County clarifies Code of the West for city slickers
YAKIMA, Wash. (AP) – If you’re thinking about moving from the city to this part of central Washington, don’t expect the cows to smell sweet, the roads to be paved or your recyclables to be picked up at the curb. Chelan County has adopted and published the Code of the West, an informal set of country-living truisms designed to help city folks prepare for life in the sticks.
“It’s really just a reality check for people who live in an urbanized environment and aspire to live in a remote environment,” Buell Hawkins, a Chelan County commissioner who lives in the city of Wenatchee, said Monday.
The Code of the West got its start in Larimer County, Colo., in 1996. Both Chelan and Larimer counties credit noted Western writer Zane Grey’s account of the men and women who valued integrity and self-reliance in their daily lives. Chelan County localized and amended the code.
Chelan County, with a population of about 58,000, was one of the fastest growing in the state, according to the 2000 Census, attracting urban expatriates, retirees and migrant farm workers weary of life on the road.
Blessed with 50-mile-long Lake Chelan, a national recreation area, and stunning views of the Cascade Range, which stretches from northern California through Oregon and Washington, Chelan’s wide-open spaces and acres of orchards and timberland have sprouted new homes and other development.
One of the most common complaints, Hawkins said, involves roads.
“People come into the area, build a beautiful home, perhaps up a rural, primitive road,” he said. “After they’ve traveled that road for some period of time, they believe that road ought to be just like a road they used to travel in an urbanized area.”
Chelan County is already responsible for more than 663 miles of road. It can’t afford to take on many new ones, nor do the commissioners believe it’s the county’s collective responsibility to improve roads just because someone’s built a dream home at the end of a dirt lane.
Dan Wright, 52, who lives in Union Valley, north of Chelan, is one of the people who’d like to see the dirt road to his house better maintained and improved. With about 100 cars on it a day, the road gets dusty or muddy and covered with ruts.
“I guess the main issue that I always look at is if you’re living in … a rural area, you should at least get the road service that your taxes are paying for,” he said.
“We don’t have cable TV, don’t have mail service,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of the services that people downtown just take for granted.”
And he believes the county’s Code of the West has merit.
“I just think it’s common sense,” he said.
On the Net:
www.co.chelan.wa.us