SATURDAY, AUGUST 7, 2021
Baker City, Oregon
A4
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EDITORIAL
Trail
Center’s
long
closure
The announcement this winter that the
Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, one of
Baker County’s most popular visitor attrac-
tions, would be closed for about two and a
half years for renovations no doubt surprised
some people.
But it turns out that was only half of the
story.
Approximately.
In reality the Center, operated by the
Bureau of Land Management on Flagstaff
Hill about fi ve miles east of Baker City, is in
the midst of a closure that likely will extend
for close to four years.
And although the BLM has been offering
a variety of programs outside the Center,
and its network of trails has remained open,
the veritable loss of a building that has
attracted close to 2.4 million visitors since
it opened on May 23, 1992, and for such an
extended period, is disappointing.
The pandemic, as with so many other
things, is partly to blame.
The Center closed on Nov. 17, 2020, due to
a surge in COVID-19 cases.
And it’s understandable that the Center
needs to be closed in advance of the ren-
ovations — the goal is make the facility
more energy-effi cient, at an estimated cost
of at least $3 million — to allow the many
exhibits, some of them fragile, to be properly
packaged.
But the renovations aren’t scheduled to
start until March 1, 2022.
And although the pandemic, due to the
prevalence of the delta variant, is running
rampant again, for much of the past spring
and early summer the situation was rela-
tively tranquil. People started traveling
more frequently, and the Interpretive Center
would have been on many vacationers’
itineraries.
Fortunately the BLM will have an
“Oregon Trail Experience” in Baker City
during the renovations, likely in the Baker
Heritage Museum.
But with the renovations expected to take
about two and a half years, the Center itself
isn’t likely to reopen until late summer of
2024 at the earliest.
That’s a bitter pill to swallow for the
county’s tourism industry, which has already
suffered severely due to the pandemic.
— Jayson Jacoby, Baker City Herald editor
Your views
Train quiet zone would make Baker City even better
I’m a retired police offi cer and a retired
counselor at the Powder River Correctional
Facility. I share this fact because I’m sensi-
tive to the safety and security of citizens. I
also have an educated awareness of mental
health issues and some of the stressors
which can aggravate sensitive populations.
Extreme noise levels are an added ele-
ment to an already stressful environment.
Stress can reduce productivity, increase
blood pressure, cause anxiety, sleeplessness,
and even propel people into violence.
There are not many times in this old
man’s life that I’ve been as supportive of a
cause as I am now. To reduce stressful noise,
I fully support Baker City adopting a rail-
road quiet zone as more than 700 other U.S.
cities have.
According to Federal Department of
Transportation studies, railroad quiet
zones have caused zero increase in rail-
road-auto accidents. That’s why I sup-
port this from the law enforcement
perspective.
From a mental health professional
perspective, this is a “no brainier” (pun
intended). The sound of a trickling creek,
or the quiet sound of a small fan is found
to be soothing and refreshing. Now con-
sider the opposite — a loud horn breaking
up our concentration and sleeping pat-
terns multiple times per day and night.
The impacts on sensitive populations
include our children: Persistent loud
noises can cause them to be more irri-
table, have behavior issues at school and
home, get poorer grades, and sleep less,
which makes everything harder.
A close friend and fellow mental health
professional literally sold her house near the
train tracks for a low price recently because
of the trains. The stress just wasn’t worth it.
I value this great place, Baker City. Many
of us appreciate just what a wonderful place
it really is. Let’s make it a little more won-
derful. I simply do not see this as a contro-
versial issue. Please join me in supporting a
cause that will reduce our stress and enrich
our lives.
P.S. I’m signing the petition going around
town. If you are like-minded, maybe you
will too?
Layne Frambes
Baker City
OTHER VIEWS
Biden steps up on eviction crisis
Editorial from New York Daily News:
When the national freeze on residential
evictions, in place since the start of COVID
last March, lapsed on Aug. 1, it wasn’t just
at-risk tenants who panicked. Democrats in
Congress and the White House were furi-
ously fi ngerpointing for the other to act
immediately, fearful of families being put on
the street and them catching blame.
Congress needed to pass a new law,
claimed the Biden team, pointing to a
U.S. Supreme Court majority that said
that the CDC did not have the authority
to impose a nationwide moratorium. And
the states were to blame as well for only
handing out 7% of the $46.55 billion the
feds set aside for rental aid.
No, said Speaker Nancy Pelosi, the
administration needed to extend the mora-
torium because there wasn’t time for a new
law since GOP members had blocked last-
minute legislation. That left unanswered
why the House and Senate hadn’t moved
when the high court ruling came down on
June 29. Some states, like New York, still
have their own eviction freezes in places,
but unpaid landlords retain their rights
to their own property, and with the House
away until Sept. 20, something bad was
going to happen.
Just then, on Tuesday, some clever
people at the Centers for Disease Control
crafted a new temporary freeze on evic-
tions that may pass court muster. Citing
the rapidly growing delta variant, the order
imposes a moratorium until Oct. 3 on those
counties “experiencing substantial and high
levels of community transmission levels of
SARS-CoV-2.”
