Spring/Summer 2006 Land

Posts: Readers Write about Land

Defense of Farmland

The land belongs to all of us. Oregon is about to reexamine the uses, limits, responsibilities, and pleasures land gives to each of us in the wake of Measure 37. It's time. A deed to a particular parcel bestows many more rights to the owner than the rest of us enjoy. I would argue that those are limited rights that are governed by current law, no matter what year you or your family purchased that land.

At the outset, I will disclose a bias. I am a farmer. I grew up over eighty years ago on the land I can see from my living and dining room windows. I have tractored its fields, swum in its creek, and hiked the woods left along that creek. It's done well by me. It has changed noticeably in that time. The cows that sustained my family are gone along with the fences and hedgerows that contained them. Better to set aside more riparian wildlife areas along the creek than weed infested hedgerows bordering every field. Weed-free grass seed now pays the bills.

It's good land. The Willamette River is only a couple of miles to the west, but Muddy Creek corkscrews eight or nine miles to get there.

I love the wildlife. Foxes denned recently in my back yard, and I ended up feeding the pups road kill when their parents deserted them too soon. Another year, it was skunks, and I had to live trap two of them and move them to the other side of the creek when they decided to make the living arrangements permanent. The birds are the most fun. I have a covey of twenty quail that regularly stop by for a handout. Towhees, juncos, song sparrows, and nuthatches are regulars.

If it sounds idyllic, it is. The trouble comes from the threat of Measure 37. That would permit me and my neighbors who have farmed this land for generations to subdivide into small buildable plots. It wouldn't make much difference at first but gradually would change the character of the area. Farming would lose out to houses. But the biggest loss would be in the intangibles. Some part of my land belongs to all of us: the uncluttered landscape, the wildlife, the products of my fields, my economic contribution.

When we are adding up the ledger, count the things I get in return. By being a good steward of the land, I get farmland taxes that were greatly reduced when Exclusive Farm Use zoning came into being in 1973. Most of all, I get the satisfaction of knowing that I am practicing sustainable agriculture that will be passed down through my family for generations to come.

--Hector Macpherson, Albany

Terroir

I walked all the way around Portland, along the invisible line called the "UGB," the Urban Growth Boundary. Once in a while I could bushwhack across fields when the map's dotted line didn't follow the road; otherwise I approximated its zigzags on city streets and rural two-lanes, a long walk that I hoped to get a book out of. Somewhere between the map and the territory was Portland, that dream of a good place to live--plagued like all human places with disputes over what shape that dream should take and who should control it. Community-wide decisions? Individual property rights? Measure 37 loomed in the near future. I kept my feet to the ground and listened, smelled, looked.

And tasted. One warm April day, walking a rolling, semirural part of Southwest Portland, I got a confusing vision. On the supposedly "city" side of the boundary, spring-green rows of grapes trellised up a hill. Its sign announced Cooper Mountain Vineyards. A bucolic oasis--but with oversized houses crowding its edges. Then I noticed buildings nestled near the top that could only mean one thing: Tasting Room.

I was glad to step into the cool interior. Behind the bar was Morgan, an attractive young woman briskly pouring out free samples: Some kind of special day. My timing was perfect. As I sipped whites and then reds and then a white again, Morgan told me about her pioneer family farm, not far south on Bull Mountain, and how her great-grandfather Harris had been wagonmaster of an overland party, staking out the farm on arriving in Oregon.

Perfect, I thought--watching Morgan pour, listening to her loving descriptions of Cooper Mountain, its soils and slopes and grapes--perfect. Here is the daughter of wandering pioneers, learning the settled-in art of viniculture. Growing grapes, making wine: It's an art of place. The over-fancy wine-drinking word for it is terroir, which means the qualities that are tasted here and nowhere else. What you know when you pay attention, when you decide to stay and make a life here--here, with no safety valve of just clearing out and heading west when problems arise. There is no west from here. This is it.

