Three Sisters

I grew up in a small town east of Oregon's Willamette Valley, flush against the foothills of the Cascades. From my backyard on clear days I could see three far-off peaks known as the Three Sisters.

Early settlers of the region had named them Faith, Hope, and Charity.

I'm sure the Indians who inhabited the area beforehand had their own names for them as well. Those names were likely unassociated with Christian sentiments, however.

The romanticism of the names eventually died. Today the sisters are rather mundanely referred to as--North, Middle and South.

The name Three Sisters had metaphorical overtones, evoking the image of a family hanging together under duress--in their case the volcanic Pleistocene epoch of hundreds of thousand of years ago.

The peaks are among the highest in the Cascades and have long been a playground for climbers, hikers and campers. My family did quite a bit of the latter two when I was a kid, and I have great memories of those times. We hiked along mountain trails and swam in ice-cold lakes, fished for trout, and took row boats and canoes far enough offshore to earn admonitions from our clan's various beer-swilling elders.

Unfortunately, the camping trips ended with the early death of my brother-in-law, Henry Hogan. He was the family's camping and fishing guide, teacher and organizer, a great outdoorsman and deep-throated country singer, and a swell guitarist.

I was about ten years-old when he died, of Hodgkin’s, at thirty-three. He died in the Veterans' Hospital in Portland, a sad day for me because I truly loved the man. His five children worshipped him as much as I, obviously, and it was crushing for all of us to see such a brilliant and gifted man die too young.

The husband of my sister Lucille--she was twenty-two years older than I-- Henry had been a great father figure to me.

My father, Reuben, had died in an auto accident when I was six-months old. Driving home late one night, he sailed over a guardrail and into a deep ravine outside Cascadia, the tiny village where my family lived at the time.

He survived the initial crash, they say, and climbed up the steep embankment before collapsing at roadside. A passing motorist found him dead the next morning. He was 51.

The road, Highway 20, was treacherous with its sheer drop-offs and tight corners, some of which hadn't guardrails at all. That stretch of road put the fear in me for years. I couldn't travel it without thinking about what had happened there, to my father and to many others.

My mother and father had owned a large, two-story house in Cascadia, with a big front yard surrounded by a white-picket fence, and a large willow tree for shade. The house sat adjacent to Cascadia State Park, known for its soda springs.

I couldn't drink the soda water. Many in my family loved it, claimed it had regenerative properties, and filled gallon jugs with it to take home and refrigerate. I could never get use to its smell and acrid bite.

I don't remember living in the house in Cascadia. My mother moved the family down the mountain and closer to town shortly after my father's death. She didn't drive, so the move was absolutely necessary. Her kids old enough to drive were long gone; three of my brothers were in the army in Korea.

We visited the park and its environs often when I was young, passing through on our trips to the high lakes. I can remember my mom's forlorn sighs whenever we visited the old place. I was young, but I think I understood at the time how wistful our circumstances made her feel. She had a tangible sadness when she gazed at the house. She and my father had lived there for most of their marriage--twenty-five years--so it must have, understandably, pained her to reflect on her memories of the place. Good and bad.

Whatever she was thinking, she never let on about it. Around me at any rate.

Over the years, the house began to rot away. I went up there once, years later, and it was gone, but the big willow tree remained.

My sister and Henry had two kids of their own before I was born. My sister Evelyn had a son older than me. As did Lyle, the oldest of my four brothers. Those three and my other brothers and sisters--seven in all--would keep pumping out the babies until there were too many to remember.

All this made me an uncle before I came out of the womb, in other words, a clear indication I was a dreadful mistake.

I grew up with my nieces and nephews, a nest of them born right around the same time I arrived, in 1951. As we grew up together, attending the same schools, playing games, fighting, a few of them were more like brothers and sisters to me than my actual siblings. Though realistically this happened: I came to embrace solitude more than family.

I was on my own a lot from a young age. My youngest sister was ten years older than me. My youngest brother was six years older. Neither wanted anything to do with me, naturally.

This meant that from about my twelfth-year on, my mother and I were alone in the house I grew up in at the end of Thompson Lane.

When you're a twelve year-old boy you begin to lose interest in your mother, or at least I did. I figured out later that she was just as relieved to be done with me; of dressing the wounds and hearing the problems of children she’d had enough.

She'd had enough by the time I came of age—that is a certainty. We were both capable of ignoring each other for days on end.

We thrived on our unattached natures. I enjoyed solitude and the fantasies of which only a lonely child is capable. I lived in a kind of dream world, and had a rich fantasy life.

Which likely didn't aid me later in life, but that is a different story.

We had moved from Cascadia fifteen miles down the mountain to Thompson Lane.

Two houses sat at the end of Thompson Lane. My house and a neighboring house to the right as you came down the rutted-road from the highway. That house's occupancy turned over frequently with workers, as did several of the other houses along Thompson Lane closer to the highway.

At a later date I’ll tell you about the fire that consumed one of those houses, killing seven of my neighborhood friends.

The tragedy had profound repercussions for me, which I'll try to relate.




TS