Editorial

Are you ready?
    For a while, as recently as mid-June, it may have seemed like summer would never come. But after one of the coolest, wettest springs on record, things have definitely changed.
    It has been a month since any significant rain has fallen on the Methow Valley. The lush, tall grasses of April and May are mostly brown and leaning over now, and while our nights are still refreshingly cool, daytime temperatures in the 90s for the past two weeks have turned things crispy.
    Typically, we start to think about wildfire around the Fourth of July, reminded of our special fire-prone status by the fact that fireworks are generally not a part of a Methow Independence Day celebration. This year, things are a bit behind schedule, but have no doubt, conditions are now ripe for wildfire.
    While many wildfires are started by lightning – and some thunderstorms are expected this weekend – many others are started by carelessness – leaving a campfire unattended, parking a hot car or truck on dry grass, allowing sparks from machinery to catch in dry brush.
    The Methow is surrounded by dry forests, often overgrown and dense, with plenty of standing dead wood just waiting for a spark. Wildfire is a natural phenomenon; the only variables are when and where it will occur.
    The most we can do as individuals to protect ourselves from this very real danger is to be sure the area around our homes is tended to in a way that will, in the words of the Firewise program, “eliminate the wildfire’s potential relationship with [the] house.” This is done primarily by removing dead vegetative material from around the house and, when feasible, decreasing the amount of live vegetation right next to the house.
    There are plenty of resources online about how to protect your home from wildfire and prepare yourself.
    We’ve been lucky these last few years in the Methow, with few blazes actually threatening homes. But it’s only a matter of time before a sudden, out-of-control blaze is on our doorstep. When that time comes, will you be ready?
–John Hanron

 

Letters to the editor

Amenities?
Editor,
    Hopefully, the trailhead for Twisp Pass/North Lake is not the typical example of the Forest Service’s attempt to fulfill the six amenities required before fees can be charged (Methow Valley News, July 21).
    A picnic table right next to an outhouse in a hot gravel parking area with no shade, appears to be satisfying the letter of the law but is an insult and a waste of feepayers’ money.
Brad Garner
Winthrop

Hydrocarbon culture
Dear Mrs. Torvik,
    I came across your article in the June 30 Methow Valley News (“That giant sucking sound,” Hello!). I work in the Gulf of Mexico, and I am vacationing in Winthrop this week.
    We have been drilling in the Gulf for 50-plus years with a very good safety record. This was an individual’s error, not a company or an industry error. I hate to see the marsh oiled like everybody else, but if we stop drilling in the Gulf, you will not be able to afford to fly at 35,000 feet.
    Our economy and culture are based on hydrocarbon. We need a secure domestic supply. You cannot go three feet or one minute without seeing something made from oil or gas.
Charles Clement
Bunkie, La.

Flowers – quickly!
Editor,
    I am so glad someone is planning to plant flowers around our “new rusty iron Twisp” sign. What a great idea!
May I suggest hollyhocks. They grow quite tall. I grew up in the country in an era where outhouses were plentiful. And usually hollyhocks were planted around them to make them less noticeable. Might I also suggest that you install a grow light in the lighting system. It helps the plants to grow faster.
Mary Ann Bame
Twisp

An economic engine
Editor,
    The board and staff of the Twisp Public Development Authority would like to express our deep appreciation for the tremendous involvement of people in the community in creating the vision for the Twisp complex. We have been very gratified by the response to interviews, surveys and participation in the many meetings held over the past three years. The newly adopted master plan reflects the many voices we heard.
    As we ponder the next steps, the vision is clear, the potential significant. We get from here to that great future with elbow grease, ingenuity, co-operation and, yes, money.
    In just a year, the PDA has taken possession of the property, occupied many of the buildings, mobilized hundreds of citizens to participate in the planning process and acquired funding for the first two years of operation.
    The health of our local economy is the central focus of the PDA. Our charter is broad and accommodates many approaches and activities that will create jobs, and bring visitors and investment to the region. Our vision and master plan emphasize economic vitality because it is at the very core of what we are doing and is a basic motive for the volunteers and professionals that are making this happen. Our goal is creation of an enterprise that will bring substantial dollars to the valley, enhancing and improving the life we all enjoy so much.
    Partnership is the strongest and most stable long-term approach to creating jobs and other economic opportunity. In addition to innovative programs in arts, education, agriculture and green technology, the PDA will be actively seeking a partner organization to operate an economic development program. As partnerships unfold, we plan to see physical change on the property along with a growing population of occupants. This is where the support and creation of economic vitality begin.
    We want to thank the town of Twisp and the citizens of the Methow Valley for their great support and engagement and encourage everyone to keep working to fire up the economic engine that we are building. Together, we can harness the creative energy of the Methow Valley.
Twisp PDA Board Ray Johnston, Don Ashford, Jon Brown, Meg Donohue, MaryAnne Quigley and Hanz Scholz; PDA staff Maggie Coon, Mark Wolf-Armstrong and Angie Dahlstrom


 

Hello?

