Rogue River mail - Rogue River mail boats

Sunset, August, 1995 by Peter Fish

On this morning, when a white mist veils green water, the fishermen speak in sign language. Our boat glides past theirs, and they stand up, arms spread wide to indicate the enormity of their just-landed salmon. Four feet! Five feet! Then they grin, throw their hands down in disgust. The chinook aren't biting, not yet. The fishermen laugh. We laugh. It's an old joke, but it's a crowd pleaser.

Our boat is an old crowd pleaser, too. This year marks the centennial of the Rogue River Mail Boats, 100 years of ferrying letters, packages, and paying passengers from Gold Beach, Oregon, up the Rogue. The boats are almost the last of their breed: in the West, mail boats serve the Rogue and portions of 10 other areas, including Idaho's Snake River. Sleek and jet-powered, carrying 20,000 passengers a year, today's Rogue mail boats are not quaint. But as the floating inheritors of a century-long tradition, they still possess the romance of the remote.

Homesteader Elijah Price began the service in 1895. Before then, communication in this roadless, thickly forested comer of Oregon was hit or miss. Depending on who was willing to bring it up- or downriver, a letter might take a month to get to you. Or a year. Price changed that. His boats - 18-foot, double-ended wooden craft powered by sails and oars and sometimes by the pilot getting out on the bank and pulling on a rope - took nearly four days to make the round trip between Gold Beach and the Rogue's meeting with the Illinois 32 miles upstream.

Through the years, oars became Model A motors and the mail boats became indispensable to life on the Rogue. They delivered freight and parcels and groceries, and, once the Rogue began attracting fishermen, even some famous visitors: Zane Grey, Clark Gable, Ernest Hemingway. Boatmen like "King of the Rogue" Lex Fromm (still going strong at 85) became local heroes. After all, while the postal service motto might mention snow and rain and gloom of night, Rogue River mailmen also had to contend with driftwood that bashed in their boats' hulls and with floods that made the Rogue not just roguish but life-threatening. Even in today's aluminum-hulled jet boats, says the mail boat company's current president, Ed Kammer, steering a boat up the Rogue is "a skill and an art."

Now our pilot, Scott Adams, whose family has lived on the river for four generations, slows down as we approach another fisherman. "I think that guy has landed a salmon."

"Nope," says the woman near me. She, too, is a local, and she's pulled her scarf over her blond bouffant like a tarpaulin over a haystack. She adds that when you do see a fisherman with a fish, chances are it was his wife who caught it.

In 2 hours we arrive at Agness, not so much a town as a collection of cabins hiding in the woods, with a total population of 150 or so. Adams steers us to a tiny dock and tosses out sacks of mail. These are then hauled up to the post office, where Agness postmaster Sandy Stallard makes it clear that despite her town's isolation she runs no postal backwater. "This is a full-service post office. Do we do Express Mail? You betcha. Federal Express won't even deliver here. They stop at Gold Beach and pay the postage to put the mail upriver on the boat. But we do Express Mail."

Like the mail boats and Stallard's post office, Agness has been touched by the modem. A road was built in the 1960s, and it tethered Agness more firmly to the coast. It also cut into the mail boat service: now, in winter, the mail is delivered not by boat but by four-wheel-drive. What was once a community of people who fished and farmed and didn't pay much attention to the outside world is becoming a place where people can pay such attention, if they need to. "The world has changed," says Scott Adams. "People used to work to live. Now society has changed where you live to work. Agness has taken longer to catch up, but it has."

After lunch we passengers get back on the boat and, lulled by the steady hum of the engines, fight off sleep as we make the return trip to the coast. The trip back takes only 2 hours where once it took nearly two days, but it doesn't seem rushed. The river spreads before us, and the mountains surround us like a thesaurus of greens: mint green, spring green, pine green, forest green. I'm thinking about the way even remote places become part of the great world beyond them. We're a connected society these days, and I suppose part of the mail boats' allure comes from idealizing an era when we were a little less in touch. In the time of e-mail and voice mail and overnight express, the notion of your creditors or your boss not being able to reach you every second of every day starts sounding pretty appealing.

We're almost back to Gold Beach when Adams spots another fisherman and says, "That gentleman has landed something."

And, yes, the fisherman has hoisted up a chinook salmon for our inspection. It is a large fish, a magnificent fish, a fish that had it been in the Bible would not have needed multiplying along with the loaves. At least that's what I think. But the woman in the scarf squints at it dubiously. "Aww," she says, "that's an itty-bitty fish. I could do better than that."