Inside, it smells of dogs and wood fire. A huge deer head fixed to the wall stares at me as I pull up a chair. Dona sits beside me, sipping from a water bottle, and thumbing a scrapbook full of more Cooper news stories. Of the numerous books on Cooper, she says she “hasn’t read one yet that’s accurate”. In fact, to my amusement, Dona doesn’t even think Cooper landed in Ariel at all. Someone clever enough to plan such an audacious heist, she says, would have jumped near Portland airport “because they would have never looked for him there”. Despite the proprietor’s misgivings, the DB Cooper party continues each year. One regular even bore an uncanny resemblance to the artist’s sketch that the FBI released of Cooper (which some people also thought looked like Bing Crosby), but Dona assures me “they checked him out thoroughly”. I ask why the story is so big still, 40 years on, and she suddenly becomes animated. “Because the government's always screwing us over and finally somebody got ‘em back.”