A rock opera about the Columbia Gorge watershed comes to life

When you think about the Columbia Gorge, a multimedia rock opera might not be the first thing that comes to mind. But that’s exactly the vehicle producer Sarah Fox chose to showcase the unique history, personal stories and ecology of the Gorge.

“The Watershed Rock Opera” unfolds in five movements that symbolize the cycle of the watershed itself. The journey starts in the clouds, descends into the Cascades and moves through a pear orchard before it ends in a kind of homecoming at the mighty river that connects the people and communities who call the Gorge home. (There’s also a comedic detour and duet prompted by a clogged toilet.)

Fox recorded interviews with five storytellers who provided the narration in the rock opera and inspired its musical score, which 20 local musicians and performers will bring to life this Friday for a series of sold-out shows at the Columbia Center for the Arts in Hood River. Fox joins us for more details, along with Lesley Tamura, a fourth-generation pear orchardist in Hood River, composer and arranger Eric Kaneda and music director and percussionist Leila Kaneda.

Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.

Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller. For years now, Sarah Fox has been telling the stories of the people and places of the Columbia River Gorge. She’s done so with podcasts and essays and live events, but she has never done anything on as big a scale as her new project. It’s called “The Watershed Rock Opera.” It’s a five movement multimedia extravaganza with live music, singing, and video that explores the history, personal stories, and ecology of the Gorge. 20 local performers will bring it to life starting tomorrow night in a series of sold-out shows at the Columbia Center for the Arts in Hood River. Sarah Fox joins us now along with three of the people she has been working with. Eric Kaneda composed and arranged music. Leila Kaneda is a music director and a percussionist. Lesley Tamura is a fourth-generation pear orchardist. Welcome to all four of you.

Sarah Fox: Thank you.

Lesley Tamura: Thank you.

Leila Kaneda: Thanks for having us.

Miller: Sarah, why a rock opera?

Fox: I knew that would be the first question out of the gate.

Miller: Very easy.

Fox: Yeah. I think for me as a producer, my goal is always to seek out interesting stories and then do everything I can to consider how best to share them. And there’s so many different ways to share stories, but as we sort of have more and more ways of getting information, you have to figure out new ways to cut through and get people to listen. And what I had noticed is musical storytelling, in the Sense of Place program that I run, was really catching people’s attention. We had a lamprey biologist who rapped about lamprey, we had a beaver singalong, we had a volcanologist who played violin. And so I started thinking about how we might use music to tell stories.

Miller: I mean, kind of a Trojan horse here.

Fox: A little bit, definitely.

Miller: If you want to get people to pay attention to lamprey…

Fox: Yeah.

Miller: The rap helped.

Fox: Absolutely.

Miller: And if you want people to listen to climate change, or hear about it, maybe music helps the poison go down?

Fox: Yeah, well, I think it’s not even the poison. I think it’s, how can we change up the format? How can we consider new ways of telling stories? And I think as a producer, that’s my job, because if my goal is to do the best I can sharing a story like Lesley’s, then I need to consider what’s going to be the way that I can draw in new audiences. Because that’s really important to me; I don’t want to just preach to the choir, I want new people to come and listen to this story. And music ended up being a… it’s obviously one of our oldest ways of telling stories, and then you pair that with Mother Nature’s plotline of the watershed and it was a natural combination.

Miller: What was your starting point? I mean, because you have this idea, but you’re not, am I right that you’re not a composer?

Fox: I am not a composer.

Miller: Okay.

Fox: For a couple of years I’ve been struggling with two questions when it comes to telling stories. One is, how do I get people to pay attention to stories that maybe don’t seem that interesting on the face, but which I know are really important stories. And two, how do I get new people in the door? And so in thinking about changing up that format, the idea of using music in a rock opera and producing a rock opera came about. And when Oregon Humanities gave me the fellowship as a community storytelling fellow, I knew, okay, I want to try to tell as many stories as I can from the Gorge, not just a single story. So how can I tell multiple stories in a single setting? And then how can I make sure those stories connect in some way? And so music became a way to connect them all and the watershed provided the through line so that I could connect Lesley’s story to the other stories in the opera.

Miller: Eric, what was your reaction when Sarah told you about her idea and asked you to be involved?

Eric Kaneda: I was like, wow, this seems like a big project, right. And in trying to understand what Sarah was saying, I’m like, okay, this is… and I started asking some questions and kind of went down some rabbit holes and quickly kind of got lost in it. And then many times this has happened: Leila is like, no, no, this is what Sarah means, right? And then it was like… so it was a lot of, oh, what is this? And then Leila being, oh, this, you can do this and this and this…

Miller: Leila, your wife, who was also a musician?

