Adventure Jeep

My Dad had a wild side to him that needed an outlet, so shortly before we moved from California to Oregon in the summer of 1963, he bought a large blue canvas tent and a green Jeep with a canvas top and no doors. That green Jeep took us into many a wild and untamed wilderness, which seemed pretty exciting to me and my three younger brothers, but caused my Mother untold worries.

To the west of Melrose, where we lived outside of Roseburg, there is a mountain range called the “Callahan”. That name conjured up visions of the wild, wild west in my imagination, because we spent many a long day up in those hills exploring “where no man had gone before”, or so we thought.

The four of us kids would sit on a hard bench seat that Dad built in the back of the jeep (it didn't come with a back seat at all) and as soon as he turned off the paved highways to climb the dirt and gravel logging roads we had to hang on to anything we could, which was sometimes just each other. The ride was rough and bouncy and of course there were no seat belts.

While exploring the Callahan, I'm not sure if Dad had any particular destinations in mind, but it seemed to me he would drive just about anywhere he thought he hadn't been before. It was all about discovery. If the road didn't go where he wanted it to, he would cut “cross country”. Sometimes a stream bed became our road (we always liked that part!). If there was a fence, it wasn't beyond him to push it out of the way or even cut a lock to continue on his journey. “No one has been up here for years!”, he would say, as if that made it okay. Somehow it did, I guess, because after all, we were just exploring and not hurting anything. At least that's what I told myself.


Sometimes the road would seem like only a narrow pathway clinging to the side of a wall, with a bottomless canyon over the other edge. When Dad would get to a particularly treacherous spot like this, we would all get out while he walked back and forth a time or two, then cheerfully announce, “We can do it!” Mom would tell us kids that we could NOT get back in the jeep until he reached a safer spot and then we stood by to watch as he maneuvered through the danger zone. I remember worrying that he would crash down the mountain, and then what would we do? We were miles up in some lost wilderness with no means of communication. As Mom stood there breathless, with four young children near the edge of a cliff, I'm sure she cursed my Dad more than once.

During the mountain adventures Dad would tell us to keep our eyes open for Conks. We only knew it as some kind of “bump” that grew out of the side of the fir trees. He said people would pay good money for them, and we collected a few. I don't remember ever hearing if he found anyone to buy them, however. We often saw deer along the way, too, but hardly ever any other people.

So it would come as a surprise to me that we found a couple very old, tumble-down homesteads up in those hills. The windows and doors of the house would be gone, the house empty except for trash, and the stairs so rotted that we didn't dare go up them to see what was on the second floor. Outside would be tired, overgrown apple trees hidden in the grasses and sticker bushes. I wondered a lot about the kind of life that some family must have had in such a secluded place so far from “civilization”.

Occasionally we would go adventuring with our cousins who lived nearby that also had some kind of four wheel drive vehicle. Amazingly, Dad and Uncle Howard would be even more daring than usual, because if one of them got stuck, the other could gleefully hook up a “winch” and pull them out. I think they loved that part best of all. Seemed like it happened a lot, anyway, and the men were always laughing about it.

The jeep had it's share of tamer adventures, too. That's when the big blue tent came along and we would go camping. Or maybe we'd be challenging the sand dunes over by the coast. (Lots of good “winching” fun over there!). That green Jeep was my Dad's way of having fun and getting his wiggles out, and we kids were just along for the ride. And what a ride it was!

The Jeep eventually ended up crashing down a mountainside and landing almost into the Umpqua River. My Dad was driving it alone to work one morning, and swerved to miss hitting a deer. The Jeep hurtled off the road and rolled down over and over until it smashed against a tree next to the river. At the first bump, Dad bailed out. Remember, there were no doors or seat belts in that vehicle. He claimed forever after that if he had been belted and shut inside he would have died in the wreck. And he's probably right. He came home without a Jeep that day, but it wasn't many days later that he pulled into our driveway with another one...and it was bright PINK! Not much exciting happened in the pink Jeep that I remember...and it later got traded in on a boat. That was the beginning of new kinds of adventures and thrills!