Prineville, Oregon
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Twenty years ago, they descended.
The Rainbow Family wanted to gather somewhere, and the “somewhere” they chose in June and July 1997 was Oregon — the center of the state, to be exact. About 20,000 of them streamed into the Ochoco National Forest, just a handful of miles from the town of Prineville; that was the peak number recorded by the National Forest Service.
The Rainbow Family, for those under the age of 40, is a loose coalition of what the locals describe as “hippies.” Each year, they return to Central Oregon, though never in the same size batches as that summer in ‘97.
Their annual gatherings down the road from Prineville are the punchline to a joke your correspondent, a terrible comedian, hasn’t set up quite yet.
Oregon as a whole is dubbed a blue state, but there are pockets of deep red, particularly once you work your way away from Portland and its surrounding environs. The centermost area, Crook County, in which the town of Prineville (population 9,253) is nestled, went for now-President Trump by 70 percent, with 8,511 votes cast for Trump out of 12,172 votes for president. That was a little higher than usual, percentage-wise, but it’s pretty much always gone GOP.
And so you can imagine how a community of farmers and ranchers and hyperconservatives might react to a flood of free love. In fact, you’ll have to imagine, since, oddly, most people around just shrug or roll their eyes when it’s brought up.
The name is pronounced “Pr-eye-nvil,” the type of word that, when said aloud, most people would think you’d misspoken. What is that “r” doing in there? It’s almost as incongruous as the yearly incursions of Rainbow Family members. Turns out the city was named after Barney Prine, who was one of the first merchants to set up shop on the spot back in the 1860s. He also has a steak house that bears his brand. (Your correspondent doesn’t have the budget for steak, so others will have to decide whether Barney Prine Steakhouse and Saloon does its namesake justice.)
But while the Rainbow Family serves as a useful contrast to the town down the road, that’s not Prineville’s defining feature, not for those who live there. There are 51 other weeks in the year for Prinevillains.
Steve Lent is the historian at the A.R. Bowman Museum in Prineville, just on the corner of N. 3rd and Main Street. Before working at the museum, he fought wildfires, worked with the Bureau of Land Management. Steve was there for the giant Rainbow Family gathering of ‘97 — he was working out at the campsites. “Clothing optional,” he says with a bit of an exaggerated grimace. Still, they brought some money to the town when it was sorely needed.
In its heyday, Prineville had five sawmills, and trucks of timber went up and down Route 126. But a couple decades ago the mills started closing down. The last one essentially shut its doors a few years ago, when heavy snow caved in a roof, meaning more than 200 people suddenly found themselves without gainful employment.
“We’re sort of a bedroom community for Redmond and Bend, where the jobs are,” Steve says.
Now, the biggest employers in town are Les Schwab Tire Centers — which until recently was headquartered there (they split for nearby Bend in 2008, though there’s still a factory in Prineville) — and, however unlikely it might seem, Facebook and Apple.
Facebook and Apple both have giant data centers here, big facilities in which they stash every swipe and star and like; the number of seconds you did or didn’t view that recipe video from a site that actually stole said video from BuzzFeed.
Facebook broke ground on its complex in 2010; Apple in 2012. The problem with these data centers, say residents, is that neither company is paying the city taxes, and they won’t for 15 years at least, and the number of permanent staff hired from the Prineville pool has been disappointing to some. But it’s better than nothing, people mostly agree, and just the simple building of the buildings has perked the place up a bit.
An example, provided by Steve’s museum colleague Gordon, who used to serve on the City Council: While the five local electrical engineers were up to their eyeballs with work, Prineville didn’t have any more to offer, and so Facebook still had to bring in an extra 110 from other parts.
Multiply that situation out by the other professional segments needed to build and maintain these centers, and you can see how that might create a serious squeeze on the local housing market — for how long, exactly, no one really knows. And it’s not just Prineville. Used to be, a two-bedroom in nearby Redmond cost you $550 a month, one Redmond resident says. Now one-bedrooms are going for $1200 in some cases.
Facebook also parcels out grants to local community groups, totaling $100,000 for 2016. $9,000 to get kids braces here, $15,000 to update the high school’s stadium there. It’s something.
The Facebook Data Center, with two-going-on-three buildings, dwarfs its next-door neighbor, the Humane Society of the Ochocos, a no-kill animal shelter that you could easily drive past twice without realizing what you’d missed.
