”Do you have a refrigerator?”

The question is fraught with possibilities.

It comes from a rustic little woman of 65 or so who abruptly presents herself from inside the Sidewalk Cafe on Main Street in downtown Mitchell.

”No.” A shot in the dark, a lucky stab, it turns out, at impromptu interpretation.

”Oh, then it must be him,” she says, pointing at a delivery truck idling across the street.

Jane Max darts across Main before she can hear the monosyllabic reply, leaving the traveler feeling like he’s standing flat-footed next to that big moose mural in Cicely, Alaska.

But no, this is Mitchell, Oregon, home to 185 disparate souls, one of whom is now taking delivery of a 22-cubic-foot upright in front of Schnee’s Grocery and yakking with a deer hunter looking for gas while surveying the sidewalk for her cat she calls Princess.

Max, who’s lived in Mitchell a dozen years, works for George Schnee but pretty much presides over the goings-on in this historic little burg at the eastern foot of the Ochoco Mountains.

”This town collects a variety of people,” Max says later over fish and chips and an ice cold pop. ”Some of them you really enjoy. Some of them you don’t … But it’s the openness of the people you do that keeps me here.”

Hard against the eastern bank of Bridge Creek, downtown Mitchell sports three cafes, two grocery stores, a residence high school, two gas stations and two churches. There are no bars.

Schnee is one of the reasons Max has stuck around, although she won’t go fishing with the 79-year-old grocer (she knows how to bait her own hooks, thank you).

Schnee spends most days inside the store, sequestered behind the counter obscured by merchandise that’s overflowing from shelves, hemming him into a corner.

”I fool a lot of people,” says Schnee. ”They don’t really expect me to find what they want. And I usually do.”

Today, it’s a hearty clientele of hunters, looking for everything from white gas to duplicate licenses. Schnee accommodates them, to a man.

The locals trade here, too, stopping in for a bag of salad greens here, a pack of double A batteries there. Most charge the items to their accounts, transactions Schnee dutifully records by hand on individual invoice sheets.

He’s got a friendly greeting for everyone, a considered opinion for anyone with an issue and five or 10 minutes to spare.

Schnee has lived in Mitchell since coming out of the military in 1946. He built the grocery store in 1959.

”There have been a lot of changes in the old town,” he says.

”When I came to town, there were 425 people here.”

And there were five mills within a 25-mile radius. In the early 1960s, the last of the lumber mills left the area; today, Mitchell is best known as ”The Gateway to the Painted Hills.”

The Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument is 10 miles northwest of town.

Mitchell was named after John Hipple Mitchell, the town’s first postmaster (in 1873) who later served more than 20 years in the U.S. Senate.

If sagebrush, serenity and local color are what you’re looking for, Mitchell’s an ideal destination for a day trip or an overnighter.

Lodging is available at the historic old Oregon Hotel just up the street from Schnee’s and the Sky Hook Motel back toward the highway.

Throughout the day, the stream of riflemen and women continue in and out of his remarkable establishment, the conversation weaving and bobbing across a wide field of interest.

”I don’t see why some people are so dead set against giving out their Social Security numbers,” he tells one hunter who’d just recited his.

”If I had my way, a guy writes a 50 cent check and it doesn’t go through, he goes to jail,” he says after accepting a check from a Portland-area hunter.

Steelhead, the welfare state, cranberry juice – nothing gets under Schnee’s radar.

Schnee’s Grocery is a fine place to spend an afternoon, cozily crammed in between the beer cooler and the Coleman lanterns.

But it’s getting late and, goodbyes said, there’s just enough time to walk back across Main and admire Max’s framed photographs inside the Sidewalk. Cows, wildflowers, sagebrush countryside, all rendered with a sensitive eye.

She speaks of wide open cattle country and an old ranch hand, a dear friend, who helps her compose her photographs.The Cicely feeling has passed along with the afternoon.

Max is no sitcom oddity and this is no Northern Exposure.

This is home.

IF YOU GO:

– GETTING THERE: Take Highway 26 47 miles east from Prineville, over the Ochocos. Turn right on the Business Route through town.

– ROUND-TRIP DISTANCE: About 94 miles. A side trip to the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument will add about 20 miles to the drive.

– LODGING: Oregon Hotel, 541-462-3027; Sky Hook Motel, 541-462-3569.

Jim Witty can be reached at 541-617-7828 or jwitty@bendbulletin.com.