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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Aug. 5, 2017)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, August 5, 2017 East Oregonian Page 5A Hundreds of years of harvest F or the past couple of weeks, my son Willie and I have been harvesting wheat on land we farm in the Helix area, something my family has done in one form or another for approximately 130 years. Some things have not changed significantly in that time, but many other aspects of modern farming would be unrecognizable to my great-great-grandfather, who came to northern Umatilla County in the 1880s to help construct the rail line that connected the newly platted town of Helix to the line near present-day Wallula via tracks laid through Vansycle Canyon. After the construction project was complete, he decided to stay in the area and homesteaded land in 1886 that is still owned by my aunt and uncle. The railroad was a vital part of the local economy. It provided a means by which agricultural products (such as grain and livestock) could be exported to market and, conversely, was a means by which imported goods (such as hardware and lumber, farm equipment, housewares and thousands of other items) could be brought to the area. The rail lines were also the principal means by which people traveled any distance more than a few miles. The automobile, or at least a widely available practical version, was still decades in the future and the roads at the time were mostly wagon trails that were used by the local residents to pull conveyances that relied upon real horsepower. In our modern petroleum-powered economy it is difficult to fathom the tremendous amount of work that was accomplished through the cooperative effort of man and beast. Horses pulled barges on the Erie Canal. Draymen, and more importantly their hardworking four-legged partners, transported goods in cities that ranged from heavy materials used in construction of early skyscrapers to beer from breweries. Before the Industrial Age came to the Pacific Northwest, an entire Native culture and trading network relied upon the animal whose vernacular moniker is synonymous with the tribe who so adroitly employed them. Closer to home for me, my family relied upon horses (or in later years, mules) to power all of the tillage, seeding and harvesting equipment used on our farm for two generations. Even for someone so ostensibly stuck in the past as I am, it’s hard to imagine breaking into a field of prairie sod with a single 12- or 14-inch plow behind a team and at the end of a good day perhaps an acre and a quarter of land had been turned. With our 50-year-old tractor and rod-weeders, we can work up to a quarter- section (160 acres) a day and yet be scoffed at by neighbors spraying chemical fallow with a GPS-equipped sprayer at a rate of 800 acres or more in a good day in the spring. One aspect of harvesting that would still strike a familiar chord with great-grandad is the approximate width of the cutting apparatus (header) on Willie’s combined harvester-thresher (combine). Unlike most of our neighbors, who have expanded to I wonder if either of us could perform the required tasks of the other if transported to the future or to the past. Choosing how to go T he West seems to have a disease that will kill him. He is different attitude about life educated, alert and rational, and right and death than other parts of now feels no pain or anxiety because the country. Of the five states that a hospice manages his discomfort. allow medical aid in dying, known Yet he does not like being tethered as MAID, four are west of the to an oxygen line while he slowly Mississippi — Oregon, Washington, suffocates. He wants his life to be California and Colorado. The fifth over but is too incapacitated to do is Vermont and, although it is not a anything about it. At one point he Rob state, the District of Columbia. asked me if I could get him a gun. Pudim Other states have come close. According to the Colorado Comment Montana courts have found that referendum, two physicians have there is no public policy against to agree that a person’s medical assisted death, and New Mexico condition is incurable and the drug briefly allowed it in 2014 before overturning cocktail has to be self-administered. It it in 2015. In Arizona, the Legislature will sounds simple. not let the bill out of committee even though Nothing is simple. most Arizonans are said to What if your doctor has favor it. religious beliefs that preclude Most Westerners, I think, assisted dying, or has a believe that allowing people to literal interpretation of the obtain medical aid to die is a Hippocratic Oath, which states simply a matter of choice that that before anything else, should not be a decision made by the state, do no harm? What if your doctor’s beliefs a state legislature, a medical association, a require you to live out whatever life has dealt