On Oregon’s Rogue River, Writers Retreat to Homestead in Wilderness

John Daniel often writes poems and essays about wilderness, but in four years of living in Portland, his ears became hardened by city noises.

“The quiet alone, I’m finding, is helping,” said Daniel of his new home deep in the wilds of the Rogue River Canyon. “It’s not just a quiet of absence, but helped a little by birds and wind.”

Daniel is the third writer in as many years who has been chosen to experience the solitude and hard work that go with living on a remote 92-acre homestead that was carved out of the Klamath Mountains in southwestern Oregon in the 1880s.

It’s an experience that brothers Frank and Bradley Boyden enjoyed during boyhood summers.

“We get to meet a lot of really interesting people and make available an opportunity that is extraordinary,” said Bradley Boyden, a biology teacher from Colorado Springs, Colo.

Besides, it was just too difficult to hire a caretaker who was both reliable and willing to live so far from civilization, said Frank Boyden, an artist from the Oregon Coast community of Otis.

Frank Boyden is founder, with his wife, of the Sitka Institute for Art and Ecology, which offers residencies to artists from around the world. He originally thought the old homestead his parents used for a vacation home could be another retreat for artists. But he decided the location was too far from art supply sources.

“We thought, ‘Why not start something for writers? They don’t need anything,’ ” Frank Boyden said.

He contacted his old fly-fishing buddy, David James Duncan, author of “The River Why” and “The Brothers K,” who helped get the retreat going through PEN Northwest, a writers’ group.

“It’s certainly something I would have jumped at any time from my late teens into my early 30s,” said Duncan. He wrote his first book while living in Portland but now lives with his wife and three children in Lolo, Mont.

*

“For a lot of writers, when you are starting out you are just dealing with creating a lengthy space of time. This kind of thing is more valuable, in my opinion, than any program,” Duncan said.

“You can grow a great garden, chop wood, hike down to the canyon every day and get your exercise in an hour and spend the rest of the day wrestling with great ideas.”

Hidden from the summer flow of whitewater rafters on the Rogue River, the homestead is accessible over twisting logging roads of gravel and red clay that pass through stark clear-cuts and dark forest. Yellow lupine, golden iris, red currant and wild mountain lilac bloom along the roadside. The final, jarring descent is over a mile of dirt road crossed with 81 water bars, small ditches cut to divert rain runoff.

The Boydens’ parents started packing in on horseback to fish and hunt along the Rogue in the 1930s. A surgeon from Portland, Dr. Allen Boyden came to the wilderness to recuperate from the stress of his profession. The couple bought an old homestead in 1968 and built a simple cabin with a deck overlooking a meadow with apple trees. After Boyden died, his wife, Margery, turned the place over to her sons.

The original clapboard house from the homestead is still standing, but unoccupied. There’s a small log barn with a rototiller inside, the caretaker’s cabin where the writer in residence lives and a pond that helicopters use to dip out water to drop on forest fires.

A big garden is protected from marauding bears and deer by a 6-foot fence topped by three strands of solar-powered hot-wire.

Langdon Cook, a writer in the master of fine arts program at the University of Washington in Seattle, spent seven months here last year. He chased bears out of the garden, watched a cougar while drinking his morning coffee, tracked down the nest of a pair of sharp-shinned hawks, went fly fishing for steelhead, and bushwhacked through the hills. He also wrote 200 pages of a novel on a Royal manual typewriter.

“You have to be at home with just yourself,” said Cook. “I found the work I did really useful in keeping a mental balance: chopping wood, putting up fence, digging water bars in the road. When I wasn’t writing my fiction, there was always something else to be done.”

Daniel is well known in environmental and literary circles as the author of a book of poems, “Common Ground,” and a collection of essays, “The Trail Home.” He’s taking over as chairman of PEN Northwest, and will help choose the next writer to live here.

Since coming this spring, Daniel has chopped wood, planted the garden and explored a little of the canyon, finding rusty old pipe left by gold miners long ago and a fire ring left by rafters a few days earlier.

Cooking is on a stove that will burn wood or propane. Light comes from propane lamps. Communication with the outside world is over a radiotelephone powered by generator. A battery-powered radio pulls in classical music and National Public Radio news.

“I’m remote, but still connected to my culture,” said Daniel.

Writing in longhand at an old gray Formica kitchen table with chrome legs that have a French provincial sweep, Daniel is working on a memoir, “Coming Toward Oregon,” and refining an essay on the 30th anniversary of the Wilderness Act. His new book of poems, “All Things Touched by Wind,” is due out soon.

“I write at the table I eat at,” Daniel said. “My regular propensity in the city is to be a night person, but here I want to use the daylight.”

The lack of electricity to power a computer for writing doesn’t bother him.

“Sometimes I can tell when a friend goes to a computer,” Daniel said. “He starts writing longer poems. Not better poems, longer poems.”