P A I D
S U P P L E M E N T
BEYOND
The Threat of Toxics
A Road to Paradise Soaked with Poisons
“H
e said the stuff he was using
was safe enough to drink,”
Denare Axell recalled. “I
should have asked him right
then and there to prove it.”
Denare, a nurse, had found her piece of
paradise in the high desert near La Pine,
Oregon.
Tall Ponderosa pines guarded her small
two-bedroom home. She planted plum,
pear and apple trees, and a vegetable
garden about the property to help feed her
family. A row of roses went in along the front
fence. She purchased native plants for an
ornamental garden. Small rhododendrons
and azaleas adorned her 2-acre lot. This
was her home, the place where she and her
family enjoyed raising their chickens and
St. Bernard dogs.
In the summer of 2010, Denare was
working in her yard when she heard the
truck moving slowly down the road along
her fence line. She walked to the end of her
driveway and saw a Klamath County truck
spraying a liquid along her property line.
When she asked what it was, Denare was
told that the county was spraying chemicals
for weeds.
Within weeks, Denare’s roses began to
shrivel. The fur on her 150 pound St. Bernard
came off in great fistfuls and within a month
the dog stopped eating and died. Then the
chickens started dying. A year later, not a
single fruit tree remains. The grass didn’t
only die, there’s no longer a trace that it ever
existed. Only one lonely, brown, stunted
rhododendron is stubbornly holding on in
what now looks like a barren wasteland.
by Lisa Arkin, Executive Director of Beyond Toxics
Central Oregon to the Three Sisters wilderness:
malignant mileage.