Politics roiled a community. It worked to rebuild trust with trash and flowers.

Before the troubles started, Melanie Wilson believed she’d finally found paradise. 

She and her husband had moved from Washington, D.C., to Washougal, Washington, in 2019. After the cacophonies of the U.S. capital, they immediately felt at home with tranquil views of the mountains, including the snowcapped peak of Mount Hood in the Oregon distance. Lewis and Clark once camped here on the banks of the Columbia River over two centuries ago. The pace of life here is as unhurried as the logging barges wending through its gorge.

“I’ve been looking for a home my whole life,” Ms. Wilson says of the town of 17,000 people. “I want to make friends here. I want to put down roots here.”

That was five years ago. Then the pandemic hit in March 2020. Two months after that, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. And the Wilsons’ paradise, it seemed, suddenly erupted into the kind of rancor they thought they had left in Washington, D.C. 

Protests sprang up in the conjoined towns of Washougal and Camas that summer. By August, pro-police rallies were attracting hundreds of supporters waving American flags in support of law enforcement. On opposite sides of the street, half as many counterprotesters hoisted Black Lives Matter signs in a clash of highly charged remonstrations.

The area has been called the “crossroads to discovery.” Today both towns are at the crossroads of America’s deepening political and cultural divides. The bedroom communities are just a 30-minute drive west from progressive Portland, Oregon. A few miles to the east, however, horses, cows, and alpacas graze on gentle swells of verdant farmland, scattered with barns and houses displaying enormous signs supporting Donald Trump.

The protests in Washougal and Camas were mostly peaceful. Mostly. The police broke up a couple of push-and-shove scuffles. Demonstrators in pandemic masks chanted “I see a racist” at Trump supporters. In one instance, a man driving past the Black Lives Matter protesters threw coffee out the window, drenching an older woman. Some protesters displayed Confederate battle flags. One showed up with a semiautomatic rifle.

Ms. Wilson was getting increasingly worried. Then, at a school board meeting in 2021, the vitriol she’d been witnessing reached a tipping point, jolting the sense of home that had become so important to her life.

During the meeting, a man stood up and jabbed his finger at the elected officials sitting in front of them. “‘Civil war is almost here. We’re sharpening our bullets,’” Ms. Wilson recalls the man saying. “‘Do you people really think you’re going to win it, the war?’”

She was startled once again by the crowd’s response. “People around the room clapped and stamped their feet on the floor,” she says. “It seemed to me, that’s a flashing red warning in a community.”

After the meeting, she began talking to others in the community about the violent rhetoric. She joined a group of citizens in Washougal and Camas to think about how to counter the civic vitriol that seemed to be tearing their community apart.

Over time, she conceived a simple idea: People would gather to pick up trash, together.

Today, Ms. Wilson is the co-founder and executive director of the East County Citizens’ Alliance. Its volunteers don’t chant and shout. They don’t tote signs and megaphones, let alone AR-15s. What they do carry, however, are seedlings, paintbrushes, and trash bags. One volunteer even brings his tractor. 

The organization engages in other projects, too, from feeding the hungry to mentoring students. It’s all in service of an underlying mission: Getting people out of their news silos and partisan bubbles to gather together outside – their outside, their gorgeous, scenic, pastoral part of the world – and make an effort to work together and get to know each other. 

This idea, too, is simple: To fix our politics, we must first mend our culture.

There are groups like Ms. Wilson’s springing up all over America, in fact. From Wilkesboro, North Carolina, to Madison, Wisconsin, to Compton, California, small bands of volunteers are working to improve their quality of life, not only in their neighborhoods, but also in their hearts. 

There’s little glory in it. Sometimes, volunteers may even wonder if they’re making any progress at all. But with each small act of kindness, they’re working to weave a social fabric of grace, stitch by stitch, and rooted in tolerance, respect, and faith in each other, as different as that other may be.

“They model what trust is. They show up,” says Frederick Riley, executive director of Weave: The Social Fabric Project, founded by columnist and author David Brooks with the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C. The project seeks to mend the country’s shredded fabric of social trust, which it believes has left Americans “divided, lonely, and in social gridlock.”

