I’ll call him “White Speedos,” which does seem to unfairly objectify him even if it accurately captures my fascination with him as I began to acknowledge my attraction to other boys. After all I need to call him something as I don’t use real names in these essays–at least for anyone living–at least for now. They are all however, real people. I’ll never forget how beautiful he looked standing there smooth and tan in Menucha’s commercial kitchen surrounded by stainless steel, wearing only a pair of white speedos while chatting casually with his mother, who also worked there. His mother who would once tell me that I was far too young to be so cynical, and while I don’t know what this was said in reference to exactly—I surely have always been a cynic—I have never forgotten the way she said it with a hint of indignant anger. Did she know I was in love with her son? He surely did not. Forty years later it’s a memory that’s become embellished, dramatized and twisted in my mind to become like the scene from Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams’ “Suddenly Last Summer” where Sabastian sends Elizabeth Taylor into the surf at the mythical Cabezo De Lobo in a thin white bathing suit that turns transparent when wet to lure the local boys into a frenzy that would ultimately have them “gobbling” Sabastian to death on the mountaintop, while mother Venable jealously guards the unspeakable family secret. However, I would not see that movie (made the year I was born) until many years later, and would not have understood its dark Hollywood censor-shrouded homo-secret even if I had. I don’t even know how old we were then (15, 16?) or whether we were yet friends, which we did become for a time. At first though there was adolescent rivalry. After all his grandfather had a history with this place where I’d been working a little more than a year, having designed the original gardens and grounds in the 1920s and then leading a crew of 30 full time gardeners during Menucha’s short life as a private summer home for the Meiers, Portland’s first family of retail. He was, I thought, a know-it-all, and in my mind I had gotten there first. Whatever happened to turn our tension into fisticuffs in those first weeks of working together (lust?) I do not remember, but after a long chat with our fatherly leader Chuck Knapp we managed to overcome it and actually become bosom buddies—at least for a season or two.

He was a year younger and I had a car, which spelled adventure to boys in the country. We used to drive down the old highway to the trails around the waterfalls of the Columbia Gorge to go running between shifts at work and took advantage of any excuse for a road trip. Once in early spring—too early it would turn out—we planned a road trip to find a ghost town in eastern Oregon called Cornucopia.  We only had one day for the 500-mile round trip so the plan was for me to pick him up before sunrise. When I drove up to his family’s house in my hand-me-down green 4-door ‘63 Chevy Bel Air, the house was dark. I waited—nothing. Clearly he was not coming out. Clearly no one in the house was even awake. I wasn’t about to start horn-honking at 5AM in his sleepy family enclave in the woods, nor was I about to give up on our adventure. So, secure in the knowledge that no one in the country locked their homes at night, I simply walked in the front door. I had no next move in mind though as I had never before been in his house. What happened next is foggy, but somehow I found him, and by the time we set out from there the whole family was up and making sure we had been fed. I got pulled over for speeding that morning, which is truly funny given what I was driving, but the speed limit back then was 55-mph due to the ill-defined “fuel crisis” as some of us will remember, though few understood. We pressed on over the snowy pass to La Grande, the town my parents would retire to years later, where we spent nearly all our money on a big breakfast. My dad always said what a good snow car that old Chevy was. I guess because it had so little power and a weird 2-speed transmission or something, but it was in fact good in the snow. We found the road to Cornucopia, though I have no recollection of what kind of map or directions we were using. I am now entirely dependent on GPS, even driving around my own city. The dirt road was covered in deep snow but we were determined teens and started walking, sinking deeper with each sneaker and jean soaking step until wet snow reached our crotches. By that critical juncture we had already seen some old weathered mineshaft structure and decided that was enough to say we’d made it to Cornucopia, and we started back. We immediately stripped off our jeans when we reached the car and waited for the heater to kick in. We didn’t stop shaking for many miles, but, mission accomplished, we headed for home with no money and less than half a tank of gas. I coasted whenever I could with the engine off, not something I think you can do in today’s cars, but soon it got dark. I used whatever fuel saving techniques I thought I knew while White Speedos slept in the back seat. Somehow several hours later we made it to the giant truck stop on I-80 in Troutdale, the western-most gateway to the Gorge. This meant we’d already past home, but Corbett being 1000 feet above the freeway with no gas station, it seemed our safest bet to stay in the valley and go for gas. We dug around the car and came up with some change and handed it all to the attendant too tired to count it ourselves or to be embarrassed (Oregon to this day has no self-service gas stations). Clearly neither of us did any of the math (miles, time, dollars…) before setting off on this adventure—but then what 16 year old does that?

