JIM HIEBERT says it’s all different now. In the ’60s, the kids used to put big blocks in their Arctic Cats and hold drag races outside the high school. You get a powerful enough engine into one of those snowmobiles and the front skis will come right up off the ground.
“It was wonderful back then,” says Hiebert, now seventy-two years old, decades removed from those days. “There’d be a football game at the school and they’d shut the mill down so people could come watch. It’s not like that anymore.”
Detroit, Oregon (population 180), sits on a tiny curve of land between Highway 22 and the Santiam River. It’s beautiful country, the hills lined with Douglas firs, the snowcap of Mount Jefferson visible in the near distance. Just west of town, the Detroit Dam funnels the river into a pristine reservoir. In high season the shoreline of Detroit Lake is a phalanx of RVs and boats. Since the bottom fell out of the timber industry some thirty years ago, tourism has drawn more people here than just about anything else. People go camping, they fish for trout, or they head into the forest and try to spot elk.
Hiebert is right: it’s not what it was; no place ever is. About a hundred and forty years ago, Detroit got its start as a railroad company work camp. Soon the company went bankrupt, and since then, the town
