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Biking with the Mormons A firsthand account of riding alongside the missionaries of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints BY ERIC MANDEL emandel@covingtonreporter.com
Editor’s note: This is the first piece in a three part series.
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All-outdoor school set to welcome first classes
Oh no. As I reached Lake Meridian Park to meet my companions for the day, my 1970s-era Viscount bicycle started making a consistent, distinct grinding noise. It’s kind of hard to describe in print. You know: Errch… Errch… Errch… Errrch… — that rasp of rusted metal on loose spokes and unreliable rubber. It’s an off-putting noise. And certainly not the sound I’d hoped to hear leading up to a day of peddling. This hand-me-down relic came from my grandfather, who shuffled it off to my dad, who passed it along to me – rather than sending it to the dump. Thus, I offered an initial warning to the pair of eager and smiling ladies ahead of me. “If this bike falls apart, I may need some first aid,” I said, only half-joking. “We’ll pray for help,” said Sister Mikayla Pearson, laughing with a surprisingly keen sense of irony, with each pedal pushing her ahead of me. First Meeting I’m not sure what I expected as I entered the slightly overcast June 4 morning with the most spiritually excitable strangers I’d ever met. All I really knew was that I’d be riding with the Lake Sawyer Ward missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-day Saints. You know, Mormons. “Have you ever heard of Mormons before?” Pearson had asked me a few weeks prior, rolling up behind me at the corner of Kent-Kangley and Southeast Wax Road, with her companion, Sister Savannah Webb. The ladies wore modest, business casual clothing with helmets and matching blue and tan-trimmed backpacks. Before the small talk
BY KATHERINE SMITH ksmith@maplevalleyreporter.com
Sister Webb, right, and Sister Pearson introduce themselves to Williams Cacao, who doesn’t speak much English, and try to explain their mission with the Mormon church at a bus stop on Southeast 272nd Street. ERIC MANDEL, The Reporter started, I noticed the daunting black name tags affixed to their cardigans: “Sister Webb” and “Sister Pearson” above the distinctively printed name “Jesus Christ.” “Damn it,” I’d thought to myself. “How do I politely get out of a religious sermon?” Knowing what I know now, this is a fairly common initial response to a chance — or miracle, depending on your perspective — encounter with the Sisters. People have busy lives and don’t typically love being solicited, or proselytized, for unknown reasons. “We don’t expect everyone to jump on our message and to accept it,” Pearson, a native Californian with sandy-blond hair, told me later. “We are just trying to offer it to people and invite them. Sometimes I do wish people would let us have a conversation
with them, but we all have busy I could do so, Pearson told me lives and not everyone is going they’d need permission from the to take time to listen to what we Church leadership. have to say. A lot The national of times the people press hasn’t been that aren’t going too kind to the to listen to our Church of Jesus message, they don’t Christ of Latterrecognize the imday Saints of late, portance of it. We after Mormon Kate believe the message Kelly, a human we have is sacred rights lawyer from and has eternal Washington D.C., consequences and was excommuniwe know they don’t cated for advocatrecognize that. If ing that women they really knew should be ordained what they were in the Church. In The Sisters often bike 8-12 turning their backs miles each day. my initial research on they might take on the religion, the time to listen.” I also found a I decided to unearth my 2012 BusinessWeek article that rickety two-wheeler for a chance detailed the nebulous relationpeek into the response and reacship between the Church and tion of other strangers happened [ more BIKING page 2 ] upon by the sisters. But before
Sarah Schumacher is busy this summer preparing to open Maple Valley’s first all-outdoor school for young children, a program she said is the first of its kind in Southeast King County. Schumacher is the co-founder and president of Playful Hearts, a Maple Valley-based nonprofit dedicated to connecting young children to nature. This fall they’ll be launching the Little Sparrows all-outdoor preschool at Lake Wilderness Arboretum. “The children will get to climb and get muddy and do things that children do well,” Schumacher said. And, yes, that’s all-outdoors for the duration of the 10-month program. “The proper gear is really important,” Schumacher said with a laugh. “Rain boots will be on every teacher and child and parent.” The famous weather reputation of Seattle aside, Schumacher believes in letting children be children, and Playful Hearts’ educational philosophy is one that is inspired by well known models including Waldorf and Montessori schools. “I would say that our approach is a blending of earth-based, Waldorf-inspired, and using a lot of the Montessori tools,” Schumacher said. Along that vein, Schumacher said the school is seeking an official affiliation with WECAN, the Waldorf Early Childhood Association of North America. WECAN states its mission as, “to foster a new cultural impulse for the work with the young child [ more SCHOOL page 6 ]
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