Lee Phelps

Lee Phelps killed himself on Thursday morning, March 26. He had suffered a severe head injury in May of last year; he seemed to make a good recovery, but those close to him knew he was still struggling.

Lee was born in Enterprise in 1986, and went to the Wallowa schools. His family had a hay and cow business near Lostine. During Lee’s high school years, his father was often gone on pipeline jobs during the summer and fall. Lee and his sister and mother kept the farm going— irrigating, haying, fixing equipment, and taking care of the cow herd on rangeland in Zumwalt and rented land up the Lostine river.

Lee attended the University of Oregon, studying literature and history. While in Eugene he trained in a martial arts gym, and in 2008 Northwest Martial Arts flew him down to Ventura, California, as their light-heavyweight entry in the Pan-American Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Tournament. It was a single-elimination competition. Lee won his first bout, against the contestant from France, then lost (on a decision) to a man from Texas who won the division. Lee was pleased to have done that well without taking it seriously.

He abandoned the U of O in favor of tall ships. His first was Shenandoah, a square-topsail schooner out of Martha’s Vineyard, under Captain Robert Douglas, one of the famous old men of the tall ship fleet. Two of the crewmen on that ship became and remained Lee’s best friends. Lee served as deckhand, bosun, and mate on several more ships, always looking for experience with different rigs. His favorite was the HMS Bounty, a fully-rigged ship (i.e. a square-rigger with square sails on all three masts). Bounty was built in 1960 for the Marlon Brando version of Mutiny on the Bounty, and was actually somewhat larger than the original Bounty. Lee was on her for several voyages. The longest was from Florida across the Caribbean, through the Panama Canal, and up the coast as far as Vancouver, B.C. From Vancouver they headed out into the Pacific for a long run down to the Galapagos, then over to the coast of Ecuador, and back to Panama and home to Florida… months at sea under sail, in an 18th century ship.

Bounty was caught by Hurricane Sandy and sank off Cape Hatteras, with the loss of the captain and one crew member. Lee would have been on board at the time, but he happened to be home for his sister’s wedding.

Between ships, Lee occasionally took other jobs. He worked one summer at a mountaineering resort in Alaska, doing glacier and rock climbs on his days off. He also worked on trail crews here in the county, packing into the wilderness areas, and he once fished on an Alaskan gill-netter for a season.

All this adventuring came to him easily. Humor First was his motto (Safety being a poor fourth or fifth), and he was known for turning the crew of practically any ship into a happy crew.

One side of his character that few of his friends could appreciate fully was his scholarship. His enthusiasms for certain places or periods were like his enthusiasms for mountaineering or sailing. Russian literature, Japanese literature, and Roman and Greek history and literature were some principal ones. The British writers from the turn of the 19th century through the 1920’s were what he knew most thoroughly, however.

His Dead Friends, he called them. The ones he was closest to were T.E. Lawrence, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon.

After the sinking of Bounty, Lee worked for a couple of seasons in the Caribbean, on two schooners, Liberty Star and Liberty Clipper. In February of 2014, he and his father traveled to Azurduy, in the south of Bolivia. They bought a pack horse, and spent two months wandering in the roadless mountains of the Department of Chuquisaca. Back home, Lee went to work for Getty Pollard of Lostine, who provides starling control by means of falcons for vineyards and blueberry growers in California and the Willamette Valley.

Lee got into the ancient art of falconry with his usual energy. It was while chasing an AWOL falcon that he had the four-wheeler accident that gave him his head injury. He recovered well enough to do falcon contracts that summer and fall, but the injury continued to

affect him in subtle ways.

Evidently he decided that to go on living in a damaged state was something he was not willing to do. He will be missed by all who knew him.