What Oregon Is: A State at the Edge of Its Own Contradictions

Oregon is a state that has, more than once, decided to be a particular kind of place.

It decided, in eighteen fifty-nine, to be a free state with Black exclusion written into its founding document. It saw, in nineteen forty-two, the second-largest city in the state built on a floodplain for the workers the war required, and left them to sort out the consequences when the river reclaimed it in nineteen forty-eight. It decided, in the nineteen sixties and seventies, to build the most comprehensive suite of environmental laws of any American state, public beaches, returnable bottles, urban growth boundaries, and it largely kept those decisions.

None of these decisions resolved themselves cleanly. The exclusion language was removed from the constitution in the nineteen twenties but not forgotten. The old-growth forests were protected in the nineties but only after most of them were already gone. The salmon are still listed as endangered in rivers where treaties that are now a hundred and fifty years old promised them permanence.

Oregon is also, in ways that do not make the headlines, an extraordinary place. The Cascade volcanoes, Hood, Jefferson, the Three Sisters, Mazama turned inside-out into Crater Lake, mark a chain of fire running the length of the state. The Willamette Valley produces grass seed that plants lawns across the world and pinot noir that wins against the best in France. The high desert east of the Cascades is one of the last places in the lower forty-eight where you can drive for an hour without seeing another car, or stand outside at night under a sky that has not been touched by light pollution.

The Indigenous peoples who have been here for ten to fifteen thousand years, the Chinook, the Nez Perce, the Kalapuya, the Klamath, the Northern Paiute, the Siletz peoples, the Grand Ronde confederation, the Warm Springs and Umatilla and Wasco, are still here. Some have federal recognition and treaty rights that the federal government is still working out how to honor. Some, like the Chinook Nation, are still waiting for recognition that was promised and then withdrawn.

Oregon is a state of extraordinary natural endowment and complicated historical decisions about who that endowment was for. It is still making those decisions. Driving through it, through the rain forests and the high desert and the river valleys, through the coast and the volcanoes and the dry east side, you are moving through a place that has been fought over and cared for and shaped by every culture that has lived in it.

That is most of the story. The rest is outside the window.