Smoke billowed out of the Gorge on the approach to PDX. One reasonable plume, not yet the whole consumption of a string of foothills. Must be new, barely fresh enough to have the wildlands guys head in with the axes.
By and large, Manifest Destiny was a failure. It succeeded on some fronts, often its most horrific ones: from the displacement and genocide of the people who’d lived on the land for untold millennia, to the aggressive destruction of native flora and fauna, to thefts of the waterways in favor of state-subsidized private cash crops and lime-green golf courses against the needs of residents, to the exploitation of all those toiling in the “frontier” for the profits of those who came in with enough capital to steal a couple of plots. Ostensibly, the American Empire succeeded on these fronts. The cultural hegemony stuck, but its presumptive permanence—its conquest—failed. Now the land is again becoming barren. Populations bleed out of the Dakotas, and the last thing left for any sense of future in the prairie is what can be fracked out of the ground. The ghost town isn’t a 19th-century attraction anymore, but a recurring sight—lest your town in eastern Wyoming be lucky enough to get a Dollar General rather than becoming another series of houses buried beneath the tumbleweeds.
When the Spanish first made their way north, they stopped in Southern California—no use pressing on in this endless desert. It wasn’t until the beaver trade that anyone took the Oregon territory seriously, and a few gold mines helped too. The Trail, famously, was brutal, but what many forget is that the worst part (‘sides the duldruma of the Midwest sky) was Oregon itself. Before you get to the lush temperate rainforests on the Pacific-side of the Cascades, you get some of the loneliest deserts in America. Nevada has an expanse, and the Southwest is nothing to balk at, but there’s something so cruel about that last stretch of nothing between (what’s now) Boise and the piney green mountains that everyone thinks is all the PacNW is.
First time I really understood it was driving from my then home of Bozeman (now itself a symbol of the kind of a kind of death to the West, begat by the real estate price-gouging of an influx of coastal WFH types and the 8-9-10-digit wealth of the world’s most enthusiastic ski resorters) and down to central Oregon for an annual family reunion. Once you cross the border past Boise, the road destroys itself, asphalt blowing away in the sandy wind. Two lanes take you past dozens of shuttered settlements, not closed down after the gold mine dried up, but something more recent. The gas pumps look like they were updated in the 1980s, maybe even the 90s, but somehow still feel like they haven’t been attended to in a hundred years. It’s a landscape of death, one foolishly thought rejuvenated by violence and technology—“civilization,” it turns out, might be as much a Ponzi scheme as the suburbs, propped up by the value or making something new, but its ultimate price is much more than anyone is reasonably willing to pay for the maintenance. We should’ve let the prairie to the buffalo rather than the Waltons.
Usually when my family drives to the high desert, they head south through Salem and then cut east over the mountains, down through the cute little towns beloved by weekending families and cross-country bikers in equal measures. Some of those burned down a year or two ago, although maybe it was three. Whole communities propped up on tourism when all else left was whisked away in a couple of hours by the red sky—only the empty asphalt and boats floating on the artificial lakes created by WPA damming projects from a long-forgotten advanced society leave traces of what was there before.
This year I take the bus, running the northern route over Mt. Hood and into the vaster country. One of the advantages of driving directly east towards Sisters and Bend is you get to stay in the trees, watching Douglas firs give way to ponderosa pines. Moving southeast down the foothills of Hood is a different story: you really see the desert. That expanse was covered in a thick layer of smoke, blooming the yellow hues of the dusty ground into golden. The desert’s vastness is not liberating today, but suffocating. Its beauty is harsh—out on the res houses are trying to hold themselves up against the sand, and water runs away from the sun by embedded itself deep within the start gulch’s that run like scars across the valley. Diving under the plateaus you find the last of the gold mines: a casino on the border of Oregon-controlled territory, in a sense siphoning back some of the profits stolen off the land. Then you get to see green.
While the mountains burn, the desert is meticulously watered. Gardens and golf courses start to carpet the expanse. It’s scenic so much as it’s illusory—a pretend version of America imposed on a land that can’t take it. And because it can’t take it it’s beaten down with imported topsoil and rerouted waterways for a bourgeois excess that expects the suburbs wherever they go: large house, wide roads, and plenty of parking takes dominates the (seemingly) previously inhospitable land. It won’t last—the lawn sprinklers don’t regenerate the river, but drain it, and the fires won’t stay in the hills forever.