in my ’63 Ranchero, the truck overheated coming up the long grade north of Grants Pass. Hoping to find a place for repairs, I coasted downhill on the next grade where I found an exit for Sunny Valley.

It was a middle-of-nowhere situation. There was a gas station and a small RV park. However, it turned out that the owner of the gas station was an ace mechanic. An eccentric fellow, he figured out the problem (a bad thermostat) and did the repair in about an hour. Then he sent me on my way without gouging me on his price for the work. 

The next year (1969) I came through Sunny Valley on my way to Alaska. This time I was driving a ’59 VW bug. Traveling with a good friend and fellow rover, we were shooting 16 millimeter movie film along the way. The idea was to make a commercial movie about “traveling”. This was my first effort at creating a professional motion picture. The project would eventually take two years to complete. The title of the finished piece was “Northbound”. It played well to the college audiences of the time. Worth noting, a brief clip of the highway exit sign for Sunny Valley made it into the final cut of the film.

Four years later I screened “Northbound” for a woman named Christie with whom I was becoming involved. Watching the movie, the clip of Sunny Valley caught her attention and she became fixed on the idea of living there. We eventually moved in together and within a year built the original Gypsywagen. With nothing holding us back we hauled our creation behind my old Chevy truck all the way from Topanga, California to Southern Oregon.

We arrived at Sunny Valley in the late summer of 1973, not knowing anyone, and stayed at the old RV park by the old gas station. The place was still owned by the eccentric mechanic who actually remembered me from five years before. A young man named Marvin worked for the mechanic. He admired our Gypsywagen and quickly befriended us. We spoke of our intentions to find a more permanent place to encamp. Marvin told us of abandoned miners cabins that were located on the logging roads in the mountains east of Sunny Valley. He lived up there himself and was well acquainted with all the folks who inhabited the various cabins. He informed us there was one cabin still available that was 17 miles up the road. We went for it.

As it turned out the cabin was uninhabitable. We didn’t care. Our Gypsywagen was sufficient for our needs. There was a fast running creek nearby, a well built fire pit and most of all, this was a place far from the madding crowds. Our nearest neighbor was five miles down the road and the nearest telephone was seventeen miles away. We called the place, “Camp Nowhere”.

Christie and I became acquainted with some of the folks who inhabited the long road back to Sunny Valley. On a few occasions we joined our neighbors for pot luck gatherings. What unfolded for us were experiences akin to Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings accounts of her life at Cross Creek in 1930s Florida. We reveled in our time, there in the mountains above Sunny Valley. Then the weather turned cold and we realized we couldn’t sustain ourselves through a snowy winter. So we broke camp and moved on to the town of Ashland where we rented a farmhouse. I went to work in a local manufacturing operation and within the year Christie and I parted ways. We parted on the square… she kept the Gypsywagen, I kept the truck. And we both kept our memories of a time and place that was the stuff of dreams.

The truth is we just can’t know where our paths will take us in this life. I suppose all anyone can really do is to try and make the best of things as days go by. My return to Sunny Valley on this journey has provided a stark remembrance of a time, long ago, when everything seemed possible. In one of his short stories, Joseph Conrad characterized youth as “the romance of illusions.”