Clear Is Kind

If you’ve been in Jackson long enough, you’ve probably heard yourself say what lots of locals say: "I came for the mountains. I stayed for the people.” It’s true. It has remained true through seasons, cycles, and tensions. When push comes to shove, the people of our community have worked together and worked for each other. 

When I learned that our auto genius, Roy, had been helping my 19-year-old son, Silas, rule out the lemons as he looks for his first car, I suggested Roy probably had paying customers that should be his priority. “I know, Mom. He’s so nice. He said he’d look at 100 cars with me if that’s what it took to help me find a good car.” 

Roy’s kind of generosity reminds me how lucky we are to live in a community with people this starved for time, often with customers to please or mortgages to pay, who still manage to invest in other people.  A hundred faces flip through my mind like calendar pages, the people who literally made our sons nice people. Becky and Betsy, their earliest childcare professionals and until now the only ones who know our boys only served “coffee or wine” when they played restaurant at school. Mo, whose heart-pounding woo-woo-woo's for our boys during basketball games convince me that if every kid could bask in that kind of full-hearted support from a grownup outside their family, the world would change. Patty, who could charge a zillion dollars for a haircut if you could get in because she’s really good at her work and also because she’s like a soul-whisperer for anyone who sits in her chair. “Bring him in for a haircut,” she said when my son was having a hard time in high school. He didn’t tell me what they talked about, but there was a light in his eye that had been dim for a while.  

As I think of all the Roys and Pattys who enrich our community, I’m interrupted by a jarring memory of 2020’s most unpleasant conversation, which happened with someone who described herself as a “dear friend of one of your dear friends.” I was still trying to place this “dear friend” as I got her third message (voicemail, email, text) and a list of things she wanted to sort out. As a new arrival, she wasn’t sure about the traffic and wanted me to list construction projects I knew were coming. Were schools up to snuff? Was there any tech happening here? “You could google that,” I suggested unsubtly. Even that didn’t slow her down. But my answer to her final question did.  

“Is this town savvy enough to leverage the kind of talent that’s moving here?” she asked me. 

I was recollecting in my head a long list of savvy people, like the Muries, the Turners, the Rockefellers, the Van Vlecks, Briggs, McCollister, Pezthold, Huidekoupers. Her attention waned, but I continued in my head, “Marion, Marilyn, Clarene, Pete, Alan, Bill...” 

Then I answered: “Our town is savvy enough to worry about the pressure we feel on our housing, our workforce, our schools, and roads, and how vulnerable our community’s character is right now.” 

As I watch our town become flattened by a local epidemic we call housing insecurity, and as I search for how to connect this month’s theme of “Kindness as a Strategy,” I want to borrow from sister Brene: “Clear is kind.” 

So, let’s get clear. 

Savvy people protected Grand Teton National Park, envisioned Jackson Hole Mountain Resort, elected the country’s first all-female town council. Savvy people platted the Town Square and built our hospital, our library, our bike paths, a vertical greenhouse and our Center for the Arts, along with a parking garage, because they were also practical. 

It took our collective intelligence to survive the past year – to help workers unemployed by COVID eat or pay rent, to keep people alive in the ER, and to offer the kindness, strength, mental fitness tools, and casseroles our community needed to keep going. 

 I don’t have answers to all the challenges we face, but I do know that part of getting clear is asking the right questions. What do I value? What do I want to protect in my community? What can I do, today?  

Ask the good questions, big ones and small ones. There’s a kid out there who could use your help with something.  There is a way to start connecting more of our housing stock to jobs that serve the needs of our community.  

And don’t be afraid of direct, clear answers. “I stayed for the people.” Sounds pretty savvy to me.