Sin Crops

            The Applegate is going to pot.

           It used to be ranches and farms. When I first arrived, in 1972, the Krauses were still running cattle on Grayback Mountain, herding ten or twelve head twice a year up Thompson Creek Road, not on horseback but from their pick-up. That only lasted a few more years. The Applegate was mostly cattle and sheep farms then, and hay fields.

This is not in the Applegate, but you get the idea.

Farmers would get at least two cuttings of hay every summer. Bales would stand in the cut fields, ready for pick-up. Seeing them always reminded me of a home movie of my mother as a young woman, "helping" with the haying on my grandfather's farm. She is struggling to haul a bale to the truck, laughing, calling out, "Help me!" We can't hear her words, of course, but the shape of her mouth makes the words clear. In the Applegate the smell of dry hay used to permeate the air, as it did on my grandfather's farm.

            Before hay, tomatoes were king. When I arrived in the Applegate, they were just being phased out as the main crop. I worked one summer picking tomatoes at Messinger's Farm, the last commercial tomato field in the Applegate. When tomato was king, the air in the Applegate at harvest, I've been told, smelled like catsup.

            The main crop on my grandfather's Kentucky farm was tobacco. The barn, with its long leaves of tobacco curing in the rafters and its bales of hay stacked on one side, smelled of a rich mixture of tobacco and hay. When we were little and visiting our grandparents, my sisters and I used to jump from the top hay bales to the rumpled piles of broken bales on the floor, sending up poofs of redolent hay dust. After my grandparents died, the farm was sold, the barn torn down, and the fields made into a golf course.

            In the Applegate, after the tomatoes, came the hay and corn, and, more gradually, organic vegetable farms. But if there was an "after tomatoes," there was also an "after cattle and sheep, hay and corn," and what came after was grapes. Hay fields were supplanted by vineyards. Trees were cut down, and grapes went in. Wineries won awards and opened tasting rooms. People began referring to the Applegate Valley as another Napa.

Troon Vineyards, in the Applegate

           Then marijuana became legal in Oregon, and, more suddenly than grapes displaced corn, marijuana snatched up land. Suddenly landlords could raise rent on agricultural lands to such exorbitant levels that organic farmers were forced out.

Three guesses who'll be buying this property!

Suddenly large fences blocked the views of fields along the highway, and we all knew what grew behind them.

Suddenly greenhouses glowed with blindingly bright grow lights for indoor marijuana,

and the smell in the air at harvest in the Applegate was no longer either catsup of years gone by nor hay of recent years but the pungent odor, some say the skunk-like stink, of highly resinous marijuana buds.

            Maybe the Applegate hasn't entirely gone to pot, though. Sheep with their leaping lambs still dot the pasture down the road, and organic vegetable farms still thrive in the Applegate. Still, the money is in the sin crops: wine grapes and marijuana in the Applegate, tobacco in Kentucky.