Bluebirds and Bloodlines: Flocks and folks travel to a steady Bickleton beat
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In Bickleton, dogs don't just sleep in the main street. They clump into a hairy roadblock. In Bickleton, the sky is wide, the fields are pale and the ground is hard. The phone book is a page and a half. The high school is graduating four boys and one girl.
The community treasure is a 96-year-old, 24-horse carousel, kept locked in a secret vault for all but three days each June, when it becomes the centerpiece for the annual pioneer picnic. Kids hang on and giggle; old-timers smile at the memories.
Any stranger who passes through this rugged town out on the eastern end of Klickitat County in south-central Washington should wave back when waved to, but beware the town tradition of rolling dice to determine who buys the round of coffee or beer. Bickletonians know the rules far better than you.
Not that there's much reason you'd be cruising past the "Bickleton, Population 90" sign and down its two-block main street, which is greatly enhanced whenever the Bookmobile is in town. You'd be about 20 miles northeast of Goldendale, a half-day's gallop across Horse Heaven Hills, almost four hours of fast driving from Seattle.
In fact, if you've ever heard of Bickleton at all it's because of bluebirds.
Late each winter, around Valentine's Day, the tiny bright males show up and stake claims to white-and-blue birdhouses hammered into trees or topping fence posts that line the surrounding two-lane roads. Females usually arrive in March, and by late April, they're matched up and making families. Through late spring and summer the Bickleton countryside is awash with flits of blue.
The North American Bluebird Society honored Bickleton in 1983 and the town has used the nickname "bluebird capital of the world" ever since. It's not the type of town that capitalizes, though. The tavern, which opened in 1882 and survived two fires that razed every other pioneer building in town, is known as the Bluebird Inn and serves up a humongous "Bluebird Burger." But that's about the extent of bluebird commerce in Bickleton.
By late October, the birds move south for sun and warmth, leaving Bickleton residents and their helpers to brave the sweeping winds and clean the gunk out of the bird hotels like maids stiffed on the tip.
It's a chore to prepare the houses for the next spring's arrivals, and it takes money and volunteers to replace the ones that rot away or get stolen by strangers. Bluebirds dress up the tiny unincorporated town in the southern foothills of the Simcoe Mountains and give it a measure of distinction, but what impresses people who live there is staying power - of the fourth- and fifth-generation kind.
THERE ARE TWO memorials in Bickleton.
One is set on the corner of a vacant lot along main street, the very spot where Charles N. Bickle settled more than a century ago. It was erected by one of his relatives and tells the essential story: He was one of 20 children and father to 16. He managed a trading post and livery stable and also served as the area's first postmaster, carrying mail for two years between Goldendale and Bickleton. The town was named after him in 1879, but he's buried in Prosser.
The other memorial is a 4-foot-high, blue-and-white bluebird-house-shaped marker in front of the post office, saluting Jess and Elva Brinkerhoff for "bringing the bluebirds back to Bickleton."
Highland wheatfields are ideal for bluebirds, and Bickleton sits at 3,000 feet, about as high as the summit of Snoqualmie Pass. But the area lacks the dead trees and rotting fence posts that bluebirds favor for their nests. Many of the trees have long since been logged to make room for crops. Without help, bluebirds get out-muscled by tougher, more aggressive birds such as starlings and English sparrows.
When the Brinkerhoffs of Richland were camping in the Bickleton countryside in the mid-'60s they somehow were able to notice what they did not see. There were hardly any bluebirds where there should have been many.
Jess hammered a one-gallon tin can to a tree that very moment, and over the next two decades he and Elva built and installed more than 2,000 wood bluebird houses over a 150-square-mile swath surrounding Bickleton. It was the ornithological equivalent of "build it and they will come." And they did in a flurry. Mostly, Mountain Bluebirds come, but red-breasted Western Bluebirds inhabit the area, too.
The number of birdhouses up at one time has fluctuated over the years but they are still so plentiful in the Bickleton environs that they're just part of the scenery. The bluebirds prefer things away from people, but there are birdhouses all over town, too. The one in front of Bickleton's lone church sports a steeple.
Elva Brinkerhoff died in 1985, and the task of maintaining and building more birdhouses eventually passed to Bickleton folks. Building birdhouses to precise blueprints, including a 1-inch circular doorway that keeps starlings out, is a pet project of school shop classes and Scout and church youth programs. You can buy houses at the Market Street Cafe and Grocery for $12.
Cleaning the abandoned boxes each fall to prepare for the next spring arrival is less rewarding. Fortunately, students from surrounding towns and as far away as Portland have helped for years. Some people just show up and install new birdhouses, although that can do more harm than good if they are bunched too close together. The houses should be a quarter-mile apart because bluebirds, like Bickleton folks, like room between neighbors.
The bluebirds may have spruced up Bickleton and given it a measure of distinction, but there are some who regard them as scene-stealers.
"We got a monument to a guy who's been gone forever and a monument to birds," says one Bickleton old-timer. "How about one to people who keep this place going?"
IF THERE IS such a monument to Bickleton's staying power and rural eccentricity, it's the Whoop-n-Holler Museum a few miles south of town. There, on Lawrence and Ada Ruth Whitmore's family farm, sits a cache of community history and odd memorabilia.
