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SUNDAY OREGONIAN (Portland, Oregon) 09 July 06 How do you handle a rattler? Kill it (Richard Cockle)
Imnaha: Tradition dies hard in Imnaha, as shown by the "Rattlesnake Count" taped to a freezer in the Imnaha Store and Tavern.
Dave and Sallie Tanzey have posted the count every summer for almost 20 years in their store as a way to keep track of timber rattlers and diamondbacks killed by their customers.
"There's always been rattlesnakes down here," Sallie Tanzey says. "You try not to leave a door open, or they'll crawl in."
The snakes average 2 feet to 3 feet long, but folks sometimes find a 50-incher.
And when they do, you're sure to hear about it at the Tanzeys' store -- long the center of life in this tiny northeastern Oregon town beside the Imnaha River.
"This is where all the information up and down the river is exchanged," resident Buz Cates says."During the fire season, that phone rings every three minutes."
Imnaha, population 14, is tucked into the bottom of a narrow ax-blade of a canyon 30 miles northeast of Joseph and almost 100 miles from the nearest traffic signal.
The unincorporated town boasts a post office, a three-unit motel locally known as "Motel 3," a restaurant called the Hells Canyon Roadhouse, a church, a kindergarten-through-eighth grade school with 15 students from the surrounding area and one teacher, and the 102-year-old Imnaha Store and Tavern.
Locals begin congregating in the store when it opens at 9 a.m. to exchange gossip, tell elk hunting stories, bear stories, cougar stories, snake stories, steelhead fishing stories and to discuss world events. Nobody seems to pay much attention to the satellite TV.
"If the whole world was run out of this room, everything would be perfect," says Dave Tanzey, 57. No lattes here
Imnaha is a decade or two behind the times: Cell phone service hasn't yet arrived. The Tanzeys, both native Wallowa County residents, still charge only 35 cents for a cup of coffee -- up from 25 cents two years ago, though the price includes refills.
Dave Tanzey refuses to sell such syrupy confections as lattes and cappuccinos. "If they want to drink coffee, they can drink coffee," he says.
The cafe's mealtime specialty is chicken gizzards, but "Frogs Legs With Fries, $6.50" has gained popularity of late, says Sallie Tanzey, 45. The frog legs are shipped in frozen from a frog farm in Southern California.
"We tell the tourists we get them out of the river," she says.
The mounted head of a mule deer has decorated one wall since 1919, and hundreds of dollar bills are tacked to the store's ceiling. The bills were thrown there by customers who folded quarters into them as weights so the tacks would stick to the ceiling. That creates a peculiar form of precipitation each spring when moisture from the swamp cooler causes the bills to open up.
"The first two or three days with the swamp cooler going, it rains quarters pretty good," Sallie Tanzey says.
The store is where townsfolk hold wakes and baby showers and celebrate birthdays, weddings and anniversaries. A Bible study group occasionally takes over a booth near the bar.
"The hunters say, 'I can't believe this. Here I am drinking beer, and they are over there prayin',' " Sallie Tanzey says. Snake Feed no more
Until 2004, Imnaha's biggest annual event was the September "Imnaha Bear and Snake Feed." Dave Tanzey got the inspiration for it almost 20 years ago while taking part in an "Ugly Bartender Contest," which he claims to have won twice.
The bear and snake feeds benefited a scholarship fund, and the Tanzeys hosted them at the store and tavern. But the event became too big to handle, they say, attracting upward of 700 people who consumed as many as eight barbecued bears per event, all killed by local hunters.
As many as 300 hundred snakes also gave their lives for each of those feeds, although Dave Tanzey admits that's an estimate: "I'd count 'em for a while and after that, it was enough."
When people brought in snakes, the Tanzeys' daughter, Heather, now 23, skinned them and popped them in the freezer. She took on that job at age 5, and the headless rattlers often coiled around her arm as she skinned them, deeply alarming some gentle-spirited customers who hadn't spent much time around Imnaha.
"It would freak a lot of people out," Sallie Tanzey says. "A fresh kill is going to keep wrapping around you, even with the hide off."
From time to time, somebody swaggered into the store with a live rattler in his fist.
"They were told to leave real quick," says Dave Tanzey, who acknowledges a bit of prejudice toward live rattlesnakes. "I used language they could understand."
Imnaha's bear and snake feeds might be history, but hunting rattlesnakes continues as a tradition around here, the Tanzeys say.
Folks cruise between Joseph and Imnaha after sundown on the lookout for buzzing serpents that crawl into the road to enjoy the warmth of the asphalt.
Says Dave Tanzey: "When a kid kills his first rattlesnake, he's got to come in the store and show us."
How do you handle a rattler? Kill it

JEEZ.....don't know where to begin on this one. Between the lying to the customers about where there frog legs come from, losing money on coffee sales(coffee is expensive these day) or just the needless killing of rattlesankes.....sounds like a great town.....not to stop in. WOW what an article!

Timbers and Diamondback rattlesnakes in Oregon?