You’re standing on a downtown corner in Bend, circa 1990. Trucks rumble by bearing stacks of large logs, some with pink tape tied around them.

A movie theater sits across the street. The surrounding businesses include an old fashioned ice cream shop and an optometrist.

Now fast-forward to 2002. That travel agency behind you is now a Starbucks, where a fellow in fleece sips a latte and scans his laptop. The Internet didn’t even exist in the American consciousness 10 years ago, let alone high-speed color computers the size of a chess board.

To the left, the Pronto Print Shop is now Hot Box Betty, selling New York-trendy clothes to ladies with model-thin bodies.

Next door is Red Point Climbing Supply, catering to the ever-expanding number of outdoor enthusiasts.

Teens with pierced lips whiz by on skateboards. A poster in the window for the latest Central Oregon Symphony performance is taped next to one for a show at the local roller rink by Grateful Dead-style jam band Leftover Salmon.

Bend, leading the way for Central Oregon, transformed during the last decade.

Growth penetrated every part of the region. Change came hand in hand.

”This may be the most significant decade of the century for Deschutes County and Bend,” said Bob Barber, president of Central Oregon Community College since 1990.

The most obvious difference is how Central Oregon looks. Sagebrush yielded to subdivisions on the edge of Bend, Redmond and other towns. Lights now twinkle atop Awbrey Butte where cougars once prowled. And thousands of square feet of corporate retail space sprang up in the High Desert.

But the difference is also the way we entertain ourselves, earn a paycheck and live inside our homes.

A smile spread across Barber’s face as he pondered the changes. Bread, he said. There are more specialty bakeries selling fresh-baked bread.

”It’s hard to describe to somebody who wasn’t here then,” he said of Bend. For instance, the Barbers struggled to find a four-bedroom house to buy in 1990.

Central Oregon hardly lacks fresh-baked bread, or anything else, today. Just do some walking through the Yellow Pages.

The 1989-90 Yellow Pages lists just one coffee shop in Bend, Royal Blend on Second Street. Sushi was an unknown commodity. There were half as many golf courses, and the selection of clothing stores seemed threadbare.

By comparison, the book lists 15 coffee shops in Bend today. Clothing store listings jam two pages. Restaurants serve everything from trout to Thai.

Redmond native Diana Barker, for one, prefers today’s Central Oregon. The economy is robust, entertainment options are plentiful and the newcomers are often talented.

”People complain about the congestion and growth, and I say, Yeah, I love it,’ ” she said. ”I remember the days when you had to leave Redmond to go shopping. You could shop Bend in less than a day. J.C. Penney was right downtown.”

Barker makes few shopping trips to Portland now.

But some people also say Central Oregon’s transformation brought new challenges.

”With it has come the double-headed monsters of bad traffic problems and crime,” said Bend resident Bob Woodward, who served on the city council and as mayor in the 1990s.

Woodward, a free-lance photographer and writer, lives just off Portland Avenue, which was a quiet street when he arrived in town 25 years ago. Now hundreds of cars use it as an artery every day.

Another result of growth, Woodward said, is middle-class newcomers and longtime residents are becoming priced out of the market.

Bend native Kris Battleson, 31, said she knows what Woodward is talking about. About two years ago, interested in returning home after several years in Salt Lake City, she and a local company began negotiating for an engineering job.

”The thing that shocked me is they said, You should feel lucky to be living in Bend.’ They pretty much said we don’t have to offer a competitive wage,” Battleson said. The company offered her about a third less than she was making in Utah.

She also realized the equity in her house in Utah would only translate to a condominium on Bend’s west side, where she would prefer to live. So Battleson chose to stay in Salt Lake City.

As Bend experienced phenomenal growth, as well as the 1999 annexation of about 11 square miles and 14,000 new residents, the rest of Central Oregon’s locales lived their own tales of a decade.

Census figures show the majority of growth occurred around incorporated areas of Deschutes County. Urban Deschutes County surged by 25,837 people.

By contrast, rural Deschutes County attracted about 14,572 more people in the ’90s.

Residents of La Pine, one of the county’s most rural areas, spent the ’90s debating whether to incorporate and how to handle the growth of houses scattered in the trees and businesses lined along Highway 97.

”I think we’re missing out on a lot of things because we’re not incorporated,” said La Pine resident Carol Brewer, acknowledging that those can be construed as fighting words.

Brewer, 69, moved to southern Deschutes County in the 1970s to run the general store at Wickiup Junction. But she said a desire to retire, combined with competition from two grocery chains built during the ’90s, led her out of the business.

She said La Pine’s growth, particularly among retirees, brought more businesses and services to the remote end of Deschutes County. She doesn’t drive to Bend as often.

Meanwhile, some people living in other areas began commuting to Bend more.

