Turnarounds have happened in the West, in up-from-the-ashes towns like Telluride, Colo., which went from hard-rock mining to hard-core poverty to ski-mountain riches, and Bend, Ore., another timber town just 100 miles east of Sweet Home, which found reinvention as a mecca for tourism and second homes.

But what path to choose, when to leap, what to pay forward in hopes of it coming back around — those are the questions of a town’s, or a family’s second act. Stay rooted or move with the best opportunity? It is an American dilemma as old as the frontier, but when so much feels uncharted in the economy, that doesn’t make things feel easier on the lower rungs of the ladder.

The Johnsons, for example, live in a better trailer park now than they did back in Ms. Johnson’s junior high years. But six people in three generations — her parents; a younger sister, Brittney, 18; a brother, Tommy, 10; and her maternal grandmother — are still crammed into a rented four-bedroom unit. Tommy sleeps unhappily in the crowded living room, with its blaring television and lack of privacy. A yard-sale organ in a corner, bought for $50, is never played. A cigarette rolling machine gets its own table in the kitchen, next to a money-saving bag of loose tobacco. But Candalynn Johnson — the only adult nonsmoker — hates the smoke and the way it permeates their world.

In the trailer, it seems, no one is quite where he or she wants to be. Mr. Johnson, sitting by an open door as fans moved the air around on a hot late-summer afternoon, said much of his life was shaped by the second-guessing of what might have been. Back in high school, he did well on his SATs, he said. College beckoned. But then his father, who had worked around the West in various jobs — from training racehorses to playing minor-league football — moved the family again, for a 14th time, to a 14th school. Filled with frustration and anger, he dropped out. It set a pattern that took decades, he said, to escape.

Now he talks of moving his own family again, closer to the Oregon State University campus in Corvallis, and maybe even keeping everyone together despite Candalynn’s talk of getting her own place.

Rice family anchors are shifting, too. Ms. Rice is looking ahead, figuring that the food bank is one thing in town with a future. She had been awaiting word on a $14,000 state grant for a backup electricity generator — blackouts plague Sweet Home’s electrical grid, imperiling stored food. The grant just came through, allowing her group and two other food banks in town to create a shared cold-storage space and take a step toward buying a new walk-in freezer.

Dan Rice and his brothers, all nearing retirement age, have just about given up on the idea of being able to sell the trucking business, where about one in five employees are extended family members, and no one from a coming generation is interested.

“I wouldn’t counsel anybody to invest in logging,” he said. “Invest in Google.”