Letters to the Editor 9/6/2023

Truck stop?

To the Editor:

The furor over the proposed mega gas station and the new big apartment complex in back of Takoda’s made me think wistfully about my first of many visits, starting many years ago (1997 maybe?), to the little town of Sisters.

A friend and I lived over by Ontario and we came over with our horses to camp and ride in the Cascades. It was usually hot, so we looked for a cool spot (for the animals) to park our rigs and were delighted to park under the big ponderosas back of Takoda’s, where there was food, ice, and other supplies handy close by, before we headed out into the forest to the horse camps.

Growing up an hour south of LA makes you doubly aware of overcrowding problems, such as no parking, long waiting lines, and driving hazards. In LA it was the smog, here it is now the smoke, but the rest of the story is the same!

Regarding the gas station, wouldn’t it be great if there was a roomy truck stop outside of Sisters, where the folks with trailers, buses, and big rigs could fill up before the crush of town traffic makes it a headache for everyone? I suppose it’s impossibly unreal to think it would be possible for a chunk of USFS land along Highway 20 could be traded for that present gas station property? Easy in, easy out for trailers and buses, a place to fuel up, even eat and sleep for big truckers? Why not? It’s not going to get better as we get bigger!

While I’m here, I’d have to say I appreciate the sanity of the Bunkhouse columns. We pass a law making it legal to carry drugs in our cars. Then we are surprised that we’re now at the top of the list of states in drug addicts! According to Kotek and her cohorts though, our problem is really that we don’t have enough “dry out” clinics! Is that what the woke consider “intelligent” thinking? God help us.

Marilyn Bernal