But like many other rural towns across America, Harrah, Inaba's hometown, is a ghost of what it once was. First the bank went, then the hardware store and the pharmacy. And then, the roof on the only café collapsed under a heavy snow during the winter of 1996.
The café is often the heart of a small rural town. It's where people meet not just to visit and drink coffee. "There's a lot of business done there," says Inaba. If the heart goes, so does the community.
So Inaba, hop grower Gary Morford, Dale Meshke, and a number of others formed a 501c3 nonprofit corporation called "The Friends of Harrah" and started calling people. Within four hours, they raised $10,000. Eventually they raised more than $60,000 in cash and in-kind donations. They set up the old pharmacy as the new café, hired back the former manager, and now meet for lunch, and do business, in Harrah's new heart.
But even such a dramatic effort cannot halt the impetus of change. Rural towns disappear not just because Costco offers a better deal on groceries in the nearby city, but because people are leaving. Farmers get tired of competing with Chilean asparagus and Mexican strawberries and beating their heads against an economic wall. They give in to inevitability and sell the place to a bigger neighbor, or a developer.
"It's sad to see your neighbors go out," says Inaba. "They've been in there for generations, and all of a sudden they're gone.
"That's kind of the way everything's going, you know. Everybody wants cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. I don't see how the American farmer is going to be the least-cost producer."
No matter who or what you want to blame-predatory pricing, vertical integration, foreign competition, globalization, urban sprawl-the fact of the matter is, rural America is packing it in. At least the rural America of our memory, or imagination.
"It used to be that rural areas were thought of as stable and unchanging," says WSU rural sociologist and demographer Annabel Kirschner, who tracks population trends in Washington state.
In contrast to many areas in the Great Plains, Washington's rural counties for the most part are not dramatically losing population overall. Retirees and urban refugees love the low cost of living in Ferry and Okanogan counties. But no matter how civic minded, no matter how good they are for the tax base, there's one thing that retirees don't add to a community. Youth.
One trend that concerns Kirschner is the out-migration of young adults. It used to be a kid from Ferry or Adams or Okanogan county would graduate from high school and go off to Washington State College to get his degree. And then, like the Inabas, he'd go home and help dad farm. Or work at the family elevator or hardware.
And some still do. But now the farms are larger and more mechanized. There just isn't a need for as many new farmers.
There's an interesting genre of writing that has gained visibility of late. Led by farmer/professor Wendell Berry, the genre extols the virtue of local agriculture. The genre is often inspiring and vital, sometimes sanctimonious and needling, always intriguing. Some critics are calling this the new agrarianism. I call it pastoralism.
The pastoral in English literature seems to resurge whenever there is a migration from country to city, says WSU Shakespeare scholar Will Hamlin. Shakespeare, who presented the pastoral so well, wrote at a time of enclosure in England, when the rich landholders fenced their fields, eliminating the commons, driving many peasants to the city.
Hamlin perceives two primary themes in pastoral literature, nostalgia and social criticism of the city and the court. Pastoral works often extol the good old days, a better place and time, a golden age, a green world of greater harmony, when you could eat good cheese made by a local shepherd and pick your fruit right from the tree, a time when kids worked hard on the farm and loved it and all the neighbors looked out for each other and everyone went to church on Sunday morning and politicians were statesmen instead of crooks.
It's not only a literary genre that reflects this pastoral impulse. Master Gardeners, with its emphasis on building community, has turned into something of a social movement across the country since its inception at WSU 30 years ago. Also, people flock to farmers markets. Seattle now has 14 farmers markets in addition to Pike Place Market. Spokane residents flock on weekends to the Greenbluff area north of town to experience a little rural life, pick apples, drink cider, observe real farm animals, talk to real farm people.
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