With two hands and her whole heart, Kia Armstrong takes on the big problems — by homing in on her immediate surroundings.
Back East in college, it was the prison-industrial complex.
And out here on the North Olympic Peninsula, it’s homeland security via local-food supply.
And then there’s that work-life balance thing.
Armstrong, at 31, has already lived lots of life. Born in southern Maine, she went off to Ithaca College in New York to study organizational communication.
But “Ithaca has a phenomenal politics department,” she recalls.
Armstrong dived in to various causes, such as the way the college’s food-service company was heavily invested in the private prison industry.
She left school to keep working for change; eventually the food company divested.
Meantime Armstrong waited tables to pay her bills and to save up enough to take an open-ended road trip across the United States. She had a thing for the West, for the high mountains — and after three months of traveling, found herself on the south fork of the Hoh River.
She met friends who introduced her to the rest of the wonderland called Olympic National Park. From that point forward, she went on a hike every week.
“That was,” she recalls, “one of the best years of my life.”
She got a house-sitting gig off Taylor Cutoff Road west of Sequim and a job waitressing at Petals, then the restaurant surrounded by Cedarbrook Lavender and Herb Farm.
Armstrong turned 23 in February 2003, and she recalls thinking that this would be a turning point.
“I didn’t know what the year would bring,” she says now. She just knew that she was where she wanted to be.
Around this time, Armstrong heard about Nash’s Organic Produce, the farm and the little store in Dungeness. She began shopping for vegetables there, got to know the manager, and one day was offered a job in the store.
But after years of waitressing, Armstrong was a bit burned out on retail. When she saw a man carrying an armload of fresh produce into the farm store, she thought: That’s what I want to do.
“Show up tomorrow morning at 5:30,” the manager told Armstrong. “You’re on the harvest crew.”
Thus began the foundation for the next phase of her life.
“I’ve always been a hard worker,” she said. But field labor “took it to a whole new level. All I did was pack at first,” which meant chasing after the harvesters, trying to box everything they picked.
“They would just fly,” she remembers.
Saturday mornings, Armstrong brought those vegetables into town, to the Port Angeles Farmers Market, the year-round, all-weather outlet for produce grown on the North Olympic Peninsula.
At her market stand, Armstrong learned how to talk fresh food. She also learned the art of the cooking demonstration — and to this day, she loves to get out there with her skillet.
“When you realize how easy stir-fry is, it changes your life,” Armstrong says.
Ask what’s good right now, and she brightens even more: “We have gorgeous leeks, and delicata squash. You can sear up some Brussels sprouts, and at the very end, add some parsnips,” for ultimate flavor.
In the ensuing years, Armstrong took her demos and her vegetables on the road. Nash’s Organic Produce has stands at four year-round farmers’ markets now: Port Angeles, Seattle’s University District and Ballard neighborhood and, on Tuesday afternoons, Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles.
Armstrong and the Nash’s crew have watched as organic food and farmers’ markets have taken off in popularity.
And Armstrong finds it gratifying that the Women, Infants and Children, or WIC, and Senior Nutrition Programs have made fresh produce markets more accessible to more shoppers.
She notes that WIC and senior nutrition are on the chopping block again, however; she counts advocating for those programs’ survival as part of her job.
Nash’s Organic Produce founder Nash Huber marvels at Armstrong’s unflagging passion. For going on nine years now, he’s watched her spread the good-food message for people of all ages.
The message is simple: “Health care is what you eat, not the medicines you take,” Huber said.
“That’s the answer to health care. But the status quo has so much inertia,” with big companies selling food to school districts and hospitals.
Armstrong, nevertheless, has worked for years on a farm-to-cafeteria program to bring local produce into school cafeterias, and to start classroom discussions about the food that’s grown on nearby farms.
Local hospitals, meantime, are starting to change their vision when it comes to food service, Huber adds.
Olympic Medical Center in Port Angeles has its own farmers’ market, and Jefferson Healthcare hospital in Port Townsend has Arran Stark, a chef who is integrating local foods.
This new way of thinking, Armstrong believes, not only invigorates the body; it also has the power to restore our economic health.
“There is so much potential,” she said. “There are so many things we could be making for ourselves. . . .
“Our local food system is, I think, what’s going to turn us around.”
Nash’s is an example: The company has increased the proportion of produce sold locally as opposed to that sent off the Peninsula.
