Dozens of Wallowa County residents braved wind-chill temperatures this past weekend to ask themselves the question posed by this year’s Winter Fishtrap workshop: “Can We Talk?”

Huddled together in Fishtrap’s downtown Enterprise headquarters (with some participating online), one of the things they learned was that “Can We Talk?” probably was the wrong question.

The better question is this: Can we listen?

The 2024 edition of Winter Fishtrap couldn’t have been more timely. Nationally, as you likely have heard, polarization is on the rise — and it’s not likely to lessen as we head into the new year, which features a particularly fraught election.

Wallowa County likes to think it’s above the fray. It prides itself on being a place where residents can work through their disagreements — in part because the county is so remote, so rural, that we have to rely on each other, regardless of what our opinion is on the latest hot issue. And there’s more than a grain of truth to that.

But the county is not immune to polarization. To that end, one of the highlights of Winter Fishtrap was a panel discussion featuring three county residents who have been in the midst of contentious issues over the last few years. One of the participants, Beth Estock, the pastor at Joseph United Methodist Church, is a relative newcomer to the county, having taken the post some 18 months ago.

Estock started her new job, she said, with a series of conversations, to get the feel of the place. In each conversation, she asked the same question: If you could change one thing about Wallowa County, what would it be?

Every person answered the question in the same way: We seem to have become more divisive, and that’s not good.

But it was inevitable. Despite its relative isolation, Wallowa County still is subject to the same forces that are driving divisiveness nationally, and other panelists pointed to those forces: Chantay Jett, another panelist and the executive director of the Wallowa Valley Center for Wellness, pointed to the isolating effects of social media, which tend to push people into smaller and smaller silos — silos that are open only to people who believe the same things.

A third panelist, Nils Christoffersen of Wallowa Resources, identified another factor: “There’s a sense of anxiety about the rate of change that’s taking place. And it’s elevated by the sense that individuals don’t feel like they have control or influence or agency over that change.”

So, after a series of large — and contentious — meetings on hot topics, Christoffersen said he held follow-up conversations one-on-one with some of the participants in the larger meetings. Those conversations turned out to be productive sessions: “We were just trying to share where we were coming from so that we can understand each other better.”

These conversations aren’t debates. They require that people listen to each other. Sometimes — a lot of times, it seems like — it’s easy to forget about that, to be racing ahead to the next brilliant point that you want to make.

Listening takes time. It requires a commitment to go slow, in Jett’s words. It’s not easy. We don’t have as much practice in it as we used to.

Wallowa County would seem to be in an ideal position to stage a listening renaissance. We can understand that a person with whom we disagree on that issue or this one remains a neighbor and a friend — and that we share considerable common ground.

“Can We Talk?” — even if its title asked the wrong question — was a timely reminder of that fundamental truth.