This entry is specifically for any Oregon readers I might have (and bless you for being here, too--I love to think that there is someone from home reading this), but also for anybody with a parental notification measure on their ballot, or a possibility of one in the future.

Folks, you have to vote no on these. As much as it may make sense to you that an underage girl should discuss having an abortion with her parents before she does it, you and I both know that legislating that is a bad idea, not in the least because so many girls would have their right to choose negated by having to get parental permission, and also because of the possibility of harm or violence to a girl who has to tell her parents. Not everyone has good parents, understanding parents, reasonable parents, and parental notification legislation assumes they do.

In the specific case of Oregon's ballot Measure 43, things are even a little bit worse. What Measure 43 requires is for doctors to send a form letter via certified mail to the parents of any minor seeking abortion services. There are no exceptions for rape, incest, or abusive homes. This means that in some terrible cases, notification of a girl seeking an abortion could be sent to the very man who made her pregnant against her will. I can't imagine anything more destructive to choice than that, not to mention how dangerous it might be for the girl herself.

Parental consent is both one brick in the wall against choice for everyone and a separate and infuriating slap in the face of body autonomy for teenaged girls. It is incumbent upon all of us who are safe in our abilities to make our own decisions about our bodies to protect the rights of those whose autonomy is threatened, particularly in cases like this, where the young women who would be effected aren't even allowed to cast their votes on the legislation that could so drastically impact their lives.

Please vote NO on Measure 43, and spread the word.

For more on Measure 43, see:
NARAL Oregon
No on 43
Oregon Education Association
League of Women Voters of Oregon
ACLU of Oregon

I can generally count on listening to NPR on my way to or from work without hearing any news, good or bad, from southern Oregon. The neck of the woods from which I hail just doesn't draw national media attention all that often. However, much of my commute this morning was taken up by this story. It didn't make for a good start to my day.

For those who don't want to listen to or read the story, here are the broad strokes: for many years, the federal government made a shit-ton of money off logging federal timberlands. This happened all over the country, but it happened a disproportionate amount in Oregon. Because the land was federal, the profits weren't taxable under state income tax (which is one of Oregon’s main revenue sources, as there is no sales tax there). This was, understandably, a fiscal disaster, so in order to moderate it, the government gave grants to counties in which it logged.

This worked for quite a while, until logging on federal forestland was pretty much shut down in the 1990s. Since they weren't making any dough from logging in those counties anymore, the feds no longer wanted to give them annual grants. So, in 2000, Congress passed a safety net measure, stating that they would continue to pay the counties for six years, in amounts based on past timber harvests. This amounted to a $400 million subsidy every, of which Oregon received the biggest chunk, about $150 million.

And now time is up. The last of the checks were sent out in December. And all hell is breaking loose.

For example, the NPR piece noted, Jackson County, the southern Oregon county that includes the city of Medford, is closing all 15 of its public libraries. Not cutting back hours, or restricting the purchase of new materials--closing them completely. Next door in Josephine County (which is admittedly less populous), police services are going to be reduced to the point of one squad car patrolling an area roughly the size of Rhode Island. And in my home county, Douglas County, lay-offs in public education and the road department are planned to start any time.

Oregon is not a rich state. It's become a less and less rich state since timber busted and flat-lined. This is, in some of southern Oregon, what has to feel like a crimp in the ventilator line. Perhaps a fatal one.

The question of whether or not it is the state's own fault is complicated. On one hand, they should have known for the last six years that these funds were going to end this year. On the other hand, even if they did know, given the dismal resources county commissioners were faced with (low income tax returns due to high joblessness and a pathetic economy being the biggest), how much could they really do? And does the amount the federal government has already remitted really come anywhere close to paying the state and counties back for the tremendous federal benefit received from logging all of those public lands? And then, of course, the biggest question--should logging on federal land really have been near-completely shut down at all?

Several Oregon politicians were interviewed for the piece, including Congressman Peter DeFazio, who is currently working to pass an emergency one-year extension of the subsidies. The most interesting, though, was Douglas County Commissioner Doug Robertson. The piece stated that Robertson "assumed that Republicans would take care of these rural, "red" counties in the waning hours of the last session." But they didn't. Then he assumed they would pick it up in the lame-duck session. They didn't. Then he thought they'd have a plan when they returned in January. They don't. His quote was clearly one of a rural man discouraged with the party that is supposed to look out for rural folks.

Maybe I'm just in an optimistic mood, but to me, that sounds like silver lining. If this disaster helps people in rural Oregon (and maybe the other places where this is happening as well) realize that no, the Republicans really aren't their champions in Congress, then maybe it's worthwhile. For far too long, poor people, especially rural poor people, have been snowed into thinking conservative politics are in their best economic interests, when time and time again it has been shown that they aren't, that conservative politicians want to gut programs the poor need to survive, roll back laws that protect them, then give all the tax breaks to the rich. It is only stuff like this that drives home the impact that these corporate-loving Republican assholes are really having. May this be one of the final nails in their coffin.

Came across this article this morning, about some lost hikers who made it off Mount Hood alive. In part, their luck was due to the lab mix hiking with them, Velvet. Quoth the article:

"The dog probably saved their lives" by lying across them during the cold night, said Erik Brom, a member of the Portland Mountain Rescue team. As the group started out on Saturday, the weather was clear and Velvet was leading the way, Liston said. "She looked back every once in awhile to make sure we were OK."

Gotta love that.

Alicia at Posie Gets Cozy pays photographic and written tribute to one of my favorite places on Earth, the Portland Farmer's Market. Go there and read it, then feel, as I do, jealous that she lives there and you don't.

So first, yes, I am at BlogHer 09. And I promise I will tell you all about that, just not tonight. Tonight I am exhausted, and overwhelmed, and thinking about something else altogether.