By far the most interesting group to visit Menucha in those days came every year from the Psychology Department of Oregon State University. I was able to find a reference recently to the actual class. It was buried deep in one on-line published doctoral thesis, “Counselling 577,” which means yes, I read the whole boring thesis. It was a class centered on “self-disclosure” encounter groups.  We thought they were hippies—which they were—but super interesting things went on while they were in residence. “Jonathan Livingston Seagull” was a thing then, and they would blast the movie soundtrack in the Great Hall on their own high-end stereo equipment and dance around with all the doors and curtains closed while staff would giggle in speculative wonder in the kitchen. I had read the book in high school, but honestly its message was lost on me, though I love Neil Diamond’s soundtrack to this day. It’s hard to think that he’s the same guy playing Vegas these days with his clumsy Vegassy stage presence.

One of the psych students took a liking to me and we began hanging out. He invited me to sit in on one of their “self-disclosure encounter sessions,” which I found super uncomfortable and “disclosed” nothing. He was a particularly hairy hippie with a big beard. Now days I would immediately peg him as a garden variety “bear” in gay nomenclature, but his clothes were much like those of the actors in Jesus Christ Superstar when they arrive on the bus–lots of fringe and bangles. He was much older than my 16 at 20-something when we met. To be fair he was very surprised when I told him I was 16 and I believe he was. I used to get into bars at that age while my older friends would get carded. He became good friends with the Knapps and was allowed to move into a basement room one summer.  We spent a good deal of time together, White Speedo boy, Hippie Bear and me, listening to Cat Stevens on his reel to reel in the basement of Ballard Hall. Hippie Bear had the requisite old Dodge hippie van and the three of us would head off on random road trips, once to the California border, just because. His family owned a cabin at Government Mineral Springs across the river in Carson Washington about 50 miles from Menucha. By a freakish coincidence my own mother’s family had also owned a cabin there years before and I was familiar with the place, especially how the heavily mineral sparkling water tastes in Kool-Aid and pancakes from childhood picnics.  We would visit my mother’s old cabin where you could still read carved inscriptions in heavy wood benches built by her father—the grandfather I never knew.

White Speedo boy and I spent a long weekend at Hippie Bear’s cabin one summer, where we spent evenings by the fireplace talking about I-Ching and other hippie psycho-spiritual stuff. While just a year earlier a group of us had read aloud to each other from the 70’s block-buster book “Seth Speaks” and truly believed in spirit guides and reincarnation, I had quickly rebounded into my natural state of cynicism. By the time of this fireside threesome chat I was finding this spiritual crap to be just that, so I decided to up the ante by fabricating my own little ghost story about how frightened I was of an old black rocking chair in the corner of the room that was giving off an evil vibe. I got everybody on edge—including myself—in that dark cabin lit only by the fireplace and some candles. I took the charade as far as pretending to force myself to sit in the haunted chair, but being unable. If there’s one thing closeted gay youth do well it’s make stuff up.

The next day we floated the perfectly-sized-for-inner-tubes Wind River, after which we were nearly frozen through and White Speedo boy and I spent the afternoon playfully rolling around in an upper bunk to keep warm while Hippie Bear was out collecting wood or something. Later that evening Hippie Bear apologized for walking in on us, which we hadn’t really noticed, implying that more had been going on under those blankets than actually was—oh how I’d wished. That night Hippie Bear taught White Speedo Boy and me to make bear calls out of a #10 tin can with a rope pulled through a hole in the bottom. With the can held in both hands by one and the rope gripped tightly and pulled with a damp cloth by another, the contraption sounds exactly like a menacing Black Bear. We then climbed into the hippie van and headed to a nearby campground and began terrorizing the campers. It worked better than I would ever have expected. We stayed out of site in a dry streambed as campers searched with flashlights for the marauding beast. When we heard a man start yelling about getting his rifle from his truck, we began to panic and doubt our chances of a clean escape. Somehow we slithered through the muddy creek bed, ran to the van and raced off with no one the wiser, and another adventure-box checked.  White Speedo boy was/is straight of course, alas. However, years later I got a weird kind of love letter from Hippie Bear man, who had of course never interested me. I guess he waited till I was of legal age to make his feelings known, but I had always known, and frankly I had always played him. As is the case in many intergenerational relationships the power does not always lie with the older party.

