With the coming of spring, Omanson was finally in the mood for a little society and joined an encampment of friends in the valley of the Hoh River south of Forks, about three miles east of Robert Lee’s place. Omanson was soon in the habit of dropping in on Robert Lee on a regular basis, as the older man possessed a wealth of backcountry skills and colorful tales. As Robert Lee’s sidekick, riding in an old wreck of a car to visit out-of-the-way corners of the Peninsula, Omanson had glimpses of an older America which had long since died out nearly everywhere else.
Read Part 3, A Solitary Winter in the Woods
I Join an Encampment of Friends on a Tributary of the Hoh
Sometime in April I decided to accept an invitation to join an encampment of several friends about twenty miles south of Forks on a small tributary of the Hoh. After spending the winter alone I was ready for a little society. Also, I had been in my location on the Calawah for over four months, and you didn’t want to squat illegally in one place for too long. With warmer weather around the corner and more fishermen on the river, it was only a matter of time before I would be discovered.
But I should have known better than to join a group of six folks camping anywhere on company land. It was too many folks in one place. I had escaped detection on the Calawah through the winter precisely because I was just one person and had taken precautions to avoid detection, such as only keeping a fire in my stove at night or in bad weather when no one was likely to be out, and never being spotted on the road within a mile of my place, and so forth. This new encampment near the Hoh was far more conspicuous and, as I soon discovered, no one was being careful at all. There were two or three vehicles and Mitch and Liz were there with a big plywood trailer. We might as well have had a ferris wheel and some fireworks. Everyone just figured we were going to be discovered and kicked off no matter what we did, so why worry about it? And surely enough, within a few weeks, that’s exactly what happened.
As it came about, we got a visit from the sheriff one morning. He hadn’t come calling to evict us, but rather to warn us that we’d been discovered and to expect a visit from the logging company. The lady proprietor of a little resort on 101 had learned of our presence in her “neighborhood” and started making complaints. She didn’t want us cluttering up the woods. For years she had been carrying on a campaign against Robert Lee whose property was such an eyesore, and now she extended that campaign to us. The sheriff, who was known by all our friends as a thoroughly good fellow, was just being neighborly. He had dropped in on several previous occasions for coffee and to pass the time, and now he was stopping by just to give us a heads-up. He didn’t seem very concerned, so neither were we, but from that day on we each began to pack things up and to look around the area for a new place to camp. We were beginning to think of ourselves as a band of gypsies: never too popular with the locals and always being shoved along to the next place.
Calling on the Country Estate of Robert Lee, Esq.
The best thing about living on that Hoh tributary was that it was only about three miles from Robert Lee’s place, so I got in the habit of walking over to see him every few days, just to drop in and pass the time and listen to his stories.
For drivers heading north on 101, there was no way to miss Robert Lee’s “estate.” Along the entire fifty-mile stretch of highway from Queets to Forks, and all the way up to Port Angeles, for that matter, there was no other eyesore that even came close. With his forty-foot plywood cheesebox of a trailer— with stovepipe, door and not one window— Robert Lee’s dead-basic abode was just one architectural step above a root cellar.
At the back of his property loomed an ancient sea-going fishing boat, propped up on concrete blocks, that looked as if it hadn’t tasted salt water in decades— for in some earlier phase of his long colorful career that stretched from being a bull-whacker in North Carolina logging camps during the 1930s to driving log trucks from one end of the Peninsula to the other throughout the ‘50s and ‘60s, Robert Lee had also put in a stint as an independent salmon fisherman.
Elsewhere on the property, wherever one cared to look, gathering rust and vines and disquieting pools of black oily water, set among scrub pines and cascara shrubs, was a host of broken-down automobiles and pickups from earlier eras, and all in various states of decay and dismemberment.
And if this wasn’t enough, there was the unavoidable prominence of the property itself. Just as the overloaded northbound campers and Winnebagos from places like Davenport or Kankakee crossed the only place on the Peninsula where 101 bridges the Hoh, they were confronted with a ten-foot-high promontory of land in the shape of a ship’s prow heaving up before them and momentarily blocking their view— until, as the highway swept around the long ship’s-hull curve of his property, the whole disgraceful panoply of Robert Lee’s junkyard was spread out before them in all its overgrown, run-down glory.