The CDC uses a four-level color-coded
COVID scale on its maps: High (red) and
substantial (orange) areas would have
the moratorium, as opposed to moderate
(yellow) and low (blue) counties. Numeri-
cally, almost 83% of U.S. counties are now
covered. This is not the nationwide ban
that the court opposed, but wisely targeted
to where the disease is the worst. The goal
is to buy time to send out the fi nancial aid
and bring down the virus. Just what the
doctor ordered.
Rabbitbrush gets an early start on late summer
The rabbitbrush seems confused
about which month it is, and it hap-
pens that I feel a trifl e uncertain
myself about precisely where we are
on the calendar.
I noticed the rabbitbrush on Sat-
urday, the 17th of July, while driving
to the mountains in search of relief
from the heat.
Specifi cally I noticed the bright-
yellow blossoms that distinguish this
species of shrub which, along with
sagebrush, is a ubiquitous fl ora of the
dry steppes.
Which is not to say that rab-
bitbrush is confi ned to the desert
country.
The plant is also common in parts
of Baker Valley that haven’t been con-
verted to agriculture and thus aren’t
regularly irrigated. The clumps of rab-
bitbrush that attracted my eyes grow
profusely on the east side of Highway
30 between Baker City and Haines.
What gave me pause is that date
— July 17.
Rabbitbrush for much of the year
is, like the sage, a rather drab shrub of
dull green or gray.
(One of my essential sources on
such matters, Ronald J. Taylor’s lav-
ishly illustrated “Sagebrush Country:
Technically it’s early summer,
being less than a month past the
solstice.
But when I saw the rabbitbrush
blooms, conspicuous against the
A Wildfl ower Sanctuary,” tells me
backdrop of brown, desiccated grass,
there are two predominant types of
I was instantly thrust ahead into
rabbitbrush, the gray and the green,
August, to a time when certain sea-
and that they often intermingle.)
sonal fi rsts — day of school, football
But each year, along about the
game, scrim of morning frost on the
middle of August, rabbitbrush, like a windshield — begin to feel plausible.
formerly reclusive person who sud-
I suspect the drought and the heat
denly discovers a sense of style, turns have conspired to convince the rab-
fl amboyant.
bitbrush to defy the calendar.
For me — and I suspect for many
It occurred to me, as I drove past
people who live east of the Cascades those surprisingly bright patches
— rabbitbrush is a bellwether of sum- beside the highway, that rabbitbrush
mer’s waning as reliable as the dwin- isn’t the only symbol of this strangely
dling hours of daylight and the fi rst
fast-moving summer.
morning when the temperature dips
That evening, as I reclined in a
into the 30s.
chair in my yard to read, the pun-
(Two of my other favorites in that gent aroma of woodsmoke settled in,
category are the astringent scent of
and the westering sun blazed with
peppermint, blowing in on the north- the color of erupting lava, a shade of
west wind from the Ward Farms dis- incandescent orange normally seen
tillery, and the thin crack of football
only at Hawaiian volcanoes and on
shoulder pads colliding.)
garish late 1960s muscle cars.
Taylor’s book also notes the sea-
The next evening the smoke — an
sonal nature of blooming rabbitbrush, unfortunate byproduct of the Bootleg
referring to its “late summer” arrival. fi re burning more than 100 miles
July 17, of course, is not
away, in Klamath and Lake coun-
late summer.
ties — slunk in even thicker yet. This
JAYSON
JACOBY
thin white pall suggested the possi-
bility of a refreshing rain shower but
this was of course a lie — this was a
cloud made not of water vapor but of
soot and other particulates that irri-
tate the nostrils rather than soothe
the fevered brow.
Like the blooms of rabbitbrush,
I associate wildfi re smoke, with its
heavily scented evenings and blood-
red sunsets, with the end of summer
rather than its middle.
Yet events come ever earlier, it
seems to me — a trend that affl icts
the natural, such as the maturing
of shrubs and of wildfi res, as
well as the solely manmade. Hal-
loween candy, for instance, begins
to burden store shelves (and adoles-
cent enamel) before the autumnal
equinox, and the stuff ed turkey and
the jack-o-lantern seem to share a
season rather than one giving way to
the next in the beloved sequence as it
once was.
This summer is something of
an outlier, to be sure, what with the
absence of rainfall and the record-
setting heat wave.
Yet we are no longer surprised
when the woods or the rangelands
are ablaze in June or in early July.
I remember, though, that the fi rst
wildfi re I ever worked on during my
career as a summer employee on the
Wallowa-Whitman National Forest
— I can’t rightly say I “fought” the
fi re since it didn’t put up much of a
resistance — was in the third week
of July 1989.
And I also recall that, among
the veteran smokeaters I met that
summer, this was considered a rather
early time for a blaze, and particu-
larly for one ignited by lightning.
We have in our living room a dig-
ital picture frame — a cunning little
device that displays, for an interval
of several seconds, the photographs
on a thumb drive. I happened to walk
past this the other day and the scene,
looking into our yard, was in winter,
and a heavy snow was falling.
I don’t recall that winter, with its
skin-tightening temperatures and
snow that squeaks underfoot, ever
seemed so distant, so indistinct and
so improbable, as that moment, while
I stood there, the air-conditioner
rumbling behind me, battling the
summer that arrived early and seems
disinclined to leave.
Jayson Jacoby is editor of the
Baker City Herald.