Written Testimony - Mary Wood, Eugene

[To the Senate C0mmittee on Education and General Government:]

My name is Mary Christina Wood. I have come to testify in support of SB 30. Senators, if there is one way of describing the Metolius River, it is a quiet, peaceful, timeless river that runs like a thread through generations of Oregonians, and back to time immemorial for native people of the Basin. When a river provides the kind of quiet solitude that the Metolius has for eons, it becomes sacred.
I come before you this evening as a fourth generation on the Metolius with ties to this river on two sides of my family. And I bring my son, Sage, and my baby Nicholas, as representatives of a fifth generation on the river.

My grandfather General Lamar Tooze Sr., with his wife, Marie, bought a cabin in Camp Sherman in 1946. My other grandfather, Erskine Wood, bought property along the Metolius in 1918 and built a small camp with four little open huts, a one-room log cabin, an open cookhouse, and a fire pit. Today the Wood Camp looks exactly as it did in 1918. My siblings and I donated 30 acres of meadow and islands in the river to the Nature Conservancy.

Aside from the landowners in the Basin, families across Oregon take comfort in knowing that the Metolius today is still much like it was when their parents or grandparents first experienced it. You can’t say that about many places any more. My little children walk and fish along the banks, just like I did. Around the campfire we talk about our ancestors almost as if they are right there with us.
There is a strengthening, eternal pulse to the Metolius. Our family tells the story of General George C. Marshall, Army Chief of Staff to President Roosevelt during World War II. Marshall was a close friend of my grandfather. During the anxious weeks leading up to D-Day, General Marshall asked my grandfather to bring him to the Wood Camp for a few days. He explained why only much later. He had sought out the quiet waters of the Metolius to gain courage and fortitude for what this nation was about to face. On June 6, 1944, when our American troops landed on the shores of Normandy to beat back the Nazi tide that was rolling across Europe, the waters of the Metolius gave grounding and conviction to this country’s highest commander.

A professor from Boston wrote to you yesterday describing the Metolius as “an unspeakably beautiful river, unique, more intimate and calming than any other I have ever known. . . .” It should not surprise you that many Oregon families, including my own, have buried or scattered the ashes of their loved ones in the Metolius Basin. It is one of the only places left where one can be amidst the lasting peace of Nature.

And so, Senators, when I am asked to testify on these proposals for destination resorts that would bring homes and roads and golf courses and crowds of people to this basin, you might as well ask my opinion on child abuse or robbery. These proposals shock the conscience. They are the work of predatory developers driven by vicious greed to annihilate the quietude of the Metolius Basin. If these are strong words, I am sorry, but you will probably hear many strong words from the citizens of Oregon tonight because the Metolius is inseparable from the memory of loved ones who have sat on its banks though time. The citizens of Oregon will fight for the Metolius until we secure its safety forever, because its waters carry our childrens’ legacy.

The proposed legislation, SB 30, is not about private property. It’s about public property. The people of Oregon own the river, the air, the wildlife and the forests that are threatened with these resort proposals. The developers’ private property rights do not overcome the legislature’s responsibility to protect legacy public resources. As the Supreme Court said in 1907, and again just two weeks ago, “[T]he state has an interest independent of and behind the titles of its citizens, in all the earth and air within its domain. It has the last word as to whether its mountains shall be stripped of their forests and its inhabitants shall breathe pure air.”

I brought my son, Sage, here to testify. He sees Nature being destroyed all around him. There are few things more disheartening and depressing to a little boy than to bear witness to such destruction. He asks me, why is government allowing this? Is there any end to it? Why won’t I be able to enjoy the Nature that you had growing up? The only thing I keep saying to him is that the government does have the obligation to protect places like the Metolius for the people, forever -- and that government has gone far astray, but that there will be those heroes, like the sponsors of SB 30, joined by every other Senator and Representative in the Oregon legislature, I hope, who will have the courage in their hearts to do what is right towards our descendants, and not give away public treasures like the Metolius Basin to people like the Lundgrens and the Colsons who would line their pockets by stealing what is most precious from the generations following us.

I’d like to leave you with a few lines from a poem that my great-grandfather, Charles Erskine Scott Wood, wrote in 1921 as he was sitting on the banks of the Metolius River at our Camp. He was a lawyer, and an author, and about 70 years old when he wrote this poem. He loved the river and bequeathed it poetically to future generations. We read this poem as we laid my father’s ashes to rest on the banks of the Metolius.

I Charles Erskine Scott Wood,
Make now my last sure will and testament
For those grandchildren who share with me this solitude
And whom I must too shortly leave.
To my grandchildren,
I give all trout in the Metolius. . .
I give them mornings on the river-bank,
Song of the river when the new sun shines. . .
And the solemn discourse of the pines
At evening when the melting shadows fall
And Peace sits on the bank with folded wings’
The birds all [offering] a good-night call,
And deep in dusk a yellow warbler sings,
The river is for your delight.

Senators, if your great-grandchildren can wake up on the banks of the Metolius River 100 years from now, and there are still fish in the waters, tall standing pines leaning in the breeze, and quiet all around, they will know that you – you personally -- secured their precious Metolius Endowment for them to also hand down for all generations to come.

Mary Wood
Eugene, OR