Beaver Town

Lyle Hehn was having fun when he created this engaging scene. Your job is to follow his clues, sleuth around...what could it all mean? Once you’ve had time to contemplate, read on! 

First, let’s get our bearings. To the east, that’s Mount Hood in all its snow-capped majesty. In the foreground are mighty cedar trees, rooted into the rolling green hills that surround a dammed-up body of water. Lyle is providing the clues you need for Beaver-ton and its neighboring community of Cedar Hills.  

The beaver in the painting has stockpiled kegs of beer and keeps a keen eye on the flying “Hammerhead boys” circling above to prevent planes from dipping low and snatching up barrels. And don’t miss the Hammerhead in the lower left corner of the frame, standing on the wing of his biplane, getting a clearer view of the flying blue horse and the solar eclipse through his opera glasses. 

In the upper left corner, the horse is left blue in the shade of the eclipse while the glider’s pilot steers it toward the mountain of kegs. In his hand he readies scissors to cut the rope, allowing him to fly, a reference to local aviator Charlie Bernard who designed, built, and flew a horse-drawn glider at his family farm in Beaverton. The property would later become Bernard’s Airport, where you’re standing now. 

You may be wondering why Lyle featured a solar eclipse. He finished this panel on August 21, 2017, the date of the first visible solar eclipse in US skies in nearly four decades. Its path of totality spanned from Salem, Oregon, to Charleston, South Carolina, making it the first eclipse in 99 years visible from coast to coast!