OPINION
Wallowa County Chieftain
A4
Wednesday, June 19, 2019
VOICE of the CHIEFTAIN
ROLL OUT THE BARRELS
T
his past week has seen Wal-
lowa County endure what
might have been a major
crisis, if not disaster: the detection,
characterization and recovery of
one barrel which once contained
herbicide, and eleven others--
whose former contents are a bit
more mysterious --from Wallowa
Lake. Fortunately, the saga has a
happy ending. Thus far, the bar-
rels have contained no toxic con-
tents, and were probably empty
when they were placed in the lake.
Joseph’s drinking water is safe.
We can swim again without con-
cern. Fish and fowl are unaffected
by toxins. (A bald eagle was keep-
ing a close eye on the diving oper-
ations, just in case…) And there
was never any presence of “Agent
Orange.”
The Environmental Protection
Agency and Oregon DEQ did the
right thing in responding promptly
to public and environmental con-
cerns. By thoroughly investigat-
ing the barrels and the surround-
ing sediment, they provided facts
from which we who live and recre-
ate here can make sound decisions,
and sleep better at night. We owe
them a debt of gratitude (and tax
dollars), along with our Sherriff’s
marine patrol, and especially Dep-
uty Marc Christman, for keeping
both divers and boaters safe.
But while we rested easy in
learning the facts of the barrel’s
distribution and contents, peo-
ple outside the county were not so
EPA
An EPA image of the 2,4-D or 2,4,5-T barrel reveals that it is rusted and corroded.
lucky. The Portland Fox News sta-
tion KPTV and Rob Porter of The
Oregonian both reported the erro-
neous story that barrels contain-
ing Agent Orange ingredients were
found in Wallowa Lake.
They leapt to this conclu-
sion because of over-enthusias-
tic reporting, and an error of a
single, small, and seemingly insig-
nifi cant word. The word “or.” A
lowly article, to grammarians. The
most mundane of words, but to this
story, and to the arc of our lives,
the most important two letters in
the alphabet.
The label on the herbicide bar-
rel said “2,4-D or 2,4,5-T. To make
Agent Orange you need 2,4-D
AND 2,4,5-T in the correct con-
centrations and proportions.
EPA spokesman Bill Dun-
bar noted that an EPA press-re-
lease was partly to blame for the
Agent Orange Debacle because
it incorrectly stated that one bar-
rel “was labeled 2,4-D AND
2,4,5-T” although the image pro-
vided by Blue Mountain divers
clearly showed the label as 2,4-D
OR 2,4,5-T—meaning only one
ingredient was or had been in that
barrel.
To make matters worse, one
caption on my initial story also
said “2,4-D and 2,4,5-T.” It was
a careless error, but an error with
consequences.
The Agent Orange story, which
had roots in this careless word-
ing from two local, on-the-scene
news sources, soon blossomed
into “Wallowa Lake contains bar-
rels labeled Agent Orange.” (Ore-
gon Fishing Forum) and “Agent
Orange Zone” which now has its
own blog. A documentary fi lm-
maker from New York called
The Chieftain and wanted to fi lm
a story that seemed to revolve
vaguely around how Agent Orange
destroyed a small town’s econ-
omy, ecosystems, and probably the
human population.
The lines between facts, errors
of a single word, and full-blown
rumormongering can be blurry.
Rumormongering and the creation
of disasters are much more fun and
sell a lot more papers.
Efforts by The Chieftain and
EPA to correct and curtail these
stories met with little to no
response, although the stories are
slowly fading as they run out of
rumor-stoked oxygen.
The bottom line for Wallowa
County is that we have all pulled
together, kept our rural common
sense and level-headedness, and
are ready to move on. There may
rightfully be lingering questions
about the EPA’s costs of cleanup,
the long-term sources of our water,
and the loss of some tourist rev-
enue. As your editor, I will make
occasional errors of spelling, gram-
mar, and judgment. But bear with
me if you can. I love this place,
and entirety of people who call it
home. We are a community, and
although our opinions may be
diverse, we rely on one-another
more than anything. That unity of
community and concern was evi-
dent this week. Thanks.
