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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (Nov. 18, 2017)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, November 18, 2017 East Oregonian Page 5A Two rural dining experiences NE: When I first patronized the place, I don’t think the The Club was formally called The Club. I think it was just the local name for the establishment. The only signage identifying it as a café/bar was a plywood sign on the roof, lighted by incandescent bulbs that said simply “Eats.” It was a hot July Saturday afternoon when I walked into the building, through a beat-up front door into a white Formica café with four small tables, a dozen straight backed chairs, and six leatherette stools at the counter. The kitchen area was tiny, with a serving window ledge. I could just see the top of a gray head, belonging to the one cook who also acted as waitress, cashier, and busperson. I was the only patron. It looked dark and cool back in the bar, so that is where I went. An old-school wooden bar hugged one wall. A few round tables skirted a dance floor and jukebox. The bartender wore a ballcap that said “Clyde.” I asked Clyde if it was alright to eat in the bar and could I see a menu? He handed me a single sheet of 8 ½ x 11 paper with a mimeographed price list. While a beer made peace with my ulcers, I studied the menu. A hamburger with fixings was a dollar, a bowl of chili 50 cents, and a chiliburger $1.75. I pointed out to Clyde what seemed to me to be a discrepancy in the pricing. “So?” “Well, this must be an error. It just O seems like it would be cheaper to order a hamburger and a bowl of chili than to ask for a chiliburger.” “So?” “Well, what is the difference? If you are charging two bits more for the same ingredients and calling it a chiliburger, is it something special, something more than chili over a hamburger and a couple of sunk buns? I mean, is the chiliburger something I eat with my fingers or with a fork?” Clyde gave me a “you stupid-pup” look that I saw several times in the next few years, jerked the menu from my fingers and said, “Hell no, son. With a mouth like you’ve got, I’ll walk over home and get you a scoop shovel if you think you’re going to need it.” I ordered the chiliburger. TWO: When I was a teenager, at the very beginnings of what turned into a 30-year on-and-off career as an agricultural worker, I put up loose hay out in the Sandhills of Nebraska, where ranch families made darn certain that their help ate three square meals per day. The big meal was at noon, called dinnertime, when the women of the family would bring a big spread out into the fields and feed the workers as though they were going to market us by the hundredweight in the fall. I fondly remember sitting in the shade of a tractor wheel and feasting on fried chicken, potato salad, coleslaw, and homemade bread, washed down with raspberry Koolaid and followed by a piece of gooseberry pie and a short nap. Ranch families made darn certain that their help ate three square meals per day. By the time I was in my thirties and had bounced around the planet, I ended up in the high country above the Salmon River in Idaho, where no food was ever offered by the various ranchers I helped, and, eventually, none was expected. We cowpokes and silage pit stompers would sneak home at noon for a baloney sandwich or into town for a chiliburger at The Club. Except for one time. It was weigh-out day at the ranch, as close as one can get to Cow Owner Christmas, that day when the cattle buyer with the dusty tan Cadillac, big checkbook and five cattle hauler trucks shows up at the ranch to weigh and load grass-fed beef for the trip to the big feedlot in the sky. It was rancher’s payday. About mid-morning, when the crew was encrusted with cow crap and the rancher and cattle buyer were opening their second pint of Old Overholt, the owner yelled into the pens that none of us were supposed to leave at lunchtime because his wife had prepared food for all of us. Crazy Dan and I were both surprised at the sudden appearance of a meal plan in our terms of employment. I was right at the front of the serving line and was the first to realize that the only entrée on the menu for the day was microwaved beef liver served on a paper plate, with potato chips. I never was a gut eater, and I challenge you to show me a person who ever butchered a steer and eats rare steak. Nuking beef liver does nothing to the organ meat except to heat it up and turn it warm and gray. The ranch wife was using this day to clean out her freezer. I was lucky. I was able to accept