Catching Delmar And Dallas At The Anatone Cafe

To Dallas Dodd, there are two things most beautiful in the world.

The first is the sight of just about any crop when it is still green and flexible, shimmering in the wind, seed pods swollen but not headed out. The second is the flash of a silvery steelhead in a jump three feet off the Grande Ronde River.

The 47-year-old farmer is also fond of his wife, Dianne; his aging German shepherd, God, country, Tom Clancy novels, hunting and ketchup. He treasures his many friends, especially 76-year-old Delmar McMillan. When they are not in the fields or down by the river, Dallas and Delmar can often be found at the Anatone Cafe, where a poster above the door is testimony to their friendship. "Delmar and Dallas," someone wrote in red felt-tip on a picture of two oblivious fishermen about to be swallowed by a humongous bass. "Who has to buy tonight? Watch out for the big one."

The Anatone Cafe sits on a high plateau in the southeastern-most corner of Washington state. The plateau is flanked by burlap hills that draw into shadowy gullies before dropping down to the river. Way in the distance are the snowcapped Seven Devils of Idaho. Close by is mostly sagebrush canyon, grassland and fields of wheat, barley and black peas. It's 18 miles, 3,400 vertical feet and 21 curves in the road to the next small town. It's 5 1/2 miles beyond that to a city with a hospital, sporting-goods store and grain-growers association.

Anatone itself has 51 people, 19 horses, 17 cats, 15 dogs, two dozen grain farms, a Methodist Church, a tiny post office, the state and Asotin County highway sheds and, of course, the cafe.

This is classic Hemingway country and, as a matter of fact, Jack Hemingway (son of writer Ernest, father of actresses Mariel and Margaux) drops by the cafe when he visits his grand log cabin on Rattlesnake Ridge about two weeks a year during the steelhead run.

Anatone's other celebrities include: Country singer Barbara Mandrell, who occasionally passes through to visit her husband's friends down the road; Q.M. Brown, who ran the Anatone store during the Depression and made sure no one went hungry; William Hamilton, who was hanged by a band of vigilantes in 1903 after he raped and killed the sheriff's daughter; L.K. Brown (no relation to Q.M.), who, in 1908, invented a wood-burning, self-propelled combine, a chitty-bang-bang contraption with wagon wheels, a 40-gallon steam tank and a thresher as big as a Ferris wheel. Two men followed it through the fields, one man to pick up the belts that popped off; the second man to douse the sparks.

Other than that, everyone claims Anatone is not noted for anything or anyone. Everybody knows everybody else. The cafe is open from 6:30 in the morning until 8 at night, every day except Tuesday. Homemade berry pie is $1.75 a slice.

WITHOUT FRIENDS, life would crumble. Friends are what keep us going day to day. The lucky among us make friends for life. And then there are Delmar and Dallas.

In the corner of the cafe, at a table crowded with beige plates, biscuits and gravy, Dallas Dodd is furtively squirting ketchup from a squeeze bottle onto Delmar's eggs and hash browns. "That's ONE, Dallas," Delmar sputters. "I'm counting. I'll get you back, just you wait." Dallas grins, tips the beak of his fleecy orange hunting cap.

Big Dick Scheibe pushes aside the Avon catalogs on the counter and settles onto a vinyl-topped chrome stool. "Clark at Clark's Taxidermy said it was the biggest elk he'd ever seen," Dallas tells him. Dick got the elk last week on Hemingway's place. A six-point bull with antlers wider than a pickup. One shot with a 30-06 Model 70 Winchester.

That gets Delmar talking about how he's been lucky with elk in his lifetime, 30 altogether including a streak of seven in eight shots. Then he brings up the time he had a chance for a trophy whitetail when he was using a new gun Dallas helped him sight so well he got a crow at 100 yards.

"You did not kill a crow at 100 yards," Dallas interrupts, pulling at his moustache.

"Yes I did, Dallas; don't you remember?"

"Delmar, you did not kill a crow. That's illegal."

"You're right, Dallas. I didn't even see it."

Something went wrong with the scope after that so Delmar never saw the whitetail either, but since that was the season he got his last big mule buck, a three-point beauty, it all turned out OK.

Dallas thought about that hunting trip a lot last year when he slept on a cot in Delmar's hospital room, listening to Delmar wheeze. The trip was just after fall seeding. It was overcast but not raining, a little dampness in the air. The mule deer was in its prime, lithe, dark-gray hairs tipped with black.

Delmar got it with a running shot on a steep grassy draw; Dallas helped him gut it, and by then it was dark. No moon. The night smelled of fresh meat, bunch grass, the buck's faint musk. A cougar screamed in the bottom of the canyon. It was the kind of moment you never forget.