When we listen to the land and to each other, we begin the process of creating that transcendent terroir called community--what Oregon land-use laws hoped to achieve--deciding, together, what to keep and what to change. Yet (to finish the episode) Morgan said the vineyard would soon be sold off for lots; the owner would move to his other acreage safe outside the UGB. The crowding suburbs would win.

Pity, I thought. I was particularly enjoying the Reserve Chardonnay, which started with a nice citrus crispness but then mellowed to a surprising buttery afterglow in the mouth. It put me in the mood to forgive. Let the vineyard move if it must. If we can keep the UGB in place, perhaps it won't have to move again.

--David Oates, Portlandv

The Ink Is Fading

I'm a city kid, a Portlander inside and out. But the place that connects with me most is in the hills and hollers of Douglas County. Winding through the hills of the coast range up Smith River Road, on the way to Gunter, up a steep, twisty, puke-your-lunch-out-sometimes gravel road, lie two old homesteads. At first glance they have the look of Appalachia about them. (Don't be fooled, there's money in them thar trees!)

A dented red jeep rattles across the hillside and down toward the apple orchard. The colors all around are sap, sienna, green, gray, umber, blue. Bumping along in the jeep an old man, wearing a crumpled felt hat and baggy jeans with suspenders, waves "Hi!" as he drives down the hill. But it's a phantom jeep--my grandfather died long ago. Sitting in that century-old apple orchard, I have an intensely strong sense of belonging. I know, there, who I am. It is there that I am grounded. On that land. On that point in space, I am written into its memory.

The land is the book that holds our story. But what happens when that story begins to be forgotten? History tomes relate what has happened, and a Google search supplies more information than we can use. But the experience of this land and its story is being lost. Fewer and fewer of us hear the tale. The page is turning--the story of the land is changing and being edited, and edited again. Meanwhile the ink is fading on the memory the land carries.

Realities are Measure 37, forest lands about to be sold off to boost county budgets, and natural beach erosion thwarted for grand homes-with-a-beachfront-view. Portland is following a policy of in-filling at any cost. Eminent domain has the Supreme Court's sanction for projects as diverse as building a shopping center in Connecticut or rebuilding New Orleans. Controversies about how to manage forest lands rage as fiercely as the fires that destroy those forests.

In the midst of all that, do we consider the story the land holds, that each place is unique on the planet? Have you ever thought how the sense of your body in relation to the land changes depending on where you are? Three years ago I visited south-central Illinois. It was February--flat, grey, sparse, cold. Somehow it felt very different being in the center of a continent, surrounded by land for 1,500 miles in all directions, than it feels here in Oregon at the edge of a continent. Claustrophobic. Like I could run and run, almost panicky, and never get anywhere because there's just more land ahead, behind, and all around. The land in Illinois has a very different story to tell than in Oregon.

As a sixth-generation Oregonian, I feel some sort of a claim to this land, to its heritage, to its future. I'm curious about the next chapter to be written in our narrative. But in the midst of growth and commerce, Oregonians must stay connected to the land, each in our own way. Walk in the rain, go fishing, walk along the East Side Esplanade, hike the Gorge, get out of your car and smell the sagebrush. Honor your heritage as an Oregonian, and respect the memory written in this land.

--Sally Woolley, Portland

Conquerors or Caretakers

Many of us come from a culture that views land as something to conquer and use to our advantage. I remember a magazine article, written about my grandfather, that hung framed on the wall by his desk, titled, "He Fought the Desert and Won." He cleared and leveled his land with an ax and a team of mules. The planting of the land began in 1920, and it produced good fruit for many years until it was recently covered with a golf course and luxury homes.

Very little unaltered land remains in the area where my grandfather farmed because there are no land-use laws like the ones currently being challenged in Oregon. Even the amount of farmland there is dwindling rapidly as land prices have risen from $10,000 to $200,000 per acre in less than ten years, and farmers are being enticed to sell. The changes to the land that came after Lewis and Clark opened the doors to the West were far greater than those of the powerful Missoula floods that shaped much of the landscape of the Northwest. With cities like Beaverton, Bend, and Boring changing before our eyes, we can begin to imagine how Native Americans felt as the land was transformed around them.