New young staff would arrive every summer break, and one year I returned to Menucha from school to find a very small but larger-than-life character added to the kitchen staff. She was a very bubbly, very blond teen girl who skipped happily but awkwardly through her work and loved absolutely everyone. She had the most perfect name to match her demeanor, Heidi. We would become close over several years that would last beyond our time at Menucha. She was the quintessential fag-hag—and I don’t mean that in a nasty way—there is just no better way to describe a girl so desperate for love and dance partners. She had a funny way of half running/half skipping as she hurried about the kitchen. Naively I mentioned it to Zelda Mae the cook one day in a sort of “isn’t that cute” way. Zelda became very stern and pulled me into the walk-in cooler and shut the door. There she explained that among Heidi’s several other birth defects she had only one leg. I was as naïve about those things then as I was about her severely bleached hair. I still assume any head of hair that’s not green, pink or blue is natural.  I would later find myself pulling clumps of her damaged hair through tiny holes in a plastic cap with a special hook to create a frost and tip effect. I got to apply the scalp-burning white paste with disposable plastic gloves and cover the whole mess with still another plastic cap to await the magic.

She was a year younger than me and had moved to Corbett with her alcoholic mother and little brother after a divorce to build a new house. I think she became frustrated that people around her, including me, either didn’t know she had a prosthetic leg or were too embarrassed to mention it. One day she ended the awkwardness by coming to work with a very large nail driven through her jeans into her right shin, and proceeded to skip about the kitchen enjoying our reactions. That was typical of Heidi over the next several years that I knew her. She either showed incredible strength of character or deep depression and insecurity that manifested itself in terrible self-destructive ways. I liked Heidi’s mother in the way a teenager would be attracted to a train wreck. She was a very stylish train wreck in her vintage Mercedes who clearly didn’t think of herself as a grownup. One night the three of us got drunk together and she proceeded to tell me the story of Heidi’s unhappy birth, complete with a recount of her own first words at seeing her baby for the first time: “kill it.” I was 17 then and mortified, no doubt crying throughout this story, which her mom had clearly told with rehearsed emotion many times before. It was a bit like those tortured scenes in “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolf.” I thought I was being tested in some sick game–“snap”–and I thought she was making the story up as she went–“snap”–except that of course I’d seen the physical evidence.  Heidi was 16 at the time and outwardly un-phased, having heard and lived the story herself. The leg wasn’t the only deformity, and while her father had left them, Heidi could never hate him as she believed him to be the reason she was alive. She got more comfortable with all of us at Menucha and even lived there for a while in an apartment called the Hideaway—another stray taken in by the Knapps. I remember looking around the grounds for her one summer afternoon and spotting her leg standing on its own next the pool. She was a very good swimmer without it. White Speedos wasn’t around much by then and Heidi and I became pals. We even fucked once, though I was so high that anything or anybody could have had that, though I felt bad because I knew she felt more for me. Somehow we stayed friends even after Menucha, even after fucking, and even after I met Dale, my first true love, which would last from 1979-1983. Heidi was our best friend, but by then she was living a “Looking for Mr. Goodbar” life, fucking someone different every night and having casual abortions. She became seriously bulimic and very thin. When Dale and I had our little house on SE 47^th we invited her to move in with us for a time, and while we still had some good times together her illness became more than I could handle. Accidentally kicking a towel-covered plastic bucket in the basement one day and having vomit slosh onto my foot became the final straw and I asked her to leave. I felt awful about this for years and I never saw her again. I wish her the best, but fear the worst. I actually found a book once that was dedicated to “Heidi the girl with a nail in her leg.” I wrote to the author, but she too did not know Heidi’s whereabouts. Google and Facebook have been of little help.

