Hood River: Pears, Wind, and a Town That Welcomed the Unwelcome
Oregon
The Columbia River Gorge funnels wind like a natural nozzle, channeling air from the dry high desert east through the narrowing canyon toward the wet coast. At Hood River that funnel effect is strongest. In the early nineteen eighties, a group of windsurfers from Seattle arrived and discovered that the gorge winds blow hard and predictably from May through September, creating wave conditions more consistent than almost anywhere else on the continent. By nineteen eighty-six Hood River was hosting a professional windsurfing race with a thirty-thousand-dollar purse, and the town's identity shifted almost overnight from agriculture to wind sports.
The agriculture had been remarkable in its own right. Nathaniel Coe filed the first homestead claim in the valley in eighteen fifty-four and planted some of the earliest fruit trees in the region. By the eighteen nineties orchards covered the hillsides, and in nineteen hundred the valley shipped its first apple cargo east, helping establish the Pacific Northwest fruit industry. Then a killing freeze in nineteen nineteen destroyed most of the apple trees. Rather than replant apples, growers switched to Anjou pears, which handled the valley's cold winters better. Hood River County eventually became the leading producer of Anjou pears in the world.
During World War Two the valley's fruit economy depended heavily on Japanese American farming families who had been working the land for a generation. Executive Order Nine Thousand and Sixty-Six in February nineteen forty-two forced virtually all of them into internment camps within weeks, leaving orchards without their most experienced hands. When the war ended and families tried to return, some found neighbors who refused to serve them in shops they had patronized for decades. Anti-Japanese clubs formed to block their return. The orchards they had built from young trees were sometimes lost or sold at distress prices. The story of Hood River sits at the intersection of natural bounty and institutional cruelty, a recurring American pattern dressed in the colors of the Columbia Gorge.
