End of the Road

      The very end of Fire Road consists of a quarter mile long ad hoc logging spur somebody put in maybe fifty years ago to haul timber.  It parallels the Siuslaw River and has been known to flood more than once.
      Pete, our one time neighbor, used to own the land at the end of the road.  He tried to jump through the hoops to get a building permit but Lame County steadfastly refused him as he was not a big time developer and needed to change the zoning.  If he had been able to write a fat check to a local "consultant" it would have happened 
in a week.  He finally gave up and let the bank repo the land.  
Eventually Mustang Sally and her husband bought the place at an extremely reasonable price.
      Mustang Sally got her name from driving her new blue Mustang at 
high speeds up and down Fire Road and everywhere else she went.  
Sally worked at Lame County and whaddaya know, somehow the zoning got changed so that she and her husband could build at the end of the rugged logging spur.
      Sally and hubby got a garage with an apartment built before an ugly divorce put the place back on the market.  The Kiosks bought the real estate and lived there with their two sons for close to ten years before they divorced.  Roger Kiosk was famous for starting huge projects and never finishing them.  He paid big bucks to have a pair of gigantic used laminated beams delivered and spanned across the Siuslaw.  The beams had been the back bone of a logging bridge that Weyerhaeuser had taken up and surplussed.
      Kelly Kiosk ran ten miles every day and I used her as a basis for one of the characters in a trash novel I gave up on.  When they split the sheets, the housing market was way up and they had no problem selling the farm.
      The new people moved in with horses and children and raised chickens and ducks.  The land at the end of the road is trapped between a wooded hillside and the river.  It has a northern aspect and is shaded by many trees.  It is cold and dank in the winter.  As I have mentioned previously, the Siuslaw floods from time to time.
      This spring the rain came down heavily and steadily.  One morning, the new people noticed a cirque starting to slump in the beginning of their quarter mile driveway.  It dropped maybe 4 inches.  Then a dozen tons of mud slid down the hill and blocked the road in the middle.  I got involved and helped saw trees out of the road and shovel mud out of the toe of the slide in an effort to extract automobiles to solid ground.  The mud was so gooey that we had to employ a two ton comealong to pull the two small cars through the notch in the slide.  The cirque was still drivable so the cars got parked at the very beginning of the old logging road.
      I walked to the end of the road a week later to discover that the cirque had now dropped a good two feet.  There was a solid bit of road against the sand stone cliff that was wide enough to comfortably walk a horse but too narrow to drive even a small car.  Then some more rain and several hundred tons of mud and trees came down in the middle of the road.  At least the family cars were out.  The pickup and horse trailer are land locked.  It will take some serious shovel work to reduce the latest slide to where you can walk a horse over it.  I sawed the logs into manageable pieces.
      The old logging spur had been designed to last a year or two so it certainly achieved its goal.  The only way to renovate the road at the cirque would be to cut into the thirty foot tall sandstone cliff.  It is tall enough that it would have to be terraced.  That would take some serious heavy equipment and somewhere to dump thousands of tons of material.  The major slide can't be accessed by equipment until the road is widened at the cliff.  I guess that leaves Roger's bridge.  It is just two massive lam beams emplaced across the muddy Siuslaw on ce-ment footings.  If completed, a road would have to be built over somebody's property, thus requiring an easement.  Ain't no easy answers for this one.  N