Like a most other 0th-generation Oregonians I’ve met, I’m interested in the local lore. I usually find it hard to identify with people scalping indians, trapping beaver and cutting down the biggest trees they can find, but the landscape is fascinating, and I haven’t yet grown tired of its starring role in the recent, desperate history of the West.

Eileen O’Keeffe McVicker’s memoir, (with Barbara J. Scot) Child of Steen’s Mountain (OSU Press, 2008) humanizes that story for me. McVIcker grew up poor, though she didn’t know it, on a sheepherding homestead on Steens Mountain, outside Fields and almost all the way in the southeastern corner of the state.

I caught a glimpse of the Steens on a visit to Burns. It was far away.

This passage recounts when the O’Keeffe family moved closer to Burns so that McVicker could go to high school. This is the early to mid 1940s:

It should have been easier to get to high school with a school bus making the route instead of the old Studebaker, but somehow we were always in trouble with the principal for being late. In fact, we were late so many times that he kept a special book for our excuses. “Well, which was it this time?” he would say. “High water, a runaway horse, or you got behind a bunch of cattle being driven somewhere and couldn’t get through the road?” I’m sure we were a legend in the teachers’ lunchroom.

It isn’t like the school bus actually came to our house. We rote our horses down our extremely long lane and left them in a corral by an abandoned house. When we got to the old house, we took off the saddles and tied the horses to the manger Dad had built there and fed them hay for the day. Then we changed out of our jeans, put on our school clothes and walked about a quearter of a mile to the blacktop highway to catch the bus. If we were late we had to go home, but sometimes if the bus driver saw us he would wait as we ran down the rest of hte lane. I think he felt sorry for us, to tell the truth, and sometimes when we got off the bus at the end of the day he would slip us each a candy bar as we left.

McVicker is scorned, and she is pitied, and she knows it, and still she manages to give us the gift of empathy.