Two younger women and a slightly older one are working there one morning when the phone rings; lengthy exultations shortly follow. The shelter’s scale, you see, has been broken for a few weeks, and a new one costs $300. That’s too much for their budget, so they put a post up on the shelter’s Facebook page asking for donations. The phone call was from a woman who saw the post and was offering to go to the store right that day and buy them a new one.
One of the younger women, Shawnee, has lived here almost all her life, after her parents moved the family up here for reasons she doesn’t quite remember. “It’s comfortable,” she says. She’s married, with a 10-year-old daughter, has two dogs, three cats, two horses, and a mule — one of the horses was pregnant when she bought it, and no one was sure whether the donkey or the other horse had got to it. “Turns out she was into donkeys,” Shawnee says. She spoiled the mule early on and now it’s a big pain in the ass (no pun intended), but like most people around here, she has a soft spot for animals. In fact, people are so generous and willing to open their homes and hearts that the shelter is running low on dogs.
An older couple bedecked in camouflage walks in and asks to see the dogs available.
***
Much of the town’s thought is bent on this summer’s main event, which is not the possibility of a bunch of Rainbow Family members dropping by, but instead the forthcoming total solar eclipse that will occur on August 21. Central Oregon is anticipating anywhere between a quarter of a million to 700,000 visitors, thanks to Prineville’s position in the path of totality and its lack of light pollution — sometimes you can see the whites of the Milky Way, if you’re out on a lonesome bluff outside town on a clear night.
Already every available hotel, motel, inn, RV park, and campground in the area is booked: Prineville is the furthest south, roundabouts, that the path of totality touches in Oregon. Residents are being advised to stock up on food and water and gas well in advance. “Did this happen for the one in ‘79?” one woman asks a fellow local. “Nah,” he says. “People weren’t crazy back then.”
Ranchers are seizing on this opportunity: Steve has seen camping spots on local ranches going for a cool $7,000 for four nights via eBay, and has a buddy who’s offering up space on his prairie on a bluff. It’ll wreck the land, and everyone’ll have to do some rehabbing, but it’ll be worth it for the extra cash. “Imagine coming out all this way and shelling out that much money and then it’s a cloudy day,” he says, bemused.
Steve’s friend Fred stops by the museum — he and Fred worked together for years; Fred worked out in the forests and national parks, helping pick up around camp sites and making sure they were left a little better for the next visitor. He’s anywhere from his 60s to 70s, missing a few teeth on his left side, wears a Cowboys cap — not Dallas, Crook County High, home of the Cowboys and Cowgirls — and a Western Oregon Wolves windbreaker.
Fred says there’s been some job training offered in the area, which has helped a little. Steve recalls the days when the unemployment rate in the town was practically zero; in the early 2000s, it was up around 20 percent, he reckons.
Another older man drops in to sign a card for an acquaintance turning 100. Reminders of mortality are omnipresent: The owner of Dad’s Place, a diner where townies and farmers used to gather, just died, and his wife is looking to sell the place. (A marathon runner, he dropped dead of a heart attack on a run, not far down the street.) One man’s brother recently died of cancer. A resident of a nearby town lost his wife to cancer a few years ago.
Most of the people available to talk to have that appellation here — “older.” Nearly a quarter of the population of Crook County, per the U.S. Census, is 65 or older.
The median household income in Crook County is just over $37,000 a year. The percentage of the population living in poverty is 15.9. About 15.5 percent of those over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree. It is overwhelmingly white: July 2015 Census data puts it at 88.3 percent “White, Not Hispanic or Latino.” However, that same Census data also says 95.1 percent identify as “White alone.”
A Redmond resident describes the place as “awful cowboy,” which is as apt and succinct a description as you’ll hear; a man wanders into a diner with a Stetson on his wintry head, and it’s not even passing strange. It’s a place where pick-up trucks are less an affectation than necessary for hauling wood or hay or construction gear. Camouflage is the pattern of choice, mixed in with some flannel.
***
A few blocks down at the Tastee Treet, a slab of large bearded men have gathered — some veterans, proclaimed by their hats or jackets — to hash out an auction they’ve just come from. They discuss 20-foot lathes and various other machinery a soft person like your correspondent doesn’t really know much about.
The place is usually full, but right now the crowd is at a bit of an ebb. Most people who come in, their food is at their spot before they can even sit down, or at least their favorite beverage (decaf coffee, Mountain Dew) is. There can’t be more than 10 spots at the U-shaped counter, standard black sparkly vinyl stools bolted to the floor an age or two ago. A few tables lie on the other side of the soft serve machine. Playful sass is thrown by regulars and the staff (comprised mostly of local whippersnappers). They stop in for a few minutes or a few hours, for just a cup of coffee or sweet tater tots or cobbler or a giant Mountain Burger (6 inches in diameter). A 13-year-old boy, claims a server, snarfed two of those in one sitting and got a free t-shirt for his gastric trouble.