Many of the events of those 5 years get mixed up in my memory, three high schools, working summers, my original adopted family and two seasons of horse shows with the wife of a dentist, 3 junior colleges, and even a stint on the high school football team. It’s hard to imagine how there was time for it all and how it fit together sequentially is blurry, but Menucha always stands out as kind of a home-base—a constant with growth and change swirling around it. The difference between this place and my real home is that it accepted and expected change. For 2 seasons I even lived on the grounds in a small apartment attached to what had originally been dog kennels then used as a pottery studio, a long empty building with low swinging doors that would blow in the wind as the only reminder of its former life. The building, set within a craggy old apple orchard, was some distance both horizontal and vertical from the main house, which stood at the center of the grounds. The tiny apartment had traditionally housed the annual summer lifeguard, though I don’t know if anyone but me ever wintered there. The room was just large enough for a bed and a side table that I made from bricks and a thick slab of old wood, like a short section of a heavy barn beam, lightly coated in clay dust from the pottery studio. Under the wood between the brick end columns I placed a small electric heater, which was never enough, and on top a clock and a large candle—and that was it. It was monk-like living. One night I fell asleep with that large candle still burning, resting directly atop the dried out section of wood, and I awoke the next day around noon to discover the entire wood block charred black, the clock melted. My little side table made of junk had burned and smoldered through the night right next to my head, but I did not wake. The wood was deeply cracked and blackened all over, but only the question of why it had stopped burning remained lingering in the air—no smoke, and barely any smell. I was curious to know what had happened. Was the fire—and me—deprived of oxygen in that tiny room to the point of being extinguished? I didn’t share the story for fear of being thought too irresponsible to be trusted there on my own—I was 17 or just turned 18.  More dead brain cells.

There was no toilet at the kennels; that required a climb up 100 steps and into the basement of the mansion reached through a long service tunnel under the lawn. There was a sink however, and strangely enough even hot water, which I would never have discovered on my own as it took a good 5 minutes to reach that little sink from the boiler 100 yards away. If the weather was dry I could drive my 1972 red beetle down a dirt road into the orchard, otherwise it was a long decent down wooden stairs through the woods to reach my little haunted kennel room. I usually made this decent running as fast as I could, knowing the shape and size of each roughhewn step by heart, and then slamming and locking the heavy solid 1920s door behind me not to emerge till daylight. One moonlit night after a quick flight down I was met face to face by a large buck deer, which at first scared the shit out of me, but quickly that fear turned to comfort as his presence reassured me that no real danger was awaiting me from predators, or monsters. From then on his little herd became welcome friends in the orchard. It was when they were missing that I would get nervous. Coyotes were everywhere with their high pitched yelps that sound like children in distress, and once I saw an injured Cougar limping through the woods below my little orchard with its giant tail streaming behind. The rumor was always that Julius Meier raised Dobermans on the estate, a story that I always assumed was intended to frighten me until I recently found a picture of the family with two Dobermans clearly visible.

My red beetle was named Marc for my first schoolboy crush—the original blond. They have all been blonds. Memories would be made in that little red piece of garbage that I bought at a sleazy dealership on 82^nd avenue, having noticed it only for the giant teddy bear sticking out of the sunroof. Minnie Ripperton would play on the cassette deck that I added, the good Minnie Ripperton, not just the “Lovin You” Minnie that most people know. She had one song that ended with a very high-noted “Marc, I’m calling you…” which became the VW’s theme song. I had no idea that she had a son named Marc, or that her daughter would become SNL’s Maya Rudolph, but I would soon be deeply saddened by her young death from breast cancer in 1979, and will forever defend her music against her many haters. The blond Mark was the reason I stayed on the high school football team my freshman year. Besides being extremely loyal and cute as a bug, he had a habit of falling asleep in my lap on those long late-night bus rides home from away games. I would stroke his silky blond hair ever so discretely, somehow making the whole ridiculous sham of football worthwhile. Unfortunately adolescent closeted gay boys make terrible friends—always afraid to get too close. Marc the beetle had some nasty habits, like windows that couldn’t be defrosted, tailpipes that would fall off, requiring me to steal one off a similar model (easily done by hand) but worst of all, a sunroof that didn’t close completely. This last defect was a real problem on those late nights when I would drive into the orchard at Menucha to park outside my little room at the kennels after a long drive home from downtown Portland cruising around 3^rd and Taylor. If I would forget to park facing downhill, and it would rain overnight, the entire headliner would fill with water that would come gushing onto my head and lap as I soon as I started to back out the next day.