The poor put-upon woman down the highway, struggling to ply an honest trade selling gas and oil and bait and renting out boats to respectable tourists, had been been pressuring state and county officials and anybody who would listen for years to get Robert Lee’s property condemned, or somehow compel him to clean it up, for there was no doubt in her mind whatsoever that he was bad for business.
But all her efforts had come to nought. There wasn’t a lot of sympathy on the Peninsula for interfering with how any man, or woman, might choose to live out their lives on their own land. That private property was an especially sacred right in these parts was due in large measure to the fact that the culture of the Peninsula was still essentially a frontier homesteading culture, with many children and grandchildren of the original homesteaders still alive and still living on those same homesteads. Another exacerbating factor was that, during the 1930s, with not much warning and even less compensation, the government had peremptorily bulled its way in and kicked homesteaders off their land to make room for the national park, an occasion that was still in living memory for many, and which still rankled mightily.
And so it was that Robert Lee, despite all efforts to the contrary, would be left to go right on living exactly as he wished on his own land, sitting atop a mountain of junk in plain view of the world, and all the tourists from Peoria and Waukasha and Terra Haute would just have to swallow their indignation, avert their eyes, and keep on driving.
Visiting around the Peninsula in Robert Lee’s Two-Gear Sedan
The best days of all were when Robert Lee went visiting and took me along. Visiting meant driving north— never south for some reason, and never to a town or city— but always to somewhere remote and out of the way, invariably down a narrow winding dirt or gravel road to some tucked-up little place in a hemlock grove or on the bank of a creek or at the wooded edge of a pasture. Robert Lee didn’t seem to know anyone who lived in town or, more probably, no one who lived in town would have wanted Robert Lee showing up unannounced on their doorstep. He was not a sight for civilized eyes.
He stood six feet four inches, was well into his sixties, was inordinately strong, and all-in-all possessed the physique of a medium-sized bear. He seemed to have just one set of clothes which he washed rarely if ever, and in which he appeared to sleep, even to his boots. His hair was perpetually tousled as if he’d just crawled out of a hollow log, and he usually wore three or four days-worth of stubble. There was no running water on Robert Lee’s property, but he did have that big icy river close at hand which he could always make use of when absolutely necessary. I tried to stay upwind of him just as a general precaution.
As Robert Lee’s sidekick, I visited out-of-the-way parts of the Peninsula that I would never have seen otherwise and met a cast of distinctive backwoods characters who lived too far off the grid to have ever been encountered under normal circumstances. In Robert Lee’s company I felt I was seeing a part of the old America that had long since vanished everywhere else except maybe in forgotten pockets of Appalachia or the deep South, or far up the road in Alaska. We traveled in whatever old wreck from his junkyard was deemed most road-worthy at the time. None of them were actually licensed, but that didn’t seem to concern Robert Lee in the least, and I certainly didn’t give it a thought.
The car we used most often was a low-slung rusted sedan whose make I can no longer call to mind. It was a good old runner on the whole but for one crippling peculiarity. The transmission had seen better days and possessed neither a workable first gear, nor a reverse. Driving without first gear didn’t present much of a problem, provided you started out on a downhill slope. You could even start out on the level in second gear, if you had the right touch, and for a veteran trucker like Robert Lee it presented no problem at all. Reverse was another matter, for you could very easily find yourself on a narrow dirt road that just petered out, where the option of reverse was an absolute necessity.