A collection of ancient farm equipment is spread across the rolling bunchgrass fields, and inside a large shed you'll find a couple dozen of Lawrence's classics: Model T's, Studebakers, a horse-drawn hearse on sled runners. He acquired them in trade, by buying real cheap or by rescuing them from the wrecking yard before restoring and polishing them to museum quality.
One of his grandfathers settled the land they live on and another, Frank Churchill, was known around Bickleton as "the snake charmer" because he had a way with rattlers. There's a grainy old photograph in the Whitmore house showing him holding onto and wrapped up by 13 rattlesnakes. He never got bit and was known to bust up poker games by taking off his hat and letting the snakes inside slither out. Churchill was also a moonshiner, which may explain his courage.
Another building on the Whitmore property is called the "treasure house" and contains a smorgasbord of curiosities. Leg irons worn by prisoners from a Walla Walla chain gang. Rattlesnake skins and petrified tarantulas. A 1959 electric lunch pail (with instructions). Art made from plant and tree roots. Pack saddles. The first bathtub Lawrence and Ada ever owned. A pump organ on which Ada Ruth, without prompting, will sit down at and play "What a Friend We Have in Jesus."
The most curious item of all is contained in a glass display case, next to an old ring with a pill compartment. It's the false teeth that once rested inside the mouth of Lawrence's great-grandmother.
Not far from the treasure house is an 1896 one-room schoolhouse. It has a chain of tiny desks with dusty textbooks, a pot-bellied stove and confiscated sling shots hanging behind the teacher's station. To enhance the visitors' experience, Ada Ruth had Lawrence rip off wood sheathing someone had nailed over the walls to keep out drafts.
"My wife likes to use French words like, 'we,'" said Lawrence, who is 73, tall, burly and gravel-voiced. He motioned toward the walls inside the schoolhouse. "Guess who did all the 'we' on this."
Not that Ada Ruth is a slacker. The closest thing Bickleton has to a historical society is the shelving in her house. In various rooms she has stored dozens of binders and boxes filled with clippings, photographs, letters, government records. They tell stories of fires, schools, poor farms, sheep herding, eccentric hermits, ranches, the post office, the Bickleton gas station (it has none now) and the pioneer picnic.
She has the scoop on the daring robbery of the Bickleton Bank in 1917, in which the banker got locked in the safe, and the town's last murder - in 1879. Actually, the murder was in Cleveland, a tinier town to the west.
Ada Ruth co-authored a picture book of the area's history, which looks at the various settlements around the hub of Bickleton, like Glade, Bluelight and her hometown of Dot. She's also in proud possession of a book that lists the first 50 years of Klickitat County marriage licenses.
Her most exhaustive work, though, concerns the dead.
For 31 years, she has dug through records, sent letters and made phone calls in an effort to determine just who is in each grave within the area's nine pioneer cemeteries. Once she's found the identity, she works to get at least a concrete marker in place. Sometimes she pesters the families, sometimes the community chips in, sometimes she and Lawrence just buy them. Over the past two decades, more than 200 markers have been laid thanks to her.
"I just think people shouldn't be forgotten," she said.
Lawrence is renovating the large storage bay of an ice-cream truck parked on their property, turning it into an office where Ada Ruth can keep her mounds of historic papers. All those records will be more secure in there, they reason, if or when fire sweeps across the bunchgrass.
THE TOWN TAVERN holds special significance, and not just because it serves beer.
It's the oldest building and, in fact, claims to be the oldest tavern in the state. People are proud of the pool table that takes up a third of its floor space because it's old - a 1903 Brunswick. They're proud of the oil-plank wood floor because it's original. Only a small, rectangular patch has been replaced. Bickleton folks say that's because a former owner, 400-pound Lyle "Skinny" Mains, wore it out by sitting in the same spot for so long playing poker.
The tavern has stayed in business since 1882, but has gone through 17 sets of owners and several atmospheres. It used to double as a barber shop. It used to be a social club in which hats weren't allowed. There were times, not all that long ago, when women couldn't enter and couldn't call and disturb card games, either, because there was no phone. Now it's a no-smoking joint (except for an enclosed side cardroom), and a place where kids can buy candy. It serves good food and closes at 8 on weeknights.
Bickleton lost a lot of its history between 1937 and 1947. The 1937 fire wiped out one side of downtown. A second fire razed the other. There used to be a butcher shop, bank, funeral parlor, meat market, hotel, gas station, movie theater and blacksmith shop, but they're gone now.
"After World War II, I married a German girl and brought her to Bickleton," said Keith Jensen, who has retired from logging and ranching. "Tumbleweeds were blowing down main street and I'll never forget how she said, `We passed through all this beautiful country and we end up in Bickleton?'"
Now, downtown Bickleton has the tavern, an automotive garage, the fire hall and the two-story International Order of Oddfellows building on one side of main street, the cafe, a tiny post office and Grange Hall on the other. The Presbyterian church sits about 50 yards off main street and the K-12 school is a half-mile up the road heading east.
