From the Back Pew

By Wendy Lestina

Originally published in the "2-26-09" issue.

“The impact of this recession is real, and it is everywhere.” President Obama said those words aloud Tuesday night as whispered conversations in the aisles of the Valley Grocery, Valley Lumber, the Red Front, and the Post Office tried to pool the rumors about Humboldt Creamery, conversations that, pointedly, stopped short of articulating the question that is in each of our hearts.

What’s going to happen to us?

The 50 dairies that make up the membership of the cooperative that is the creamery are not bucolic artifacts propped up in the countryside to attract tourists. Our dairies are the rebar in the construction of this community. When the dairies are struggling, the town struggles; heaven forefend the dairies should fail.

Don Andersen was visiting with Terry Strong and me in the Cream City Café yesterday morning, and he reminded us of the remark (made by the U.S. Comptroller of the Currency, Robert L. Clarke, in 1988), “When the economic tide goes out, you find out who is swimming naked.”

We don’t know who’s been skinny dipping at the Creamery; we don’t have the facts yet, we can’t comprehend what has become “financial irregularities.” “It’s huge,” unquotables have uttered; “It’s very bad” – we’re told enough to be scared and confused.

Lawyers can write and talk in code; journalists can report the facts. I am neither. And so, I wonder: if, say, none of the 50 dairies were paid, and the alternate markets for the milk were already saturated with product, how would the bills in town be paid? Would, for example, Frontier cut off telephone service to the entire valley? In the Great Depression, “little people” — oddballs no one paid any attention to in the good times, eccentrics who hid cash in rusted Folger’s cans in the cupboard of their cabins — sent money into town to help out the widows and the ill. Who would help us now?

What about the cows? And where would the workers go? Most are extended families who have lived here for decades; they’re not “new” people. Five of the men who still milk on the dairies were at the retirement party for my father, Doc Detlefsen, in 1983. These families aren’t migrants; they’re people who have invested in this community with their work, their enthusiasm, and the lives of their children.

This is the point where my friends and family tell me to calm down. I’m warned that I’m way ahead of the situation, imagining circumstances that are highly unlikely. “You exaggerate everything; you’re always so over-dramatic.”

Reminds me of a day in October 1983, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I was on a panel with Jane Pauley and Ken Blanchard (“The One-Minute Manager”). I was the last person to speak, and while Blanchard was talking, I studied the audience, and noticed that their reactions to his remarks were peculiar. I discreetly motioned for one of the conference organizers, and handed her a napkin on which I’d written: “What’s with the audience?” She grabbed a pen and wrote back: “Have no jobs.” There were 500 people attending what had been billed as a “management conference,” and they had all recently become unemployed. In the five minutes I had before being introduced, I rewrote my speech.

In my speech, I turned to the moderator of the program and said, “How do you plan to rebuild this economy?”

“We’re not going to be an industrial, factory-based economy anymore,” she said, with an ominous pride. “We’re going to be a service economy.” Ken Blanchard nodded. People in the audience, following his lead, smiled and nodded.

“Really?” I asked. “And what are you going to service?”

I was escorted from the podium, and later, it was carefully explained to me how I didn’t understand macroeconomics and the evolution of the information-based, technological labor pool. “They will be retrained,” I was told.

Yes, now that I reflect, the entire video game industry was subsequently created by laid-off drill press operators.

Whatever revelations will become public in the next few weeks and months, Humboldt Creamery is a group of professional dairymen and –women who have the skills, intelligence, faith and dedication to repair the damage and rebuild the business.

That is their job.

Our job is to understand that our future relies on their recovery and success and that our help is needed now, as critically as it was during the floods, to aid that recovery.

When the facts are out and the damage is assessed, a town meeting may be in order, to ask how we can help, what we can do to sustain and nourish the Eel River Valley through what may be a long and arduous recession.

In the meantime, if you’re swimming without clothes, get out of the water and grab a towel. There’s no civic inspiration in the sight of a naked old man.