The Greater Idaho movement is getting more press than it could have hoped for — and maybe more than it deserved. Recent accounts in The New York Times and Washington Post have highlighted the election victories of the movement in many Eastern Oregon counties, including one — by seven votes — in Wallowa County. Our commissioners had their first required meeting to discuss joining Idaho — the intent of the vote measure — which apparently went off without rancor. I did not attend.

But an American born in Salem, Oregon, and repatriated to France for 50 years, came home to see what was going on in his birth state, and somehow landed on me as an interviewee. He’d just come from the commissioners’ meeting in Ontario and had already interviewed a few people in the county. He was on the edge of giving up the project.

I told him about former speaker of the Oregon House of Representatives Mark Simmons’ appearance in Enterprise to promote Greater Idaho. How he had responded to questions about Idaho’s lax land-use laws and the mall-sprawl from Ontario to Boise along I-84 — he thought we might grandfather Oregon laws. That one of his arguments for rural Oregon joining Idaho was that we would help “save Idaho” from Blue Boise. Finally, Simmons argued that the whole thing was really about Salem and Western Oregon, “listening” to what we in the East —and in rural Oregon generally—have to say.

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Old friend and longtime Oregonian columnist Jonathan Nicholas was here last week with a group of Peace Corps volunteers he’d served with in Nepal 50 years ago. He had a delightful time showing them the Wallowa Mountains, Hells Canyon, the East Moraine, the Zumwalt Prairie and the Nez Perce Wallowa Homeland, all of which he had lauded during his years at The Oregonian.

We talked long about Cycle Oregon and its five trips through the county. Jonathan was one of Cycle Oregon’s founders, and made sure that the trips through the county were frequent, with overnights at Wallowa Lake, Joseph High School and the golf course in Enterprise. Sometimes they stayed an extra day so that people could ramble and spend, and always local groups—Rotary and Lions clubs, high school sports teams and cheerleaders — served meals, hauled bags and earned money for our causes.

And many of us could — and did — apply for Cycle Oregon grants. These moneys helped fund the Nez Perce Homeland in early days, rebuilt the Joseph High School track and rehabbed the fairgrounds in neighboring Halfway. And Cycle Oregon brought people from across the world — and mostly from Western Oregon — to our doors.

(Earlier this year, Cycle Oregon announced that this fall’s weeklong “classic” long ride through rural patches of the state will be its last. It will continue with smaller, shorter and cheaper rides.)

Even before Cycle Oregon, Jonathan and The Oregonian had played big in my life. When I let him know that The Bookloft was for sale in 1988, he wrote it in his column and Mary Swanson read it and bought the store. When we started Fishtrap, Jonathan covered that and helped bring Oregonians from across the state to our annual Wallowa Lake writers’ conference.

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Having arrived in the county in 1971 with the Oregon State University Extension Service, I have always felt that we were an important part of the state: county fairs, state fair, 4-H summer camps at OSU and a parade of agricultural specialists that were at our beck and call.

That feeling was never stronger than when Dr. Lowell Euhus gathered a group to come up with a plan to keep the Family Practice Residency program from Oregon Health Sciences University here. At a meeting a few years prior, he’d complained that he and Scott Siebe were the only docs in the county, that they were trying to cover everything, and they were dying. The OHSU rep said that he’d solve the problem that day, and right then made a mandatory two-month rural residency part of the Family Practice Residency regime at the med school.

The school paid the rent for a few years, and was asking us to pick it up. Lowell’s ad hoc group came up with a plan: Mick Courtney donated a lot, local contractors stepped up to volunteer and, with grants from West-side Meyer Trust and Oregon Community Foundation, we built the “doctors’ house” on the hill above Enterprise. At a recent appointment, my OHSU rural resident told me she was staying at the house, and we talked about the impact that has had on medical practice here — some of our docs were part of it — and across rural Oregon.

We have often depended on the people and the cash from Western Oregon to help us sustain our communities, and sometimes, as in the case of rural medicine, Western Oregon has listened to us.

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The two primary spokesmen for the Greater Idaho movement, as described in the papers, are recent immigrants from Western Oregon. Some of the signs I see on houses here seem to indicate recent arrivals. I guess that they are people who feel left out — or left behind in a world that is becoming browner, a world where women are becoming stronger and a world where all of us are struggling with remedies for drugs and gun violence, and all of us are looking for meaning in our lives.

But — I wonder too about the rise of social media and the loss of a statewide newspaper that helped knit us together. That provided a communication link that Mark Simmons says we’re missing and that Jonathan Nicholas and The Oregonian once helped provide.