Gold Beach residents Rafael and Bernice Torrez swear they went fishing last week for candlefish to light up the streets for the Hathaway Jones Tall Tales Festival.
OK, they may have been taunting truth a mite. Even we daily scribes know the wind blows too hard along the Southern Oregon coast to keep even a well-dried candlefish lit for long.
And it promises to get mighty windy in the Rogue Playhouse at 96491 Moore St., Gold Beach, come Oct. 14. The preliminary rounds start at 2 p.m. with the bullfest finals beginning at 7 p.m. A spaghetti feed — five bucks a head — begins at 6 p.m. for preposterous prevaricators and laughing listeners alike.
Festival organizers Rafael and Bernice were merely getting into the spirit of the annual festival, first held in 1998, put on each year by the Curry County Historical Society.
Participants, who can sign up at the door, are given five minutes to spin a whopper or retell tales spun by the legendary Jones, a giant among those who like to draw back the long bow of hyperbole and let fly. Cash prizes of $50 to $300 will be given to the winners in each of three categories — adult, intermediate and junior.
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In other words, embellishment enthusiasts focus their tales on places like Devil's Stairs, the Coffeepot, Paradise Creek and Half Moon Bar. Tales shouldn't be overtly religious, tasteless or political in nature.
Incidentally, is it true politicians and journalists are barred from the competition because they have an unfair advantage?
"Well, we usually just get amateurs," he responded.
Alas, it's true we do have some expertise in the subject of maiming and maligning the truth. I once saw a fact struck so hard by a speeding journalist racing across the Fourth Estate that even the politician who brought it up in the first place failed to recognize the victim.
But no damage was done. It seems the original fact had been so bent out of shape by the politician that the irresponsible reporter accidently knocked it back in shape.
OK, I'm mostly fibbing.
Born in 1870 in Douglas County, Jones was a contract mail carrier along the lower Rogue River Trail from 1898 until his death from falling off a horse along the trail on Sept. 21, 1937. In addition to letters and packages, he brought tantalizing tales of 50-foot snowdrifts, wild animals that were smarter than your average humanoid, even rocks that defied gravity.
Take the fireplace he built for his cabin, the one with a chimney that drew like no other.
"I used to stack my firewood on the porch just outside the front door and when I needed some wood I would open up the chimney flue and crack the front door a bit," he claimed. "That fireplace would suck the wood in right off the front porch."
One day our man Jones opened the flue and cracked the door just as his wife was holding a tea social on the front porch featuring the new preacher, a real lady's man.
"The draft sucked the toupee right off of his head," Jones insisted. "The ladies all put their hands over their mouths and he got up and left. He moved the next day and never came back."
You get the drift. We're talking windy whoppers here.
Southwest Oregon has historically produced prodigious story tellers. Allen Boice, a colorful former Curry County sheriff, told me in 1993 about watching the river roar during the historic 1964 flood.
"The only beds we saw for four days were the ones we saw floating past," he said, then added, "It was raining so hard we were getting complaints from the ranchers that the dog salmon were chasing the sheep up on the hillsides."
And there was my cousin Frank Cooke, a former Brookings resident, speaking at his father — my uncle — Edwin N. Cooke's funeral in Cave Junction back in 1998.
His father, who felled timber in Southern Oregon during the early days of his more than 90 years of life, once cut a tree so big that a photograph of it weighed five pounds, cousin Frank said with a perfectly straight face.
But even my raconteuring relatives paled when it came to matching myths with Hathaway Jones.
Meanwhile, if you get lost in Gold Beach on the way to the Rogue Playhouse, just look for the lit candlefish on the street lamps.
Let's hope the giant rattail fish don't climb the poles to eat the candlefish like they did last October. It was a horrible sight. Of course, the catfish would have pounced on the rattail fish if only those barking dogfish hadn't chased them off ...
Paul Fattig is a reporter for the Mail Tribune
