God’s Country
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 of the Malheur occupation led by Ammon Bundy in 2016.
On that trip, snow still blocked the road up Steens and mosquitoes claimed the refuge. Early this October, the trail seemed clear although the wildfire smoke that cloaked the Rogue Valley touched here, too.
At 10,226 square miles, Harney County is the largest in Oregon, larger in area than six U.S. states. It is also the most sparsely populated county (7,329 people) in Oregon, with a population density of 0.27 people per square mile.
About 75 percent of the county’s area is federal land. The 760-acres Burns Paiute Reservation, north of the City of Burns (pop. 2,783), is a remnant of the former Malheur Indian Reservation—a 1.5-million-acre federal trust land set aside by Ulysses Grant in 1872 for “all the roving and straggling bands in Eastern and Southeastern Oregon, which can be induced to settle there,” but discontinued six years later as ranchers and settlers usurped the grassland.
Today, about 500 ranches and farms producing beef cattle, hay, and alfalfa operate within the county, with cattle outnumbering people 14-to-1. Frosts come early and leave late, and the growing season is short.
Typologically, this is high desert, with elevations averaging between 4,000 and 6,000 feet above sea level. Most of the area receives well under 15 inches of annual precipitation (except for Steens Mountain which rises high enough to receive considerable snowfall). Basalt lava flows that erupted from miles-long vents and spread across thousands of square miles 30 million years ago have left a volcanic landscape that is as stunning as it is arid.
The high desert has an effect on people, those who live here say. It has a way of swallowing you up.
Steens Mountain
The 52-mile gravel road that winds up and down Steens Mountain begins at Frenchglen (pop. 12). Tony and I drove 15 miles before encountering another human, a burly man walking in our direction dressed in camouflage with a rifle strapped to his back. Indeed, for the next 37 miles, virtually the only folks whose paths we crossed were men in camo with rifles and large trucks, maybe two dozen in all. For a moment, Tony and I conjured up our own conspiracy theory: that these were militia waiting for the call to restore order at the nation’s ballot boxes. The truth, of course, lacked intrigue: they were hunters, including the lucky few who had drawn the most sought-after antelope tag in Oregon, the Steens Mountain hunt.
The Steens may look like a small mountain range, but it is actually just one massive mountain, the largest fault-block mountain in North America. Snow falls early and lingers late here, as Tony and I had learned the year before. If you’re hiking in the mid-summer heat, you’re advised to carry a gallon of water. On this cool fall day, the quaking aspens were in full glory.
A great moisture collector, the Steens present vastly different ecosystems from the valley floor to the mountain top. While the upper west slope may receive as much as 25 inches of precipitation, the Alvord Desert in its shadow receives little. Sagebrush covers the lower, drier slopes, giving way to dense stands of juniper, then quaking aspen and mountain mahogany as the moisture levels increase.
Near the summit, Tony and I hiked 1,000 feet down one of the mountain’s five glaciated canyons to Wildhorse Lake, filled, we heard, with cutthroat trout. On the way back up, a weathered sixty-something hunter with a heavy backpack leapt from rock to rock in front of us. When I caught up with him in the parking lot, I asked how the hunting was going.
Bighorn sheep, pronghorn antelope, mule deer and elk call the mountain home, he told me. “But you have to be patient and look hard to find them.”
“I come for the solitude and scenery more than the trophies,” he said. “The day before, I come across two young pronghorn. I took out my binoculars, not my rifle.”
For some, Steens Mountain’s largest attraction is a herd of wild horses, believed to be descendants of Spanish Mustangs brought by conquistadors in the sixteenth century. The Bureau of Land Management tends to the herd, which sometimes reaches 1,000. Periodically, when the horses outgrow their sanctuary and encroach upon private land, a portion are captured and relocated, though not without public outcry. Just before our visit, 216 wild horses had been helicoptered out and readied for BLM’s Wild Horse and Burro Adoption and Sale Program.
Alvord Desert
On this trip to Harney County, Tony and I had also set our sights on driving the length of the 4,000-foot high Alvord Desert, which stretches 70 miles down the eastern flank of Steens Mountain. With an annual rainfall of 7 inches, it is the most arid spot in Oregon and, arguably, the most isolated.
The heart of the Alvord Desert was once a lake extending over 100 miles but now completely dry, a “playa” (like the one in Death Valley) approximately 20 miles long and 7 miles wide. At various points along the gravel “highway,” you can drive onto the cracked, vast white floor of the playa. A tourist brochure invites people to camp under the stars, test rocket propelled vehicles, make art, race landsailers, or soar in gliders “riding the thermals fueled by heat rising from the desert floor.” Tony and I took our Subaru for a spin. I took photographs of a seated boy tracing lines on this infinite canvass, with his bike nearby.
