I'm not sure how the
Pacific Northwest
looks to people
from other regions
of the US and other countries.
Eugene
is very low in terms of interpersonal crime,
but higher in property crime.
So, while none of my friends have ever been mugged,
bikes left in the open on campus after 6PM are not safe.
In the West Coast states
(Oregon, Washington and California)
there is no separate minimum wage for some workers.
Thus, a tip is never required.
If you receive good service, you should tip
however much you feel is comensurate
with the service you received.
In certain other, backward states,
there is a separate minimum wage for certain workers
to accomodate continued slavery after the Civil War.
In those states, tipping is expected in order
for the workers to make a living wage.
The State of Oregon does not collect a sales tax
on most things.
Therefore, the price listed is the price you will pay.
Certain non-tangible things, like hotel stays,
are subject to a local tax.
Because of the mountainous nature of the Pacific Northwest,
the rivers are well controlled by dams.
The almost constant rain in winter can cause the ground
to become unstable and trees to fall.
Although there have been
spectacular mudslides
in the Pacific Northwest,
they have generally been hundreds of miles from Eugene during the winter.
We do not have hurricanes, but the wind can combine with the rain
to cause trees to fall and knock out power lines.
This really doesn't happen in summer, though.
With global climate change, any sense of "normal" weather is a myth,
but prior to 2000, it didn't rain in Oregon from June 21 to September 1.
During OPLSS in 2009, this trend was broken
when it rained at 8PM for about 30 seconds.
Since then, it has rained several times during OPLSS,
one year lasting all through the night.
Being mostly evergreen forest, the Pacific Northwest is subject to forest fires
in the summer.
In 2017, teenagers started
a fire in the Columbia River Gorge
(near Mount Hood by Portland) by setting off illegal fireworks.
The fire was declared "contained" after three months,
but wasn't fully extenguished until the next summer.
About 150 hikers were trapped in the smoke overnight.
The old Highway
(a tourism experience you shouldn't miss)
was closed for a year.
A section of
the Pacific Crest Trail
(the western-most section of the
Great Western Loop)
was closed for a year.
The air quality in Eugene, 150 miles away, was severely affected
with residents advised to stay indoors for several weeks.
The kid who started the fire was sentenced to 12 months
of community service and a $36.6 million fine.
In 2020,
the Holiday Farm fire
caused a shelter in place order for Eugene residents,
followed by several weeks of stay indoors advisories.
(The first morning, I woke at 4am thinking I had left the stove on
and the house was on fire.)
In general, OPLSS occurs too early in the summer to be affected
by forest fire air quality issues.
Occasionally, we have very small earthquakes.
They're so small that I usually don't notice
until it's reported in the news.
However, western Oregon is in the
Cascadia Subduction Zone
,
which runs from
Vancouver Island
to
Mendocino California
,
and makes up our local participation in
the Ring of Fire
.
Each year, North America moves about 1 ½ inches to the left.
This causes the Juan de Fuca Plate,
which holds up the local bit of the Pacific Ocean,
to be subducted under the North American Plate.
Actually, it does not so much subduct as lock together
and build up pressure.
Then about every 500 years, a massive earthquake
(about 9.0 magnitude with resulting North American/Asian tsunami)
occurs and the plates slip past each other
really fast only to lock up again.
The last Cascadia earthquake happened on Jan 26, 1700 at 9PM,
(we know the time even though there were no Europeans living here,
because we know when the tsumani created devastation
in Japan the next day)
so your trip to Oregon will probably miss the destruction of the
Pacific Northwest by about 30 years.
I appologize for the lost tourism opportunity,
but the next cascadia subduction event will be glorius
when Vancouver, Portland and Seattle are destroyed
in a massive fiery cataclysm.
In case you're worried about war,
the last time Oregon was involved in local fighting was 1942 in World War II,
when a Japanese submarine fired on
the military base
at the mouth of the Columbia River,
but missed and destroyed a local sports field instead.
The kids were not playing there at the time.
The same submarine then launched a plane which dropped
two incendiary bombs into the forest,
igniting fires that were quickly extinguished.
In 2025, when President Trump declared that Portland
was in a state of war lead by people in chicken costumes,
federal judges found this not credible, but hilarious.
Before the 1940's, war with Britain almost broke out in 1846 over the border.
Prior to that time, the word "Oregon" was claimed by Europeans
to be a Native American word referring to a large, fresh water lake
in what is now southern British Columbia.
Linguists find no credible word in the 300+ Native American dialects
spoken here, and there is no such lake,
but when no lake was found, the word came to refer to the area
from what is now southern British Columbia
down to what is now the California-Oregon border.
Although most European occupants of that territory
were French fur trappers who worked for the Hudson Bay Company,
which labeled the area of what is now all of British Columbia
down to what is now Eugene, Oregon as the Columbia Department
of the Hudson Bay Company,
eventually the word Oregon referred the United States loyalists
who wanted to extend America to the Pacific Ocean.
The Oregonians had the slogan "54-40 or Fight!".
Setting the border at the 54.4th parallel would have given
Oregon most of what is now
Canadian British Columbia.
The purchase of
Seward's Folly
from Russia,
along with extending Oregon up to the 54.4th paralell
would have given Britain only 200 miles of Pacfic coastline.
The British wanted to extend British Columbia down to the 42nd parallel,
the top of what is now California, which was
owned by Mexico at the time,
thus denying the United States any Pacific coastline.
The Treaty of Oregon
set the border
at the 49th parallel
,
the current border, and nobody fought.
In 1871, the border was clarified by Kaiser Wilhelm of Germany, an impartial observer, after the
Pig War,
a war between the US and Britain.
When the US
invaded Iraq in 2003, the only UO
Peace Studies major camped outside the University President's office in protest,
thus closing the Peace Studies program due to war.
