My drive to the bird festival that weekend not only took me
across an ancient ocean bed framed by exquisite small canyons but paralleled
sections of what was christened in 2012 as the Oregon Desert Trail. The Oregon
Natural Desert Association (ONDA) plotted and pieced together this 750-mile
trail that starts at the Oregon Bad- lands Wilderness outside of Bend and
continues to the southeastern Oregon canyonlands that flank the Owyhee River.
Other than a few permitted easements across private land, the trail takes pains
to stay on public lands the whole way.
I moved from New England to the high desert to ranch four
decades ago. Though I now live in town, my love of this hardscrabble outback
still informs my every day. So no surprise that this new trail spoke to me,
lured me back into the desert. No longer actively ranching, I decided I would
walk sections of the trail and write about it—about what I saw and those I
encountered. I would make a point of evenly and fairly presenting the
conflicting points of view about repurposing open areas of public land. I
prided myself that in so many ways I already knew the players: ranchers; Bureau
of Land Management, Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife employees;
schoolteachers in rural schoolhouses; merchants in remote outposts; American
Indians on reservations in the high desert; law enforcement officials who, some
years back, were kind enough to wave me on, despite my excessive speed, as I
made my way along desolate Highway 20 back to the ranch with a station wagon
full of fussy infants and sacks of groceries. I knew and understood desert
dwellers. This narrative would be about and with them.
At dinner, I asked those at my table their thoughts about
ONDA’s trail through this wide-open, tumble dry, high desert. As they finished
their salad course and passed around the fresh-baked rolls, I posited my idea
that the trail is as long and circuitous as it is not only to lead trekkers
through some of the most scenic, and heretofore unexplored, areas of the high
desert but also because it dares not stray off public lands lest it create
conflicts with private landowners. Did they agree? I wanted to follow, I
explained, the course of this high desert camino that skirts key concerns
facing this sagebrush ocean: protection of sacred Native American ground,
protection of habitat for endangered species, elimination of “predators,”
“wild” horse protection, grazing “rights” for livestock, hunting “rights,”
water “rights,” demand for recreational land for motorized vehicles, demand for
land for what was touted as low-impact recreational uses. I told them I wanted
to show how these issues meet head-on at various inter- sections along the
trail. How solutions that work for all are elusive, charged, and complicated
but do exist. How, to me, the Oregon Desert Trail, as it zigs and zags
assiduously avoiding privately held tracts, is a powerful metaphor for all the
land-use and other issues facing not just southeastern Oregon but all of the
ranching West.
As my mashed potatoes and roast beef got cold, I went on
(and on . . .). I explained the broader philosophical musings the trail excited
in me as suggested by the contradictory rights various groups and users claim.
What is wild? Who says grazing is a right? Who says it isn’t? What is the
highest best use of public lands? According to whom? Whose narrative is most
compelling and is influencing policy decisions? Their answers and related
questions would be an important part of the book I planned.
Hiking emblematic sections of the Oregon Desert Trail, I
explained I’d also interview other key individuals like them who represent the
variety of perspectives on high desert land use. I’d welcome the questions the
process raised and would embrace the conundrum that a passionate love of the
same place is not a predictor for common solutions. From these many
conversations I would glean reasonable, collaborative approaches to pending
decisions. Everyone really can just get along. What did they think? No
surprise, the varied and compelling responses from my tablemates at the
festival dinner, and from those I interviewed subsequently, charted the course
for this linked narrative and populated the pages to follow.
Because curiosity killed the cat. Because Burns, Oregon, is
the county seat of Harney County, where the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife
Refuge took place in January and February 2016. It was now April. Ammon Bundy
and his band had left the refuge only two months earlier. The buildings they
occupied on the refuge and portions of the refuge itself were still closed to
the public. Damage to refuge struc- tures, to Northern Paiute artifacts and
burial sites was still being assessed. Burns was now on the map. The occupation
had identified a new 1 percent—those in the nation who had actually heard of
Harney County, the refuge, and Burns, Oregon. But, United States of America,
ignore what took place there at your peril.
The forty-one-day occupation rendered my original concept
for this desert trek narrative a nursery rhyme, la, la, la, a polite conversation
about land-use conflicts. The trail was now a mere a contrivance to link the
perspectives of those who want to harvest natural resources and those who want
to protect land for various recreational and environmental reasons. The
land-use policy options I intended to write about turned into a shouting match
during the occupation between, for starters, those who want no government
intrusion and those who understand the benefits of government involvement and
collaboration. And since the Bundy occupation, militias have gone public,
brother has armed against brother, false information has been embraced as fact.
How armed and dangerous we are! How blunt an instrument our thinking has
become! How very afraid we are. How misappropriated by the Bundys and their
constituents are the United States constitution and, for that matter, God and
his son. How misunderstood the laws affecting land-use and, well, everything if
one believes the Bundys. And many do.
This unknown region of the United States suddenly became the
poster child not only for land-use and conservation issues but for, yes, the
angry, gun-toting, disenfranchised and the rural silent minority who, in
combination, helped define the 2016 presidential election, dramatically
reframing America’s conversation. This demographic, like this area of the
United States, is no longer unknown or uncharted. The failure of those—who see
themselves as educated and informed, who are at the helm of this nation—to
acknowledge and engage the predominantly white, no-longer-silent disenfranchised
as much shapes this book as does the elaborate cursive script the Oregon Desert
Trail inscribes across southeastern Oregon.
“When hay is fresh and new, all my praise to You. When hay
is fresh and new, all my praise to You.”
Virtual Book Launch - Walking the High Desert: Reading and Q&A with author Ellen Waterston - High Desert Museum Wed., June 17.
Hear author Ellen Waterston read from her new title, "Walking the High Desert: Encounters with Rural America along the Oregon Desert Trail." Uniting stories from across this diverse landscape—the humans and non-human voices—Waterston weaves an incomparable narrative of wonder, science, history and prose. Walking the High Desert is at once travelogue, meditation, memoir, history, philosophy, …