A Lucky Writer Blooms Next To The Garden At Rogue River Retreat

ALONG THE ROGUE RIVER, Ore. - John Daniel often writes poems and essays about wilderness, but in four years of living in Portland, his ears became hardened by city noises.

"The quiet alone, I'm finding, is helping," said Daniel of his new home deep in the wilds of the Rogue River Canyon. "It's not just a quiet of absence, but helped a little by birds and wind."

Daniel is the third writer in as many years who has been chosen to experience the solitude and hard work that go with living on a remote 92-acre homestead first carved out of the Klamath Mountains in southwestern Oregon in the 1880s.

It's an experience that brothers Frank and Bradley Boyden enjoyed during boyhood summers.

"We get to meet a lot of really interesting people and make available an opportunity that is extraordinary," said Bradley Boyden, a biology teacher from Colorado Springs, Colo.

Besides, it was just too difficult to hire a caretaker who was both reliable and willing to live so far from civilization, said Frank Boyden, an artist from the Oregon Coast community of Otis.

Frank Boyden is founder, with his wife, of the Sitka Institute for Art and Ecology, which offers residencies to artists from around the world. He originally thought the old homestead his parents used for a vacation home could be another retreat for artists. But he decided the location was too far from art-supply sources.

"We thought, `Why not start something for writers? They don't need anything,' " Frank Boyden said.

He contacted his old fly-fishing buddy, David James Duncan, author of "The River Why" and "The Brothers K," who helped get the retreat going through PEN Northwest, a writers group.

"It's certainly something I would have jumped at any time from my late teens into my early 30s," said Duncan. He wrote his first book while living in Portland but now lives with his family in Lolo, Mont.

Hidden from the summer flow of white-water rafters on the Rogue River, the homestead is accessible over twisting logging roads. Yellow lupine, golden iris, red currant and wild mountain lilac bloom along the roadsides. The final jarring descent is over a mile of dirt road crossed with 81 water bars, small ditches cut to divert rain runoff.

The Boydens' parents started packing in on horseback to fish and hunt in the 1930s. The couple bought an old homestead in 1968 and built a simple cabin with a deck overlooking a meadow with apple trees. After Dr. Allen Boyden died, his wife, Margery, turned the place over to her sons.

The original clapboard house is still standing, but unoccupied. There's a small log barn, the caretaker's cabin where the writer in residence lives, and a pond that helicopters use to dip out water to drop on forest fires. A big garden is protected from marauding bears and deer by a 6-foot-high fence.

Langdon Cook, a writer in the master-of-fine-arts program at the University of Washington, spent seven months here last year. He chased bears out of the garden, watched a cougar while drinking his morning coffee, tracked down the nest of a pair of sharp-shinned hawks, fly fished for steelhead, and bushwhacked through the hills. He also wrote 200 pages of a novel.

"You have to be at home with just yourself," Cook said. "I found the work I did really useful in keeping a mental balance: chopping wood, putting up fence, digging water bars in the road. When I wasn't writing my fiction, there was always something else to be done."

Daniel is well-known in environmental and literary circles as the author of a book of poems, "Common Ground," and a collection of essays, "The Trail Home." He's taking over as chairman of PEN Northwest and will help choose the next writer to live here.

Since coming here this spring, Daniel has chopped wood, planted the garden and explored a little of the canyon.

Cooking is on a stove that will burn wood or propane. Light comes from propane lamps. Communication with the outside world is over a radiotelephone powered by generator. A battery-powered radio pulls in classical music and National Public Radio news, as well as the San Francisco Giants' home games.

"I'm remote," Daniel said, "but still connected to my culture."