About a month ago I started a new job in my college town eight hours, two states, and a time zone away from my hometown as a hotel front desk receptionist. The hotel has created conversation pieces for guests and employees by putting the employee’s home town on their name tags. When asked what I wanted my hometown to be, I could have easily said Seattle, because everyone knows where it is and something about it. Yet I chose to have my actual hometown, Arlington, put on my tag.

My assumption was that nobody would know where Arlington was, however on the first day I wore my name tag I met a family that currently lived there and another that used to. I thought it was neat, until I noticed what outsiders knew about my hometown.

The first outsider comment I heard was from a tall, burly man that had glanced at my name tag while I was making him keys.

“Oh you’re from Arlington? Isn’t that where that catastrophic mudslide was?” Yes. I lived down the road from the United States’ largest mudslide, covering over a square mile in mud and soot and claiming forty-three lives. Yes, I knew people who lost their lives in the mudslide. Yes, I take it seriously and no, it does not depress me. I mourn for the lives that were lost, for those I knew and those I did not, on the anniversary of the slide, but I am more proud of my community than I was before. We are as stronger and closer knit community because of the slide.

Noting that Arlington was close to the mudslide was an inevitable fact. We had FEMA and news reporters from all over the country stationed there for weeks. My little community lived in the national spotlight for weeks until the very last body was recovered exactly four months after the slide occurred. I had anticipated that maybe one person would remember the event, however, I did not plan for the question to continue to come up especially not once or twice a week.

Then came a different subject, a couple weeks into wearing my badge.

“Didn’t those guys that killed that couple this spring live in Arlington?” While I instinctively told the sweet elderly lady that had handed me a North Dakota identification card that they were actually from Oso and weren’t even property owners there, it hit me that while this was big news in the state of Washington, I hadn’t realized it was news anywhere else. I suppose it made sense, the men were wanted internationally after fleeing to Mexico following the act, but I hadn’t even imagined that it would ever come up in Montana or North Dakota.

A short few weeks ago I had a younger man that needed his keys re-made ask me if I knew the kid that shot his friends and himself in that one high school’s cafeteria. After I told him I didn’t know either the shooter nor the victims personally because I actually attended a different high school a few miles down the road, he remarked on how hard it must have been to be so close to the largest high school shooting since Columbine. I was somewhat upset to begin with, but it was just a comment and I moved on from it.

It wasn’t until this past weekend that I became truly angry. On Friday September 23^rd a man walked in the Cascade Mall, which was just a twenty-eight-mile drive from my house and an address I so proudly recited to my friends when I was a young girl, and opened fire in the women’s Macy’s store, killing four women at the scene and a man in the hospital the morning after. I didn’t work that night and names of the victims were not released immediately. The next evening while I was at work I got a text from my mom telling me that two of the victims were loosely related to me. They had entered the mall to pay their Macy’s bill while one’s husband waited in the car.

Despite not knowing either victim very well, to say I was upset would have been a gross understatement. After taking a short break, I returned to work determined to finish the night and head home to unwind. It wasn’t shortly after before a well-meaning guest, having only seen my name tag and not knowing how close my home was from the mall, asked me if I knew any of the victims. I was enraged that anyone would ask me something like that in such a sensitive time. I was upset that anyone could have connected my sweet, close-knit hometown to such tragic events. Didn’t they know any better? How could people define my hometown as being connected to these tragic events? Didn’t these outsiders know just how traumatic it was to many people in my community to be a part or know someone involved in these events? Couldn’t people associate small town Western Washington with something better?

It was then that I realized that not many people outside of our area knew what it’s like to actually be from there. In reality, we have an extremely competitive hockey team, the Everett Silvertips. When I was in middle school the majority of the guys in my school played hockey, some even regularly travelling to Canada to play with teams there. We also have a farm team for the Seattle Mariners, where Felix Hernandez rehabbed and even pitched this summer.

Snohomish County was also home to the last 3A grass football field in the state, which was finally replaced, with the help of grants from the NFL and the Seattle Seahawks, with turf in 2014. When I was in high school one of my classmates even drove a tractor to the school’s car show. The most happening business on a Friday night in my town is not a bar, but rather the bowling alley. We were a shorter drive to Puget Sound than to any of the malls, unless you counted the outlet mall that was really only frequented by people who drove down from Canada to shop because it was cheaper than shopping in Canada and we were close enough to the border. Sure it is small town living, but it’s wonderful regardless.

Being from my area means you spent summers in one of the many lakes in our area, floating the river, or at a beach on the sound. You either hiked one of the numerous trails in the foothills of the Cascade Mountains or you found your way to the Big Four Ice Caves (and you walked in them despite the many, many, signs telling you not to). One could hit up one of the numerous festivals in the area – from the Strawberry Festival in Marysville to AquaFest in Lake Stevens.

Maybe the concert scene was more like it, so you hit up the one time that “hippies” made it to our area for the Summer Meltdown music festival at the Darrington Rodeo grounds or you could go to the Stillaguamish Festival of the River that featured several local and big name country acts for free. Extra-curricular activities if you came from my area included the Future Farmers of America, 4-H, incredibly competitive sports teams, rebuilding old pickups to go “flexing” in the foothills, or working the Lip Dub competition was cause for an entire day off of classes in order to film every student in our high school lip-synching popular songs (my personal favorite being Arlington High's PNW Dub, featuring acts from the Pacific Northwest).

While all of these are just a few amazing attributes of the area I call home, they aren’t the best. Community ties are what makes my home better than its descriptors. When the Oso Mudslide occurred volunteers were the first ones in and the last ones out. They found the first survivors and the last victim, despite being pushed away again and again by the professionals. Volunteers can be credited with creating the road around the slide that remedied the one-way in and one-way out highway being blocked.

When the shooting at Marysville-Pilchuck occurred, the surrounding high schools in our area supported the school by wearing its colors at our football games and spirit days. We decorated the entire length of the chain link fence around the school in flowers, posters, stuffed animals, and other shrines in support of the students and faculty. Now in response to the tragedy at Cascade Mall, over two-hundred first responders, some even off-duty from several counties over, responded and several hundred tips were received to help identify and catch the suspect in under twenty-four hours.

Being from a rural town in western Washington does not define us as the victims of a shooting. It does not define us all as survivors of a mudslide. We are not the neighbors of murderers. We are a tight knit community that enjoyed the great outdoors and the simpler things in life.