Trouble in the Sagebrush
Udo only sang about half the day today. Somewhere in the endless sagebrush landscape that is Southeastern Oregon, his voice gave out. –Or maybe it was just the road smoothed and he resigned himself to lying on his pillow and propping his head between the front seats for a snooze. At least until he decided it was poop time. This was somewhere near Burns. Which if you look on the map you will realize is about 150 miles from pretty much nowhere. (The closest “where,” being Klamath Falls.) I don’t mean forested, silent nowhere. I mean pretty much, “Why in God sake did these people settle here and why bother stealing from the original natives nowhere?” It’s the decided views of sagebrush at sunset I’m sure. Burns did however have a gas station, with field for Udo to pucker the butt a few times, (someone else’s expression) and a Dairy Queen. One chocolate dipped, chocolate cone later and we were driving another 150 miles to Ontario. A town where Udo decided it was dinner time and opened up with a full aria. It lasted until downtown Boise. By this time the SO had announced “Overness” with sagebrush.
Overness with sagebrush? How could you get over it in just 300 miles? Nah, too really “over” sagebrush you have to really get acquainted with it. It has to be your endpoint in life. For four years, you have ride to and from school, on a 55 mile an hour bus, staring out the window at what just looks like one continuous grey tombstone. That same bus has to stop at a railroad track each way, which in all that time never, had a train on it. But the track was the only break in the sagebrush for ten miles, and it was so unusual, you started to treat it like a holy spot. It was place you really didn’t understand why the little yellow Blue Birds stopped in their migration, but they always did, so twice a day it was like someone praying to Mecca out of devotion to the unseen force. A force we hoped would one night fly in and carry us to a land with more color. Even, if just for one night.
Okay, I exaggerate. Once, in like 11th grade, we saw an engine coming up the hill, two miles away. You could see either direction for five miles, so no train was going to sneak up on the underpowered meek Blue Bird bus. There was a single diesel electric towing two coal cars that made once a month delivery to the Air Base heating plant. We (the sagebrush break worshiping students of Mountain Home High School) convinced the driver to wait. Wait for 10 minutes as the train climbed the grade to the road crossing. Then we all stuck out hands out the window and made the motion for the engineer to blow his whistle. He did. We all cheered like the football team had just won the state championship. Then we broke into a rendition of “I’m just a Bill, and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.” (Note: That bill in the School House Rock cartoon on how a bill becomes a law, was about the school bus stop law at RxR) We sang it, all the way through, twice. Maybe we did that for the train, because we never got to do it for the football team. I don’t know. Maybe we did it because we were over sagebrush. But we all went home that evening and told our parents that we’d actually seen the Mohamed’s winged horse at the temple today.
But that’s still not sagebrush acquaintance. To really know the grey brush, eat the deer your father annually assassinated that browsed on sage shoots. Have served a dinner quail, chucker or pheasant that just gobbled sage seeds before its soul was shotgun disembodied to join the Blue Bird rescue force. Masticate on that gamey, dry, sour, after taste, day in and day out for the entire season between September when hunting opened and May with “Mountain Stream” saved you with a switch to boney fresh water fish. To really “know” sagebrush, you had to figure out how to polish out the scratches you’re your Dad’s Jeep because you snuck into the stuff after another loosing football game. Was it to get a quick beer to deaden the taste or a forbidden body part from someone? Then when you are locking lips in the desert, and you realize even this other person tastes gamey and sagebrush like. So you do the only thing you can, get on your motorcycle and ride back out into that stuff, rifle and a few buddies in tow, and murder as many ground squirrels as five bucks of .22 bullets can. Then you switch to shooting the sagebrush itself in an attempt to cut it down. Twenty dollars in .22 bullets later the only thought is how to get out of the town, by college by the military, by hitch hiking, by……hoping a fucking winged horse will carry you away at the railroad tracks. That’s when you know you are over sagebrush.
Overness with sagebrush? How could you get over it in just 300 miles? Nah, too really “over” sagebrush you have to really get acquainted with it. It has to be your endpoint in life. For four years, you have ride to and from school, on a 55 mile an hour bus, staring out the window at what just looks like one continuous grey tombstone. That same bus has to stop at a railroad track each way, which in all that time never, had a train on it. But the track was the only break in the sagebrush for ten miles, and it was so unusual, you started to treat it like a holy spot. It was place you really didn’t understand why the little yellow Blue Birds stopped in their migration, but they always did, so twice a day it was like someone praying to Mecca out of devotion to the unseen force. A force we hoped would one night fly in and carry us to a land with more color. Even, if just for one night.
Okay, I exaggerate. Once, in like 11th grade, we saw an engine coming up the hill, two miles away. You could see either direction for five miles, so no train was going to sneak up on the underpowered meek Blue Bird bus. There was a single diesel electric towing two coal cars that made once a month delivery to the Air Base heating plant. We (the sagebrush break worshiping students of Mountain Home High School) convinced the driver to wait. Wait for 10 minutes as the train climbed the grade to the road crossing. Then we all stuck out hands out the window and made the motion for the engineer to blow his whistle. He did. We all cheered like the football team had just won the state championship. Then we broke into a rendition of “I’m just a Bill, and I’m sitting here on Capitol Hill.” (Note: That bill in the School House Rock cartoon on how a bill becomes a law, was about the school bus stop law at RxR) We sang it, all the way through, twice. Maybe we did that for the train, because we never got to do it for the football team. I don’t know. Maybe we did it because we were over sagebrush. But we all went home that evening and told our parents that we’d actually seen the Mohamed’s winged horse at the temple today.
But that’s still not sagebrush acquaintance. To really know the grey brush, eat the deer your father annually assassinated that browsed on sage shoots. Have served a dinner quail, chucker or pheasant that just gobbled sage seeds before its soul was shotgun disembodied to join the Blue Bird rescue force. Masticate on that gamey, dry, sour, after taste, day in and day out for the entire season between September when hunting opened and May with “Mountain Stream” saved you with a switch to boney fresh water fish. To really “know” sagebrush, you had to figure out how to polish out the scratches you’re your Dad’s Jeep because you snuck into the stuff after another loosing football game. Was it to get a quick beer to deaden the taste or a forbidden body part from someone? Then when you are locking lips in the desert, and you realize even this other person tastes gamey and sagebrush like. So you do the only thing you can, get on your motorcycle and ride back out into that stuff, rifle and a few buddies in tow, and murder as many ground squirrels as five bucks of .22 bullets can. Then you switch to shooting the sagebrush itself in an attempt to cut it down. Twenty dollars in .22 bullets later the only thought is how to get out of the town, by college by the military, by hitch hiking, by……hoping a fucking winged horse will carry you away at the railroad tracks. That’s when you know you are over sagebrush.
posted by Stan at 1:51 PM
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