"Small" town living

Wenatchee is not a small town. With 30,000 people, it is a city, officially classified as an urban area. Sure, it’s within a rural county (which means we vote by mail – no polling booths here). Sure there are some goats and horses and chickens and orchards sprinkled around town. But there are also restaurants and auto body shops and schools and a mall and traffic lights with left turn arrows. Nevertheless, Wenatchee still thinks like a small town. See the following examples.

Example 1

When I first came to Wenatchee, I had dinner at the house of Jim, who was on my hiring committee. His wife Carol, who works for community health and has since taken me out to farm worker camps for outreach trips, suggested I get in touch with their neighbor Judith, both to see if Mike & I might be able to live in a small house in her backyard, and because she likes goats, and because she too works with farm workers, as a legal advocate. I left a few messages, but Judith and I never ended up connecting.

JUMP SCENE.

More recently, I went to a meeting of a committee that works on water quality issues in the Wenatchee River. Makes sense – I work on pesticide reduction, part of the benefit should be improved water quality. At this meeting a disagreement broke out between Dave, a public works guy from Leavenworth (the false Bavarian tourist village up the mountain),

and Ryan from the Department of Ecology over how to lower phosphorous levels cost effectively.

JUMP SCENE.

At the small small community-led Yom Kippur services here, Kyle, who rock climbs with a guy that just retired from my workplace, introduced me to Judith, who occasionally comes to Jewish community events with her kids. Of course, this did turn out to be Judith, legal advocate, neighbor of Carol and Jim. Judith invited Mike & I to her house the following week for a discussion she and Carol were hosting with one of the candidates for County Commissioner.

JUMP SCENE.

Mike and I arrived at Judith’s house on a Wednesday night. Her husband answered the door. He turned out to be Peter, who had been at the water quality committee earlier that week with Dave and Ryan. And speaking of which, there was Dave from Leavenworth (false Bavarian village) public works at the house as well, still frustrated about the phosphorous treatment plant discussion. And Jim and Carol. And Laurie, who I had met at the local foods group and at Carol’s workplace and at the Sound of Music performance in Leavenworth this summer. And Peter turns out to work in environmental engineering, waste water, and septics, like Mike used to in Minneapolis. And he may need some work help, which Mike might be able to provide. Meanwhile, Peter’s networking computer consultant is Norby, the German husband of one of the ladies that Mike works for part time at the CSA, who we just saw perform in a Bavarian dance show at the Oktoberfest, yes, in Leavenworth this weekend,

after which he and his wife Sherri took us mushroom hunting.

Example 2

Mike has been working part time with our neighbor Dave the carpenter, who is building a house in the town of Plain (for the mom of the guy who made the documentary about the apple industry that my advisor had suggested I watch before I interviewed for my job here). Dave has a degree in divinity and almost became a priest, but decided he’d be better as a carpenter. He is married to Sheryl, a psychologist who teaches at the community college with Bob, who used to drive the CSA truck during the summer but handed off the job (to Mike) when the school year started and he had to go back to teaching.

Last year, Dave and Sheryl volunteered at the high school with a mentoring program where you are matched with a student who is the first in his/her family to want to go to college, to help him/her through the application process. Dave and Sheryl asked if we wanted to volunteer this year. Susan, the woman who runs the program, also coordinates much of the environmental education in the valley, which is the field that Mike would really like to be in. Anyway, we decided to do it. Susan, by the way, coordinates alongside Alejandra, the woman who had previously arranged for me to give a presentation on pesticides to the farm worker parents of the toddlers at the migrant headstart center where she had previously worked before moving to the high school.

The day after the mentoring orientation, I found a thank you card in my box at work. It was from Susan. Turns out she also coordinated the Awesome Apple Adventure, a program where all the second graders in the valley come to the Tree Fruit Center (where I work) to spend a day learning about fruit research and apple picking. All the employees volunteer to run stations. My station had been the harvesting one, and Susan was the person sending thank-yous to all the volunteers. Of course, the harvesting station was a popular one, as all the kids got to wear picking bags, pick apples, and dump them into an apple bin.

Lucky for me, it was also easy to learn how to teach. And it happened to attract the attention of the Wenatchee World journalist who did a story about the event the next day... And who also happened to show up to the apple cider pressing party Mike & I went to a following weekend, because he was the father-in-law of the sister of Marya the party host.

It's all so circular. No anonymity. Everything comes back around. The down side is that a lot of town functions in a “who you know” sort of way. The up side is that it’s pretty easy to make friends, and that these friends all wear multiple hats and show up in multiple places. So in that spirit of multiple hats and purposes, Mike & I have decided to start multi-tasking in our household as well. So for a week earlier this fall, the goats who live in our backyard pen also lived in our… sukkah! (which was a makeshift moving sukkah, so that the goats could get to new grass every couple of days). And the branches for the roof of the sukkah, which came from Marya the cider party host, have also had a transformation. While the goats did not want to eat them when we presented the branches as food, they became irresistible for pulling down to eat once we presented them as roof.

Oh alright, maybe that’s a stretch – our household is not quite as small and coincidental a world as the larger Wenatchee community… yet. We’ll have to keep trying.