But despite plowed ground, clear cuts, dams, subdivisions, malls, and freeways, we here in Oregon really haven't seen land change like it has in other parts of the world. I spent many years in Haiti, which Columbus called "the Pearl of the Antilles." Today the land of Haiti is devastated. The forests are gone. The topsoil is gone. The rivers are choked with eroded rock and gravel. If the political and economic situation there were to miraculously change, the people would still be needy because the land is ruined.

In 1990, a serious drought gripped the region of Haiti where I lived. This, coupled with the degraded condition of the land, meant that springs used as water sources had completely dried up. People walked miles for water until the rains returned. At the time, I was working on a reforestation project with a group that had fifteen years earlier purchased 120 acres on a small mountain that was so badly eroded it didn't produce viable crops even in seasons of good rainfall. But in the year of the drought, the people from the village nearby were saved from walking miles for water when a spring was discovered on the reforested land. There had not been a spring there in recent memory. The land was no longer sore. It was restored and refreshed and able to provide for the people around it.

We have been blessed both to live on the land and by the land we live on. We should be wise in how we use it. What does changing our laws to make land more accessible to developers gain us in the long run? Even if we could sell it for $200,000 an acre, what could we buy to replace it? If we allow development to pave the land, our descendants won't easily be able to restore it, should they desire to. For the sake of the land, ourselves, and those yet to come, let us look to the future of our land, not as conquerors or consumers, but as caretakers and restorers.

--Jon Anderson, Albany

Solitude

We think of remoteness as a factor of difficulty. The hardest trails, the steepest climbs, the longest routes would rightly reward the backcountry hiker with a solitude that allows communion with nature and an intuneness with one's spirituality impossible among crowds. But remoteness of geography doesn't always guarantee remoteness from strangers. Innumerable times I have pulled myself at last over the rocky ascent to a high-altitude lake only to find other campers already there, the campsites taken, and the place crowded with people fishing and walking, with children and dogs, with tents, hikers, horses, and a whole jumble of state-of-the-art, high-tech campers. This crowd irritates me, but if I were not such a snob for the experience of solitude, I would admit that the wilderness is usually large enough and the terrain varied enough to accommodate all those who come to enjoy it, that I am not often actually bothered by the people themselves, only by the fact of their presence, that those who fish are quiet, that I think children who experience the wilderness grow up a little wiser than those who don't, and that sometimes, even, I enjoy the interaction with strangers.

Besides, when I go into the wilderness, I am usually accompanied by a backpacking partner, so when I talk about solitude, I am stretching the meaning of the word: not one alone but two together. For those two who are sharing the solitude of the wilderness (assuming it is not crowded), nature provides a unique context for relating. Thomas Berry says that "the delicacy, the fragrance, and indescribable beauty of song and music and rhythmic movement in the world about us" are what enable us to have "refinement of emotion and sensitivity" in our greater lives, a refinement we need not only for nature but for each other. The intricate rock gardens of wildflowers below South Sister Mountain, the sweet drift of perfume from the Shasta lilies on Clear Creek, the song of the waterfall spilling over the cirque of Grizzly Lake, the eep of an osprey fishing over the Devil's Punchbowl, the slip of the tides on the beach, the rustle of Jeffrey pines adjusting themselves to a breeze, the bats dipping into Echo Lake with balletic rhythms, the tiny tumbling rockslide dislodged by the gentle vibrations of an ocarina played from a rock spit over a lake--I have been in the presence of such beauties of nature, such delicacy and song, with many friends. With each such experience, our bonds of emotion and sensitivity strengthen and deepen. We interact more creatively and more deeply, and we bring home with us that profound bond, a deeply satisfying sense of other that is a part of our spiritual natures.

