Day 17 - Brogan & Vale, OR - 342 Miles from Home
- Esther Lisa Tishman
- Jul 20
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 21
I met Matt Davila today. "We love Vale! We moved here from Elko, Nevada. That was not a good place to live." BUT, here, Matt tells us, things are quiet, the town is quaint, folks are older, and it's a great place to raise kids. "The schools here are AMAZING." On the other hand, he shares with an apologetic shrug - a sort of go figure gesture - his house's ceiling just got split open by lightning.
On July 4th, almost exactly as we were arriving at our very first stop on this pilgrimage, lightning struck Matt's home. "I thought it was fireworks!" The jolt left his trailer's roof intact, but then burst inside the ceiling, and through his television - which shattered through the wall toward him. "It was like 3-D, dude!"The whole town saw that lightning had struck ground and were amazed to find out his home had been blazed open - and that everyone was safe and sound. "My skin was still prickling and my hair was still standing on end when the firemen came." The ceiling has now mostly been repaired - and Matt has "a story to tell!" And he loves Vale.
I met Matt in the laundry room at the Vale Trails RV Resort. He gave me quarters - went home and fetched more change for me. He told me which dryer to avoid. He's the second person in Vale to tell us how great this town is for kids.
At first sight, it's hard to tell that Vale is a town of growth and nurture. These eastern Oregon towns feel hard hit and contracting. I've never seen a Dollar General as big as the one in Vale, for instance; the franchise has clearly taken the place of whatever local grocery store could no longer support itself. (The town's Dollar Tree is even larger, I realized later.) But then again, there are signs everywhere of community igniting - coming back to life.
Take the Starlite Cafe - with its cute decor and great food ("it got a major facelift a few years back" our waitress told us - taken under the wing of Vale restauranteur Malinda Castleberry, whose Mal's Diner also gets rave reviews for its massive local beef burgers)... And then, there's the Vale arts collective, the Drexel H. Foundation, a nonprofit seeking to restore the Grand Opera House and Vale Hotel. The Foundation sponsors summer art camps and other enrichment programs for youth and families . Their painted plywood cows dot A Street in town, as do their benches bearing plaques that read: "Art Builds Community." There's something going on, in Vale.
Sometimes lightning strikes.
We're spending two nights in Vale, lured by places like Starlite and great cell coverage (we're shameless hounds of the signal bars). But in truth we only walked to Brogan, today - itself 20 miles west of Vale. We split the day in two as is our wont - each walking 11 miles. As I was nearing our final rendezvous, Bob got enough cell coverage to call me en route and let me know he was waiting for me "at the corner of 5th Avenue and Willis." As if there was a chance I'd miss the RV in this place that seems, mostly, to be where a town was. Lightning hasn't struck Brogan, I don't think - but Brogan does seem to mark the place where the desert plains with their endless ranches and future Mal burgers, turn into endless green rows of corn.
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