Eagle Point, Oregon: Life and Death in the American West

In Eagle Point, Oregon, the houses have wheels, the husbands are unfaithful, and the land is on its way to sub-development. And because nothing lasts, time moves faster here; methamphetamine addictions are abundant, cars speed, teenagers are parents, and the middle aged are elderly. Young men leave for Iraq, old men rarely leave their bar stools, and lonely wives and mothers invite strangers into their homes. And so I find myself in Linda Knapp’s dusty front yard, stranded in a bivouac of old mattresses and orphaned car parts during the final days of summer.

Linda and I meet while I am sitting on the hood of my broken-down car in front of the barber shop where she works as a janitor. She tells me her boyfriend, Joe, is an amateur mechanic and can fix my car the next day. In the meantime, I'm invited to spend the night. The couple lives in a double-wide trailer in the rolling yellow hills above Eagle Point, population 6,630. The town was founded in 1852 when gold was discovered in the Rogue River, and according to a Web site maintained by the Eagle Point Chamber of Commerce, it is currently undergoing a second population boom, due to the construction of a Robert Trent Jones II Pro Am 18-hole golf course. At the time, telephone wires are the only indication of development, but Linda is quick to mention that a Wal-Mart and a Taco Bell would be built in the fall.

Linda has robin’s egg blue eyes that are frozen in a sad squint and tan skin that is puckered from the sun. Her teeth are colored from the near constant inhalation of Winston cigarettes and her breasts sag, defeated, under a neon pink halter-top. When she was 16, she ran away from her parent’s home in San Francisco with a sailor and gave birth to their son (I’ll call him David), on a naval base in Washington. The sailor turned abusive and shortly after David was born, Linda brought the infant across the country on a Greyhound bus to live with family in western Pennsylvania, collecting loose change from sympathetic bus passengers to pay for diapers. David, now in his 30s, lives in Mississippi; Linda returned west a decade ago. She has spent little of her life alone. Her mother and sister moved to Oregon when she did and she lived with them until she met Joe, who is grizzled and gaunt except for a first trimester belly, in 2003. “Joe,” she said, “is a asshole, but he’s my asshole, he’s all I got.”

The next morning Joe heads to work. He has a full day of installing plumbing ahead of him and can't get to my car for at least a day, so Linda gives me the keys to her Trans Am and tells me to go for a drive to Crater Lake, an hour north of town. The glacial lake, held in a caldera formed by a volcanic eruption some 8,000 years ago, has been a National Park since 1915 and still serves as the area's main tourist attraction.
The Klamath Indians, who have lived here since the lake's formation, consider it a sacred site that will kill anyone who looks directly at it. Two months after my visit, 8-year-old Samuel Boehlke, an autistic boy visiting from Portland, will run from his family’s car when his dad tells him it is time to go home. Search parties will find neither footprints nor a body. A pink ribbon, tied to a tree where dogs picked up a trace of his scent, now serves as the lake’s only memorial.

Death is easy in Eagle Point. Sadly and simply, the town is caving in. Beyond the standard signs of decay worn by residents—missing teeth, resounding smoker’s coughs and obesity—there looms the ominous sense that every home, vehicle, and restaurant is swallowing its occupants alive. And it is no small fact that water, which led to the town’s founding when gold was discovered in the river, and which currently supplies the region with white water rafting tourist dollars, is a potentially fatal force. The river's current is too swift for swimming and the precipitous descent to the freezing lake makes it inhospitable on even the hottest summer day.

On dry land, a burgeoning population of meth addicts resort to violence to support often fatal habits and drunk driving is a given as the distance between town and tavern, the only business besides AMPM open after 5 p.m., mandates traveling long distances on unlit roads.

On the afternoon I visit the lake, I return to Linda's trailer to find her carrying an armload of t-shirts to her car. Between drags of a Winston, she tells me that her friend had been found dead in his front yard—all 300 pounds of him naked—and that she wants to cover him before calling the police. “You know, we all saw it coming,” she says, before speeding up the driveway in a cloud of dust, “he had real bad lungs.”

The conclusion of a once luminous American dream has mutated here at the end of the Oregon Trail. After the gold rush boom, an ecomony sustained by timber and orchards flourished and fell. Because the sons of farmers and loggers are of little use to a globalized county, the only thing sustaining Eagle Point is a local penchant for fast food, nicotine and one stop shopping. The new pioneers in town are weekenders looking for cheap land for vacation homes and Mexican families seeking farm work.

Much to Linda's frustration a taqueria recently opened. The restaurant serves greasy but edible food and is avoided by the town's white residents but popular with Mexican high school students who crowd into plastic booths with 20-ounce cups of soda and gossip in staccato Spanish. It sits near the river, across the street from the old covered bridge, a 19th century relic and town’s centerpiece. Once the only passage over the Rogue River it is a point of pride for residents. But a newer, more austere bridge is now used for traffic, and the covered bridge sits and collects dust, a sepia backdrop to the neon lights of the all-night convenience store where Linda buys candy bar dinners after work.

Linda met Joe at a local tavern. She thought he was gay because he cared more about his beer and his buddies than her attempts at conversation, but they eventually started dating and moved in together. He cheated on her once that she knows of, in Las Vegas. He tried to beat her once too, but she nailed him with a 2x4 and that was the end of that. They sustain one another. She cooks, he takes care of the cars, and they don’t get along, but both know better than to look for new partners. In the fall, Joe will move to San Jose to work for a bio-diesel company. He hears it’s a real moneymaker, so he’s selling his land to developers and leaving Linda with the trailer, her Trans Am and the couple’s four dogs who will no longer serve as his punching bags. "Just think," she says one afternoon, surveying the tall, yellow grass in front of the trailer, "one day soon this is all going to be condos. It’s going to be real beautiful."

On the drive to her trailer my first night in town, Linda tells me about the richest man in Eagle Point who was killed in his home last winter. He had returned from a night of drinking at the bar he owned and was beaten to death. Apparently he’d been bragging to the wrong people about his fortune and someone had come to collect enough to support their habit or get even with fate. No one knows who killed him. No one really wants to know, Linda says. It came and went as another inevitable ending, no better or worse than dying naked in the front yard. As we passed the man’s former house, a boarded up one storey building, Linda tells me that he was a good guy and that he didn’t deserve to die. Then she launches into a soliloquy about the mall going up across the street.

There is no room for Eagle Point, Oregon anymore, at least until the mall is finished. The town of Shady Cove, up the road about 10 miles, has cornered the tourist market, boasting river rafting tours and an expensive lodge. Eagle Point is just the last place to get gas for nearly 60 miles, and soon it will be the last place to buy plastic lawn furniture, propane and chalupas. Residents pass away, move on, or sell their land to men who will build summer homes and play that 18-hole golf course. There is cigarette laced air and exhaust from cars being driven to Crater Lake and soon everyone will have bad lungs, and the tourists will forget to name the departed, lying belly up in front of their trailers, as they bury them beneath condominiums.

Julia McCallum studied anthropology at Barnard College and is currently a graduate student at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She lives in Brooklyn.