A quiet road led me northward from North Powder, climbing gently through rolling hills. Suddenly, an agricultural vehicle veered off the road directly into my path, slowing to a halt as the driver leaned halfway out the cockpit. “Just a heads up–we’re about to be herding 800 cattle on this road. They’ll be coming right towards you, towards the white gate up ahead.” Like most pilgrims on the Camino, I’ve become familiar with rural traffic jams, with small packs of cows lumbering along the country roads, but this would be on a whole different scale.
As it turns out, he was underrating either how long it would take to get those cows in gear or my walking speed, or both, but I beat them to the punch. I could see the pack of cattle gradually convening, gathering with the same urgency my former colleagues used to bring to a faculty meeting. Even from a distance, though, the sound was remarkable, akin to a freight train charging down the tracks, with clouds of dust churning all around them. While I was sorry to miss the show, it was also a minor relief to not have to hop another barbed wire fence to evade the stampede.
The small town of Union stood at the walk’s midpoint, as it has for over 150 years. Founded in 1864 and named after the Union army, with the Civil War still unspooling, it’s a cheery and bustling little town, known for its Victorian architecture, with lots of people out and about on this late Friday morning. It made national headlines in 2007 when an 18-year-old win the mayoral election on a write-in campaign, having made the case–apparently quite successfully–that he couldn’t do any worse, given the instability that had marked the preceding years. While I could find a ton of articles about his election, I couldn’t find any that evaluated his effectiveness as mayor. That’s partially a reflection of the amount of time I had to invest in the search, and even more of a statement on our attention span.
I’ve been thinking a lot in recent days about how ready I am to complete this walk. With the end in sight, there’s no reticence or bittersweet sentiments seeping in. Who knows–maybe they’ll sneak up on me over the next week. But still, as I sat under a gazebo in Union’s park, enjoying a snack and a cold drink from the market, with the sun shining brightly and the sound of laughter leaking in from some other corner of town, I was reminded just how much of a joy this can be–the freedom of movement, the discovery of new places every day, the sense of capacity and accomplishment, the simplicity. In the US, some days are harder, and out west especially I’ve had to lower my head at times and grind out mile after mile. But these last couple of days, with a little more civilization, and crisp fall weather, have been reinvigorating.
And then I left Union. Right away, I noticed an unusual site–a yellowish-gray cloud cover sweeping in from ahead. At first, I worried that it was smoke; it had that sick, corrupted hue to it. Instead, though, I was seeing dust and bits of hay and wheat, all being swept up in a rapidly accelerating wind that proceeded to smack me square in the face. All of a sudden, my pleasant, idyllic walk was replaced with a grind. I leaned forward at a 45-degree angle and focused on holding to my two-foot-wide shoulder, with traffic from La Grande whipping past at a steady stream. On my left, the gravel embankment slid abruptly down to marshy terrain, so there wasn’t much margin for error.
I had expected to be walking through largely empty terrain en route to La Grande, with the railroad and occasional ranch houses providing the main interruptions. So imagine my surprise when a regal, brick mansion suddenly appeared on my left, overlooking a small lake. Had I been transported to Southern England when I wasn’t paying attention? Was this heaven? No, it was still Eastern Oregon, and this was the Lodge at Hot Lake Springs.
It’s a building, I would learn, with a fascinating history.
The Union Bulletin offers a tidy survey of the major plot beats. For centuries, this was a key gathering place for indigenous folks, bringing Nez Perce and Shoshone into the Cayuse territory in what became known as the Valley of Peace. Even then, the steaming lake, heated to 200 degrees by geothermal springs, was already associated with curative powers. The first group of European travelers–the Hunt-Price expedition–passed by here in 1812, heading eastward from Astoria.
Washington Irving, in his narration of Robert Stuart’s westward explorations in 1836, characterized the explorer’s visit to Hot Lake in this way: “Emerging from the chain of Blue Mountains, they descended upon a vast plain, almost a dead level, sixty miles in circumference, of excellent soil… In traversing this plain, they passed, close to the skirt of the hills, a great pool of water, three hundred yards in circumference, fed by a sulfur spring, about ten feet in diameter, boiling up in one corner. The place was much frequented by elk, which were found in considerable numbers in the adjacent mountains, and their horns, shed in the spring-time, were strewed in every direction around the pond.”
It would take a half-century for formal development to occur, but that unfolded on a large scale in 1864. Not only was a European-style colonial hotel established, but so too were a post office, barbershop, blacksmith, drug store, and–of course–bathhouses. Eager to take even fuller advantage of the prevailing belief in the capacity of hot springs to heal, a physician, Dr. Phy, bought the hotel in the early 1900s and rebranded it as Hot Lake Sanatorium. In time, the lodge became known as the “Mayo Clinic of the West,” drawing patients from around the world, along with celebrities like Wild Bill Hickok. Phy, like a television doctor before his time, was simultaneously viewed as a genius and an antisocial jerk. One anecdote mentioned that he “made his employees serve him meals through a window so he wouldn’t have to socialize with them.”
After Phy died in 1931, hard times followed. The hospital was closed, and then a fire destroyed more than half the building in 1934. Oddly, it was briefly converted into a flight school and nurse training facility during World War II, and then another short stint as a nursing home followed in the 1950s. Still the second half of the 20th century were largely lost years for the lodge, which fell into disrepair from a prolonged period of neglect.
Hope returned for the lodge in 2003 when a Walla Walla millionaire purchased it and poured loads of resources into its restoration. While it has changed hands yet again since then, the upward trajectory continues, with rooms available, a pub for meals, and even a small cinema.
Of course, it doesn’t take a great deal of imagination to anticipate that the combination of an isolated hotel, an early 20th-century sanatorium-slash-mental health clinic, rough weather, a decrepit building, and even rumors of its use as an asylum in the mid-20th century would spur all manner of innuendo and gossip. Indeed, Hot Lake Lodge is now a hotbed of ghost stories. Some claim that the hotel is haunted by a former gardener who died by suicide. Others assert that residents from its rumored time as an insane asylum still circulate around the building, screaming late into the night, while blood appears on the wall and the smell of feces pollutes the air. Piano music can be heard coming from the third floor. Not just any piano, either, but a piano said to have been brought here by Robert E. Lee’s wife on one of her many visits. I wonder if she passed through Union on her way here.
Richard R. Roth, the son of former owners of the lodge, has written four books about its history, and his response to these enticing rumors is to let facts get in the way of a good story. For starters, he rejects any claim of the lodge operating as an asylum, which would have occurred during his parents’ ownership. More dispiriting, he asserts that Mrs. E. Lee never visited and by extension never brought a piano. This is another reminder that there’s no surer way to kill a fun story than to get a historian involved.
On this particular day, though, I didn’t have the bandwidth necessary to ponder the legitimacy behind any of these stories. I barely had the juice to take in the view of the lodge. The wind’s assault was relentless. But maybe the timing of this rogue windstorm–the first I had encountered in weeks–was a little suspicious. Suddenly, with no warning, out of nowhere, tempestuous weather strikes me just as I approach Hot Lake? One has to wonder.
