Speaking of names, the Oregon Outback, the sage steppe, the empty quarter, the cold desert, the back of beyond, cowboy country, the nothing-but-nothing, the sagebrush ocean, the Great Basin, the great sandy desert, the rolling sage plain, the Artemisia desert all refer to the same thing: the high desert. Since the nineteenth century, us settlers have tried to name this place and thereby, as is the fancy of settlers, to lay claim to it. But the enduring fascination of the high desert, and the reason its survival as a wild place is within reach, may well lie in the fact that this vast open can’t quite be named. It stays always one step ahead of the namers, luring us who would try deeper and deeper into its embrace.

People start to channel their inner Carlos Castaneda after spending time in this high desert. They also get real. That a rancher hangs a coyote hide on a fence doesn’t mean the rancher is angry at the government, as environmental historian Nancy Langston speculated in a January 6, 2016, New York Times op-ed. It means the rancher is angry at the coyote. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. The coyote ate the rancher’s newborn livestock. “Makes a person mad,” states a rancher in typically understated fashion. The only indication of a stronger emotion: the force behind the spit of chewing tobacco he sends to the ground. As far as the rancher is concerned, the dead coyote draped over the barbed wire fence murdered, robbed, and ate a hole in his wallet.

This brief pronunciation and cultural sensitivity guide matters. Simply stated, we must remove our cultural and class filters to have the necessary conversation about this place and about all the people who love it in their unique and seemingly incompatible ways.

Those who have never been to Oregon imagine the whole state rainy and green, like Portland or Seattle, and believe that the Portlandia culture made popular by the sketch comedy television series characterizes all ninety-eight thousand square miles of this northwestern wonderland. In fact, three-quarters of the state is dry and separated from “the valley,” as the western portion is referred to, by the majestic High Cascades, all dormant volcanoes, at least for now. They block the rains from coming east, keep the high desert the high desert. Where I live, in Bend, at the foot of the Cascades on the eastern side, the average annual rainfall is twelve inches a year. As one old-timer said: “Remember that time it rained forty days and forty nights? We got an inch and a half in eastern Oregon.” It’s a part of the world where evaporation exceeds precipitation literally and metaphorically, giving back more than it receives. It’s a desert that doesn’t get the credit it deserves for its generosity.

In April of 2016 I drove the 130 miles east and south from Bend, located roughly in the middle of the state, to Burns to take part in the annual Harney County Migratory Bird Festival, a favorite event of mine. So good to get away from Bend’s increasingly Californialike culture. A former lumber mill town, Bend is now ultrachic, latte’d, churning with construction and growth, and teeming with self-aware forty-something bio- and high-tech CEOs. One of the fastest-growing communities in the United States, it boasts a populace remarkably unaware of the desert that surrounds them. Perhaps that’s good news for the high desert.

Lucky for me it’s only a matter of driving a short distance east until I am reunited with what has become my reassurance that all is right with the world: vast sagebrush flats, the echo of what used to be ocean bottom, flanked by escarpments and buttes, gnarled juniper forests, basalt canyons carved by ancient rivers. Other than power lines, and perhaps the distant silhouette of a barn or ranch house, nothing interrupts the view. Along Highway 20 between Bend and Burns, if you stop by the side of the road in the spring, the loudest sound is likely the buzzing of a fly. Artist Robert Dahl, who serves on the advisory council of Bend’s High Desert Museum, once placed a cheesy aluminum folding chair with nylon webbing in the middle of Highway 20 and sat down for the ultimate selfie and existential Christmas card: nothingness ahead, nothingness on either side, nothing to recommend going in any direction . . . or not.

Closer to Burns the palette changes from the muted browns, grays, and ochres of the sage to bright green, evidence of spring melt and a water table that sits just below the surface of the miles and miles of pancake-flat fields. Dramatically framing them to the south is the 9,733-foot, snowcapped Steens Mountain, its southernmost side a dramatic escarpment that plummets to the Alvord Desert before sliding into base in Nevada. Ranch houses in Burns that are built on these seasonally soggy paddy flats don’t have basements. Abandoned homesteads and barns shrug their way to the earth as their underpinnings rot. The spring runoff in this landlocked basin creates perfect habitat for birds . . . and the word has spread.