“You don’t trust the government; you don’t trust big business; you don’t trust big NGOs,” says Mr. Riley, whose project helps support organizations like Ms. Wilson’s across the country. “But this neighborhood person is out here every day, helping to till the community garden for no pay. ... They’re teaching you how to trust again.”

Organizing an alliance to build trust

Barbara Seaman apologizes that her minivan smells like pork as she drives around the conjoined towns. Ms. Wilson, riding shotgun, plays tour guide to Monitor journalists along for the ride. A few days previously, the duo transported braised barbecue to ReFuel Washougal, a program that serves free meals to residents in need. The East County Citizens’ Alliance took a turn hosting a dinner in collaboration with Washougal High School’s culinary arts program. 

“If you were in my car, it’d be full of traffic cones and trash bags and trash,” Ms. Wilson says. “This is what community-building looks like. It doesn’t look like fancy discussions about policy.”

But the group’s members did get their start with discussions. About 90 residents, including Ms. Wilson and Ms. Seaman, held regular meetings in 2021 about the culture war issues roiling their schools. The topic of political extremism in the area started cropping up more and more. 

The discussions soon grew into the organized alliance. People decided they were done focusing on politics as a community. “I’m so sick and tired of everybody labeling everybody,” says Ms. Seaman, the group’s assistant executive director. “I just want to get people together to build relationships.”

As they drive, Ms. Seaman points out all the community gathering places that have closed in recent years. The bowling alley near downtown Washougal. The community pool in Camas. A once-popular family restaurant that served both. These were the places people would sit for hours and talk. These were the tendrils of community. Now they sit, abandoned and shuttered.

The emerging alliance needed a project that could both build community ties and be free of controversy. So it decided to start simply, getting people with opposing political views outside, working together for a common purpose in the offline world.

“Nobody likes trash,” says Ms. Wilson. “They’re both picking up trash next to each other. They’re talking about, ‘Who would leave a tire on here? ... And I’m sick of these beer cans out here. What are people doing?’” 

That could lead to conversations about drinking and driving, she continues. “We’re all against drinking and driving. They’re finding what they’re against and for, together, in the moment. And if you have to start out small because everybody hates trash, that’s where you start.”

In addition to picking up the detritus along State Route 14, which runs parallel to the Columbia River, volunteers also decided to meet to plant wildflowers. They decided to tutor teenagers struggling with postpandemic learning loss. They decided to paint murals on buildings in downtown Washougal, which, too, is still recovering from the pandemic.

While laboring together to help the towns they love, the alliance’s volunteers are indeed starting to trust one another to show up. Ms. Wilson hopes that the trust now taking root within the politically diverse group of citizens can grow and flourish and spread beyond those participating in this civic project of building trust. 

A “Trust Index”

Trust in institutions has taken a major battering in the United States, even before the pandemic. Today only one-third of Americans trust churches, Gallup finds. Just one-quarter trust the presidency. Big businesses are viewed with suspicion by 86% of Americans. A minuscule 8% trust Congress. Only small businesses and the military still enjoy the trust of a majority of Americans. 

“But what gives me hope for this are these stories, and these people that I get to talk to every single day,” says Mr. Riley, who travels extensively for Weave. 

He mentions how his project supports a Baltimore effort, led by two women, to build a stage in an alleyway previously littered with needles and dead rats. 

“We helped them bring the Baltimore Symphony there for an evening production in this really rough neighborhood,” he says. “And now they’re figuring out how they can build these stages [in] alleyways in neighborhoods all across Baltimore.”

His organization has spent the past year creating a soon-to-be-released project called the Trust Index. It’s a neighborhood score of what trust looks like in American communities. Scores will be based on numerous factors. For instance, does the area have spaces where people can meet? Does the community exhibit trusting behaviors such as turning out to vote, participating in community meetings, or contributing to nonprofits?

“I’m optimistic, because I don’t believe that a government can help us out of this issue that we’re in,” says Mr. Riley. “But I do know these people in neighborhoods that I’ve traveled to all around our country who have the power to corral people to come together in their community.”