Cattle
On a trip that took us past hundreds of miles of cattle ranches, Tony and I expanded our scant urban knowledge of raising cattle. We started by finding out how many cattle ranches there are in Harney County (497 in 2012) and their average size (3,029 acres). Then we made a list of some questions:
What’s the natural life expectancy of cattle [20 years) versus their actual life? [Dairy cow, 5.5 years; breeding bull, 3 years; beef cattle, 18-24 months; beef calf, 8 months]
What do we know about their intelligence and social-emotional skills? [According to research, cows are generally quite intelligent animals who can remember things for a long time. Animal behaviorists have found that they interact in socially complex ways, developing friendships over time and sometimes holding grudges against other cows who treat them badly.]
What’s the daily routine for beef cows? [Generally, the morning and early afternoon grazing period is followed by a time of social grooming, subsequently followed by an extensive resting period with rumination.]
Do cattle sleep lying down or standing up? [Lying down.]
Do free-range cattle ever get lost? [Yes]
How do ranchers gather up their cattle when it’s time for slaughter, spread as they are across miles of sagebrush? [On a large ranch, it takes about 12 days for a group of six men and three women—who go along to help and cook—to gather the cattle.]
We wondered, too, how and when the first cows arrived in Eastern Oregon. A new film, First Cow, by Oregon filmmaker Kelly Reichart, has the answer: the state’s first bovine arrived in 1820 courtesy of a Chinese immigrant, secured for use by a British official.
Hay and alfalfa farms mix with the ranches here. Intrigued by the pivot irrigation system that watered the circular alfalfa fields to our left and right, Tony and I also studied this agricultural invention. In our cursory review, we never quite figured out what powered the wheels on these long-armed contraptions.
Trump World
It is no surprise that Donald Trump hovers over these sparsely inhabited lands. In the 2016 Presidential Election, Trump won 73 percent of the Harney County vote compared to Clinton’s 13 percent. Make America Great Again signs and American flags adorn ranch gates. Spend a day driving the county’s gravel and two-lane highways and it doesn’t take long to understand the spirit that drove Blake Shelton’s 2019 country music hit “God’s Country.” When he first heard the song while working on his farm in Oklahoma, he says:
“I had to stop and just listen to this song, because the song was talking to me about a place that I was in at that moment, which was a place in the middle of nowhere that meant something to me that probably nobody else could ever understand, what that is and what it is inside of me and what my connection is to the land.”
Shows of patriotism, individual freedom, and anti-government sentiments run deep in Harney County, along with connection to the land.
Still, there are conflicting narratives.
When Bill Clinton approved the Steens Mountain Cooperative Management and Protective Act in 2000, he was responding to local landowners seeking to restrict 1.3 million acres from mining and additional cattle grazing. In January 2016, when Bundy occupation leaders, as part of their anti-government standoff, held a meeting with area ranchers to persuade them to repudiate their federal grazing contracts, none did. Harney County, it turns out, has a reputation as a poster child for collaborative discussions over land use.
COVID-19
One might think that in this remote region, where cattle outnumber humans 14-to-1 and the coronavirus “positivity rate” is less than one percent, the pandemic would be a mostly silent presence. Not so. A walk down main street in Burns (pop. 2,783), the seat of Harney County, reveals the same mask wars you find in Texas, Wisconsin, and beyond.
On a storefront filled with NRA stickers, a typed sign read: “Kate Brown [Oregon’s governor] says you are not an intelligent being and cannot take care of yourself. She says I have to tell you to wash your hands and wear a mask. What say you?” A handwritten reply followed: “I won’t.”
A popular bar and grill, Central Pastime, offered messages scrawled with magic markers. One read: “The Governor of Oregon strongly suggests you wear a mask in public buildings. This is a private business.” Someone had crossed out “strongly suggests” and replaced it with “requires.” Another said: “If you are sick, do not enter. If you choose to wear a mask…DO. Please use common sense. You’re welcome.”
A lengthy notice on the door to the boutique Robin’s Closet advised: “The proprietor of this business DOES NOT WEAR A MASK. We welcome all persons into our shop whether they are wearing a mask or not. IF WE SEE YOU WITHOUT A MASK WE WILL ASSUME YOU HAVE A MEDICAL CONDITION THAT PREVENTS YOU FROM WEARING ONE. Thank you for supporting our small business.”
Nonetheless, off main street at the town’s Safeway grocery store, it seemed that more than half of the customers wore masks—matching the national average.
At the southern end of the Alvord Desert, in the town of Fields (pop. 120), there is small roadhouse that serves up, by all accounts, the best milkshakes in the world. It was still morning when Tony and I pulled up, parking between a Chevy Silverado and an all terrain vehicle, cloaked in dirt and sporting American flags. “Please, one customer at a time,” a sign at the roadhouse entrance said. I waited for the owner of the ATV to exit and, masked, entered and ordered a chocolate milkshake. “Thank you ma’am for wearing a mask,” the owner said. “Step outside and we’ll deliver your shake to you.” A few minutes later, a gentleman wearing a “Make America Great Again” mask handed me a tall milkshake, thick with chocolate ice cream and milk, the kind of milkshake you can only consume with a spoon.
It hit me like an ice cream headache: The pandemic marks the first time the planet—from its biggest cities to its most remote places—has shared the same experience, faced the same challenge, and had to ask itself the same question.
How do we deal with this moment?
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