With this edition we have completed five full years of publishing The Other Oregon. We look forward to many more years of bringing you stories about rural Oregon.

Our goal when we started in 2018 was to help bridge the growing rural-urban divide by giving city dwellers a look at life in rural Oregon.

A lot has happened since we put out our first edition. The pandemic, the social unrest of the summer of 2020 and the following presidential election played out differently in the urban and rural regions.

At the same time, the devastating wildfires of September 2020 brought Oregonians together, if only briefly. As rural residents fled the flames that swept through their communities, the urbanites’ sense of safety was shaken by the smoke and ash that enveloped Portland, Salem, Medford and other cities.

This seems like a good time to take stock. What is the state of the rural-urban divide?

We asked for reader input. Everyone said that the divide has grown wider. As to why, the responses can broadly be put in these terms:

• Urban Oregon has more immediate problems of its own — homelessness, crime, violence, etc. — to worry about the rural-urban divide.

• Urban Oregon has the political clout to ignore minority opinions.

• Urban Oregon just doesn’t care about rural Oregon’s concerns.

• Partisan divisions are too great, and while it’s a bit simplistic those divisions are often cast as an East-West issue. Urban readers blamed rural Oregon, rural readers blamed urban Oregonians.

I’ve often thought the extremes of any question get the most oxygen, but that most people live in the middle between the extremes. Is there middle ground in this discussion?

I talked this over with Eric Mortenson, a veteran reporter who has been writing about the divide for at least a decade. Eric explores the issue in his cover essay, talking with people who live on one side or another, but work across the divide.

I won’t give the ending away. But, it turns out, there’s a way for rural and urban Oregon to get closer together — if both sides make an effort.

— Joe Beach