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About East Oregonian : E.O. (Pendleton, OR) 1888-current | View Entire Issue (July 21, 2018)
VIEWPOINTS Saturday, July 21, 2018 East Oregonian Page 5A Remember to water the bamboo T he sun was in late Leo/early Virgo the first time I saw San Francisco Bay. I came out of Chicago in a Ford pickup, with my motorcycle took-to- pieces and wrapped in a tarp in the back. Everything else I owned was stuffed all around me in the front seat. I started motoring up the east side of the bay, and I knew that this was where my home was going to be because I hit Fremont on a Sunday afternoon and right there by the freeway was a full-tilt drag strip with hundreds of far-out cars and right overhead were real gullwing gliders, cruising out over the bay and landing beside the drag strip. I scored a little house to rent across the bay in Menlo Park, by a cemetery. I unloaded my stuff into the house, put the motorcycle together and went job hunting. I scored a job as veterinarian’s assistant for a crusty old dude on El Camino in Mountain View. I didn’t mind shoveling dog manure, really, but I totally was not able to handle holding the dogs down while the doc shot them up to put them away. Something about their eyes. I told the vet that California was just too much for me, that I missed my family and I was headed back to somewhere, and could I please have my week’s pay? This guy was so used to losing help that he just wrote the check. No deductions, no goodbyes, no nothing. There used to be jobs around every corner. On the way back to Menlo Park I saw a Help Wanted sign. I parked the bike and went over and read the fine print that said “Janitor needed, easy work, low pay” and gave a phone number, which I called and set up an appointment for an interview the next day at Lee Manor. Lee Manor was a 100-unit, three-story, singles’ cinderblock studio apartment thing, down by Bayshore in Palo Alto, shaped like a horseshoe, with a swimming pool in the middle and a rec room wedged into the open end. I stashed the motorcycle a couple of blocks away. You never know. The job interview was strange. An older Chinese dude, Mr. Lee himself, dressed like some kind of Sicilian gangster with a diamond stick pin and big gold pinky ring, was sitting in the rec room eating pudding. When I came in, he offered me a little plastic cup of chocolate pudding and we sat there eating pudding at a folding table. He didn’t ask or say a thing, just stared at me eating pudding. Finally he said, “Let us walk.” I walked, but he was 90 years old and had metal taps on the heels and toes of his wingtips, so he shuffled, and it was fingernails on the blackboard stuff. Sounded like somebody was dragging a refrigerator down the hall. We stood out by the pool, and he waved his arms around his empire, telling me to watch the garbage, and skim the pool, and water the bamboo (which are these little teenage bushes all around the pool), and paint the rooms every time somebody moved, and buff the hallways, and I was to get $300 a month. Then he scraped over to a Lincoln Town Car and peeled out toward downtown Palo Alto. I’m hired. I never really figured out who lived in The sign read: “Janitor needed, easy work, low pay.” Don’t permanently sterilize wild horses n Thursday, the U.S. local anesthesia. The reality House of Representatives is that these proposed surgical passed the Interior sterilizations would be conducted Appropriations bill — a massive in a nonsterile environment, piece of legislation that funds thereby increasing the risk of post- a wide range of government operative complications including programs and agencies, including infections. the National Park Service and the In a 2013 report on improving Joanna Environmental Protection Agency. wild horse management, the Grossman National Academies of Sciences Every year, the Interior bill Comment becomes a vehicle for all manner stated that ovariectomies are of controversial riders that impact “inadvisable for field application” our nation’s wildlife. This year was due to the probability of “prolonged certainly no exception. But what’s new bleeding or peritoneal infection.” this cycle is a tucked-away provision that Whether the Bureau of Land would adversely affect some of our most Management has fully weighed the iconic and treasured animals: wild horses costs and feasibility of a mass surgical that embody a spirit of freedom for so sterilization program is unclear. Any many Americans. population control proposal should Under an amendment by Rep. Chris consider the following factors: pain relief, Stewart (R-UT) — a longtime and vocal antibiotics to treat infections, the long- proponent of culling wild horses to reduce term health and behavioral effects of population size — the Department of the removing organs, the ability to provide Interior’s Bureau of Land Management individual care and attention, and the (which oversees much of the land these safe handling and transport of large wild animals inhabit) could launch a mass animals. surgical sterilization program for stallions For an agency that routinely warns and mares. lawmakers and the public that it lacks A diverse group of stakeholders sufficient resources and funding to recognizes the need to deal more effectively manage wild horses and burros, effectively with wild horse populations on the idea of bankrolling mass surgical the range. But when it comes to managing sterilizations doesn’t make fiscal sense. these federally protected animals, it is If the Bureau of Land Management were important to implement viable and humane to move forward with impractical mass fertility control options that the American sterilizations and the results fell short public can support. It is irresponsible for for whatever reason (costs, difficulty, the federal government to use tax dollars complications), that failure could spur for surgical sterilizations. lawmakers to renew their push for the Rep. Stewart’s amendment ignores agency to resort to outright culling the obvious humane fertility control options, herds to reduce numbers. such as porcine zona pellucida (PZP) — Wild horses are protected by the Wild an immunocontraceptive vaccine that and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act can be administered safely. Conversely, of 1971, which established a policy of surgical sterilization entails a risky, allowing these “living symbols … of the stressful, painful, and highly invasive West” to thrive on public lands. This latest procedure on the animal. rider circumvents the law’s intent since Conducting ovariectomies (i.e., mass permanent sterilizations would lead removing the ovaries of mares) on the to nonreproducing herds and nonviable range or in a holding pen is a complex populations. and costly process. Trained medical As lawmakers in the Senate and House professionals would need to conduct the work to reconcile their versions of the surgery. In ideal circumstances, horses Interior bill in the coming weeks, they undergoing this procedure — which would do well to reject this misguided is normally performed to deal with an approach to herd management. abnormality or to remove a malignant ■ growth — would be put under general Joanna Grossman, Ph.D., is the equine anesthesia and monitored carefully. Wild protection manager at the Washington, D.C.