A Look at Tillamook County, Oregon’s Needs by the Numbers

By Neal Lemery

(Published in the Tillamook County Pioneer, 7/7/2025)

A friend asked me the other day what they might do to help the community. They wondered if we had significant poverty and other social issues. I told them to take a good look around and become aware of what seems so obvious to many of us. I researched some alarming statistics, which are likely outdated, understated, and under-reported. These numbers paint a disturbing picture and are a call to action.

Oregon State University and the Ford Family Foundation have assembled an insightful look at where our county is at in terms of our well-being, health, and educational needs. https://www.tfff.org/wp-content/uploads/Tillamook-CountyProfiles-2024.pdf

46% of our households experience financial hardship (12% live below the federal poverty line, 34% below the Asset Limited, Income Restrained, but Employed (ALICE), which means they don’t have enough income for their basic needs). That 46% compares to 29% nationally.

11% of the population has food insecurity.17% of our kids live in poverty.

33% of our population has a third grade reading level or less; 21% have a fifth grade math level or less.

We pay more property taxes ($2,296 per person) than the state average of $1,862.

Our two-year-old kids have only a 56% vaccination rate (Oregon has a 68% rate).

Our mental health providers have a ratio of 317 people per provider, but Oregon’s ratio is 148 people per provider.

We live in a “child care desert” with 7.9 providers per 100 kids. The state ratio is 18.4 providers per 100 kids.

With the oncoming cuts in SNAP benefits and Medicaid (the Oregon Health Plan), these local statistics and the impact on our neighbors and our community will only become more challenging. There is talk about not keeping local hospitals and clinics open, and cutting food programs in schools.

What my friend can do, and what we can all do, is become better informed, and more involved in organizations that are taking on the social issues that these statistics mean to all of us. We all know people who are working in the professions that deal with the problems associated with poverty, education, health care, food supply, and the needs of kids. Their knowledge, their experiences, and their passion for service and care of others are tremendous assets to the community.

We need more conversations, more engagement by all of us in these issues. We need to be better informed, not only on the issues that these numbers represent, but how we can collectively address these problems, learn about solutions and how to become engaged in being our community problem solvers.

These numbers, and the daily struggle and challenge our community members have, are a call to action. We need to have difficult conversations, and be the cause of “good trouble” as John Lewis famously said.

As Margaret Meade said, “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed individuals can change the world. In fact, it’s the only thing that ever has.”

–7/7/2025

A Few Lessons in Compassion and Caretaking

By Neal Lemery

(Published in the Tillamook County Pioneer, 4/3/2025)

This week, life gave me some perspectives of my role in community building and healing. It was time for me to be in school, and to get reacquainted with taking a positive, proactive role, to quit my bellyaching and whining, and take some positive action.

A friend invited me to coffee, seeking some guidance and direction on their new role parenting a young relative. They thought I had some wisdom on the subject, but I suspect they were more in search of affirmation and encouragement, with me as a cheerleader and proverbial optimist. I can certainly play the role of cheerleader, and have the scars to prove I’ve played the role of a parent of teenagers.

Yet, I celebrate my role as parent, having just had a rich conversation with one of my sons this week. That unexpected phone call was filled with rich stories, laughter, and his comment that he had called “just to hear your voice”. Our talk about relationships, marriage, and our mutual desire to keep learning affirmed my thoughts that I’d done a decent job with him.

At coffee with my friend, I listened, commiserated, encouraged, and offered a few suggestions. My friend thought I was a genius, as they acted on my ideas and found success and affirmation. My theory is that they instinctively knew the answers and the ideas had ripened and were well received. They had done the hard work, and just needed to see they were headed in the right direction. It’s not too hard to give a gentle nudge when people are already doing the right thing.

It was a reflective week, as well. A friend had given a talk about their passion in cleaning cemetery headstones, and helping families find their heritage, while sharing some nearly forgotten local history. In that work, they celebrate the lives of those who have gone before us, and giving us all a sense of foundation and heritage.

I took that message to motivate me to visit my own family graves, and do some much needed maintenance and rehabilitation. As I stood there in the cemetery, gently brushing off old leaves and debris and applying a cleanser to wash off decades of gunk, I took a good look at the names, and the dates of birth and death. I ruminated over all the good times and hard times represented by the dashes between those dates, and the impact those ancestors had on me.

It was a time of contemplation, gratitude, and respect. I hadn’t taken the time lately to acknowledge their contributions to my life and the importance of the ancestors’ various roles in their raising of me. Like most of us, I get caught up in the daily busyness and worries, and ignore who I’ve become and why. A lot of that comes from those family members whose headstones I was cleaning. A few tears came, and also a flood of good memories and gratitude.

