Frontiers part 2

I am sitting down to write before 11pm. Woo-hoo! C. is in Portland for a-night-and-a-day, and both kids (having spent 2 hours in a kiddie pool in the sun) fell asleep early. So here I am.

To elaborate on the frontier.

Oregon is obviously a frontier in LeGuin's first sense: a great rush of people came here in (as she says) a stormfront, not long ago, and utterly remade it to suit themselves -- killing or displacing the people and most of the animals who had been here, knocking down trees, re-routing streams, damming rivers, building roads and houses and towers...

But then something interesting happened. The people changed. This place changed them; they changed as they adapted to it; and so while at first they were "the people who came here," they transmuted into "the people who live here."

Now they are on the other side of the frontier. They are Oregonians. They live and breathe and raise children here; this is their everyday reality; and though it is not what it was, still they love what it is.

But today – especially in Bend – another great rush of people is coming. These new people have different ideas about what constitutes a good town, and Bend, while a great place, is not precisely what they had in mind; so they want to alter it. Also, they’ve got emotional baggage. They’re scared of certain things and try to protect themselves against them – whether they ought to still be scared, here, or not. (Hence the gated communities. Medians. Etc.) And they behave in a way that seems to be a reaction to a hurried environment – brusque, curt – that just doesn’t exist here.

So the people who live here, the people who consider themselves Bendites, find that their town – as well as the forests and desert -- are being transformed under their feet. And if they want to speak with these newcomers, they have to use words and concepts that the newcomers understand. And risk being changed themselves – or (even worse?) risk learning to see this place as the new people see it, forgetting what they originally valued, until it’s gone.