You can buy a Crunchwrap Supreme in Baker City but you can’t have a baby delivered in a maternity ward.

There are a few new places to fill your fuel tank, or a soda cup with a capacity more typical of a reservoir, but nowhere to catch a train or, soon, a bus.

On the final day of 2024 I pondered the concept of progress.

It was an interesting diversion.

I tend to think of progress as linear — inexorable, even — and in some ways, and some places, it is.

Population, for instance.

The number of people in Oregon, and in the United States and in the world, has been rising for decades.

The rate isn’t constant but the upward trajectory is.

Baker City belies that trend.

After increasing in each of its first nine decades, per the U.S. Census, starting in the 1960s the city’s population began a cyclical trend unique among Oregon towns with more than 5,000 residents.

For more than half a century, Baker City has alternated between gaining residents one decade and losing inhabitants in the next.

As rollercoaster graphs go, this one has decidedly gentle grades, unlikely to induce more than a minor flutter in riders’ stomachs.

The city’s population has stayed within a relatively narrow range during the period, never more than 10,099 (2020 census) and never fewer than 9,140 (1990). The change during a decade has not exceeded 7.9%, and usually has been less than 4%.

After reaching a then-record high of 9,986 in the 1960 census, the city’s population had dipped by 1970 to 9,354, a 6.3% decline.

The city swelled slightly during the 1970s, to 9,471 residents in 1980 (1.3% increase).

Then it dipped a bit to 9,140 in 1990 (3.5%), grew to 9,860 in 2000 (7.9%), shrunk a tiny amount in 2010 to 9,828 (0.3%) then climbed again, to 10,099, in 2020 (2.8%).

Statistics, of course, tell only a partial tale.

I was thinking, on the final day of 2024, about other matters, ones not so easily rendered on a chart.

(Which of course means that nearly a quarter of the 21st century has passed. As a child of the 20th century — I was born in 1970 — it strikes me as passing strange to realize that I’ve lived nearly as long in the current century as in the previous.)

The sense that progress is absolute is powerful, to be sure.

The past can seem simple, even quaint.

The reality that I can stand atop Elkhorn Peak or Eagle Cap and use a single handheld device to check football scores, scan Doppler radar images for incoming storms, and chat with pretty much any person anywhere on the planet would have seemed, as recently as 35 or so years ago, fantastical.

Yet as indispensable and ubiquitous as the smartphone has become, its capacities are as much stunt as substance.

As I pondered the past, on the precipice of 2025, I thought not so much about what we couldn’t do 35 years ago but rather what we could do then and can’t now.

On the final day of the 1980s you could drive west on Auburn Avenue, just past the railroad tracks, and see stacks of logs on the Ellingson Lumber Company property.

You could, if you pulled over and rolled down the windows (literally roll them down, probably, as powered windows were nothing like as common then as now), perhaps hear the singing of the saws from the lumber mill.

That mill, the last in Baker County, turned out its final board in 1996.

On that day you could have bought a ticket for an Amtrak train, or a Greyhound bus, that would take you from Baker to Portland or Boise or, through connections, to most anywhere.

Take you on, as Professor Dumbledore might put it.

Amtrak rolled through for the last time in 1997 — 113 years or so after the rails reached town.

Greyhound is going away in a couple weeks.

You could have bought a copy of the Baker City Herald, so fresh from the press that its ink would likely smudge your fingers if you weren’t careful.

(Actually you could have bought a copy of the Baker Democrat-Herald, as the newspaper was then known. The publication reverted to its former name, Baker City Herald, on May 11, 1990, in recognition of city voters’ decision, in November 1989, to switch from Baker, the city’s official name since 1911, to its original Baker City.)

We haven’t published a print issue since late June 2024, although Baker County stories are included in the East Oregonian, which publishes every Wednesday.

I don’t intend to sound morose.

Or to imply that life in the past was altogether better, or more fulfilling.

We have gained over the years as well as lost — and in ways more meaningful, it seems to me, than the ability to access the internet from mountain peaks.

On the last day of 1989 there was no Leo Adler Memorial Parkway along the Powder River. That ribbon of riverside asphalt has enriched Baker City for nearly a quarter century. I would feel bereft indeed if deprived of the chance to take a stroll and see an otter making its graceful way through the water, or a dipper doing its endless deep-knee bends while perched on a slick-black stone.

The top of Flagstaff Hill was crowned by sagebrush and grass rather than the Oregon Trail Interpretive Center, which wouldn’t open until May 1992.

The Sumpter Dredge was deteriorating, its fascinating and haunting interior closed.

As a frequent pedestrian, I appreciate that we have more sidewalks.

The comparison between then and now, suffice it to say, can’t be defined in simple, absolute terms.

And it is of course an intensely personal matter.

Each of us has a unique set of values, an individual spectrum on which mill jobs and train tickets and newspapers and smooth sidewalks occupy quite different positions.

I wonder, though, how many of us would define as progress the addition of soda machines and cheese-drenched roast beef against the subtraction of rooms where newborns wail.