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THE ASTORIAN • THuRSdAy, AuguST 22, 2019
OPINION
editor@dailyastorian.com
KARI BORGEN
Publisher
JIM VAN NOSTRAND
Editor
Founded in 1873
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Circulation Manager
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Production Manager
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Systems Manager
WRITER’S NOTEBOOK
Season of ripe apples, rich memories
E
very few years, sugar just might
coalesce out of the kiln-baked soil
in my grandparents’ plum thicket
at their little retirement ranch in western
Wyoming.
The plums were the size of cheap
green olives, hard enough to use for sling-
shot ammo until September, when the first
daredevil winds tobogganed down the
mountains and playfully
knocked them down.
A presidential adminis-
tration might come and
go before any survived
until they were edible.
But when the maraud-
ing frosts lurked above
MATT
6,000 feet for a precious
WINTERS
extra couple of weeks,
earth’s delicious alchemy
of slanting sun and towering August thun-
derstorms infused them with sweetness.
In those exceptional years, a slippery
fermenting mass of ripe purple bonbons
enticed mule deer down from the hills to
get plum drunk, silly as kindergartners at
an all-you-can-eat cotton-candy buffet.
Grandma Bell kept canned foods in the
dark recesses lining her dirt-floored cellar,
where a pump always in need of Grandpa’s
tinkering stayed half a step ahead of the
ditchwater that seeped through the walls.
Although grandma had a Tibetan monk’s
sense of frugality, I don’t remember that
she ever made preserves from her plums
— they may have been just too fickle.
Winters family
Farm kids, including a couple of Matt Winters granduncles, relished homegrown apples and made temporary pets of chickens and pigs
in the mountains of western Wyoming.
THANK HEAVENS, WE’RE LuCKy HERE IN THE
PACIFIC NORTHWEST TO BE NEAR THE WORLd’S
MOST CELEBRATEd APPLE-gROWINg REgION
ANd MANy NEW ARTISAN CIdER MAKERS.
Apples: A farmyard staple
Apples played a bigger role than plums
in my family’s survival.
Walking home during the first com-
fortable weeks of autumn, as a girl my
mother meandered through her folks’
apple grove, where beckoning mottled-red
fruit bent the branches so low they almost
touched the tall grass, more dusty yellow
than gold in the brief interlude before the
snows pounced. Maybe they were a har-
dier variety of pioneer cowboy apples,
or maybe her memories were filtered
through the perfecting lens of time, but
Mom didn’t recall them having worms,
only juice sweet as dessert on a one-room-
schoolhouse day in the austere 1930s.
Mom remembered a year when their
pig gorged on so many it nearly enacted
the exploding-glutton scene in Monty
Python’s “The Meaning of Life.” This
pig sparked another memory of Mom’s,
of a year when she and her brothers Tom
and Bud rescued a pair of orphaned mal-
lard ducklings on the old family ranch on
Upper North Fork and fed them so many
earthworms they couldn’t close their
greedy little bills. They survived the expe-
rience, still lean and coursing with enough
wildness to quack up into the southbound
migration that fall.
This year I have my eye on several
gnarled apple trees that peek out from
the brush in long-abandoned farmsteads
Liquid apples
Reveille Ciderworks
Availability of regionally made craft ciders
has greatly expanded in the past decade and
now includes Reveille Ciderworks in Astoria.
around the Columbia River estuary. They
also may date from pioneer times and
could even represent rare “lost apples”
— cultivars that slipped beyond memory
as varieties like Red Delicious took over
grocery-store produce aisles. My grand-
pa’s apple orchard may well have been
planted in the 1880s by some veteran of
Antietam, thirsty for the magical elixir
that a perfect hard cider can be. Apples
were planted here along the Lower
Columbia starting back in the early 19th
century when the Hudson’s Bay Com-
pany was, in effect, the government. Sav-
ing these archaic apples from oblivion has
become something of a pet cause in the
Pacific Northwest.
