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.