'Writing for a newspaper is a privilege, affording a front row seat to life'

Editor’s note: We are thrilled that longtime journalist Duane Noriyuki is joining us as a regular columnist in Community Voices. Please, keep an eye out for his upcoming columns.

My wife, Julia Sandidge, and I are retired in a small house on a small channel of the McKenzie River next to a giant maple tree some 200 years old. We are fortunate to live among river and trees beneath a quiet sky and stars that seem scrubbed by the moon.
We love how our dog, Yogi, can frolic in the backyard, fetch sticks from the river and nap in the sun.

It’s a good place – maybe too good – to ponder and meditate. Both are solitary activities that have consumed a good deal of my attention since moving here eight years ago. At age 72, I often find my thoughts loitering on the bygone, which is troubling, because life in the past tense is closer to dying than living.

I come to this page quite unexpectedly, and there’s a good chance you did too. Who would have guessed a year ago that there would be a new wholly digital community newspaper in town at a time when so many newspapers were closing?

Certainly, not me.

It has been 20 years since I left the Los Angeles Times and started teaching, and doing a bit of freelance and volunteer work. Prior to that, I worked at the St. Paul Pioneer Press, Detroit Free Press and a slew of small newspapers in Colorado, including the spirited Aspen Times, where I shared an office with the company dog and learned that skiing was just as important as most things in life.

It’s easy to forget that writing for a newspaper is a privilege, affording a front row seat to life that – back in the day – attracted an eclectic cast of misfits, alley cats and barroom poets of shared intent – to ask the right questions and to hold people accountable.

Times have changed. I think reporters are probably better behaved than we were, and newsrooms are more civil and less likely to catch on fire. But journalists now, as young as many of them are, are largely driven by the same itch, the one that leads to the next question.

The late writer Barry Lopez, author of “Arctic Dreams,” winner of the 1986 National Book Award for nonfiction, lived just upriver from us and wrote prolifically about some of life’s most remote, least understood areas, from glacier to desert to humanity’s inner soul. But he needed only two words to define the role of the writer.

It is, he said, “to help.”

I can think of no better reason. I probably won’t be taking out your trash or mowing your lawn, but I will try to write meaningfully a couple of times a month, often from the shade of a giant maple.