The Oregon Experiment by Keith Scribner Page B

the hunger stats, and there’s just no excuse. The taxes that Nike alone sends to Washington could feed them all. Never mind our other resources—the water we’d control, the agriculture and fishing, not to mention green technology.”
    “Why don’t you work with one of the more established groups?” Scanlon asked. “Some of them have been going for decades, right?”
    “More than a century for the State of Liberty folks down south of here. I
did
work with them for a while. It was a distance, but I’d drive down for meetings and help out however I could.”
    “And they’ve had some real success,” Scanlon said. “Declared independence. Elected a governor.”
    “But that was 1941, and only a handful of counties on either side of the Oregon-California border. In Yreka, their capital, bears on leashes led a torchlight parade to the inauguration. Men with hunting rifles set up roadblocks on the highway, handing out copies of their declaration along with State of Liberty windshield stickers. The roads were dotted with State of Liberty signs. It was a national spectacle—the
whole world
took notice—with all the events captured on newsreels and scheduled to play in theaters around the globe on December eighth. But then December seventh came, and the only story was Pearl Harbor, so they abandoned their secession for the sake of national unity.”
    “But aren’t they still active?”
    He shook his head. “They’re living in the past. It’s all about the
mythic
State of Liberty now. The independent state of mind. There’s a State of Liberty National Scenic Byway. The Feds named it, for God’s sake, and put up the road signs. They’ve become a quaint bit of Old West history.”
    “But I’ve read they’re doing stuff. Like the Klamath water war?”
    Hank’s face darkened. “That didn’t get them any closer. To my mind it
lost
them ground.” He stared into his beer for a long moment before continuing. “There’s so much at stake with water. The Upper Klamath Lake irrigates thousands of acres of farming and ranching. After the dry winterof 2001, the Feds closed the headgate at the top of the irrigation canal so that all the water would flow into the Klamath River for endangered coho salmon and suckerfish. A bunch of farmers busted the headgate open with blowtorches, the Feds closed it up again, and this went back and forth until federal marshals arrived. You had environmentalists out there supporting the Feds, and farmers coming in to protest from all over the West. A couple nights they got the gates busted open again, and for a month or so I was sure somebody was going to pull a trigger. A few of the local boys were the sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons of the men who blocked the highway in 1941, so their sense of mission ran deep. And the Klamath Indians have water rights around Chiloquin, too, so they had their own stake in the standoff. Don’t get me wrong—I don’t think Indian rights trump everybody else’s or that environmentalists have a better case than farmers and ranchers. The point is that the wilderness trail you want to hike on with your children runs through trees that are gonna get cut if your neighbor’s gonna feed
his
kids. And it’s neighbors who’ve got to work these matters out. Not a suit in some air-conditioned high-rise in Washington, D.C.”
    “What about that?” Scanlon said, seeing his opening. “You’re a government employee. Isn’t there a conflict with you working for secession?”
    “So I’m a hypocrite?”
    Scanlon let the question hang.
    “We’re in a situation where it’s impossible to live a day without making implicit or explicit moral compromises. Period. Still, there may come a time when the PNSM gains some ground, and I’d have to drop out. I won’t be that cop at the water war.”
    Scanlon shook his head, unsure of what he was referring to.
    “As the summer heated up and the fields dried out, a lieutenant on the local police force—a rancher