I had this conversation, with a group of women I had never met before (aside from Skye), about the desire to go home. One woman, whose name has already totally escaped me, said that as soon as she had a child, her desire to go home intensified dramatically.

Of course it did. I've thought of that before, of wanting not just to go home, and not just to have a baby, but to go home and have a baby. But, for whatever reason, that thought hadn't carried out to its logical conclusion:

If Mark and I decide to have a child, we will quite likely begin trying to conceive said child within the next five years. I'm about to turn 30--more than five years out, it starts to get a bit more difficult to do, or at least that's what I'm told. And if we try to conceive within the next five years and are successful, we're going to be having a baby in Virginia. An entire continent away from home.

To say that I am horrified by that thought would be a radical understatement. Austin was far enough from home. But the East Coast? How is that even a possibility? How could I possibly even consider having a child over 3,000 miles away from my mom? 3,000 miles away from trees? 3,000 miles away from proper mountains and proper rain and proper coffee?

This is another one of those things that just didn't used to happen to people. We never used to be so mobile. And sure, there are telephones and Skype and air travel, but the bottom line is that when you are geographically far away from someone (or somewhere), they aren't part of your life in any real way. Especially given hyper-stressful day-to-day situations, like, oh, say, a baby's first years.

For the first time in months, I am seriously rethinking whether or not I want to have a child in the near future. I've been getting more and more gung-ho about the idea of starting to think seriously about it, and maybe even starting to do something about it in a year or so. Now I'm not so sure. I know we won't be going home for five years or so, and even then, there is no guarantee. The reality may well be that I never live in Oregon again. I can't much bear that thought, but there it is. And I find it just as upsetting as the idea that I may never have a child. Both of them are things I've started to want so much that I almost assume that they are in the future, just around the bend, even. But it's quite likely that they aren't. And what happens then?

This is the last cowboy song.
The end of a hundred year waltz.
The voices sound sad as they're singin' along.
Another piece of America's lost.
-"The Last Cowboy Song", The Highwaymen

Someone asked me recently what I mean when I say I'm a Western girl. Like a lot of people, I think she was picturing what I was missing as a liberal oasis full of organic food and good pot and possibly naked hot springs. And yeah, that stuff all exists in my West, but it's so much more than that. Much of it is counter-intuitive to that vision.

One of the reasons Texas has been able to feel like home to me is that, however it differs from home in the Umpqua Valley, there is some of that same Westerness. Austin is a city, but around the edges there is that little bit of cowboy. And I think I'm going to miss that on the East Coast.

Boots and jeans make a lot more sense to me than black tie. I grew up on classic country music and I love it relentlessly. I've bottle-fed a calf; I know the difference between bear shit and bobcat; I've seen a bald eagle in its natural habitat. There is this whole world that was almost lost by the time I was born and is even more lost now. I am privileged enough to have caught that last little bit of it, and to have it in my blood. And my God do I miss it.

I never thought I would. When I lived in that world, I couldn't wait to get out. In part, I didn't know the rest of the world was different. I expected everybody to know who Gus McCray was. And, in part, I thought I was too good for it--too smart, too cultured, too experimental and wild and outlandish. Even as a pretty young kid, I consciously steered myself away from anything to "country." I wanted to do more.

Now I've done more. I've lived in cities for a dozen years. I've been to New York and to Europe. I've worn formal clothes, gotten a graduate degree, and read a whole lot of really important books. I taught myself not to say "pop" or "crick" or "rig." I learned to like effeminate men and to use multiple forks to eat the same damn meal.

And some of it, I was right about. It's a big, diverse, strange world, and I love that. I love knowing people who didn't all come from the same place. I really do like Indian and Thai food more than venison and boiled potatoes. But mostly, I was completely wrong. I haven't seen everything, but nothing I have seen is nearly so impressive and summer on the river where I grew up. I've read a lot of books, and I keep coming back to Larry McMurtrey and E. Annie Prolix and Pam Houston. I've been to probably hundred concerts, and nothing has ever beat the time Willie Nelson played for three and a half hours at the county fair.

It should have been obvious all along, I guess, but I just figured it out. I'm not just homesick because I'm far away geographically and getting farther. I'm homesick because the way I grew up is fast becoming extinct. Even if I were a different person, one that could live full-time in a small town or on a rural ranch, it's unlikely my kids could grow up the way I did. I couldn't be the parent my parents were not just because of my different personality, but because the world has irreparably changed around us all. The West in which I grew up is, mostly, dead. What is left is so hard to find and so hard to maintain that I hold out very little hope it's going to stick around.

Country music illustrates exactly what I am talking about. The great country was mostly already recorded before I was born, but even when I was a kid there was some real country music being produced. ("The Devil Went Down to Georgia" was the number one song the year I was born.) People were still, at least occasionally, making music about drinking and fighting and trains and Mama. Today's country music is just like today's pop music--it's about marketing and money. (Personally, I blame Garth Brooks.) It can't go back. The greats are mostly dead, and the ones who aren't are retired to Hawaii or making reggae albums.

The whole thing is enough to make me cry into my beer. But I won't. Instead, I have to focus on how incredibly lucky I am to have caught even the end of the West. I didn't grow up in Remington painting, but I at least I recognize what is going on in one. It is important to me--more so every year, and with every mile further away I get--to preserve that little bit of the West that I inherited. How one does that, in the world in which I live, I'm not exactly sure. I think it's safe to say, though, that's it isn't about fashion or music choices, or even where you live. It's about respect for the land and for the past. It's about loyalty to your loved ones. It's about valuing hard work and not being afraid to get your hands dirty. And I can hold on to those values. After all, I am a Western girl.