Sunrise Bulletin Vol 31 Issue 28 (Jan 09, 2017)

Bankruptcies, suicides, death threats: A battle over water rights was destroying an Oregon community until a Rotarian found a way to bring it together

The water, steel gray, muscled with hidden current, surges by in a steady itinerant push, making a sound like bacon lightly frying, or faint applause. Blue-black against the afternoon sky, the snowy peaks of the Cascades overlook the river’s basin. To stand on the cool, muddy banks, it’s hard to imagine the tears of heartache, bitterness, hostility, and despair that have been shed over this vital artery of the American West.

The 263-mile Klamath River, which stretches from Oregon to a remote corner of California, has been the object of a custody battle as ugly as any parental fight for a child. Indian tribes. Farmers. Ranchers. Fishermen. Neighbors. Environmental activists. Politicians. All have been locked in a stalemate so fraught that it has an unofficial title: the Klamath Water Wars.

Melita’s Restaurant & Lounge just outside Chiloquin, Ore., isn’t much to look at. With its corrugated metal roof, hand-painted “open” sign, and faded Pepsi ad circa 1970, it’s little more than a roadside pit stop. But it’s got good pie and barbecue chicken and serves a generous helping of mashed potatoes; more to the point, it’s about the only game in Chiloquin, a timber town just down the road from the sprawling ranch that belongs to a mild-mannered Rotarian named Jim Root.

Jim Root recalling a Rotary Convention session that inspired him to get warring factions of his community talking.

In his jeans, leather vest over a light blue chambray shirt, cowboy boots, and professorial wire-framed glasses, Root, 69, doesn’t much look the part of miracle worker – more like a kindly uncle who always knows the right thing to say.

And yet I traveled cross-country to this remote corner of Oregon to meet Root precisely because of the improbable feat he pulled off at the turbulent height of the water wars here. In the most tense of moments, the self-effacing businessman got a group of enemies to start talking.

What emerged was the framework for a comprehensive water-sharing agreement reached by some 42 competing groups that previously couldn’t agree on the color of the sky.

The Klamath Basin Water Recovery and Economic Restoration Act made it all the way to the U.S. Senate, carrying the blessing of everyone from the editorial pages of the New York Times, which declared an “End to the Klamath War,” to the Obama administration. Then, at the eleventh hour, a single Oregon lawmaker doomed it by adding a “poison pill” provision. To the people Root brought together, and to those who took those meetings and built them into a nearly miraculous coalition, it was a crushing blow.

Still, in the months that followed – as the sides limped back to the drawing board – something extraordinary emerged from the ashes of dashed hopes, something Root and other key players believe will ultimately fulfill the promise of their hard work, something nearly as precious as the water over which they’ve fought for so long: a healing of the wounds, racial, cultural, and political, that have scarred and bloodied this region for generations.

This healing might not have occurred had it not been for Root and the life-changing lessons he learned in his first days as a Rotarian.

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