There are a few ghost towns in Oregon's Coast Range. Wide spots in the road bordered with rows of clapboard clones that once were company housing for the mill workers. Sometimes there's a general store/gas station/post office still clinging to life, but more often even that's closed, and the few folks still in residence make a weekly trek to the Willamette Valley for the essentials.
"How much farther is it?" I asked my assistant, as we rounded yet another curve and looked down one more long, tree-lined tunnel. The pickup lurched into a pothole and the tires threw up a fan of muddy water. We'd had a solid two weeks of rain and I was getting tired of it, even though I'm a native Oregonian. This morning the weatherman had offered a cautious hope that the weekend might be dry. Yeah, right!
Jeff checked the map. "A mile or so, then we may have to walk the rest of the way. This map's twenty years old. You know what that means."
I knew. Roads that were once smooth and well graded could, in a few short years, disappear under dense second growth forest. The Coast Range was a logger's paradise, although little remained of the ancient forests filled with enormous trees the first settlers had written home about.
We came to a junction. I pulled the pickup off onto the grassy shoulder and killed its engine. The unpaved road that crossed ours seemed well traveled, for all there was a rivulet of water cutting its way along it. Our road seemed to end, despite the map showing it continuing on for several more miles before passing through our first goal of the day, a little place marked on the map as Everafter (site), before ending at the Flora Mainline, an abandoned railroad grade that was now a more-or-less road.
We got out and walked about a quarter mile. Sure enough, the road continued on. But we wouldn't, except afoot. Young alders had taken it over, growing close-spaced and tangled along the shoulders and median. Most were ten to fifteen feet tall, with slender gray trunks too big to circle with both my hands. Even in the concave tracks cut by countless tires, seedlings sprouted, but those were smaller and less vigorous, not quite yet winning the battle with hard packed, gravelly soil.
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