Rich Wandschneider

And five cats and a dog. The dog for companionship, the cats — one per acre — to help keep ground squirrels and other rodents under control.

Fifty-one years ago next month, we moved to Wallowa County. My first job was in the Extension office, then on the second floor of the courthouse at the corner of River and Main streets in Enterprise. I was there for five years.

Ben Weathers had a column in this paper called “Fifty Years on Main Street,” and an office in what is now the Bookloft, where I spent my next 12 working years. When we started Fishtrap, we moved up and down Main Street, borrowing office space — and computer space in those early years of the devices — from Ralph Swinehart and Wallowa Mountain Engineering. Fishtrap and I moved to Grant Street for a few years, but I’ve been back on Main Street in Joseph for more than a dozen years. Fifty-one years on or close to Main Street.

We didn’t know it in 1971, but we were part of a large movement of young people across the country that some called “back-to-the-land.” And, indeed, in 1972 we bought the 5 acres with an old house with ramshackle small milking barn and other sheds and lean-tos on Alder Slope. We thought we were making our own unique path, but with the cookbooks we bought, the subscription to Mother Earth News and the numbers of young newcomers who were streaming into the county, we soon realized that we were part of an army of back-to-the-landers who were leaving cities for small towns and rural counties.

Over the next years we stacked straw bales around the house without a foundation, fussed with a pump that pulled water from a shallow well in the swamp — that we now call “wetlands” — and turned one of the sheds into a “bunkhouse” for visitors.

And for a play place for the two boys we adopted. They had run of the land and buildings, rode the bus up and down the hill to school, and made a stab at 4-H sheep rearing. (Years later Matt would tell me that the reason the buck sheep charged him when we walked into the barn was that he and some friends had done some rodeoing on his back.)

I had dreams of profiting from a large garden, but the only profit I remember is trading raspberries for honey with another young family up the road. We got plenty of our own apples, pie cherries, plums and eggs and a bountiful corn harvest made for some great Alder Slope feeds. Bring your own beer and we’d provide all the corn you could eat. Selling fruits and vegetables proved a hollow dream — although the few thousand dollars in lambs, wool and government wool subsidies made some mortgage payments.

About the time we had our first son, I left my salaried job at Extension, and we started a bookstore. House payments were $120 a month, a doctor’s visit was $5, and we cut our own firewood. Judy started baking cookies and breads to sell in the store, and when the kids hit school age opened “Judy’s Kitchen” behind the bookstore. The courthouse lawn was their after-school playground.

And then we’d go back up the Slope, feed the animals, stoke the stove, do homework and make ready for the next day. We sometimes walked through snow and carried kids and groceries on sleds up the hill to the house. The pump broke down with cold weather, and the chimney blew off in a storm. Ewes didn’t wait for good weather to lamb and didn’t always want to be mothers. Skunks got into the chickens, and a hornets’ nest in the chicken coop exploded on Matt when he went to pick up eggs.

It’s easy to remember the good times, and to laugh now at the hard times and empty bank accounts. Looking back on it, the camaraderie of that army of young people — the food co-op we started, the Day Camp, ski run, kids’ soccer and baseball, town team basketball, the arts council and even a failed run at county commissioner that were all talked over in Judy’s Kitchen — was the glue that kept some of us here, and melded us into the community.

There’s a new army of back-to-the-landers now, young people looking for green grass, blue waters, high mountains and a place to raise kids. Your hurdles won’t be ours — but you’ll have ‘em. Long, rainy springs like this one. The lack of racial and cultural diversity that salt and peppered your college lives. Hours to airports and family far away.

Hang in there. Summer will come, and good friends along the way will help you climb those hurdles.