Vance Bennett

Granite Stories Vance Bennett

"Go ahead, try it on for size. It won't hurt." That's probably what Smokey would tell you. The year is 1977 and you are in your twenties again. You owe no one and no one owes you. You're just looking for a paycheck and a place to be. You're traveling on that muddy, pot-holey, raggedy ass, piece of road we used to call the North Fork Highway in a battered old sedan with bald tires with seven dollars and twenty-seven cents in your pocket. You're looking at what's left of that town; a town leftover from lifetimes past; a falling down town at the head of an emerald green meadow being covered with the first of a new winter's fresh snow. This is a tale about that town. This is also a tale about those of us that populated that town during the late nineteen seventies and early eighties. This is a tale about Katy Gunn, Timothy O'Leary, Jim, Alice, and Cecil. Children born of the late nineteen forties and early fifties. A piece of what was loosely referred to as the "Working Class" back in those days. A piece of what was known by the demographic parceling of a generation called "Baby Boomers."Then there was Thor, Smokey, Angelina, and Marshal Bud. Those that seemed like they had always been there. They were our elders, so to speak; the keepers of the local wisdom. Then there was Sonny and his people. Hillbillies, for want of a better label. Those that migrated from the Blue Ridge Mountains in Virginia to the Blue Mountains of Eastern Oregon. That's the way we were.