Things are the same all over
Finding common sense in the middle
I
C
just returned from my 60th class
reunion. My wife has begged me not
to tell anyone it was the 60th. I tried
comforting her by telling her I graduated at
age 9. While I was at the reunion I decided
that age does some terrible things to peo-
ple. Thank God they had name tags with
our senior picture on them or I would have
recognized few. In some cases it was like
going to a wake for all of us. Ageing can
be cruel. Some of the old grads had fallen
apart a little at a time while others kind of
crashed and burned. The one thing they
seemed to have in common was they loved
talking about it. I heard more about bad
hearts, knee and hip replacements and just
about everything but STD. There were very
few success stories but what do you expect
from a bunch of underachievers. One thing
I noticed was that I was glad to see every-
one, even the ones I didn’t particularly like
then. It did seem that once everyone got
older they grew up and got a little nicer.
While in California I spent some time
with a rancher friend and went to the live-
stock sale in Turlock. I was just sitting
when I saw someone smiling and wav-
ing at me. Jake Stanley from Hermiston
was there buying cattle for a feedlot in the
NW. The return trip I had the company of
my eccentric brother who came with me
for a visit even though the last time he vis-
ited I worked him for a week modifying
my deck. One of the reasons he likes to
visit here is that sometimes his wife annoys
him. He mistakenly thought that by leav-
ing her home he would be safe. Wrong.
First problem was the pilot light on the hot
water heater went out and she was incapa-
ble of lighting it. He called the utility com-
pany and had them send a technician over
to light it. He then called his wife back to
inform her of the appointment and got no
answer. Spent the next hour and a half call-
ing and fi nally got her to answer. The next
day the outside temperature got to 103°
and the wife called to inform him the air
conditioning had quit. Inside temp was 87°.
Since the air conditioner was new it was
still on warranty and he called the guy who
installed it and arranged for an appoint-
ment to fi x it. He then called his wife back
OPEN
RANGE
Barrie Qualle
to tell her to be sure she was at home at
2:00 p.m. to let the guy in. No answer.
Again he spent 2 hours trying to call to no
avail. Finally he called the neighbor and
asked him to go next door and tell Linda
to answer the phone. The kindly neighbor
complied and called back to say she wasn’t
home. An hour later he fi nally contacted
her and scolded her severely for not being
attentive to his phone calls. It was a pretty
good rant and he ended up hanging up and
realizing he hadn’t told her about the 2
o’clock appointment. He called back and
she didn’t answer.
I just fi nished helping a friend gather
his herd to move to the forest. I wish there
was a program like the weed program to
remove all the old barbed wire from the
range. It seems all the old ranches are lit-
tered with it and in tall grass it is especially
dangerous. Any one who has ridden a horse
into some of this knows how bad it can be.
A valuable horse can be ruined quickly and
maybe ruin the cowboy as well. There are
plenty of hazards like badger holes, rocks
etc. nothing can be done about but the wire
is fi xable. It is the same all over the West.
In a lot of cases the fi elds are leased and
neither the leasee or the leasor want to pay
the price to clean it up. I am considering
limiting my riding to the arena or brand-
ing pen.
Remember everyone the Kickoff to
CJD Ranch Rodeo is Saturday June 29th.
A great chance to watch local cowboys
compete in classic events. Should be about
12 teams all local. Things start off Friday
the 28th with a trail ride to the top of the
Moraine and anyone can join. Ride starts
at 2:30 p.m. at the rodeo grounds and get
back about 5:00. Dinner and Cowboy Cal-
cutta follow and the public is invited. Have
a ball!
ommon sense.
People like to talk about fi nd-
ing “middle ground,” but I think the
object of discussions, when there are widely
divergent points of view, should be to fi nd
some common sense ground that most sides
can stand on.
In a recent “TED Talk” on the radio, a
very smart guy delivered a sermon on the
new meats—grown in labs or made from
plant materials or cobbled together in some
scientifi c way to give us the protein we need
without cows. His big concerns were meth-
ane and health.
