…Bestville, around the corner from Sawyers Bar, was platted by George Best as a result of his being, some say forcibly, removed one night from the Sawyers Bar Community Hall during one of the notorious methanol fueled hoe-down blow outs that would draw all form and type of folk from miles up and down river and occur most nights except Thursdays when the hall was reserved for the DAR meetings which themselves typically ended in a blood curdling brawl after minimally polite discussions of lineage turned to heavy allegations recriminations and insults of heritage and provenance.
The she said she saids resulted in multiple layers of blood teeth vomit spouting forth from the combatants/historians. Scraps of skin and assorted articles of clothing were then found amongst the leaf litter on the rough hewn porch Friday mornings. This exfoliated layercake of gore and grime was tended to by the chinese labor who maintained a sleeping porch out behind the building before the schoolchildren arrived for their lessons. While the Hall was being scrubbed and shoveled birds tidied their nests with the hanks of womanly hair strewn about the property caught on the briars and brambles the long trailing tresses gleaming in their beaks like spider’s silk as they stole back and forth through the morning sunlight.
But I digress…George’s expulsion was due to a specific interaction with an even-toed ungulate on christmas eve 1877, after which spectacle no one in the very clique-ish community cared to see or hear from George again so he dragged himself out of sight around the corner and the aptly named Bestville rose, didn’t last long by modern standards, and fell to ruin melting back into the trees as locales tended to in those days of the rabid mining era where sustainability had not entered the lexicon and standards were low but by god they were there and intimacy with ungulates was one of those lines that shouldn’t be crossed and such behavior was met with swift and definitive judgement as George discovered.
There were many lines then as there are today and they twist, turn, bisect, interlace and it’s a strange and tangled dance but pay close attention because you don’t want to find yourself over the line and end your days like George wiggling through the riffles along the banks of the North Fork Salmon River, a whimpering crank clawing at the gravel making godawful mewling noises like a cranked out wino getting kicked loose from the hind teat of a three legged diseased dachsund.
