I have always wanted to see the southeast corner of Oregon.  According to the map, there’s not much there other than the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge.  I was at the refuge once with a class of elementary students, but the visit was very limited and brief.  I didn’t see much.

Yesterday I had the opportunity to take the Bradfords on a field trip.  Heidi and her 9 children graciously consented to accompany Marjorie and I on the jaunt.  I called my nephew, Brent Kerns, and asked for his brother Wes’ phone number.  Wes’ ranch abuts the refuge.  I told Brent that I wanted to go see the birds.

He said, “Let me tell you about our experience there.  We arrived at the outlook and found a lady there with her binoculars.  The lady was complaining because she’d been there four days and hadn’t seen a single bird.  Mary pointed right in front of us and said, ‘There’s a covey of quail.  And up there are several hawks circling around.’

“I got an antelope tag, and went hunting there with Wes.  We used our binoculars to scope out the area, but we couldn’t find a thing.  Mary pointed and said, ‘There’s a herd of them right over there.’  So we have a saying in our family.  Whenever something is obvious, but we aren’t seeing it, someone says, ‘Where are the birds?’”  (In other words:  Put away your binoculars, and just look.)

I called Wes for instructions on how to find his place.  Among the directions was this:  “The highway makes a 90-degree turn to the right in Princeton, but continue straight onto Diamond Loop.”

That sounded very straightforward.  As we approached Princeton the highway made a 90-degree turn to the right, so we continued straight “into” Princeton.”  You’re never really “in” Princeton because Princeton consists of maybe three houses, and there wasn’t another 90-degree turn anywhere in sight.  When the pavement ran out a couple of miles later, we backtracked, and eventually found the mailbox on the left that we were looking for, with no house anywhere in sight.  We drove a couple of miles down a long, long lane that would be a nightmare to plow if it ever snowed there in winter.  It does snow there, and when it does, it drifts.

Wes and Mary live in the house that her father was born and died in.  He was born there on a particular day, lived there 84 years, and died on the same day.  I like the symmetry of his life.  His father built the house.  There is no running or standing water on the ranch.  Mary’s grandfather dug a well, installed a windmill to pump water, and had five bands of sheep.  A band of sheep consists of over 1,000 animals.  The sheep were taken to the mountains for the summer.  They were taken elsewhere to winter.  Wherever it was that they were taken, it was open country, and the sheep were generally able to fend for themselves all winter without extra feed.  On the years when it snowed, there was nothing to be done but to watch the sheep die of starvation.  Sheep aren’t very hardy, so grandpa said that sometimes he’d take five bands of sheep to their winter range, and return with one.

Wes has a more-recently-drilled well in the field near his house that produces 1,600 gallons per minute that feeds the pivots he’s installed.  The well is 200 feet deep, with a static water level of 60 feet.  The 1,600 gallons per minute that’s being drawn out doesn’t drop the static water level a bit.  There’s more there.

Mary’s dad ran cattle.  The cattle were in the hills in the spring.  To give you an idea of what the country looks like, Marjorie said to me this morning, “If you ever get the urge to go there again, just go drive around Keating for a couple of hours.”

(I feel guilty making the Bradford kids endure that long road trip.  Maybe they’ll write up their impressions of the excursion, too.)

Each summer all the ranchers put up wild hay from the valley that is now the National Wildlife Refuge.  The area is on the birds’ flyway, and they loved the green fields and the water that flowed through the valley.  After taking the hay off the fields, and after the hills had dried out, the cattle spent the summer where the hay had been cut—the area that would become the refuge.

The government took over the valley, formed the refuge, and banned the ranchers and cattle from using that huge area.  It was to be left in a natural state so that the birds could use it without human encroachment.  The whole area went natural, and grew up into rank, 6-foot-tall vegetation that is basically unusable by wildlife.  There are still plenty of birds on the flyway, but they’re mostly to be seen in the green fields of the farmers and ranchers nearby.  Outside the refuge we saw five huge flocks of snow geese feeding in those fields.  They were a spectacular sight.  There were perhaps 2,000 birds grazing in each tight little flock.

I said to Wes:  “It would be interesting to see if you could get the federal government to consider letting the local ranchers do an experiment on the refuge.  What if you were allowed to harvest the wild hay off a 160-acre block of the refuge, and compare the birds observed on that block with the birds using the rest of the refuge?”

“It wouldn’t do any good,” Wes answered.  They tried that elsewhere where they were trying to restore the numbers of bluebirds.  The bluebird numbers increased dramatically in the area where farming was allowed, but stayed the same in the area where farming was prohibited.  When the comparison was pointed out to the bureaucrats, they brushed it aside by saying, ‘Would you rather have lots of bluebirds in an unnatural environment, or a few birds in a natural environment?”

Wes took us to see the Indian pictographs that are on his land.  Few people even know that they’re there, but it’s plain to see where someone tried (unsuccessfully, I’m sure) to chip one out as a souvenir, and to take it home.  I’m sure that it shattered.  Wes can’t imagine how Indians could have even existed there in former times unless the climate was more moist, which he thinks it was.  He says that the ranchers in grandpa’s day were able to grow wheat in the 1920’s, but when the drought that was the 1930’s hit, they were no longer able to grow wheat.  They’ve never been able to grow wheat in that area ever since.

The whole area is under-laid with lava of volcanic origin.  There are outcrops everywhere.  There was a thin layer of soil over the underlying rock near the pictographs, and I idly mused about how long it must have taken to form that soil.  Wes answered that he was sure there is no new soil being formed now because everything is so dry.  If anything, they’re now losing soil; but in former years when things were wetter, soil would have formed faster.

Wes drove us down the road to the Pete French Round Barn.  It’s a national historic site.  Pete French built it as a facility in which to train draft horses.  Huge teams (21 horses?) were needed to freight wool and products from there to Hermiston.  Fresh teams were kept all along the way.  One team was trotted 20-or-so miles to where the next team awaited.  The freight could be thus delivered to Hermiston in just five days.

The barn is an impressive structure, and very cleverly built.  Pete French was a cattle baron who claimed the whole country.  Other settlers tried to move in, and Pete tried to keep them from encroaching on his kingdom.  One day a man named Oliver shot him in the head.  Oliver was arrested and tried for murder, but a jury of his peers acquitted him.  The same thing happened to Pete French’s father-in-law.  A jury acquitted his murderer, too.  Both men were bullies. with angry personalities.  The general feeling was, apparently, that they got their just desserts.

Wes took us several more miles down the road, and instructed us to grab hold of all the small children.  We found ourselves looking down into a deep bowl that was the crater of an extinct volcano.  It was not a place that you’d want a child to fall into.  The big boys, however, immediately scrambled down the rocks, and after a difficult descent, were running around over the grassy mound at the bottom of the crater.

Wes took us a few hundred feet away to another deeper, but more gently-sloped crater into which the smaller children were free to descend.  “There are nine of these clustered right around here,” Wes said.

We traveled to the area via John Day, and returned via Vale and Ontario.  Each route takes about four hours.  It was a long, long way, but the Bradfords can now say that they’ve been to Seneca, Crane, Princeton, Buchanan, Drewsy, Juntura, and Harper, Oregon.  How many people have even heard of those places?  The only one the Bradfords might remember, however, is Crane, where there is a boarding school for all the kids for miles around, and a beautiful, stand-out meetinghouse of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.