One of the Newspaper People

The rail yard in Vale, Oregon, after rain. Hundreds of thousands of pounds of produce,
particularly onions, are farmed in Malheur County every year, thanks to dam irrigation.
Produce is loaded on to refrigerated box cars at points like this one. (Photo/Rachel Parsons)

By Rachel Parsons

An older man with white hair under a trucker’s cap hollered at me from down the block. I looked up to find him squinting at me. He was tan-faced, in a sleeveless plaid shirt, old Wranglers and dusty boots. His expression was curious, not hostile. 

 

“Are you one of the newspaper people?” 

 

“Yep,” I answered, as I tried to get the damn key to work in the front door of my temporary home. I had not got the hang of it yet, it was sticky, and it was blazing hot in the Oregon desert of Malheur County. 

 

There were a few of us working 10-week gigs at the local newspaper, I told him. Most of us were staying in an apartment together on top of a building built in 1907. The pile of old bricks constituted one of the aging collection of two- and three-story buildings that made up downtown Vale, county seat, population 1,900. 

 

“Well, I’m Matt,” he yelled, (or was it Mark? I lost it immediately in the heat). “And that’s Steve,” he nodded across the street behind me. Steve was nowhere to be seen. 

 

“At any rate, Steve owns that building, and I own this one,” he said, jerking his head to a large wood sided house on the north end of the block.

 

I won’t use the phrase this is the kind of place. 

 

It would be trite and do this place a disservice because the people who live here know precisely what kind of place it is, thank you very much. And those who don’t, well, they fall into two camps. 

 

Either they have spent some amount of time in rural America and have some accurate sense of what kind of place I’m talking about, or they haven’t. For the latter, their imaginations likely conjure stereotypes; pop-culture reinforced representations of what country means. 

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So, Malheur County isn’t the kind of place where strangers introduce themselves to the newcomers on the sidewalk (if at a socially-distanced holler from yards away). It simply is a place where strangers introduce themselves. It’s a place where they check out people they don’t recognize. 

 

It is a place where people don’t say “thanks, I appreciate it.” They say “thanks, I appreciate you.”

 

It is a place where, in response to the Black Lives Matter Movement, bulletin boards at businesses around town feature computer-printed signs that read “YOU MATTER” and on at least one large outdoor advertisement in Nyssa, a town half an hour away, “COWBOY LIVES MATTER.”

 

But that’s not all it is, of course. It is not just a place where white fear of others asserting their own basic human value makes people defensive. 

 

It’s a place where Vale’s Catholic priest from Sri Lanka uses Google Translate and help from parishioners to give mass in Spanish once a month; a place where one of Nyssa’s greatest cultural treasures exists in the form of a petit, sharp 81-year-old curandera, or Mexican folk healer, named Eva Castellanoz. She arrived in Nyssa in the 1950s, the daughter of migrant farm laborers, and built her life there. She was proud to show me the wall of portraits of her children in military uniforms. Four of her sons and one granddaughter joined the U.S. Army. 

Longtime Nyssa resident Eva Castellanoz, traditional Mexican folk healer and artist. 
(Photo/Rachel Parsons)

The week I started at the Malheur Enterprise, the BLM movement made its way to the town of Ontario, the county’s largest, at about 11,000 – part of the movement’s thrust into rural America from coast to coast. 

 

In the newsroom, we had no idea whether to expect 2 people or 10 to take part in the march and rally. About 200 people turned out for it. It was completely peaceful. Faces of every color of the rainbow, some from neighboring Idaho communities, showed up. The LGBTQ community was represented. A large number were Hispanic, as was the event’s organizer. 

 

Malheur County has a population of around 33,000 people. About one-third are Hispanic. Thousands are second, third, fourth generation Americans. Thousands of others are migrant seasonal farm workers, an unofficial lineage continuing from the Bracero Program from the 1940s – America’s largest foreign guest worker program.

 

It is a place that has not been unscathed by the past several years of vitriolic politics and vile behavior. A Latina in her 50s who was born and raised in Ontario told me that growing up, in school she never encountered bigotry. A Latina in her early 20s who was also from the area told me her classmates used to tell her to “go back to Mexico.” 

 

“I’ve never been to Mexico,” she said. 

 

A program manager at an Ontario nonprofit that helps connect migrant seasonal farmworkers with services told me that after the last presidential election, the instances of children of color catching verbal racist abuse shot way up.

 

The desert canyon that is the showpiece of Succor Creek State Natural Area is one of
Malheur County's natural wonders. (Photo/Rachel Parsons)

Geographically, the county blankets a hunk of the upper reaches of the Great Basin Desert on the border with Idaho, where the raw, arid land that has been home to humans for roughly 15,000 years peters out into the pine forests just to the north.

 

It’s an irrigated desert. A place where, by early August, the scent of onion permeates the air from the thousands of acres of sweet, yellow, red, and white varieties farmed in the region. None of that would be possible if not for a pre-New Deal era dam built on the Owyhee River. At its construction it was the highest in the world. 

 

As a rural community newspaper that pulls no punches in its reporting, the Malheur Enterprise is a place where I found keys to the front door on my desk the first day of work. It’s a remarkable publication not just for the fact that it’s still operating after more than 100 years (in the two months I was there, at least two other century-old weekly papers in other states shut down), but for the fact that what they do there is so clearly needed. And welcome. 

 

A potted plant sits on the lunch table with a florist’s card attached. It was from a group of readers thanking the Enterprise for its substantive reporting. There is a bulletin board covered in handwritten thank you cards and letters from others expressing the same. I have never been in a newsroom that gets thank you floral arrangements from its readers. 

 

The editor-in-chief, Les Zaitz, a veteran investigative reporter from The Oregonian, has made the Enterprise work by embracing digital. The bulk of his revenue comes from ad sales and digital subscriptions, he told me. 

 

Far from being a weekly print paper with a weekly workflow, it publishes daily with just a couple of reporters. They do an inordinate amount of work. Were it not for the Enterprise, there would be no local county-wide news source. No one covering the county commission, various city councils, or school boards. The TV and radio news come from Boise, more than an hour away in another state.

 

Ten weeks in this place was nowhere near enough time to get into a reporting beat. It was enough time to begin to cultivate sources and relationships just in time to get up and leave. As I write this, I am preparing to move to London for graduate school. I’m a city kid, but after all these years spending short amounts of time in rural places all over the world, I came out of the place with a strange sensation. I don’t know if I’ll ever see Malheur County again. Yet something makes me hope I will.

 

 

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