camp: Baker National Forest, Baker County, Oregon
context:
After a week of learning about ranching, wolf reintroduction, and the tensions
between ecologists and ranchers in the area, we invited a bunch of ranchers to
dine with us on our last night in Wallowa County, Oregon. Todd Nash is one of
the ranchers who came to the dinner.
So
yesterday we had our 41 person dinner with the ranchers and the
environmentalists and biologists and whoever. I wasn’t a huge fan of the
serious group discussion, but I had a really great conversation with rancher Todd
Nash and Elli about USDA approved slaughterhouses and food production in
general. I asked Todd what he thought about grass-fed meat, and he said that’s
all he used to eat as a kid, and organic produce because his family grew it all
themselves, and it was really weird for him to see people start wanting those
things as consumers because it was just how he grew up. I wish I knew how to
make a living off the land like that. I wish more people in general did. I feel
like we lost all this knowledge about how to take care of ourselves sometime in
the last fifty years and now there’s a growing movement to re-learn it. I wish
I were more like Dana—baking bread and buying fruit by the tree and canning
stuff. I suppose I can always learn, but I wish I’d learned as a kid from Nonny
or Grandma or something. I wish parents cared as much about their children
knowing how to garden as they did about their children doing well on the SAT. I
feel like providing for yourself like that builds good things—self-reliance, a
work ethic, a sense of community…I’m sure I’m romanticizing it a bit, but I see
something different in the way those ranchers talk. It’s not a hobby or even
just a job for them; it’s a way of life.
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