I read Michael Pollen years ago, and
found his descriptions of meat packing
plants and the feedlot to table process dev-
astating. Pollen didn’t have problems with
cows, but with what we have done to them.
The thing that sticks in my mind is corn.
Cows do not easily digest the corn we now
like to fatten them with; they have evolved a
complex digestion system over thousands of
years that makes them the perfect harvesters
of grasses.
Corn—in our cows or in our gasoline—is
a complex issue for a number of nutritional,
political, botanical, and economic reasons,
and the subject for another day. Back to cows
and other grazing animals. Over millennia,
grazers, humans, and a wide range of natural
environments have developed complex and
complementary relationships. In the far north
caribou and reindeer graze on lichen, sedges,
and grasses, and have provided food and
clothing for the people forever. In the des-
erts of Asia and North Africa camels fi nd and
effi ciently use sparse vegetation and water
and have provided food, clothing, and trans-
portation for the people forever.
Cows and sheep came out of the Mid-
dle East to feed and cloth Europeans, and
then Americans and now people across the
world. Cows and sheep graze on ground that
often cannot be easily planted and harvested
for food crops—and even when they graze
on fl at farm ground and eat hay produced on
farm ground they are part of a complex rela-
tionship between soil and animal that has
proved effective over time.
This week the Wallowa County McClar-
ans are celebrating the 100th anniversary of
Wallowa County’s Newspaper Since 1884
M EMBER O REGON N EWSPAPER P UBLISHERS A SSOCIATION
Published every Wednesday by: EO Media Group
VOLUME 134
USPS No. 665-100
P.O. Box 338 • Enterprise, OR 97828
Offi ce: 209 NW First St., Enterprise, Ore.
Phone: 541-426-4567 • Fax: 541-426-3921
Contents copyright © 2019. All rights reserved.
Reproduction without permission is prohibited.
MAIN
STREET
Rich Wandschneider
their family ranch. It has been, I think, a fi ne
example of sensible—and thoughtful—agri-
culture on hard ground. The ground is the
canyon country of the Snake River and its
tributaries. Joe McClaran started with sheep.
His son, Jack and wife Marge, converted
to a cattle operation. It’s remarkable today
in that the fourth generation of operators is
women—three sisters, the children of Scott
and Vicki McClaran. The ranch is a leader in
a movement—of women running ranches—
that is growing in the inland West.
Adaptation is key to agricultural success.
When students in a class I taught at Eastern
Oregon asked Scott McClaran what kind of
cows he favored, he said “our cows,” mean-
ing cows raised on the ranch, adapted to the
canyons. Although they occasionally have to
bring in new blood, the McClarans have not
been concerned that the cows are black or
brown, this breed or that. Common sense.
In a more recent conversation, Scott told
me that he thinks we are fi nally getting it
right about agriculture in the Zumwalt—after
trying small homesteads, fruit trees and pota-
toes, we’ve learned to use the ups and downs
of the country through the season for graz-
ing. Kind of like the Nez Perce did.
The Indians grazed horses from about
1730 and cows from the 1840s in the can-
yons, picking up the best of what white set-
tlers brought them and adapting things to
their own cultures.
Which puts me in mind of more com-
mon sense. For hundreds of years, Euro-
pean settlers in the new world tried to make
Indians white, “take the Indian out of him,”
they said, and “save the man.” Take away
language, religion, ceremony, and hair; do
things our way. Today we are listening to
Indians as we deal with wildfi re and salmon,
and applauding their dancing and drumming
in the old Nez Perce lands.
Periodical Postage Paid at Enterprise and additional mailing offi ces
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Wallowa County
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General manager, Jennifer Cooney, jcooney@wallowa.com
Editor, Ellen Morris Bishop, editor@wallowa.com
Publisher, Chris Rush, crush@eomediagroup.com
Reporter, Stephen Tool, steve@wallowa.com
Administrative Assistant, Amber Mock, amock@wallowa.com
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Wallowa County Chieftain
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