The Wallowa County Who-Who

 

The Portland Review, 2000

 

By Charles Deemer

 

 

No one knows when the first spotted owls alighted in Wallowa County. Normally the endangered species preferred the milder climate of old growth forests in Oregon’s coastal range to rugged mountains more fit for a goat, where winter could last three-fourths of the year. Their arrival was not expected, and by the time the owls were discovered in Joseph, they were already there in great and public numbers.

            Mayor Divorak saw them first. He had come to City Hall shortly after five a.m. on Monday to catch up on paperwork before the morning’s emergency session of the City Council. An emergency meeting was no small matter; usually the Council hardly had reason to meet at all. But the Nez Perce had hired a fancy lawyer from Portland to challenge the city’s plans, initiated by the mayor himself, to develop the north end of Wallowa Lake into a resort and marina. Lord knows something had to be done to revitalize the Eastern Oregon economy. The trouble was, the land in question was adjacent to the grave of old Chief Joseph, on land the Nez Perce regarded as sacred. If the Council went through with its plans, the tribe’s lawyer threatened, the case would be taken all the way to the Supreme Court. This was not the way Mayor Divorak wanted to put Joseph on the map.

            Who owns the land?, was the question on the mayor’s mind that morning. He reached into a pocket for his keys to open the small building on Main Street that was City Hall. Who-who, came a near sound. The mayor hesitated, distracted by what he thought was hallucination, before putting the key into the lock. The sound came again, close and from above: who-who, hoot. The mayor looked up at the eaves under the law roof and heard a flapping sound, as if from stretching wings. He took the key out of the lock and moved back toward the corner until he saw them. Then he stopped in horror.

            It couldn’t be true; his eyes must be conspiring with his ears to fool him. What he saw were countless birds perched atop City Hall, and by their flat oval faces he recognized that they were owls. Who-who, hoot, they murmured.

            The mayor didn’t linger long. He hurried into the office and swallowed four aspirins. A prank, he finally decided. The Nez Perce were trying to rattle him.

 

*

 

            Fletch found the owls next. He had no reason to go to City Hall so early in the morning but had every reason to be across the street at Tony’s when the door opened at six because his hangover was crushing. Last night, dancing outside under the full moon on the patio at The Cowboy Bar, he and Renford had created a new dance step. Not that Fletch could remember it, or Renford either. But last night, inspired by liquor and the country harmony of The Fishtrap Boys, Fletch and Renford had created a two-step they called the Wallowa County Who-Who.

            The nearby table of loggers loved it. The loggers, in fact, had contributed to the night’s inspiration, first with loud jokes about the spotted owl (“There was this homeless man who was surviving by eating pigeons. ‘What’s a pigeon taste like?’ someone asked him. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it’s sort of a cross between a bald eagle and a spotted owl.’”), later by ordering their beers with loud hooting, who-who! who-who! Given the danger spotted owls presented to the survival of the logging industry, everyone on the patio agreed that the Wallowa County Who-Who should become the State Dance of Oregon. The Fishtrap Boys even promised to write a song just for the new two-step. The dance was such a sensation that the widow Rosie took Fletch home with her, to her trailer on the north end of town.

            So Fletch wasn’t feeling his best as he ambled past City Hall before crossing the street to Tony’s. The he heard them. Who-who, hoot! He stopped, and it took him a minute to find the origin of the noise. “What the hell?,” he thought.

            Unlike the mayor, Fletch didn’t think it was a prank by the Nez Perce. He thought it was Providence, some cosmic conspiracy against his very way of life, and he wasn’t about to go down without a fight. Instead of going to Tony’s, he continued straight ahead toward his room above Mel’s Tavern, to get his shotgun.

            Mayor Divorak was buried in legalese when he heard the gunshots. By the time he got outside, six dead owls lay on the ground in front of City Hall, and the sky was live with wings and panic.

            “Fletch!,” the mayor yelled as Fletch took aim at another owl.

