On the Back Roads by Bill Graves

think that, that’s OK.”
    I stopped for the night at the Waterwheel Campground, which is right on the river. Ray Poteet and his dog Maddie met me at the door of the log home that he and his wife Kerry built in 1991. They live upstairs. Downstairs is the campground office and recreation room.
    That Ray and Kerry should run a campground—they have always spent most of their free time in an RV—is the realization of a dream at its finest. Now in their mid-30s, both had good jobs in the San Francisco area. They gave all that up in 1989 to live life on their terms in the outback of southern Oregon.
    Their log house, surrounded by wooded hills, seems a perfect fit for the Poteets. Made of machine-turned lodge-pole pine, it is obviously Ray’s pride and joy. A woodstove heats their 1,800-square-foot house. “The logs act like storage batteries, picking up the heat when I have the stove going,” Ray explained. “Then they radiates it the rest of the time. Once the logs get cold, it takes a few days to charge them up again.”
    That night it snowed. Ray warned me that it would dip into the twenties by dawn, so I drained my water hose.
    As soon as there was light, I stepped outside into the fresh snow. With each step, the frozen grass crunched with a sound like breaking glass. It was so loud, I feared it would wake my neighbors. Just a dusting of snow, but it was everywhere. Steam rising from the river trans formed the frozen air into something lacy and ethereal.
    I call this the “fairy-tale feat ure” of nomadic life. A new view from the window eve ry morning. An early walk in a place where I have never been. I love it out here. I really do.
    Overhead was a wild, clamorous sound that cut even the chill. High in the April darkness flew skeins of snow geese, honking northward in undulating V-formations across the dark sky. Necks stretched toward Canada, their white bellies cast an eerie glow as if reflecting the white of the new snow. Absolute trust in their instinct, it pulled them north into a new season.

20
Where Flies Come to Die
Prineville, Oregon
    W alking around the parking lot behind the Crook County Courthouse, I tried to line up a picture.
    â€œWhat’re ya looking at?” came a voice from the driver’s window of a little gray pickup.
    â€œI want to get a picture of the clock tower, but the sun isn’t right.”
    â€œHow long ya going to be here?”
    â€œNot long enough for the sun to be on the front.”
    â€œSun’s never on the front. Ya wanta go up in the tower?”
    I didn’t know why I should see the tower from the inside. Obviously, this experience was to be had by invitation only.
    â€œSure,” I replied.
    â€œCome on back around three-thirty.”
    He sped away. I gave up on the picture.
    My first day here and I was already on the good side of Fred Farrish, the maintenance man for the most important and tallest building in Crook County’s biggest and most important city: Prineville, population 6,000.
    Killing time until three-thirty, I picked up a copy of last week’s Central Oregonian. A section called the “Law Enforcement Log”reported a sixteen-year-old male cited for “minor-in-possession of tobacco.” I read it again. It said exactly that.
    That intrigued me enough to look up Russ Miller, the managing editor of the newspaper. Russ was in his office. “The experts call tobacco a ‘gateway drug.’ They say it precedes drug and alcohol use,” Russ explained. “So the town has an active campaign to cite kids when they catch them with it, which is often. It isn’t just cigarettes. Chewing tobacco is a bigger problem because it’s a ‘cowboy thing.’ Kids see a lot of that being used around here.” Russ went on to say that the people of Prineville have the largest percentage of church affiliation of any city in Oregon—something like 80 percent.
    The north