Dinner on the Covered Bridge

The candles and hanging lights create an intimate affair at the Covered Bridge Dinner. This year Nature did her best to intensify the embrace of the partially enclosed space with the rhythm of rain on the roof and the unwelcoming yet soothing wet that seemed to draw revelers farther inside.

One couple had come down from Seattle. They discovered the event last year while visiting a farmer's market on a camping trip to Wahkiakum County. They loved the experience so much, they were back again.

Two couples from the Aberdeen area heard about the dinner and decided to come. They had fun and vowed they would be back next year.

"We're seeing more folks coming from out of the area," Carrie Backman, the 4-H educator for the WSU Wahkiakum County Extension said. "Seattle, Portland, even Hermiston, Ore."

Joel Fitts, the auctioneer, recited some of his cowboy poetry.

"Now they started in a Kentucky bar at the head of a whiskey row," he said. "Well they wound up down at the depot house some forty drinks below. Well they pours them up and they turns them down and they goes to the other way, and to tell you the gosh forsaken truth, well them boys got stewed that day."

Jeffrey Reynolds wandered up and down the length of the bridge with his fiddle, playing for each table. He was later joined by Andrew Emlen on the banjo.

After a dinner of ham and salmon, squash, scalloped potatoes and cole slaw salad, diners had a piece of huckleberry cheesecake.

And the auction began. Young 4-H members who had waited on tables were now carrying auction items back and forth for bidders to examine.

One item was a porcelain doll. One woman, Pat Thralls became determined to get the doll after hearing one of the 4-H servers say "Isn't this a beautiful doll? I just love this doll."

Thralls remembered the feeling from her youth. After trying to buy the doll outright before the auction, she outbid her competitors to claim it.

She gave it to Ruth Blaylock, the young server who had loved it so much.

Moments later, after the two had hugged, Blaylock was in tears and in the arms of her older sister Damaris, who was crying too.

Generosity seems to be the rule for most bidders because they know the money raised goes to the Wahkiakum County 4-H program.

The item that went for the highest bid? A jar of pickled beets.

"The dinner and auction was a success," Backman said. "We're still tallying the proceeds, but it looks like it will surpass prior years, despite the rain!"