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EPILOGUE THIS SPECIAL PLACE I was shaped by the West and have lived most of a long life in it, and nothing would gratify me more than to see it, in all its subregions and subcultures, both prosperous and environmentally healthy, with a civilization to match its scenery.—wallace stegner When a person holds property with the expectation of selling it for a profit, it is a speculative real estate investment. . . . Don’t try to tell me it is a property right—frank demonte1 O regon writer Ken Kesey oªered up a modern-day, real-life story in a brief personal memoir of his boyhood trek from eastern Colorado to Oregon during the war-hot summer of 1943. Kesey’s father, who had enlisted in the Navy, was taking the family to Grandma andGrandpa’snewfarminCoburg,Oregon,wheretheyhadrecentlymoved “seeking richer dirt and brighter horizons.” Crowded into the back seat with his brother, Kesey thought the drive stretched on interminably, the scenery just as “deserty” as the home the family had left behind. The westwardbound travelers passed “failed farms and ribby cattle” and side roads leading oª to nowhere. On a sweltering August afternoon, the Keseys drove into Oregon across an arid and baked landscape. “Even the place names along our bleak route sounded bleak,” Kesey wrote. “Burns. Hines. Wagontire . And the pass we were passing through? It was called Stinkingwater.” The family crossed the Cascades after sundown and reached Coburg after 314 midnight. After hellos and hugs, the Kesey boys were bedded down on the grandparents’ porch. The writer concludes his personal Oregon Trail narrative with the following: At dawn I was awakened by the swelling of birdsong and bladder. In a grumpy blur I made my barefoot way down oª the porch. I shu›ed to a blue-black loom of bushes at the edge of a lawn. And, standing there, blinking and shivering and draining myself of warm sleep, I suddenly became aware of a wondrous thing. Those looming bushes were covered with berries, festoons of glistening, dew-beaded berries!—sweeter than soda pop and more numerous than the stars fading in the sky! As I stood filling my mouth with this wild bounty, I watched the light come up on the land that had produced it. Through rising mists I saw Grandma’s vegetable garden, heavy with tomatoes and string beans . . . and Grandpa’s sweet-corn patch with its long ears lifted, haphazard orchards drooping with plum and pear and fat Guernseys standing to their bags in clover, and further away, forest after emerald forest of timber, hemlocks and firs and pines, their points lifted like hope itself to the new day. “Maybe Grandma and them pioneers was right about this land after all,” I found myself conceding through the blackberry juice. A concession I have never recanted, though nearly half a century has passed.2 Ken Kesey’s story is a familiar one. With the exception of the Native people among us, Americans have lived at the edge of movement and change for more than three centuries. As the dominant culture pushed its way relentlessly from East to West, emigrant groups developed and elaborated a set of romantic myths that ended in a blissful land of milk and honey. At the end of the western trails were places where golden dreams came true, providential settings that glistened with hope for those seeking renewal, a wonderland filled with a raw and productive beauty that would defy the ages. Those great utopian myths have been part of the Oregon story for more than 150 years. Better than anyone else, the writer Wallace Stegner grasped the essence of that mythical world that pulled the nation westward, “where every day is payday, a Big Rock Candy Mountain where the handouts grow on bushes and the little streams of alcohol come trickling down.”3 Epilogue: This Special Place 315 Formostof itshistory,writestheOregonian’sBrianMeehan,Oregonrepresented an idea: “an Eden where people prospected not for gold but for a better life.” Beginning with the Oregon Trail in the 1840s, the Oregon idea kept reinventing itself through successive generations. The Great DepressionandNewDealprogramsattracted “bustedfarmersandlaborers”tojobs on federal projects such as Bonneville Dam; the Second World War drew African Americans to Portland’s shipyards; Oregon became a beacon during the 1960s and 1970s for young people seeking a bucolic existence living oª the land; and finally during the 1990s cashed-out Californians headed north in search of a quieter, more bucolic life. Meehan contends that...

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