Heckletooth 3

On Meeting David Shetzline and Discussing Heckletooth 3

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On Sunday, my friend Kevin and I sat down with David Shetzline, author of Heckletooth 3, one the greatest overlooked American novels of the last 50 years, and talked of Heckletooth 3, and other matters, for over three hours. It was easily one of the top moments of my many years reading, studying and writing about Oregon history and literature. It’s right up there with interviewing Dr. Cameron Bangs of Vortex I fame and Maurice Lucas, the bad ass Portland Trail Blazer.

Thank you David, for sharing the remarkable story of this incredible novel, your writing career, and other stories that probably deserve novels or films.

(And thank you to his daughters Andrea and Erika for arranging the meeting.)

Published by Random House in 1969, set in and around the mythical coastal town of Sixes and the Oregon woods, which happened to be engulfed in fire in the plot, Heckletooth 3 is a classic, a forgotten classic, that never saw a paperback edition, was never reprinted, and is almost impossible to find except for a few rare copies. It’s pretty much been purged from Oregon libraries except University of Oregon’s.

I am overjoyed to announce here that David has agreed to allow the publication of an e-book version of H3 scanned from the original version. (More on that project later and how you might be able to assist the resurrection of this novel.) He is also going to write an introduction to the e-version!

We are also on the hunt for the missing manuscript of David’s novel called October All Over, about his experience as a salmon troller out of Newport in the 1970s. Our hope is to locate it and somehow have it published. Where there is a will, there is a way. That’s been my whole publishing career and want to see if we can make it happen for this novel. It must exist.

Again, thank you David. It was something else to read that final magisterial paragraph of H3 to you, and we both were tearing up. It was also fantastic to break huckleberry pie with you, pie made by Kevin’s wife Wendy, from coastal huckleberries! Don’t get no more Oregon than that.

Welcome back to the Oregon world of letters David Shetzline. Oregon is very much a different place than it was in 1969, but H3 is more relevant today than it was upon its release. That’s why it’s a masterpiece.

Thoughts on Heckletooth 3

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The novel is Heckletooth 3 and it was written by David Shetzline and published by Random House in 1969.

It is set on the Southern Oregon Coast in and around Sixes, a forest fire has broken out and the community and the authorities have galvanized to extinguish it. One man, Replogle, a WW II vet, has shot an elk out of season and tries to cover his poaching using the fire and confusion as cover. Meanwhile, other men in the woods fight the fire or pretend to fight the fire, and reflect on their lives and duties and dreams as Americans.

After Ken Kesey’s Sometimes a Great Notion, I would rate Heckletooth 3 as the second best novel ever written where the story unfolds in Oregon. I recently reread it and marveled at the ruggedness of the setting, characters, plot and exploration of the rural American mind. With the exception of one character, a family country doctor, who of course don’t exist in rural America anymore, everything holds up about the novel. These type of men are still living in Oregon’s hinterlands and struggling to make a living while people from the larger cities grow wealthier and distant from nature. The chasm was real then. Think of it today. It’s an ocean.

Interestingly enough, Shetzline wrote about dope coming into the land. He almost anticipates the opiod crisis that is clearcutting its way through rural areas but not the invasion of Dollar General or the Dollar Store. Someone needs to write a novel of that invasion. Shetzline also writes with insight on the relationship of rural men and the various governments that often provide their bread and butter. It is a curious relationship indeed, one I’ve observed up close in my 21 years of living on the Oregon Coast.

The book never went into paperback as far as I can tell, and is almost impossible to find for an affordable price. It has almost entirely disappeared from Oregon’s libraries as well, including all the ones on the Southern Oregon Coast. I’ve talked about Heckletooth 3 with multiple aficionados of Oregon literature and they all feel the same way about it—a regional classic—that somehow must be resurrected. I wish Nestucca Spit Press had the ability to do that.

I reached out to Shetzline a few years ago when I was writing my Lost PNW classics column for the paper then known as the Oregonian. We were tentatively going to meet, somewhere near his home outside of Eugene, but it didn’t happen and I can’t recall the reasons.

He never published another novel that I am aware of and I recently learned he’s in poor health. Where is the Oregon literary community to reprint this novel?

I urge anyone with an obsession with Oregon novels to track this book down. It came out four years after Notion but is entirely of the late 1960s and Vietnam while Notion was set in the 1950s and sounds more honky tonk than rock and roll. Both novels get logging like nothing I’ve ever read. Obviously Shetzline worked in the Oregon woods and it even says so in his biography at the end of the book.

One wonders if there will ever be another novel set in the Oregon woods written by an Oregon writer who worked in the woods and can spin a story out to readers who have never seen the Oregon woods yet live just miles from them. One wonders.

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