This is a direct response to the article that was published by the East Oregonian on July 6, 2020, concerning county commissioner candidate Jonathan Lopez.
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Our house is situated 20 miles from where I work and I make the round trip drive several days per week. This results in about 15 hours per month of free-range contemplation, while I sit behind…
Esteemed Umatilla County commissioners, leaders, representatives, law enforcement, community members and all residents with the most deepest sincerity of what’s left of my heart and life, I wo…
This is an “all hands on deck” moment to keep Pendleton working. Avoiding shutdowns and providing shoppers and tourists with confidence in their safety is key, and lowering our numbers of COVI…
Last year, a student presented me with a mug whose inscription read, “History Major: I’d be more interested in you if you were dead.” For sure, there are plenty of tales of bygone years to be told.
When I stated at a June 17 meeting of the Umatilla County Board of Commissioners that I did not know what “systemic racism” was, I could and should have been a little more specific.
The Fourth of July is an exercise in hyperbole. There’s no better example of overstating an emotion than setting off fireworks to celebrate it.
It’s now cliché, but we are living in difficult times. I want to focus for a minute on race, a topic that makes many of us uncomfortable and is a focus of much of the country at this time. It …
Welcome to a new column about health. Webster’s dictionary defines health as “the state of fitness of the body, or of the mind,” which is a good start.
Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot should be rolling in their graves.
You might not have ever heard of the Independent-Enterprise, but it was once a weekly newspaper that filled a unique place in Payette County, Idaho.
On Tuesday, June 23, our organizations made the difficult decision to withdraw from the Northern Blues Forest Collaborative. As founding members of Northeast Oregon’s forest collaboratives, ou…
In 2016, Tobias Read was elected Oregon state treasurer. In that time, Oregonians have seen significant issues financially impact Oregon including PERS changes, a corporate activity tax, a pro…
Stay home, stay healthy. We hear that over and over as we navigate the COVID-19 pandemic. But what if you can’t stay home in order to stay healthy? What if you are struggling to pay rent and y…
I remember the day I realized I am racist, though not the year. I would have been 18 or 19. Of course, I hadn’t believed it of myself. I grew up during the fruition of the Civil Rights Era. I …
Permanently embedded in my memory is the number 1,718. It is the gallon capacity of my portable backyard pool.
There she was, her fine gauge knitting needles working a small square that would join others in a knit patchwork blanket for one of her five grandchildren. Maybe you’ve seen her in the past at…
“The world is made of stories, not of atoms,” Muriel Rukeyser wrote. But can stories really take us “from here to anywhere?”
Outraged demonstrators on our streets are pushing elected officials at all levels to consider a host of criminal justice reforms: a ban on tear gas, mandatory use of body cameras and a full re…
Schools across Oregon closed for the academic year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, turning the lives of nearly 600,000 K-12 students and their families upside down.
The answer to the above question is, quite a lot, actually.
As the region steps into storm season, it seems appropriate to review the whirls of the Northwest, both great and small.
During the past few weeks, I’ve been reading a lot about hope and its necessary role in healing, recovery and moving forward, not only as individuals, but as communities and a nation.
The Forest Service is proposing to remove the prohibition against logging trees larger than 21 inches that grow in national forests on the east side of the Cascades in Oregon. The probation wa…
This spring, even as we all were cooped up, the world seemed to wake up. It happened when I drove to Oregon’s Klamath Basin to witness the incredible abundance of migrating waterfowl that gath…
My grandparents were married before interracial marriage was legal in the United States. In their lifetime, the progress for equality has grown immensely. Yet, racism, poverty, and inequalitie…
I’ve spent a good portion of my working life tending hamburger on the hoof. This summer, I hope to again make the pilgrimage to central Idaho where, 40 years ago, my daughter and I lived in a …
On June 25, 2020, the world will observe the 70th anniversary of the outbreak of the Korean War. Korea left a light footprint on Umatilla County; casualties were few and no grand domestic mobi…
I’ll be honest with you, 2020 was not the year to start writing a newspaper column with a focus of trying to promote positivity. Good lord, we started the year with catastrophic flooding. We q…
We are in the midst of a crisis that’s delivered a one-two punch.
Though the state budget hole grabbed the most headlines, there were other important takeaways from the state’s latest economic and revenue forecasts.
There is a world map that hangs in the hallway of our home. It’s bright and colorful, has a few tears in places, and needs to be restapled to the wooden frame it hangs from, but in the hustle …
Looking for a positive diversion from the grim news headlines happening around America the past several days, I watched the joint NASA/SpaceX launch of the manned Falcon 9 rocket last Saturday…
I am a hunter that is trying to give up lead.
It’s graduation season, a time for grand speeches and soundbite advice. We look into the faces of the next generation and try to muster a few words based on our own experiences to help guide t…
Fifteen years of memories. That’s what I take with me as I close out a fascinating career as a reporter and photographer at the East Oregonian.
I grew up in Western Oregon during the 1970s and ’80s, which means I also grew up knowing who D.B. Cooper was.
Life on planet Earth has been upended by a microscopic speck. Since a vaccine designed to immunize, or a drug hoping to cure COVID-19 are not yet available, the best advice that 21st century m…
Division and discord seem to run deep in our country and historic events — such as the COVID-19 virus outbreak — often highlight those rifts.
I have lots of spare time these days. I’m not sure if it was out of sheer boredom or curiosity, but I virtually attended a recent city council meeting. Also, I read a half-dozen applications f…
Nostalgia hit recently with reminiscences about work and interactions with our kids, some memories arising after a local Sunridge Middle School teacher, Blair, talked to me about the new norma…
We live in a new normal of strange days and that is why the traditional elements to our daily life — such as Memorial Day — carry a little more meaning this year.
In these unprecedented times, I have found myself reflecting more and more on the importance of tradition. Our great nation is rooted in many wonderful traditions. They bind us together, they …
Many business owners have applied for or received funds from the Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) and/or Economic Injury Disaster Loan (EIDL). We have received the following questions and wan…
The COVID-19 pandemic has swept across America, but not through it. The virus remains despite states beginning to reopen and easing the restrictions that kept the curve relatively flat. The co…
Do you enjoy watching the weather? Are you someone who likes helping your community and keeping others safe? If you answered “Yes” to both of these questions, you may be interested in becoming…
We are living through an event that will remain every bit as memorable as 9/11, Katrina and the JFK assassination. We will have years to reflect on what went well, and what went poorly, to cel…
We were headed to Portland on March 2 when my husband learned of a coronavirus closure at work due to a presumed positive test. Some days later COVID-19 was officially here in Umatilla County.
So here we are, two months into social distancing, checking the daily COVID-19 numbers and trying to make sense of our lives in a world turned upside down.
On May 8, the world marked the 75th anniversary of the Allied victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. This is a time for all of us to pause, reflect and remember. What was happening here in…
Even though, deep down inside, I knew it was coming, Gov. Kate Brown’s announcement that large events should not happen through the end of September still stung me like a Mike Tyson bite to the ear.
Beginning on Feb. 5 and lasting for five days, the Umatilla and Walla Walla rivers overflowed their banks, battered communities and made themselves unwelcome visitors in homes.
This month, the U.S. Forest Service is launching a public process to fix a flawed and unscientific obstacle to restoring national forests throughout Eastern Oregon. For the past 25 years, a po…
It is difficult sometimes to believe just a few short months ago most of the world never heard of the COVID-19 virus.
I’ve spent much of my life in social distancing, from being the spoiled only child of a railroad family in the Sandhills of Nebraska where cattle outnumber humans 50 to one, to living a few wi…