Cross-pollinating within a community

On a drizzly and gray Sunday afternoon, the sun is more elusive even than Washougal’s celebrity resident: Bigfoot. A team of 14 assembles, undeterred by the inclement weather, to tend to the wildflowers it planted near the highway earlier. Ms. Wilson and Ms. Seaman are delighted at the larger-than-expected turnout. Most of the volunteers are people that Ms. Wilson doesn’t know. 

“What happens when you cross-pollinate like that in the community?” she says. “Can you build or create something that didn’t exist before?”

Wearing fluorescent yellow safety vests, the team branches out along the roadside as cars and trucks whoosh past. Some plant seeds. Others wield weed trimmers to repel an encroaching thorny thicket of Himalayan blackberries. Volunteer Lukas Johnson takes notes on a clipboard about the progress of flowering California poppies. 

The millennial English teacher became aware of the alliance via its blog, East County Voices. He appreciated how its essays highlighted the good within the community at a time when everything felt bleak.

“There was so much negativity surrounding that whole COVID era,” says Mr. Johnson, whose family lineage in the area dates back to 1852. “There was a lot of division.” 

When the alliance tilled the land next to the highway in July, a retiree named Mitch Patton showed up with a tractor. “He’s one of the upriver folks,” says Mr. Johnson, describing him as “kind of the right-wing persuasion.”

For his part, Mr. Patton describes his politics as “kind of in the middle.” Though he’s not registered to vote, he says his friends range from right-wing Republican “wack jobs” to left-wing Democrats. He recalls the invective during the pandemic against those who didn’t wear masks or get vaccinated. It made everyone distrust each other. Mr. Patton blames local county measures for exacerbating tensions. A friend was fined during the lockdown for walking alone with his dog on a trail, which felt outrageous. 

“Granted, it was a mess. And there were people dying left and right,” Mr. Patton says. “But when you live out in rural areas like we are, I think they went a little too far.”

The larger tragedy, he says, was the mental impact on children when the Washougal schools closed for a little over a year. During lockdown, his granddaughter – once a happy-go-lucky kid – cried day after day. Now, the ninth grader frequently misses school. Once the head of her class, she’s now in the bottom four or five. 

“My oldest granddaughter is still a mess today,” says Mr. Patton. “I don’t know if she’s ever going to come out of it.” 

He’s more optimistic that the neighbor-versus-neighbor tensions were a temporary phenomenon. When Mr. Patton saw a post on social media about the alliance’s highway cleanup activities, he reached out to help. He’s already involved in several local environmental endeavors, including serving on the advisory board of a Superfund site at the nearby Bonneville Dam. The amiable retiree was unaware that the East County Citizens’ Alliance core mission is repairing a politically riven community. “It’s a great idea,” he says.

Mr. Johnson, the young teacher, says the retiree’s selfless donation of his tractor sped up the big job of tilling the soil for the wildflowers. 

“It was an opportunity to not see somebody for their political persuasion – as we so often have in these last several years – and just to see, ‘What good can I do for the community?’” Mr. Johnson says.

Conversation tables

This summer, Camas will stage its annual parade. Spectators lining the sidewalks will cheer on marching bands, clowns on stilts, and people racing each other in bathtubs fitted with wheels.

It’s a stark contrast to a very different kind of parade on these streets four years ago. When a peaceful march mourning the death of Mr. Floyd passed a gun store in Washougal, it was stared down by armed men.

“The mere presence of an armed rooftop sniper – wearing ear and eye protection, clad in all black, and brandishing an assault-style weapon toward the peaceful marchers – constituted a true public threat,” a Washougal resident complained to the City Council. (Washington allows citizens to carry firearms openly.)

The gun store, which features large signs with Bible verses on the building, recently posted ominous warnings on its website about the imminent arrival of “World War III.” (The owner refused to talk to the Monitor.)

Members of the alliance are acutely aware that although the pandemic is over, fault lines remain throughout Clark County. So they asked a professional mediator, Ryan Nakade, to help launch a bold new endeavor: talking together about controversial topics. 

Mr. Nakade is a trainer for Cure: PNW, a group that addresses political violence in the Pacific Northwest and promotes conflict resolution. On a recent Saturday morning, 12 of the citizen alliance’s volunteers attended a training workshop to learn how to set up conversation tables in the community.

