The Real Oregon

The first year in Oregon, you love the rain. It’s a complete novelty. Sitting inside on a winter day and listening to the beat of raindrops on the windows is so cozy you can’t describe it.

The second year, as September fades into October and the sun retreats for the next eight months, your heart simply sinks.

After 20 years, we’ve come to love the rain. The winter sky is infinitely variable in its grayness, and the subtle darkness of the wet fir trees on the mountainsides is incomparable.

All in all, it doesn’t actually rain that much in Oregon. Eugene gets about 50 inches a year. Portland gets about 45. That may sound like a lot, but it’s only a little more than three times as much as a typical year in Los Angeles. And it’s really nothing compared to 460 inches a year at the top of Kauai.

What makes western Oregon seem so rainy is that it rains all the time, from October to May, and sometimes through the summer, too. Just not very hard.

It’s “OAR-rih-gun.” Pure and simple. Say it any other way — like “ORE-gahwn,” perhaps — and you brand yourself as an Easterner. Or even worse, a Californian.

There are a few other tricky place names in the state. “Willamette” looks easy — that’s the name of the main south-to-north running river in the western valley, oddly enough called the Willamette Valley, which has most of the state’s population. And most newcomers pronounce it “WILL-a-mette,” the way it’s spelled. Sorry. It’s “Wih-LAH-mit. Rhymes with “dammit.”

Yaquina Head on the coast is “Yah-KWI-nah.” Heceta Head is “He-SEE-tah.” Head is “HED.”

And no one actually knows how Champoeg Park is pronounced.