The soundtrack of small-town America can be heard in its cafés, where muted voices mingle with laughter while bacon sizzles on the grill. It is the music of everyday conversation.
And as rural life contracts it’s becoming difficult to find. Running a restaurant miles from any large town is a gamble often lost even in prosperous times.
So when you pass through Mitchell, east of Prineville and the Ochoco Mountains in central Oregon, you’ll be slightly amazed to find not one but three cafés.
There is, apparently, an unwritten rule that at least two of these will be Closed when you arrive. The Little Pine and Bridge Creek, rumored to be run entirely at their owners’ whims, were dark on my most recent trip through the area, which left The Sidewalk, now reopened after years of dormancy.
I didn’t expect to see the red plaid hunting hat that hung on a hook inside the front door, unclaimed, for a decade, but I was pleased that the counter stools, vinyl buttons of green and red, were still intact. A classic touch, though hardly anyone sits on them any more. Better to take a table by the window, which we did.
A rancher and his wife? girl friend? daughter? were at the next table talking about the weather. Five degrees that morning. Frozen pipes. Outside, he had a pump motor on the passenger's seat of his pickup, but he said he’d come back for her. Grinning. Unless she wanted to walk the short distance. “You won’t freeze.”
After they’d gone a local couple, elderly, came in, and then another man. Within minutes they were all chatting about someone they knew in common. I joined in when the last arrival said he now lived in Athena, in the northeastern part of the state—I’d been there several times shooting harvest pictures—and wasn’t a bit surprised he knows the same farmer.
Meanwhile, the waitress/cook/owner kept the coffee flowing. My fingers warmed up. And breakfast, right on cue, began playing in the background.
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