E. Kaneda: Yeah, yeah.

Miller: But you have a day job ‒ you both do ‒ in the computer world, which I imagine keeps you busy. Did you say yes immediately?

E. Kaneda: So what actually happened was I said yes and then realized, wow, I don’t have the capacity right now, so I actually declined after maybe within a week. And then my day job had kind of calmed down a little bit more to then take on this project later around August.

Miller: Sarah, a lot of what people are going to be hearing tomorrow night is recordings that you’ve done of interviews with various people in the Gorge. I want to play, in just a second, some of this narration or interview segments. We’re gonna hear something from Thomas Morning Owl, an Indigenous linguist and member of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation. Why did you want him to start this off?

Fox: The very first sense of place that I hosted featured the creation story and traditional forced food stories as told by women from Yakima Nation. And it seemed, in talking about stories of a place and especially the Gorge, that leading with stories from those who’ve been here the longest made sense. And it also was a natural framework for where this watershed was going to begin and as you also see, end.

Miller: Let’s have a listen to part of this first movement. Again, this features Thomas Morning Owl.

Thomas Morning Owl [with musical accompaniment]: The story of the water. Knowing that it impacts us every day of our lives, whether we recognize it or not.

[Speaks in Native language]

It’s our life. It becomes our strength. And it becomes the very blood in our bodies.

Miller: Eric, what was the composing challenge for having these different interviews and then creating music that would work with them?

E. Kaneda: The composing challenge would be, it was about lining things up in such a way that it had good flow and that nothing was too much or too little. Another challenge was that this is 50… we clocked in the music at 53 minutes of total music, and it’s also the pacing of each of the parts as it relates to itself.  We didn’t want to have two movements back-to-back that were super quiet or two movements back-to-back that were super duper intense. So thinking about that and not… I think the biggest challenge was I didn’t have quite enough information at some points to be able to write and kind of plan things out. I’m very much a planner, and so when some of those ‒ when I compose ‒ and when some of these details aren’t there or hasn’t arrived yet in my mind, or things like that, then that was the biggest challenge. Also, kind of writing music, on a consistent schedule every single week for about five months, that was quite a challenge as well. But I got a lot of help from Leila.

Miller: Well Leila, so what does it mean to be the musical director for a project like this?

L. Kaneda: So in general, it means that you are responsible for herding all of the musicians, which can be like herding cats…

Miller: Herding?

L. Kaneda: Yes.

Miller: Making sure that they are where they belong, not inflicting pain on them?

L. Kaneda: Yes, sorry. And also setting schedules, making sure the rehearsals happen and the show gets to where it’s going to be. However, for a production like this the role was more expanded, so it involved all of that: identifying the musicians, getting them in the room, making sure we’re ready, but it also involved a lot of working with the composer to make sure that the music was written in a way that we could learn it in one month or two months and be ready to premiere. That it worked with the people we had available to us, even if some of them we didn’t know at the time of writing, as well as the creative process and scope of making sure that Sarah’s intention, Sarah’s vision for this, the stories from all of our advisors were represented as intended or as close to intended as possible, while making it creatively interesting. So I became a little bit more of a music director, plus in a way of helping out.

Miller: You both moved here to Hood River about four years ago in the terrible teeth of the pandemic. Did working on this introduce you to more people in the community?

L. Kaneda: It did for sure. I would say when we moved, especially moving in the middle of the pandemic, neither of us had really gotten out in the community to do anything musically. I’m a professional performer and all of my gigs, even while living in Hood River, were still in Portland, so I would still commute or take jobs that way. I never played in the community. And then working on this project, we were forced to meet as many people as we could to find the players for this. And so this is really like the first time playing in town and it’s helped us create some relationships to know that hey, there is a community here. There is an outlet. In the future, let’s work with these people and bring music to the Gorge instead of always going to Portland.

Miller: Sarah, I want to play a little bit from the second movement, which is about a little animal called the Cascade fox.

Fox: Red rox.

Miller: Cascade red fox. I apologize to that fox for neglecting its important color. What should we know before we hear this?

