I vaguely remember the first story bearing my byline in the Baker City Herald.

I think Unity was involved.

Possibly hunting.

I could find it if I wanted to.

The story, now almost 32 years old, lives within the pages of one of the bound volumes that preserve the Baker City Herald’s past issues.

But I don’t feel inclined right now to take even a brief detour into that history.

The volumes, each covering three months, are heavy enough to imperil my increasingly decrepit vertebrae when I lug one across the office.

That’s not the reason for my reluctance, though.

Later this month the Herald will publish its final issue in which ink is applied to paper.

Whether it is truly the last such issue is a question beyond my ability to answer.

The trends in print journalism that have brought us to this point do not justify optimism, to be sure.

The legacy of this newspaper lies heavily in my thoughts.

It is not a weight which can be measured, as with those bound volumes lined up behind my desk.

But it is a great burden, no less so because it can’t be expressed in pounds or tons.

It is a burden of time.

The name has changed several times but the Herald’s lineage dates to May 11, 1870, and the first issue of the Bedrock Democrat.

That’s 154 years ago.

It would be possible to calculate a reasonable estimate for the number of issues printed over that tremendous span.

The approximate tally of stories could be derived from a simple bit of multiplication.

But the task feels to me too monumental, the numbers, and the sense of melancholy, too immense.

When I try to comprehend the history I feel the same sense of impotence as when I contemplate the scale of the universe, something so vast that my brain, accustomed as it is to the comparatively minuscule measures of miles and months, balks at the task.

The comparison is clumsy, of course.

The universe is unique in its dimensions.

But 154 years is a substantial stretch just the same.

The newspaper that has chronicled that entire period, with the sort of reliability usually associated with sunsets and ocean tides, can not be summarized with a tidy list of anecdotes, jotted down in the manner of a grocery list.

When I try to conceive of the volume of events which have been described on the Herald’s pages, my thoughts become quickly obscured, like a distant peak enveloped in cloud.

There are too many.

Of everything.

Too many controversies that played out at city hall and the courthouse and meeting rooms in buildings that no longer exist. Matters that seemed so vital in 1890 or 1913 or 1956, that dominated conversations in cafes and across backyard fences, but which have long since been forgotten, gone to the graves along with those who were so intimately involved.

Too many people whose lives, in moments of triumph and tragedy and the vast ordinary that lies between, for a brief time qualified as that nebulous concept we call newsworthy.

Too many issues, pages, stories.

Even my comparatively puny experience with the Herald sometimes seems to me mysterious.

And I actually lived it.

When I go through a volume to compile the Turning Back the Pages feature I frequently come across a story with my byline and, though I exert quite a lot of mental energy in the effort, I can’t conjure more than the blurriest memory of the event.

And occasionally not even that.

This is a trifle disconcerting.

None of us retains crystalline memories of our every experience, of course. Or even a small percentage of what transpires between birth and death.

But it seems to me passing strange that a story I wrote could come to feel so foreign, so firmly separate from my life, even though I know that while I was typing, the topic was foremost in my mind.

It is perhaps the greatest cruelty that the passage of time can inflict, this ability to render what once was fresh to gossamer threads of memory which forever after float just beyond our grasp.

The Baker City Herald survives.

Its purpose is as relevant today as when that first issue was printed, just five years after the Civil War ended.

(For perspective, 9/11 happened almost 23 years ago.)

We will continue to write about local events and local people.

Words and images are as real when rendered on a screen as when pressed in ink.

The stories persist.

They need to be told as they always have.

This is a kind of compulsion but it also comforts me, reassures me much as coming home does, after a lengthy absence, and seeing the familiar rooms just as I left them.

And yet I recognize too the significance of this change. I acknowledge its solemnity.

Paper is palpable in a way that pixels can never be.

Paper can be bound with glue and string. It has mass.

Its digital equivalent is ersatz. A century’s worth can be captured in a device with no more heft than a roll of breath mints.

This is a relief for the vertebrae, a balm for aging shoulders and for knees which emit unpleasant cracking noises when flexed.

A triumph of technology.

But it can’t be pressed into a scrapbook.

It can’t displayed on a refrigerator, held there by a magnet shaped like a piece of fruit or bearing the name of a national park.

And it does not make that pleasant and unmistakable soft rustle, like leaves set to dancing by a breeze, when you open it, a window to a small part of the wider world, a portal flimsy in its construction but also, in its way, as permanent as stone.