MEIER & FRANK

The influence of the Meier family and their retail and political empire reached into the crevices of Oregon’s history in the first half of the 20^th century, written and unwritten, including that of my own family. Everyone of a certain age knows what “meet me under the clock” means with regard to the downtown Meier & Frank store, but what I did not know that summer day in 1973 in the Meier’s former greenhouse was that my grandmother Mirrelle Petriquin had visited Menucha more than once in the 1930s for Meier & Frank company picnics. She knew for example about the earlier log cabin that had become infested with termites to be torn down and replaced by the current 1927 mansion, and probably much more about the place that I never got around to asking her. My grandparents had in fact met while both working at the large downtown department store that made the Meier and Frank family dynasty what it was until bitter family feuding tore the store apart in the 1960s to be sold off to a chain more profitable for its shareholders, but a lesser store in so many other ways. I’ve read that the retail world jovially referred to the west coast as four markets: San Francisco, Los Angeles, Seattle and Meier & Frank, which had grown to half a dozen large stores and dominated Oregon.  Grandma was an elevator operator and grandpa—who I never met—a carnation-wearing “floorwalker.” He was much older than she, which created a rift with her own father; my great grandfather Emile the minister, who would ultimately outlive Fred his disowned son-in-law, my grandfather.

I remember Meier & Frank as a great department store with its animatronic Christmas window displays and its Santa’s workshop with a monorail that carried children around along the ceiling. Visiting Santa there was as close to the movie version in A Christmas Story as I imagine any department store would have been in the 1960s. Even when I too did the inevitable and went to work at Meier & Frank in 1979, long after its sale to May Company, tales of the store’s legendary customer service were part of our training. We were taught to accept a return of virtually anything. If no manager was available to approve it, to slip into a stockroom, wait a moment and emerge happily willing to give the customer whatever they wanted. Metal charge cards were still around, and the old women who had them would never give one up for plastic. We heard the story of a man returning a hose not sold at the store in 40 years and getting… well something for it. From 1979 to 1989 I worked at three Meier & Frank Stores off and on to pay my way, oh so slowly, through college. The store’s glory days are epitomized by two great estates built by sons of founder Aaron Meier and his partner Sigmund Frank: Fir Acres in the southwest hills of Portland built by Aaron Meier Frank, now Lewis and Clark College; and the other being Menucha, the 102 acre summer retreat of Julius and Grace Meier, now owned by Portland’s First Presbyterian Church. Both these men had reputations that could be called robust, the former ran off to Europe with his young secretary, while the latter became governor of Oregon, hosting both Hoover and FDR at Menucha, presumably spending some of that time in the hidden “Pub Room” in the basement with its secret bar opened by the touch of a button belbow the fireplace mantel. Actually the hidden stairs were quite steep so probably only Hoover would have seen this room. The Meier and Frank families inter-married rendering subsequent generations’ surnames more than a little confusing, and by the third generation the department store dynasty ripped itself apart in a battle over control vs. sale, and as all the other great American department stores before and since, it was ultimately sold. It’s Christmas time as I write this and of course Miracle on 34^th has been running since Thanksgiving with its constant references to Mr. Macy. A little known piece of trivia is that the R. H. Macy who takes the stand to testify that he believes in Santa Claus had in fact died in 1877 and the store was sold to the Strauses in 1895, the very real couple who refuse to separate, remaining aboard the sinking Titanic in another much later movie. Today Meier & Frank stores bear the flagship Macys name under the ownership of Federated Department Stores. A good deal of historical information is available about the Meier & Frank Company, including a chapter in “Merchant Princes, An Intimate History of Jewish Families Who Built Great Department Stores,” but even that book lacks the kind of intimate detail one would want after such a close personal brush with their beloved home.

