Pooles on the Loose

Victory Peak, overlooking Hong Kong. 

My parents manage apartments and travel the world. With an inventive spirit and a mind for family, they blazed their career path to fit their needs. Starting out as a dynamite pastor/teacher combo in Cle Elum Washington, their first international adventure together was a honeymoon in the Canadian Rockies. With unconventional vision they brilliantly leveraged their post-graduate degrees in Ministry and Education to land jobs as apartment managers in the Lewiston & Clarkston Valley, rated the number one place to live by New York's Outdoor Life.* 

After parenting their three children through infancy –– which included one child jumping three stories from stadium bleachers, another taking a knife to his scalp, and other kid stuff –– they traveled to Russia. They went to the country that haunted their childhood with missile threats and satellites to offer humanitarian aid.

Even with a spirit for international travel, they spent most of their time investing in their local community. Carrying a strong elbow and a smile to their duty of toilet scrubbing and lawn mowing, they helped make Lewiston and Clarkston a place where others could afford to live in modest style (the kind Outdoor Life appreciates).

They also worked hard to give their children a chance to experience the spirit of travel. Through vaning, flying, camping, and funding, my parents sent their kids all over the Contiguous, and to places like Europe, Mexico, Canada, Samoa, and Malaysia by the time they graduated from secondary.

Now that their kids are practically fledged, the ocean-hopping bug has once again been biting, or hopping in their bones. In January, they left their cellphones and pummel stones behind and flew to Hong Kong, Asia's World City. They took on the city with the same tenacity they repaint an apartment after a chronic smoker has turned the walls yellow.

In Hong Kong the wealthiest people –– and they get pretty rich –– are in real-estate: people who buy, sell, own, and rent land, houses, skye-scrapers, and apartments. I told some people what my parents do, and they said, "Oh, very rich-ah." I laughed a little and said, "They work in a small town... Yeah, they're rich. I mean, you could say they're doing things pretty good."


* The LC Valley is also ranked "Number One Place to be Born and Raised," by the publishers of The Year of the Dragon®.