On one occasion we were bouncing along on a narrow gravel road that ended abruptly at the edge of a precipitous ravine. As soon as we saw the drop-off dead ahead, but still a few dozen yards off, I assumed Robert Lee would brake to a stop, get out and assess the situation and ponder our options but, without hesitation and much to my horror, he stomped the pedal, barreled straight ahead toward certain destruction and, at the last possible moment, slammed the brakes, wrenched the wheel as hard as could with a blood-curdling Yahoo! and basically spun that heavy old sedan around on a dime, splattering every tree in our immediate vicinity with gravel. He didn’t actually pull off a complete 180— it was hardly even a 120— but it was just enough that he could then coax the old wreck completely around and off we went, rattling back to the highway. To this day I still don’t quite see how he pulled it off. We had come close enough to that ravine that I could stare down into oblivion and I was truly shaken. “God damn it Robert Lee,” I shouted, “if I’d known you were gonna pull a fool stunt like that, I’d have jumped out!” Robert Lee just looked straight ahead with a big grin. “Son,” he said (he always called me Son), “That was nuthin’. Purely nuthin’ ”
Notwithstanding Robert Lee’s grubby demeanor and backwoods hygiene, folks generally seemed pleased to see him. In the old country way, he would just drop in unannounced, — not that there were any practical alternatives to such casual sociability. It’s not like anyone had a telephone! The custom of neighbors and friends dropping in on neighbors and friends was as well-established as the countryside itself. Sometimes we would all just stand around and talk— sometimes, if there were chairs or stumps, everyone would take a seat— and sometimes, if there was an actual house, we might be invited in.
Once we called on a woman who was probably in her late thirties living in a small house at the edge of a forest with her teenage daughter. They were both memorably beautiful, with fine-boned delicate features, long dark hair and graceful dresses that reached to their workboots. The mother was soft-spoken and gracious, and took obvious pleasure and amusement in Robert Lee’s rollicking geniality. Robert Lee, for his part, was his usual gregarious self, rambling on happily about nothing in particular. The daughter was shy and mostly silent. The mother invited us in, sat us at her kitchen table and served us bowls of miso soup, the first I had ever tasted. It was unexpectedly smoky, and delicious. Then we were out the door and down the road.
On another occasion we parked at the end of a twisting gravel road and hiked a quarter mile or so through moss-hung forest somewhere along the Hoh River until we came to a spacious shadowy grove of old alders, carpeted in oxalis and fern. A balding fellow of indeterminate age with a long beard was snoring loudly on a bed of fronds in a lean-to of cedar boughs, and when Robert Lee hollered a loud drawn-out halloooo the poor fellow lurched out sideways like a crab, tripped over a log and pitched headlong into the ferns. He wasn’t accustomed to visitors and didn’t seem overly pleased to see us— and moreover was three or four sheets to the wind.
As soon as he had recovered his composure somewhat, he made a show of hospitality by inviting us to sit on a mossy log with him and share some swigs from his bottle of rye whiskey, an offer that it would have been rude of us to refuse, so we didn’t. It took him a few minutes and quite a few swigs to recover his voice, and as he gathered himself I looked over his lean-to. There were several layers of plastic sheeting beneath the cedar branches, and a good-sized trench all around the structure that was ditched away into the woods on the lower side to handle the run-off, but I still couldn’t work out how it would offer enough protection during the winter rains.
Robert Lee asked him what the occasion was for his one-man celebration and he said he had lived there in his woodsy abode for two years now, to the very day, and had nothing to show for it but a very cunning little woodstove that he had constructed from a large coffee can using nothing but his Bowie knife. It was, in fact, a piece of admirable workmanship— an entire little functioning woodstove no more than a foot tall, with a hinged door and a stovepipe contrived from several tin cans. I’d never seen the like, but it was the perfect size for that little lean-to. The only disadvantage that I could see was that it could burn nothing larger than a clothespin, which meant spending quite a lot of time every day just whittling wood.
I tried to console the fellow by suggesting that his stove was something he could be proud of, and he owned that he was proud of it, but that he had nothing else to show for two years of living there and wasn’t proud of that at all. Which is why on this day— the second anniversary of his sojourn in the woods— he was devoting his full attention to drinking rotgut rye until he passed out.
As the poor fellow was well into the maudlin stage by this time and making straight for stark insensibility, where he might unsheath that big knife of his and start mindlessly waving it about, we wished him a good day and slipped back into the woods as inconspicuously as we could.
Not long after that I ran into the same fellow again, at one of Robert Lee’s impromptu outdoor get-togethers that he hosted whenever he was feeling more than usually sociable. I asked how he was faring and alluded to our recent visit to his campsite. He had not the least recollection that we had ever met.
