History with an absurdist twist? They drink to that

The Clampers, a fraternal men’s group, toast the offbeat in Gold Country.

LA PORTE, Calif. — Everyone had forgotten about the Butt Lake Dinky by the time workers in 1996 dredged up the rusty H.K. Porter steam locomotive that had been submerged in a reservoir for eight decades.

That lack of remembrance didn’t sit right with the Order of E Clampus Vitus, a men’s fraternal organization with chapters scattered around Gold Country. They commemorated the teeny train with a bronze plaque.

From his perch at the Plumas Club, a dive bar that serves as his chapter’s de facto headquarters, Ron “Right-On” Oxley swirled a vodka and cranberry juice and tried to sum up his often misunderstood group.

“A lot of people get confused and think we’re a bunch of drunkards,” said the resident of Quincy, a small mining town. “We’re actually a nonprofit historical organization.”

America is full of memorials for epic battles and soaring monuments and somber cradles of historical figures. The men of E Clampus Vitus — a.k.a. the Clampers — don’t bother with those.

“We believe in the absurd,” said Gene Koen, a Clamper from Oroville.

In Truckee, the group paid homage to the Tin Can bar from the early 1900s and Dot’s Place, a brothel. In Mono County, a Clampers plaque honors the Legend of June Lake Slot Machines: illegal machines said to have been tossed in the lake in the 1940s and sought by cold-water divers.

In a kind of running theme, the Clampers seem to celebrate a fair number of places overtaken, biblicallike, by water.

The group once paid tribute to the town of Prattville, whose original buildings are submerged beneath Lake Almanor. A bunch of Clampers in 1973 got a boat and chucked a plaque into the water.