Innholdsfortegnelse for March Vol. 56, No. 03 i High Country News

I RECENTLY WENT TO SEE a documentary about the coast redwoods at a local film festival. I mean, how could I not? They’re the tallest trees on the planet, reaching over 300 feet into the sky. There are whole ecosystems in their crowns; animals and other plants spend their entire lives in the treetops. Coast redwoods can live for more than two millennia. And they are highly adaptable, growing two kinds of needles — one that absorbs light, another that takes in water, allowing the trees to simultaneously take advantage of both moist and dry conditions. They communicate with each other through vast shallow interlacing root systems that extend over 100 feet from the base of each tree, which means that they literally hold each other up. I was glad…

If you would like to make a tax-deductible contribution, please scan the QR code to the right, visit hcn.org/give2hcn, call 800-905-1155 or mail a check to: P.O. Box 1090, Paonia, CO 81428. CHAMPION OF THE WEST ($50,000 AND ABOVE) Anonymous MEDIA LEADER ($10,000-$24,999) Anonymous John Crowley | Columbia Falls, MT Mark Headley & Christina Pehl | Jackson, WY PUBLISHER’S CIRCLE ($5,000-$9,999) Durfee Day | Telluride, CO Lynne & Joe Horning | Washington, DC PHILANTHROPIST ($2,500-$4,999) Pat Blue | Reno, NV Katherine Borgen | Denver, CO Emelie Olson & Glenn Yocum | Taos, NM The Merlin Foundation | Missoula, MT STEWARD ($1,000-$2,499) Anonymous In memory of Robert "Oz" Osborne | Jackson, WY Trace Baker | Boulder, CO Virginia Darvill | Mount Vernon, WA Nick DeWolf | Seattle, WA Mark & Meredith…

Alex Boersma is a Canadian scientific illustrator living in Chicago. Her work runs the gamut of science media, from figures for scientific journals to children’s book illustrations. Geri Doran is the author of Epistle, Osprey (Tupelo, 2019) and two previous collections of poetry, Resin and Sanderlings. She teaches in the Creative Writing Program at the University of Oregon. Miles W. Griffis is a writer and journalist based in Southern California. He writes “Confetti Westerns,” a serial column that explores the queer natural and cultural histories of the American Southwest.  Kenji C. Liu is a book designer, artist and author of Monsters I Have Been, finalist for the 2020 California and Maine Book Awards for poetry. He lives on unceded Tongva land, Los Angeles. Brooke Herbert is a filmmaker and visual…

WHEN THE SIMPLE blue-and-white postcard arrived in January 2023, Sarah Ferris missed it. The mailer, sent by the city of Vancouver, Washington, told 270,000 municipal water users that a group of chemicals called PFAS had been found in city water. Levels were low, the postcard said; the city would soon test again to comply with state law and share more information. When a more detailed flyer arrived in April, Ferris looked it over. A chart showed that water at three of the city’s nine wellfields had tested above the state limit for two common PFAS chemicals, PFOA and PFOS. Other sections called these levels “very low,” and said experts were “still learning about their health impacts.” Ferris tried to decipher it all. “I was scanning, not really having time to delve…

Why do I sufferspring rain wind lightninglike a scarecrowlistlessin this cold twilightI, an immigrant child —Morio Hayashida, from “Immigrant Child,” in Where to Go, Los Angeles (trans. Andrew Leong and Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), 1928 SEVENTEEN-YEAR-OLD Morio Hayashida stepped off the Japanese ship Shinyo Maru into San Pedro, California, in late 1921. Seven years later, while living in Los Angeles, he published a 220-page collection of Japanese-language poems, 向處に行く (Where to Go). Hayashida was part of a literary community of Issei (first-generation) immigrants — educated, aware of Japanese modernist literary trends, and firmly rooted in life in the United States. Few Americans realize that between the world wars, there was a flowering of Japanese-language literature in the U.S. The Issei brought their love of poetry to the Western U.S., establishing livingroom literary…

OREGON Holy Chicken Little, Batman, we didn’t see that coming! The door plug that blew off an Alaska Airlines jetliner in January made an unexpected landing in the yard of a Portland science teacher, KOIN 6 reported. It detached itself just minutes after the Boeing 737 took off from Portland and plummeted 16,000 feet, only to crash into a tree in Bob Sauer’s backyard. “In the flashlight beam, I could see something gleaming white in the trees in the back that isn’t normally there,” Sauer said. “And when I went to investigate it, it was very obviously a plane.” Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board were delighted to retrieve the 65-pound, 4-by-2-foot chunk of airplane. We pause here for a safety reminder that even plugged emergency exits are never…

High Country News is dedicated to independent journalism, informed debate and discourse in the public interest. We welcome letters through digital media and the post. Send us a letter, find us on social media, or email us at editor@hcn.org. GREEN COLONIALISM MARCHES ON I am a 70-year-old enrolled Yakama and Wenatchapam on my maternal grandmother’s side. I remember the “Fish Wars” on the Columbia River as a youth, and relatives hunting elk on ceded lands and getting arrested for exercising treaty rights. Washington state has been an enemy of treaty rights for as long as I can remember. Such an attitude reaches back to Congress and the Treaty of 1855 and earlier. It will remain so into the future. This fact is evidenced by your informative article (“Who’s Protecting Badger…

Estate planning — at any age — can help bring you peace of mind, knowing the loved ones and organizations you treasure will be cared for. There are many ways to make a difference and invest in independent journalism: • Put HCN in your will • Name HCN as a beneficiary of an investment • Give a QCD, or IRA rollover or distribution • Give a gift of appreciated stock If you haven’t created a will, please use our free tool at hcn.org/mywill Talk to a live human at 800-905-1155 Or peruse options described in our planned giving guide: hcn.org/pgguide…

I GREW UP IN a small Catholic town in northern New Mexico. If I created a documentary about teenage lesbian life there in the 1990s, no one would appear in it — not even me. A photo shows me towering over the two friends I went to my junior prom with; one of them happened to be one of the two openly gay boys at my school. In 2003, New Mexico named the whiptail lizard its state reptile. All whiptails are female, so they’ve been nicknamed the “lesbian lizard.” If threatened by a predator, a whiptail can detach her tail, leave it writhing on the ground, and dart to safety. But human lesbians have no such superpower. Once you’re identified in a small town, there’s nowhere you can go. I knew…