These days are abundant in harsh words and comments, with people taking the opportunity to be snide, hostile, and even indifferent to another person’s crisis. The daily news cycle overflows with crisis and uncertainty. I’m trying to limit my exposure to social media and its recent abundance of nastiness, and political discussions having a dominant theme of adversity and opposition. I want all that clamor to instead be a vehicle for addressing challenging community needs.

I left the cemetery, and that coffee shop after seeing my friend, with a new sense of gratitude and peace, knowing that in life, we do a lot of good things, and help a lot of people on their own walks in life. The daily news cycle may seem important to people now, but knowing that I’ve been both the giver and the recipient of good thoughts, support, and kindness is worthy of my celebration and thanks. That’s where I need to put my focus and my love.

4/2/2025

Komorebi

(published in the Tillamook County Pioneer, 2/17/2025)

(Komorebi: The interplay of light and leaves as the sun shines through the trees.)

Into this place, this space
Open to light, streaming, flowing
Straight light, angled, shaded, scattered in part

By and through
Leaves of trees, trunks, and limbs Dancing onto the ground, my face
In all the colors in this place.
Quiet here, except birdsong and breeze, All that is not human,
And leaves, rustling, murmuring Gathering and scattering the light.
I take it all in, absorbing
Marveling,
Me only a small insignificance,
A mere witness
To magnificence,
Awe.
No word in my language to describe it
I rely on the Japanese
Komorebi
—Neal Lemery 3/28/2023

When I am in need of quiet and contemplation, space to sort things out and re- gain my perspective on life, or simply work through a difficult and challenging prob- lem, I take myself to the forest. I seek out the quiet, off the “beaten path” places, and look to immerse myself into that experience, into what I call the purity of nature.

Unpolluted by human activity, the real forest experience seems uncomplicated, where time takes on a different existence, where process is not measured by modern culture, but by the incremental pace of natural life.

“Slow down” is the message I soon experience, until I start thinking that my hu- man concept of time is actually toxic, harmful to other life forms. And after I move into the “slow down” mode, I start listening. I listen and begin to hear the silence, and then the subtle sounds of forest life and being. A breeze in the trees, a bird song, the al- most inaudible sound of a small twig falling or the faint sounds of moving water. The chaos and sound clutter of modern life ebbs away, and I am left to again discover the calm of natural sounds, and the rhythm of the real world.

In the quiet, I hear myself breathe, hear my footsteps, hear the noises of the for- est, its inhabitants, the breeze, leaves, animals, the now familiar sounds of this world. And, I wonder why I don’t go there more often, to just be, to sit with the natural quiet, to feel the rhythms of the real world. I can hear myself think and I become reacquaint- ed with my thoughts, my true “self”.

What I had thought important and worrisome a half hour ago, is now just noise that is fading away into the background, to be set aside so that I can again hear the sounds of the forest, and feel at peace. Human problems and worries diminish in this visit to nature, and what is really important in life re-emerges, comes out of its hiding places, and takes center stage in my brain.

All is good. All is well. All is calm.

I take some breaths, feeling myself breathe, feeling a deep sense of relaxation, of ease, of the flowing away of tensions and stress. I am in a good place, a place of peace. Tranquility. And in all that, I am comforted, put at ease.

The simplicity of all this, the minimalist being of all this, astonishes me. No money changed hands, it was little effort to come here, and to quiet myself, and begin to no- tice things, and to not notice the things that had been pressuring, irritating me. I could simple be a being that noticed, that observed, that was present. A being focusing on existing, on experiencing the quiet and the spirit of the forest. I was in simplicity, and it was good.

Part of my brain, freed at least for a while from the tyranny of being in “work mode” and being the analyzer and problem solver, worked in the background, and I found myself picking up my brain’s solutions and answers to what had been troubling challenges. I wasn’t very conscious of that thinking, but the answers and paths to solu- tion came forward. It was easy and I just found myself accepting that I was getting some answers, that troubling problems had solutions, and I wasn’t struggling to find them. I was calm, in touch with myself, with the world, and in my focus on where I was at, what I was experiencing in the forest, somehow opened the door to my human world tasks.

I breathed again, deep, and unfocused. I was simply “being”, not doing.

Again, I realized I needed to be a being and not a doing. The creatures and spirits in the forest were all beings, and not doings. I could be like them. I could learn from them, how to live, how to be, how to be immersed in my existence. How I could just be alive.

And that was enough. No great expectations, no objectives. Just be alive and feel.

The forest did not sit in judgment of me, or evaluate, assess, critique. I could just be. Myself. I could just be myself, without expectation.

Whatever purpose, whatever mission I had come to the forest for this day, was ac- complished. I sensed a new feeling of satisfaction, of accomplishment. Maybe not tan- gible, maybe nothing I could check off a box about, but I had come for what I needed. And it was good. It was enough.

I breathed again, and gave thanks to the forest where I sat, and was filled with gratitude, and with a sense of completeness, of accomplishment. Not in the human, “civilized” sense, but deeper than that, a sense of wellbeing in my soul.