Eating up the strong
By Solveig Torvik
    “We’ve got to get rid of this ‘protecting the weak.’ If we keep the weak alive all the time it eats up the strong, and then our economy will never come back.” – Clint Didier, Republican candidate for U. S. Senate.
 
    Once again, we’re hiring the servants. This time, the state’s top political contest, for a seat representing us in the U.S. Senate, offers candidates with crystal clear differences of opinion about the role of government.
    Three-term Democratic Sen. Patty Murray has two Republicans vying for her seat: Dino Rossi, a two-time loser for governor, and Clint Didier, a newcomer to politics. Rossi paid his dues, and presumably learned something about the craft of lawmaking, as a member of the state legislature; Didier, a farmer and former professional football player, is innocent of lawmaking experience.
    In my view, asking voters to send you to Congress without first having served in a state legislature to learn lawmaking skills is like sending eighth graders to college without benefit of high school. So on that basis alone, Didier’s competence is questionable. Nonetheless, his candidacy serves a purpose. Because he’s so vehemently anti-government, he focuses attention on the proper role of government in a democracy. And that’s by no means a bad thing. We’re not there yet – and neither are the boogeyman socialist democracies that so terrify Didier and his supporters.
    Rossi is searching for credibility on a more moderate ground; for him, the immoderate Didier is a useful foil. Rossi and Didier typify the confused struggle for the soul of a seriously conflicted Republican party. Didier has the blessings of the Tea Party and Sarah Palin, whose presence on the vice-presidential ticket was Barack Obama’s single biggest stroke of luck; she ensured John McCain’s defeat. So shouldn’t it follow that an embrace by Palin is a kiss of death for politicians? Hello?
    Wrong. Enough people remain charmed by Palin’s empty-headed, self-promotional stunts to make you wonder, in darker moments, if we shouldn’t have stuck with the monarchy after all.
    Didier, 51, has a long bill of particulars against government, some apparently newly discovered. With irrigation water provided by Grand Coulee Dam and paid for almost entirely by federal taxpayers – to the tune of 98.5 percent, according to Washington State University economists – he farms in Eltopia in Franklin County and has accepted $273,000 in federal taxpayer farm subsidies on his 1,000-acre farm since 1995.
    But now he says he opposes any government New Deal-type public works such as the Grand Coulee project that made Eastern Washington deserts bloom. And, after media revelations that he’s been taking farm subsidies, he told The Seattle Times that he’d no longer accept them. “We’ve all got to realize that this is unsustainable. We’ve got to quit taking this money,” he said.
    Didier wants to eliminate the federal Department of Energy and Department of Education. He also favors slashing Medicare, Medicaid, welfare and food stamps. That’s certainly consistent with his call to stop “protecting the weak.”
    “It’s turning us into a socialist country,” as he told the Times.
    Dreaded “socialism” has supplanted discredited communism as a fearsome, pernicious evil for some Americans. That’s especially true in sparsely settled rural areas, where we like a bit of psychological elbow room and tend to fancy, like Didier, that we alone provide for ourselves. In these precincts, socialism often is understood to pose a grave threat to rugged American individualism and self-reliance, not to mention interfering with free – read here unregulated – enterprise. The socialist democracies’ emphasis on attending to the common good as a means of preserving civil society is anathema to the Tea Party crowd. In fact, its message seems to be that human societies work best when it’s every man for himself.
    Civilized nations everywhere, including ours, have soundly rejected that anarchist model. That’s because our species has learned that wherever many people gather, trouble is sure to follow unless some form of governance is at hand. Still, the delusional lure of a life free of government restraint lingers as a deeply embedded cultural artifact in certain corners of the American psyche, and it’s not going away any time soon.
    Whatever. Washington voters won’t have much trouble sorting out their choices for the Senate. Murray believes government has a legitimate and necessary duty to protect and provide for the common good. Rossi, not so much; Didier hardly at all.
    Murray, a former schoolteacher and daughter of the middle class who remains mindful of her roots, learned the art of governing first as a school board member, then as a state legislator. She ran for the Senate and won as an underdog “Mom in Tennis Shoes.”
    Diminutive, dogged, self-effacing – a work horse, not a show horse – people have learned not to underestimate her. She’s risen to the inner circle of the Senate Democratic leadership and chairs the powerful Senate Appropriations committee subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development and Related Agencies. Veterans’ affairs, workplace safety, children and families, and homeland security are among other issues she’s championed.
    Of course, many of these are the very issues that would become none of the government’s business were it left up to anti-government candidates such as Clint Didier.
 
Solveig Torvik lives in Winthrop. Her column appears monthly.


 

Correction

    A photo caption in last week’s newspaper stated that canoers at River Camp competed in a five-mile race on the Methow River. Actually, it was a quarter-mile race on the Chewuch River.