115. Social Capital

A friend sent me Christopher Ingraham’s February article from the Washington Post on “social capital.” 

“communities with high amounts of interconnectedness and communal trust — what experts call social capital — experienced less severe coronavirus outbreaks in 2020,” he says.

“In communities with large reserves of social capital, people trust their institutions and their neighbors. They belong to civic organizations such as churches, Elks clubs and bowling leagues. They help each other in times of crisis.”

Ingraham also notes that social capital is easier to find in rural areas. Of course! Wallowa County, once a Democratic bastion, voted for Trump; we have a number of Christian churches that are skeptical of liberal social tendencies; and we are definitely falling behind the nation and our own state in the percentage of people who are vaccinated. But we all get along in most ways with those politically, socially, and religiously different from us—because we share schools, sports teams, the ski run, Wallowa Lake, the rivers and mountains, Senior Meals, Safeway, the Grain Growers, Post Offices, doctors, a hospital. And we look out for each other when a house burns, cancer strikes a neighbor or the covid hits. 

It makes sense that our independent minded citizens, many with conservative and government skeptical views, are not jumping to a 70 percent vaccination rate. And that social capital accounts for our low rates of Covid infection and of Covid-related deaths. 

Add the fact we live and work outdoors more than those in the average American city or even small town, and it is increasingly clear that Covid infections are much less likely to travel in the great outdoors. We like our outdoors because there is a lot to like; most visitors come here because of it, and some people move here because of it! And now we have another reason—which we kind of knew all along: it is healthier.

In the end, although our vaccinations are not at 70 percent, we’re rural and outdoorsy, and well over 70 percent of us are civil and nice to each other.

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114. And the World Goes on....

Las Vegas, short on water, is imposing a ban on “useless grass.” Brown lawns and alternative plant-scaping are popular in rainy Portland. John Wesley Powell said—over 100 years ago—that most of the West was dry and unfit for agriculture. He thought that much of the West should be left to “barbarous” Indians, who could make their way in it. Powell, like many men of science in his day, was racist; he divided the world’s peoples into the savage, the barbarous, and the civilized. His views on land-use hold up better than his views on race and culture. 

Drought conditions continue to plague the West, CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising, global temperatures making the same upward ride, and we are bracing for another big wildfire season. 

Meanwhile, economies are “opening,” the local restaurants are full, and the license plates on Main Street in Joseph say North Carolina, Alaska, and Texas as well as the familiar Idaho and Washington. 

House prices in our state and county continue to rise with the temperature. There are large new houses on the hill outside of Enterprise; it’s been platted for years, but the urban-suburban flight seems to have ignited development now. There is also a new housing development of over forty lots at the edge of Joseph. 

Covid-19 itself, morphing and mutating as it reaches the farthest corners of the globe, is still here. Like water flowing downhill, Covid follows paths towards human density and poverty There are talks and plans about getting vaccine to these global hot spots, but it’s a daunting task; there are so many of them in Central and South America, in India, Malaysia. Some of the smaller countries that had escaped the first waves with strict practices of distancing masking, and isolating have opened up to economics—and the Covid. 

In our own country the vaccine deniers and resisters are still with us. And although the numbers of infections and deaths continue a downward trend, the disease is still here, and still mutating. Are the continuing Covid deaths totally or largely among the unvaccinated? I’ve not seen any statistics on that. 

Unfortunately, even if statistics showed that the vaccinated are not getting sick and not dying, while much higher numbers of the unvaccinated are, it would probably move into more rancor. 

We remain stubbornly divided. 

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113. Spectator

Spectator

As this pandemic winds down in Oregon and the US, it occurs to me that I’ve been living in a fantasy land, a place removed from the major traumas of the disease and its oil-spill-like spread across the country. Sure, it came close when my grandson brought it back from Portland, but friends and the local medical community rallied around and we moved on.

And yes, a few people I know have died, but they were elderly, and specific circumstances in each case make them anomalies. Here in our high-mountain, low-population perch, we’ve largely gone about our business. The low population density, the fact that our agriculture is ranching and grain and not row-crop, and the fact that many of us live outdoors as much as we can regardless of Covid, have helped insulate us from the disease’s worst runs in neighboring places. I.e. We do not have farm-labor crews traveling in tight vans and living in cramped housing; we do not have french-fry or other ag-business industries. 

The community responded by supporting restaurants with take-out, and we bundled and ate outside when we could. Builders—outside workers—have kept busy remodeling second homes and building new ones for urban escapees, and we wait in line for plumbers and electricians.

It’s like the 1840s when the Oregon Trail marched by a mountain ridge to the west; the Wallowa Valley Nez Perce, the wålwa'ma band, were not pressed by settlers from the nearby Grande Ronde Valley until the 1870s, almost a full generation after the missionaries and first settlers had traipsed along the Trail. 

The Covid has not made a similar run at us, and we sit here, somewhat smug, in relative safety in a stormy world—just as our country comes now to a sense of normalcy and smugness about it as the big world outside rages with Covid, drought, fire, and other signs of the biblical apocalypse.

It’s happened before, and we’ve been dragged into the muddle in 1914, 1941, etc., in Europe and Korea and Vietnam, war intertwined with influenza, drugs, and PTSD. The all-volunteer military has un-democratized war, so that only a handful—a small percentage of us—has been impacted by Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and “traumatic brain injury.” Like Afghan TBI, NFL TBI comes to us remotely. 

But there is a world out there, a world of wars, natural disasters, climate change and refugees—and Covid, still raging across South America, India, and now Malaysia. It’s sometimes hard to reconcile being a spectator in such a time and place. And I wonder whether it will creep back weeks or months from now—maybe with a returning Volunteer soldier. 

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