Fox: This story blows my mind. This biologist who lives in the Gorge in 2008 was doing research up on a mountain and happens to catch a photo of a fox that in 2008, most people had no idea lived in the Gorge. And this is a native fox that has genetic connections to the foxes that originally came over, and it could have just disappeared and we would have never known if it wasn’t for the research that this biologist was doing. And so this story, this movement tells the story of that discovery. What happens to do the research, what it takes to learn about this animal in a remote place, and then what comes of that biologist’s research.

Miller: And the biologist is Jocelyn Akins.

Jocelyn Akins: [with musical accompaniment]

I can remember in 2008, I was going through the photos from one of the cameras that I set. And I was just scrolling through photos of rayjays and Pacific martins, and all of a sudden this fox pops up. I shared the photo with the expert, and he said, ‘well, congratulations, you have found the elusive Cascade red fox.’

Miller: Lesley, you’ve done a lot of straight-ahead interviews about what it means to be a fruit grower, to be a pear grower, but this is different. What has it meant to you to have your stories, your voice, be a part of this very different version of storytelling?

Tamura: It’s been an interesting experience for sure. When Sarah first told me she was embarking on this project and she asked me to be an advisor for this movement, I was game and I sat down and spoke with Sarah and she recorded me talking about the entire growth season. I did not know at the time that my voice would be featured so heavily in the performance itself. I thought I was just providing information, so it was a bit of a bait and switch on that.

Miller: So what was, is that a fair way to put it, did you know at the time what it was going to be used for?

Fox: I think Lesley has come to learn, we’ve now worked together enough that she knows once she answers my call, there are wild things ahead.

Tamura: It wasn’t shocking, but I didn’t realize it until I met Eric for the first time, and he started telling me, ‘I’ve listened to you speaking over and over and I’m pulling soundbites and here’s how I’m using those soundbites.’ And I went, ‘oh, okay, that’s a new concept for me, but sure, it’s too late now.’

Miller: You mentioned that what you talked about, which has been now turned into this movement ‒ we can hear a live version of it in just a second ‒ but it is based on basically the four seasons, the life cycle of a pear, but also the work cycle of orchardists. So we’re talking in early to mid-April right now. Where are we in the work cycle for pear growers?

Tamura: We are in what we refer to as the busy spring or the spring rush when everything is just overlapping. We are trying to finish up our pruning season that starts in the winter. We are trying to watch the flowers as they bloom. We have to watch them very closely to make sure we’re bringing in our beehives at the right time so that the flowers can be pollinated. We are aiming to plant nursery trees by the end of the month to replace older trees that we’ve had to remove. And we are also in the midst of frost season when we are watching the overnight temperatures very carefully and using our frost fans and our heaters to keep everything warm enough so that we don’t have frost damage.

Miller: It seems like a time of a lot of excitement and maybe a lot of nerves?

Tamura: Yes, that’s accurate. Frost season is always a difficult time because you just never know what the weather’s going to bring. Some years, we have springs where we don’t run our fans one time. A couple of years ago, we got 14 inches of snow in late April, and that has never happened before. So you just have to be ready to adapt to whatever Mother Nature brings you and move forward.

Miller: So Leila, part of your job, if I’m not mistaken, was to take the nuts and bolts of pear growing, as Lesley has talked about them, and we just got a short version of just a couple, a month period of that over the course of the year, but to take that and to turn it into percussion. So where did you even start? And I should say that you have a bunch of instruments with us here and I’m hoping you can illustrate how you translated some of the orchardist’s work into percussive sounds.

L. Kaneda: Of course. So it’s actually funny a little bit how we started. Sarah had me roped in, and we knew what was going on with the movement, and I told her I can’t write anything until I know what I’m working with. So then Sarah calls Lesley and she’s like, ‘hey, can we come out to the orchard and test out things?’ And of course she’s like, ‘sure, come on out.’ So we go and we’re walking around and Lesley’s like, ‘here is this piece of equipment we use. This is how it’s used in the orchard.’ Some of them are, ‘this is a family heirloom that’s been here for generations and we pass it down’. And I’m standing there like, ‘are you sure I can hit this? Are you sure it won’t break?’ And she’s like, ‘go ahead.’

Miller: Wait, you brought drumsticks with you?

L. Kaneda: Mmmhmm.

Miller: With the idea that she would give you a tour and you would hit sticks against things to see what they sounded like?

L. Kaneda: Exactly. Everything.

Tamura: She climbed inside my fruit bin and sat in it and drummed on different parts and yeah, everything I showed her, she just drummed on it to see what it would sound like.

Miller: Honestly, I mean, this is a side, but it seems like one of the great things about being a percussionist is that anything can be an instrument.

