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Welcome to town
Lou Marzeles
News Editor
I've just moved here, to take the position of editor of The Goldendale Sentinel, from the city of Sedona, Arizona, where the javalina population more or less outnumbers the people. For those of you unacquainted with Southwestern wildlife, javalina are indigenous wild pigs-except they're not really pigs, but that's a whole other story for another time and very likely an entirely different publication.
I get the same puzzled query when I tell people where I moved here from, which roughly goes, what would possess me to do such a thing? Sedona is known pretty much everywhere; most of my friends have never heard of Goldendale. Sedona gets lots of warm weather; Goldendale gets lots of cold. The javalina in Sedona are rambunctious and exotic; this is cattle and horse country. Sedona gets five million visitors a year; Goldendale would like to get a lot more noticed.
Well, notice has to start somewhere, and the city certainly got my attention. I think it's lovely, and I'm not just spouting platitudes when I say the people are remarkable, and remarkably friendly. Like a great many communities, the city may be too familiar to its residents, and that can make it easy for outsider compliments to go overlooked for the truth they contain.
I can honestly say that there's no way I would be here if I really didn't want to be. So why would I?
I'll give you an excellent example, in the form of an event that took place days after my arrival here. I refer to the extraordinary day-long planning meeting on Goldendale's future held last Saturday, reported extensively in these pages. City planning meetings come and go, of course, and I hear that the same is certainly true of Goldendale. There are those who view Saturday's meeting, I'm sure, with at best a sense of caution, hesitant to believe that perhaps the best might actually come to be. I've been in a lot of community planning meetings myself-but my experience is that they really can produce dramatic, positive results. And I've never seen a meeting like the one Saturday here, in which such striking incentive for actualization was ignited.
I came here because this town felt like a Golden Dale to me, a shining potentiality on the cusp of something wonderful, something that would express in form how it feels inside. I'm grateful for the opportunity to be here as that unfolds.
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