Coos County and the entire Southern Oregon Coast, without question, is an exquisitely beautiful area, so six years ago I thought this would be a wonderful place to raise my daughters. Within a year, however, some hard realities and culture shocks began to set in.
At first they weren’t so out of the ordinary, I mean everyone knows old people often have too much time on their hands and meddle in other peoples lives, it happens everywhere. The news is riddled with daily accounts of bad cops and incompetent police work around the globe, not just here. The term ‘good old boy’ system wasn’t coined in Coos County and it is no surprise the system thrives here as well as elsewhere.
Elected officials misuse public money and mistreat public employees everywhere, not just in Coos County. Crimes against women are committed everywhere, everyday, not just here. Hard economic times, poor financial planning and lousy business ethics don’t necessarily go hand in hand but they each happen everywhere not just here.
Still there is some other element, some indefinable undercurrent, some unquantifiable but nevertheless measurable resistance, some low amperage buzz always in the background, a niggling impediment to a peaceful and productive life. Coos County has a certain meanness to it. Coos County takes a strange delight in the suffering of others, schadenfreude it is called.
Not that the county and the communities that make it up aren’t changing. Long time incumbents have found themselves replaced with fresh blood, despite an electorate with a below average literacy rate. Some new blood is moving to the area and more importantly some of the old blood, the ‘good old boys’, are grudgingly relinquishing control or passing on. But old habits are hard shaken and the inevitable reaction to fight tooth and nail to maintain power manifests as a mean disregard for anyone perceived as a threat. The despicable handling of the Coos County Road Department layoffs last New Year’s Eve and the recent forced departure of Coos Bay’s city manager are two good examples.
Since moving here I have made some lifelong friendships and had some wonderful adventures but in a nutshell, Coos County is not a good place to raise bright, imaginative and highly gifted children, especially daughters. Despite recent events for which I heap strong praise on local law enforcement for speedy resolutions, Coos County is not a safe or nurturing place for women.
After witnessing the treatment of citizens and employees by local leadership across the county, it isn’t somewhere I want to do business either. In fact, whereas this area made everything harder, set up endless hurdles for me, my children even my damaged veteran son and made almost no effort to support a gift that would have provided $2M in annual revenue for the schools, my little company is now being greeted with an abundance of solid technical support, years of experience and downright goodwill and optimism. A breath of fresh air.
These last several weeks, much to the chagrin of my kids, I have been commuting daily or living in hotels while completing the V-LIM generator outside the strange cosmic influences of Coos County. With a lot of help, we have made less than concentric components concentric, we have laboriously measured and narrowed the gap between magnets and coils. We have remade parts and then remade them again and I have learned the glaring difference between an artisan, an assembly firm and a real manufacturer with years of experience.
We have designed the testing procedure and believe we have located a state of the art digitizing oscilloscope to measure flux fields, resistance, inductance, voltage, amperage and, oh yes, kilowatts output. We now are, I am now ready…
… except to post this I have to find some decent cell coverage or a good internet connection. Guess you can’t have everything.
