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Wednesday, October 12, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon
The Bunkhouse
Chronicle
Craig Rullman
Columnist
Still standing
There is an old red barn
just south of Lakeview on
the verge of collapse. I’ve
been watching this barn for
the last 10 years, gauging its
precarious buckle and lean,
keeping a private book on
its chances for surviving yet
another round of hard winter.
By whatever law of physics,
it’s going down one knee at
a time, stubbornly, like an
old prizefighter who carries
our hopes on his shoulders
and whose ultimate fall will
mark the end of something
we can’t articulate so much
as feel.
I’m happy to report: it’s
still standing.
Last week I went on a
mission for meat. First, to
the Wagontire unit to hunt up
a buck with a cadre of part-
ners who have been hunting
out there for a combined two
hundred years. But there are
no bucks in Wagontire this
year. At least not between
Brothers and Christmas
Valley, where we made a
dozen good hunts and saw
nothing but cat tracks and
very old deer sign.
A good friend remarked
that the bucks had all been
rounded up and sent to re-
education camps, which is
entirely possible in the cur-
rent climate. Still, for me it is
more about the hunt than the
kill — though that is a nice
bonus when it happens —and
the country was exactly the
way we wanted it: cold and
crisp, ancient, and the light
over Soldier’s Cap so sharp it
could cut glass. I’ll take that.
With the hunt behind me
I headed south, into the old
home range, to pick up our
steer, raised by my folks,
then butchered and wrapped
by a store in my hometown
known as the Idaho Grocery.
The store was founded
by Ignacio and Marceline
Urrutia — Aita and Ama —
Basque emigrants who came,
like so many other Basques,
from the Pyrenees to the
Great Basin in search of
opportunity and employment.
Ignacio, whose name was
shaped and shortened by
the vernacular into “Idaho,”
started the grocery with his
wife a very long time ago,
when photographs came only
in black-and-white and the
print’s edges were jagged.
They never grew out of
the original building, and
today Idaho’s is still run by
the Urrutia children, now
middle-aged adults: Robert,
Joey, and Renee. The kids
have kept the grocery close,
and they’ve kept it alive, a
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tradition, a family enterprise,
a pillar of the high desert.
It’s a Basque thing, that stub-
bornness, that refusal to give
in, and it shows up in their
language, Euskera, which has
no known relatives.
That can only mean one
thing: the Basque were never
conquered. By anyone. Ever.
Aita and Ama have passed
on, and the kids have had to
adjust to wildly different
market pressures, to learn
to compete with and beat
the box grocery outlets and
even a WalMart Superstore
that landed like a giant alien
spacecraft on the edge of
town — where an old barn
used to be.
These days, Idaho’s is
a butcher and meat shop,
resplendent with virtually
every spice and rub known to
humans, and a meat counter
second to none. And nobody
knows meat, and how to cook
it, like the Basques.
When I was a boy, and
town seemed like a faraway
place, a foreign land where
we didn’t go much, my step-
dad would sometimes take
me into Idaho’s for a treat.
Ignacio sold baseball cards
at the checkout counter. A
quarter apiece, with a stick of
gum inside the wrapper. The
gum never lasted long, but
baseball cards last forever.
Decades later, I pulled into
the back of Idaho’s before the
sun was up. The store opens
at six, I was early, and Robert
and Joey were already inside.
PHOTO BY CRAIG RULLMAN
Defying age and gravity, battered and brave.
Joey brought out the meat,
22 milk crates of home-
grown beef. My step-dad
and I loaded it into the mass
of coolers in the back of my
truck, and there was some-
thing of tradition in that,
too, he and I back at Idaho’s
together for the first time in
decades, two creaky grey-
beards in the dark, loading
meat.
There is a line from one
of the more famous William
Stafford poems, “Travelling
Through the Dark.” The
poem is about a man who
encounters a dead doe on a
dangerous mountain road
at night. She was pregnant.
The speaker stands at the
rear of his car as the exhaust
turns red in his taillights. The
engine purrs. The wilder-
ness seems to listen. He says,
“I thought hard for us all
— my only swerving — then
pushed her over the edge into
the river.” As I drove home,
through the Madeline Plains
and north, through Alturas,
over the Pit River, and then
along the edge of that dry flat
known as Goose Lake, I kept
thinking about Stafford’s
poem, about our failed hunt,
about a little family grocery
known as Idaho’s.
The road was rolled out in
front of me like a grey ribbon,
and the truck, loaded down,
swayed ever-so-slightly in
the turns. I kept thinking: it
doesn’t get any better than
this. And then, coming into
Lakeview, I saw again that
old red barn — battered and
brave, just refusing to finally
go down.
I suppose it’s the imper-
manence of good things
that hurts the most, a kind
of dull aching in the mar-
row, because we know. But I
had my dogs with me, and I
couldn’t let them see me cry.
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