“We recognize that people feel like they don’t have a voice, like nobody cares about what they think,” says Ms. Seaman, who is a librarian at Washougal High School. “And that was causing so much unrest.” 

A conversation table, set up in a public space, invites members of the community to sit down with someone and share what’s weighing on their hearts. The point of a conversation table, or “empathy booth,” isn’t to extract information so much as to build relationships. The alliance avoids publicly calling them empathy booths, however, because it worries that “empathy” sounds like a left-leaning term, and it doesn’t want to scare off conservatives.

During the workshop, Mr. Nakade demonstrates how to ask questions that aren’t loaded, judgmental, or ideologically biased. Instead, questions should inspire deeper reflection. In typical conversations about politics, people often begin simply by parroting familiar talking points from their political tribe. 

“In mediation, there’s a difference between what’s called ‘the interest’ and ‘the position,’” Mr. Nakade tells the Monitor. “The position is the surface thing that someone says they want. The interest or value is what they really want. But sometimes you have to dig in order to unearth that value, that core value.

“Once you unearth it, for me, it feels like striking conversational gold,” he says. “There’s almost a cathartic release in the conversation where I feel like, ‘Oh, this is what the issue is really about.’” 

People have different interpretations of values such as justice, liberty, equality, equity, and parental rights. A conversation-table facilitator can ask questions such as, “How did that idea become important to you? What are the personal life experiences that shaped how you think about this?”

Ms. Wilson envisions the East County Citizens’ Alliance setting up conversation tables in public settings such as a farmers market, a coffee shop, or a library. She floats the idea of possibly even setting up a conversation table outside the gun store. 

The alliance isn’t interested in changing people’s minds. The point is authentic conversations with others.

“Once you unleash or unlock the value, you can then come up with solutions that fulfill that value, or satiate that value, that are outside of the box,” Mr. Nakade says.

“We can be actors in our own public life.”

The first time Ms. Wilson stood on the cliff overlooking the Columbia River Gorge, she wished her son could see the view.

“I’m not very religious, but I texted him saying something like, ‘The fingerprints of God are still visible in this part of the country,’” she recalls. “The great geological forces, the eons of time. It’s all here.”

She’s lived in the Northeast, the South, and the Midwest. But here, in the Pacific Northwest, she felt like she’d found her forever home. Now that the onetime single mother is nearing retirement, her focus has shifted from caring for her immediate family to having a broader awareness of the wider world. 

“I started thinking about, ‘What is home? How do I make this my home?’” she says. “It’s where you invest your time, talent, treasure. It’s where you’re plowing yourself into the ground.” 

It’s been a little over two years since the social worker helped found the East County Citizens’ Alliance. The organization is still not too well known in the conjoined towns. But seemingly everyone knows about the yellow-jacketed volunteers who are beautifying Route 14. During Sunday’s work with wildflowers, passing vehicles honked encouragement. The alliance hopes to expand even as some members of the community continue to feel pessimistic about the possibility of a more harmonious community. An influential local conservative, Rob Anderson, says what’s needed is a reckoning with pandemic policies such as vaccine mandates, which he says were an authoritarian overreach into personal liberty.

“There has to be clarity; there has to be a recognition of mistakes made in order to really find true healing,” says Mr. Anderson, who’s been gathering signatures for a Restore Election Confidence Initiative. “You can’t have healing without repentance.”

He’s not the only member of the community who feels cynical about the community becoming even relatively harmonious. Outside the local hardware store in downtown Washougal, one person says he’s moving to Idaho because he was so tired of local politics.

Members of the alliance’s leadership committee don’t assume they’re right about everything. The initiatives they’re piloting are instinctual. They realize their mission is ambitious.

“We don’t know if it will work,” Ms. Wilson says. “But I don’t think anything else will work. ... It’s not just about the wildflowers. We’re showing people they don’t have to be resigned about things. We can be actors in our own public life.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to correct the timing of local business closures. Both the swimming pool and bowling alley closed shortly before the pandemic. Additionally, the explanation of ReFuel Washougal’s services has been clarified. The program provides meals to residents in need from many walks of life.