My brother and I had all kinds of summer jobs in our teenage years.
Construction, working on a commercial fishing vessel, and other odds and ends jobs.
One reliable spring and summer job was working as a summer ranch hand at an uncle’s property in Oso, about half a mile downriver from where the slide destroyed homes and killed more than three dozen in one awful and cataclysmic event.
Springtime sprung in Oso with record rainfall and any good that the warmer, wetter weather might have ushered into my neighborhood in Everett was off-set by the reality of what happened on that morning on March 22 just 20 miles away in familiar Oso.
We knew those people.
Our uncle would match us up with some Oso area farm boys to buck hay and we came to understand life “up river,” as they pridefully described it, while working shoulder to shoulder with them.
There’s a rhythm to river life that builds around the annual mountain snow melt, heavy rain, dry spells, fishing and swimming in river pools.
Every kid in that area knew that rhythm.
A local boy might describe the forecast not by what the sky might do that day but what the river might do.
“River’s low today” or “Good day to fish” were mumbled on hay wagon rides from the field to the barn.
So when news of the March slide came, all I could think of was those kids — now grown men in their 50’s.
Tough kids who didn’t say much, they loved life up river and couldn’t imagine living anywhere else.
Most of them figured that their last day on earth might be in or on the river.
But a one square mile side of a mountain wiping out an entire neighborhood from above? I’m sure none of them imagined that.
Life can be taken from us suddenly.
That’s what the tragic slide means to me. It’s a reminder of how fragile life can be.
So I’m doubling down on the friendly hello’s, enjoying the people I work with even more and loving up my family and friends in new ways.
Tragedy does that to us.
It reminds us that every day is a gift and we must honor that gift with our best effort in service to each other.
Tom Hoban is CEO of The Coast Group of Companies. Contact him at 425-339-3638 or tomhoban@coastmgt.com or visit www.coastmgt.com. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_P_Hoban.
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