“Friday night here, you can’t hardly find a place to eat now,” a man at the counter named Dan grumbles, citing the newcomers hired by Facebook and Apple that are filling up the other restaurants. There are the obligatory local brewpubs, the Ochoco Brewing Company and Crooked River Brewing. But the Tastee Treet, a greasy spoon with A-plus soft serve and an unimpeachable Marionberry cobbler, and which has been there, it seems, since Barney Prine set up shop, is where the old-timers feel most at home.
Dan, who’s called Prineville home for 45 years and describes himself as “the pickiest fat guy alive,” drives a truck for the Steve Miller Band and doesn’t bother checking up on the news so much. It’s depressing. “The other guys here, they come in and talk politics,” he says. “I go outside whenever they do, I don’t need that shit. Not like we can change anything.”
We’ve been hearing that narrative for as long as there’s been depressing news to report, and in a time when the dismal deluge threatens to reach into every corner of one’s life, it’s a temptation that — though it applies only to a select few groups who can afford to ignore the news — is understandable.
But Dan doesn’t go so far as Don, who comes in not long before Dan leaves. Don, who looks somewhere in his 60s and is clad in University of Oregon gear, takes on the task of educating your correspondent on the single family who controls literally every aspect of everyone’s lives: the Rothschilds. They are the ones who ordered up World Wars I and II, and have decreed a third that should come sometime soon. He first asks your correspondent where she’s from.
“I was living in New York for about nine years.”
“No, where are you from?”
“I grew up in Central Florida.”
“No, I am asking you where you’re from,” he says, and every word makes clear the patience he is showing. “Where were you born?”
“Connecticut?”
Don smiles with a certain grim satisfaction and nods his head, as though he’s caught your correspondent’s full measure by sussing that out. What that tells him that “lived in New York for nine years” didn’t, we’ll never know.
The conversation takes this turn after some prompting about the very real economic hardships Prineville has faced, particularly in the mid-2000s. Don reveals that it didn’t bother him much because he knows that every 12 years or so the globalists simply stop the worldwide economy in its tracks.
“Who are the globalists, exactly?” your correspondent asks with genuine curiosity. “Giant corporations?” There’s a pause.
“No, it’s one family. You really ought to read this book — it’s the Rothschilds. They’ve financed every war since Napoleon, even the Revolutionary War. They’re in every central bank.” He doesn’t trust any news source — the Murdochs are Masons and members of the Illuminati, as are all other media moguls. But especially not the internet, and he independently researches everything he hears or sees. How? Through books. First time he heard the term “Illuminati” was maybe seven years ago. That was also when he started digging into the globalist conspiracy. He is keenly aware that the Masons have a presence in Prineville.
A younger man visiting from McMinnville, a bit southwest of Portland, sits just a couple seats down the counter with one of those Mountain Burgers in front of him. (They really are enormous.) He can’t help but interject, with a “This stuff is really mind-blowing.” It takes a good 10 minutes and a couple more comments to realize the young man is not egging Don on, or being sarcastic. He is of the same firm belief that the Rothschild family’s goal is to exterminate 90 percent of humanity.
The word “Jew” never escapes their lips, but the Rothschild mythos is one of the hallmarks of an especially insidious type of anti-Semitism. However, it’s the closest thing your correspondent hears to any kind of overt racism during her three-day visit, though rumors abound of white supremacist activity in yet more remote parts this side of the mountains.
As for the claim that the goal of a group with the type of power the Rothschild family allegedly has is to murder 90 percent of the human race, a comment about them certainly taking their sweetass time — “Wonder what on earth they’re waiting for” — goes unacknowledged.
But Don doesn’t wish your correspondent ill, any more than the young man from McMinnville does. They simply wish her to open her eyes and do her journalistic duty.
It’s more chilling coming from the younger man than the older one.
There are a few papers of record around these parts: The Bend Bulletin, the Redmond Spokesman. The Central Oregonian is based in Prineville, in fact, and publishes a couple times a week. They have their own press, and about 10 editorial and design staffers. They survive by being lean and delivering the kind of local news people in the community are interested in.
