Oregon Tavern Age: Talking Turkey

I sat at the bar at Turkey’s. Linda and Gary were to my immediate left, Kip to my far right, and two OTA brothers milled around behind me. Turkey was the bartender. A Grand Prix race played on television and the racers were E-cars and barely making a sound. That didn’t go over well with the OTA racing fans.

It was a brutally hot day along the Rogue River. It was Rainiers-chilled-in-the-river time. Then you sat in the river in cutoffs and drank Rainier. No craft beers allowed.

I asked Turkey about the exquisitely crafted trio of wooden pot pipes on display behind the bar. Turkey told me they were made from myrtlewood, Jesus wood, that only grew on the Southern Oregon Coast and in Israel. Turkey said a regular carved the pipes and gave them away. Turkey said it was a lot safer, germ-wise, sharing a pipe rather than sharing a joint. Everyone agreed. I said I had to own a myrtlewood pot pipe made by a Turkey’s OTA regular—right now—even though I didn’t smoke pot. Turkey said he’d hook me up.

Jesus Pot Pipe—great name for a stoner Christian rock band and believe me, in Oregon, there was such a musical niche.

Kip slid across a few stools and landed next to me. He was holding a homemade gizmo of wood and metal with one hand and a saucer of painted Styrofoam in the other.

“What is that?” I said.

“The Shepherd’s Hawk,” he said.

I got off my stool to better inspect. He handed the gizmo to me.

The Shepherd’s Hawk, Kip informed me, was his latest creation. It amounted to a beaver stick approximately three feet in length attached to a metal housing via screws and clamps (think plumbing). A hinge extended from the housing and fitted into a double-grooved slot on a saucer-shaped piece of Styrofoam that Kip had carved into an aerodynamic flier. The flier was painted yellow and black to resemble a swooping hawk.

I sipped my beer and assessed the gizmo while Kip continued his explanation. The idea was to draw the stick back like a Chuck-it! dog toy and then whip it forward, which released the hawk into the sky. He gave me a mini-demonstration of the arm motion but obviously didn’t release the bird inside Turkey’s, although I wished he would.

Kip claimed it could fly a hundred yards on the beach. He said he was registering the paperwork for a patent on Monday.

I told him I’d give him $15 for it.

He refused.

I raised the offer to $20.

No.

I upped to $25 and fanned the bills.

Kip wouldn’t budge. This particular stick and hawk were the prototypes for the patent. He invited me outside to his SUV to browse the rest of the stock. In the scorching sun, he offered me a sickly-looking stick and red saucer decorated with a German Iron Cross, sort of like the Red Baron.

Forget that! I pressed Kip again and he promised me the hawk after he had successfully registered his patent. We shook hands, and Kip got in his SUV and drove away. I went back inside Turkey’s to beat the heat with cold beer.

The subject of ospreys came up, perhaps because one flew by with a woodland creature in its beak and several of us saw it out the window. Gary recalled a time when he was scouring the hull of his boat in his driveway and he heard a thunk and the boat rattled. He looked up and saw an osprey soaring overhead. He looked inside the boat and saw a black snapper on the deck. The osprey had dropped it. Gary cleaned the fish and fried it up for lunch.

One of the OTA brothers then launched into a story about an osprey dropping an eel on someone’s deck not far from Turkey’s. They ate it for supper.

By this time, Tom had replaced Turkey as bartender and had overheard the osprey conversation.

He had an osprey-dropping-something-from-the-sky story to recount as well. There were six people in Turkey’s and three had osprey-dropping-something-from-the-sky stories. I wanted one.

Tom said a woman living up the road was weeding in her garden when an osprey dropped a five-pound steelhead and hit the woman on the back of the head. “It plowed her into the fucking ground, knocked her out cold. She had to go to the hospital!”

He didn’t know if they cooked the steelhead for supper. They probably did. A steelhead from the sky meant something in Oregon and when it didn’t, Oregon was dead.

The osprey stories drove the joint into a frenzy and Gary told me to ring the bell over the bar. That’s the kind of man he was.

I demurred. I was afraid. I’d never rung the “drinks-on-the-house” bell in OTA country before. Gary insisted and I rang the bell, and goddamn it, the peal felt righteous all the way down to my loins!

I wasn’t taking notes, but after the bell rang, I excused myself and ran to the car for a notepad. Upon my return, Tom had a new beer waiting for me in a chilled glass. I took a deep drink and scribbled notes.

A minute later I said to the bar: “I’ve got five bucks that says the next person who walks in here won’t have an osprey-dropping-something-from-the-sky story. No one took the bet.