Op/Ed

Greeting visitors says a lot about us

An Opinion Column
by Karen Henslee

     The manner in which we welcome visitors says a lot about a town.
     And so it was last week, when several students from the Olympia area, specifically, from Evergreen College, stopped by The Sentinel office.
     They came in, a little hesitant at first. After spending several minutes at the front counter with Eva, she called me to meet them.
     There were six of them, five girls and one boy.
They were here to gather information for one of their classes, though I’m not sure exactly which class it was.
     According to one of the girls, they were “dropped off” in town and told to go out and “talk to the people.”
     They visited the City office, where they met the city administrator. Encouraged by him, they ventured downtown and into The Sentinel office.
     They explained their reason for coming, and began asking questions about our community.
     How has the national economy affected us on a local level?
     What are some of the issues we’re facing now and down the road?
     What are the community’s concerns?
     I asked them some questions as well. Of the six of them, only one was from a small, rural community... in Maryland, I think. The others were raised in a more urban environment.
     We discussed the most obvious concern for both urban and rural areas -- the price of fuel. Rural living requires a lot of driving, and we do not have mass-transit as an option.
     We talked about last year’s I-5 closure. One of the girls remarked that she was on the freeway the day they closed it... five minutes behind her. She was driving back to school from Portland, and was driving through standing water on the roadway, looking at a flooded McDonald’s restaurant. And I told her about the way the traffic spilled over to our side of the state, and the long line of trucks and other traffic stretching as far south as the eye could see.
     We discussed the decision by the local health facility to discontinue offering obstetrics services.
The students were stunned by the idea that a woman in labor would have to travel a distance of up to 70 miles to deliver her baby. That decision is still something I cannot quite understand.
     One of the things they were hearing over and over was how young people are itching to get out of town where there’s more “stuff to do.” Yet they come back to town once they get married and have children. They want to raise their kids here.
     When I considered their ages, I guessed them to be about 20 years old. I assume it must have been a bit daunting, like entering a foreign land. And although I spent only about 20 minutes with them, I was encouraged by their visit. The community was friendly and cooperative. They got excited about talking to people, and wanted to do more.
     Encounters like these help to give perspective to living in Klickitat County. Even with our quirks and squabbles, there is still no other place in which I want to live.
     I love the trees, the sun, the cold and the snow; the spectacular mountain views and the breathtaking sunsets. We have no hurricanes or tsunamis to worry about; only a volcano that erupts once every hundred years or so.
     There are always opportunities to show visitors and newcomers we are proud of our town and why we like to live here.
     Whether they are young students from the city or visitors from around the world, we should do what we can to help them feel welcome.
     It says a lot about us when we do, but even more so when we don’t.