get granular and feel the love, plus Babe is moving to Substack

gm and welcome to issue 66. Last week I wrote about how I’m pretty sure inOregon is a lifestyle business—not a startup. And how that feels like a relief and a joy and a realization that I really should have come to sooner but didn’t.

This week’s supposed to be a quick one. It’s not.

I went to rural Eastern Oregon to document the Harney County Migratory Bird Festival, and something about it stuck. Hope you enjoy.

Announcement: Babe is moving to Substack! After today, all newsletters will come to you from there. K, that’s all.

Shall we?

pitch yourself—bet on you

I think I’ve mentioned before that one of my social media clients is a nonprofit based in rural Eastern Oregon. They do good work—bringing different voices together on crucial issues so that they can collaborate and work towards a common goal.

Honestly, every community should probably have something like this—people whose job is to help others disagree productively.

OK so a few months ago I pitched a content collection trip to the nonprofit. I could see that people-first posts were, by far, performing the best. Duh. And I really wanted to capture more of the people and the place that make Harney County. To my somewhat surprise, they said yes and signed me up to attend two full days of the Harney County Migratory Bird Festival.

I was nervous, but mostly excited. It took a lot of prep on my end. I had the nervous race shits leading into the event. I had the low-appetite-force-yourself-to-eat days leading into it. I had the wtf am I doing. And then… all of a sudden I was there. The start-line gun had gone off and I was no longer anxious. I was just there, wholly inside the experience. How you do one thing is truly how you do everything—racing bikes, work, art, life.

among the birders and the ranchers and the beef

Fast forward to last Wednesday evening, when I drove out to Harney County for their annual Migratory Bird Festival. Over the course of two super-packed days, I had the privilege of taking in so much. I cried a few times reflecting: I can’t believe I get to do this and get paid for it. Something I often felt while traveling around the world with a bike between my legs. Only I didn’t really get paid to do that. Unless I was on the podium, then I got some dollars.

I interviewed people with wildly different beliefs than my own. Humanizing one another is seriously one of my favorite things to do.

One of my favorites was a birder from Connecticut named Dottie. Folks, Dottie is a fucking baddie. She’s maybe in her seventies and flew into Boise and drove 3 hours over the pass, by herself. When I interviewed her, she said that she didn’t think she’d make it to Malheur in her lifetime. I couldn’t tell if she was about to cry or if I was.

I trekked—mistakenly alone and on purpose with a tour—into Malheur National Wildlife Refuge. Ammon Bundy country, yes. But also so much more than that. With birds and wide-open sky and a jaw-dropping level of biodiversity all around, I could not stop saying this is so fucking beautiful aloud. Over and over again. And it was.

I learned so much that I didn’t know before—from people who know and care and are doing a lot to restore, conserve, make a place and its ecosystems better. Like did you know that the Southern Oregon-Northeastern California (SONEC) region is one of the most important landscapes for migratory waterbird populations in all of North America?

Neither did I. It supports up to 70% (!) of bird populations in the Pacific Flyway–a "major north-south migratory route for birds, extending 4K miles from the Arctic (Alaska/Russia) to Patagonia, South America.” Holy shit.

One of the many important things I was reminded of on this trip was this: the more granular we get, the more connected we feel, the more we care.

In poetry school, Arielle used to say something about how specifics are the tangibles that people can feel and connect with—zoom out too much and it’s all a tad abstract to hold onto. Give us something we can hold onto!

She’s right. And the same applies to literally everything else.

specifics are the shit

At some point during this trip, I interviewed someone about a dam they helped restore/build in Malheur. More or less, the intention was to “improve habitat and fish passage, a collaborative effort aimed at better managing the river and mitigating the impact of invasive carp.” The result has created positive ripples in every direction, not to mention a continental impact on migratory birds.

Now, if I had randomly come across this dam without having learned all this cool shit about its purpose, or its effects on the birds and the basin and the farmers, I would have been like cool, it’s a stream with some rocks, sticks, and a few Juniper root balls—and moved on. With the specifics in hand, however, the world before me was transformed. The dam was so fucking cool. I could connect with it—and couldn’t believe what its structure (rocks and sticks and root balls) were achieving. I didn’t want to leave.

one specific closing note: Babe is moving to Substack!

That’s it. That’s the whole specific closing note. The Babe archive—issues 1 through this one—will remain on the beehiiv platform. Starting next Tuesday, all future newsletters will be coming to you through Substack.

Why? Beehiiv’s been great—but the price is about to spike, and I’d rather put that energy into growth than overhead. Substack feels like a place I can actually expand this thing. So we’re going.

Either way, you’ll soon find Babe over on this currently blank Substack page. Until then. 🫡

That’s it for issue 66. Thanks for reading and getting somewhat granular with me.

Until next week.

xoxo,

lw