About eight months ago, I received a phone call from a friend saying his parents were in distress. “My dad and stepmom,” he said, more than a little anxiety in his voice. “They were evicted from their home by a SWAT team.”

“You’re kidding, right?” My friend’s a practical joker. Once, as a messy goof, he mailed me an envelope full of glitter.

“A 20-person SWAT team. For real. The house where I grew up in Oregon. They’ve been living there for more than 20 years.”

He was serious. All I could come up with was “Holy shit!”

“Don’t you write about this kind of stuff? Crooked cops. Foreclosures. You think that you can take a look? Something’s got to be wrong. They’re living with their neighbor and they’re scared out of their heads right now.”

His call came during The Daily Show on a Tuesday. I was all the way in Boston; my friend was in Florida. I jumped online, pulled an unexpected all-nighter, and by early Wednesday afternoon discovered the following about his native Josephine County:

• This southwest corner of Oregon, though a spectacular valley in the heart of redwood country, has seen its economy irreparably damaged by harvesting restrictions put on federal forests in the past several decades. Once the biggest producer of timber on earth, last year the region tragically, emblematically lost the last of its commercial mills.

• As a result of slinking industry, there’s been an erosion of logging subsidies that paid for public services for generations. Since losing most of its sheriff’s budget two years ago, Josephine’s become a “zombie county,” as areas left lawless by local governments are sometimes called. Even Bill O’Reilly noted reports of a 911 tape featuring the voice of a Josephine woman, who was subsequently attacked, being told by an emergency operator, “It’s unfortunate you guys don’t have any law enforcement up there.”
• Since the forced cutbacks, the juvenile pen in the Josephine County seat of Grants Pass has been shuttered, while dozens of violent adult offenders have been prematurely paroled. Those desperate for protection have embraced the numerous mountainside militias, or in other cases have joined organized watch outfits formed to thwart crime vigilante-style. No surprise there — split across its belly by the fittingly named Rogue River, Josephine and its people have been proudly independent since the frontier days.
• Prospectors are hoarding private land in the Siskiyou foothills of Josephine County, which is loaded with some of the last significant harvestable forestry reserves in the Pacific Northwest, and with glittery minerals that are used in microelectronics manufacturing. It’s a gold rush all over again, though one with markedly different players and dynamics than those that were a part of past greed stampedes.
• Despite fiscal restraints and swelling criminal activity, authorities in Josephine have used their resources to aggressively facilitate foreclosures. The eviction of my friend’s parents was the handiwork of a Constitution-thumping county sheriff named Gil Gilbertson, who some locals consider their own Cliven Bundy for his feud with the federal Forest Service. Gilbertson sees himself as a contemporary version of John Wayne, who actually enjoyed vacationing on a famous ranch in the area, and who played a sheriff in a town on the Rogue in the True Grit sequel Rooster Cogburn.

I booked my flight that evening. Less than one month later, I flew to Portland, then drove south four hours to Grants Pass, where I spent a week reporting on the lawless state of affairs and the war on homeowners. In a scene resembling a cross between Inside Job and The Lorax, as one close observer puts it, families appear to have been strangled by predatory schemes to take Pacific timberlands, and with no end in sight.

As for my friend’s parents, their chain of home ownership reads like a Greatest Hits of the Past 25 Years of American Mortgage Scams. Ten years after they purchased their 60 acres, the initial holder of their deed pleaded guilty to racketeering. From there, their fate fell into the hands of unsavory companies like Northwest Trustee Services, as well as national leeches including CitiFinancial.

Faced with homelessness and threats from authorities, my friend’s family has sought help from everyone from hippie farmers to the Oregon Department of Justice in trying to correct what appears to be a shady eviction. As local courts and officials pay meager attention to the disaster, it’s become clear that unchecked resource plundering and mortgage scheming have screwed residents of Josephine far beyond fairness. The more I dig, the worse it looks, and despite the clear injustice at hand, those in power have proven unwilling to help. The only hope is for these stories to reach sympathetic ears beyond Grants Pass.

I have spoken with editors from national outlets about commissioning this crusade. Some were uncomfortable to learn that I am old friends with the son of my subject, which is a silly concern but fair enough. Others balked at my insistence on covering all factors leading to the evictions, from economic to environmental, while a few refused to dispatch me to an NRA Graceland where the scant law enforcement there is may be hostile. In the interest of finally bringing this issue to light, I ultimately decided that while certain elements of Oregon Tale will appear on supporting sites and in various forms — podcasts, bonus posts, video blogs — this dedicated Medium collection will serve as a clearinghouse for all related material, including serialized installments to be released at noon EST on Sundays starting January 4.

Finally, I appreciate any support people are willing to put toward this mission. Sales from past Write To Power projects have covered an initial trip to Oregon and research expenses thus far, but I’ve assembled a small team for legal advice, the continuing investigation, and outreach efforts, and will need additional resources as we return to Josephine for follow-up recon and interviews. Like so many people throughout our nation’s history who have headed west in search of one thing or another, I’m not exactly sure what lies ahead. At the least, I’m hoping for some modern-day justice in a place where the establishment has historically served other interests.