CHAPTER XVII

Good-bye to Crater Lake, and a Motor Trip to Bend

Uncle Billy was as good as his word the next morning. At half-past four he shook Bennie and Spider, and he had to shake them hard, too. Then all three of them went into the other tent, and rolled Mr. Stone and Dumplin’ upside down in their sleeping bags. It was still cold, and the sun was not yet up over the snowy crags of Garfield. In the still, crystal-clear air, the water of the lake was without a ripple, and every rock and tree on the rim was perfectly reflected in the blue mirror.

“Take a good long look, boys,” said the doctor. “It’s good-bye to Crater Lake as soon as we can load the cars.”

“I hate to leave it,” Spider said. “I don’t believe I’ll ever see anything so grand again, or have such a good time.”

“I hate to leave it, too,” said Bennie. “But I bet we’ll have a lot more good times. I guess old Oregon is full of ’em.”

“I am satisfied with Oregon,” Dumplin’ began to sing, in a high falsetto voice to the tune of “Glory, glory, hallelujah.”

“Shut up, do you want to wake everybody else on the rim, just because you’re up?” his father cautioned.

“Time they got up,” Dumplin’ laughed. “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man dopy with sleep in his eyes.”

“Gosh, if he can’t sing, he makes up poetry,” Bennie groaned. “Give him a flapjack, quick.”

As soon as breakfast was over, Mr. Stone and the doctor tinkered the cars for the trip, while the boys struck the tents, deflated and rolled up the sleeping bags, packed their dunnage sacks, and then began to stow the luggage in the cars. It was after seven when everything was at last packed aboard, and Uncle Billy gave the order to start. The engines turned over, reluctant to start after their long idleness, but at last the explosions came, the exhausts spit smoke, and the cars moved out over dry ground, where a week ago had been a snow-drift, headed toward the road.

“Good-bye, old lake!” cried Bennie.

“Au revoir, for me. _I’m_ coming back some day,” said Spider.

“And now where, Uncle Billy?” Bennie added.

“Bend,” said his uncle. “I wish we could go back home on the Sky Line Trail that some day Oregon is going to build into a highway right up along the spine of the Cascades. But at present it is only a ranger’s trail, and it takes weeks to travel it, with an expensive pack train. So we are going by motor up the east side of the range to the town of Bend, and we’ll get a pack train there and go in and sample a bit of the Sky Line Trail, to say we’ve ridden it, and maybe climb a snow mountain.”

“Are we going in on horseback?” Bennie demanded.

“We are, if we go at all,” said his uncle.

“Hooray! I never rode horseback!”

“You’ll have plenty of chance to learn, then,” Uncle Billy smiled. “About the first night, you’ll wish you hadn’t tried to learn, too.”

“Bet I won’t!” Bennie retorted. “How far is it to Bend?”

“Oh, a hundred miles, I guess. Maybe more.”

“Seven-thirty now—twenty-five miles an hour, that means we get there at noon.”

“You are my idea of an optimist, Bennie,” said the doctor. “This is an eastern Oregon road we are going to travel on. If we should travel twenty-five miles an hour, we wouldn’t get there at all.”

For many miles, the road out of the park took them in a southerly direction, down the Anna Creek valley, through a noble forest of yellow pines, a tree the boys had never seen before, which has great flat scales of bark which looks almost like copper, and past the deep cañon the creek has cut in the lava, with sides fantastically carved into giant columns. Finally, they reached the gate of the park, were checked up by the gateman, and went on, swinging eastward now.

Bennie, as soon as they were off the government road, very soon realized why they wouldn’t make Bend at noon. In eastern Oregon, a country “dirt” road, which in the East is usually quite decent in summer isn’t a dirt road at all, really, because there isn’t any dirt. All the soil is powdered volcanic ash and pumice, no doubt deposited there by Mount Mazama ages ago. This volcanic soil looks almost gray-white in color, and a road made on it, without any macadam, is very quickly pounded, in dry weather, into a layer of dust inches thick, which rises like a smoke screen behind the car, and gets kicked out of holes in the road by the passing tires till the holes deepen more and more, making the road one endless series of bumps.