Johnny Appleseed was a real man,
John Chapman, who traveled the young
nation from the 1790s creating fenced
apple nurseries. These were in effect
operated as some of America’s first agri-
cultural cooperatives, selling trees to
neighbors on shares. In an era when con-
taminated water was a relentless killer,
hard cider was a pure, mildly inebriat-
ing beverage that also provided a way to
package and preserve many of the nutri-
tional benefits of apples. Cider mills were
scattered across the country, and pro-
vided Chapman with free seeds to encour-
age the planting of orchards. Increasing
immigration from Germany, with its ado-
ration of beer, combined with the disrup-
tion of Prohibition to blight the cider busi-
ness. Today, most people think of cider
as a less-refined form of apple juice, an
autumn novelty of no consequence.
There is a sensation like biting into a
crisp, tart apple when you sip a great hard
cider, a rapturous transportation into an
idyllic fall morning — perhaps like my
grandparents’ old orchard where I can
still imagine the frost evaporating off into
white vapor, a bright crescent moon look-
ing close enough to touch still floating
high above the sage- and pine-clad moun-
tains. Like a good wine, a well-made cider
encapsulates the best of its birthplace — I
think I first could imagine England after
my first taste of Woodpecker, a medi-
um-sweet cider available from importers.
Most mass-market ciders available in
grocery stores have far more in common
with wine coolers than legitimate cider,
being a carbonated concoction of apple juice
and other ingredients. Thank heavens, we’re
lucky here in the Pacific Northwest to be
near the world’s most celebrated apple-grow-
ing region and many new artisan cider mak-
ers. Last week I tried two offerings from
Astoria’s Reveille Ciderworks — a gener-
al-purpose cider and another infused with
marionberries — and endorse them both.
Mom made applesauce most autumns
in her 85 years, another way to preserve
and enjoy the essential goodness of fall.
Months later, as the rain pounded down,
we’d open a jar and relive autumn’s per-
fect weeks of starry nights, dewy dawns
and shirtsleeve afternoons. I know my
daughter, after once spending an after-
noon learning at her grandma’s side, will
always keep a perfect apple in her heart.
Chinook Observer editor Matt Winters
lives in Ilwaco.
OTHER VIEWS
Selected editorials from
Oregon newspapers
The Oregonian, on Malheur
County calling for investigation
into reporters’ actions
sually, when public officials don’t
want to answer a reporter’s ques-
tions, they respond with “no
comment.”
In Malheur County, however, they’re try-
ing something a little more hardcore.
The Malheur County counsel asked Sher-
iff Brian Wolfe to open a criminal investi-
gation into the actions of Malheur Enter-
prise reporters. Their alleged crime? Sending
emails to the personal accounts of county
economic development employees outside
of office hours which Greg Smith, director of
the Malheur County Economic Development
Department, has deemed “not appropriate.”
Let’s be clear. That isn’t a crime. That’s
called reporting. Journalists frequently try
to contact government officials and others
through official and non-official channels as
they pursue leads, develop sources, gather
documents and build a story. They also try to
make every attempt to reach them if they are
writing a story relating to the officials or their
work, so that the officials have the opportu-
nity to refute conclusions, correct informa-
tion or explain their side of a story. There’s
nothing inappropriate and certainly nothing
illegal about it.
In a call with The Oregonian’s editorial
board, Smith acknowledged that going to the
sheriff’s office might not have been the right
avenue. He added that journalists have every
right to contact him and that he has tried to
be open and responsive to public records
requests and journalists’ inquiries. But he
U
said his employees have felt intimidated
by the frequency of emails from the Enter-
prise, the exhaustiveness of their information
requests and the window of time given to
them before publication. He added that they
believe Enterprise journalists are not dis-
closing personal conflicts and biases and are
using their position to settle scores.
The Enterprise, meantime, has said it has
used “standard and professional methods.”
To drive that point home, the newspaper pub-
lished a column Sunday describing how the
story was reported and sharing the full text
of emails sent to Smith seeking responses or
rebuttals.
