MARMOT--Only early spring in Marmot but already warmer than it should be, trees and grass coming along green and winter only a reminder when you see the large looming face of Mt. Hood off to the east and completely covered with snow.  Marmot, if you don’t know, was once a landmark on the Barlow Road, a privately owned extension of the Oregon Trail that, for a fee, brought pioneer wagon trains down from Mt. Hood and into the Willamette Valley. (Photo: Sam Barlow)

   Everything was boondocks around here then, of course. But when Adolf Aschoff, a forester and guide around these parts, settled here in 1883 there was enough going on to start a post office and give the place its name: this from the little furry rodents who dug burrows hereabouts, creatures referred to as “marmots” by early settlers. (Illus: mountain beaver)
   Curious, Aschoff did research on the critters and found that they were actually Aplodontia rufia, or whistling mountain beavers, but decided wisely that Marmot was a less cumbersome name.  A little over 20 years have passed since I last visited Marmot, then as now to visit with Joe Miller Jr., a retired physician who for a full third of his 92 years has been fighting to guarantee the future of Portland’s water supplies in and around the relatively pristine Bull Run watershed.  When I last met with Joe he was 69, his wife Amy was still alive, as was his beloved German Shepherd, “Poochie,” and he was in the second stage of that life cycle some have described as “young,” “old” and “‘God, you look good!’” 

   Amy, who he married in 1934, died of cancer in 1983; Poochie a little over a year ago, but Joe, if he now looks okay, has a few more liver spots, is bent a bit more and will admit to having a little less energy than back in 1971, when he first locked horns with those who would mess around with Bull Run after learning that logging had been going on secretly in the watershed since 1958.  He is also concerned with unregulated public access to the city’s precious and relatively pristine water supply, now and for the future, “and not being told what is going on. That is my main concern,” Joe maintains.
   Address this venerable concern and Joe seems revived. Joe, who for the past five years has been sharing his Marmot home with a housekeeper, Gail Sanford, tromps upstairs to a large office that is crammed with files amassed through years of vigilance that would have staggered a less tenacious man.

   As he prowls and gropes files yellowing with the years, Joe continues to have faith that others might care as much as he does. The view outside is an open field and timber to the horizon. Not virgin but old growth, perhaps as old as he is, and down in a gulch, unseen, a small stream that runs toward the Little Sandy River, alongside of which are some 1,700 acres that, along with the 98.272-acre “Bull Run Watershed Management Unit,” Joe wants protected from public intrusion. (Photo: Little Sandy River, is a kayak link.)

   His main argument is that the Little Sandy provides a year-around source of clean water with a flow one-sixth that of Bull Run, and why should the City of Portland be pumping less desirable water from wells when this is available and apparently ignored.  Also, he says, there are “rumors” of greater mischief afoot; that the powers that be are interested in placing a 395-foot-high dam on the Little Sandy and creating a four-mile  reservoir with unrestricted access, a move that would encourage the roar of crowds and inevitably threaten the river’s water quality.
   “The imminent danger, of course,” Joe emphasizes, “is from public recreation,” both of us envisioning hordes of visitors with their littering trash and trailered boats roaring about.  Joe refers to a tangled web of federal laws and amendments pertaining to the watershed, the most impactive in the 1970s when Bull Run authority was given over to the U.S. Forest Service, and most recently, an act passed last year pertaining to public access and protection of the watershed. (ODOT Photo: Bull Run River Bridge, circa 1894)

   “President Bush signed the most recent amendment last August that would repeal the Trespass Act passed in 1977, though it’s hard to understand.”
Which it is; a labyrinthine document of legal verbiage that stuns the casual reader, but which, not to put too fine a point on it, translates into the government’s past, present and future meddling with a precious resource. 
   Admittedly, government officials of various ilk have argued and counter-argued over the importance and potential of the Little Sandy River as adjunct source of Portland water, but as Joe knows, it depends on who you talk to.  (For history, reference and current updates, Joe recommends research into the extensive “Bull Run Interest Group Open File” (BRIGOF), kept in Multnomah County’s Central Library in Downtown Portland.) 

