MYSTERY WRITERS – Do you need inspiring, dramatic scenery, with no one around and no way to contact anyone? For those crime writers who lament the contemporary ubiquity of plot-destroying cellphones and trackers, who yearn for earlier times when someone could simply disappear, or be out of touch, I give you the forests of Western Oregon! There is spotty (at best) cell reception and absolutely no one around. I loved it! (Mostly)

I was in Western Oregon last month spending time with my father and brother in Yamhill. I had a day to myself, and I took a neighbor’s advice and traveled the “scenic” route to the Oregon coast, a winding road leading out of the nearby town of Carlton, OR, called Meadow Lake Road, which would take me to Beaver, OR, and thence to Highway 101, which would get me to the coast. Oh! that it were so simple.

What few knew was that a landslide had covered the road near the town of…well, there isn’t a town anywhere near there about 18 miles along from where I started. In fact, I was enjoying the natural beauty and the fact that I had the road to myself when I came upon a very serious “Road Closed” sign across my route. “No problem,” I thought, “I’ll just double back and take a different road.” I’d get to relive looking at and communing with gorgeous, soaring forest and dramatic streams, as the car ran in and out of dappled light. I had already noticed that my phone had no signal, but somehow, what with the abundance of nature, that seemed like a very good thing.

But as the miles (re)flitted slowly by it dawned on me that I didn’t remember seeing another road leading off from this one. And I do mean slowly: these are country roads, with severe turns and steep climbs; some of the turns have signs saying 15 mph, and for once I took the DOT at its word.

Would I have to drive all the way back to Carlton? It was at about this time that I began to regret the lack of a phone signal. I pulled over to test it, feeling that maybe it just wasn’t trying hard enough. But nothing. I looked in the glove compartment for an Oregon map. Again, nothing.

Finally, there was a turning to the right, which seemed like it would be the correct way to go, towards Wilamina, whoever or whatever that was.

In the picture above, you’ll see that the route leading around the red “wrong way” symbol seems straightforward enough. (I must stress that no such wrong way symbol existed when I started out.) But the route around the landslide is a BML (Bureau of Land Management) road, barely one-and-a-half lanes wide. If there had been a car traveling in the opposite direction, in order to pass one another we would both have had to dip our passenger-side wheels on the shoulder. The shoulder of the road (where there was one) could be frightening–either it led directly to a precipitous 80-100 foot drop, or into a ditch. By the time I started up the hill, I hadn’t seen another car or person for at least 45 minutes.

As the BLM road led its winding way upward, I wondered where I was going, and as I glanced down at some of the ravines I was skirting, I realized that if I tumbled down into one and died, it might be years before someone found the car and my body. Worse, no one knew I had taken this route, so they might not think to check along it–and where would they check? What if they looked for me along the logical route I would have taken…and it was entirely possible that this was not the most logical route. So finding my body was going to be left up to chance.

In the end, I made it back to the main road. But I had taken a ten-mile (40 minute) detour around a stretch of road that was probably less than two miles. When I finally had a cellphone connection, I found out that the place on the coast I was going had closed. So I turned back home…via main state highways.

The scenery was lovely when I finally felt that I (somewhat) knew where I was.

I’m going to put a good state map in every car I travel in from now on. I also stumbled across some serendipitous moments, scenes and places that will figure in my forthcoming novel, Witness Tree.

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James McCrone is the author of the Imogen Trager political suspense-thrillers Faithless Elector, Dark Network , and Emergency Powers–noir tales about a stolen presidency, a conspiracy, and a nation on edge. Bastard Verdict, his fourth novel, is about a conspiracy surrounding a second Scottish Independence referendum. All books are available on BookShop.org, IndyBound.org, Barnes & Noble, your local bookshop, and Amazon. eBooks are available in multiple formats including Apple, Kobo, Nook and Kindle.

He’s a member of Mystery Writers of America, Int’l Assoc. of Crime Writers, and he’s the current president of the Delaware Valley chapter of Sisters in Crime. He lives in Philadelphia. James has an MFA from the University of Washington in Seattle. His current, work-in-progress is a mystery-thriller set in Oregon’s wine country…A (pinot) Noir, called Witness Tree.

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