L. Kaneda: It is exactly that. No matter where you go, if you have your hands or you have a couple of things to hit with, it’s an instrument, this microphone even.

Miller: But please don’t do that.

L. Kaneda: No.

Miller: Okay, but so you’re there, but show us some of the things that you turned that tour into.

L. Kaneda: Yeah. So one of the things I have with me here is called the smudge pot. And that’s one of the things that’s used to keep the plants warm on the orchard, especially like when Lesley was talking about during frost or some of these other times when they need to keep the trees at a warmer level. And the one that we have is one that is no longer in use, they’ve I think switched to more efficient ones, but it’s a giant metal cylinder, basically, with a base at the bottom and the way that we use it in the show is a couple different ways.

So the first way is we use some drumsticks and a mallet to hit it, which will sound something like this [metallic drumming]. Really tinny and tingy. But then later on when we have a nice delicate section, which is when the flowers are blooming, right, we still use this smudge pot sometimes, so we still use it as an instrument, but now with a lighter touch, which will sound something like this [metallic drumming].  And so we can get different timbres from this one little piece of metal. When we brought it home and told Eric that ‘okay, we’re using this in the show,’ he looks at this metal thing and he says, ‘what am I going to do with this?’ And I said, just wait and listen, and we pulled out my entire bag and tried a bunch of different implements on it and got the different sounds.

Miller: I’m hoping we can hear a stripped down version of just one part of this third movement. There’s one more instrument I think we’re going to hear. This, Leila, it’s a cajón ‒ a wooden box percussion instrument ‒ and we’re going to play the recording, on top of you playing some percussion live. And this is part of Lesley’s interview when she’s talking about how a commercial pear growing operation knows that it’s ready for pears to be picked. So take it away and then we’ll hear Lesley, the interview on top of what you’re playing live.

[Music playing]

Tamura [recorded]: In a commercial orchard, pears are always picked before they’re ripe, and the primary way we know when they’re ready to be picked is the pressure test. The pressure test measures how many pounds of force it takes to push through the skin of the pear. They always test it a few times and then once they have a really good idea of when you’re going to start, they show up and say, here’s your start date. Hope you’re ready. [Musical interlude]. Not yet. [Musical interlude]. Not yet. [Musical interlude]. It’s go time.

Miller: Lesley, when it’s go time, what happens?

Tamura: Well, at that point, like I said in the original interview, you just hope you’re ready for it. You’ve done all the preparation, and then when we’re told it’s time, that’s when you take your crew out, your tractors out, and everybody does their job. The pickers are on their 12 ft. ladders, picking every pear by hand, putting it into the picking bag that’s strapped across their chest. They are emptying that picking bag into our bins, our large boxes that hold about 1,100 to 1,200 pounds of pears. Those bins are transported by tractor to a central area where it’s loaded onto a truck, taken to a packing house and that’s where it’s processed, sorted, graded, and then it eventually makes its way out to the stores and the consumers.

Miller: I want to go back to what Sarah was saying before, that as a producer, it’s part of her job not just to find stories that are worth telling, but to figure out ways to get people, especially new audiences, to be exposed to them. What are you hoping that either folks in Hood River or the Gorge or Oregonians more broadly, that they will understand about the job that you and other orchardists do that they might not be aware of right now?

Tamura: I think what I would love people to take away from this movement is just the varied types of tasks that are integrated into the growing process. A lot of people assume that they know what it means to grow fruit or grow produce and they have the basics of it, but there’s so many things we do that are necessary to the process to put high quality, fresh produce onto the market. And I think a lot of people are unaware of that. And I think some of the things that we have to do in that process people find very inconvenient. And I would love for people to understand we’re not doing it to inconvenience anybody, but it’s part of what we have to do. We don’t have a choice. This is how it works and we do it because it’s necessary.

Miller: What’s an example of the tensions you’re talking about between an industrial scale agricultural operation and say nearby homes?

Tamura: I think two big examples. One right now is our frost season. Our frost fans are very loud. They’re large engines, there are towers that are high up in the sky, and it creates noise. Some people have described it as sounding like a plane is taking off or landing near them. And in Hood River, especially where we have residential homes nestled right next to commercial orchards, they’re going to be hearing that at night. And we’ve had people say to us, can’t you run those during the day? We say, no, that’s not how it works. The cold temperatures are overnight. That’s when the trees need to be kept warm enough to protect the buds.

Miller: So to them it sounds like planes landing and to you it sounds like the possibility of pears in the fall.

