The Things That Do Not Burn
Wildfires, like hurricanes, gather names, some etched in memory for what they leave behind. Here in the Rogue Valley, last September’s Almeda Fire left unprecedented destruction in an already unprecedented Oregon wildfire season. In the case of the Almeda Fire, a brush fire aided by gale force winds provided the spark, igniting an inferno that within hours charted a relentless course through Talent and Phoenix, two modest communities along Oregon 99 between Ashland and Medford. I remember standing that morning in the field next to our house in Ashland and looking north for smoke in a cloudless blue sky. The same winds that furiously fanned the flames in Talent and Phoenix eight miles away kept the fire, let alone the smoke, out of sight here. By the next morning, the Almeda Fire had displaced thousands in a region where affordable housing was already scarce. Nearly 3,000 homes — including 1,750 in 18 mobile home parks where residents lived paycheck-to-paycheck — were incinerated in a single day. In the school district that serves Phoenix and Talent, nearly three-quarters of the students lost their homes. When families returned several weeks later, after officials finally removed the blockades, they found there was nothing to sift through.
Driving in the Fog | Inversions
“Can you see where you’re going?” I asked Tony as we crept onto Interstate 5, our car headlights glaring back at us in the thick, night fog. Three minutes earlier, when we left our house (elev. 2,200 feet) and headed downhill to the Interstate entrance (elev. 1,900 feet), a crescent moon hung in the sky. Now, 300 feet lower, a dense cloud bank rising from the ground erased not only the moon but also everything familiar. We were headed 15 miles north to the airport in Medford, intent on catching a 7 am flight to see the young family we’d left behind in Brooklyn nine months earlier (surprising even ourselves by our sudden decision to move to Southern Oregon). “We’ll never make it,” I said. “Even if we do, no planes will be flying.” Cautious when I’m confident and confident when I’m cautious, Tony said, “It will work out.” It did. We arrived at the airport just before the gate closed (an hour later than planned), and minutes after take-off we burst into a blue sky sun rise.
From Pulitzer Prize to Useful Fools: The Demise of Local Newspapers in Southern Oregon
City Council and school board meetings. Small-town sports and politics. Local government corruption. These are a handful of the news and issues that go unreported when small newspapers shutter or gut reporters. Over the past 15 years, more than one in five papers in the United States has closed. A vibrant, responsive democracy requires enlightened citizens, and without forceful local reporting they are kept in the dark. In Southern Oregon, the two longest-standing newspapers remain but their descent feels tectonic—papers that once won Pulitzer Prizes for their investigative journalism. Recently, the current publisher announced that he would no longer publish or support liberal points of view.
Sharing Food, Building Community: The Ashland Food Project
When Paul Giancarlo and John Javna started the Ashland Food Project in 2011, they had one, basic question: How do we get more food into food banks? Soon they grew a second mission. “It was about serving the people who were giving the food too,” says Javna. “Making it personal, making them part of something bigger than themselves.” What they underestimated was the extent to which the project would engage Ashland’s young, as well as older citizens.. In some families, the task of filling the green bags with food falls to children; their full bellies notwithstanding, they understand hunger. At the bimonthly drop-offs, you’ll see an eight-year-old working along an octogenarian, unpacking the green bags and stacking food bank shelves.
Summer Escape: Leaving Heat and Lockdown Behind
Like so many Americans, Tony and I longed this year to break out of our pandemic-narrowed life. We set our sights on a 4,000-mile August road trip ending in Brooklyn, where we would bequeath our Subaru Forester to our older son and his growing family. Our travels began in a remote corner of northeastern Oregon nestled high in the 9,000-foot Wallowa Mountains. In Yellowstone National Park, we hiked for ten miles across high prairie with hot springs and bison bones on either side and few humans in sight. We watched the sun set over the Grand Tetons, then went on to help our younger son, his wife, and 18-month-old Damian settle into an old Victorian house ten blocks from downtown Denver. Crossing Iowa, we learned that the cornfields had a new crop: over 6,000 wind turbines. In Chicago, we met up with a colleague I have known since I directed the Annenberg Challenge in the 1990s. A priest turned community organizer, Ken Rolling had introduced me to Barack Obama before Obama ran for state senator in Illinois. In Brooklyn, I danced with 22-month-old Timmy while Tony tossed baseballs with Lucas, 7, who appeared every day dressed for the baseball field. The September afternoon we flew back to our home in the Rogue Valley, we found dense smoke and heat everywhere.
When the Center Does Not Hold
Oregon’s record-breaking summer COVID surge exposed the same fault lines that have always divided the state—between the cities along Interstate 5 and the smaller towns and rural communities to the east. Predictably, vaccination rates have mirrored Democratic and Republican party lines. As of mid-September, while nearly 71 percent of adults living in counties that swung Biden in 2020 were at least partially vaccinated, the vaccination rate in Trump counties had yet to exceed 40 percent. But political affiliations tell only part of the story. More telling is the resentment in Oregon’s rural communities that cities receive more than their fair share of resources and look down on rural people; the chasm between the lives of professional and technical workers in office buildings and farmers and cattle ranchers working the land; the tension between individualism (a.k.a. “freedom”) and social responsibility which knows no geography—and much more. Wrangling over vaccines, however, turns out to be an Oregon tradition. A century ago, a group of women in Portland, calling themself the Public School Protective League, applied their new voting rights to oppose compulsory vaccination. They were emboldened by a firebrand named Lora Little.
This Land Was Their Land
Here in the Pacific Northwest, acknowledgments that recognize Indigenous Peoples as traditional stewards of the land have become de riguer. They are spoken at the beginning of public and private gatherings, from live performances to sporting events to town halls. Such acknowledgements, of course, do not address, in real terms, the extermination of Native peoples locally or across America. Indeed, Indigenous anthropologists reportedly worry that land acknowledgements may sanitize the trauma of dispossession rather than being taken for what they are: a starting point for justice. Most of the little I know about the dispossession of Native tribes here comes from hiking along the Oregon and Northern California coasts with Tony. Our favorite hike, Amanda’s Trail, tracks the last four miles of a 75-mile forced march by a runaway Native woman, Amanda De-Cuys. In 1864, she and a band of other Native fugitives were rounded up by the U.S. military and returned to the reservation they had fled.
The Logger’s Daughter
Tony and I began our cross-country trip this past August in the far northeast corner of Oregon, home of the Wallowa Mountains. Known as the “Alps of Oregon,” they offer grand views and long trails. We’d also come, though, to learn more about the Wallowa logging community of Maxville, where African-American and White loggers worked side by side in the 1920’s and early 30’s, at a time when Oregon’s exclusion laws prohibited “free Negroes” from moving to the state to live and work.The mountains were all we hoped for, but it was the story of Maxville, told by Gwendolyn Trice, a daughter of one of these Black loggers (born when her father was 58), that lingers.In 2009, the Oregon Public Broadcasting (OPB) produced a 28-minute video “The Logger’s Daughter,” filled with Trice’s interviews with men and women, “colored and not,” who worked and lived in Maxville during those years. “What I thought was going to become my story is really the community’s story,” Trice says.