Heres the deal.

That Wallowa County is beautiful is a no-brainer. The mountains, the waters, the trees, the wildlife, the snow, the canyons, the sunshine, the seasons, and the grass-carpeted valley floors all within a rural county with 7,000 people and no stoplights are both easy on the eyes and atypical.

Atypical because our end-of-the-road location is a buffer from mans propensity to taint and stain.

But that, inevitably, will change.

Not all, but some things are out of our control. For instance, more than half of Wallowa County is owned by the federal government which seems unable profitably to manage what should be an incredible asset: timber on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Instead of proactively generating much-needed jobs to selectively thin, harvest, and mill wood from that forest, the government has taken the Neanderthal-type approach of doing nothing until its time to empty public coffers fighting forest fires.

But some things are under our control and have been for years.

I remember many years back, when forced to sit through county planning commission meetings that challenged Father Time in length, when county leaders plotted how Wallowa County should grow.

On more than one occasion, I told the planning director at the time, Bill Oliver, that he had the toughest job in the county.

That was about the time the Wallowa County Natural Resource Advisory Committee was formed to draft the ingenious Salmon Plan, and some solid groundwork was laid.

But somethings not working.

We live in this gorgeous environment, super groundwork for growth and expansion was drafted and implemented, and yet nearly every other house and business in our towns has a For Sale sign plastered on it.

Pointing fingers at such unaccountable entities as the Forest Service might be emotionally gratifying, but does absolutely nothing to resolve the problem thats reached a point where local food banks basically were barren before winter set in.

But thats an alarmist viewpoint, right? Common sense says to close our eyes, smoke another cigarette, crank the volume on Monday Night Football, and ride out the storm.

But something has to give, and suddenly theres a golden opportunity to capitalize on our biggest asset, Wallowa Countys overall beauty.

For more than a decade the Wallowa County Board of Commissioners, as a whole, has taken heat for spending millions of dollars to purchase an abandoned 63-mile railroad line between Joseph and Elgin. That heat sizzled even hotter when a decision was made to store ugly railroad cars for two years all along the Wallowa Valley floor to pay back the loan used to buy that abandoned line.

Lets face it, reality says that our little secret about The Little Switzerland of America will become known, and maybe it should.

And maybe now is the time.

Within the past few weeks the Wallowa Union Railroad Authority, which owns the 63-mile railroad line and right-of-way, has put on the table the idea of constructing a pedestrian/bicycle trail within that corridor.

Lets see, if bicyclists routinely leave 20 percent more coins along their paths than other tourists (as studies repeatedly document) and our food banks are getting barer and barer, maybe its time to pull away from Monday Night Football at least during commercials and scratch our heads.

And thats not the type of head-scratching that should be left to anyone but yourself.

Public meetings are on the horizon and Id guess somewhere in the dusty annals of history there are times when citizens from a democracy have accessed their inherited powers to defy inertia and protect their own.

Jabberwock II columnist Rocky Wilson is a reporter for the Chieftain.