Main-street Bickleton is a lonely place between when the cafe serves breakfast and the Bluebird pours beers. By late morning, the road through Bickleton is populated by dirty pickups and napping dogs. Most of the activity is in the auto shop, where John Jensen repairs station wagons, fire trucks, tractors and school buses.
Next door is the H.O. Wilson hardware store. H.O. "Dick" Wilson's family has owned the business since 1937. He's turned it over to his son, Cory, to run, but he still works there on occasion, such as when Cory makes fuel deliveries.
Cash is rarely involved in transactions at the hardware store; almost every family and business in town has a booklet bearing its name. When someone buys something, the charge is written in the appropriate book. At the end of the month, bills go out.
Wilson was chatting with old friend Tom Juris around the store's woodstove when a farmer walked in and silently handed him a package of sandpaper. A return. No explanation or negotiation. Wilson opened the customer's book and crossed off the charge.
"Now see how easy that is?" he said. "If I used a computer it would be spitting out paper for the next 10 minutes."
A few minutes later, Wilson's 94-year-old father-in-law walked in, looking to replace the head of his electric razor. Wilson not only had the part, but installed it.
THE WILSON HARDWARE STORE isn't as busy as it used to be because about a quarter of the area's farmland - the maximum allowed - is enrolled in a government program that pays farmers to leave their fields fallow and help keep crop prices stable.
This is dry-land farming because the area collects perhaps a foot of rain a year. Moisture can't seep too deep before hitting rock, and the steady, strafing wind and summer sun keep the ground parched. More than ever, farmers are trying to limit erosion and production costs by confining the passes they take through their fields during planting to two. First they kill the stubble. Then they fertilize and seed at the same time. Then, they pray for the right weather.
The Whitmores and their neighbors put their fields in the government program in the mid-'80s. Now, they have 4,200 acres chock full of deer, and son Dave Whitmore manages it as a hunting club. Each year, 32 club members pay $500 for the right to hunt the property during a nine-day season, and he has a waiting list.
He is also a road-grader for the county and a bit of a cattleman. He co-owns a small herd of cows with Leona Clark, a wiry 76-year-old. As she finished a feeding one recent morning, Whitmore arrived with his 11-year-old son, Alex.
It was Friday, a school day, but Alex was skipping class to help his dad take some of the cows to auction in Toppenish and learn a little entrepreneurship. One of the calves headed for market belonged to Alex and he optimistically expected a $700 price.
"I get to miss school because I aced my social-studies test," Alex volunteered, as if feeling guilty.
With Alex in Toppenish, the population at Bickleton's school shrank to 107 students spread across the 12 grades and from farms as far as 25 miles away. The lockers in the high school's hallway contain the same basic equipment - lunch bags on top shelf, coats on hooks, books on the bottom, Britney Spears decals inside - that Seattle school lockers contain. What's unusual is that you can see into every one, because all are left wide open.
"We give out locks at the beginning of the year," says business manager Judy Naught. "But they never use them."
It's been about two years since anyone reported anything missing.
This year's senior class consists of Tim Mains, Sarah Cook, Duke Matson, Guy Roberts and Rajko Radevic, an exchange student from Montenegro. That's about average. Photographs of graduating classes dating back to the early 1900s line the hallway wall. There were two graduates in 1943, five in '56, three in the class of '98. In 1992, Tammy Williams was not only the valedictorian of the senior class - she was the senior class.
Longtime Bickleton teachers like John Rapach somehow keep the lineages straight and the progress of graduates up-to-date. Rapach is a friendly science teacher with hair as white as his lab coat.
After school ended one afternoon, he headed down the hallway with briefcase in one hand and lunch pail in the other, walking slowly, picking out images of students he had taught the past 28 years.
"He's a lawyer," Rapach said. "That one graduated from Gonzaga ... Marletta's a deputy prosecutor for the county ... He's a graduate of Air Force Academy ... Scott's farming on his dad's farm ... He's working at the aluminum plant ... Cory runs the hardware store. ..."
About three-quarters of every graduating class goes to college. Many of them won't return because Bickleton is too small. Others stay or return after college to marry, raise kids and perpetuate the cycle.
Bluebirds are the most famous regular visitors to Bickleton, but they aren't the most meaningful ones. Many natives return the second weekend in June for the annual pioneer picnic and rodeo, which has happened every year since 1910.
The celebration revolves around the big rodeo, but it features the town's 1905 Herschell-Spillman carousel, with wooden horses that rock instead of bob. The town bought the attraction from a Portland-area amusement park in 1928. Before electricity came to the community in the late '40s, they used a tractor engine to power it.
While kids leave their bikes lying along the road for days and grownups often leave keys in their cars, that carousel stays locked away until the celebration. Someone offered a lot of money for it and someone else tried to steal it by posing as a restorer.
Those horses are valuable to Bickleton, not because collectors and thieves are interested, but because everyone who grew up there has, sometime in the past seven decades, ridden them. You see, while the bluebirds arrive with style and paint the pale countryside, they move on when the cold winds stream in from the foothills. Those horses stay. And when they're up and running, they move the Bickleton way, round and round, slow and steady.
Richard Seven is a staff writer for Pacific Northwest.