“How much are the burgers?” the rather churlish man demanded.
“There’s no charge” replied Bruce Rippy, pastor of the Condon Community Church (CCC), who was serving as head waiter and order taker at the food booth during the Condon Fourth of July celebration.
“Well I suppose you watch how much I put in the donations bucket so the church can make a big haul.”
“No,” Bruce Rippy replied. “All the money this year goes to the senior meals program, and if need be, you can take some money out of the bucket.”
The incredulous man stuffed a wadded bill in the bucket and stomped down the line to get his burger.
Apparently he warn’t from around here. He didn’t get how this and countless other efforts at the event (the parade, library, rodeo, grounds set-up, even the beer booth) were performed by uncompensated people. Why would you do things for free?
Carolyn Rippy headed up the food concession at the Fourth celebration, organizing around 30 volunteers. She assessed my resume and qualifications and assigned me to garbage bagging. The CCC donated $2,700 worth of burgers and brats, purchased from the Mission Mountain Mercantile at a discount. The Blackfoot Telephone Cooperative donated another $500, and total donations, including that of our surly friend, totaled $3,651, which will go to the senior meals program. That program had received some governmental support, but recently that fell through a bureaucratic crack.
Despite its paltry population, the Swan Valley is alive with activism and outreach. The medical and fire system is volunteer. There is the library, the historical society, and the many works of the Swan Valley Foundation, and much more.
I attended another such event, organized by the Burke family for the CCC, where three logging truckloads were rendered by 40 volunteers into firewood for families with physical or economic challenges. The logs were grasped by grappled tractors, then sawn into 18-inch rounds. They were then moved to log splitters, and the wood loaded into trailers. 25 BIG trailer loads were delivered, and a large stack created for future needs.
The tractors grabbed the logs in the middle, and then one sawyer on each end would cut toward the middle until all the logs were cut into rounds. I would start on one end and Don Kirchhofer would start on the other. No matter what I did—new chain, bigger saw—I could never beat Don to the middle. His chain never got dull, either. Further, he never got tired. After we were done sawing, he picked up the split pieces all afternoon. I was wondering what he must have in his Thermos, except he never stopped for a drink.
What with the tractors, the chain saws, the log splitters, and the trucks, there was a serious racket. Almost everyone wore headphones to keep their eardrums from exploding.
I mused, after the sawing was done and the tedium of the log splitter weighed, about all these folks, moving about with their headphones on, carrying and stacking wood. Sweating and grinding in the din and the sawdust and the mud—bringing heat and fuel to someone they may not know.
With headphones on.
What would happen if we shut out the noise—turned off the cable news, shut the lid on our computers, put the phone in a drawer?
No red, no blue. Just burgers, brats, and wood.
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