After that, Delmar seemed to lose a little energy every day. By the time mule-deer season rolled around again, Delmar would pant just getting in and out of his pickup, but he wasn't one to let that cancel a hunting trip. They went to Couse Creek down a canyon off Montgomery Ridge Road. Delmar spotted a deer, followed it over the crest and then collapsed, gasping like a fish pinned to the bank. Dallas loaded him into the rig and screamed across the long plateau at 105 miles an hour.

"DELMAR!" Dallas shouted. Delmar was fading, his head flopped forward onto his orange sweater. He didn't have enough energy to respond, but recalls hoping Dallas would calm down a little so they wouldn't get into a wreck on the way to the emergency room. An ambulance met them on Asotin Grade and pumped Delmar with 100 percent oxygen.

It would be a long week before the doctors determined Delmar had escaped brain damage. You can imagine how much fodder for jokes the brain-damage assessment has since provided, but back then, at least for a couple of days in the cafe, everybody got nostalgic about old Delmar.

Dick Scheibe, who got the bigh elk, remembered 1959, when he was a newly married stock boy at the hardware store in town and Delmar told him he ought to buy a house. Can't afford it, Dick told him. Delmar signed a blank check and told Dick to use it for money down, pay him back later. Over the years, Delmar did this for 20 young couples. Always said a home was important for families. He himself lives in the blue trailer behind the fertilizer plant.

So when the doctors announced Delmar had pulmonary fibrosis, a condition that's not the worst but bad enough, Dallas knew he'd need to cheer Delmar up. What could he do to make his friend feel better? He spread a rumor. "Terrible news from the doctors," he told everyone, in a drawl slower than ketchup. "Delmar has an advanced case of VD."

Back in the cafe, over the fryolator's crackle, they all teased Delmar no end. "Have you not been using protection again?"

"That's one, Dallas!" Delmar retorted, pretending to glare at his friend.

"Delmar," they joked about his soft jowls and coffee-mug lips, "Are you by any chance related to Gov. Lowry?" At this, Delmar sputtered some more, clenched his fists and then tried to pick up the tab for the whole table.

Delmar had been released from the hospital in December. By January, Dallas proudly reports, Delmar caught his first steelhead of the season, and he got 23 more after that.

He looked so well, in fact, that the breakfast crowd in long sideburns and heavy work boots started ribbing him about the last big mule buck he ever shot, how the screaming cougar might have torn it away from him. Usually Delmar returned the insult, except for once, when he got a little too quiet, chins drooping into the collar of his plaid shirt.

Dallas set down his fork in a puddle of ketchup, peered into Delmar's dizzy eyes. Actually, cougars aren't like that, he said. Jim stopped sipping from the cap of his thermos, cleared his throat. "When Delmar was in his health," he said, "there was no cougar or any wild animal or any single woman in the county he couldn't take on."

"Thank you, Jim," Delmar replied, sitting a little taller on his aquamarine chair.

Then Dallas and Delmar and Jim and Gary and the rest set down their plain white coffee cups and went off to do things that may never make the news but will remain the talk of the town for a long, long time.

"WHEAT'S UP, DALLAS," Delmar says.

"Sure is, Delmar," Dallas agrees. They are in the overheated cab of Delmar's GMC pickup, surveying Dallas' fields along Montgomery Ridge. Tiny winter-wheat seedlings peek like blades of grass out of contoured furrows. Golden barley stubble lies scattered in frozen brown crumble. Oat grass blows along the fence.

The fields have a beautiful pattern to them, even in winter when there's not much growing. From above, the curves, strips and terraces Dallas laid out to prevent soil erosion look like a child's finger painting. From a tractor, with Delmar driving, the pattern seems endless.

"The strips of no return," he says. The first time he went out there to spring chisel, he went round and round, practically got lost. "Turning, turning, turning," he complains to Dallas. "You can lay it out so when you're done, you're done."

Delmar, Dallas jokes, is the only one who can get lost driving tractor in a wheat field.

Dallas farms 2,500 acres, the same land farmed by nine families when he was a kid. His fields are dotted with their empty houses, light showing through the planks. Used to be you could raise a family of six kids on 160 acres, but what with rising costs and depressed prices you need at least 1,000 acres, and even that's plowing close to the edge by the time you figure fertilizer, herbicide, pesticide, seed, tractor fuel, crop insurance, accountant, lawyer, health insurance, land payments, labor for harvest.

"Twenty-five hundred acres - that's absurd," Dallas says. "I don't see any future at all for the family farm and farm culture."

Working a family farm, Dallas says, is kind of like raising kids. Some crops are child prodigies - destined from the time they sprout to produce more bushels per acre than you'd ever hope. Others refuse to thrive no matter how much extra tillage and pesticides and fertilizer you put in. So much is up to chance.

Like the time a thunderstorm broke through Dallas' erosion controls and sloughed water clear over the top of the next diversion, washing precious topsoil across the pastures. Or the time President Ford embargoed the Soviet Union and the price of wheat dropped - clunk - from $4.60 to $2.50 a bushel. Just as prices finally crept back up again, the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan, President Carter called another embargo, prices fell, the whole world saw that the U.S. was not a reliable supplier and turned to Australia and Argentina for grain.

