I read your story on the who who’s of Wallowa County . All too true. In fact even more true with the discussion of the Nez Perce and the state plans for a park by Wallowa Lake .
My son is a logger, so your story was all too true.
The short story in question is The Wallowa County Who-Who, which first appeared in The Portland Review.
This story, and the earlier The First Stoplight in Wallowa County (published in Northwest Magazine before it folded), came out of my experience of two stretches of living/writing in Wallowa County in the 80s, one summer in a cabin at the lake and another in a boarding house in Joseph. This was before Joseph became the quaint artsy-fartsy tourist town it is today, when it still had the flavor of a small eastern Oregon ranching town. Local land owners were quite generous in renting to out-of-town writers, and those summers were ridiculously inexpensive. At the lake, I was working on my first hyperdrama (see What Is Hypertext?) and later on a new play. I hung out at Swede's Tavern in Joseph, which was the inspiration for Stop Light. Who-Who came a few years later, after I was back in Portland and settled into my urban routine.
Stop Light got great exposure. It made the cover of Northwest Magazine with a delightful painting by an eastern Oregon artist (I always wondered where the painting ended up). The story got almost as much regional notoriety as my earlier play on public television, Christmas at the Juniper Tavern. My decade of relative fame ha ha. I don't miss fame but I do miss, for lack of a better word, respect. I don't like strangers asking me if I've written anything since then, which happens now and again.
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