Remember that fourth-grade Thanksgiving pageant, the big feast with Indians providing most of the food? Squanto was there, kindly teaching the Pilgrims how to put a fish in a hole to grow corn and beans and squash. Somehow I don’t remember learning that Squanto — more properly “Tisquantum”— was taken to England and then abducted […]
Rich Wandschneider
Posted inWotr
As the housing market improves, have we learned to live more modestly?
The trouble with dream houses — the dream homes on the dream streets of big-city real estate tours, or tucked among canyons near resort areas like Sun Valley, Idaho — is that dreams tend to change over time. Despite the notion that a dream is a private world that only the dreamer can know, dreams […]
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A novel solution to the drug problem
A cop friend told me not long ago that he had changed his mind completely on the idea of legalizing drugs. His current take: “Legalize everything but meth and hang the meth-pushers” — or something close to that. We were talking about a kid we both had known back in the day, a kid who […]
Posted inWotr
A poet whom readers won’t let go
Remembering William Stafford, a popular Northwestern poet
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Hard to believe, but it’s my 50th high school reunion
A half-century of memories, and a look forward
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Without big government, where would we be?
Like most people who use email, I get an extraordinary amount of SPAM, plus a large volume of canned messages from both sides of the political spectrum, forwarded by well-meaning friends who think I will agree or who think I should agree with the e-mail’s premise. Most of these messages get a quick hit on […]
Posted inWotr
Parenting again, though not by choice
Just a year ago, I turned 65, had a modest Social Security income and half-time job with the nonprofit I’d founded 20 years earlier, and I was divorced — amicably — after a 34-year marriage. Home was a small house in the small town of Joseph in northeast Oregon, but I was making frequent trips […]
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The only thing we have to fear …
Maybe because Christmas and the New Year are traditional times for celebrating a sense of community, it’s also a good time to acknowledge some of the rough patches in the rural Shangri-La where I live: the growing demands at the local food bank, dissension in the town of Joseph, Ore., over our governance, the 23 […]
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The way it looks in rural Oregon in this shaky economic world
A few years ago, local realtors in Joseph, a town of 1,000 in northeastern Oregon, were clamoring for houses and properties to put on the market; now, “for sale” signs are everywhere. Yet real estate deals in Wallowa County are stalled because the boom times in Bend, Ore., have come to a grinding halt. Four-dollar […]
Posted inMay 12, 2008: Boom! Boom!
No country for old men
I’ve lived in rural eastern Oregon for 37 years, and in that time have known several suicides (HCN, 3/31/08). Some are variations on the scripts that Ring discusses. But there is another type of suicide that is not unusual in the rural independent West – the elderly or terminal individual who clings to control over […]
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Idealism wakes up in America
I am one of the thousands of returned Peace Corps volunteers that Chris Matthews of MSNBC predicted would support Barack Obama after he lit the fuse in Iowa. But I had already been tapped by Harris Wofford, a Kennedy-era warhorse and director of the Peace Corps program in Ethiopia, who is now stumping college campuses […]
Posted inDecember 26, 2005: A New Green Revolution
Scandal and war fracture conservative coalition
The wars in Vietnam and Iraq aren’t the same, of course, but there’s an eerie feeling of similarity between what happened in the early 1970s and what is happening now. Only this time, a conservative political coalition is crumbling, instead of a liberal one. In 1971, when I moved to rural Wallowa County in Oregon, […]
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It’s déjà vu all over again in Iraq
The wars in Vietnam and Iraq aren’t the same, of course, but there’s an eerie feeling of sameness to what’s happening now and what happened in the early 1970s. Only this time, it’s a conservative political coalition that’s crumbling. In 1971, when I moved to rural Wallowa County in Oregon, a national liberal coalition held […]
Posted inApril 4, 1994: Who speaks for the Colorado Plateau?
An open letter to Andy Kerr in rural Oregon
ENTERPRISE, Ore. – I don’t know you, Andy, although we’ve met a couple of times. You came into my bookstore 12 or 15 years ago, then we met again the evening of Allan Savory’s grazing talk. I’ve heard your voice on TV and seen your face in the newspapers over the years. I remember one […]