By John Marble
I woke up slowly this morning, several hours too early, gradually coming to grips with the
knowledge that it was Thanksgiving day.
A hard rain was pounding on the old house, the wind lashing the trees down along the creek, and I began thinking about the idea that while many folks think of this holiday as a celebration of the fall harvest, my personal view is that the final Thursday of November is actually a clear notice that the first day of winter has arrived.
As I lay there listening to the storm I found myself feeling quite content. My woodshed is overfull of dry sticks, both hard and softwood. My freezer and pantry are both filled to the brim. Fall maybe finished for the year, but looking back, it was a spectacular season, at least for me.
My fall season began on Sept. 1, with the opening of dove season. My hunting pals gathered for the often-embarrassing challenge of using scatterguns to try and hit speeding targets the size of poker chips. There was a bit of bragging here and there, but not much. Next came the much less challenging grouse seasons: three species of fun. In a typical year there would be a bit of a break before the big game hunts began, but not this year.
This September brought a long-awaited safari to northern Canada in search of the mighty and exotic mountain caribou. This turned into two weeks in the bush, hunting in difficult conditions and tough country, accompanied by great people and amazing horses. The days were cold and wet, the ground was too swampy to walk on but too hard to sleep on.
Suffice to say, it was a great hunt.
On my return to the gracious weather and terribly civilized conditions of the Calapooia valley, I found most of the September mail sitting on my dining room table. It was divided into two cardboard boxes, one for the true “mail:” letters, bills and junk, while the other contained newspapers. Lots of them.
Looking at the stack of newsprint it suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t read anything in weeks, as I was pretty deeply engaged in trying to survive under challenging conditions.
As I began reading I was struck by the calm joy that the local news brought me. Not that it was all good news. Goodness, the wealth of news bits about crime and car wrecks, obituaries and crashed dreams was a touch frightening.
But all of that was washed away by the news of babies born to happy parents, school children doing their best, athletes honing their skills, workers and business folks and our local governments trying to do their best. And all of this was local news, most of it from Linn County.
I tried to skip over the snippets of national and international news as it had become clear to me that the most important and impactful things that had happened during my absence was, in fact, what had occurred right here in my community, where my neighbors are struggling and thriving.
As most folks know, the American newspaper industry is staggering along, just trying to survive. Even big city papers are folding up and locking their doors. Maybe that shouldn’t be too much of a surprise, as those big-market papers are competing with all kinds of national and international news feeds.
Small town papers are struggling too, of course. But if people in small towns want to know what’s up at the school district or the town council, about the only place for reliable news is their local newspaper. Linn County readers are lucky to have three local papers: The New Era, Brownsville Times, and Albany Democrat-Herald.
For me, personally, it was these little papers that welcomed me home and helped me get back into the local groove. World news is great, but reading my local paper feels like the Big News to me.
– John Marble lives, reads, and writes in Crawfordsville.