religion or any other person. you? What if the pharmacist thinks the same Maybe it has to do with the independence way and refuses to issue the prescription? of people or geographical distance from each What if the hospital does not have the other, or the knowledge that we sometimes correct protocols in place or the legal have to depend on only ourselves. A lot of boilerplate necessary to allow a patient to die us believe that each person has the right to by choice? What if the hospital is run by a decide about our life or death, and whether church? What if you are physically unable to life is worth living when a condition is take the drugs you need to end your life? incurable and the future filled with pain. According to Compassion & Choices, a Granted, we all have the ability to commit national organization that pushed medical suicide but generally that choice is not aid in dying in Colorado, 10 prescriptions pleasant — jumping off Golden Gate Bridge, have been filled so far, but it is not known guns, death by police or an auto crash. how many have ever been used. Advocates If you assist or encourage someone — and say about 1 in 3 patients who receive the there was a recent controversial case of a drugs fails to take them. They may have just young woman encouraging a boyfriend to wanted the option available. commit suicide — you can be charged with My old and dear friend has been facing being an accessory to murder. Medical this. He could move to another state and help in dying, however, is neither suicide establish residency, which could take at nor murder, and most cases of a loved one least six months, or is it a year? He does not helping another to die are dismissed. have the time or ability to do this, though In 1996, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals paradoxically he has a lot of time — to lie in ruled: “Those who believe strongly that death bed and think about his future. must come without physician assistance In Colorado, lawmakers put $44,000 should be allowed to follow that creed, into the budget in May to help doctors with whether they be doctors or patients. But they patients who might ask about receiving should not be free to force their views, their aid in dying. Republican State Sen. Kevin religious convictions or their philosophies on Lundberg says tax payers should not support all other members of a democratic society, the practice: “This is not the job of a doctor, nor should they be free to compel those it’s certainly not the job of he government.” whose values differ from theirs to die a Well, whose job is it when you’re stuck in painful, protracted and agonizing death.” a bed with tubes and wires attached to you? Briefly stated, it’s your life. It’s your And what if this happened to you? death. It ought to be a personal and private ■ choice. Rob Pudim is a contributor to High A dear friend I have known for more Country News. He says his friend died while than 50 years has an incurable, progressive in hospice care on June 16. It’s your life. It’s your death. 30 feet and more, we are still at a 20-foot swath — just like our family’s outfit from the 1930s. Somewhat similarly to grandpa, we can harvest about 40 acres a day with the machine but can now accomplish the task with a crew of two opposed to four or five back then. We also have an air-conditioned cab and power steering; they had goggles, a neckerchief, the top button fastened, and did not need to lift weights at the gym to have powerful biceps. Grandpa’s outfit from the late 1930s was pulled not by the great 24-32 head (or more) teams as had been practiced for a couple of decades. Instead, it was hitched to a steel-tracked crawler tractor. Our family switched to a tractor in 1934 and, just for good measure and remembrance, we still own an operable 1933 model that starts with a hand-crank. Also in the 1930s, a shift occurred in the method of handling grain. For years, grain was sacked either at the stationary thresher or on the combine on a platform next to a “sack chute” (we have one of those in the barn) that would hold five or six sacks of grain each weighing 120-140 lbs. Sack piles around the field were then retrieved by wagons or, later, trucks. Bulk handling of grain eliminated the job of sack jig and sewer, but created a need for wheat truck drivers and scale house operators at giant elevators where grain could be stored and shipped to market by truck, train and eventually barge. Today we haul grain to giant “ground piles” that will be tarped before winter and shipped as the market dictates. Especially when driving the truck without a radio, I frequently ponder the similarities and differences between my “modern” (we are outdated by about one generation) farming operation and that of my ancestors. M att W ood FROM THE TRACTOR I wonder if either of us could successfully perform the required tasks of the other if transported ahead to the future or back to the past. I