This piece first ran in the Eugene Weekly on July 6, 2006. It resulted from academic research I was doing at the time on Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) and the use of fire as a landscape management tool. It was also my first paid piece; I still have the check stub somewhere in my records.
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The Oregon Country Fair springs to life every summer on park-like 350-acre
property next to the Long Tom
River, 15 miles from Eugene.
The land, a mixture of grassy fields with islands of shrubs and oak trees, is
flooded for part of the winter by the river and its tributary creeks. Dense
thickets of scraggly, 70-year-old Douglas fir dominate the uplands above the
floodplain. For years, fire suppression has allowed dry wood and other fuels to
build up, creating a potentially dangerous situation.
The site is usually still green in early June. But in drought years it dries
out by fair time, usually the first weekend in July. According to fair fire
crew co-coordinator Bill Pack, fire danger has been extreme for the last five
years and was especially high during 2002 and 2003. "I think it's just a
matter of time before we have a situation," says Pack, a 30-year U.S.
Forest Service veteran. "We've been pretty fortunate."
The fair, in its publicity material, expresses a respect for Native American
culture. Pack and others would like to see its community, known as the Fair
Family, learn to use fire to help manage the landscape, much as former
inhabitants, the Kalapuya Indians, did.
