I'm gonna share an impression. And that involves memory. I'm not saying that this impression is fact, only that I have it, and that it came from something that appears to me to have actually happened, though the two other people that could back me up on it with their own impressions are both dead which is a shame they were great guys.
One winter's day back in December of 1968 Bill Heckard and one of the Sheldon brothers, I believe it was Dave, took me steelhead fishing way up in the mountains at Elkhorn Ranch.
This was a legendary place in my personal mythology. It had been homesteaded by the Gould family, in a spot halfway between Allegany and Loon Lake on the Coos River, more properly the upper MIllicoma, the west fork thereof, homesteaded way back in the day by these hard guy pioneer types, larger than life, who market-hunted Roosevelt Elk or Wapiti for the tables of Coos and Douglas Counties around the turn of the previous century.
I was befriended by Norman Gould when I first came to North Bend back in 1951 I was 3 and Norman was 4. As I was growing up there we stayed friends. By the way Norman is a brilliant artist, the best feel for the female figure since Tintoretto, utterly unknown, still living up Kentuck Inlet north of North Bend. And although Norman would disappear with his entire family every fall for the Elk hunt at Elkhorn, I had never actually been there myself. I digress.
I had been up all night and probably the night before, and I didn't expect the boys to actually show up but they said they would and they did and I didn't have any gear but they had some spare tackle and we spent a cold drizzly day thrashing the river with no result except that I was tired and cold and pretty much in this Coos County Hillbilly Heaven. I was a city kid and a speed freak and a hippie and this country boy stuff was exotic and strange and these guys were good people and good men the both of them talented musicians and outdoorsmen all their lives. Now I could say I had seen Elkhorn Ranch.
And they were both big and attractive and vital and thriving men and I was pretty much in heaven sitting there between them with the heater blasting.
We were riding back in Dave's pickup or maybe it was Heckard's Dad's truck anyway there was the usual crap on the dashboard that accumulates in a man's pickup and one of the things that caught my eye was a box of Remington Nitro Express shotgun shells. It was, after all, duck season.
I asked Bill what was in the box, and Sheldon answered like you would to a little kid that they were shotgun shells and yes I could look at the box. I was, like I said, a hippie and a peace-freak and guns and gun stuff were utterly foreign to me. I fiddled around with it, looked inside that there were still some in there, more than half. It said birdshot on the box, and it was heavier than I thought it would be. I put it back, reading the name out loud and thinking how cool it sounded to say the words in that order.
"Hey, I said to no one in particular and without having thought about it,"That would be a great name for a band, if you just changed that one word"
"What?"
"Elkhorn...Nitro...Express"
"Naww" came the response pretty much simultaneously from them both, dismissive, thinking about their own worlds, not really interested in mine "Naw, nobody would know what that meant."
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