Cracked Window

From Pendleton Round-Up at 100: Oregon’s Legendary Rodeo

It was a battle of the sexes that never came to pass. Not that Mabel Strickland and other cowgirls didn’t try in 1924. Emboldened by their skills and growing popularity among rodeo fans from Pendleton to New York to London, they wanted to compete directly with the cowboys.

Who could blame them? The prize money was richer and the trophies larger. Riding bucking broncos and wrestling steers to the ground, the women faced the same dangers as men. The prowess and daring of Strickland, Fox Hastings, Lorena Trickey, Prairie Rose Henderson, and others were evident. A month before the Round-Up that year, Strickland had the second best time in steer roping among cowboys and cowgirls at the Frontier Days in Cheyenne, Wyoming. Two years earlier at the Round-Up, she had roped and tied down a steer in eighteen seconds, close to the men’s world record.

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From Pendleton Round-Up at 100: Oregon’s Legendary Rodeo

In an era of stark racial divides, it’s remarkable that the Pendleton Round-Up’s most famous contest happened at all. The year was 1911. Segregation was rampant, and memories of Indian wars and slavery lingered. Viewed through the lens of today’s world, the storyline smacks of something Hollywood might contrive for maximum ratings: three cowboys—one white, one black, and one Nez Perce survivor of U.S. Army bullets—competing to become champion bronc-buster. But the Round-Up had been an open affair from its start a year earlier, and the usually strong grip of prejudice loosened long enough for the historic competition to take place. Unanswered even now, however, is whether racial bias rather than skill dictated the controversial outcome.

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For The Oregonian, Jan. 22, 2009

This is a story about love, shopping locally and the power of the Internet.

And burritos, too.

It began in early December when a man learned that his mother’s Northeast neighborhood business, Broadway Books, faced financial problems more ominous than the struggles small independent booksellers typically see.

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For The Oregonian, Feb. 28, 2008

A young man’s face gazes upon the world from a gnarled tree.

His portrait is attached to the trunk along a well-traveled street of tidy houses. Painted mostly in blues and black against sunset reds, the image burns through winter’s gloom, luring a motorist to stop.

Black, unreadable eyes stare straight ahead. The mouth hints at a suppressed smile. The long, flawless face is unguarded and open. There’s no signature, adding to the intrigue.

Does the artist live in the nearest house? A knock summons a bearded man wearing a short-brimmed cap.

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For The Oregonian, May 8, 2008

Martin Barrett and Dan Bravin stand next to tidy rows they’ve planted with spinach, lettuce, carrot and other seeds — and at the edge of a new take on urban farming.

Their idea: to farm in city backyards of people who donate the land in return for a share of the harvests, and to sell the rest to nearby consumers and at farmers markets.

The plan took root in Barrett’s backyard and blossomed into City Garden Farmers. The motto: “Live Urban, Eat Local.”

“We’re not reinventing the wheel,” says Barrett in his Scottish brogue, recalling a childhood of meals from his family’s garden in Edinburgh.

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This personal essay won the 2005 non-fiction award in the graduate writing program at Portland State University.

A photograph haunts me. It stares down from atop my bookcase. I feel it on the back of my neck. I take it down and look at the image, again. In black, white, and every shade of gray, I see the end of the world.

Tumbling toward the camera are billowing plumes of water, a river losing to gravity. Watching are three Indians in broad-brim hats, ghostly shadows against a white wall of water. Two are standing, cloaked shoulder to ground in blankets. The third is sitting, chin resting on hand. In the distance, a jagged ridge and sloping plateau blot out the sky.

I grew up next to silent water, a placid lake ringed with orange groves and oaks—a place unlike anything in the photograph. With both hands I hold it close to my face, a voyeur seeking more. I try to imagine the roar the Indians must have heard, the mist they must have felt. But I get only memories of my lake in Florida: water warm as a bath, redwing blackbirds flicking in and out of cattails, calling to each other all at once, my two brothers holding their breath somewhere beneath me. In the photograph’s vast panorama of the West, I am a stranger. The Indians are home.

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