Tamura: Exactly. It’s the difference between having a crop to harvest later in the year or not having a crop at all.

Miller: Sarah, I want to move on to the fourth movement, which is about toilets and the sewer system.

Fox: Wastewater management.

Miller: Yeah. Why?

Fox: I mean, OK, so three years ago I found myself sitting across from a former city manager and I couldn’t help but be like, ‘what the heck does a city manager really do?’ And so I asked, and she told me the many, many things that they do. But I was like, ‘listen, I’m not going to be able to sell this at a dinner party. What’s the one thing that every city really needs to keep running?’ And she leans in, and she looks at me, she says, “You really want to know?” And I was like, ‘I really want to know.’

Miller: No, you can’t handle the truth.

Fox: Yeah. Lay it on me. She goes, “Wastewater management.” And then she goes on to explain why this thing that is so mundane, even though we all experience [it], is really the underpinnings of all of our lives, our schools, our businesses, our homes. And I thought, by God, this is the thing that connects every single one of us. And as someone who cares about showing people how they’re connected and how we’re in this together, I was like, this is my golden egg, here. And so I knew at that moment, at some point I would want a song written about wastewater management and this project finally made it happen.

Miller: Unlike the other parts that we’ve talked about so far that have, whether it’s a wildlife biologist or a linguist or a pear grower and you have their actual interviews and then you had Eric and Leila have music with that. Here you went in a different direction. So what did you do?

Fox: I felt the sell on this was going to be a little bit trickier, and I knew from the get-go. There’s a woman in the Forge, her name is Molly Schwartz, and I was like, if anyone can convince people of the importance of wastewater management, it’s Molly. And so she was one of the first people I talked to and I said, ‘this is my idea. This is what I want to do. I want to show people how important this is. Are you on board?’ And she was, and she wrote the lyrics and they’re incredible. And I said, there’s one other thing that I really want. I think there needs to be a Wastewater Wizard. And I, because I spent a lot of time paying attention to what’s going on and I had been to a local choir concert where I could not take my eyes off this one man who seemed to be having the best time. And I thought, that guy at some point I want to work with.

Miller: Oh, he was performing.

Fox: He was performing.

Miller: You didn’t just go for the person who was clapping the most in the audience.

Fox: No, no. He was in the back row singing and I was like, who is this guy? And I ended up finding out who he was. And so when it came time to figure out who our Wastewater Wizard was I was like, I got to find that guy. And fortunately, Marcos Galvez said, “I’m on board,” and so he’s our Wastewater Wizard, and the two of them together, I think, tell this story in a way that nobody will forget. And my hope when I spoke with Eric about the music, I said, “I want a hook that people are singing as they walk out the door at night.” And I can tell you over the past months of hearing this song and seeing our different musicians and singers play it, it hooks in people’s ears.

Miller: And you were generous enough to give us a recording of a recent rehearsal. It’s a little bit hard to hear some of the fastest parts of the lyrics. So can you give us a sense for what we should be listening for? What is happening that these two characters are going to be singing about?

Fox: So the Wastewater Wizard is trying to convince Molly, our sort of socialite, that this is worth paying attention to. And so they’re going into the city and kind of going down underground and learning about all this amazing stuff that’s happening under all our feet.

Miller: Let’s have a listen.

[Music playing]

Molly Schwartz [singing]:

You’re not picking up what you’re putting down.

There’s a city at work underneath this town.

All we do is go to and fro without a thought to what goes down below.

Marcos Galvez [singing]: When the pipes don’t flow, when things get slow,

They clog the big end and dig out the mud.

Schwartz:

I have kids and they’re all boys, down the pipes with endless toys.

I hear you now about the poop and the pee.

The wipes were my bad, obviously.

Galvez:

They’ve been getting number one. It raises the work and clogs.

It takes the pipe that’s made to swipe and turns it upsettingly small.

It clogs and clogs as days not rain,

Work and struggle and drain.

It was just a simple clog and that might just be all.

One, two, three, four, don’t put grease down the drain,

It creates such a strain.

Don’t put grease down the drain…

Miller: Sarah, maybe this is like a who’s your favorite child kind of a question, but do you have a favorite moment from this whole work, from this nearly hour-long project?

