The Seattle of the late '90's and early 21st Century was not the Seattle I had enjoyed so much in the mid-80's. It had evolved from basically a working class city full of ship yards, the winter harbor for the Alaska Fishing Fleet and Boeing manufacturing to a city of Microsoft millionaires. People where not as friendly and were more class conscious. After Waldo I wanted to get someplace where I could walk down the street and say "Hello" to people without being looked at like I was a mad-man; a place where I could easily see the stars at night and sit outside and not hear the constant din of traffic.
But how to get there? How to go about making a decent living in an out of the way town? Well, I'd always liked the US Forest Service, so I started looking at jobs there -- so desperate was I to get out of Seattle that I was even willing to go against my "religion" and work on timber sales. Then I recalled I had always thought that Dispatch would be a nice place to be. My first image of a dispatch office was the one that served the south end of the Willamette National Forest in the early 80's, a mobile home trailer at the Oakridge airport staffed by a fellow named Eric Jager.
As they say, you need to watch-out what you ask for because you just might get it. In this case I landed in Lakeview, Oregon, a little redneck, logger, miner, rancher and cowboy town located further from an Interstate highway than any other community in Oregon. Truth be known, I came to like Lakeview a lot after my initial misgivings and have maintained close ties with a number of folks there.
Lakeview is located in the Goose Lake Valley in the northwest corner of the Great Basin near the Oregon, California, Nevada state lines. It rests against the Warner Mountains to the east. When you walk through town you look right up on the Warners. The Fremont National Forest boarders the valley to the east and west. East of the Warners you get into some amazing desert country, Hart Mountain (home of the Hart Mountain National Wildlife Refuge) and further east the stunning canyons of Steens Mountain.
Dispatch had changed a lot in the years since I first met Eric Jager in that little trailer in Oakridge. Now dispatch centers are increasingly centralized, modern offices located as often than not in communities far larger than Oakridge -- places like Eugene, Everette (WA), Wenatchee (WA), Pendleton (OR), Missoula (MT) and so forth. There are still some in much smaller communities such as Lakeview and Crow Agency (MT) -- more about Crow Agency later.
When I tell people I work in a fire dispatch I frequently hear, "Be careful out there." Sad fact of the matter the most dangerous thing about working dispatch are the doughnuts people bring in, that and infected paper cuts. When fire season really gets going I rarely see the outside of the dispatch office; days consisting of getting up, going to work, coming home and going to bed.
While in Lakeview I met the man who was to be my lover, partner and companion for the next six years, John Craig. He was living in Paradise, California at the time and we started off chatting online, swapping emails and seeing one another once or twice a month.
John & I explored southeast Oregon together that summer, going to Hart Mountain, the Steens and other spots in that neck of the woods. I was living in a single-wide mobile home, something I'd never envisioned myself doing.
That winter I volunteered at the Lakeview Chamber of Commerce visitor center and wrote a story or two for the Lake County Examiner, as well as spending more time with John in California.
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