Oregon is a dry state with a wet reputation. For all the extravagant precipitation of the coast and valleys, our region is home to regular drought. We live among massive rivers and volcanic lakes as well as immense deserts and a sprawling endorheic basin—that is, a drainage with no outflow—around Harney and Malheur Lakes. This place is damp, and this place is thirsty.
This issue is about waterways, mostly. I’ve wanted to devote an issue to this theme since 2020, when I spent several months working on a proposal for a series of videos about waterways and Oregon history. I spent many hours talking with scholars and water policy experts and culture bearers and tribal leaders. We didn’t get the grant, and the project fizzled, but it left me with a better understanding of my own ignorance and a desire to get some of the ideas I encountered into this magazine. So here we are.
The stories in this issue aren’t a comprehensive introduction to Oregon waterways or the traditions and laws and relationships and conflicts that surround them. That would be impossible in forty-eight pages. But they do begin to give a sense of the complexity inherent in talking about water, and how any time you talk about water you also have to talk about power and human migration and history and place and climate and the intertwined needs of all living things.
Ben Waterhouse is Communications Director at Oregon Humanities. He supervises the organization's communications and publications efforts, including Oregon Humanities magazine, the Beyond the Margins essay series, The Detour podcast and radio show, and marketing strategy. He created the Dear Stranger letter-exchange project.
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