This afternoon Jean, Buddy, and I drove to the top of Mt Hebo on the Oregon Coast. I remember going there on a school field trip when I was in grade school and there was a Cold War Radar Station on Mt Hebo to warn us of Russian Nuclear attacks. Which didn’t happen, actually.
Sometime between then and now, the Radar Installation with its domes and barracks and fences and high security was demolished and removed. Nothing left but some massive concrete foundations and the scarred mountain top. Off to one side, the mountain has sprouted communications towers and microwave dishes and the buildings and fences that accompany modern communications. But the top of Mt Hebo is bald and mostly flat, not unlike the top of my head.
Jean and I walked (Buddy ran – sniffing a buffet of smells) around the rim of the mountain top and once again marveled at the almost limitless view. Mt Hood 100 miles to the east, floating on a sea of haze. Mt Adams to the Northeast across the Columbia River, Mt St Helens next.
Then Tillamook in a broad green valley north and a little west, then glimpses of surf and mountains and surf again. Just a little south of west, Haystack Rock (the other one) and the beach of Cape Kiwanda at Pacific City where we’re staying this week.
To the south the mountains stand in ranks like platoons of soldiers, each rank a little bluer than the one in front of it.
Just below us to the northwest is a green valley with white dairy buildings, houses, and lots of white roofs.
I love it.
We drove slowly down the winding road past five acre Hebo Lake with its campsites quickly filling up for a warm Memorial Day weekend. At the bottom of the mountain we drove past Hebo Elementary School where Mrs. Darby did her best to put some education into my eleven-year-old brain. I’m afraid her efforts must have brought her considerable frustration as my brain was way more interested in fishing in the Nestucca River that ran at the bottom of our pasture, in tractor driving, bike riding, and bravely going where no kid had gone before up and down Highway 101 picking up pop and beer bottles to redeem for a penny each. Our farm was a mile north of Hebo and the Cemetery a mile south right on 101.
Hebo Cemetery was blossoming with flowers and flags for this weekend’s Memorial Day Celebration, so we drove in and walked among the graves and flowers and flags. I very clearly remembered a summer day in my eleventh year (Fifty-five years ago) when my friend Tony and I, tired of riding our bikes along the shoulder of Highway 101 dodging log trucks, climbed the Cemetery Hill and sat on a grave in the sun and watched the traffic on the highway below and talked about the things that eleven-year-olds talk about. I can’t remember what those things are, but I know that’s what we did.
Higher up the hill are the new graves, the graves of people who died after that 1954 summer afternoon, so Jean and I went about half way down toward the road where the graves are older, the headstones weathered, and the dates of death pre-1950’s. That’s where Tony and I sat. This afternoon I sat there, probably on the same gravestone, and wondered what ever happened to eleven-year-old Jimmy Stephens and his friend Tony.
Eleven-year-old Jimmy could not possible have guessed that he would be married at twenty, a father at twenty-three, spend his twenty-fourth year in Vietnam, become a businessman, a preacher, a pastor, a missionary, and live outside the US for nearly two decades.
He wouldn’t have the capacity to imagine that fifty-five years later a man much older than his thirty-five year old father, a man old enough to be his grandfather, named Jim Stephens, would sit on that same gravestone in the afternoon sun and think these thoughts.
Eleven-year-old Jimmy contained the man who would fifty-five years later sit in the sunshine on the same gravestone. Jim Stephens, sitting on the gravestone this afternoon in 2009 contains eleven-year-old Jimmy. But the sad thing (and I do feel a sadness about it as I think about Jimmy) is that they can never meet. He couldn’t have imagined what it would be like to be me. I can’t remember what it was like to be him. But I miss him and think that all-in-all he must have been a pretty good kid!
