Bona-fide characters drink at the Lostine Tavern. You must have a definitive, long-established personality and you need a favorite beer. It’s like a name-tag or a birth mark. John, the horsepacker, drinks Hamm’s. They cost $1.50 in a can. Peter, the British mining engineer, drinks Moose Drool draught. Jim, the large man who talks a lot and very quietly – an odd combination, come to think of it – usually doesn’t drink much but today is his birthday so he’s having a beer, red. That’s Budweiser with tomato juice.
I’ll take a Moose Drool. I’m just visiting, but Pat and Dianna, the mother-daughter barkeep and cook, welcome me in, personality or not.
Lostine is in the northeast corner of Oregon where few people go and a few distinct mountain ranges swell out of the rolling landscape of golden farms and ranchland. The Wallowa Mountains rise south of Lostine, home to the Eagle Cap Wilderness and its alpine lakes and 9,000+ foot granite peaks. Nearby Joseph gets more attention for its chalet-style buildings and postcard perch beside Lake Wallowa. It’s also where Dianna is heading after closing down the tavern. She’s the third-ranked poker player in the state of Washington (originally from Spokane) and there’s a game in Joseph tonight.
The Lostine Tavern opened as a pharmacy and creamery. It evolved into a soda fountain and deli in the 1920s before becoming a tavern in the ‘40s. The original icebox cabinets sit prominently behind the beer taps, chilling the mugs and pitchers. The tavern stays open 363 days a year, seven days a week from 7am until the last customer leaves.
Pat says folks will call from hours out and order their ribeyes for an 11pm arrival. Pat obliges. She hand-cuts the meat and the potatoes for French-frying. She has twelve great-grandchildren and has lived from Lostine up to Wasilla, Alaska, having worked in a post office, logging yards, as a longshorewoman, motel maid, and cook. (Yes, she met Palin, when she first ran for mayor.) Dianna and Pat stand side-by-side, elbows on the bar, smoking cigarettes like professionals.
I eat a 16oz rib-eye and drink my Moose Drool. As the night winds down, Peter and I stack stools on the tables and help with trash clean-up. Dianna gives me another beer for my effort. The following day I wake up early in my truck parked in Peter’s driveway. I spend the day hiking a long loop in the Eagle Caps, a foot of new snow in the valleys and only deer, elk, squirrel, and cougar tracks ahead of me.
John is loading his horses into his truck when I make it back to the trailhead. He’s returning from two nights setting up a winter camp high in the mountains. He gives me a lift down the hill, cursing the son-of-a-bitch icy road threatening to slide us and his towed trailer full of seven horses into a mess of horizontal pain-in-the-ass shitshow at the bottom of a son-of-a-bitch ditch. We make it down to the Lostine Tavern. Dianna welcomes us with a Moose Drool and a Hamm’s.
DIANNA and PAT
