Logbook 5: Meet the author

Regardless and for better or worse, I, Denis Dedrow, am the compiler of the logbook for Lost Goat Coffee House. That's me, on your right, as depicted by my friend Dani Weiner, the best artist in Eden Hills.

Every reader is entitled to know at least something about his or her author. Readers of this Logbook think so, too, and some have written to ask for more information about “the writer,” as they have put it. To that end, I submit the following piece, begging readers to please forgive my self-indulgence.

I descend from families of distinction, but I have never amounted to much. It is the way of life. Genetics may claim predictive results in horse racing, but in human procreation, it apparently works differently. The blueblood-achievements of my ancestors had run their course when my parents married and produced their three children. My two sisters and I are by no means bad people, or even impaired; comparatively speaking we just didn’t discover our pathways to success. No book will record our contributions to society. We will not have led a great army to victory on the battlefields of Iraq. The TV news will not find our bodies beautiful nor our voices sexy. Our names do not appear in the columns of the daily newspapers of major American cities. We’re normal, maybe even less than normal.

My mother is a direct descendant of John Adams, the under-praised intellect of the American Revolution. My father traces his family to the French Enlightenment and such men of letters as Voltaire, Rousseau and Diderot. My family represents the elite of American and French intellectualism but for my sisters and me, life has bequeathed no silver spoon.

My father was a writer. Not the admired author of interesting novels or profound short stories, but an everyday journalist who compiled the police logs and covered the county fairs for local, small-town newspapers. Like a Guthrie character, Dad followed his dream. The jejune hope of a better job (doing roughly the same thing in yet another small town) kept my father on the move and my mother on edge. Her longing was for a stable life, anchored in a familiar place and revolving around her beloved garden, romantic novels and the children on which she doted. Ambition, especially that of an aspiring crime reporter, was something she had no ability to understand. They divorced when I was 12 and my sisters were 10 and 9.

The girls remained with my mother, and for family balance and some simulacrum of fair play, I was sent with my father. In 1961, his next job (the best yet, Dennis!) was in Yakima, Washington. I helped Dad load our station wagon with his meager possessions, and by the time we filled the 8-foot U-Haul, we had everything he owned and about twice what we needed to establish ourselves in a new town in search of a new life.

Except for the books. Dad had forgotten his most prized possession – his orange crate of literature. He prized his copy of The Complete Works of Henry Adams and Discourse on Inequality by Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He would have claimed to have been all right with leaving Voltaire’s Candide behind, but he would have lied. Although he detested its elitism, Dad considered Voltaire essential reading for a crime reporter for a major metro newspaper (which was just one career step away for him). His collection of Charles Dickens was hardly impressive, but to him it was priceless.

So Dad uncrated the books and told me to get in the car. Then he packed the volumes around my feet and in the recesses of the closed door, across the expansive seat of the Oldsmobile, and onto the raised hump the massive drive train. Although I had little room to move and not much more room to breathe, the mission had been accomplished. The books were with us.

The miles along Old Highway 99 unrolled slowly that summer in 1961. We crossed the Sierra near Mount Shasta, and pressed on past the wheat fields of Tule Lake. We admired the arrow-straight rows of the bean and potato fields around Klamath Falls, and tugged our way over the pass and into the high plateau south of Bend. On and on. I eventually wriggled free and found Dad’s paperback copy of A Tale of Two Cities. I propped my head between the door, John Ernst Steinbeck's East of Eden, and the velvety seat back of the ragged Oldsmobile, and I began to read. For Dad and me, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” too.

We settled into a trailer house near an apple orchard in Yakima, and Dad began his job as police beat reporter for the Daily Record. Six months later, we left for a better job in Chahalis, followed by a better job in Pendleton, followed by a better job in Snohomish, followed by a better job in Lincoln City, followed by a better job in Silverton. At the age of 17, my junior year at Linn-Benton Alternative School, I wrote a note to Dad, thanked him for everything he’d done for me, and filled a knapsack with a couple of books and a jar of peanut butter. I walked to the railroad yard, and when a southbound freight inched through town, I hopped on an open-doored boxcar and didn’t get off until it stopped in Stockton, California.

There’s not much else to report, at least insofar as readers of the Lost Goat Coffee House Logbook would be concerned. I rode freight trains and generally made do for the next forty years, picking fruit, cleaning sidewalks, and helping farm hands. In the year 2002, on the Fifth of November, I jumped off a train from Timberville as it slowed for Eden Hills, Oregon, and found my way to Lost Goat Coffee House, where I’ve been since. They gave me a few odd jobs and eventually asked me to keep this logbook for them. In return, I get enough money for food, free brew coffee, a place to stay in the back by the coffee roaster, and all the love and care a man of the rails could want. I’ve found my home, my place and my time, and it all suits me fine.