The area is part of the migratory path for a huge variety of largeand small-winged victories. Birders with binoculars cruise along the dikes that frame fields of hay, alfalfa, and Timothy grass, training their eyes on yellow-headed blackbirds, bitterns, meadowlarks, mergansers, egrets, and willets. Visitors learn to return the favor of an index finger lifted off the steering wheel by the rancher as they pass his oncoming pickup, his stock dog leaning into the wind, teetering on bales of hay stacked in the bed of the truck. It feels like acceptance into the fraternity of those who work the land for a living. It used to be most of us could recall a relative who farmed or ranched. Not so much anymore.

What started in 1981 in the town’s grange hall, the Harney County Migratory Bird Festival now locates activities all over Burns and at favorite viewpoints within the 187,000 acres of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, with bird talks and guided tours held within the refuge and on adjacent ranches. You’re likely to see flocks of snow geese lifting off the greening meadows like bedsheets flapping in the wind, clusters of avocets and phalaropes probing the marshes and irrigated fields for food, squadrons of haughty white pelicans, and sandhill cranes looking as regal and prehistoric as they are, their ungainly squawk matching their ungainly stride. What people come to observe and exalt is beautiful, glorious, fragile.

On the Saturday night of the festival a dinner is held at the Harney County Fairgrounds. In 2016 there looked to be two hundred people in attendance. More? In any case, a record-breaking turnout, according to organizers. Long banquet tables were decorated with rough-hewn barnwood boxes made by local high school students and filled with wildflowers. Crude paintings of birds, also by students, were on display to be auctioned as well as raffle items, from carved ducks to horsehair bracelets to homemade apple butter crafted by local artists and cooks. The gregarious organizer, president of the Burns Chamber of Commerce (considering all the empty storefronts in town, a triumph of hope), orchestrated the evening skillfully as she called out raffle winners and introduced speakers. The dinner was prepared by members of the local Mennonite community. Between the main course and dessert the Mennonite men and boys in their pressed white shirts, the women and girls in their long skirts and small bonnets came out of the kitchen and lined up next to the toiling coffeepots to sing in the purest of harmonies: “When hay is fresh and new, all my praise to You. When hay is fresh and new, all my praise to You.”

Presentations featured a talk about sage grouse habitat and the prospect of the bird being protected, a touchy subject among ranchers who fear the designation of the sage grouse as an endangered species will reduce their grazing permits and, therefore, their ability to make a livelihood. For the time being, an uneasy peace had been negotiated between government land-use agencies and private landowners who collaborated successfully to protect existing and create new habitat for the bird. The next talk, by the wife of a local rancher, informed the city folk in attendance about what was happening on ranches in the spring of the year—calving, weaning, haying—and then, clearly off-message, she kind of reared up and declared that, by golly, she supported her community law enforcement officials and the local government land management agencies. Harney County had recently and unintentionally made national headlines due to, let’s just say, land-use conflicts and, like the sage grouse issue, also a sensitive topic among locals.

But no matter. No one was inclined to take issue with anything tonight. Nope. If the noisy chatter was any indication, the crowd was clearly eager for a time-out from recent controversies, a night out. Strangers introduced themselves to tablemates, ranchers and visitors applauded anything and everything, knocking their water glasses onto the decorative paper doilies, into their whipped cream and fruit salad. A good time.

My drive to the bird festival that weekend not only took me across an ancient ocean bed framed by exquisite small canyons but paralleled sections of what was christened in 2012 as the Oregon Desert Trail. The Oregon Natural Desert Association (ONDA) plotted and pieced together this 750-mile trail that starts at the Oregon Badlands Wilderness outside of Bend and continues to the southeastern Oregon canyonlands that flank the Owyhee River. Other than a few permitted easements across private land, the trail takes pains to stay on public lands the whole way.

I moved from New England to the high desert to ranch four decades ago. Though I now live in town, my love of this hardscrabble outback still informs my every day. So no surprise that this new trail spoke to me, lured me back into the desert. No longer actively ranching, I decided I would walk sections of the trail and write about it—about what I saw and those I encountered. I would make a point of evenly and fairly presenting the conflicting points of view about repurposing open areas of public land. I prided myself that in so many ways I already knew the players: ranchers; Bureau of Land Management, Forest Service, and Fish and Wildlife employees; schoolteachers in rural schoolhouses; merchants in remote outposts; American Indians on reservations in the high desert; law enforcement officials who, some years back, were kind enough to wave me on, despite my excessive speed, as I made my way along desolate Highway 20 back to the ranch with a station wagon full of fussy infants and sacks of groceries. I knew and understood desert dwellers. This narrative would be about and with them.