-based Animal Welfare Institute. horses, by contrast, would likely receive O Lee Manor. Nobody cares to meet a janitor. The first floor was mostly big brown guys from junior colleges, being fattened by Stanford as their football team of the future. Big guys produce big garbage. The second floor was a crash pad for stewardesses working out of SFO. They were slobs. Flight attendants may be the super-tidiest of human beings when they are at work, but you put a couple of them in lounge chairs by the pool and they trash all of East Palo Alto with their hair spray cans and wads of Kleenex, then they barefoot it back to the apartment and leave the mess for the servants. Litterers. Get out of the airplane and think the outside world is so big they don’t need to deal with their trash. And then there was the Artichoke Woman on the third floor. I never saw her wearing anything but a pink chenille housecoat. I think she worked nights at Stanford Hospital or something. Anyway, she was mysterious and lived on a weird schedule where every Tuesday night she came home, ate artichokes and tried to run the leaves through the garbage disposal. You can’t do that. I didn’t even know what an artichoke was. The first time I took apart her disposal and found all that fiber wrapped around the works I seriously thought that she had decided against hanging herself and shoved the rope down the sink. The second time I asked her what she was putting down there, and she showed me, so we made a deal and every Wednesday morning after that I picked up a little plastic sack of artichoke leaves from in front of door 329. The first of October I come to work and there was Mr. Lee standing out by the pool staring at the pool plants, which are nice and gold, like everything should be by the J.D. S mith FROM THE HEADWATERS OF DRY CREEK first of October, right? I’m from Nebraska. The cottonwoods turn in September. Mr. Lee looked me up and down, looked at the plants, looked back at me, back at the plants, then reached into the breast pocket of his Taiwan suit coat, peeled off three $100 dollar bills, handed them to me, and dismissed me from his employ, right there, saying “You are fired, sir. Somebody no water bamboo.” A week later I was working on the city of Palo Alto tree crew. ■ J.D. Smith is an accomplished writer and jack-of-all-trades. He lives in Athena. President Trump keeps the Bundy standoff alive P resident Donald Trump’s of the Oregon Cattlemen’s pardon of the Oregon Association, said he thought ranchers whose legal case that state and local officials had helped spark the armed takeover overreacted to the presence of of the Malheur National Wildlife militia members. When community Refuge perpetuates the polarization meetings were shut down and schools closed, that only encouraged triggered by the entire Bundy saga. conspiracy theories about federal Dwight Hammond and his son, Rocky agents stalking and harassing local Steven, were convicted of arson Barker people. He and other ranchers in 2012. The men set two fires on Comment had no intention of siding with federal land, one in 2001, witnesses the Bundys, he said, but he also testified, to cover up a poaching believed the federal government had treated incident, and the second in 2006, initially the Hammonds too harshly. allegedly set as a back burn. This happened When the 41-day occupation of the at a time when relations between federal wildlife refuge ended, one man, LaVoy officials at the Malheur National Wildlife Finicum, was dead. But the division over Refuge and many local ranchers had land policy continued. The Bundys and become especially tense. five others were acquitted of conspiracy, The charges against the two men were weapons and theft charges after a five-week brought under the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which trial in 2016. But many of their followers are either in jail or face fines and probation. required a mandatory five-year sentence. Then in January, U.S. District Judge Instead, U.S. District Judge Michael R. Gloria Navarro dismissed the case against Hogan sentenced Dwight Hammond to three months in prison and Steven to a year, Cliven Bundy, his sons and others involved in the 2014 Nevada standoff. She said saying the mandatory sentence “would that prosecutors had engaged in “flagrant shock the conscience to me.” misconduct” by withholding evidence that That wasn’t enough jail time for U.S. could have supported the Bundys’ case. Attorney Billy Williams. He appealed and No matter what you thought about the Hammonds were ordered to complete the Bundys and the radical band of anti- their five-year sentences. government, gun-toting extremists who That’s when Ammon and Ryan Bundy follow them, it was clear that the federal weighed in. In 2015, they came to Burns to government had bungled the two cases. take up the Hammonds’ cause, which even Imagine this: What if President Barack some moderate ranchers supported. Obama had commuted the Hammonds’ The Bundys’ involvement inspired sentence, showing clemency for the two militia members and other supporters, men who had been willing to return to who had clashed with federal enforcement prison and accept the consequences for their officers at the family’s Nevada ranch in 2014. That dispute was over federal grazing actions? Instead, it was President Trump fees that Cliven Bundy, the family patriarch, who gave the Hammonds a full pardon, thereby feeding the fires of conflict over had refused to pay for decades. federal land management. The Hammonds, however, ignored the An earlier, more nuanced approach Bundys’ call to join their occupation of might have placated Fred Otley and other the wildlife refuge. Instead, they decided Oregon ranchers, who might have felt that to return to prison, thereby demonstrating justice had been served. It might also have some support for the rule of law. helped the many federal public servants I spoke with federal employees whose who must carry out their jobs protecting our families were bullied by some of the men public lands, often in lonely and vulnerable with assault rifles who came from across circumstances. the West to join in the Bundys’ protest. The Now, provocateurs like the Bundys can people who worked for the government feel empowered to push their alternative were members of the community — brand of American history and the law. The coaches of Little League teams and standoff continues. volunteers in churches who also served in ■ local government. But the Bundy supporters Rocky Barker is a contributor to the opin- treated them like enemies. Rancher Fred Otley, a former president ion service of High Country News.
