The Dalles, population 16,000, sits in an eighty-mile-long gulch formally known as the Columbia River Gorge, but everyone here refers to it simply as the Gorge. Although it’s only 85 miles east of rainy Portland, The Dalles lies on the dry side of the dividing line between wet western Oregon and the arid country of the east. Just 20 miles to the west, in the rain- and snow-shadow of the Cascade Mountains, moss and evergreens grow on the Gorge’s walls above the town of Hood River. Once a sawmill hub, Hood River now runs on tourism; downtown, you can find a Fjällräven boutique, a place for facials called the Hood River Skin Bar, and psychics who will tell your fortune and sell you your birthstone.

The Dalles, however, sits in a high desert. Although the Columbia runs right past it and is filled with more than a million salmon, The Dalles gets only 14 inches of precipitation a year. Two summers ago, the temperature reached 118 degrees. Little more than scrub brush grows around The Dalles, and the Gorge’s constant west wind blows tumbleweed up against the fence lines in the industrial district. In wintertime, everything here—the scrub brush, the ground it grows from, and the volcanic rock that forms the Gorge’s walls—are all the same dull matte brown color of stale gingerbread.

With a climate and a landscape unfit for tourism, as the 20th century became the 21st The Dalles found itself on the wrong side of more than just green and brown Oregon. Unlike Hood River, it was still stuck in the old economy. In 1958, Harvey Aluminum had built a huge smelter in The Dalles. Harvey became a serial polluter, but at its peak the smelter employed one in eight of the city’s adult population. Like so many American factories, however, the smelter began to falter in the 1980s. After several different owners, it closed for good in 2000. People remember those years here in negative superlatives.

“Our town was dying,” city council member Darcy Long says.

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Whatever the reason, experts who study interactions between small towns and big corporations say that while the dealings between the two are often one-sided, the relationship between Google and The Dalles is unusually dysfunctional and lopsided.

“It really is one of the more egregious instances of corporations and public officials colluding to keep really important information about public resources away from the public,” says Pat Garofalo, director of state and local policy at the American Economic Liberties Project, which works to reduce corporate influence in politics and the economy. “Secrecy has been normalized to such an extent that corporations try to keep things hidden that are patently ridiculous.”

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