know my great-grandfathers would have liked to have had access to the crop insurance I can buy and I wish I had access to the old-growth, straight-grained lumber they used to build their barns. For now, none of that matters. I need to grease the combine and harvest another 500 acres. ■ Matt Wood is his son’s hired man and his daughter’s biggest fan. He lives on a farm near Helix, where he collects antiques and friends. Celebrate the unlovely fish W esterners, we’ve especially ones dominated by got a problem. A human activity. He does his trout problem. For best fishing in reservoirs, below decades, anglers have fetishized dams, and along what he dubs these silvery stream-dwellers, the Industrial Edge, “ecotones of maniacally pursuing rainbows, smokestacks and cinderblocks browns and brookies to the and rusty pipes and climbing neglect of other underwater life. ivies” where the built and Every year, obliging fish natural environments collide. Ben managers pump America’s Goldfarb On Oregon’s Willamette River, waterways full of millions of across the channel from railroad Comment hatchery-born trout, diluting gene tracks and homeless camps, he pools and overwhelming native lands dinosaur-like sturgeon, species. We fishermen consider ourselves ancient fish that were swimming Western enlightened stewards, but our trout rivers when hominids were a glint in myopia reveals our true self-centeredness. evolution’s eye. And let’s not even get started on bass. Spitzer has a soft spot for invasive Fortunately, there are plenty more fish species, too. After netting non-native in the sea — to say nothing of rivers, carp, he says, perhaps optimistically, creeks and lakes. For anyone seeking a “that we can strike a balance with deeper understanding of what lies beneath non-indigenous species and incorporate the surface of Western waterways, them into our cultures.” Slathered in “Beautifully Grotesque Fish of the teriyaki and curry paste, he discovers carp American West” offers a lively primer and hideous snakehead fish aren’t half to the region’s aquatic biodiversity. Over bad. If you can’t beat ’em, eat ’em. the course of 11 chapters, Mark Spitzer, Occasionally, the author turns the lens a writing professor at the University of inward, to the grotesqueries of his own Central Arkansas and a certified angling life. Spitzer makes passing reference to addict, travels the country seeking the an acrimonious divorce, the death of his kinds of experiences that you’re unlikely mother, and, finally, a new partner. In to find valorized in the pages of Field & one passage, landing 6-foot-long gar in Stream: ice-fishing for burbot in Utah’s Texas soothes his bitterness about the Flaming Gorge Reservoir, bounty-hunting dissolution of his marriage, providing a for pikeminnow in the Columbia River, redemptive connection to “that youthful snagging paddlefish in Missouri. capacity for wondering and marveling at Spitzer’s shtick is to love the unlovely, what this world has to offer.” During such moments, you can glimpse the contours to venerate the homely stalwarts that of a more personal — and emotionally make up in resilience what they lack richer — book lurking just beneath the in conventional beauty. This is a writer whose master’s thesis was a novel about a surface: a fisherman’s version of “Wild,” “misunderstood, man-eating catfish,” and with, say, the Missouri River standing in for the Pacific Crest Trail. Spitzer angles whose first two nonfiction books profiled half the rivers in the West, but he never the alligator gar, a gargantuan primitive plumbs his own depths. fish with a crocodilian smile. You might What “Beautifully Grotesque Fish” think that a lifetime of scribbling about lacks in soul-searching, though, it makes gruesome freshwater monsters would up in soul: It’s a paean to the ignored, an have scratched that particular itch, yet homage to the uncelebrated. It’s about Spitzer’s ardor for the ugly is powerful. embracing the nature we have, whatever He rhapsodizes about the razorback it looks like, wherever it swims. There’s sucker, a “quasi-Quasimodo with an also plenty of technical advice for elongated horsey head”; the paddlefish fishermen hoping to duplicate Spitzer’s and its “crazy flat spatulated nose”; and quirky exploits: The best lure on which to the way American eels swim together in catch pikeminnow is “either a rubber tube “spermy formation.” Granted, not all the fish he targets truly deserve the grotesque or a grub.” In the end, Spitzer’s book offers a label: You get the distinct feeling that fishing manifesto for a human-dominated he includes a chapter on muskellunge planet. May trout have company in our — a sleek, tiger-striped predator that’s hearts, and on our lines. gorgeous by anyone’s definition — ■ simply because he yearns to catch one. Ben Goldfarb is a contributor to High Just as Spitzer revels in homely fish, he delights in less-than-scenic landscapes, Country News.
