I had a fine time in Salt Lake City. I stopped for lunch at The Bayou, a Cajun-food restaurant whose modus operandi is to serve beer, lots of very strong, very unique beer, to a city that’s strangled by complicated and draconian liquor-sales laws. In fact, as I enjoyed a 9% ABV local beer (I forget which one, sorry), I read a rant in the City Weekly against the incumbent (Mormon) governor’s stance on liquor licensing, watched an anti-drunk-driving ad on TV, and spoke with the bartender about serving beer in Utah. This was all at 1:00 in the afternoon, and after the restaurant scanned the barcode on my driver’s license.

The bartender said there’s an incredible amount of red tape around the issue, with something like six different types of liquor license a business can apply for. It’s not uncommon to see places advertising what kind of liquor license they have on billboards. The state wholesales all beer, wine and liquor through the Utah Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. Supermarkets can only sell “Utah beer,” below 4% alcohol by volume. That’s also the only stuff that can be sold on tap—so most establishments sling more of the bottled stuff.

The bartender, who comes from the laissez-faire drinking state of Nevada and spent some time in Oregon, said things are getting better. Judging from what a hot political and “moral” issue this is, that will take some time.

After lunch, I went to walk off my beer with a cup of black coffee in Temple Square. I felt like such an outlaw.

I. Horses

While driving near Burns, Oregon on Highway 20 I passed the Bureau of Land Management’s wild horse corrals, where they keep all the wild horses that they round up from the vast surrounding rangeland. Some of the horses are allowed to stay in designated areas, but numbers are tightly controlled. The corral facility offered an “auto-tour,” so I drove slowly around the holding pens for mares, studs and young horses, watching them kick around in the dirt and whinny at each other.

They have an adoption facility on site. Horses that aren’t adopted can be sold by the BLM, but many are also killed.

II. Cows

In Idaho, I saw my first CAFO (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operation). Si-Ellen Farms in Jerome, Idaho is a dairy operation with thousands of cows that stand around on a brown, empty expanse, some of them poking their heads through the fence to munch on feed. Big stacks of hay divide up the lot. At another CAFO I saw later in the day, young cows were separated into individual doghouse-type shelters. With all the negative stuff I’d heard about feedlots from Michael Pollan and others, it was a bit of a shock to see them in real life. Residents of Idaho’s Magic Valley area are largely supportive of feedlots—that’s how they make their living—but the incredible amount of manure generated has led to waste management concerns, as Scott Weaver discusses in this week’s feature in Boise Weekly.

III. Toxic Waste

On Interstate 84 near Mountain Home, Idaho, I noticed signs pointing down a country road: US ECOLOGY IDAHO WASTE SITE. This sounded too enticing to pass up, so I ended up following the signs like breadcrumbs down 20 miles of tumbleweed-strewn desert road. I lost the signs when I got to the town of Grand View, and I had no idea what I was missing.

US Ecology, a division of American Ecology, is one of just a handful of companies in the United States that will happily dispose of virtually any toxic or radioactive waste, no matter how hazardous. Their biggest customer by far is the US Military, though they take truck and railcar deliveries from all kinds of clients.

The Grand View, Idaho waste site is a hundred-acre pit in the desert that’s surrounded by another 1,000 acres and a security fence. It’s lined with what the company says is a state of the art combination of materials designed to prevent leaching, which is a good thing since the site is just uphill of the Snake River, which provides drinking water for 20,000 Idahoans (as cited in the feedlot article).

US Ecology boasts that this facility is one of the only ones in the nation that accepts PCBs (that’s the toxic goop that leaked out of the old General Electric factories, contaminating the Hudson River). They also recently accepted a shipment of sand from a former American base in Kuwait, which was irradiated in the firebombing of vehicles armored with depleted uranium.

A: Pretty fast.

Looking Westward across the Snake River to Ontario, Oregon, from Interstate 84 in Idaho

]]> http://kam.ph/2010/09/02/saying-goodbye-to-oregon/feed/ 0 http://kam.ph/2010/09/02/crossing-the-cascades/ http://kam.ph/2010/09/02/crossing-the-cascades/#comments Fri, 03 Sep 2010 03:00:07 +0000 Stefan http://kam.ph/?p=704

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I got a late start around 5 pm on Tuesday, and I was already on Route 26 (Powell Blvd.) so I took that up into the Cascades and the rain, winding through tall trees at the base of Mount Hood. I didn’t feel like I had reached escape-Portland velocity until I emerged on the other side of the mountains’ rain shadow, into the dry high desert of Central Oregon. While driving (sorry, Mom) I recorded a video.

Beyond that, the views really got incredible. Huge, empty canyons, bluffs rising out of nowhere, headlights creeping along cliff walls as the sun set. Then 26 drops to Warm Springs, where pines and willows line a healthily meandering river through the dry landscape. It’s dried grass and scrub brush until things heave up a bit in eastern Oregon.

From my story and this week’s Willamette Week.

I’ve mapped out a tentative route for my trip from Portland to the East Coast. Of course, I’ll be contacting editors for job offers along the way, so I may never actually get to my hometown of Lambertville, New Jersey… but this is the plan so far.

