I’ve been updating my list of things I’m going to address when I become King of the World, and at the top of my list is fixing the whole daylight situation. Some genius, at some point, decided that when days start getting short we should all change our clocks to make them even shorter. I’ve never understood how that plan got approved, and when the time comes, that whole stupid thing will come to an end. It’s going to be “fall forward” when I’m in charge, but until then we’ll all have to put up with just living in the dark for six months every year, and we were headed north into that darkness on this first post-season Friday night. It’s not easy to find teams that get to play any playoff games on their home field, but the Gervais Cougars would be hosting the Lowell Red Devils in round one of the 2A playoffs, and I was looking forward to seeing Gervais High School again.
Gervais is a small town of just over 3,000 people in northern Marion County named for the settler Joseph Gervais. Joe came to the area in 1811 and worked as a trapper, and thirty-two years later he was at Champoeg to vote in favor of a provisional government. He never lived in the Gervais area, but he did have a land claim in the northern part of the Willamette Valley, and he was well enough known in the area that when the little town was incorporated in 1874 it was named after him. I don’t know how Joseph pronounced his last name or whether he was related to the actor/comedian Ricky, but if you pronounce the name of the town the same way Ricky pronounces his last name you’ll get some funny looks from the people in Gervais. Contrary to rumors, the town is pronounced Jer’- vis, as it always has been.
We took a short drive around the little town, since that’s really the only kind of drive you can take in Gervais. It’s got a tiny little post office building and a shiny new police headquarters, a few shops and at least one bar. Around the small downtown you can find lots of old homes, but go a few blocks in any direction and you’ll see that most of the town is new housing developments that have gone up over the past few decades. Gervais has grown a lot, and I expect it will continue to. Later, we saw a lot of what I took for Russian Orthodox fans in the stands at the game, just judging by their dress. There is a large Russian presence in that part of Marion County, and I always assumed that their beliefs and culture would preclude them from participation in something like football, but many of them must have had children on the team, and they were vocal supporters throughout the game. I don’t really know the tenets of their faith, but football seems to be one of them, which is nice to see.
My only previous visit to Gervais High School had been as a 14-year-old competing in a track meet and, while I had not been exactly impressed, it had been a lot of fun. The “track” at that time was literally a pasture with perhaps a dozen little orange cones spread around in the approximate shape of an oval. Little flags had been planted in the deepest gopher holes and beside the largest rocks, but the rest of the ground was still uneven enough that you had to watch where you were placing your feet with each step. A path, maybe four feet wide, had been mowed around the cones, but beyond that the grass grew freely, and to top it all off it was a rainy, blustery day. I have fond memories of that ridiculous meet. It wasn’t something I’d experienced before and never would again. It could never happen these days, but Gervais was scheduled to host a track meet, and they did it with the resources available to them at the time.
Back in my day, Gervais was bad at everything. There were only three size classifications, and Gervais was probably the smallest school in all of the 2A classification. Competing at the 1A level they may have had some success, but they had to compete against some schools twice their size and were a doormat for the rest of the league. Fortunately for them, there are seven classifications now, and they’re still a 2A school and have had great football success over the years. Not!
The Cougars lost a B championship game in 1951, lost in the first round of the playoffs in 1953, and then went on a 60-year playoff drought until 2013, when they were blown out 49-0 in the first round. After the 2022 season they had won 26 games in their previous 19 seasons of football. That’s an average of just over one win per season, which is not good. It may have something to do with the fact that 2A teams started playing 9-man ball in 2022, but last year they finished 9-2, winning a playoff game for the first time in 70 years, and had some momentum coming into this season. They were 7-0 before dropping a close game at Colton last week, and finished second in Special District 2 behind that Colton team to secure a playoff spot in consecutive years for the first time ever.
The high school is just off of Douglas Avenue, the main east-west road through town, and we found a spot for The Bucket in the big parking lot in front of the school. The field entrance is on the far west side of the lot where there is a little blue ticket booth. Interestingly, the two ladies running the booth were both standing outside of it to take my $10 and stamp my hand with a tiny Cougar pawprint. I don’t know why they chose to work outside when someone had clearly gone to the trouble and expense to provide them with a nice little sheltered booth. It didn’t matter, but struck me as kind of funny.
So, many years after my first visit, I had the chance to revisit that site and see if anything had changed, and it certainly has. The football field, Hoye Field, was named for Ordie Hoye, who coached the Cougars in 1947, 1948 and 1949. He was a navy veteran who taught at Gervais for 13 years and also did stints at Sherman, Myrtle Point and Willamina. The track at Willamina High School is also named for him, so he must have been quite a guy, and I was glad to see they had upgraded the whole place from what it used to be. The old pasture is now a well-manicured natural-turf football field with lights, and an aluminum grandstand on the east side with a big Cougar-blue press box above the south end. There are smaller aluminum bleachers on the west side for visitors, and a nice 8-lane rubber running track where those cones and potholes had been back in the olden days.