            The shotgun fired, another owl fell to earth. Divorak reached Fletch and grabbed him.

            “Stop it!,” the mayor shouted.

            Fletch lowered his sights. He turned to the mayor, then looked across the street at the crowd that had gathered outside Tony’s.

            “Come on and have a cup of coffee,” said the mayor.

            Fletch nodded. Just before stepping into Tony’s, he looked up over his head, where dozens of owls were circling in chaotic flight. “Don’t you dare,” he thought.

 

*

 

            By 7:30, when the American flag was raised outside City Hall, the owls had settled in on the roof again. The corner was filled with onlookers, all curious,  most puzzled, many amused, only a few terrified.

            The first reporter arrived just before noon. This was Ralph McDonald of The Observer in La Grande. McDonald was the only reporter in Eastern Oregon ever to have won a Pulitzer Prize.

            Divorak knew from past experience that he couldn’t keep a lid of this: a few years back, when someone from Enterprise had pulled a prank on Joseph by putting up a stoplight in front of Swede’s Tavern (there wasn’t a stoplight in the entire county), some writer from Portland had published a story about it in The Sunday Oregonian and, of course, had got it all wrong. Whatever else it was, the arrival of the spotted owls was news, and this time the mayor hoped to keep the reporting local and accurate, so he called Lowry at the Weekly in Enterprise.

            Lowry didn’t believe him. “This ain’t the climate for spotted owls,” he said and hung up. The mayor rushed to the City Council meeting.

            After the meeting broke up near two, without consensus or compromise on the proposed resort and marina, Divorak found McDonald on a pay phone on Main Street, reading from his notes. He tried to listen in without appearing snoopy, stooping to read the headline at a nearby newspaper machine.

            The reporter hung up and said, “Hello, Mayor. I see you have quite an oddity going on.”

            Divorak weighed his response carefully. The trouble with McDonald was that his stories tended to get picked up by the wire services. He wished McDonald would stay in Union County where he belonged.

            “You know how summertime’s the season for pranks around here,” said the mayor at last.

            “Unless it’s the Greenhouse Effect. Or something else fowling up nature. Sorry for the pun,” McDonald laughed.

            “So did you send in a story?”

            “Just then? I was talking to CBS in New York. They’re sending over a cameraman from Portland to work with me.”

            The mayor tried to hide his groan. McDonald slapped Divorak on the back and said, “This may put your little town on the map.”

 

*

 

            Before the end of the week, all three networks had covered the story of the sudden and strange arrival of spotted owls in Wallowa County. There wasn’t a vacant room for rent in Joseph or Enterprise, for all the media people hanging around. Worse, as far as the mayor was concerned, their snooping had turned up the controversy at the lake, and the Nez Perce’s Portland lawyer delighted in giving afternoon press conferences on the patio at The Cowboy Bar.

            The idea for an Eco-Village was Fletch’s. Or maybe it was Renford’s. The mayor couldn’t remember, everyone was drinking pretty heavily that night and reckless talk was flying fast around the table at Swede’s Tavern. It was the end of the week, and Divorak was trying to numb the rumor that Time magazine was sending out a reporter for a cover story on the spotted owl. The owls were here, the most recent theory went, because Wallowa County was one of the last unpolluted spots in Oregon. Like the canary in the coal mine, the owls had stopped singing in the coastal range and were on an exodus for survival.

            The owls were also a nuisance and a mess. Their sheer numbers, which continued to increase until the mayor was sure that every spotted owl in Oregon was in Joseph, required them to spread out beyond City Hall, and so they began to perch on the roofs of businesses and homes throughout town. The mayor had no idea what they ate. There were rumors that environmentalists from the college in La Grande were sneaking in past midnight to feed them. Surely the owls were eating something because bird droppings were everywhere.

