Worry in the wheat belt

WILBUR, Lincoln County — Dave Beaver can hear echoes of the Great Depression. In the ground beneath his feet.

It is 950 rolling acres of dust and sage. It seems a minor miracle he gets anything to grow on it, let alone lush fields of green alfalfa or golden wheat.

On a recent warm evening, the 47-year-old farmer was supervising alfalfa baling and telling me how the faltering economy is pushing him to the brink. Energy costs are so high he's selling this year's wheat at a loss.

Then there's his lifeline: an operating loan at a local bank he uses to sustain his family until the crops come in.

"I can see how it could all start to steamroll," he said. "You take some losses here and there. Credit freezes up. Then your bank goes down. It could get real tough in a hurry."

It happened before, he says, right here. It turns out this farm was foreclosed on back in the 1930s. The local Bank of Wilbur took the land in a loan default and has kept it to this day (Beaver leases it in a sharecropping arrangement).

The Great Depression shaped much of this region's farmland ownership. Seventy-five years later, the offshoot of that tiny Bank of Wilbur still owns nearly 25 square miles — about the size of Redmond and Kirkland combined.

That history makes the threat of new hard times seem more real.

"With the banks under so much pressure, some of these farmers may not make it," says Tom McPherson, 66, the son of the man who ran the old Bank of Wilbur, and who still lives in town.

He told of how back in the '30s — "the Dust Bowl days" — farmers got so beaten down they just walked off, abandoning their land.

"We didn't sell because there was nobody to sell to," he said. "It's unsettling to imagine anything like that happening again. It's amazing we're talking about this in 2008."

It's mostly that: talk. The economy is nowhere near that bad, nor may it ever be.

But the recent national bank failures have stirred powerful memories of penury out here. Farmers live a teetering existence anyway, often boosted by subsidies even in good times. So on this subject they know what they're talking about.

During a road trip last week through Washington's wheat belt — Grant, Lincoln, Adams, Ferry, Stevens and Spokane counties — I found people deeply worried, even angry, about the future.

"America's on a losing streak," said Darla Dehlin, 46, a community hospital nurse in the mining town of Republic, Ferry County. "I think we deserve it. We're a society looking to have whatever we want right now, to just take that credit card and buy it."

"The U.S. should be embarrassed — period — with what we've done with our economy," said Mark Cronrath, 55, a grain buyer at the Odessa Trading Co. "The pain's going to cascade down on us pretty good."

"This country is in a world of hurt," said John Hardt, 62, who drives a tractor on a wheat farm near Odessa, Lincoln County. "I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about the young people. My grandchildren. What's this country going to have for them?"

The crisis has resurrected a culture of thrift. Many people seem almost pleased that troubles ahead may force them back to frontier roots.

Jack Hamilton, who greeted me in his Republic gun shop with a grin and the pelt of a cougar he'd killed, said he's already felt the ground shift. His bank is faltering. Stock he owns in AmericanWest Bank of Spokane has lost more than 90 percent of its value this year.

But the former gold miner turned giddy describing how he'd make it if it all goes to hell. Shoot as much food as he could. Then live off his 13 cows.

"I can sell 'em," he said. "If it gets real bad, I can eat 'em."

Echoes of the Depression aren't that distant in Republic. Many here are off the grid, without water or power service. Recently a construction crew severed the town's fiber-optic lines, shutting down the ATMs, credit cards, Internet and phone service.

"It was kind of like the 1930s, where the stores had to take IOUs to keep the place alive," says Dehlin, the nurse.

Everywhere I went, people were angrier at the government bailout than at the notion the economy might collapse. Let it fail, they said.

"We can take care of ourselves," says Cronrath, who has lived in Odessa, population 917 and shrinking, since 1968. "This is a wake-up call, one we've needed for a long time now. We don't need the government to come in and try to prop things up."

This fierce independence I found curious, because the government has been propping up farmers for decades with various subsidies. The difference, I was told, is that Wall Street is being rescued from avarice and incompetence.

"The farmers get help to smooth out forces they can't control, like the weather or commodity prices," said McPherson, the Wilbur-area landowner. "They have not done anything to cook their own goose. Yet we taxpayers now have to cover for simple Wall Street greed."

There isn't much excitement for the presidential election. The feeling is, it's all too broken for anyone to fix. Most said they will vote for Republican John McCain, because they admire him personally and don't trust Democrat Barack Obama.

Beaver, the wheat farmer, said he voted for President Bush twice but now doesn't want to talk about how that turned out. It's a touchy subject out here. When pressed, he said Bush took America off track with the Iraq war, and we've never recovered.

"Now I just want somebody to say: 'Let's fix what's wrong here,' " he said. "We're selling our country off piece by piece. We need to come home."

The sun was setting at that moment, bathing the olive sage in gold. Mule deer grazed the alfalfa. It had been 10 minutes since a car passed.

I said I could see why a farmer farms. Beaver beamed.

"I get mad sometimes, at what's going on out there," he said, gesturing vaguely at the horizon. "But this brings me back. I get to go home at night, lie there and listen to the coyotes howl."

Danny Westneat: dwestneat@seattletimes.com or 206-464-2086.