From West by Northwest.org Voices of Spencer Creek Norm's Notebook: The Story of the Spruce Tree, and Mosby Creek, a New Land Use "Lot Adjustment" By Norm Maxwell Jun 21, 2003 It is approaching the longest day of the year and I ran a hose to a five foot Sitka spruce that was starting to disappear into the privet hedge of clipped douglas firs I planted around the property line ten years ago. Sitkas don't grow around Lorane. This one came from my grandmother's 40 acres on the Siletz River, 120 miles to the northwest. They like moister conditions than these parts so I am careful to soak the roots of this one every couple of weeks during the summer. When I was four years old, my mother married Neil, my step dad. The greatest words I could hope to hear from then on were "Let's go to the ranch." This was as good as a 7 layer chocolate cake with lemon frosting and vanilla ice cream. One of the most powerful memories I have of the place was waking up in the back seat of the '54 Chevrolet. Dad had driven himself and me there one night from West Fir. The stars were blazing in the summer sky and I could look in the glass front of the turn of the 20th century house and see Neil talking to his brother, Casey, who was living there at the time. I couldn't hear what they were saying but I could tell that they were animated and happy to see each other. It was reassuring somehow and all was right with the world. I watched them for a long time from the car before I went inside. Gramma Pat was born in Norway above the Arctic Circle. Her given name was Astrid Benjaminson but when she came to Oregon, her teacher dubbed her "Pat" instead of that horrible foreign name and it stuck to her dying day. Family history has it that the Benjaminsons had left Norway after Grampo Conrad experienced a premature detonation in the copper mine he worked in. After the dust had cleared, he and a couple other unlucky miners were thrown in rough wooden boxes to be collected by next of kin. Grammo Gertine looked at the stiff and told the mine quack that her husband wasn't dead. The quack did not revise his opinion. So Grammo hired a dray and had the box hauled down to the railroad station. Sometime the next day, they arrived in Bergen--Gertine in the coach and Conrad in Baggage--and she hired another dray to haul Grampo to the hospital where she bothered people until somebody decided to humor the crazy lady with the dead man in the box. Son of gun. A doctor detected signs of life and Conrad was revived after being "dead" for at least 24 hours. He swore off mining and they sold their worldly goods in Norway. Gramma told me the name of the ship they made the passage to Ellis Island on but I forgot it. She was 14 years old and carried her guitar. She knew as much English as I know Norwegian. They came to Oregon as they had relatives here who would show them the ropes. Astrid and her husband bought the ranch before the Second World War for five thousand dollars. They had managed to juggle the paper and log the place and pay for it. I never met Kelly. He was killed in a logging accident before I was born. So was Lee, their oldest son. Kelly Hamar laughed at Gramma's Norwegian heritage. Eventually it came out that the name Hamar wasn't as Irish as Kelly had thought. There are two little towns in Norway by that name. The Winter Olympics were held in Hamar a few years back. Undoubtedly the name is derived from Thor's Hammer or something similar. What is an Irishman but a shipwrecked Norwegian? The Norwegian jokes died out in the Hamar household. When WW II broke out, Kelly had already served his bit in the Navy on the USS Pennsylvania in the 20s and was under no obligation to join up. Instead he chose to take his wife to Alaska and leave the kids with Conrad and Gertine who lived near Nashville, Oregon. Kelly and Pat worked for the Alaska Spruce Project on the Hooligan River getting out aviation quality spruce to build primary trainers in the States and ship to England where the De Haviland aircraft company built incredible twin-engined "balsa bombers" named Mosquitos that flew a little bit higher and a little bit faster than most German interceptors on their way to Berlin with four 500 pound bombs. They didn't show up on the radar of the day as well as conventional all metal aircraft either. If you didn't want to fight back then and were a skilled logger, ASP was a legitimate option. Kelly was a foreman and Gramma was a camp cook. I have the old '95 Winchester with shortened stock that she had as a camp bear gun. After the war, they moved back to the ranch and Kelly logged for a little while until his death in '47. Gramma started working in a drapery studio in Lake Oswego, near Portland, and driving to the ranch on weekends. In the early 60s she started building a tiny cabin as the old house filled with antiquities was just too worn and too much for her to manage and the pack rats had taken it over anyway . The old house was a veritable museum with records grooved on one side only and a wind-up victrola. I can still remember one of the records having a song about "Oh how I hate to get up in the