            “You ought to use the owls to get the Indians off your back,” Fletch told the mayor at Swede’s Tavern that night. Or maybe it was Renford. “The Nez Perce want to save the damn land, so let them save the owls along with it. Build an Eco-Village at the lake. Put the owls in there, bring in coyotes” – he pronounced it “kai-otes” – “whatever, it’d be a little zoo of endangered species. The tourists ought to love it.”

            “If we’re talking endangered species, let’s have a cage for the loggers in that Eco-Village,” someone said, and everyone laughed.

            The mayor’s wheels were already turning. An Eco-Village at the lake! A home for endangered species! Why, the tourists probably would love it, and if the Nez Perce fought it, they’d come off looking like anti-environmentalists. It was a hell of an idea!

 

*

 

            Unfortunately, the owls vanished as mysteriously as they had arrived. Once again, Mayor Divorak made the discovery when going to the office early in the morning. He planned to work on his proposal for an Eco-Village and marina at the lake.

            “Who-who!,” the mayor said in good spirits, looking up at the roof.

            But the roof of City Hall was bare under the gray sky. Silence chilled the air. “Who-who?,” the mayor tried again but no owl echoed a reply.

            Divorak looked up and down Main Street. He looked down the side street toward the river. He saw bare roofs everywhere.

            Then he heard a distant who-who, hoot!

            It was Fletch, morning drunk and staggering his way down the middle of Main Street on his way home from Rosie’s trailer.

            “Fletch!,” the mayor called. He waited for the retired logger to weave his way close enough for normal conversation.

            “What happened to the owls?,” the mayor finally asked.

            “They went thataway,” Fletch slurred, circling unsteadily to lean north. “About four this morning. Shoulda seen it, owls everywhere in the sky, all flying north. Going to Montana, I guess.” Then he circled back to point himself south and staggered on toward his room above Mel’s Tavern.

            By eight the mayor’s phone was ringing off the hook. No, he didn’t know what he happened, he didn’t know why the spotted owls came in the first place and now he didn’t know why they had left. It seemed like every reporter in the county needed a personal quotation from the mayor.

            By the end of the day, all the media people had left town. Motel marquees showed vacancy lights for the first time in over a week, and there were no lines at the counter in Jerry’s Market. Once again The Cowboy Bar was quiet in the afternoon.

            A few days later the mayor’s phone started ringing again, this time with local complaints. Everyone wanted Divorak to do something to get the owls back. Didn’t he realize that local business had boomed with all the reporters in town? Didn’t he realize that the owls were money in the bank, as good an investment as Chief Joseph Days?

            Later Mayor Divorak tore up his proposal for an Eco-Village and went back to the uncertain task of trying to make sense out of legalese, in preparation for the next City Council meeting.

 

*

 

            Not even the Wallowa County Who-Who survived the disappearance of the owls. The Fishtrap Boys somehow never got around to writing a song for the dance, and Chief Joseph Days came and went without anyone dancing the new two-step. Near the end of the summer, Rosie even stopped asking Fletch to come home with her.

            One afternoon in September, Fletch and Renford were in The Cowboy Bar reminiscing about the magical night they created a new dance.

            “Hell of a two-step,” said Fletch.

            “The loggers sure loved it,” said Renford.

            Charley, the bartender, said, “Heard on the radio that them spotted owls have been seen up near Glacier Park.”

            Fletch and Renford were silent.

            “Montana,” said Charley.

            Fletch shook his head and sipped his beer. “The Greenhouse Effect,” he said.

            Charley said, “I never believed they was endangered ‘til they started acting so crazy. Something must be wrong with them.”

            “I’ll tell you what an endangered species is,” said Fletch. “It’s us. Logging.”

            “We belong in a zoo,” mumbled Renford.

            “Except who would come? Who the hell cares about a logger?,” Fletch asked the empty bar.

            There was a long silence. Fletch had planned it this way. He knew Charley couldn’t stand long silences and, sure enough, before another word was spoken, Charley did just what Fletch had figured he would do.

            “What the hell,” said Charley, and he bought the next round.