Have you stopped, looked around and thought to yourself, “wow, we live in a great area” lately? Sure, when it’s steaming hot outside and the air is full of smoke from another wildfire, it makes one wonder. But at least we’re not ravaged by semi-annual floods, hurricanes or God-forbid earthquakes and tsunamis.
While we try to convince our loved ones that this is the place to be – You tell them things like, “Come home from the west of the Cascades, you know they’re talking about the whole thing sinking into the ocean in the next few years. That they’re overdue for the big one – one that will put anything they’ve had in California to shame. Come home.”
Of course that doesn’t work, but sometimes you can tell they’re thinking about it, especially after visiting home. My brothers were home last week – one traveling from the disaster waiting to happen west side of the state, and the other from Guernsey, an island in the English Channel. While it’s great to see them and know they and there families are doing well, there’s still something in me that wishes they’d move back home. My daughter and her family is home this week and it’s the same thing. Of course I also think that about all my friends and former classmates who moved to places where I just can’t see them often enough. I’m still waiting for Star Trek-like transporter devices to be invented. Of course that would probably open up a whole new can of worms when relatives you don’t want visiting keep popping into town ore your house, literally.
I know we live in a great place – when 14 people, mostly visitors to the Tumbleweed Film Festival, were floating down the Okanogan from Lake Osoyoos and having a wonderful time, you just can’t help but smile and think to yourself “Why live anywhere else?”
Last weekend I attended part of the Pacific Northwest Trail Association party held near the Oroville Trailhead. What a great bunch of folks were there celebrating a worthy cause and our section of the PNTA, the Whistler Canyon and Similkameen River Trails. Just another reason to live in this wonderful place.
My friends from the west side can’t get enough of floating down the river, hiking the trails, listening to local performers and hanging out in the local establishments like Hometown, Alpine, Trinos, the Pastime and the Kuhler. We might not have all the amenities – we still need a movie theater or at least a drive-in, what we do have is great and I count my blessings I can still live such in a great place, surrounded by good people.