   Predictably, over the years some have come to consider Joe simply a curmudgeon, while others have referred to him as a kook; a selfish retiree of independent means who wants only to preserve the view and quietude on his mountain top.   And this was partly so at first, when Joe had more fire and in 1975 instigated formation of the “Bull Run Interest Group,” which he claims had no members but consisted of “participants.”
   “At first, I didn’t know anyone was interested in Bull Run but me,” he said. 
   Joe later found out, however, there were many others similarly concerned. 
 As if to convince detractors of his sincerity, in 1977, three years after Joe and Amy moved to Marmot permanently, they donated all but 2 1/2 acres of their original 94-acre property to the Portland Audubon Society as a bird sanctuary.
      It was then too that Joe, an environmentalist since his boyhood days in the Midwest, became even more concerned after hearing that the Little Sandy had been excluded from protection by federal legislation.

   It should be explained that Joe and Amy, living in Portland where Joe had his medical practice, purchased the property in 1948 from an Aschoff descendant. They used a former homesteader’s cabin on the site as a vacation and weekend retreat until the present home was completed in 1976, and the cabin was turned over to the Audubon Society, which uses it to this day.  Searching for the property, they knew what they wanted. Amy wanted a place that was “old fashioned” and felt like a pioneer farm. Joe wanted a place with old-growth forest, and they both wanted a view.
   “Amy always called it ‘The Farm,’” Joe says, smiling at the recollection. “I called it ‘The Land,’ and our ideas seemed to mesh.”

   Amy was the daughter of missionaries and grew up in China, Joe was the son of prominent Chicago physician, Joseph Miller, Sr., and attended the University of Chicago, where he studied medicine, eventually becoming an internist.  Joe was graduated in 1935, and in 1940 he and Amy gave in to wanderlust and hit the road seeking a new place to live and set up a practice.
   “We came west and decided that we would like to live either in Portland or San Francisco,” he explains, “and the decision came one night while we were staying at a motel in Portland. There was a painting above the bed, a picture of a cozy cottage with a white picket fence and roses, and Amy began to cry. ‘This is where I want to live,’ she said, and this is where we stayed. We found a home in Eastmoreland.”

   After a moment Joe says wistfully, “There have been so many miracles in my life.”  
   He talks about the medicine he practiced during his early days in Portland, his  volunteering at the medical school; his service in the Army Medical Corps during World War II, where he served with the physician who would join him in practice in civilian life. 
   “In the Army they called me ‘Careless Joe’ because I was so careful and methodical,” he says with a chuckle.
    In the Army he became friends with another Portland physician, Franklin Underwood, who when they were aboard ship returning from Europe turned to Joe and asked simply, “Do you want to practice together?”

   “I was quite flattered,” Joe said. “And this turned out to be ideal,” he added,  “because I had no talent for running an office, while Underwood’s wife Maggie could not only run an office but the lab as well.”
   After leaving the practice in the early 1970s, their two children, Mary and Philip now out of school, Joe and Amy came to Marmot permanently. Amy quickly became involved in her passion, folk craft: spinning (her large antique spinning wheel dominates Joe’s living room), tole painting, weaving and other passions that inspired the Millers to purchase an old school house in Damascus and turn it into a crafts center.
   “Amy started it in 1968,” Joe explains, “and it’s still going.”

   One of Amy’s companions was Audrey Moore, who taught here Navajo weaving, and who was also concerned with the future of the Bull Run Watershed--as were many others, Miller discovered,  as he began contacting them through a newsletter he puts out to this day. Visiting with Joe after all these years I must confess to some small suspicions. Being a third-generation
Oregonian (my son lives in his great-grandparents’ house in Portland) I’ve always been deeply concerned with the environment, which has certainly changed since I was a boy. I do remember, however, how my father would pull a drink of Bull Run water from the tap, look at its clear, fresh coolness that frosted the glass, and say, “best damn water in the world!”

   Yet, I must admit to Joe’s use of the word “rumor,” and wonder if after all these years of diligence he might not be coasting on whiffs of his former raison d’ etre; a man nearing the end of a life that, in later years at least, has become an obsession.  Maybe after all these years of commitment, for Joe to simply sit back, look toward the hills beyond Marmot and turn the whole thing over to fate and the future, might just kill the man.
   “Next week,” he says wistfully, kneeling with some effort next to a stack of files,  “I won’t be as good as this week. . . And the week after I’ll not be as good as the week before.”
   He misses Amy, of course, though he says she is with him every day, and he misses Poochie, though his life, he admits gratefully, has been a long and productive.
   “Have I done any good?” Joes thinks for a moment. “Let’s just say I think I’ve done ‘potential good.’ 
   What else can anyone ask for?

© 2002 Paul Pintarich  All photos and illustrations are links to a topical source.