There Were Plants and Birds and Rocks and Things…

It’s hard to believe five months have already come and gone. Writing this, I am currently looking down the last week I have of this internship, before I pack up and road-trip back to the Midwest. Last May, I departed from the bustling Chicago-land area to begin work out here in Burns, Oregon, a town that prides itself on having more cattle than people. My concept of Oregon had predominantly been formed by alleged Big-Foot sightings and shows like Portlandia and Twin Peaks. I had been completely unware of the Eastern desert half of the state, a cowboy’s paradise.

The land here is vast and open. The horizons stretch on forever, occasionally broken by juniper and sage-brush covered mountains far off in the distance. Sunsets and sunrises are humbling to witness, creating scarlet bands on the edge of the sky that encompasses your entire field of vision. The land may be dry and at first glace empty, but upon closer examination, it is teeming with life. Elk, mule deer, and antelopes dash alongside the roads. Wild horses gallop in packs up and down steep slopes with tremendous ease. On the ground, lizards and snakes dart from rock to rock, while hawks, osprey, and turkey vultures whiz by, or circle overhead. Streams and rivers lay hidden, tucked in mountain valleys, and hot springs gurgle and emerge from the ground on the edges of the desert. This is a quite place, and a beautiful place.

Being able to work out in this land has been a privilege I won’t soon forget. I have learned much, both on a professional and personal level. This job is through the Bureau of Land Management, and has been an eye-opening experience on how the government functions, as well as how there can be so many wildly varying (and often justifiable) opinions towards the government. The BLM is focused on land management, and as a result must take into account resource extraction, livestock utilization, recreation use, archeological value, and environmental sustainability, all at once, for the same plot of land. Each of these interests are overseen by different departments in the BLM office, and each of these interests have different third-party activist groups either strongly in-favor, or strongly opposed to the actions of the BLM. From my limited perspective, it seems hard to appease both environmental groups and cattle ranchers, when a land plot must be used for both cattle grazing, recreation, and be simultaneously preserved in a sustainable manner. While the BLM does its best to placate all of these array of interests, it is not always infallible. The BLM, like any organization, is composed of people who come with their own biases, and are capable of making mistakes. This is not to say the BLM is ineffective; in fact, I believe the BLM is a million times better than the alternative of having no regulatory force over these large swaths of land. In my short time here, I have discovered the BLM does amazing work and I do genuinely think it is slowly improving the land here, as well as the relationships with the large web of people it must work with.

On a personal level, working here has been pretty eye opening post 2016-election. I hail from the Northwest suburbs of Chicago, an area with a heavy liberal demographic tilt, and as a result, I was a bit hesitant coming out to this rural and conservative area after such a divisive and polarizing election. In my time here, during offhand conversations, I was bluntly asked strong political-value based questions (e.g. gun control, affirmative action, immigration policy, etc.) and was pleasantly surprised at how easy it was to have dialogue with people of starkly opposing opinions. Now this wasn’t always the case, and sometimes conversations had to be dropped as soon as they were started, but for the most part, I found myself having constructive back and forth talks about issues that I had formerly believed to have no middle-ground. And while opinions weren’t always changed, I think for the most part, both parties walked away more sympathetic to where the other side was coming from, even if we agreed to disagree. On a deep level, this has provided me a lot of hope for the future of this country.

In a week I will begin a road-trip home. I will leave here with many good memories much to reflect on. I am grateful for the opportunity I had to work out here, the other interns I worked with, the people I met, and the beautiful nature I saw. I will be leaving, but I think I shall be coming back in the near future…after all, supposedly Big-Foot is still out here, waiting to be discovered.

-Carter Cranberg (Burns/Hines District BLM)