Diane Urbani De La Paz

Peninsula farm work a savior for ex-convict

DUNGENESS — Mud, carrots and moisture are Patrick Drum’s tickets to an unexpected life.

He’ll tell you right off that he spent close to half his adulthood in prisons around the state.

He’ll also tell you that for the past two years, he’s been doing something that makes him feel good at the end of each day.

Drum, 33, is a year-round field worker at Nash’s, supplier of organic produce to Western Washington.

On this Labor Day, Drum is laboring, all right.

It’s the peak of harvest season in the 400 acres Nash’s leases across the fertile Dungeness Valley.

Ask Drum what he did last week, and he replies: “a bunch of irrigatin’.”

He also bags grain and picks lettuce, cabbage, spinach, carrots, berries, broccoli and anything else among the 100 crop varieties grown on Nash’s farm.

It was Kia Armstrong and Scott Chichester, two longtime managers at Nash’s, who gave Drum a chance in September 2009.

He had a prison record, having most recently served four years for drug-related offenses at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla Walla.

“From the time I was 16, I would get intoxicated. I used chemicals,” Drum recalled.

“I was just lost . . . in nonsense.”

His parents were also users. His mother died in 1996 at age 47; his father followed in 1998 at age 50.

But “I stayed acting up for a while,” Drum said, adding, “I’m a slow learner.”

While he was at the penitentiary, Drum saw other inmates, career criminals who were serving 30 years or more.

“One wrong turn, and that was their life,” he said.

Somewhere, Drum found the will to start down a different path.

Released from Walla Walla at 31, he got a job washing dishes at a Sequim restaurant.

He did that, and hated it, for nine months.

Hot-air balloon visits Sequim as a teaser for next year's festival ...

SEQUIM — As if wanting to entice a healthy flock of hot-air balloons, Sequim presented an azure sky and a field unruffled by even the slightest wind Tuesday afternoon — for what amounted to a teaser.

This teaser, starring the 90,000-cubic-foot balloon Aura, was for the inaugural Sequim Balloon Festival, a multicolored and -faceted event to take place here Labor Day weekend, Sept. 1-3, 2012.

Mandy and Vic Johnson of Covington brought Aura, a balloon and four-person basket powered by liquid propane, to Fred and Loretta Grant’s property at the end of Washington Harbor Road.

Shortly after 5 p.m., they inflated the thing, then let it breathe as the festival steering committee watched.

Heading up the group is Randall Tomaras, the festival organizer who calls the event not just a good, high time, but also “an economic exercise.”

Tomaras, a Sequim-based commercial photographer who previously orchestrated Everett’s centennial celebration — which included a hot-air balloon show — first floated the Sequim festival concept earlier this year.

The first time up, he said, the event should attract about 20 balloon meisters — including Vic Johnson, who said he is “absolutely” coming back for it — plus plenty of admirers.

There will be early morning group launches, balloon rides and a “night glow,” when the balloonists turn on their heaters to illuminate their colorful orbs, Tomaras promised.

“The whole idea,” he said, “is to create an economic benefit for this area.”

As he began envisioning a balloon festival, Tomaras researched Sequim’s late-summer weather and found that the Sept. 1-3 period rarely sees rain or winds above 10 mph.

That makes it ideal for hot-air ballooning, he said.

Thank you Diane Urbani de la Paz for a great article!

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