Sunday In Toledo, A Real Working Class Town In Oregon

 While ostensibly a trip out to the local woods to see if we could rustle up a glimpse of You Know Who Goes There, what it turned into was a cursory examination of a small working class American city.

It is  located at the convergence of three rivers, the Yaquina, the Depot, and the Olalla, and on Highway 20, deep in the soggy woods of western OR.

I suspect that the business that keeps the town in existence is the Georgia-Pacific paper mill.  You can sure smell it.  Everett used to smell like burnt cabbage also and for the very same reason. But our paper mill is long gone.

The gossip is that truck drivers do not like to deliver to this mill because of the setup and the mean old lady troll at the booth on the way in.

However, you will be excited and pleased to know that Toledo has its own Arts District!

As we were witness to yesterday, there is a lot of said art in the wild around Toledo.  One hesitates to judge.

Also on the cultural radar is a well-loved Hawaiian cafe, the Cafe 235.  This is odd, but not too odd in a place as droll as Toledo, OR.

 

It´s hilly.  There are a lot of dead ends.  There is an old cemetery that is gated so I could not drive through.

We found this contrivance to be mysterious and intriguing.

There is a sleepy old downtown, though I must admit to it being a Sunday. so perhaps not so sleepy during the week.

Toledo was at one time a timbering area.  Of course. Fish and timber were what you did around here.

Ralph did not make an appearance, but I really could not blame him.  It was a very cool and wet day.  I imagined that he and Ramona were at home in a structure roofed over by carefully overlapped layers of cedar branches with sturdy driftwood walls, and maybe a boulder fireplace.  Just keeping comfy and laying low you know?

So.  What do you think?

Could you live in Toledo?  Would it be a good place to ride out the coming days?