If Smith had concerns, there are other ave-
nues to resolve them, from writing op-eds to
even filing civil lawsuits if the situation mer-
its it. Seeking a criminal investigation is an
inappropriate use of government resources
and appears more of an attempt to dissuade or
intimidate reporters. Especially considering
that Smith, who is also the Republican repre-
sentative for Heppner in the Oregon House,
has been the subject of recent Malheur Enter-
prise stories raising questions about the work
he has done in his position as the county’s
economic development director.
As a legislator, Smith knows that media
scrutiny is a critical component of keeping
government accountable. He shouldn’t look
to government to suppress that scrutiny.
Albany Democrat-Herald, on
death penalty legislation
N
early two months have passed
since the 2019 Legislature
wrapped up its work, but there’s
still plenty of confusion surrounding one
of the session’s most significant bills, the
measure that limits how the death penalty
can be applied in Oregon.
The key question is this: Is the bill retroac-
tive — that is, does it apply to the 31 inmates
who are on death row in Oregon?
One of the bill’s key backers, state Sen.
Floyd Prozanski, a Eugene Democrat, has
said a special legislative session is required
to make it clear the law doesn’t apply to death
penalty cases sent back for new sentencing
hearings as well as new trials. But another
backer, former House Majority Leader Jenni-
fer Williamson, D-Portland, has said no addi-
tional work is needed on the bill and that it
always was intended to cover situations such
as new sentencing hearings in old cases and
new trials.
A recent opinion by the state Department
of Justice sided with Williamson’s interpreta-
tion, noting that the new law applies to death
penalty convictions and sentences that have
been overturned, in addition to pending cases.
The measure in question, Senate Bill
1013, narrows the definition of “aggravated
murder,” the only crime in Oregon that can
be punished by death. The death penalty in
Oregon now can only be applied in four types
of crimes: killings motivated by terrorism,
murders of children 14 years or younger, kill-
ings by an incarcerated person who’s serving
a previous aggravated murder sentence and
premeditated killings of police or corrections
officers.
Other crimes that used to be considered
aggravated murder, such as slayings commit-
ted during a rape or robbery, no longer can be
punished with the death penalty.
The bill was carefully constructed (per-
haps too carefully) to ensure that it didn’t
require a vote of the people; such a vote
would be required of a measure that called
for completely doing away with the death
penalty in Oregon.
It’s probably fair to say that many, if not
most, legislators believed that the bill was not
meant to apply retroactively. In that light, the
measure didn’t seem likely to make much dif-
ference for death-row inmates: It’s been more
than two decades since Oregon executed a
prisoner and Gov. Kate Brown is continuing
a moratorium on the death penalty that was
instituted by her predecessor, John Kitzhaber.
But the idea that the bill could be applied
retroactively to some cases changes that cal-
culation to some extent: As The Orego-
nian’s Noelle Crombie reported, it’s not at all
unusual for aggravated-murder convictions
or death penalty sentences to be overturned
or remanded to a lower court. In fact, Crom-
bie noted, seven cases have been reversed in
the last two-and-a-half years, and not one of
Oregon’s death row inmates has exhausted
their legal challenges. It would be interesting
to see if legislators approach the bill differ-
ently should it come up again in a special ses-
sion or next year’s short session.
Regardless of what happens to Sen-
ate Bill 1013, legislators should stop sneak-
ing around the issue of the death penalty and
fully confront it by referring to voters a mea-
sure to abolish capital punishment in Oregon.
Oregonians have a long and tangled his-
tory with the death penalty. Capital punish-
ment was outlawed by Oregon voters in 1914
and then reenacted in 1978. Three years later,
the state Supreme Court ruled that the death
penalty was unconstitutional, a ruling that
paved the way for a 1984 initiative in which
voters reaffirmed capital punishment.
Since then, the topic rarely has been revis-
ited in Oregon, and the gubernatorial mora-
toriums have had the effect of sweeping the
debate about capital punishment under the
rug. Meanwhile, the national conversation
about the death penalty has taken fascinat-
ing turns.
It’s been almost four decades since state
voters affirmed the death penalty. It’s long
past time to bring this conversation to all of
Oregon.