View Directions to lambertville, nj in a larger map

I’m making a point of staying off interstates from time to time, so I can see a little more scenery and talk to some people. A few projected stops:

• The historic Santiam Pass, carrying Route 20 over the Cascade Range in Central Oregon.
• The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.
• My family in Aspen, Colorado.
• Dodge City, Kansas (which I will then get the hell out of).
• A Kansas City barbecue joint to be determined.
• Mountaintop removal mining outside Charleston, WV.
• A cruise along the Ridge-and-Valley Appalachians, which stretch from Birmingham, Alabama to northern New Jersey.

I leave on August 31. I’ll be blogging the whole trip right here… and please leave your suggestions for other things to see in the comments.

I just posted this over on Blogtown in response to a post about IKEA (a negative one, if you can believe it)… but it’s too informative not to share here as well.

Prawn cheese spread—or räkost—is one of my favorite Swedish food novelties. Walk into any Swedish supermarket, in fact, and you’ll find an entire aisle full of things in tubes. Bacon cheese, pesto cheese, cheese cheese. Then there’s the caviar in tubes, made to be squirted out in zigzags atop your open-face breakfast sandwich. And garlic-flavored mayonnaise tubes with little star openings that make your mayo squirts into lithesome florets. The tube-foods of Sweden are delightful, and they’re begging for a squeeze. Varsågod!

There are a lot of things I miss about shopping in Sweden. Last summer at around this time, I went to Sweden to see my family there; they all thought I was crazy for getting so excited about going to the supermarket. Among the things you’ll find there are:

Salty black licorice…

Vitamin C fizzy drops (these used to come in a metal tube)…

and the most, er, effektivt bug repellent you can buy (19 percent DEET, actually, you get this at the equally amazing state-run pharmacy).

Yes, they really like things in tubes. It is a phallic country. In case you don’t believe me:

Originally posted on July 26, then removed so as not to alienate potential sources during my final weeks of employ at the Mercury. Reposted August 12.

Flickr photo by dougtone

I decided today to finalize my plans somewhat: I’m moving out of my apartment on August 31. It’s too big for me, really, and I’m tired of living on West Burnside. But there’s a bigger reason: I’m feeling a pull to move on, one that I haven’t felt since the tumultuous but exhilarating six weeks after the end of college.

Will I be moving across the river, or across the country? I have no idea. It depends on what I hear about on the job front, and a few other personal factors. But there’s nothing in particular keeping me in Portland, save a couple close friends and some extraordinary views. For more than two years Portland has been a nice warm incubator, providing diversions and serenity in equal doses while I figured out who I wanted to be. But now the draw to meet people, work hard and be relevant is starting to outweigh the pleasures of Portland.

There’s a lot of moaning about how there “aren’t any jobs,” and how journalists in particular better pack up their shit and get a new career and learn how to function like normal, despondent, post-recession adults. I call hooey on that, perhaps because I’m young and idiotic but mostly because I have a hunch that by completely ignoring any trace of defeatism I can shoulder my way into the industry. It’s not the sixties anymore, when my father was flying around gratis on Pan Am, walking onto James Bond sets and holding Papa Doc accountable. My replicating that is about as likely as me getting a cadre of rosy-cheeked Portland hipster friends, going to house shows and eating a lot of brunch. Not gonna fly.

But there’s always a chance to pick up my body and make it move in new circles, break out of a post-grad routine and relentlessly introduce myself, go kick up some dust in some part of the country.

Where do I see myself in ten years? Potential employers ask. Well, I’d like to be writing more long-form nonfiction, traveling around with a good deal of community rootedness under my belt. Very well. Where do I see myself in six months?

I have no idea. But I also had no idea when I was sitting on a plane over the Atlantic, reading East of Eden a week before graduation, peering into Limbo. And that got me here, and worked out pretty well.

I was at Cinema 21 on Friday evening to participate in a Q & A session with Eric Byler, the co-director of 9500 LIBERTY. The film chronicles the birth and death of a law in Prince William County, Va., that required police to arrest people if they had “probable cause” to believe the person was an illegal immigrant. The bill was written by some of the same national groups that had a hand in Arizona’s SB 1070.

Eric’s friend Jonah, a film professor at PSU, saw my article on the Secure Communities program and asked me to participate. I spoke a little about how the process works: although Portland police aren’t allowed to involve themselves with anybody’s immigration status, after booking the process goes directly into the county’s (and ICE‘s) hands.

I mentioned a friend of mine who got pulled over for drunk driving in Beaverton, spent a month in the Washington County Jail, and was sent up to the ICE detention center in Tacoma. I got word yesterday that he was flown down to Tijuana in the middle of the night, and as I write this he’s on a bus back to his native Yucatan.

Byler and his co-director/girlfriend Annabel Park don’t pretend to be objective. The film clearly takes a side, yet it’s not propaganda. This is something I’d like to see more of: factual, omnipresent reportage that has a spine and an opinion. One of the right-wing bigots in the film says that protesting is for “the fringe left and third world countries.” Part of me sort of agrees. I’ve had a lot of fun covering, and participating in, big rallies around Portland with signs and solidarity and “Sí se puede.” That’s an important way of getting people involved and excited, especially when you’re looking to get idealistic young white people allied with immigrant families. But there’s not much discussion at those things, and little indication of how to usefully direct the swell of outrage or excitement.

I almost regret calling the film “slow and wonky at times” in my 100-word capsule review. When it comes to what’s driving policy, I’ll take slow and wonky over outraged and passionate any day of the week.