--Diana Coogle, Applegate

Lost Local Identity

Give me land, lots of land under starry skies above. Don't fence me in." That is a familiar idea, a wonderful thought, and, when sung, a beautiful tune. But we are getting fenced in--both in our urban region and the rural areas of our state. Little towns are taking on the characteristics of our urban areas.

In the countryside, the grange halls were the seats of culture and social activity. For the most part, they have vanished from American society. That part of time will never be restored. The landscape has changed dramatically. You can drive for miles and view Starbucks and Wal-Marts and other big box names within distance of country towns. Snowboarding, wind-surfing, and other recreational activities are everywhere. Camping sites and golf courses dot the open areas. A great number of McMansions are being built and taking up a lot of open space.

In our urban areas, the single-family homes in tidy neighborhoods are rapidly disappearing. The places we desired for planting gardens and making playgrounds are mostly gone. The spaces for porches and patios where we could breathe fresh air and behold the sunsets and sunrises have been taken away. We have lost a certain sense of local identity that we once held dear.

Where have those neighborhoods where schools are nearby gone? Where are the bastions of art and culture, which were once close to where we lived? Where are the jobs that also were close to where we lived? How will we handle the problems before us? Can we use our open space more wisely? Will we build more high-rise apartments and condos? Are conventional family homes a thing of the distant past? Shall we create more Dignity Villages for the homeless? What shall we do about the many more people that are forecast to move here? It appears that the focus groups and land use gurus have their work cut out for them. Can they come up with concepts and ideas to help the Metro planners in keeping and making the spaces livable? Surely, our hopes are with them.

--Louis Simpson, Portland

Muted Histories

We have just returned from a month with students in the UK, and we find that it's not entirely a smooth readjustment. Partly it's time zones--the body's effort to catch up to the speed of air flight at 39,000 feet. But a large part has to do with the contrast between the human history readily evident in the UK and the human history readily invisible in Oregon.

Two examples: we stayed five nights in Bath, about two hours west of London. Bath takes its name from Britain's only natural hot springs. As early as the first century AD, the Romans had started to build an extensive system of pools, channels, overflow pipes, and so on. Much of their temple to Sulis Minerva, the goddess of this ever-flowing warmth, has been excavated; you can walk the pavers they laid. Within a stone's throw of the Roman baths looms Bath Abbey, a soaring church which carries on one of its outside walls the information that Edgar, king of Britain, was crowned there in 963. Furthermore, much of Bath's architecture dates from roughly the same time as the Declaration of Independence; it remains much as Jane Austen saw it. From Bath, we traveled to Hay-on-Wye, near the border between Wales and England. It's a town now famous for used bookstores, including one that occupies part of a castle dating from the thirteenth century.

In the UK, land has an evident history of human occupation. Especially in the north, stone walls of indeterminate age separate pastures. In some rural areas, pastures have been in continuous use for centuries. They have risen high enough on each side of some roads that the cattle themselves cannot be seen. In such instances, the road itself--narrow and likely once a coach road--has become almost a tunnel.

Oregon has a record of continuous human habitation that extends at least tens of thousands of years, yet we see no Stonehenge, no ruins dating from the first century AD, no ancient churches that boast of the crowning of kings. At the Oregon Historical Society we may currently view artifacts of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. They are certainly worth our time and reflection. Even as they commemorate an important historical moment, they also point to the silence that mostly precedes what has been called "The Journey of Discovery." Despite our frontier heritage, Oregon was not discovered by Lewis and Clark or Francis Drake or Robert Gray and the crew of the Columbia. For tens of thousands of years prior to those explorations, this land was known, named, storied, and well loved by uncounted generations of native peoples. They left few structures. A tragic history of destruction and disease has done much to mute their histories. In the UK, it is im-possible not to hear daily the voices of an ancient, well-documented past. In Oregon, even when we try, we strain to hear them.

--Lex Runciman, McMinnville