He didn't set out to become a civic leader, he just wanted a glass of wine. After two, somebody hugged him, which is how they get you. Before he knew it, he found himself in charge of a scrappy, all-volunteer Chamber of Commerce in California's Sierra Nevada foothills.
Twain Harte sits on Highway 108, where one bad winter can travel from empty cabins to quiet restaurant tables to payrolls nobody is sure how to meet.
After twenty years solving complex organizational problems, the challenges should've been familiar enough: limited resources, competing priorities, overextended people, and an organization that needed to change.
But in a small, unincorporated town, the line between leading an organization and serving a community gets blurry fast.
Embracing the Local: Extension Cords and All follows one year of small-town leadership through a struggling economy, damaged Christmas trees, parade fees, volunteer exhaustion, bizarre phone calls, and at least one situation that sounded suspiciously deep-state for a nonprofit in the Sierras.
Along the way, a man accustomed to finding solutions discovers what actually holds a community together. Beautiful places don't run on charm alone. They run on tired people, fragile institutions, stretched businesses, thin trust, and the dangerous expectation that someone will always step up.
Funny when it shouldn't be, candid when it needs to be, and never intentionally sentimental, Embracing the Local is about the lure of belonging, the work of community, the limits of leadership, and the cost of helping.
It's for anyone who has ever volunteered, served on a board, tried to improve the place they live, wondered why the same six people seem to do everything, or discovered that "someone should really do something about that" is a surprisingly dangerous sentence.
Because loving a place is easy. Serving it well is harder.