Julius Meier bought the property he would name Menucha in 1914 around the time the Columbia River Scenic Highway was being built through the Gorge to “rival the great highways of Europe.” A ship captain named Painter owned the land before, having fled Hawaii to escape the leper colonies. Some of his old orchards remain. I heard this story many times but never knew whether that exactly meant members of his family actually had leprosy. University archeologists found some graves in the late 70’s and marked and documented them. I only recently found a reference to the Painter farm being on the current site of the Kennels. Thankfully, I never knew that while I was living there or “Night of the Living Leper” might have become my own personal nightmare. There are other great estates and old roadhouses hiding in the woods all along the “Scenic Byway” of the old highway as it makes its way around and through the damp cliffs and waterfalls of the Columbia Gorge.  One very mysterious one is now a convent, picturesquely sited in front of Coopey Falls, the only one of the Gorge’s famous waterfalls on private property to my knowledge. You can see it from the trail that leads from what’s left of a town called Bridal Veil up to Angel’s Rest, a rocky promontory 1500 feet above the Columbia, which also happens to be the final resting place for the ashes of my one-time lover Dale. The Mediterranean style mansion was built by a Portland business man about which little can be found, while the rest of Bridal Veil was an old lumber mill town whose few remaining company houses back when I was a kid were home to some of my poorer classmates at school, but have since all been torn down by the Trust for Public Land. Another Estate lays just west of Menucha, now also a church-owned camp, and also not apparently much interested in the pre-church history of the place. Several of the great structures of the Gorge were design by Portland’s premiere turn of the century architect A. E. Doyle, including the early log house at Menucha and the great stone lodge at Multnomah Falls. I have not found any published comprehensive collection of these monuments, and some of them are no doubt hidden in the forests or otherwise lost in obscurity. The greatest of the Gorge mansions will always be in full naked concrete view as it is perched high on the Washington State riverbank of the Columbia on the east side of the Cascade Range, where forest yields to desert and there is nothing to screen it. Maryhill Castle (Museum) has its own bizarre history of egos and queens, however, the Sam Hill who built it is not the origin of the phrase “where in the Sam Hill…” as we were told as children. It’s only worth mentioning here because I imagine that somehow all these people, the big-dreaming wealthy and powerful who made the great highway a reality must have known each other. Even Alma Spreckles whose beaux arts San Francisco mansion is now the home of romance novelist Danielle Steel, played a role in the completion of Maryhill and the collection it houses. It is today a quirky but important museum with the largest collection of Rodin outside of Paris, even though one could certainly wonder “where in the Sam Hill?” as it protrudes from the rock seemingly in the middle of nowhere.  The Quaker town that was to grow around it never did.

Prior to the highway completion, the Meiers would travel to Menucha by steamship up the Columbia, docking at Rooster Rock. The wagon road leading up to the estate is still hikable though heavily overgrown. The basalt tower now known as Rooster Rock, which juts out of the river directly below Menucha’s pool, has its own colorful history starting with its name. Even the Indian name for it was phallic in meaning, and long before the prim Portland Woman’s Forum had it renamed, it was called “Cock Rock.” Lewis and Clark mentioned it in their not so flattering description of the Gorge’s ugly black cliffs. I remember struggling as a child to find a rooster in its shape, though from one angle it’s kind of there, but why would the Indians have named the monolith for a domestic bird of European origin? Ironically Rooster Rock State Park is home to the nation’s first official nude beach, but I didn’t become a regular there until shortly after leaving Menucha and meeting Dale, who took me there on our first date to, um, get naked—ah the 70s.

The main house appears modest in that undecorated historic revival style of the 1920s. Rather than A. E. Doyle who designed the first log house at Menucha, as well as the stone lodge at Multnomah Falls and the 17-story terra cotta downtown Meier & Frank store, the architect chosen to design the second house was Herman Brookman the designer of Portland’s domed Temple Beth Israel. In the late 1980s I dug out the original pencil on vellum (or was it linen?) drawings for the house from the archives at the University of Oregon Library where they had been bequeathed by Brookman. I wanted to see especially how hand carved details like rams heads were drawn in an architectural set—crudely, was my answer. The estate had all the most modern conveniences of the roaring 20s, including an extensive telephone intercom system which still bears labels like “pool,” “grill” and “Mrs. Meier’s Room.” The Great Hall is the showpiece of the house with its rusticated open wood beams each hand carved to look like, well… wood; its giant stone fireplace, its wrap-around second floor balcony and its wide covered porches. Each king post ceiling truss is supported atop the carved head of a ram with spiraling horns, the symbolic significance of which I never heard and still don’t know. The structure was a simple shed form with trusses that in what always seemed like a grand engineering mistake spanned the room in a north-south orientation. I’m no engineer, but that would seem to make the column-less space vulnerable in the east-west orientation. With a giant flat windowless wall facing directly east, perched atop a cliff in the Columbia Gorge, it would seem the house would be less than indestructible in Corbett’s 100 mph winter winds. Even our own barn at home, with essentially the same construction type, was rotated 90-degrees, and while it groaned and shook all winter it never blew over. In fact a massive cable ran from the top of the east-facing gable of Menucha’s Great Hall to be anchored in a concrete dead weight buried in the lawn. I always wondered exactly when someone had first realized the need for this and what it might have sounded like at that moment. That’s how I remember the east wind from childhood in the Gorge, as sound.

