The Land of Aasland

Notes from Lynn:

The intimidating but luxurious Cadillac town car was getting on in years. It was so old that the front fenders encased the spare tires, which in 1955 was 20 years out of fashion. It didn’t matter. Marilyn was silently impressed when the chauffeur bobbed his cap and opened the door. The beautiful young woman had come to Monterey all the way from Phoenix to see her sweetheart. Her fiancé, Cpl. Duane Aasland (pronounced “Oz-land”), who was doing time at Fort Ord, climbed in the back seat. To the chauffeur he said, politely but imperiously, “We’d like to go to Carmel Valley, to the Carousel, for dinner.” “Yes sir,” said the driver. He put the big car in gear and off they went. At the restaurant, the chauffeur sat at a faraway table. When he drove Marilyn to her hotel, Duane made a point of saying, as in the movies, “Home, James.”

Fifty-three years later, we sat at their table in Bend, still laughing. Yes, said Marilyn Aasland, she was taken for a ride. Duane confessed that the chauffeur was another draftee. Me. A fellow sufferer at the Fort Ord basic infantry training base, I had just bought the mini-limo for $100 from a girlfriend in Berkeley. With a straight-eight engine and a block the size of a Fiat, the stately town car got about 8 miles to the gallon. On the one hand, a gallon of gas in 1955 cost 25 cents. On the other hand, a private soldier was paid about $80 a month in those not-so-good-old-days of yesteryear. Marilyn and Duane were soon married in Arizona. The chauffeur was best man.

When we got together more than a half-century later, Duane had lost the slim, athletic build that carried him to letter in three sports at his Minnesota high school. (My slim build is also a memory.) His Norwegian blond hair is now gray, but it’s still trimmed in a Fort Ord crewcut. (My Norwegian blond hair is now brown and thin, but my whiskers are as gray as the fog.) We caught up on more substantial changes. After they married, Marilyn and Duane taught school in San Francisco (Hunters Point and the Fillmore, respectively). They became enduring fans of Turk Murphy and other ensemble-heavy New Orleans traditional jazz bands (they never miss the Sacramento jazz festival). They moved to the Peninsula, where Duane sold real estate, and then to Sacramento, where Marilyn became a librarian. He crossed over: He became an investigator and then an enforcement administrator in the state Department of Real Estate. He was instrumental in several major crackdowns involving developers of illegal subdivisions and rural lot-sales promotions. By coincidence, I had produced in the Examiner a series of investigative reports on similar smooth-talking thieves (“Boom in the Boondocks,” which prompted reform legislation). By then, however, we had lost touch.

After they retired and their children were grown, they moved to Newport, Oregon, and then to the high desert and the juniper groves of Bend. It’s a pretty city of 80,000 with no graffiti, no commercial graffiti (billboards), no visible trash, no visible mendicants and, with the collapse of the local real estate boom, no jobs.

In our Army days we would talk about sports, books, politics, the mess hall cuisine or the hostility of Carmel pubs toward soldier boys. Around the table in the Aasland home, we septuagenarians talked instead – naturally – about health issues: Marilyn, breast cancer; Duane, prostate cancer and the broken neck when his car was rear-ended by a truck. But the cancers prompted their move six years ago to Bend, where they found oncologists of superior ability. As expected, the Norwegian-Americans spoke without drama or self-pity about their problems. Instead, they expressed sympathy about my heart attacks and the stroke that damaged my speech and sense of balance. But all three of us have survived to pursue our own interests, me to work (slowly) on a true-crime book, they to become avid collectors.

Marilyn with obvious pride showed us a shelf of little porcelain houses in an idealized Dickens Village of horse-drawn carriages, top-hatted strollers and churches. Every place but Bleak House. Then another shelf, and another, and another. Every flat space held more creations in 19th century British themes – Christmas, farms, pubs, abbeys – and most of their tiny windows could be gleaming with light. She said she had collected about 135 (they aren’t cheap) before she went cold turkey a few years ago and stopped collecting. Nonetheless, about 120 houses and related artifacts are on display, enriching their home with fantasy. As for Duane, he began to collect porcelain lighthouses, but then concentrated on German beer steins with all kinds of embellishments. He has about 800!