Instead of traveling at twenty-five miles an hour, the doctor held the car down to fifteen, and very often had to go slower than that.

And it was hot down here below the range, hot and close. The yellow pines, and then endless acres of ugly lodge-pole pines, lined the road on both sides, shutting out wind and view. Only now and then did they catch a glimpse of Scott’s Peak, and later of Thielsen. They were in the dry country, too, for almost no rain ever falls on the east side of the Cascades. So they passed no brooks, after leaving Anna Creek. Choked with dust, the boys sampled the canteens frequently, and rejoiced that they weren’t in the second car, which was following far behind, to keep out of the dust as much as possible.

It was almost noon when they reached a stream at last, coming down from the snow-fields—and they were only half-way on their journey! Here they stopped for lunch. The doctor had insisted on saving out two cans of peaches for this occasion, and now they understood why. It was a job to worry the dry bread and the bacon down their parched throats, but how those cool peaches, and the juice they were canned in, did go to the spot!

The trip was resumed, and they went on and on northward, through endless forests of yellow pines, one of the few trees that will flourish in this dry region, till at last they came into the tiny little town of Crescent.

It was Bennie who spied a sign, “Soda” over the one store. He gave a yell, and hoisted his feet over the car door, ready to jump.

The soda turned out to be the bottled variety, and it hadn’t been kept on ice. In fact, there was no ice in the place. But even that didn’t prevent the five tourists from leaving behind ten empty bottles when they departed again.

The road through the endless yellow pine forest began to get better now. It had been straightened out and rock ballasted in places, and Uncle Billy stepped on the gas. He was traveling along at twenty-five miles or more, leaving a cloud of dust behind, when Bennie suddenly cried, “Say, I believe we just went through a town. Golly, I wonder if there was a soda there. Let’s go back.”

“This car doesn’t know how to turn around,” said Uncle Billy. “That was the town of La Pine. I know the man who used to own most of it.”

“What happened? Did he lose it out of his pocket?” said Bennie.

“I guess it crawled under a pine needle and hid from him,” said Spider.

It wasn’t long now before the car rolled out of the yellow pine forests into a great clearing, where every tree had been cut down as far as the eye could see, and a fire had followed, burning up all young stuff and making the ground dry, naked ashes.

“That’s what the lumbermen do to us!” Uncle Billy cried. “It’s worse than what they do to you in the East, because the fire does so much more damage in this dry country. I wonder how long it will be before we wake up and make them lumber properly? I hope you Boy Scouts will always work for conservation and proper forest laws.”

“If they’d left one old tree to the acre for cone bearers, and kept the fire out, I should think the forest would almost start itself again,” said Spider. “But they haven’t left a single tree.”

“They are hogs,” Uncle Billy exclaimed, angrily. “It makes my blood boil every time I go through country like this, and think that the voters of the State let ’em do it.”

The road was hard now, the car went faster, and in a short time they began to see the houses of a town. They swung under a railroad, rolled on to asphalt pavement, and found themselves in the middle of Bend, a brisk, clean little city of 5,000 people.

“Well, what do you know about this!” Bennie laughed. “It just pops right up here in the desert, like a toadstool. And, oh, boy, there’s a soda fountain—and a movie theatre!”

Spider and Uncle Billy laughed. “He’s a great wilderness scout, he is,” said the doctor. “He’s gladder to see a movie theatre than he was to see Crater Lake.”

Bennie grinned a little sheepishly. “No, it isn’t that,” he said, “but as long as we got to be in a town, might as well have something to do.”

“The first thing I’ll do is to get a bath,” the doctor laughed, as he drove right past the drug store, and stopped in front of the hotel.

The other car rolled up behind them, Mr. Stone’s and Dumplin’s clothes and faces covered thick with dust, and the car looking gray-white all over. The boys got out the dunnage bags and carried them into the lobby, while the cars were taken to a garage. As soon as the doctor and Mr. Stone came back, they got three rooms, one for Bennie and Spider, one for Dumplin’ and his father, and one for the doctor. Off came their clothes, and from three bathtubs came the sounds of splashing.

They were a much cleaner and more civilized looking outfit when they came down to dinner.