I have always been drawn to the Clackamas River watershed. My first recollection is standing in a meadow, somewhere between the town of Sandy and Estacada, with my father, Kenneth Johnson, and William Stafford, and I think Kim Stafford.  We were scouting out land that we might buy together.  I was 10 or 11 years old.  I had already heard the word commune although I doubt I understood what it meant.  My father had told me about Brook Farm, and he had built a small shed in the woods in back of our house modeled on Thoreau’s Walden hut. My great grandparents supplied flour to the Aurora Colony, south of Portland in the 19th century.  And my father and Stafford spoke both with high regard and skepticism about Glen Caufield who had moved  to Estacada to live off the grid and start the Grundtvig (Danish Folk education) Free School. Glen traveled back and forth between the Portland area and San Francisco.   We sadly, never bought the land.  A direction not taken.

At about the same time that Glen was trying to live off the grid in Estacada, a splinter group of teachers and students moved all the way from the Black Mountain College in North Carolina.

From a splendid history of the Black Mountain College:

“For John Wallen, the community was the curriculum, and in his group dynamics course he tried to find better ways of working together.  He was critical of what he saw as too great an emphasis on the arts and felt that the arts as they exited were too esoteric.  Eager to develop a more intimate involvement with the local community, he presented a community service plan through which, instead of teaching, he would have been a liaison between the college and the surrounding area for projects related to class and local arts and crafts activities.  The plan was rejected, so Wallen and a group of students decided to pool their resources to form a commune that would have an integral relationship with the surrounding community.  He left in February 1948 to find a location, and the following gummers several students joined him near Estacada, Oregon.  For several years they lived together as a farm cooperative and had a woodworking shop. To create for the small logging community a sense of its history and traditions, they started a timber jamboree with dances, logging skills, and a crafts exhibition.  When the group dissolved, many of the members moved to Portland (where several taught at the Catlin Gable School) and remained a close community of friends.”

In the mid-19070s my wife Catherine Johnson  and I bought land on Horse Heaven Ridge, high above the Clackamas, 4 miles south of Estacada.  We bought the land from one of the most splendid Millie Kiggins and her father Grover Kiggins. In the 1930s Millie may have been the first women to try out for a high school football team in Oregon.  She also had an encounter with Bigfoot.  And created a most beautiful garden  surrounding the house that Catherine and I bought and lived in for several years—a house that Millie lost in a poker game.   Millie also by chance found and purchased my great grandfather’s (LP Swan) floor milling equipment at Champoeg.

But, you have to wonder what goes on at Estacada or what draws wonderful and eccentric people there.  People Like Robin Cody whose novel Ricochet River is the best way to fully understand small town life in Oregon, and Mike Houck, the godfather of the greenspaces movement in Portland, and MJ Cody, a wonderful travel writer.

I’ve never quite come up with a good explanation of what the draw is but one suspicion is related to how the Clackamas River is the largest east west river flowing out of the Cascades in Oregon that does not have a fully paved highway.  Its like when you get to the edge of Estacada you are just going out there, not across the mountains to a town on the other side of the mountains.  It feels like you might find a place that has not been explored, or where Bigfoot might live, or in darker scenarios where serial murders or aliens have conventions.