Postcards from the Rogue Valley

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. We lost ourselves in the wilderness. In the town of Joseph, we met a woman, descended from Black loggers brought from the South in the 1920s to work in the local timber mill. 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. One day, Tony and I headed to the Museum of Modern Art, wondrously empty due to timed and limited entries. Early in our visit, an unheralded rainstorm dropped seven inches in Central Park in three hours; Timmy and I stood on our sidewalk with umbrellas. The following week, Hurricane Ida deposited seven inches in one hour; we stayed inside. 

The September afternoon we flew back to our home in the Rogue Valley, we found dense smoke and heat everywhere. 

“It looks like scorched earth,” I said on the 18-mile drive from the airport in Medford to Ashland. Exactly one year before, the Almeda Fire had leveled everything in its path along this stretch of I-5, and the desolation still seared the landscape. 

“It’s so much darker when a light goes out than it would have been if it had never shone,” John Steinbeck wrote of his winter of discontent. Our summer surely matched his winter, we felt.

Without a doubt, climate change has brought historic fires, extensive drought, and unremitting heat to Southern Oregon. In the summer of 2021, from mid-June to the end of August, temperatures ranged from the mid-90s to a record-breaking 112 degrees. Thirty-five days registered 95 degrees and above, erasing “mild” from the Pacific Northwest’s weather lexicon.

This August was the driest in 127 years, in a year that will likely be the driest on record. Across the region, irrigation ditches normally bring water to small farmers, May through September. This year, that vital intervention commenced in late June and closed several weeks later. The lakes that fill the ditches were almost dry by mid-July. 

In our past three summers, what we now see as “little fires everywhere” had cloaked the valley in smoke for weeks. But this year, a lightning strike in Southern Oregon ignited the Bootleg Fire, which quickly escalated into the largest active blaze in the nation. Easterly winds, for better or worse, sent smoke across the country, reducing air quality as far away as New York City but leaving blue skies here. Still, we were sitting on a tinderbox labeled “extreme fire danger.” When Tony and I readied for our August road trip, I took photos of the inside and outside of our house, in case we found it gone on our return.

Other crises also ignited here during this summer of 2021, sparked by the COVID Delta variant that no fire hose can reach. Here as elsewhere, attitudes about masks and vaccination largely split along party lines, and Southern Oregon has made national news for its own “pandemic of the unvaccinated.” The same ruptures appear locally, along a tense interface between the urban-inclined and rural “freedom fighters.” In late August, a viral video showed protesters demonstrating against mask requirements at a local hospital, while unvaccinated COVID patients filled the facility and health-care staff waited for support from the Oregon National Guard.

I have been thinking a good deal lately about the difference between optimism and hope. The writer Barbara Kingsolver notes: 

The pessimist would say, “It’s going to be a terrible winter; we’re all going to die.” The optimist would say, “Oh, it’ll be all right; I don’t think it’ll be that bad.” The hopeful person would say, “Maybe someone will still be alive in February, so I’m going to put some potatoes in the root cellar just in case.” And that’s where I lodge myself on this spectrum. Hope is a mode of survival. I think hope is a mode of resistance.”

Our cross-country trip revealed, anew, America’s enormous natural bounty, from sea to shining sea. Yet it also highlighted the profound divisions that challenge our democracy. Ninety-seven percent of America’s land is rural, and one in five Americans live on this land. Those of us who live in urban America can barely imagine the vast differences that shape those lives. Likewise, the persistent constructs of race and class share a geology as volcanic as Yellowstone. No wonder we cannot agree on what we are fighting for.

Despite the odds, I cast my ballot for hope: that we can repair our planet and civil society together. Today, when Tony and I headed out on the forest trail above our house, bright skies and cool temperatures lifted our feet.

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