#eastern oregon

Self Portrait

Portland, OR Spring 2017

A ranch scene in the Steens Mountain area of southeast Oregon

Photo by Ken Vermillion

The land is. . . scarred. Scabbed. Water flows like veins through the ruins a great flood. Basalt columns worn from exposure they were never meant to have.

So many ghost towns. Decaying, now dead, when the farmers left after corporations bought up the rolling hills as far as the eye can see.

Massive buttes hanging in the skyline above your town. The trees only grow on one side of the lonely mountain. The other side is completely bare. Creatures exist up there that are now unable to survive the warmer lowland surrounding it.

Gaping river gorges, of now placid water. Somewhere beneath the power of the river still roars. It's there, imprisoned to your every beck and call, every time you flip a lightswitch.

The largest reach of sprawling river, the last place it seems to run free, skeletal ruins sit on the shoreline. Do not dig the soil. Do not disturb the tanks. Do not trespass. The specter of an era long gone still lingers, poison seeping into the land that will last longer than our civilization. Generations of families inhabit the desert nearby, working to clean up the consequences of the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction. You ask a man where he works. He replies, "Hanford". You ask where his father worked. "Hanford". His grandfather. "Hanford".

"Oh, and my son is getting a scholarship for the lab!" the man from Hanford smiles cheerfully. "He will be working with a device to measure the fundamental vibrations of an ancient universe."

Inland Empire Gothic.

This is the first I've ever heard of "Inland Empire" as not referring only to an inland region of Southern California, but I'm not from east of the Cascades, so I have no idea if folks out east are all using that term!

I occasionally have an "eastern Washington/Oregon" or "interior BC" post, but I agree that when you have a mountain range between you and the Pacific Ocean, the Okanagan or the Columbia Gorge hardly feels "Pacific Northwest."