Everything west of this small town avenue is intact. Everything else is gone. - National Geographic

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The day after the devastation, as Ron Medinger surveyed the rubble of his home, he took a picture of the tomato bed. On a square of blackened soil, around two empty plant cages, charred tomatoes lay scattered like lumps of coal. That night he posted the photo to the town historical society’s Facebook page. “I think I may have done something wrong with our Talent Tomatoes,” Medinger wrote. “Not enough water maybe?”In Talent, Oregon, one of the Western towns most ravaged by this fall’s wildfires, Medinger’s question was a grim private joke. Over the years the locally homegrown tomato has become an unofficial mascot for Talent, a community of retirees, theater people, and agricultural workers. There’s an annual tomato photo contest; a fall Harvest Festival with a king and queen in red capes and tomato-covered crowns; and a custom-designed T-shirt, the most recent reading, “Home is where the tomato is.”But on the morning of Tuesday, September 8, a rush of flames shot along a nearby creek and into this town of 6,400. The fire spread through retirement communities and trailer parks, consumed strip malls and landscaping businesses, hopped over a highway, and stopped at Talent Avenue. Half of Talent was left standing; the other half unrecognizable. For hundreds of families, the fire stole their homes, their community, and a late summer bounty of beloved Talent Tomatoes.In the aftermath of the fire, the town has reeled. It was effectively split in half—those who have lost their homes and businesses, and those who have not. “This is the dividing line,” says Sandy Spelliscy, the city manager, turning her city car onto Talent Avenue a week after the fire. The main thoroughfare, once the center of Talent’s cultural life, is now ripped in half.On one side of Talent Avenue, wooden houses with picket fences and entrances leading into communities of colorfully painted mobile homes sit untouched. The Talent Club, with its wooden front porch, and a small café with an outdoor seating area are closed but unscathed, and the production facility for staging an annual Shakespeare Festival is filled with props and costumes. The Link Lonk


October 07, 2020 at 09:35PM
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Everything west of this small town avenue is intact. Everything else is gone. - National Geographic

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Tomato