morning...Oh how I'd rather stay in bed." There were old fishing lures and steel fish poles and tools and mink traps and "Big Little Books." There was a large combat knife made from the propeller of a Japanese airplane during the war not so long past in a kitchen drawer. The kitchen had a wood cookstove and a little refrigerator with a huge motor on top. Gramma told me that she used to heat the motor oil for the old cars she drove to Taft in the 30s on the stove in a bucket during winter. If you poured hot oil in a frozen T motor it would start much easier when you swung the crank. The house was a drafty pile in the winter but the kitchen was always cozy with the cookstove going. I was lucky to experience the home where Neil grew up. The battle with rats was a given. At an early age, I was running trap lines with mink traps when we came to visit. I caught furry tailed packrats mostly but also the scaly tailed variety. The "ranch" was mostly a typical coastal canyon forested with reseeded hemlock, western red cedar, a few doug firs and the odd spruce after being logged in the 30s. The nearest neighbor is a mile away. Bear Creek flows through the five acres or so of bottom land that can support a few head of cows. Elk and deer wandered freely. Bear Creek has its name for a reason. Cougars denned within a few hundred meters of the house at one time and wildcats, coons and beaver were common. The fishing in Bear Creek was amazing. Neil and I would walk down to the babbling brook and swiftly catch a dinner of voracious foot long cutthroat trout with an alder whip for a pole and worms for bait. I assumed that all fishing must be like this. I was sorely disappointed in later life. In the winter, the creek boiled with huge salmon fresh from the ocean, seven miles away. Giant Pacific salamanders would try to swallow your catch if you put it in the creek on a willow fork. Eventually, Gramma finished her cabin and a bulldozer pushed the old house out in the middle of the flat and she lit it off. There was a little mound of stuff that didn't burn for decades after that supported a clump of elderberries. would scramble up the creek to see how far I could go--sometimes fishing, sometimes not. It got steeper and darker and more rugged the further up you went. The creek ran beneath logging debris wedged between the rock walls in places and the salmon berry was thick in the spring. When I reached 16 years old, Mom and Neil divorced. I had been dropped out of school for a while by then and had nothing going for me so I joined the merry military as soon as I turned 17. When I returned to Oregon three years later, Gramma Pat had retired and was living at the little ranch at Bear Creek. I would come and hang out and cut/split/stack her firewood and subdue the brush when I wasn't encumbered with a job. The fishing was still good in the creek and there was always some sort of wildlife to watch. Gma would play her accordian on the porch sometimes in the evening and smoke Virginia Slims until she had her first heart attack. She had a nice garden in the sandy soil by the little creek that supplied water to the house and flowed under the driveway. For some reason the deer largely left it alone even though it wasn't fenced. Gramma enjoyed a good 15 years of retirement before she had to give up living in the boondocks by herself. She flew back to Norway at least three times and her cousins came to see Oregon in return. I would sleep in the basement when I visited and would fire up the woodstove in the morning if it was cold that sent heat blasting upstairs through a grate in the floor that swiftly got too hot to stand on. Gramma weighed 90 pounds soaking wet and stood almost five feet tall. There are two distinct races of Norwegians. One tall and blonde--the Benjaminsons and the Hamars are the other. She liked to take me to the Hamar Family reunions in Dallas (Oregon) where all the short people would nod and tell her "Yes, it is clear that Norman is a true Norwegian." in reference to my red hair and six foot height. We were careful to never let on that I was adopted. She enjoyed this joke immensely. Eventually she could no longer live at the ranch by herself and so she spent her last few years with Neil's sister in Boring. She lived to see me married and died soon after that. She was buried in Newport on the coast in the little family plot by Kelly, Lee and Casey. After her death, the ranch fell into disrepair. Punks discovered its secluded driveway and broke into the house to make sure there wasn't anything worth stealing. The police didn't care. I thought about calling in a stolen doughnut truck to see if that would help but never did. Neil would come and work around the place sometimes and I made it as often as I could but it just didn't work. The rats took possession of the cabin. I put a chain at the mouth of the long driveway and made the punks walk in to do their damage. Whenever I arrived I always carried a weapon, something with a 30 round magazine, and walked the last 500 feet up the driveway. I had always hoped to catch punks in the act of vandalizing the place so