Title: Edge of Awe: Experiences of the Malheur-Steens Country
Author: Edited by Alan L. Contreras; Foreword by William Kittredge; Illustrations by Ursula K. La Guin
Publisher: Oregon State University Press, Corvallis; 2019
Local Availability: Black Sun Books, 2467 Hilyard Street (541-484-3777); J. Michaels Books, 160 E. Broadway (541-342-2002)

By Daniel Buckwalter

It’s been years since I have been to the Malheur Wildlife Refuge and the Steens Mountain area of Harney County in southeastern Oregon.

I smile. I’m more of an urban man.

Yet I know people for whom annual (or semi-annual) trips to this area of Oregon is almost religious in nature. I also don’t blame the hardy settlers for planting their flag and calling this rugged, magnificent land home.

In fact, I used to work with a man who made the annual pilgrimages to Malheur and Steens Mountain. I told him once of a National Geographic piece that labeled it one of the seven best-kept secrets in the United States. He gritted his teeth. “I want to keep it that way,” he said.

This land and its over-the-top beauty is the subject of 29 essays and/or poems by 25 writers in Edge of Awe: Experiences of the Malheur-Steens Country, edited by Alan L. Contreras. The volume, along with illustrations by the late Ursula K. La Guin, is a series of love letters that cover the area’s history and all its creatures and plants, great and small.

It’s those creatures and plants, great and small, that I failed to fully appreciate as a young man. I was, instead, swept by the overwhelming vastness of the region. The wildlife refuge alone is 187,000 acres. And Steens Mountain? Wow, it’s big.

Yet it’s in the small things that the region comes alive, especially for the essayists and poets. There are the birds (too many for me to count), the wildlife, the streams and lakes, the experiences of the Native American Paiute tribe, the history of conservationists and ranchers, and the seasonal wild flowers, all of which give the land its pristine beauty and character.

The writers and poets, and all the residents and visitors, are rightfully protective of this land. It has seen its share political conflict and, though curiously not mentioned in the volume of essays, one climate anomaly.

That climate anomaly found a space in The New York Times in September of 1984. “Three lakes,” the story began, “bloated by heavy rainfall over the past three years are steadily encroaching on the desert sagebrush lands of southeastern Oregon, inundating at 95,000 acres and causing an estimated $32 million damage this year alone.

“Malheur, Harney and Mud Lakes normally cover a total of 49,000 to 75,000 acres,” it went on. “But three years of abnormally heavy rainfall and runoff into the natural basin of the lakes have merged them into a single shallow lake covering 170,000 acres, about half of which is normally ranchland.”

Twenty-seven families were flooded out, the railroad was washed out, flooding covered two state highways and three county roads, and there was a steep drop in agricultural income, but the people of the Malheur-Steens country bounced back. Their spirit, and love of the land, demanded it.

However, that was harder after the 41-day takeover of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge in early 2016 by armed right-wing militants. The social fabric was torn by suppressed political divisions. Sides were taken. There was gunfire, arrests, and the death of one of the militants.

The takeover gets a glancing reference Edge of Awe, and I don’t blame anyone for skirting it — it has taken a lot for the healing process to take hold.

Yet taken hold it has, in no small part thanks to the efforts of Christopher Thomas, a composer and musician in Bend whose work has been performed in opera houses and films. Thomas wrote the five-movement Malheur Symphony, which made its debut in May of this year in the gymnasium at Burns High School, deep in Harney County.

The Central Oregon Symphony performed it before a packed house of 700 people. It was well received and deeply appreciated.

As is Edge of Awe. I will go back to the Malheur-Steens country. I will appreciate it better.

(For a just-under-eight-minute sampling of Christopher Thomas’ Malheur Symphony, go online to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxO8OfeMyUg)