Moses Lake celebrates freedom
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Air Force Capt. Courtney Vidt talking about what she does as a pilot of a C-17 transport during Freedom Fest at the Grant County International Airport on Sunday.
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald Blacksmith Kyle Leslie gives apprentice Caitlyn Turner some pointers on working iron while Caitlyn’s father, George, looks on, during the blacksmith display at Freedom Fest in McCosh Park on Saturday.
Charles H. Featherstone/Columbia Basin Herald A girl makes a giant bubble in McCosh Park park during Freedom Fest on Saturday.?
MOSES LAKE — The city’s first annual Freedom Fest celebration began on Saturday not with a bang, but with a business deal.
Probably for a pound of locally grown cherries.
“It’s been very busy,” said Debbie Ulmer, a volunteer with the Moses Lake Farmers Market and cashier. “We have an excellent turnout, especially for the food truck rodeo.”
Ulmer sat underneath a tent in McCosh Park mid-morning exchanging dollars for tokens, wooden chits that can be used to buy anything at the Farmers Market.
The park filled up quickly, with both vendors and visitors, as music played, people hawked their produce and their wares, kids laughed and threw water balloons at each other under a hot Columbia Basin sun.
“There are additional craft vendors here,” Ulmer said as she swept her arm around her to the water park. “It’s usually the end of August before we get the whole park filled up, but it’s full today.”
The city’s Independence Day celebration has been turned into a two-day festival, complete with fireworks and a concert on Saturday and a static air and classic car show at Grant County International Airport on Sunday.
On Saturday, a number of local and regional businesses showed off their wares and their skills in hope to generate both interest and business.
“Coffee is our blood type,” said Lori Taff as she handed out samples of her freshly roasted Columbian or Mexican coffees to prospective customers.
Taff and her husband Timm are the owners of Othello-based Conversation Coffee Roasters, and they are new to the rhythm of summer festivals. The Taffs are new to the whole enterprise of coffee roasting, having started roasting in their kitchen on the stove just a few years prior before apprenticing themselves to a professional coffee roaster.
“We’ve been open five weeks,” she said. “We purchased our own roaster, and here we are.”
Not far, under another tent, another apprentice watched carefully as blacksmith Kyle Leslie pounded on the red-hot end of an iron bar to form it into the shape of an animal head.
“I was interested in being a blacksmith years back,” said 16-year-old Caitlyn Turner as she grabbed a steel bar from a bucket of water and secured it in a vise. “Then I enrolled in the welding program at Ephrata High School, and I met Kyle, and apprenticed myself.”
“I’ve not been doing this very long,” Turner said. “A few weeks at the most. But I love it.”
Leslie, whose company Tin Roof Blacksmith does a lot of custom iron work and who does blacksmithing displays for a number of festivals, said things had been very busy by mid-Saturday morning.
“Sometimes when I look up from the anvil I can only see people, I can’t see any space,” he said.
Sunday morning, the action shifted to the Grant County International Airport, where folks gathered to look at airplanes and classic cars, and get a look at the inside of the giant Air Force C-17 transport planes that fly almost daily in and out and around Moses Lakes.
“This airport is huge to our training. Without this place we couldn’t train,” said Capt. Courtney Vidt, a C-17 pilot based at Joint Base Lewis-McCord, adding that the airspace around Seattle is so busy they have no space to intensively train there.
While she was chatting up the people standing in line in the belly of the giant transport, Vidt paid special attention to the kids, telling one little boy that they carried “real army men” in this plane who would then sometimes jump out the back while the plane is still flying.
“I started going to air shows when I was 6 and 7,” she said. “A lot of my inspiration to do this comes from that, so I want to pass that on.”
Not far from the C-17, Jim Martinelli worked on a restored B-25 bomber “Heavenly Body,” trying to find an engine oil leak. All the while, reminders that the Grant County International Airport was still at work flew in an out — a heavily modified Gulfstream transport registered to the Missile Defense Agency revved up its engines to take off, while a Boeing 737-8 Max came to a stop elsewhere on the runaway, away from the airshow, part of that company’s ongoing use of the airport as a test center.
“This leak has been eluding us,” said Martinelli, a pilot and mechanic for Erickson Aircraft Collection in Madras, Ore. “It’s not bad, but it’s messy.”
“We came to see the planes,” said Owen Metcalf as he held up his son Logan to look into the cockpit of a small, twin-seat airplane. “My kids love to see the planes, and I do too.”
Charles H. Featherstone can be reached via email at countygvt@columbiabasinherald.com.