We staked out a few spots at the north end of the bleachers and I went off to take a few pictures. The track was roped off, but I usually assume that those things don’t apply to us journalists. The Gervais authorities apparently had other ideas, but I was able to snap a few pictures before being escorted back outside the restricted area. I don’t know what I must look like to other people, but the harmless-old-man picture I have of myself is clearly not the picture other people see. I’m making a note to work on my facial expression of innocent confusion that is usually pretty close to my genuine state of mind.
There was no band or cheerleaders to provide much spirit for the game, and when the Australian-accented AI voice came over the PA system to welcome us, and a recording (I assume it was a recording because I didn’t see anyone singing it, and if it was a Gervais student singing, they need to quit school immediately and start making records. It was really good) of the Star-Spangled Banner was played prior to kickoff, the stands were still half-empty. By the end of the first quarter, though, the Cougars had themselves an 8-0 lead, and things were starting to get a little crowded. We still had room to be comfortable, but Gervais is one of those places where there are no aisles in the grandstand, so once you sit down it’s very difficult to go anywhere. If that’s not a violation of some fire code, it should be.
With the grandstand mostly full and another large crowd assembled along the fence to the north, the Cougars eventually had a lot of support, and everyone seemed to get along just fine without anyone to lead their cheers, or a band to keep them entertained. It was clear early on that Gervais was just bigger and faster than their opponents from Lowell, and when they took a 22-6 lead into halftime I don’t think anyone was too surprised. Each time the Cougars made a big play there was a Cougar screech over the PA system, and we couldn't get enough of that screeching cougar.
There was no halftime show, so I figured I’d kill some time by making a visit to the concession stand to bring back some dinner. I failed in that task. I did bring back some Super Nachos, piled high with all kinds of tasty stuff, but it took me practically no time at all. The small group manning the Gervais concessions were like an Indy 500 pit crew, and what little line there was never got longer than a few people. Within seconds of placing my order I had my change in one hand and a basket of nachos in the other. So for most of halftime, Mrs. Ednold and I kept occupied fighting over the biggest chips in the basket to scoop out the best lumps of toppings.
For our last trip of the season, this one wasn’t as bitterly cold as some of the games we’d attended in the past. It was cold enough for a blanket, but stayed in the mid-40’s throughout the night. It was very dark, though, with the moon unable to shed any light through the overcast, and beyond the field illuminated by the floodlights everything just felt a shade darker than normal. Then the fog moved in and hung low over the playing field, and the scene looked like a spooky graveyard, except there were a bunch of football players where the headstones would have been.
None of that seemed to bother the Cougars, who had come out and picked right up where they had left off. They did give up another touchdown in the third quarter, but scored two more of their own for a 22 point lead, and by the end of three quarters it felt like they had the game well in hand. The Cougars went on to score twice more in the final quarter, once with just a few seconds remaining in the game, and I still don’t know why. They were leading 42-14 at the time, and could easily have run a couple of dive plays to run out the clock, but they went for the kill and added those final 8 points at the end to win it 50-14. I think there was a time when that would have been considered a bush league move, but nobody seems to think that way anymore. Maybe Gervais has just been on the other side of those games so many times over the years that they feel entitled to dish it out now that they can.
Regardless, we had cheered the newly-competitive Cougars on to a playoff win and the final 8 of the 2A bracket, and that felt pretty good. Things in Gervais had certainly changed since last I was there, and some other things had changed in other places, too. Just to change things up a bit we took Highway 99 through Labish Village back to Salem before getting on the big road, and I saw something that still has me wondering. Back in the day there was a sign just north of Chemawa Road letting you know that you were crossing the 45th parallel, halfway between the equator and the north pole. That sign is no longer there; it’s been moved to a spot about a half-mile south of where it used to be, and now I’ve got some questions. Is the change the result of more accurate measurement, or did the 45th parallel just get up and move half a mile? Or maybe the people in charge of placing the sign don’t really know where it should go and think that getting it in the right general area is good enough. If that’s the case, I can assure them it’s not. I always thought the line ran right through the middle of that sign pole, and now my whole world has been shaken by the knowledge that it never did, and still may not.
I can deal with change. I can accept the fact that Gervais is five times as big now as it was when I was a kid, that they have a real football field now, and their team is really good. But I always thought that line was set in stone. It would always be the one constant in a changing world. First, they tell us that Pluto isn’t a planet anymore, then they tell us the 45th parallel is in a different spot now. If you can’t trust that thing to stay put then what chance is there of ever making sense of anything?
Another year of really great posts. You've covered a lot of ground. Especially enjoyed the North Lake post.........country we've visited over the years. And now you get to have Friday nights off for a while.