Another time Robert Lee and I dropped in on a small, determined woman in her mid-twenties, living alone along a river in a shelter she had built herself. She had located it out of sight in a dense alder grove, but within walking distance of the county dump, which had apparently provided most of her furnishings. She was visibly proud of her little home in the woods, and had filled it with hanging baskets of ferns and wildflowers. Robert Lee took his time and looked around at what she had built and patiently listened as she pointed out some of the finer features, and then gave it his hearty seal of approval.
It didn’t take long to work out that most of Robert Lee’s friends were young enough to be his grandchildren, and that they were predominantly of the long-haired hippie variety— resilient back-to-landers intent on self-sufficiency and independence. And it wasn’t hard to see why they genuinely admired Robert Lee, as I did, for his flagrant contempt for all things bureaucratic and for all the sly, ingenious stratagems he had devised to circumvent them. Like most of the older, traditional residents of the Peninsula, Robert Lee had a sure instinct for self-sufficiency, which meant he knew how to get along without 90% of what urban folks considered absolute necessities, while possessing the full range of essential backcountry tools and skills to make it all work.
Robert Lee helped folks out as a matter of course, without making a point of it. I came to understand that the primary reason he drove all over the Peninsula wasn’t so much to stave off loneliness, as simply to keep an eye on his young friends (none of whom had lived in the country for nearly as long as he had)— just to make certain they were getting along.
A Visit to a Makah Family on Neah Bay
My most unexpected day with Robert Lee involved a drive up to the very northwest tip of the Peninsula— in fact, to the very northwest tip of the continental United States, to Neah Bay, where the Pacific Ocean meets the Strait of Juan de Fuca.
As was typical of Robert Lee, he offered little explanation, only that he was going to drop in on some friends, and so off we went on what turned out to be about a 120-mile round trip in that old two-gear rattletrap sedan of his. It is surprising in a way how little I seem to remember of that visit, but it was a gray day and the Makah Reservation where we found ourselves seemed little more than a collection of small drab houses overlooking a gray sea. As was Robert Lee’s custom— and the custom of many native folk as well— he didn’t knock on the door but stood some distance away and just shouted out a greeting. It wasn’t long before someone came out of one of the houses to meet us. After a bit of talk, we were shown inside and invited to sit at a table and join the family for their midday meal.
I remember nothing specifically about what was said as we partook of soup at their table, but that is hardly surprising— not only because it has been some fifty years since that day, but because Robert Lee did virtually all the talking, and it consisted of little more than his usual loud, hearty, amiable rambling, asking a question, not waiting for an answer, but just booming along good-naturedly to the next topic. I remember that the subject of fishing was raised, and there may have been some casual exchange on that subject, but nothing of consequence. The Makah family seemed at ease with our presence at their table, and clearly considered Robert Lee a family friend, even if they mostly just listened to him courteously without responding. Possibly my presence as a stranger dampened the conversation, but that’s not how it felt. My impression was that this was always how the talk proceeded when Robert Lee dropped in. He always talked like this, whomever he was with. The Indians were just more silent than most.
And then we were off, and back down the road. I didn’t press Robert Lee with questions as we rode, though I was very curious to know how he had come to know a Makah family well enough to be welcomed into their home. I may have asked a tentative question or two, but Robert Lee was never one to go into detail about his personal history. He had stories galore, to be sure, but they were purely for entertainment, never for self-disclosure. So I generally just settled back and listened, and let him raise and leave subjects as he was inclined.
*
Read the rest of BJ Omanson’s four-part serial memoir:
- Part I, First Days on the Peninsula
- Part 2, Working in a Shake Mill
- Part 3, A Solitary Winter in the Woods
- Part 4, Rambles with Robert Lee (coming June 5th, 2023)
BJ Omanson’s memoir, Three Years on the Nowhere Road (2023), was published by Monongahela Books and is available here.
You can also watch BJ read his poem “Closing Inventory” here.
Learn more about BJ on our Contributors’ Page.
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 4: Rambles with Robert Lee by BJ Omanson - June 4, 2023
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 3: A Solitary Winter in the Woods by BJ Omanson - May 22, 2023
- SERIAL MEMOIR Part 2: Working in a Shake Mill by BJ Omanson - May 8, 2023