Last week, Tony and made a return visit to Harney County, a rural county in southeastern Oregon, a five-hour trip from Ashland. We’d driven there in June 2019, hoping to hike the remote Steens Mountain, which stretches for 50 miles across the high desert, and to watch migrating birds in the nearby Malheur Wildlife Refuge, better known as the site …

As interest over voting by mail skyrockets, Oregon’s vote-by-mail system has attracted national attention. 60 Minutes is the latest media outlet to showcase how Oregon has embraced voting by mail since 2000, when it became the first state in the country to end in-person voting. Mail voting for local elections had been the state custom since 1981. In the 60 Minutes’ …

When my older son, Carl, was eight, he drew a picture of his brain, divided it into regions, then labelled them (“what’s on my mind”)—starting with the Red Sox, followed by geography, and ending with school. There were eleven sections in all. I pinned his diagram to my bulletin board at work. It always made me smile. A scan of …

On the same day that the US coronavirus death toll hit 100,000, I watched a mother duck with her ducklings and a group of swimmers in wetsuits share the early morning water at Emigrant Lake, five miles southeast of Ashland. The dis-ease that greets me each morning now gave way to the coo of mourning doves, the warm conversations of …

Three weeks ago, Tony and I drove from Southern Oregon to Los Angeles to meet, at last, our newest grandson, born three months ago. Air travel, in these days of pandemic, was not in the cards. Even if we accepted the health risks, nonstop flights from our regional airport to LA have been suspended and $350 will buy a one-way, …

There are whiter states in America, but when Oregon entered the Union in 1859, it did so as a “whites-only” state, the only free state to do so.  One hundred and fifty years later, Portland is the whitest big city in America, with a population that is 72.2 percent white—almost ten percentage points above the national rate of 62.6 percent—and only …

Until five days ago, when the brutal death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police set American cities on fire, our streets were eerily quiet and empty from COVID-19. If we weren’t stunned then, we surely are now—by a deadly virus that has been spreading in America for two centuries: racism. Just last week, my five-year-old African-American grandson …