Redmond struggled with the moniker ”bedroom community” as it grew at 9 percent a year. Subdivisions sprouted around the town’s core, drawing in big retail stores like Wal-Mart and Fred Meyer.

Indeed, a 1999 study conducted for the Central Oregon Housing Needs Assessment Committee found that about 56 percent of employed Redmond residents worked in Redmond. Conversely, more than 87 percent of Bend residents worked in Bend.

Bob Quitmeier wears several hats for the city of Redmond – community development director, enterprise zone manager and urban renewal district manager. Quitmeier said he envisions Redmond becoming more like its neighbor to the south.

Already some people choose to live and shop in Redmond over Bend, he said.

”Twenty years ago, Redmond was a place to drive through on the way to Bend,” Quitmeier said. ”That’s no longer the case.”

While Bend serves as Redmond’s model of a possible future, Redmond’s economic growth is now a beacon to the smaller communities of Prineville and Madras.

”We’re where Redmond was 10 years ago,” said Scott Cooper, Crook County judge.

Crook County also grew during the decade. And unlike Deschutes and Jefferson counties, where urban growth dominated, figures from the U.S. Census Bureau show that Prineville and the county’s rural areas grew at about the same rate.

Prineville grew by about 37 percent to 7,356 people, the 2000 census states. The unincorporated parts of Crook County grew by 35 percent to a population of 11,826.

Some residential development took place on the hill above Prineville, while the rest occurred in rural expanses like Powell Butte and near the Prineville Reservoir. And Prineville, once a sleepy town, now bustles with traffic and activity during the day.

”The turnover of the population is much more significant than it used to be,” said Steve Uffelman, a Prineville resident for 20 years and currently the town’s mayor.

The departure of two lumber mills in 2001 prompted unemployment to soar to 14.6 percent this past winter. Seasonal work in Crook County also contributes to the unemployment rate.

Economists believe that led some residents to commute out of town to other jobs. About 13 percent of Crook County residents drive outside the county to jobs, according to a recent survey by the state’s Employment Department.

Crook County School District Superintendent Gary Peterson also attributes the commuter numbers to general change in the region.

”Central Oregon, particularly in the ’90s, became a regional economy,” he said.

Cooper believes Crook County can draw businesses as Redmond did in the 1990s.

”I don’t think things are as bleak as 14.6 percent says they are,” he said. ”What it is we’re going to be is a healthy, vibrant, economically sound community.”

Madras Mayor Rick Allen sees that in his town’s future, as well.

”In the next decade, Madras will basically be the next Redmond,” he said. ”We’ll be a hub. People will live here and commute here.”

Madras changed as significantly as Prineville did in the ’90s. A mix of Carhartt-clad farmers, Mexican immigrants and well-to-do retirees now stroll the streets, and not every face is familiar.

”There are so many new people,” Allen said, reflecting on the town’s growth from about 3,400 to 5,000.

More of those people work at businesses like Bright Wood, Round Butte Seed Co. and Seaswirl Boats than on farms. Manufacturing became the county’s No. 1 employer in the ’90s, according to state figures.

Another significant development is that Jefferson County’s hallmark ethnic diversity became even more pronounced. The Hispanic population surged from 10 percent of residents to 17 percent, the Census Bureau says. American Indians accounted for another 16 percent of the county’s 19,009 residents in 2000.

Warm Springs, home to the Wasco, Sahaptin and Paiute tribes, grew minimally in the ’90s, from about 2,200 to 2,400, according to the Census Bureau.

Besides Redmond, Prineville and Madras, even the region’s smallest hamlets felt some tremor of the region’s growth boom.

In Jefferson County, Culver’s population leapt from 570 to 802 people, according to the Census Bureau. The number of 35- to 44-year olds grew from 77 in 1990 to 132 in 2000, making it one of the fastest growing groups in Culver.

Nearby Metolius, while still a blip on a two-lane road, grew from 450 to 635 people.

Terrebonne, a farming and recreation outpost now split by a three-lane highway, grew, as well. The Census Bureau counted about 1,100 people there in 1990 and 1,400 in 2000.

And the tourist outpost of Sisters continued to draw more residents. The Census Bureau counted nearly 1,000 people there in 2000, about 280 more than a decade before.

Kathy Deggendorfer moved to Sisters from Bend about eight years ago. She said she knows the town will keep growing and perhaps soon have a stoplight.

”I don’t think it’s bad to have growth,” she said. ”What’s bad is standing by and not saying what you want your community to be.”

As people throughout the region looked back at the last decade, they also acknowledged that 10 years from now that same corner of downtown Bend might be changed once more. The evolution continues.

”It isn’t just this decade in which we transformed ourselves,” Bend City Councilor John Schubert said. ”It won’t be our last.”