A completely fair and unbiased guide to our neighbors

Every town thinks about its neighbors more than it will admit. Enumclaw is no different. We are a plateau, a flat green shelf of land stuck up above the valley, and we are ringed by other towns, each of which we hold quiet, confident, completely unfair opinions about. In the interest of public service, here they are.

Buckley. Our sibling across the river, close enough to fight with. Buckley sits just south of us over the White River, which makes them Pierce County and us King County, a fact both towns raise only when it is convenient. We share a highway, a couple generations of intermarried families, and a football rivalry that people who graduated in 1987 still take personally. Buckley has the Log Show, which is exactly what it sounds like and better than it sounds, and if you have never gone to watch grown adults climb poles and throw axes for sport, you should be a little embarrassed. We will make fun of Buckley until the exact moment one of us needs a jump start in a parking lot, and then we are just two people on the same wet hill, and always were.

Black Diamond. North of us, old coal country, and home to the bakery. You know the bakery. Everybody knows the bakery. There is a wood-fired oven up there older than your grandparents and a line out the door every Saturday full of people who drove from three counties for a loaf of bread and a maple bar, and they are correct to have done it. Black Diamond gets to be quaint in a way we are quietly jealous of, all mining history and that famous oven, while we do the actual daily living. We forgive them the bakery. Most days.

Bonney Lake. Down and over to the southwest, and newer than the rest of us in a way you can feel in your teeth. Bonney Lake is where the plateau goes to become a subdivision. It has a lake, several roundabouts it seems genuinely proud of, and enough big-box shopping that we end up there more often than we let on, circling a parking lot, pretending we only came for the cheap gas. It is fine. It is perfectly fine. It is where you go when Enumclaw does not have the thing, which is often.

Auburn, and the whole valley floor. This is down the hill, the flat sprawling country between us and the city, and it is where a good share of the plateau actually spends its daylight hours. Auburn is the mall, the freeway, the job, the specialist appointment, the errand that needs more than one store. We commute into it, we shop in it, we complain about its traffic, and then we climb back up the hill at the end of the day and pull the plateau up behind us like a drawbridge. The valley is where we make the money. The hill is where we spend the rest of ourselves.

Wilkeson and Carbonado. Tiny old sandstone-and-coal towns tucked south into the foothills, small enough that saying their names out loud feels like telling a secret. There is Wilkeson stone in the state capitol building, which is the sort of fact a town that size gets to dine out on for a hundred years, and honestly, good for them. You drive through on the way to somewhere wilder and you think, for a second, about what it would be to live somewhere even quieter than here. Then you get a little scared and drive home.

Here is the thing under the jokes. We are not really a town so much as a plateau full of towns that all had the same idea at once, to live up here at the foot of the mountain, a little apart from the rush, close to the dirt. We razz each other because we are close enough to. The rivalry with Buckley, the envy of the bakery, the eye-roll at the roundabouts, all of it is just the private language of people who are, when the river floods or the power quits or the worst thing happens to somebody’s family, going to show up for each other without being asked, county line or no county line.

So go ahead. Pick your favorite, mock the rest, defend your highway exit like it is a point of honor. Then remember that the next town over is only us in a slightly different hat, on the same hill, under the same mountain, waiting out the same fog.

Consider it.

This story first appeared in Beyond Enumclaw, the free Substack newsletter from Enumclaw.com. Subscribe to get new stories in your inbox.