OUTSIDE JOB

SHAWN VIRGILLO HAS ALWAYS LOVED the outdoors. He grew up among farms and forests in Astoria, Oregon, near where the Columbia River empties into the Pacific. He used to make regular trips to the state’s eastern border to fish on the Snake River, and would roll down his car window to catch the bitter, citrusy scent of sagebrush baking in the high-desert sun. He was wild about that smell.

Now Virgillo lives just a few miles from the river, but he likely won’t fish again until 2022. For two years he’s been among the 200 inmates in the minimum-security section of the Snake River Correctional Institution, Oregon’s biggest prison. Virgillo was convicted of assault in 2017. He knew the officers who arrested him from his work in the event-security business. It was humiliating. “I never, ever expected myself a bad person,” he says. “I made a mistake.”

On a cold November morning, Virgillo is back outside—escorted by a corrections officer. Dressed in denim-and-neon-yellow uniforms stamped inmate, he and 10 other prisoners walk out the front door, through a perimeter gate, around the corner to a greenhouse. At workbenches they find a familiar rhythm, leavening their labor with ribbing and inside jokes. Deftly they rap the edges of conical containers to knock loose the contents: healthy gray-green seedlings of Wyoming big sagebrush.

Gnarled and drab, this subspecies rarely reaches more than a few feet tall. The plant may not inspire awe like a redwood or saguaro, but it defines its landscape as much as those giants do. Sagebrush is the cornerstone of an ecosystem that supports more than 350 animal