Strong support system: farmer-to-farmer aid

The Klesick family was supposed to be on vacation in Ocean Shores last week. Instead, all 10 of them piled into a 15-passenger van and drove from their farm in Snohomish County to the Gregory family's farm in Lewis County.

Never mind that the Klesicks had never met the Gregorys. Never mind that they were trading ocean views for miles of knee-deep mud.

"It's a farmer's responsibility to help out another farmer," says Tristan Klesick, 42, who runs the Klesick Family Farm, which grows organic produce in Stanwood. "We're a community. We have to be there for each other during our times of need."

Klesick, his wife, Joelle, and their eight children first found out about the Gregory family two Sundays ago. A woman from their small Christian church announced that her brother Brad Gregory's small sheep farm — the Black Sheep Creamery — was all but destroyed when the Chehalis River flooded on Dec. 3, devastating thousands of homes and businesses in southwest Washington. She asked the congregation to keep him in their prayers.

After church, Klesick told the woman he'd not only pray for her brother, he'd like to "donate a little labor" while he was at it.

A few days later, Klesick and his five oldest children — Micah, 16; Emily, 14; Aaron, 13; Alaina, 11; and Andrew, 9 — showed up on Brad and Meg Gregory's muddy doorstep, suited up in rubber gloves and boots.

They spent the rest of the day carrying armloads of yellow, cottony insulation and buckets of mud up from the Gregorys' flooded basement, while Joelle and the three younger kids hung out in the driveway, rooting them on.

The Klesicks are just one example of many private citizens who've donated their time, money, vehicles, homes and appliances to the flood-cleanup effort in Southwest Washington over the past three weeks.

"People who we've never seen before — from Bellevue and Yakima and all over Washington, really — just keep showing up, asking how they can help," says Karen Kerr, one of the coordinators of the Adna Flood Relief Center.

"Some people hauled fridges and washers and dryers, or bags of clothes to give away. Other people would just say, 'I'm here to help. Where do you need me?' " Kerr says.

Disaster-relief efforts organized by the Red Cross, United Way, Salvation Army and city-run emergency operations centers have relied on ordinary folks, too, to drive trucks and distribute donated goods.

"People around here just stepped up," said Sgt. Stacey Brown of the Lewis County Emergency Operations Center in Chehalis. "All you had to do was say you might need help, and you'd have three volunteers there."

Local churches also put their congregations to work. Folks from the Open Bible Church in Centralia worked 18-hour days for the first week after the flood, providing free drinking water to anyone who needed it.

Folks from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints have unloaded and distributed thousands of sanitary cleanup kits and donated thousands of hours of labor, helping people move water-logged couches and tear out muddy carpets.

And there's no such thing as too much help. As of last Friday, the Federal Emergency Management Agency tallied over 6,000 homes and businesses in Lewis, Grays Harbor, Thurston, Pacific and Mason counties that have been reported damaged or destroyed.

While FEMA doesn't have an estimate of the number of people who have been affected or displaced by the flood, it is probably at least twice — and maybe more like three times — the number of houses that were damaged, says Wali Armstead, a public-information officer at FEMA.

Also as of Friday, FEMA had given out $8.2 million in immediate aid to cover the cost of motel rooms, medications and essential goods. In coming months, many flood victims — like Brad Gregory — may also be eligible to receive low-interest loans from the Small Business Administration.

Gregory hopes to use that money to rebuild his flock as quickly as possible. During the flooding, he lost 62 of his 85 sheep — including all of the rams.

That means that instead of milking 80 sheep this April, Gregory will probably be able to milk only about 20. That's a 75 percent cut in profits, at least, he says. In good years, Gregory's Black Sheep Creamery has sold sheep-milk cheese to stores like Beecher's Cheese in Seattle. This year, he'll probably only have enough to sell at farmers markets.

"It's good the government is helping," says Klesick. "But the bottom line is that we can help each other more quickly. I want to be a part of that solution."

Gregory's not worrying about making cheese yet. Right now, he's focused on fixing the house that he and his family live in, and the rental house next door.

Last week, he was hoping that his three sons — Peter, 15; Andrew, 9; and John, 4 — who've been staying at friends' houses, would be home for Christmas. And the sooner he can get a little income from the rental house, the better.

That's why he's grateful that the Klesick family spent an entire day clearing out the basement of the rental house. By early afternoon, there was still a lot of work to be done: Several inches of mud, thick as yogurt, still coated the walls and floors, and hundreds of white cords designed to hold the insulation in place hung like twisted stalactites from the rafters.

"This is just the initial blitz," says Klesick, scraping soggy insulation from the basement ceiling with a hoe. "As a farmer, I look around and think, 'How is that going to drain? How are you going to plow that?' All I see is how much work there is to do."

Klesick plans to come back to the flood zone several times over the next few months. He hopes to organize work parties from Snohomish County that will come back and "donate labor to anyone who needs it — farmer to farmer," he says.

Later that afternoon, Gregory and Klesick, strangers just a few hours earlier, took a break in the muddy driveway. They surveyed the sodden land, chatted about the soil and rubbed their faces with mud-smeared hands.

Then they fell silent for a moment, their arms folded across their chests, rocking on the heels of their rubber boots. Two farmers, side by side, a united front.

Haley Edwards: 206-464-2745 or hedwards@seattletimes.com