the hotdog stand

stolen from the mule



Gold Hill shares a causeway along the Rogue River with the railroad tracks and the old highway. The old highway got its name when the Freeway was built on the other side of the river. The train comes through a few times every day, hauling strings of cars between Medford and Grants Pass. Local stuff. We have two engineers around here. You can tell them apart on account of how one of them pushed a car off the tracks last year in the fog, and so now he pretty much sits in the horn all the way through town. The town itself has one main street and a few residential streets. We have a good elementary school, but the kids go to high school downstream about five miles, in the town of Rogue River. Some developer put in a housing tract five years ago. It was met with so-so enthusiasm. Both houses were sold, but I don’t think that idea will fly again around here anytime soon.



Down at the upstream end of town the river takes a hard turn to the north. This is good because the old road and the railroad both have bridges there, right over a good swimming hole, and a few hundred feet upstream from a sandy beach. The sandy beach is a good thing. Everybody likes to park near the bridges. Patti’s Kuntry Kitchen is about 200 feet from the bridge. This is a good thing for Patti, and for many of the summer river rats. But the shirt-shoes-service policy and the 200-foot walk across hot ground littered with goatheads is a bit offputting to many of the younger river rats.



That brings me to the Hot Dog Stand, located right along the river, between the railroad tracks and the old road. There used to be an English double-decker bus parked there, which was an apartment on the top floor and one of those expensive coffee stands on the bottom floor. It was occupied by an actual Englishman and his American girlfriend for several years. They leased the property from Patti, who owns the Kuntry Kitchen. One day the Englishman and his girlfriend drove off in the double-decker. Sometime later a local woman put up one of those portable canvass carports in its place. She set up a neat little hotdog stand there. Hotdogs, sodas, stuff like that. Naturally all the barefoot river rats liked that idea, and it is to be admitted that many adults frequent her establishment, too.



She’s a tall person, in her early thirties, and, spectacularly healthy, in a tawny, jungle goddess sort of way. I find her charming and guileless, and don't consider her backless sideless bibless overalls to be an exhibitionistic affectation as much as a comfortable way to address the summer heat. I don’t go in for that sort of thing, mind you, but you can’t help but notice, even when you are driving by at normal traffic speeds. Normal traffic speed used to be around 50 miles per hour, even though it’s a 30 mile per hour zone, but lately, drivers have come to their senses, and go a lot more slowly when they approach the hotdog stand. Some say their sense of civic responsibility has kicked in. I say their eyesight has kicked in. Which brings me to the train.



RedBud and I were in the café the day before yesterday eating supper. Now, I would have been happy to just catch a quick snack, say, a hotdog and a soda, but RedBud wanted a more substantial meal, so we went to the café. Anyhow, the train came down the track from the direction of Grants Pass. You could tell it was the guy who’d pushed the car off the tracks. You could hear him trying to stop the train a mile away. He’s a good driver, stopped the engine directly next to the hotdog stand, hopped off, got a hotdog, pretended to count his change thirty or forty times, hopped back on, took off down the track.