Fox: There are a couple spots where, like ‘606 and Movement 2′ video, there’s just a turn of phrase, of musical phrase, that I really loved. There’s a certain guitar solo that I really love, but I honestly think for me, some of the most exciting moments are when I have seen the thing that I hoped for from the beginning, which is people who may not have been previously connected, connecting. People who may not have known each other’s stories sharing them. When I see those moments come to life and something that Lesley shared with me comes to me and then comes to Eric and comes to Leila and comes to our musicians, and all of a sudden her story is being shared in the language of all these different people. For me, those are the moments where I feel like we’ve been successful and done the thing that I hoped we could do.

Miller: How did you get everybody to take part? I mean, I understand that some people are getting a small amount of money here, but they’re also a bunch of volunteers, and this is, it’s a big production.

Fox: Yeah, for me, it’s really important, especially growing up with creative parents, to do everything I can to not ask creative people to donate their time. And so one of my jobs was really to try to raise some funds so that I could pay people and no one will get what any of us deserve, but that was important. I honestly think that people getting on board both as performers, but also in the donations that we got, which I never expected as many from the community as we did, is really a reflection of how much this sort of thing is needed.

When I was asking the initial questions that prompted this, how do we tell lots of stories in unique ways? How do we get new audiences in the theater? How do we have some fun? Those were things that I see as losing some in our culture. And so I want to try to, in my own little way, put that back in. And I think the fact that so many different people, from fourth-generation orchardists to musicians, to biologists, to tribal members, to community members who donated money, all of their enthusiasm for this project over the past year is evidence that this kind of thing is wanted. And so I think getting them on board was really just giving the opportunity for that point of connection and joy and storytelling that people want.

Miller: You mentioned Oregon Humanities at the beginning of our interview. Earlier this week, we talked with the executive director of Oregon Humanities about the out of nowhere email they got saying that their federal funding for the next two years has been eliminated. What has Oregon Humanities meant for the work you’ve done, the work you’re doing right now?

Fox: Their fellowship… so they selected me as a Community Storytelling Fellow in 2024, and that was huge, because there were these questions that I was struggling to answer and ways that I was trying to improve how I produce and do my job, because I care very deeply about how I tell the stories that are shared with me. And I’ve been wrangling with, how can I do this better? And that fellowship, they gave me the chance to try something new and to take a risk. And for a year, multiple different staff people backed me up with these crazy ideas. And when I said, I want to do this thing that we agreed to do and I want to do a little bit more, and they said, “We’re on board, how can we help?”

And I think the humanities, it’s so often difficult because it’s not this hard and fast black and white thing to sell. But the humanities in that type of work and what we’re doing here is that glue that holds people together, is that thing that creates a sense of community. And when I pull way back, I am highly motivated when I see our U.S. Surgeon General saying, “We have an epidemic of loneliness.” When I see Robert Putnam’s book “Bowling Alone” getting republished and then talking about how the community is not sticking together, that’s big scale stuff. And I’m never going to make a huge difference on a grand scale, but in my own little way in this community with people I care about, those are the kind of things in the back of my mind and in my support of things like the humanities.

Miller: Let’s hear one last part. This is “Moonify.” This is the end of it. Sarah, what should we know about the sort of the final piece of this circle?

Fox: Movement five gets started off by a Gorge resident named Terrie Brigham, who I’ve known for a while and it’s important to me and to her that she and her storytelling, as a Tribal fisherwoman, but she is so much more than that and you hear some about that. But she really characterized the fifth movement for us as a sense of coming home and a sense of belonging. And so you hear her voice first, but then you also hear from all the other voices we’ve heard before as a reminder of how we connect a place and how we connect to each other.

Miller: And this clip that we have, from this part of it, in addition to the chorus, this is from a rehearsal. Again you’ll also once again hear Thomas Morning Owl.

[Music playing and chorus singing.]

Thomas Morning Owl:

The ending is not an ending.

The cloud becomes the rain,

Rain becomes the rivers,

Clear back to the beginning.

Watersheds are all around us.

We are only a part of it,

And that will never change.

Miller: Sarah, Lesley, Eric, and Leila, thanks so much.

Fox: Thank you, Dave.

Tamura: Thank you.

L. Kaneda: Thank you.

E. Kaneda: Thank you.

Miller: Sarah Fox is a producer of the new Watershed Rock Opera which premieres tomorrow in Hood River. Lesley Tamura is a pear grower and the owner of Tamura Orchards. Eric Kaneda is the composer and arranger of this new multimedia extravaganza. Leila Kaneda is the musical director and one of the percussionists.

Contact “Think Out Loud®”

If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983. The call-in phone number during the noon hour is 888-665-5865.