PORTLAND, Ore. – In Northeast Portland, you can get culture shock just by crossing the street. Near the corner of Alberta Street and 28th Avenue, a no-frills tacqueria called La Sirenita sells fish tacos to a long line of customers for little more than a dollar apiece. On the other side of Alberta, Bernie’s Southern […]
Communities
Posted inJuly 5, 1999: The new faces of the West
Low-paid service workers get squeezed in a booming Montana resort town
WHITEFISH, Mont. – After working his $7-an-hour job at the Grouse Mountain Lodge, Jerry Wheeler doesn’t hang out in this picturesque town in western Montana. He drives 20 miles south to a modest home on the outskirts of Kalispell, the mercantile center of the Flathead Valley. Wheeler says he is one of the few Grouse […]
Posted inJuly 5, 1999: The new faces of the West
Seeking justice for all on the Colorado Plateau
Charles Wilkinson’s “Fire on the Plateau …” is a tribute to the land and people of the Colorado Plateau, especially the tribes
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Dreaming the prairie back to life
Even though the second-highest point in North Dakota lies just a few miles from the dwindling town of Regent, you probably wouldn’t know that if you saw it. At 3,468 feet, Black Butte rises from rolling wheat fields like a bump under a rug. But to Gary Greff it looks like the ideal spot for […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Cattlemen make use of a conservation tool
GUNNISON, Colo. – Frost gilds the branches of the elder and cottonwood trees bordering the Redden family’s pastureland as Brett Redden climbs into a tractor at dawn and delivers hay to 300 cattle. Then he goes to his “regular” job with the fire and rescue crew at Gunnison Airport. Some months he’ll pick up extra […]
Posted inJune 21, 1999: The disappearing farm
Can poverty protect the last, best place?
All who care about the non-metropolitan West should be grateful to Montanans. Within the generous confines of that 145,000 square-mile state, they are asking, in the closing days of the 20th century, whether the good life can be disconnected from the economy. They are testing whether a place that in 50 years has plunged from […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
Tragedy on the border
Charles Bowden’s recent book Juarez: The Laboratory of Our Future chronicled, in vivid words and photographs, the violent restlessness of sprawling Ciudad Juarez (HCN, 9/14/98). Among the most horrifying, and unforgettable, images were those of the bodies of several young women, all murdered on their way home from low-paying jobs at the U.S.-owned factories on […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
‘Petroglyph police’ try to save the art of the ancients
ZION NATIONAL PARK, Utah – A prehistoric petroglyph, chipped out of red sandstone to resemble a fat sheep, contends with a crude contemporary scrawl about a foot away. The scrawl looks roughly like a circle, scratched out with a sharp stick – the mark of an unsupervised child, or a thoughtless adult. When Sharon and […]
Posted inJune 7, 1999: Mining the past
A park all their own
HOLBROOK, Ariz. – When seasoned businessman Marvin Hatch bought a northern Arizona ranch, he and business partner Terrence “Shorty” Reidhead knew the land would yield more than just hamburger. The 60,000-acre, $3.3 million Paulsell Ranch is littered with Indian ruins, artifacts and petroglyphs. The ranch’s resources are so important that its neighbor, Petrified Forest National […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
Settlement reached in Tahoe takings case
In 1989, Bernadine Suitum had planned to build a retirement home on a plot of land near Lake Tahoe (HCN, 7/7/97). But instead of breaking ground, Suitum found herself deep in a ferocious legal battle with the Tahoe Regional Planning Agency, the bistate office charged with overseeing development around the lake. Now, a decade later, […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
Not just sheepherders
A Travel Guide to Basque America – Families, Feasts and Festivals, by journalist Nancy Zubiri, is a passionate and well-researched guide to the Great Basin country of the West. Zubiri traces Basque culture from its origins in the Pyrenees to strongholds today in southern Idaho, northern Nevada and California’s Central Valley and Sierra Nevada. Along […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
Recreation doesn’t cut it
Many rural people hope that new industries such as tourism will offset the losses when timber and mining industries pull out of an area. Research conducted by the University of Idaho’s College of Agriculture found that for at least that one small county, recreation is not bringing in enough money to keep suffering economies afloat. […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
Greens not welcome in Escalante
ESCALANTE, Utah – Heavy machinery rolled into town the week of April 12. Construction was imminent on the $7.5 million New Wide Hollow Reservoir that would provide water for a couple dozen ranchers in this rural southern Utah town. Then, on April 15, under pressure from environmentalists who say the reservoir would harm the Escalante […]
Posted inMay 24, 1999: The last weird place
Walking the path between light and dark
Good guys. Bad guys. It used to be pretty clear which side was which. When I was a kid back in the straight-arrow ’50s, I knew that the Lone Ranger wore the white hat. He was on the side of justice, law and order. In the topsy-turvy ’60s, as I learned how the West was […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
My beautiful ranchette
My name is Susan; I live on a ranchette. In the growth-pained West, this is as serious a confession as alcoholism or cruelty to animals. A year and a half ago, I picked up my local newspaper in Bozeman, Mont., and there under the headline TRACKING SPRAWL was an aerial photo of the Bridger Mountain […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
In Montana: The view from the ranchette
Montana has its own special pathologies. But the one it shares most visibly with the Mountain West in general features a peculiar symptom – furtive glances at the horizon with the expectation of seeing silhouetted hordes there, as in a Western movie, except that these hordes are driving Land Rovers and eating sushi. There’s a […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Enough nature writing already!
In a column by Anne Lamott in the online magazine “Salon,” she made the following proposal: “Rather than make perfectly good writers crank out new books every few years because they need income and are otherwise unemployable, what if we gave them subsidies not to write any more books, like they give to tobacco growers?” […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
Why I’m a poor writer
For almost a month now I’ve been trying to collect $55 that a national environmental magazine owes me for a 400-word book review. That’s two 20s, a 10, and a five. Three polite e-mails have yielded the following one response: “Thanks for reminding me. I’ll look into it.” This proves my first rule about free-lance […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
When you’re alone on the open road
During the winter, I live in the southeastern corner of Wyoming, in the capital city of Cheyenne. In summer, and in any weather when the roads are passable, I spend as much time as I can on my ranch in the southwestern corner of South Dakota. My two homes are about 280 miles apart, but […]
Posted inMay 10, 1999: My beautiful ranchette
The East Rosebud Trip
Far past road signs local paranoia claimed would signal the Russians’ attack from Montana (numbers I’d thought were Highway Department codes mass produced in Chicago maybe to identify routes and mileage, lo and behold turned out to be signals for the New World Order’s global hegemony – so clutch your rifle); past all that the […]