February 2026 Message from Councilmember Fred Obee

Getting to the Root of Resiliency
 

The farm in Southern Michigan where my grandparents lived was on East Horton Road between Pence and Scott highways, rural roads that cut Lenawee County into a squared off landscape of corn and bean fields. Upsetting the symmetry was Bear Creek, a scribbling meander that flowed slow and muddy beneath a two-lane bridge just below the farmhouse. In summer, I fished for bullheads there and hugged the bridge's riveted steel girders as the occasional car rushed by scattering dust and spitting gravel that pinged from the bridge near my feet.

My grandparents were Bobby and Fern Bruce. My grandfather was tall, slim and soft spoken. The first son in the Bruce line for four generations was named Robert, so my grandfather was known as Bobby, to distinguish him from his father, grandfather and his first son. My grandmother was short and stocky, practical and pragmatic. After raising four children, rendering lard from butchered pigs, canning beans and fruit and cooking the meals, she was used to staying busy.

I loved that farm. Each spring, two small lily ponds under shade trees in the back yard were full of black dot frog's eggs suspended in strings of jelly. Quickly they became tadpoles who grew tiny feet and by summer they stared back at me as leopard frogs. Wild cats patrolled the barn for mice, and in summer we picked greens, beans, peas, melons and corn from a large garden next to the driveway. A chicken coop stood on one side of the farmyard, and sometimes I was sent there to gather eggs. Looming large at the end of the farmyard was a big red barn where steers milled in tight quarters. Bales of hay were piled like blocks in the hayloft, and from a square hole in the floor above the cattle pens, I watched my grandfather push through the steers below, occasionally giving them a gentle swat with a coiled rope to move them out of the way.

My grandparents were the epitome of self-sufficiency, and I often think of that farm and the lives they lived when people start talking about sustainability and resiliency, and I worry we have become too reliant on products that arrive on trucks from farms many miles away. California is drought prone, after all, and we live in a place that can easily be cut off from major transportation networks. All it takes is a landslide, a bridge closure and a ferry debacle. We’ve seen all of those things more than once.

For that reason, I’m happy to see a large and growing network of farms and gardens in Port Townsend and nearby communities that provide local produce for school lunches, food banks and our own resiliency, and I look forward to discussions in the council chambers about ways we can continue to support this important network. Being able to feed ourselves is essential. Our future depends on it.