I could say "Have you seen the movie Deliverance?" or something else as clever. Eventually Neil and Linda fought over the sale of the ranch. It went legal and Linda prevailed and my favorite childhood place became the private retreat of a wealthy Californian. I will never meet my dad and brother there with a pickup load of tools and a chainsaw for a summer work party. I will never be able to ride a motorcycle down river from Siletz admiring all the little homes. The elk and deer don't care who thinks they own the place. Nor do the cougars. I'm sure the bears of Bear Creek still vacuum up the caddis fly larva off the rocks in the creek unconcerned about the transfer of paper. My last time there, I had packed out a couple elk with my old army buddy and was loading the remaining space in my truck with tools and memories. I knew I would never want to return with the ranch belonging to someone else. I sat on the tailgate in the cool November sun with Kelly's lamp in my hand. The lamp was made from an empty one pounder shell casing from the Pennsylvania with a well turned dummy projectile and set in a wooden base. Kelly had tapped all around little figures he had sketched in the brass and the effect was that of bas relief. He had created a mermaid and a sailor and an eagle with arrows and stars all around. It is a work of art. I wrapped it in a sweater and put it in the truck by Grampo Conrad's carved wooden sloop model of the kind he had fished in Norway. I took Neil's little honor flight trophy he won as a DI in the Air Force in the 50s and wandered through the tiny cabin taking bric a bac overlooked by the punks. I picked up the big log book that Neil had started when Gramma no longer lived there. Whenever anybody came to stay, they would fill in the date and what they did and repaired and saw. I left the door unlocked and ran back in the house a few times after changing my mind on the value of a cutting board Kelly had made 60 years ago and a pair of Sambo's mugs. The canyon had never changed. Neil can still point out where the old Indian trail to Siletz was before the road was built along the river. When he was a little boy, it was still in use and the river was the main drag. You floated up it on a rising tide and down on the ebb. The Stamper House in the film "Sometimes a Great Notion" is a few miles downstream. It is time to go. I decide against one more trolling for treasures through the little house and close the door. It is a sad time. I look down and see a little spruce seedling growing in the dirt fallen from the cut bank of the driveway. I pick up a rusty coffee can and pot it with a broken shovel. It is prickly like a porcupine. I will take it home with me and plant it by the shop. Norm Beyond Fire Road--Mosby Creek, the Battle Continues A few years ago I fought a developer and Lane County's Land Management Division to something a little better than a draw over the attempted development of the Siuslaw floodplain at the end of Fire Road near the village of Lorane. "Maxwell v Lane County & Developer" went through the county kangaroo court hearings process, to Oregon's Land Use Board of Appeals, to Oregon's Court of Appeals before three judges took a stand and reversed the rubberstamped development on one issue out of half a dozen that my lawyer presented them. I was pitted against a tag team consisting of a developer with a former county commissioner for a lawyer coupled with a Lane County staff lawyer paid by the Land Management Division to work with the developer's lawyer to smack me down. When the case progressed to the Land Use Board of Appeals, the developer dropped the former county commissioner and hired a former LUBA "referee" to represent him. I won the first round with the county hearings official but he "reconsidered" his decision when the LMD appealed his initial finding in my favor along with the developer. The LMD/developer complex won the final round at the county level. The Board of County Commissioners passed the buck to LUBA and the tag team won that round too. I prevailed at the Court of Appeals and the tag team didn't want to try appealing to Oregon's Supreme Court. To make a long story short, Fire Road didn't get developed but the three judges Wolheim, Linder & Presiding Judge Haselton declined to rule on some very important land use issues that need to be resolved. I shall try to limit this outburst to the Lane County "lot line adjustment" and resulting "migrating tax lot." I am not a lawyer and I will try to simplify this as much as possible. The State of Oregon defines a lot line adjustment as "the movement of a ('a' usually means one) common boundary line between two tax lots." Seems simple enough to me. My lawyer tells me that county land use policy may not be less restrictive than state law. In Lane County a "lot line adjustment" can shrink or expand a tax lot to any specifications a developer might desire to increase the density of local zoning to enable him to create more lots to build on and sell. They can even completely move a tax lot so no portion of its new, improved position touches any part of its original