Opinion
A4
Saturday, January 15, 2022
OUR VIEW
A welcome
reversal on
football
B
rad Dunten and Josh Cobb talked, and
people listened.
The winners are high school football
players in some of Oregon’s tiniest towns.
Dunten, the athletic director at Powder
Valley High School in North Powder, and
Cobb, the school’s head football coach, were
dismayed by a recent proposal from a state
committee to do away with eight-man football,
the format that Powder Valley and dozens of
other Class 1A schools have used for decades.
The Oregon School Activities Association’s
(OSAA) Football Ad Hoc Committee made
that recommendation on Dec. 20. The com-
mittee’s plan would have switched to either a
nine-man or a six-man football format for the
state’s smaller high schools.
The proposal prompted immediate oppo-
sition from Dunten and Cobb, who had, less
than a month earlier, watched Powder Valley
play Adrian in a classic Class 1A state champi-
onship game at Baker High School, a thrilling
contest in which Adrian rallied to win 46-38.
Dunten dispatched a survey to 95 Class 1A
schools, which are fairly evenly distributed,
geographically speaking, in the state, including
more than a dozen in Northeastern Oregon.
The response was overwhelmingly in favor
of keeping the eight-man format. School offi -
cials who answered Dunten’s survey men-
tioned, among other reasons for their prefer-
ence, that the eight-man format is well-suited
to the number of players who normally turn
out for football at Class 1A schools, and that
it allows schools to schedule games against
teams from neighboring states that also play
eight-man football rather than the nine-man
format.
“Eight-man just feels right,” Cobb said.
Dunten was among the Class 1A school offi -
cials who expressed their concerns during the
OSAA committee’s Jan. 5 meeting.
Two days later the committee announced
that it supported continuing the eight-man
format for Class 1A schools.
The six-man option, which has been in
place for the past few years, would continue
for the smallest schools or those that have too
few players for eight-man competition. Baker
County’s three Class 1A schools — Pine
Eagle, Huntington and Burnt River — already
play six-man football.
The OSAA executive board has yet to
approve the committee’s revised recommenda-
tion. But it should be an easy choice.
Thanks to Dunten’s eff orts, the schools most
directly aff ected by the committee’s earlier
proposal to do away with eight-man football
have made explicit their feelings on the matter.
The committee acknowledged those schools’
preferences, and the OSAA should make it
offi cial.
A sense of place in the Blue Mountains
BILL
ANEY
THIS LAND IS OUR LAND
here is a place along the upper
Grande Ronde River that has
a hold on my heart. As a kid, I
would camp there with my grandfa-
ther, him teaching me to build a fi re,
split kindling, play gin rummy, fl ip
pancakes (“belly gaskets” he would
call them) and fi sh for trout. Imagine
the patience it must take to teach a
10-year-old how to cast a fl y.
I was a city kid, raised in Portland
and Corvallis, but every summer
I would spend several weeks with
my grandparents in Northeastern
Oregon. I see now that these expe-
riences and places led me to make
life choices that have always brought
me back to the Blue Mountains. My
education, summer jobs and career
moves kept returning me to this
place that feels like home.
In an incredible stroke of luck,
one of my fi rst Forest Service jobs
was as a fi re prevention technician,
patrolling an area that included the
upper Grande Ronde. A campground
had been developed where grandpa
used to park his trailer, the lodge-
pole pine forest had been ravaged by
pine beetles, and eventually the river
was no longer stocked with native
hatchery trout, but I still felt a great
attachment to this landscape.
Each day I visited with campers,
fi shers and woodcutters and shared
with them stories of my summers
in the same spot, pointing out good
fi shing holes, access roads and
spring sources — and, of course,
spreading the fi re prevention
message.
Social scientists have a term for
this special feeling I have for the
upper Grande Ronde. It is called
T
“sense of place” and refers to the
characteristics of a place that make
it special or unique or that create in
people a sense of attachment and
belonging. My childhood experi-
ences created for me a primal land-
scape, and it is common for exposure
to natural landscapes to infl uence
our preferences later in life. That
certainly held true for me.
Have you ever driven by a house
where you lived as a kid and felt
a rush of memories, sights and
sounds? That’s sense of place. Do
you choose to camp in the same loca-
tion every hunting season, perhaps
your grandparents’ hunting camp-
site, even when the hunting success
doesn’t live up to the memories of
your youth? That tug is your sense of
place, and it’s important. During my
career I was sometimes frustrated
by my agencies’ inability to close
roads, even when the roads were
reducing the value of wildlife habitat
or damaging soil and water quality. It
seemed like every two-track road in
the forest led to someone’s traditional
family hunting camp.
Some elements of the sense of
place are cultural, referring to the
attachment of a people or culture to
an environment or homeland. I don’t
compare my own feelings of sense
of place with the connections that
Native people have to their ances-
tral lands, as my connection only
runs one or two generations deep
and doesn’t include the land pro-
viding for the needs of my ancestors
— nor was it ever taken from them.
But I do respect that Native people
have a long and spiritual connec-
tion to the land, and I appreciate the
signifi cance of their work to restore
the capacity of the land and waters
to provide for them. It must be a
powerful emotional experience to
see salmon return to a stream that
one’s ancestors used to fi sh, or to
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pick huckleberries in areas known
through family oral history.
We spend plenty of time in inau-
thentic locations, places that could
be put anywhere. Strip malls, fast
food restaurants, large box stores
and downtown areas that have been
converted to tourist traps or heavy
commercial use all lose their ability
to connect to people with a sense of
place. Gertrude Stein visited the site
where her childhood home and farm
once stood, and upon seeing that the
land had been converted to housing
developments, summarized her feel-
ings by saying “there is no there
there.” This certainly is the antith-
esis of the sense of place; I sense in
her writing a mourning for the loss
of part of her own identity.
To be sure, the upper Grande
Ronde is not the only place that
evokes strong feelings for me. There
is a lake in the Wallowas I call
“spread your ashes worthy” because
of its sheer beauty. Hayward Field in
Eugene is a place that holds special
memories for me as a track and fi eld
athlete, coach and spectator. Even
the sidewalk in front of the Great
Pacifi c has a special place in my
heart because of the many summer
Friday evenings I have spent there
with good friends.
As an adult, I have visited and
fi shed the upper Grande Ronde with
my own family. The day is coming
soon when I will be able to take my
grandchildren to the same place, and
I look forward to setting up a camp,
cooking belly gaskets, building a
campfi re, playing in the river, and
helping them catch trout on a fl y.
I suspect these experiences will
bring a tear or two to my eye; such is
the power of sense of place.
———
Bill Aney is a forester and wild-
life biologist living in Pendleton and
loving the Blue Mountains.
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