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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (Jan. 13, 2016)
22 Wednesday, January 13, 2016 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon The Bunkhouse Chronicle Craig Rullman Columnist Harney County blues “The perceptions of any people wash over the land like a flood, leaving ideas hung up in the brush, like pieces of damp paper to be collected and deciphered. No one call tell the whole story.” — Barry Lopez Nobody is winning in Harney County. Not the Hammonds, certainly, who by some strange judicial leg- erdemain — and one can’t help but believe it is likely vindictive — are now back in prison. Reasonable people might come to the conclu- sion that they have already done enough time for the convicted offense which, given the scale of it, wasn’t much at all. A hundred acres, more or less, and a rickety fence burned. The citizens of America, let alone Harney County, don’t gain much by jumpsuiting the Hammonds back into a Federal prison with cartel dope dealers and human traffickers. And the unwanted Bundy outfit, many of whom appear to have stumbled out of Ted Kaczinki shacks, have exposed themselves as knee-jerk charlatans with- out a plan, without a sym- pathetic message, and more importantly, without a rea- sonable clue. Meanwhile, the kids are out of school, the townfolk are fed up, Fox News and CNN blather on relentlessly, and the only ones worthy of any praise are Harney County Sheriff David Ward and the FBI, who have learned enough about Direct Action failures elsewhere to refuse any at the Malheur Refuge. Good on them. Buried beneath all of this are real issues. There are some who wail about the abuses of “subsidized” ranching, and would like nothing more than to see families like the Hammonds and their livestock thrown off the range for various offenses, real or imagined. Others expect public lands ranchers to behave dispas- sionately when confronted by bureaucracies that have become increasingly hos- tile, and by environmental groups that sue them into oblivion no matter what improvements they make in their practices, and no mat- ter how much good faith they show. In a reasonable discus- sion, it seems that we might remember that these are people whose livelihoods are tied to their use of public land, and who take tremen- dous pride in their steward- ship of the resource. Are there scofflaws? Bandits? Some outright bad people? You bet, and that’s true of any industry, and any busi- ness in America. It’s true of government, cops, the military, environmentalists, priests, big business, small business, and everywhere else. If you want to open the door on the room of unrigh- teousness, don’t be surprised by the people you find sit- ting in there. But thankfully, they aren’t the majority among us, in any enterprise, and never have been. It is just as wrong to decry the efforts of environ- mentalists whose efforts are most often made in equally good faith. These are pas- sionate people and orga- nizations, who cannot be faulted for their convictions any more than the folks who have ranched a few sec- tions of desert for a hundred years. Often, when seated at the same table, they find that their goals, extracted from the heated rhetoric of politics and media, line up squarely. Sagebrush rebellions are as old as the West. In recent memory I can cite the Dann Sisters, the Nye County revolt in Nevada, and the recent serious resurgence of the State of Jefferson move- ment in northern California. There are many more. And I could tell you privately, preferably over a Hoodoo Voodoo at Three Creeks — and only after my horses are fed — of any number of alleged government abuses and the subsequent sage- brush partisan sabotage. This has been going on for years, and isn’t likely to go away, so long as the present atmosphere of extremism, partisanship, and the percep- tions of disenfranchisement remain. We can do a whole lot better. Once, when I was a working buckaroo in north- ern Nevada, I had an MC horse in my string. A son of that outfit, Bill Kittridge has written brilliantly about the decline and fall of the MC, and fans of Ian Tyson might know his brilliant ballad on the sale of the MC horses. The MC is all gone now, broken apart and sold off to various interests. But no one can tell me we are better off because of it, that something precious was somehow preserved by killing something else that was equally precious. That smart and energetic palo- mino I rode with an MC iron on his hip, just the two of us working great circles in the great American outback, under bluebird skies and far out in the rocks and the bit- ing flies, is long dead, but I learned this: it’s a great big desert out there, a desert that will still be there long after we are all gone. It’s a blues joint, in fact, singing a song we all appreciate, and there’s room enough for all of us to grab a chair and sit down to listen: the righteous, the unrighteous, the cows, the cowboys, the wolves, the wild horses, and whatever little frog you’ve got. Please Connect Your Ray’s All Access Rewards Program Account to Furry Friends Foundation It’s FREE and we get 1% back on your purchases. It’s an easy and great way to donate! With your Access Rewards account information in hand (the number is on the back of your card), you can call, email or visit Ray’s to connect to Furry Friends Foundation. • Call 541-412-0005 • Email AllAccess@ckmarket.com • Visit the Ray’s Customer Service Counter and ask to connect your account number to Furry Friends for the All Access Community Rewards Program. Shop locally, donate locally! Thank you for your support. www.FurryFriendsFoundation.org Sisters Pet Food Bank • Spay/Neuter Sponsorships • Emergency Medical Assistance