But in general, residents get most of their news from Facebook, or “my phone” or “the TV.” (Very few people name a network, it’s just what’s on, though the ones who do know answer with “Fox News.”) And most of the people your correspondent spoke with just don’t want to deal with any of it.
***
The actual center of Oregon is not in Prineville. The marker — and there is a marker, in this state— lies on some rancher’s private property a good 25 miles down a very windy road, and you can only get a glimpse of it. But to commemorate the spot, some 300 yards away on the other side of two-lane Route 380 is Post General Store, so named for the community that sprang up there around the Post Office, which takes its own name from its first postmaster — this is not a joke — Walter H. Post.
Fred is the one who gives the directions to Post. He goes to great pains to give clear, detailed instructions on where to turn or not turn, describing landmarks with the ease of someone who at some point had seen them damn near every day.
The drive is just as Fred says, climbing up and sliding down ridges and bluffs carved by prehistoric lava flows from the nearby Cascades — and they do seem carved, maybe by giants, because the rocky ledges jut out at angles that seem too perfect to have come into being by mere happenstance.
There’s Eagle Rock, a massive outcropping sitting behind some barbed wire fencing. The juniper is plenty, spiking up defiantly amid the high desert climate on the slopes. You don’t think of “high desert” indicating green, but the term just refers to the amount of rainfall, and a fair number of plants can apparently get along just fine, even if their green is a little sickly this side of the mountains.
The infernal rain begins to fall again, as it has for most of the three days your correspondent has been in town. It’s been wetter than usual on the lee side of the Cascades, though the weather in these parts is always somewhat unpredictable. Fred says snow through Easter isn’t uncommon, and residents swear it’s snowed in July before, not that it stuck. It’s been cold here, too, of late, with temperatures dipping into the low 30s at night.
The only thing other than the sign in Post is the aforementioned General Store, a small space that houses both the Post Office and a knickknackery. There used to be a bar in there, the Elk Horn Tavern, where farmers and ranchers would gather and tell tall tales, Steve says, recalling one particular evening for which he doesn’t get too detailed. Fred adds that he’d sometimes stop by there for a Dr. Pepper on the way home from Ranger duty.
The Elk Horn Tavern is no more, though; the newer owners wanted to make it a bit more of a family-friendly place. There is still an elk head bolted to the wall, though, its expression one of extreme belligerence. The store is akin to the inside of every Cracker Barrel you’ve been to. The chocolate milkshake is $5, which puts you in the same mind as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, but it is worth it. The meatloaf sandwich is just as your mom made it, a slice of OK meatloaf doused in mayo and what seems to be barbecue sauce in between two slices of plain bread. It tastes like it should come with the crusts cut off.
They get good traffic in there, the mom of the store manager says, particularly during the summer months, and the eclipse ought to have them selling Post-branded shirts like hot cakes. The high school kids in Prineville have taken such a fancy to the Post-branded trucker hats that even teachers have wandered in, sheepishly asking which one they should buy.
***
Just as Oregon is not some blue monolith, neither is its heart blood red. The people are mostly white and at least somewhat overweight, if not big-boned. Some have to ask their daughters who they’re going on dates with to make sure there’s no relation. Some leave to go to the coast and drop dead just after getting there. Some return to take care of ailing parents. Some don’t leave because they can’t imagine life anywhere else. The idea of six-lane highways or millions of people all in one place seems absurd.
But they are also the county employee who buys a $15 First-Aid kit he brings with him to meetings with kids at schools, because school shootings are now so common in America — and Central Oregon so full of enthusiastic purchasers of large numbers of firearms — that he wants to always be prepared to save his kids. They’re the mom who has to rent out two bedrooms on AirBnB to help make ends meet, because she can’t work any more; she wants to go to Italy, but the odds aren’t great she’ll ever see the canals of Venice or the aqueducts of Rome. They’re the L.A. gangbanger who moved his family here and took a $28,000-a-year fry cook job at a hole-in-the-wall on US 97. They’re the people who’ve turned to heroin instead of opiates or meth, as the former has flooded the area. They’re the gay trans man whose parents still call him a daughter.
At the Tastee Treet, Don has concluded his lecture about globalists by pointing out an owl on the $1 bill that you can only really make out properly with 10x magnification. “It’s a Luciferian symbol,” he warns. He bids a not unfond farewell and exits; the McMinnville man does the same. A young Latino-looking man next to your correspondent — a happy Prineville native with sleeves of ink— looks at a dollar bill in his hand, shakes his head some, and dubs it all kind of weird, “but very Prineville.”