At dinner, I asked those at my table their thoughts about ONDA’s trail through this wide-open, tumble-dry, high desert. As they finished their salad course and passed around the fresh-baked rolls, I posited my idea that the trail is as long and circuitous as it is not only to lead trekkers through some of the most scenic, and heretofore unexplored, areas of the high desert but also because it dares not stray off public lands lest it create conflicts with private landowners. Did they agree? I wanted to follow, I explained, the course of this highdesert camino that skirts key concerns facing this sagebrush ocean: protection of sacred Native American ground, protection of habitat for endangered species, elimination of “predators,” “wild” horse protection, grazing “rights” for livestock, hunting “rights,” water “rights,” demand for recreational land for motorized vehicles, demand for land for what was touted as low-impact recreational uses. I told them I wanted to show how these issues meet head-on at various intersections along the trail. How solutions that work for all are elusive, charged, and complicated but do exist. How, to me, the Oregon Desert Trail, as it zigs and zags assiduously avoiding privately held tracts, is a powerful metaphor for all the land-use and other issues facing not just southeastern Oregon but all of the ranching West.

As my mashed potatoes and roast beef got cold, I went on (and on . . .). I explained the broader philosophical musings the trail excited in me as suggested by the contradictory rights various groups and users claim. What is wild? Who says grazing is a right? Who says it isn’t? What is the highest best use of public lands? According to whom? Whose narrative is most compelling and is influencing policy decisions? Their answers and related questions would be an important part of the book I planned.

Hiking emblematic sections of the Oregon Desert Trail, I explained, I’d also interview other key individuals like them who represent the variety of perspectives on high-desert land use. I’d welcome the questions the process raised and would embrace the conundrum that a passionate love of the same place is not a predictor for common solutions. From these many conversations I would glean reasonable, collaborative approaches to pending decisions. Everyone really can just get along. What did they think? No surprise, the varied and compelling responses from my tablemates at the festival dinner, and from those I interviewed subsequently, charted the course for this linked narrative and populated the pages to follow.

This time I’d come to the Migratory Bird Festival with not only my bird book but also walking sticks in hand. My plan was to explore the sections of the Oregon Desert Trail that wind through Harney County before heading back to Bend. Maybe take the festivalsponsored tour through the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. But this time was different. Most of the birding tours had sold out for the first time in the thirty-four-year history of the festival. The Saturday night banquet was at capacity. Motels were chockablock full. Why? Because curiosity killed the cat. Because Burns, Oregon, is the county seat of Harney County, where the occupation of the Malheur Wildlife Refuge took place in January and February 2016. It was now April. Ammon Bundy and his band had left the refuge only two months earlier. The buildings they occupied on the refuge and portions of the refuge itself were still closed to the public. Damage to refuge structures, to Northern Paiute artifacts and burial sites was still being assessed. Burns was now on the map. The occupation had identified a new 1 percent—those in the nation who had actually heard of Harney County, the refuge, and Burns, Oregon. But, United States of America, ignore what took place there at your peril.

The forty-one-day occupation rendered my original concept for this desert trek narrative a nursery rhyme, la, la, la, a polite conversation about land-use conflicts. The trail was now a mere contrivance to link the perspectives of those who want to harvest natural resources and those who want to protect land for various recreational and environmental reasons. The land-use policy options I intended to write about turned into a shouting match during the occupation between, for starters, those who want no government intrusion and those who understand the benefits of government involvement and collaboration. And since the Bundy occupation, militias have gone public, brother has armed against brother, false information has been embraced as fact. How armed and dangerous we are! How blunt an instrument our thinking has become! How very afraid we are. How misappropriated by the Bundys and their constituents are the United States constitution and, for that matter, God and his son. How misunderstood the laws affecting land-use and, well, everything if one believes the Bundys. And many do.

This unknown region of the United States suddenly became the poster child not only for land-use and conservation issues but for the angry, gun-toting disenfranchised and the rural silent minority who, in combination, helped define the 2016 presidential election, dramatically reframing America’s conversation. This demographic, like this area of the United States, is no longer unknown or uncharted. The failure of those—who see themselves as educated and informed, who are at the helm of this nation—to acknowledge and engage the predominantly white, no-longer-silent disenfranchised as much shapes this book as does the elaborate cursive script the Oregon Desert Trail inscribes across southeastern Oregon.

“When hay is fresh and new, all my praise to You. When hay is fresh and new, all my praise to You.”