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About The nugget. (Sisters, Or.) 1994-current | View Entire Issue (June 20, 2018)
2 Wednesday, June 20, 2018 The Nugget Newspaper, Sisters, Oregon O P I N I O N The Last Resort By Jim Cornelius Editor in Chief Letters to the Editor… The Nugget welcomes contributions from its readers, which must include the writer’s name, address and phone number. Let- ters to the Editor is an open forum for the community and contains unsolicited opinions not necessarily shared by the Editor. The Nugget reserves the right to edit, omit, respond or ask for a response to letters submitted to the Editor. Letters should be no longer than 300 words. Unpublished items are not acknowledged or returned. The deadline for all letters is noon Monday. To the Editor: I’d like to follow up on my recent Opinion piece in the Nugget. I apologize if the tone was overly angry. It was the wrong tone to use when raising this contentious issue again. If my use of the term “bicyclists” seemed overly broad I apologize. I referred to “pathies,” once again I’m sorry if I offended. The McKenzie Pass Highway should be managed as it has been historically, and just like Cascade Lakes Highway in Bend is man- aged today. Plow it open as soon as possible in the spring, bikes get a week to themselves, then open it to all traffic. Cascade Lakes Highway has been open to all traffic for a month or more already. Why not here? Why is traffic gated out of 242 every year in favor of bicyclists? Plow it open as soon as possible in the spring, bikes get a week to themselves, then it’s open to all traffic. Like many of our residents, weekenders and tourists, I use our local national forests, and our state highways to access them, hun- dreds of days a year, year round. I take my access to our public lands very seriously. I’m unwilling to accept any effort to unfairly lock me out of it, any of it. I hope you are, too. I’m working (trying to) with ODOT to pub- licly abandon this unfair closure policy, and to open our precious McKenzie Pass to ALL OF US as soon as possible every year. You can help by contacting ODOT in Bend with your support of access for all of us. It would be a big help and greatly appreciated. Glenn Brown s s s See LETTERS on page 30 Sisters Weather Forecast Courtesy of the National Weather Service, Pendleton, Oregon Wednesday Thursday PM Thunderstorms Sunny 83/54 82/49 Friday Saturday Sunday Monday Sunny Sunny Sunny Sunny 79/47 79/48 89/51 79/45 The Nugget Newspaper, LLC Website: www.nuggetnews.com 442 E. Main Ave., P.O. Box 698, Sisters, Oregon 97759 Tel: 541-549-9941 | Fax: 541-549-9940 | editor@nuggetnews.com Postmaster: Send address changes to The Nugget Newspaper, P.O. Box 698, Sisters, OR 97759. Third Class Postage Paid at Sisters, Oregon. Editor in Chief: Jim Cornelius Production Manager: Leith Easterling Classifieds & Circulation: Teresa Mahnken Graphic Design: Jess Draper Community Marketing Partners: Patti Jo Beal & Vicki Curlett Accounting: Erin Bordonaro Proofreader: Pete Rathbun Owner: J. Louis Mullen The Nugget is mailed to residents within the Sisters School District; subscriptions are available outside delivery area. Third-class postage: one year, $45; six months (or less), $25. First-class postage: one year, $85; six months, $55. Published Weekly. ©2018 The Nugget Newspaper, LLC. All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or in part without written permission is prohibited. All advertising which appears in The Nugget is the property of The Nugget and may not be used without explicit permission. The Nugget Newspaper, Inc. assumes no liability or responsibility for information contained in advertisements, articles, stories, lists, calendar etc. within this publication. All submissions to The Nugget Newspaper will be treated as uncondition- ally assigned for publication and copyrighting purposes and subject to The Nugget Newspaper’s unrestricted right to edit and comment editorially, that all rights are currently available, and that the material in no way infringes upon the rights of any person. The publisher assumes no responsibility for return or safety of artwork, photos, or manuscripts. Who will provide the grand design, what is yours and what is mine? ’Cause there is no more new frontier, we have got to make it here… — Glenn Frey/Don Henley, “The Last Resort” By Jim Cornelius “The small community of Camp Sherman located on the slopes of the Cascades in Central Oregon, is expe- riencing growth pains. Once the site of a handful of homesteads, the U.S. Forest Service estimates approxi- mately 250,000 visitors to the Camp Sherman Store each year, with more than 200,000 vehicles going to and from Camp Sherman annually and an average daily count of more than 1,000 vehicles during the summer season.” That’s from a report by Eric Belden in the July 2 edition of The Nugget… from 1980. The anxieties of growth and change are nothing new in Sisters Country. They are, as Craig Rullman points out in The Bunkhouse Chronicle this week (page 23) part of the bigger story of the American West — indeed of frontiers every- where. What’s happening in Sisters is a phenomenon I call The Frontiersman’s Paradox: We come to a wild, free, beautiful place, seeking an untrammeled life and a bit of economic prosperity — and our every action changes what we love. This has been going on for a very long time, and in many places we have deemed a paradise. In the 18th century Kentucky was seen as a land of milk and honey. A backwoods preacher told his congre- gation: “Oh, my honeys! Heaven is a Kentucky of a place!” Settlers poured in. The Shawnee and other native peoples did not give up this fine hunting ground easily. Men and women were willing to fight for their piece of paradise — and for a good 25 years Kentucky was a bloody battleground. Ted Franklin Belue closes his study, “The Hunters of Kentucky,” with a depiction of the aged fron- tiersman Simon Kenton — who did as much as any single individual to wrest the land from its native inhabitants — gazing with bemusement at the civiliza- tion his work had wrought on a land he had entered when it was a kind of hunt- er’s paradise: “When old Kenton returned to Kentucky briefly from Ohio to visit, he hitched a wagon ride a few miles south of Limestone to take a sack of corn to a Washington gristmill. As David Hunter’s team topped a rise, Hunter reined in momentarily. Kenton, musing and drawing on his pipe stem, gazed at the land before him, all clapboard cabins and barns and green- ing pastures and cattle and horses where once there were buffalo rattling in the canebrakes. “‘What a change. What a change’ Kenton exclaimed, shaking his head in amazement. “As the leather snapped and the wagon eased on, passing a certain spring flowing on land claimed by Hunter’s father, Hunter’s venerable passenger grinned and spun a few yarns about his adventures with (Daniel) Boone, but in the end, Kenton realized that the fabled island in the wilderness he once knew, explored, hunted, trapped out, and helped wrest from the Shawanoes was no more.” For decades, restless frontiersmen simply moved on when the land became — thanks to their own actions — too settled for their tastes. We no longer really have that option. “We have got to make it here.” We the people of Sisters know it’s at a watershed moment (see related story, page 1). “Making it here” in the coming years is going to require balancing sometimes-competing val- ues — vibrancy vs. peace and quiet; economic activ- ity vs. traffic and popula- tion growth; affordability and accessibility vs. pres- ervation and exclusivity. Sisters isn’t what it used to be. It wasn’t what it used to be in 1980, either. We can only determine what we’re going to be — and only if we take on the work of planning, negotiating, and compromising required if we — and maybe our kids — are going to make it here. Opinions expressed in this column are solely those of the writer and are not necessarily shared by the Editor or The Nugget Newspaper.