The house was neither luxurious nor spare and I’m sure that was the intent, though rumor had it that Grace Meier was not a fan of the social isolation and rustic living, in spite of numerous servants. Thick wood paneling of vertical solid boards lined all the walls and ceilings. There was no plaster anywhere on the estate, and the paneling was finished with an opaque stain that came in a few different shades, including a sort of green in the master bedroom, making the whole of the estate’s interiors rather gloomy.  Little oddities added to the architectural charm like bathroom scales built into the walls and the peephole in Mr. Meier’s bathroom medicine cabinet that allowed him to view directly into the Great Hall through a bookcase to monitor his daughter’s modesty and the propriety of her male guests. After all any house guest who found himself all the way out here in the 30s would by necessity be an overnight guest. A portrait of Grace and her two daughters hung over the mantel piece, later replaced by the new owners with a heavy wood carving, representing—well I’m not sure, but abstract human forms no doubt serving a Christian God in some capacity. The hidden Pub Room was the most mysterious room, though it also showed up clearly labelled on all the telephones, so obviously the governor wasn’t expecting to be raided by the Feds. The house was built during prohibition, but maybe the whole secret bar thing was just all in good fun. There was a very real wine cellar though. I suppose there would have been actual speakeasies and inns of various repute along the Scenic Highway and its remote offshoots in those days—something else to research. Sadly what might have become the greatest feature of the house was never finished, though it would not have been a unique feature for a great roaring 20s house as exemplified and exaggerated in the movie “Gatsby.” Directly under the large wood plank floor of the Great Hall the concrete basement floor dips down another four feet in what looks like a large indoor pool. That is not however what the pit was intended for. At the back of the towering chimney of the Great Hall fireplace at the second floor balcony is a large arched niche with some curious round brass plates covering holes in the floor but otherwise empty. I once had the good luck to be invited inside the grand old house on NE Klickitat Street and 35^th in Portland’s Alameda neighborhood, a house my mother used to drive us past when we had doctor appointments nearby in “Hollywood.” For whatever reason we kept the same doctor after moving 25 miles away, and I kept that same doctor until I was 21 who had delivered me, at which point the relationship was just plain awkward. That big eastside house, having been built by some business man in the teens to prove that the east side could compete with the west for grandeur, was by the late 70s owned by two old antique dealer queens, who serenaded me that day with their mighty pipe organ. The pipes were in the basement, filling the big house with grand, spine tingling sound. The keyboard was at the top of the stairs, exactly what had been intended for Menucha, but never installed, or so I was told. There was an old Victorian pump organ though, which I liked to play when no one else was around–not the same.

The grounds were once lavish, maintained by White Speedo boy’s grandfather and a crew of 30, but by the 1970s had taken on the character of ruins which made them even more romantic and surprising. Fountains that didn’t work, mature fir trees in what had been Alpine rock gardens, a grove of quite large Japanese Maples among native Douglas Fir, carefully crafted sets of stone stairs appearing randomly in the woods, a roseless rose garden and arbor and even a bathroom in the woods at the edge of the cliff above the river. Many non-native plant species were no doubt once cherished but now go unnoticed and overcrowded. Very recently I saw in China a tree that had always puzzled me at Menucha. A very large but soft weeping version of what looks like an Atlas Cedar, with clumping needled branches that hang straight down and move like a willow. I still don’t know what it is as I only got the name in Chinese. Only when you see a historic photo from the 20s can you realize that the entire hilltop was made over by men, now largely reclaimed by nature. Selective pieces of the grounds were maintained as gardens or lawn as a staff of 30 in the time of the Meiers dwindled to 3 or 4 part time workers under the ownership of the church. The interior maintenance too suffered for lack of funds as well as historical priority, and repairs are often shoddy or inappropriate. The reality of course is that the estate, like so many others, had quite early in its lifetime become a white elephant. It is the story of the 1920s and the Great Depression. While Meier & Frank remained financially strong through the depression, even serving as a bank when the banks were closed by the federal government, such a place as Menucha was not sustainable as a private residence. One could say the church saved Menucha from oblivion when they purchased it for $60,000 in 1950, a small fraction of what the main house alone had cost to build in 1927, or one could think of the whole episode as a sad tragedy—or both. Julius Meier died at Menucha in 1937. Who can say if things would have unfolded differently had he lived longer or had fewer children to fight over the family fortune.