my serving somewhat graciously by holding my breath. Then I excused myself from the kitchen and beat it to the porch where the We are all on unstable ground n 2015, Kathryn facility goes untoured: Schulz, a writer at Miles descends into The New Yorker, an Idaho silver mine, published “The Really wanders the bowels Big One,” a meticulous of the Hoover Dam, evocation of the oceanic and visits the Berkeley earthquake that will seismology lab where someday drown the researchers are designing Pacific Northwest quake warning systems Ben beneath a tsunami. I Goldfarb for your phone. lived in Seattle then, and You can’t write a Comment the quake was all anyone book about quakes, of talked about: at coffee course, without dwelling shops, in elevators, on buses. on California. The San Andreas Many articles, even books, had Fault plays a starring role in been written about the coming “Quakeland:” Miles wanders 9.0, but Schulz’s Pulitzer- West Hollywood with an winning story was the first to engineer who exposes alarming grab the slumbering Northwest construction vulnerabilities. by the shoulders and shake it (Wood, counter-intuitively, is awake. Until, more resilient that is, the news than stone cycle shifted, or concrete, people got on which “tends to with their lives, explode.”) and earthquakes But it’s the receded again obscure hot spots in society’s — the intraplate consciousness. faults, far from Earthquakes, the junctions of writes another colliding tectonic Kathryn — masses — that Kathryn Miles — in her new seem scariest, precisely because book, “Quakeland,” are our most we’re so ill prepared for their confounding natural disaster. rupture. We can watch hurricanes Salt Lake City overlays the spinning in the Atlantic weeks Wasatch Fault Zone, where a before they land; we detect the 7.0 would be catastrophic: The rumbling of volcanoes months region could expect 2,000 deaths, pre-eruption. Earthquakes, 9,000 injuries and 200,000 though, often provide no rendered homeless. Miles is warning at all. Our grasp of what ruthlessly pragmatic about the triggers them is tenuous; we attendant logistical nightmares: are flying blind when it comes “How would (building) to predicting them. Hence the inspectors get into a city whose complacency: Why stress the highways and runways had incomprehensible? “How could crumbled? … How would the we know so little about our city get its dead and injured out?” planet and the risks it poses to all We’re not just unready for of us?” Miles asks. disaster — we’re exacerbating “Quakeland” is a sprawling, the risk. Miles is especially painstaking attempt to answer concerned about induced that question. The author travels seismicity, earthquakes caused the country, from quake-overdue by human industry, particularly New York City to Yellowstone the injection of fracking National Park, whose slumbering wastewater into the ground. caldera, if we’re lucky, will hold The phenomenon’s epicenter is off on annihilating us for a few Oklahoma, which went from one more millennia. She is primarily of the least seismically active concerned with how various states to the most after a drilling sectors — schools, hospitals, boom. Agencies, beholden to oil tank farms — are preparing, industry, denied the connection or failing to prepare, for Big until the evidence became Ones in their own backyards. No irrefutable; other states still I Earthquakes are our most confounding natural disaster. skirt the problem. The debate uncannily resembles the conflict over climate change: Fossil fuel interests exploit uncertainty about the magnitude of the problem to justify inaction — never mind the overwhelming scientific consensus about the threat’s reality. Occasionally, Miles’ reporting is so thorough it’s exhausting: I have no doubt that a Southeastern quake would cause headaches for FedEx’s Memphis headquarters, but I’m not sure I needed a chapter to belabor the point. In leaving no seismic stone unturned, though, “Quakeland” discovers alarming Achilles’ heels in our infrastructure and emergency systems. That at least 30 faults underpin Nevada’s Yucca Mountain does not make me feel more comfortable about someday storing nuclear waste there. Fortunately, there are success stories as well as potential apocalypses. Though most Northwesterners may have again forgotten that they live in a future flood zone, disaster managers have not. Near the end of “Quakeland,” Miles visits a school in Westport, Washington, that constructed a $2 million rooftop tsunami shelter. No grim detail had been overlooked: “Surrounding the platform is a six-foot-high parapet … mostly