Like many news outlets, it’s a matter of routine that we at the Wallowa County Chieftain fix our gaze backward whenever a year flips forward. Locally, the departure of 2014 will be no exception to this, and the Chieftain’s yearly recap will appear, as it always does, in the first issue printed in January. For 2015, that’s Jan. 7.

Until then, people who regularly follow the news in Wallowa County probably won’t have much difficulty calling to mind the year’s largest local story. Or, if they don’t happen to agree that it merits the “largest story” label, they’ll be very hard-pressed to deny the event at least presented the largest spectacle.

We’re talking here about the Feb. 8 fire that destroyed Lostine’s South Fork Grange Hall and the portion of Lostine business Norton Welding that was housed in the same building.

Fire departments from Wallowa, Enterprise and Joseph all rolled out on the emergency while Lostine’s own small volunteer contingent mounted an ineffective effort to contain the blaze. By the time the out-of-towners could arrive over icy roads, what they confronted was an unquenchable inferno.

Six months later fire struck another service organization’s important community venue, the Elks Lodge in Enterprise. Thanks to an alert pedestrian who detected and promptly reported the late-night blaze inside the Lodge, the Enterprise Fire Department was able to arrive in time to save the structure.

Still, recovery for the Enterprise Elks has been a slow process, calling for selfless toil and other contributions from members to repair the Lodge’s significant interior damage. The organization, which today has but a fraction of the membership total that it boasted in its heyday, appears to be meeting the challenge, though, and the Elks Lodge should reopen.

Down the road in Lostine, meanwhile, the South Fork Grange’s future is a little more murky. The Lostine-based group, a much smaller organization than the Enterprise Elks, will presumably continue to operate because the community values it, but at present the Grange has no hall.

Much like the long-established volunteer service groups throughout the rest of rural America, those in Wallowa County struggle ever harder just to remain viable. Nearly every rural community has its own tale to tell of certain local events that may have hastened the decline.

In this light, and since we happen to be looking back anyway, let’s cast a spotlight not only on year 2014, but on the one that concluded 20 years ago – for it was during 1994 that Wallowa County sustained more or less permanent economic injury as two of three sawmills that were operating here when that year began, permanently shut down. Lost were well over a hundred positions of direct employment at the mills along with the untold number of other jobs fueled by mill employees’ local spending.

Following decimation of an industry that supported so many families, aging of the population began to take off and the phenomenon hasn’t abated. The county’s median age, which reached 44.4 years in 2000, climbed to 50.5 by 2012, the most recent year for which this U.S. Census Bureau measurement is available.

Whether you’re considering the situation as it affects a service organization, a fire department, or any other small-town volunteer group, recruiting only gets harder as the pool of prospective recruits grows grayer. Returning to our routine year-end reflections on merely the previous 12 months, maybe we shouldn’t train our thoughts only on what has happened. Perhaps we should also think about something that needs to occur but apparently hasn’t still.

What, if anything, has been going on to help reverse our most ominous demographic trend? –RCR