The great Columbia River was dammed in the 1930s and construction of a new modern freeway began shortly after, leaving much of the old scenic highway–“a highway to rival the great highways of Europe”–to rot away in inaccessible disconnected dashes in the cliffs. As a child the Bonneville Dam was a frequent destination for family outings, the sturgeon ponds in the hatchery being my personal favorite. Shallow pools with no guardrails were home to some true prehistoric monsters. Black fish as big as 12-feet long, with their menacing exposed spines, glided slowly around the shallow ponds just inches from us kids. I could never swim in the Columbia without thinking about brushing up against one. As fascinated as I was by them then, I had no idea the symbolic significance of these big fish being in that particular place, just below the Bonneville dam. I would only recently learn that the elaborate fish ladders built for Salmon and trout and their migrations, and great fun to watch as kids, were useless to the Sturgeon who were unable to swim them. The Bonneville dam forever terminated the sturgeon’s historical spawning migration and they were never again able to reach further upstream.  Julius Meier was an advocate for public power at the time dams were being built on the Columbia and debate raged over who should control the electricity. In fact that is the single reason that he was pushed into becoming governor. It’s hard to fathom now that this was even a controversy given that the dams were built with public money under the New Deal. The federal government stepped in and the Bonneville Power Administration was created, ending the debate, but these giant dams brought death to a mighty river and its ecosystem that perhaps one day can be undone. Julius Meier died before WWII, but Menucha still bears witness to west coast fears of Japanese attack particularly on the dams. Who knows, perhaps with this big house being perched on the cliffs just west of Bonneville dam these specific fears were well founded. Remaining today in many of the windows at Menucha are “blackout” shades, thick black and opaque, to be drawn at night in fear of light from inside being visible to enemy aircraft. Few Americans are aware that a Japanese plane actually did bomb the Oregon Coast near Brookings in 1942 in hopes of starting a forest fire.

Menucha is a Hebrew name simply meaning “rest,” nothing more profound. Over the years that I was there, and today still on Menucha’s website, many more poetic versions of a definition for the word have been offered to guests, focusing on the sacred nature of this place of awakening, its “Ever-changing, renewing stillness” and it’s transformative waters, of which there actually are none, unless you count the swimming pool and a few artificial waterfalls. The true history of the place, a history worth telling, is heavily distorted through the lens of the church that owns it, which does after all have its own mission. I know there are few like me who think that places are often more important than their current human inhabitants’ use for them. If I didn’t think this I wouldn’t be a landscape architect. I don’t know if the various church groups that visit the place today, from fundamentalist Christians to crafters, quilters, calligraphers and scrap-bookers find enlightenment and transformation there, but in the second half of the 1970s I certainly did. It would require many more storytellers to fill in the gaps left here, but perhaps one day a more complete accounting of the history of this remarkable place, and others like it around the Gorge will either be told or lost; places swallowed up and repurposed, or left to rot into the loam of the wet Oregon forest of the Columbia Gorge.

P.S. Among other plant species unique to the gorge, there is a beautiful Dogwood (Cornus nuttallii ‘Colrigo Giant’) native only to these north-facing black basalt cliffs, peppered with waterfalls and hidden canyons. The Colrigo Giant Dogwood reaches taller and its blossoms are much larger than other Dogwood species. If this is a metaphor for anything, I’m not sure what. It just seems right somehow.

 

I just found a pretty good resource for Gorge History by specific location:  http://www.recreatingthehistoriccolumbiariverhighway.org/