The Reverse Oregon Trail

From the densest urban areas of Multnomah County to the less populated rural counties of Oregon, there has been a growing impulse to go east, young man, east to Idaho. If you stop to think about it, this is very similar to what spurned the Oregon Trail, a sense that there is more opportunity elsewhere, that throwing the dice and incurring the tremendous cost of moving can be worth it.

Decades of bad policy decisions in the Beaver State appear impossible to dislodge at the ballot box. So people are voting with their feet.

My parents are now fully committed to that trend. They put the house I grew up in on the market. If you want to buy some prime real estate in rural Clackamas County, check this place out.

It started with the 2022 election, probably the most opportune time to have a change in governance. Shortly after Christine Drazen conceded the race, my sister texted, “peace out Oregon” and followed through on that pledge by moving to Rathdrum, Idaho. And she will ultimately be the caregiver for our parents’ final years, so they are moving too.

Here I am; my kids and I are the last Shiermans living in Oregon. There were more. The Volga German community that built Portland’s east bank of the Willamette River, which in the early years of the City of Roses was monikered “Rushan Town” beckoned my great grandfather, Johann Scheiermann to move from Calgary, Alberta, to the Albina district in 1920, back when the United States, like most of our history, had an open-border immigration policy. He had five kids. Many of them moved to Vancouver, Washington, after the Second World War, but his oldest son, Alexander Shierman, though attending Memorial Lutheran Church in Vancouver with his siblings, bought a house on Humboldt Street in north Portland.

Like my grandfather, my ties to Oregon are too great to leave this state. I’m not a homesteader like Jeff Kropf, but when he talks about his ties to the soil weighing him down, it resonates.

It’s sad to see folks go. Beyond the fact that I see my sister and parents less, there is a downward spiral to public policy when more and more sensible voters depart.

Yet there is a bottom to that spiral. When they hit rock bottom, New York elected Rudolph Giuliani. Look how much Oregon Democrats feel the need to talk about “affordability.” That popular political buzzword will eventually place some constraints on the self-imposed costs of living that Oregon policymakers like to think up. Meanwhile, the 21st-century wagon trains are heading east.

Eric Shierman lives in Salem and is the author of We were winning when I was there.