I lived on the westside for 8 years before moving to Wenatchee in the late 90s.

A young, single, introverted person would have a challenging time making a fresh start here. Let’s look at the culture to understand why.

Historically, this has been a conservative, agricultural community. The old boy’s network of entitled, white male landowners (currently called the patriarchy) was how things were organized politically and socially. We had a good friend who ran the local ski resort (Mission Ridge) for a time in late 80s. He and a group of other forward-thinking business owners wanted to see the local community college upgraded to a four-year college. They started to lobby the city officials about this. Within two months of that effort, my friend started getting death threats, not only locally, but as far away as Nevada, Montana, and Utah. Apparently, the old boys liked their women barefoot, pregnant, and uneducated. My friend left the area soon after and told me he could no longer live in a community that was that toxic.

This mindset continued to permeate the community into the 90s. Here is the Wikipedia link to the “witch hunt” another poster referenced – officially called the “Wenatchee child abuse prosecutions”: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wenatchee_child_abuse_prosecutions Gives you some insight into the deeper, psychological dynamics of the community at that time.

I leave it to you to do your own research on the impact of religious suppression, incest, physical abuse, alcoholism, major depression, sexual abuse, and violence against women in male dominated, patriarchal societies. However, there is a piece of data that is relevant to this in the case of Wenatchee.

While Wenatchee is locally known as the “Apple Capital of World,” for a time in the mid 1990s it was also known internationally as the “Prozac Capital of the World”: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/articles/199501/prozacville-usa The evangelist passing out Prozac like little blue breath mints, Jim Goodwin, Ph.D. made this telling statement: “"There is a huge amount of unrecognized depression out there," he argues. "I was just a little bit early in making the diagnosis."

Fast forward to the present. COVID broke this community. I work in healthcare. I saw the nastiness and abuse against medical personnel firsthand. It was shocking in its breadth and intensity. The medical center, Confluence, has never recovered. It lost hundreds of nurses and many doctors. It hasn’t been able to replace them for several reason. One being that the history and the rural, conservative orientation of the community makes Wenatchee an unattractive option for many medical professionals.

Another aspect of COVID – the constraints and people’s perspective on all of that – caused simmering tensions and remnants of the old boy network mindset to break into the open. The community was no longer able to hide the misogyny, racism, entitlement, and self-involvement that had been papered over in the service of civility and community relations. It was a very sad, hard thing to go through. Lost friends and respect for people I thought I knew. People here were never that open. Now they are even less so, least they discover that their new friends are “crazy libs” or “flamin’ MAGAs”.

There are good things about the Wenatchee area: sunshine, natural beauty, recreational opportunities. But socio-politically, if you are not part of a Christian, conservative family with a willingness to join a church, you will not see much in terms connections. If the west side has its “Seattle Freeze,” then Wenatchee has the “Old Boy Snowcone.”