location. This defies even Lane County's own land use policy but it happened twice at Fire Road. The Lane County Land Management Division will run interference for the developer, insulating the "lot line adjustment" from neighboring landowners by not "noticing" it to them. The party line is that the lla is NOT a land use decision, and therefore is not subject to challenge or review. The Battle for Fire Road is over. It was a classic case of bayonet expansionism. The developer came probing into the neighborhood and hit something hard and unyielding. Instead of making millions of dollars, he made only an honest profit when he sold it in the original zoning and left. Most little people would have chased the developer to the mouth of dead end Fire Road and stood down. I joined a local land use group and sat through 12 of 13 interminable meetings on the LMD Task Force, formulating recommendations for the Board of County Commissioners with realtors, developers' land use "consultants" and LMD staff personnel. In the spring of 2002, our Number One recommendation to the Board was to make the LC "lot line adjustment" an official land use decision--noticed to and challengable by impacted neighboring land owners....not to mention getting into compliance with Oregon land use law. While I was in those TF meetings in the fall of 2002, The incredible LC "lot line adjustment" and "migrating tax lots" were hard at work at a new location south of Cottage Grove, perhaps 20 miles SE as the crow flies from Lorane. At least one of the "seed" lots used in the Mosby Creek development is triangular. Remember Oregon's definition of a lot line adjustment as the movement of A boundary line. Try that with a triangle. It can't be done. Only in Lane County. Although the developer moved much faster at Mosby creek than the one at Fire Road, some very positive things happened at Mosby that didn't happen at Fire Road. The neighbors who felt slighted at being left out of the loop petitioned their county commissioner and a LC compliance officer and both of them showed, covered by the local Cottage Grove Sentinel paper. I was completely unable to interest my CC, Anna Morrison at the time, to come out for a look see. Later, Fire Road was gerrymandered out of West Lane and into East Lane as part of redistricting the five commissioners' constituencies to be more equal in population. Cindy Weeldreyer, my new CC wouldn't show either. Fire Road did make the front page of the Eugene Register-Guard regional paper eventually, but it took a long time. The Mosby Creek neighborhood is well organized and led. The entire Fire Road Defense League is writing this story. It must be admitted that the name Fire Road has a solid ring to it. Try the Peaceful Valley Defense League on your tongue and you will see what I mean. Anyway, Commissioner Lininger and Compliance Officer Ward found many interesting things about the sudden development at Mosby Creek, across the street from the Row River Trailhead. There was no record of septic percolation tests performed in the former railroad scrapyard/sawmill site that is now host to two mo-beel homes. Nor did anybody do any toxic waste testing to see what might have escaped in the decades of industrial usage here. More importantly to this story, we have the same old lot line adjustments being abused here like at Fire Road--but with a new twist of pushing tiny Rural Residential lots into the industrial zoned RR yard and having the industrial zoning magically change into the more desirable Rural Residential zoning. Anything that isn't challenged in LC land use is automatically legal. A "lot line adjustment" isn't a land use decision and therefore cannot be challenged. So we are told. BUT, in 2002 the very same Oregon Land Use Board of Appeals panel of three "referees" who heard and rubberstamped Maxwell v Lane County in favor of the developer, heard the exact same mess of phony-baloney "lot line adjustment" nonsense in Warf v Coos County. This time instead of blindly approving it, they dug into the case and stated something to the effect that in a lot line adjustment, one line may be moved at a time and then the lot needs to be re-deeded. NOT the sudden service for developers we are accustomed to in Lane County. Again, I am not a lawyer and I encourage you to read Warf for yourself. It can be readily called up on Oregon's Land Use Board of Appeals 2002 web page. It isn't that long. See what you think. I certainly hope that Mosby Creek is the last battle for the Lame County "lot line adjustment." A lot of developers have made a lot of money using the lla with the aid of our LMD. Our Land Management Division is fee based which may explain why it works for developers and not you and me. Keep your eye on Mosby Creek. Norm Maxwell block captain (retired) Fire Road Defense League Visit Norm Maxwell's other writings at West By Northwest.org Norm's Notebook: Dead Cars and the Six Million Dollar Manx (Editor's note–Norm's "Dead Cars" story inspired a feature story in the Register Guard, "Heaps of trouble in the woods.") 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