An undersecretary of agriculture sneezes, and the farmers in the Anatone Cafe groan. Like last month USDA deputy secretary Richard Rominger mentioned that tight grain supplies might prevent the U.S. from selling much wheat to China this year. Dallas' hands clenched around his coffee cup because up here on the plateau, the farmers grow mostly soft white wheat, the kind China and Japan buy to make noodles. What good is putting all that work into a crop if the market is cut out?

"Calm down, Dallas," Delmar always tells him. "It's not the end of the world."

The end of the world almost came in 1987, the year Dallas' older brother, Donald, was dying from cancer. Suddenly, a two-brother farm became a one-person farm, and even working 14 hours a day, 182 days in a row without once going fishing, Dallas didn't know if he had what it took to bring the crops to fruition. Too much time on the tractor for thinking. Didn't matter if the tractor radio was tuned to NPR or Rush Limbaugh or nostalgic tunes from the '50s. Nothing could drive away the looming possibility that he might fail the family farm. "Don't be so hard on yourself," Delmar would tell him.

Delmar retired from the fertilizer company and started coming around more and more to help till and seed and work the 90-foot sprayer. Dallas' nephew Ron helped drive tractor and fix machinery. Harvest time, neighbors rounded up 14 combines to help cut the grain. Donald died a year later.

The day of his funeral, the half-harvested fields of Anatone were quiet, all the combines stilled, only grasshoppers jumping.

Delmar took Dallas fishing. Cast, drift, trawl, strip it in, cast again. Donald's name surfaced a couple times, but really they didn't talk much. It was a good day. They reeled 50 bronze and green small-mouth bass to the bank, eased out the hooks and watched the fish swim off through the eddies.

BY LATE FALL, when steelhead come back to spawn on the Grande Ronde, they have gone about 1,000 miles to and from the Pacific Ocean, the last several months on an empty stomach. Steelhead start off as river trout, frisky smolt feeding off bottom larvae, periwinkles, surface flies. In the ocean, the fish fatten for a year or two on minnows and tiny shrimp. Then the gunmetal steelhead, streaked with pink, at least 20 inches long and up to 30 pounds, muscle their way back up the Columbia and Snake rivers, smelling their way home.

Once they're back in fresh water, steelheads' throats swell shut, but their reflex to bite remains.

Dallas and Delmar bait their hooks with big pieces of cooked shrimp. A red and black deer-tail jig goes above the hook, then a white Styrofoam bobber the size and shape of a turnip, then a couple of fluorescent orange floaters and a stopper rigged from a rubber band. The bulky outfit lacks the grace of fly fishing, but grace is not the point.

If it's cold enough so ice floats like pond scum on the river, Dallas and Delmar cast into certain seams between logs and rocks where the current goes real slow and the fish like to lie. If it's warmer, they look to the riffles, where the steelhead let the oxygen wash over them.

When Delmar was in his health, they'd slosh along the water's edge in hip waders, edging each other out for the first cast in the best holes. Now Dallas sets Delmar on a blue plastic cooler by the bank, baits his hook, casts a couple times to make sure the knots all hold, hands Delmar the rod.

Fishing is not a talking sport, but still, they do. Crop prices, hunting, whether to plant black peas or let a field go to summer fallow. Dallas sometimes mentions fishing with his Dad and brother Donald, how they both died young of cancer and all his aunts, too, and how he doesn't want to pass on that cancer gene to any children; the crops are enough to raise.

Delmar retells the story about the time during the Depression when he shot nine bear in one day while herding sheep through the canyon and the time he was at Swedish Hospital getting radiation treatments for kidney cancer and no one on the sidewalk or in the coffee shop ever said hello, the loneliest time in his life.

They talk about women. Once, years ago, Delmar bought a ring and gave it to a girl, but something went wrong and she gave it back, and since then it's been umpteen girlfriends for Dallas to tease him about. Why don't you marry that one? he tells Delmar. She's pretty good-looking. "Delmar," Dallas says, "is the most pursued and confirmed bachelor in the county."

The same stories go round and round as the seasons wear on, and nobody tires of them. Last year, when Delmar was in the hospital and work was caught up on the farm, Dallas fished 360 hours between December and February. He hooked 350 steelhead, got 144 to the bank and released all but two back to the river. Every hit was a new adrenaline rush, a fight inspiring admiration and kinship. "When it's all done," Dallas says, "it's almost like my soul is purged for awhile."

By this time, it's dark in the canyon. The river rushes, loud. Dallas and Delmar head to the cafe for chicken-fried steak; whoever caught the biggest fish pays.

Paula Bock is a writer for Pacific Magazine. Harley Soltes is Pacific's photographer.