A winter storm is shouldering its way across the southeastern Oregon high desert as darkness falls outside the rustic Rome Station. 

Joseph McElhannon, 24, glances at the falling snow through a window in the only cafe in this tiny Malheur County settlement. Rome might as well be on the moon tonight, because the storm has squeezed traffic on U.S. 95 down to almost nothing. 

"People tend not to travel in the wintertime as much," McElhannon, the cafe's cook and bartender, tells his three customers. 

Royle Hogan, 73, who lives nearby, is seated at the counter drinking beer and ruminating about jackrabbits. The desert's rabbit population is about to explode, he declares. Not likely, replies McElhannon. Rabbit numbers have dropped like a rock down a well since he came here nine years ago. 

"Back then, you could look out in the yard here, and it'd just be movin' with rabbits," says McElhannon. 

But Hogan wins the debate with invincible desert logic: "Right now, I'm seeing more jackrabbits than I'm hearing coyotes," he says with a twinkle in his eye. 

This is a place so remote that satellite TV and friendly arguments provide the only entertainment. A sign on the wall warns, "When in Rome, just avoid offending locals." 

On highway maps, Rome is another lonesome Western town tucked into the lava rock, juniper and wild horse country of Oregon's vast southeastern desert. But Rome really isn't a town at all, because Rome Station is all that's here. Nestled into a bend of the Owyhee River, Rome Station is owned by McElhannon's dad, Joel McElhannon, and consists of this tiny cafe, some gas and diesel pumps, a couple of rental cabins and a handful of RV spaces. 

The place also sports an unpaved airstrip, although no airplanes are parked along its 3,000-foot runway this time of year. From here, it is 33 miles to Jordan Valley, 145 miles to Winnemucca, Nev., and 117 miles to Boise. 

Rome Station's customers are local ranchers, travelers on U.S. 95, the main traffic artery between California and Idaho, and float-boaters on the Owyhee River. Jerry Taylor, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Land Management in Vale, says 1,600 to 2,500 boaters launch here between late February and June. After June, the water level falls too low to attract boaters. 

Rome takes its name from a peculiar formation of sandstone towers, archways and tunnels three miles west of here that reminded some long-ago frontiersman of ancient Rome, writes author Hazel Fretwell-Johnson in her book, "In Times Past." The cliffs are variously known as the Pillars of Rome, the Walls of Rome and the Rome Hills. 

The few people who live here appreciate Rome most for what it's not. 

"It's not the city," says McElhannon. "I don't like the city." 

"It's very alone here," says Hogan, the caretaker of a nearby hunting lodge. He drives to Winnemucca once a month to do his banking and grocery shopping. "What do I miss? I don't miss anything, anymore." 

"I've got my horses and a couple of milk cows," says Crissy Terry, 21, waitress at Rome Station and wife of a local rancher. "I'm content." 


Worrisome time for ranchers 
Eight nearby ranches take their livelihood from roughly 2,500 desert cattle, some of which are turned out in summer on the 1 million-acre Owyhee Resource Area in southwestern Idaho. 

For the ranchers, this is a time of uncertainty. A federal judge recently ruled that the Bureau of Land Management violated National Environmental Policy Act guidelines when it renewed 68 summertime grazing permits for about 17,000 cattle that roam the vast resource area. 

Barry Rose, BLM spokesman in Boise, said one upshot of the ruling was a July 15 cutoff on three grazing permits last summer that have traditionally continued into November. Then, in early January, the agency reported that only 15 of the grazing permits were in compliance with interim rules to protect riparian habitat and other environmental values from being degraded by cattle. 

Now, nervous ranchers worry that tougher restrictions might be handed down before the 2001 summer grazing season starts. Rose expects grazing to continue but acknowledged the possibility of tighter restrictions "is hanging over the heads of the permittees and BLM." 

Rancher Pam White, 42, lives a short distance north of Rome Station. She says banishing cattle would leave some ranching operations with no summer range and way to make a living. 

"My mother lived here all her life, and my grandmother came here when she was 16," says White. "Roots. It's a tie to the land. It's a wanting to do this no matter what." 

White's husband, Jesse, 43, is descended from Basques from the Pyrenees of France and Spain who came here around the start of the 20th century to tend sheep. He's been riding horses and herding cows since childhood. 

"I've been bucked off, I've been run over," says White. "Everything that can happen has happened." 

The Whites own 300 Angus cows they breed to longhorn bulls. Ranching is changing, they say, and those changes might best be symbolized by the federal grazing regulations that now come to them by CD-ROM. 


Land of "10 looks" 
Still, some aspects of desert life appear to be changeless. Rattlesnakes are a case in point. 

"They will bite the horses and cows, but they aren't something we live in fear of," Pam White says. 

Periodically, the desert catches fire or the Owyhee River floods. Taylor, the BLM spokesman in Vale, watched in amazement as the river level rose from 248 cubic feet per second to more than 50,000 cfs in just 18 days in 1993. 

Then there's the dust. The Whites rescued a tourist last summer whose van sank into a dust-filled pothole on a lonesome track not far from here. 

Winters often are bitter, and the mercury dipped to 10 below zero every night for a week in January, said Jesse White. When spring arrives, the roads turn into quagmires. 

"The minute the frost goes out, you sink to China," says Robert Calzacorta, 60, a retired rancher of Basque descent who has been here all his life. 

Authors Reub Long and E.R. Jackman wrote in their classic book, "The Oregon Desert," that the sheer enormity of this raw country makes it more reasonable to measure distances by "looks" than miles. The distance across Malheur, Harney, Lake, Deschutes and Crook counties, a 24,000-square-mile expanse roughly the size of West Virginia, is "10 looks," they said. 

During the Civil War, 12,000 people stampeded into this area in two short years after the discovery of gold in 1862, says rancher Mike Hanley, 59, of Jordan Valley. The mines became a vital source of gold to finance the Union war effort, and federal troops were dispatched to protect them from a possible takeover by Southern sympathizers, he said. 

"Caught in the middle of the whole mess" were the region's Paiute and Bannock tribes, whose cultures were overwhelmed by the influx of whites, said Hanley, who has written five books on local history. 

Nowadays, Hanley occupies his spare time restoring vintage stagecoaches and wagons and driving six-horse teams. Visitors sometimes seek him out wanting to buy spurs, wagons and other frontier artifacts. Then they confound him by objecting to the presence of cattle on the range. 

As a rancher, Hanley sometimes feels as imperiled as the Paiutes and Bannocks must have felt a century ago, he said. 

"They want our culture, they want our objects, but they don't want us," he said. "Now, our culture is in danger of being eliminated. I sympathize with the old chiefs."