“We used to wholesale 90 percent of what we grew,” to distributors across Western Washington. “Now it’s closer to 50 percent,” Armstrong notes.
At this time of year, when people are focused on holiday dinners, Armstrong’s farmers’ market message is about including at least one locally grown or produced food in their Thanksgiving and Christmas feasts.
You don’t need to overhaul your entire meal plan. Just think, Armstrong urges, about some sweet Dungeness Valley carrots, or local pumpkin in the pie.
“Imagine the power if everybody had one thing,” from a local farm. “It would revolutionize this local economy . . . it would create so many jobs.”
Nash’s took a step in that direction last month when it opened its expanded grocery store at 4681 Sequim-Dungeness Way, in the Dungeness area north of Sequim.
This is a milestone after years of planning, Armstrong said, but it’s just a taste of what’s to come.
In addition to the lending library, children’s play area and loaded grocery shelves, Nash’s Farm Store will offer classes and workshops on healthy living.
Armstrong, whose title at Nash’s is simply “manager,” is part of the planning team for these initiatives. Every step of the way, though, she and the crew — fellow farmers of various ages — contend with forces beyond their control.
There’s bad weather — all too plentiful last winter and spring — along with troubling climate trends and varying availability of good seeds, land and water.
Nash’s owns just 10 of the 390 acres it farms across the Dungeness Valley, Armstrong notes. The other 380 are leased.
Yet “we have a lot going for us in this valley,” she adds, referring to the community of farmers.
In them, Armstrong finds renewal. The best thing about her life, she said, is the people with whom she works — in Dungeness and across the region.
“I’m also inspired by how many amazing women farmers there are on the Peninsula,” Armstrong adds. From Karyn Williams of Red Dog Farm in Chimacum to Jane Vanderhoof of West Wind Farm in Joyce, women are among the builders.
“Even though times are tough, in this country and across the world, I really do believe in the power of our local food economy,” Armstrong said.
“I have a lot of hope for our future.”
At Nash’s, “We’re always learning from our comrades,” she adds. “We’re not doing this by ourselves.”
And Armstrong’s life is not entirely consumed by work.
One evening about six years ago, she went to a friend’s party; she was in charge of the outdoor kitchen there, while Cort Armstrong and his band, Jangle Bones, were in charge of the music.
Jangle Bones’ sound got her. She booked the band to play Nash’s next fall barn dance, a celebration of the harvest that happens inside the packing shed each October.
And from the barn dance on, Cort and Kia courted; they think of that October night as their anniversary.
The Armstrongs married in 2008, and Kia continued cooking and marketing for the farm while Cort, having changed his band’s name to Blue Rooster, continued giving concerts around the Northwest.
Then, one Memorial Day weekend at the Juan de Fuca Festival of the Arts in Port Angeles, Kia saw a woman playing the upright bass — except she wasn’t just playing it. She was dancing with the tall instrument, and planting a new seed in Kia’s mind.
So she got Cort to teach her to play the bass, beginning in 2009. Now she brings her stringed companion, affectionately known as Mona, to a variety of gigs.
Beside her at the Friends of the Fields Harvest Celebration dinner in fall 2009 was Linda Dowdell, a jazz pianist, composer and arranger who had recently moved from New York City to Dungeness.
Dowdell, who had dreamed of living out in the country like this, became friends with Huber and his wife Patty McManus-Huber, and offered to play at the harvest dinner; she invited Armstrong to learn a slew of songs with her.
They reappeared as a duo in Dowdell’s musical revue “Here’s to the Ladies!,” at the Key City Playhouse in Port Townsend in fall 2010, and then took that show to Port Angeles the following winter.
In that version of “Ladies,” Armstrong not only played her bass, she sang a solo: “If,” a comic number that moves at breakneck speed.
“‘If’ is the most daunting [song],” Dowdell said.
But Armstrong isn’t one to shrink from a challenge. Dowdell sums up her approach as “so this is the name of the game? I get it. Let’s do it.”
Armstrong, for her part, said playing music is a delicious way to spend her time away from work. It requires a whole different focus, and it gives her quality time with her husband.
“Cort continues to inspire me, with his musicianship and skill,” Armstrong says.
“Playing bass gets me off the farm,” she adds with a smile. “It feeds another part of me.”
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Features Editor Diane Urbani de la Paz, who edits Peninsula Woman, can be reached at 360-417-3550 or at diane.urbani@
peninsuladailynews.com.
