Welcome to Harney County. Photo courtesy Ken Lund.
“Fill ‘er with regular, please.” I said to the attendant as I handed over my plastic. “Fine weather, ain’t it?”
“Shore is,” he affirmed, glancing up at the cloudless cobalt sky and smiling. He swiped my credit card and handed it back in one motion. Looking to be right about my age (63), sandy-colored, sun-burnt, stocky and dressed like a cowboy, he proceeded to fill ‘er up as I went and grabbed a squeegee out of the nearest bucket.
“I’ll wash your windshield,” he offered.
“That’s alright. I could use some exercise.”
After peeking inside the car at Trisha, Abel and Jeff, the fellah looked at me and asked, “So where ya’ll headed?”
“Down to Malheur Lake. We’re out to maybe see some coots.”
He laughed. “Coots we’ve got. Ducks, geese, swans, cranes — you name it. Why just a couple of hours ago a big flock of pelicans flew over the highway here heading for downtown.”
With the Big Sandy Desert flatlands to the west, the Ochoco Mountains (Oh-Chee-Coz) and the sky-scraping Strawberries to the north, the rolling sagebrush Stinkwaters to the east and tall, glaciated, snowbound, 50-mile-long Steens Mountain to the south, Burns, Oregon, is an oasis in the Cold Desert. It’s a place of gathering winds and waters in a region where there’s plenty of the one and usually not a drop of the other. Although Burns is the seat of the great County of Harney (9th largest in the US, by golly), and a fuel stop on US Hwy. 395 (the western leg of the Pan American/Al-Can highway), Burns is just a cow town about as close as you can get to the middle of nowhere.
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