November 20, 2004

• In the past few days, I've made an important discovery: If you snort the Flonase just before you go to bed, you won't wake up with an ear canal full of goo. This is important because, well, you can guess.

  I'm a little antsy about setting out to travel tomorrow, since my ear isn't at 100%. It's more like 75-80%. The plan is to wake up Sunday morning in the Blue Mountains of northeastern Oregon, which means... being in the mountains with an ear infection. The meds don't really keep me from driving, and I'll have extra Meclizine around if I start showing signs of vertigo, so I don't think it'll be a problem, but it's still obviously very important to have something to worry about. Wouldn't you say?

  The Blue Mountains, by the way, were one of the last big physical barriers for travelers on the Oregon trail. After following the Snake river through it's plain in Idaho, you got to the mountains and their evergreen forests and high passes.

  If you look at a map of Oregon, you'll see a town called LaGrande, which always makes me think of that ZZTop song, 'LaGrange.' I've been to both places, and it's really a toss-up which is better. I hear they gotta lotta nice girls both places. Or something.

  But between LaGrande and Pendleton is the real mountain pass, and that's where I intend to wake up Sunday morning, going backwards against the flow of long-ago immigrants along the trail. Near Meacham, my near-namesake town.

  I turns out that Mitchell and Meacham and my last name are all permutations of the same clan name. I've been listening to a lot of Joni Mitchell lately, and I think it'd be really cool to find out that mutual ancestors of mine and hers fought with Duke William at the Battle of Hastings in 1066 (as this dubious web site says). Once upon a time, some feudal lord sent some young men to die for William, and then later, Joni writes a song about a river so long it teaches your feet to fly, and later, I write a 'blog entry about the Blue Mountains in Oregon.

  A journey across Oregon in 1940, published as part of an Oregon WPA program: LaGrande to Umatilla
  

  MEACHAM, 156.9 m. (3,681 alt., 70 pop.), was named for Col. A. B. Meacham, a member of the Modoc Peace Commission, who established the Blue Mountain Tavern at this point in 1863, just Outside the borders of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. In the early 1800s the site of Meacham was platted and given the Biblical appellation of Jerusalem with a pretentious plaza in the center known as Solomon Square. But the dreams of the new Jerusalem soon abated and the little mountain village reverted to the old name of Meacham.

  "They took all the trees, and put 'em in a tree museum/And they charged all the people a dollar and a half just to see 'em:"
  

  Nancy Langston's extensive Epilogue draws on her work on the Blue Mountains of Oregon. After discussing the typicality of the Blue Mountains to further the historical understanding of pine forests throughout the West, Langston concentrates on the Forest Service's activities in the "Blues." The departure point is the Forest Service's "unusual admission of guilt and confusion" in 1991 that placed the blame for the environmental crisis in the Blue Mountains squarely at its doorstep (p. 248). Attempts to manage the forest since the 1920s resulted in its near destruction. Although the early foresters failed to realize it, the timber land of the Blue Mountains fundamentally differed from forests in the Midwest and east. "Water and Fire" characterized the Blue Mountains. Once dominated by pine, few pine stands now remain. Despite the best intentions of foresters to scientifically manage the area to reduce old growth stands and replace them with manageable, even-aged, forests nothing of the sort happened. Instead, logging and wildfires resulted in a tremendous change in tree type. Just as William Robbins identified the collapse of the Coos Bay region being set in motion in the 1940s, Langston argues that the collapse of the Blue Mountains in the 1990s began seventy years earlier in the 1920s.

  • 3:34 am
  • 3 Comments