As for the 1936 Cadillac, I sold it to a captain in the Flying 63rd in the sprawling Army base with 20,000 recruits and 10,000 cadre. I told Duane that two years ago we drove our daughter Kenny to a preseason basketball tournament. It was held in a former Army gym in what is now a state university campus, an environmental center and an assemblage of civilian facilities. The dunes, with bullets from the old rifle ranges, are being converted into a federal beach park. What’s left are the old barracks and the stockade in a sword-into-plowshares transformation still called Fort Ord. The Army pulled out several years ago, leaving Marilyn, Duane and me with only memories of the fake chauffeur and the ancient Cadillac town car.


Notes from Margo:

Day 7: We slept another night in our cocoon-sized bed in the minivan at the McKenzie Bridge campground. Then we spent most of the day at Joan and Hector’s house, on the deck overlooking the river. We could get used to this – the soothing sound of the river, the light through the trees.

Joan and Hector were gone for the day, but Joan had said that we could use their outdoor electric outlets to recharge our phones, the computer, the camera, all the electronic gear that keeps us going, which was all getting run down at the campground. We have a little recharger that plugs into the car’s cigarette lighter, but it’s proving insufficient for our gadgets. When we’re camping, we don’t have internet access, either. So we’ve been finding internet cafes along the way. Today we recharged our equipment at Joan and Hector’s, and Lynn spent some time working on his piece about the Aaslands. And then we went down to the general store, where the manager was letting us use the wi-fi.

At the general store, while we were posting yesterday’s blog, a woman introduced us to Nancy McClure, who was one of the links in the chain of our wwww search. She's been in residence at McKenzie Bridge since 1936. She just happened to be at a table outside the store, drinking ice tea. She was the friend whom Joan had called. She hadn’t remembered Ida Ludlow, but she called her cousin, who did remember, and who was the one who identified the house. Anyway, it was cool to meet her and some of the other older folks who hang out at the general store.

Lynn quizzed the oldsters about where someone like Ida would have been buried, and they steered us to the cemetery in Vida. Just about 10 miles down the road, they said. They gave us detailed instructions: Look for a canal, and Greenwood Road on the left, etc. So down the road we went, thinking that we might find Ida’s grave, and maybe even William’s, the boy who had been killed by the tree. (Nancy McClure said that her cousin thought Lynn’s uncle was killed when a road-building Caterpillar rolled on him while he was working for the CCC. But that’s not our family story.)

We drove 10 miles, and then another 10 miles, and then some more. We had both given up when the canal appeared, and the road was right where they said it’d be. We found the cemetery, a tiny little community affair with hand-painted signs with the rules – no big shrubs or trees, call before digging a grave, no backhoes. One of the posted rules was that if the maintenance fees aren’t paid for 10 years, the plot reverts to the cemetery association. So, it was immediately evident that even if Ida and Billy had been buried there, we wouldn’t find their headstones. We looked anyway, of course. But we struck out.

We were already most of the way to Eugene, so we followed the path of least resistance and funneled ourselves onto I-5 with the rest of the traffic. (We had planned another route from McKenzie Bridge, which would have minimized the freeway miles.) There was a haze over everything most of the day – thick enough that I thought it was clouding up to rain. The haze is from wildfires burning in the hills near Roseburg. The sunset was a brilliant reddish-orange. On the other hand, I’m pretty congested, and Lynn’s persistent cough is worse than usual.

The miles clicked off, and we were welcomed by a cheerful sign into Linn County, the grass seed captial of the world. Dang! Who knew? Linn County was lovely from the freeway as the sun went down – smooth fields, lazy cattle, hundreds of goats and sheep, rolling hills in the distance, some geese in formation circling to land for the night. After dark, we found an RV park in Wilsonville just off the freeway, a far cry from our sweet riverside campground. But showers were our priority – we were both feeling the need after two days of driving and bicycling in the heat and camping without running water.

Mileage today: McKenzie Bridge to Wilsonville, Oregon. 140 miles

Total mileage: 704

Price of gas (in Salem, Oregon): $2.87/gallon