Jaci Dawn

Terry wrote a comment back when I started this about how I ended up in Oregon. I returned to Winnemucca with time to spare on my Ameripass and no plan. I truly did not know where to go next and I didn’t want my pass to just run out. As it happened, I knew these two men who had moved to Winnemucca to find work, but who were in the process of moving back to Oregon. Actually, Gary had already packed his bags and moved his wife back to Baker.

But Mike was still in Winnemucca, waffling about his future. When I showed back up at work, he was talking about starting a commune in Baker, Oregon (which is now Baker City, Oregon). Mike had a friend who was agreeable to start the commune and he had a house in rural Keating where the commune would begin. He knew I was footloose: would I like to join?

I agreed to at least look it over.

Background: I was in college in Iowa. The year was 1975. Two art students were behind me discussing this virtual paradise-on-earth, a place called or-uh-GONE. I’d never heard of the place and listened with increasing fascination until curiosity got the best of this Nevada girl. I turned around and asked, “Where is ‘or-uh-GONE’?” They gave me this prep-school-supior-than-thou look and said, peering down their literal noses, “It is the STATE between Washington and California.”

It took me a moment. “OH! ORYGUN! I’ve never heard anyone mispronounce it before!” I didn’t wait to see their expressions: the fact that I knew HOW to pronounce it was enough for me.

So – Orygun. I’d been there a couple times. Seaside. But Mike was talking about the eastern side of the state, close to Idaho. High desert. Country not dissimilar to the area around Lake Tahoe. Mountains, timber, sagebrush.

So I agreed. I spent the last of my Ameripass to go up and check out the “commune”. It was actually Mike, his girlfriend (Janie) and myself. We would live in an old clapboard ranch house in Keating, just ten miles from historic Baker. I could even take my cat there (the one I left with Norma while I traveled). We would be hippies in a commune. Baker was beautiful, set under the Blue Mountains, along the Oregon Trail.

I thought I could handle Oregon for a couple years. So I used up the last of my Ameripass to return to Winnemucca. I packed my things and “Cat” and got my brother to drive me back to Baker.

In the end, the commune never happened: Mike and Janie got married. I got a job and moved out on my own. Then I picked up this logger in a bar and, well, you know how that sort of thing ends. The logging industry went under and we moved to Portland to find work. Two kids, a mortgage and all that later…

Here I am, all done with that bit of reminiscing.