to protect the kids from witnessing the devastation.” Quake preparedness is partly a matter of personal responsibility: Stock an emergency kit with food, water and warm clothes today. Mostly, though, it’s a public policy problem. We must invest in modernizing bridges and developing early warning systems; retrofit our schools and hospitals; advocate for regulations to reduce induced seismicity. Gearing up for inevitable earthquakes won’t be easy, and it won’t be cheap — but we can’t bear the cost of doing nothing. ■ Ben Goldfarb is a contributor to Writers on the Range, the opinion service of High Country News (hcn.org). He is a writer in Connecticut. J.D. S mith FROM THE HEADWATERS OF DRY CREEK cowdogs were waiting. A young hard- working Dingo dog was kind enough to eat my free lunch. By the time the last of the cowboys joined me on the porch, though, the cowdogs were plumb full of microwaved beef liver. I’m pretty sure that my horse slipped on a chunk of liver that afternoon, chucked into the barnyard slop rather than left rudely on the plate. ■ J.D. Smith is an accomplished writer and jack-of-all-trades. He lives in Athena. How and why to talk about privilege F or many of us, the beyond the school grounds. approaching holidays In 2017, Oregon is still will be charged with steeped in the racism and unease. We will step out of disparity that defined its our echo chambers and find past: white supremacists ourselves sitting down with and hate groups, the family and friends we rarely displacement of indigenous talk to in person and who people, Japanese-American may have radically different internment, and entrenched Doug views. institutional discrimination Stamm What if we could against African Americans. Comment rethink how we start those Increasingly, this ugly conversations? What if there legacy is showing up in our was a way to transcend party lines cities as well as rural communities, and listen to one another’s real life where demographics are shifting experiences? rapidly. Census data There’s an app for show the percentage that. Well, not an app, of people of color in exactly. rural counties across Actually it’s a short Oregon is growing at online quiz, designed to a faster rate than the reveal an individual’s state overall. Across the “American Dream board, the picture of score.” I took it myself what it means to be an and it’s an interesting Oregonian is changing, way to look at the factors that helped and that change reveals cultural and you move up or you worked to structural barriers we have yet to overcome. Try taking it yourself overcome. (my score was 51), and read others’ How all of us, as Oregonians, stories online. The test offers an handle this moment will define our empathetic way to navigate a state’s future. conversation with people who may As a white, heterosexual, not recognize how the cards have college-educated, urban American been stacked in their favor — and male, I’m aware of my position on why that matters. the comfortable side of disparity. I And that’s a fine framework know I have a responsibility to use through which to consider some of my privilege to speak up and fight the harsh realities unmasked across for positive change. However you approach your own the country, and here in Oregon, conversations, remember what’s since the divisive presidential at stake. Have the courage to talk election. about what’s happening across our Rather than avoiding talking state and why it needs to change. politics this year, shouldn’t we ask Move past discomfort by reminding ourselves: “What is at stake if we yourself that the Oregon our children don’t begin talking?” Since November 2016, more hate deserve is a place in which equality crimes per capita have been reported is real — not an ideal. That is not a matter of opinion or in Oregon than in any other state. politics. It’s a matter of conscience. That’s worth talking about. Your voice matters. Some of these incidents might ■ seem isolated: racist graffiti, Doug Stamm is the chief intimidating fliers, racial slurs. executive officer of Meyer Memorial But small acts are the stones that Trust, where he oversaw a shift pave our society’s path forward. toward grantmaking focused on More than 20 of the hate crimes equity, diversity and inclusion. Born reported this year involve students. and raised in Oregon, he plans to On-campus harassment and step away from Meyer in 2018, after intimidation in Portland, Silverton, Bend, Coos Bay and other cities sent 15 years as CEO. A search for his successor is underway. a message that reverberated well There’s an app for checking privilege.