Ellen Waterston, Walking the High Desert: Encounters with Rural America Along the Oregon Desert Trail (2020)
Content warning:
Death, natural disaster
“Something is living in us more than we are living in it…we don’t make our story, our story makes us.” (223)
Synopsis
Weaving together a personal travelogue with local history and contemporary land-use issues, Waterston explores the many faces of the recently established Oregon Desert Trail. As she travels through different landmarks and cities scattered throughout the Oregon high desert, she discusses her experience in local communities, marvels at the underappreciated beauty of the landscape, and meditates on the future of Oregon’s public land use. Enlightening, moving, and sorrowful, Waterston’s text is a much-needed contemporary look into the region from someone who’s had 50 years of experience living and loving within it.
Essay
Oregon has a reputation as a temperate rainforest outside the state; this remains its predominant perception despite the fact that nearly three-quarters of the state is a desert. Few, if any, pieces of literature that escape Oregon’s bounds reflect this state of affairs; this discrepancy is quite obvious once you notice it. Steps are being taken to represent all of Oregon through its cultural output. Oregon’s current Poet Laureate, Ellen Waterston, has spent over 50 years living in multiple places in the state’s desert, and much of her work comes from this experience. Through stepping into the realm of nonfiction, she has more directly distilled this breadth of experience in Walking the High Desert. Through blending many different forms of writing and research, Waterston brings to light her personal experience with this underrepresented region.
If I had to define it, I’d call this text part travelogue, part history and part record of bureaucracy. The book never truly stays in one category for long! Its framing device is very much travelogue; Waterston’s text goes up and around the eponymous Oregon Desert Trail, chapters stop in towns along the way, and sections of the book are named after the most recognizable landmark on that portion of the trail. Waterston herself is not hiking the trail, rather looking back on her personal experiences in many of these rural communities. She talks about stargazing at Pine Mountain, her experience as an artist-in-residence at Summer Lake, and attending a migratory bird festival in Burns. If she’s not drawing from her own life, she’s drawing on the history of the regions, jumping from geology to anthropology to political history and founding. Much of what she focuses on is quite recent, and it ties directly into the bureaucracy of the text. Waterston is someone who has seen many sides of the public vs. private land debate, and this struggle is baked deeply into the foundations of the text.
Although there’s a lot of love and passion for the Oregon High Desert, there’s equally as much sorrow towards the way it’s currently being treated. The Oregon Desert Trail, which is so central to the text, is the result of hundreds of acres worth of compromise. Much of Eastern Oregon is privately owned for ranching cattle, and so the trail takes a snaking, winding route to remain on the public land that visitors are allowed to pass through. As someone who has visited many of the US’s national parks, the way Waterston frames much of the text through concerns about sustainability and land use issues are fascinating. These are everyday ongoing fights that aren’t necessarily on your mind if you don’t live in these areas or invest yourself in what’s going on with land usage in multiple areas all over your state. Not every fight will be publicly visible!
Walking the High Desert should undeniably be ensured a place in the current canon of Oregon Literature. Not only is it bringing light to a less appreciated area of the state, it’s deeply concerned with the politics and the future of the land itself. It’s a good entry point if you’d like to learn more about the specific politics and intricacies of public land use in Oregon. Waterston loves the desert, and through this text you can connect yourself to her love for the land.
Author Bio
Ellen Waterston is Oregon’s current Poet Laureate. After moving from New England, she has lived in places all over the Oregon high desert for 50 years, but currently resides in Bend. Previously a rancher, she brings her grounded experience and connection to rural Oregon into everything she writes.
Further Reading
Ellen Waterston, As Far as I Can Anthem: Poems (2026)
- Waterston’s Poetry; written during her first year as Poet Laureate
William Kittredge, The Next Rodeo: New and Selected Essays (2007)
- Essays examining cattle ranching + land overuse, especially in Oregon