WAGONTIRE, Ore. -- A couple of travelers moseyed into Ellie Downing's cafe to study the floor. They'd heard the previous owners had once glued a quarter there as a joke on folks who would stoop over to pick it up. The quarter was long gone.
Not spotting the two bits, they bought a couple of sodas, got back into their car and headed down U.S. 395 -- vanishing in the surrounding sage-studded flatlands."Two sodas all morning," shrugs the 70-year-old Downing, a little woman with big glasses and short brown hair.
In Wagontire, a remote outpost whose sole residents are two people and a geriatric burro named Willie, encounters like this are about all the excitement you can normally expect.
Wagontire is a blip in the middle of nowhere, a humble wayside for travelers making their way across the vast, spooky expanse of juniper bushes and scrub brush that's called Oregon's high desert.
Wagontire consists of a cafe, a six-room motel, two gas pumps, an RV park and a small landing strip. It's not much, but it all belongs to Downing. She's the queen of Wagontire. Her 41-year-old nephew, Jerry Gray, helps run this modest kingdom.
When Downing needs supplies for her restaurant, it's a 112-mile round-trip drive to Burns -- a Wild West sort of town of only 3,000 that seems like a major metropolis to folks living in the high desert.
Downing has the only telephone for 28 miles in one direction and 50 in the other. Cell phones work only sporadically amid the desert dips and hills. Television comes in by satellite. There is no cable or local news. Car radio reception dissolves to static.
Many of the few highway signs reminding motorists of how far it is to the next town are shot full of holes by hunters, frustrated or jubilant, who come to the desert for deer, jackrabbits or coyotes.
"Some boys were over here just the other day hunting jackrabbits," Downing says.
Downing doesn't mind the hunters, "just so they don't hurt my cottontails," who have moved in around the cafe.
There is something sincere about Wagontire, a place where the French fries are hand-cut, the cigarettes are unfiltered, the cowboys are real and the conversation, when a local trucker and an area resident get together, drifts toward whose grandfather buckarooed with whose over on the Alvord Desert.
As you drive across the high desert, Wagontire pops up unexpectedly amid the gentle dips in the highway -- just when you think there couldn't possibly be any sign of life out here.
Lights from Downing's cafe wink a welcome through the gray days and blowing rain or snow. Along with travelers, local ranchers also stop by for one of Downing's hamburgers -- well-known in these parts for their size and juiciness.
As Downing washed dishes in the cafe and kept an eye on a soap opera, a couple towing dirt bikes behind their car dropped by.
"We get a lot of bikers through here in the summer," Downing says. "Most of them can't make it from Burns to Lakeview on a tank of gas. I've had as many as 18 of 'em out here at one time for gas."
The two dirt bikers said they wanted to inspect Downing's landing strip to see if their plane could land there. They decided the strip was too rough.
Downing's air strip has a sign boasting that it's "Wagontire International Airport." That's about as accurate as large letters on Wagontire Cafe identifying it as city hall.
But the air strip does get used -- by government officials as a base for firefighting operations and by private pilots who land to grab a bite at Wagontire Cafe.
"We had three planes come in over there all at once a couple of weeks ago," Downing says. "I think nine people came over here for breakfast."
Wagontire has had its brush with fame. It made Ripley's "Believe it or Not" newspaper feature once. A bicycling New York Times reporter stopped by several years ago.
It's quiet in Wagontire on this early spring day. But "it's busier in the summer," says Downing, leafing through a guest book showing visitors from around the world who have stopped at Wagontire.
Downing moved from Burns to Wagontire last summer. She traded some land in Burns for the 16 acres that make up Wagontire.
She's a feisty soul. She used to own a rough-and-tumble bar in Burns and recalls throwing out a troublemaker.
"People kept telling me, 'Ellie, don't you mess with him,' but I tossed him out," Downing says.
"I kicked his butt on the way out the door. The police asked me who threw him out, and I told them I did," she says.
Downing prefers life in Wagontire. There's no rat race here.
"I don't have all the hassles," she says.
She may be tough, but Downing has a heart that's as big as the high desert.
Downing sold a car to a local cowhand, but he's been slow in giving her the money. Nonetheless, on a recent day Downing was busy trying to help him out of a legal jam by calling police and judges.
Downing also has a soft spot for Willie, a scruffy 27-year-old burro who lives in a corral behind the cafe. Downing inherited Willie when she bought Wagontire.
Willie, says Downing, is spoiled rotten. Still, she keeps visiting kids off him in deference to his age.
A couple from View, Wash., stopped by and asked a question Downing hears a lot: "So, why do they call it Wagontire?"
Wagontire is named after nearby Wagontire Mountain. No one knows for sure where the name came from. Versions vary, but all mention a wagon wheel, either from a wagon train attacked by Indians or one from a repaired wagon, left in the area in the 1800s.
Downing lives in a cabin behind the cafe. Her nephew lives in the motel. There's also a double-wide trailer out back, and Downing is fixing it up.
Downing has been married twice in her life and doesn't plan on going down that road again.
"People think I'm odd because I don't date and run around," Downing says. "I have to work. I don't have time for stuff like that.
"Anyway," she says, "the ones that come around, they think I'm supposed to support them. I ain't supporting no man."
Downing has a grand plan. She likes Wagontire's easy pace. But she'd also like to get a motor home and travel around the West.
"I've got no place else to go, and I need something else to do," she says.
So she's looking for someone to buy her property who would let her live there when she's not on the road.
"I'd like to come back to Wagontire when I want to and leave when I want to. I guess I'm just kind of a loner," she says.
People sometimes ask her why she doesn't just leave Wagontire entirely.
"I tell people I'm just waiting for some rich guy to come along, but I'm just kidding 'em."