Rural Western Communities Wither as the Young Pull Up Roots : Population: Small towns such as Eden, Ida., are not paradise when there are no jobs. As a result, they are slowly dying.

The trees still rise up from the irrigated desert of southern Idaho’s Magic Valley, marking the small communities that were the lifeblood of the Snake River Plain.

But while the water courses through the canals to keep the region agriculturally rich, those towns are withering.

“There aren’t any young people here,” Maxine Royston said. “The kids who grew up here, they can’t stay. There’s not enough money in farming to make them stay.”

Only the occasional truck rumbling by with freshly dug potatoes or sugar beets interrupted her gaze from the Eden senior citizens center, the lone occupied building in a line of vacant storefronts.

“This is a nice little town,” she said. “It still is. There just isn’t much left of it.”

Eden’s story is not isolated. Throughout the rural West, small towns are dying as young people abandon them for the job opportunities and more exciting life of bigger cities.

During the 1980s, Idaho’s population increased by nearly 7%. But the growth was concentrated in and around cities like Boise and Twin Falls. Two-thirds of Idaho’s 199 cities lost population during a decade that saw cornerstone industries of timber, mining and agriculture suffer through some of the toughest economic times ever.

In Oregon, the story is the same. Population grew rapidly around Portland and Bend, but 12 of the 18 rural counties east of the Cascade Range had lost people since 1980, according to the 1990 Census.

Washington and Utah both grew by 18% statewide, but each had six counties--all of them rural--that lost population. Even in fast-growing California and Nevada, where no counties lost population, outlying rural areas were the slowest growing.

“The businesses that serve the agricultural interests can’t survive in many cases,” said James Weatherby, a Boise State University professor who is writing “The Urban West: Managing Growth and Decline” with Prof. Stephanie Witt of Boise State.

“You have examples of all kinds of businesses that served a much broader area closing down, from farm implement dealers to hardware stores to retail outlets,” Weatherby said. “There are some who believe that communities under 2,500 are going to have difficulty surviving.”

If that is so, Eden and towns like it are a threatened species.

Once complete with high school, hotel, motel, theater, three restaurants and as many bars, a bank, half a dozen retail stores, six service stations and four grocery stores, Eden entered the 1990s with barely a shadow. Only two service stations, a small grocery and takeout restaurant, one bar and the post office remain.

Eden began the 1980s with just 355 people and lost 11% of them. Nearby Hazelton saw a fifth of its people go elsewhere in the last decade, leaving it with fewer than 400.

Farms and ranches are the backbone of towns like these, and the economic turmoil of the last decade squeezed many out, leaving just a few big operators and their small cadre of hired hands to control land once split into many individual spreads.

“There probably aren’t half the farms that there used to be,” Arlyn Bodily said. After 32 years in the Valley School District, now as its superintendent, he has seen students’ attitudes change.

“It’s amazing to even talk to them now,” he said. “They’re not coming back to farm, and there’s little else.”

From one class of about 50 high school seniors who graduated in the mid-1980s, no girls and just two boys are still in the Eden-Hazelton area.

Old-timers here blame America’s love affair with the car for starting the tumble of the small-town West. More specifically, they blame Interstate 84, built across southern Idaho in the 1960s.

Traffic that once picked its way through small towns along the Snake River now zips down the freeway at 65 m.p.h., the exit signs the only evidence that towns like Eden still exist. Teen-agers who used to find their entertainment locally now flock to Twin Falls or Burley, cities just minutes away on the freeway.

Hazelton Mayor Ervid Van Sickle was one of the few young people who wanted to live in a rural Idaho town. Now 35, he came to Hazelton 10 years ago to raise his family and open an automotive repair shop.

“I love it here,” he said. “This is a great community, a great place to live. It’s a great place to bring up your kids. But I hope that my four kids don’t want to stay in Hazelton because there’s nothing for them.”

Weatherby believes that many small towns will eventually become little more than bedroom communities to larger urban centers that can offer the jobs, the services and the amenities people expect today.

“They’ve raised their standard of living,” said Maxine Christopherson, who was born in Hazelton and now manages Eden’s senior center. Her three boys would never think of coming back.

“They’re used to having a lot of things,” Christopherson said. “They don’t want to come back to this.”

Van Sickle, Bodily and others seek ways to keep the children of Magic Valley at home, but they admit they are probably fighting the inevitable.

“You hate to see it happen, but you have to think about what these young people are going to do,” Bodily said. “A way of life just goes so far. You have to make a living.”