The barn was painted over with a sign saying “Morton went woke, what a joke” and then a bunch of other things too difficult to read from a car doing about sixty on the windy road between Packwood and Morton. The handmade signage up in Yeti country is really something else. A lot of it was the usual MAGA stuff but some of it I honestly had no idea what they were referencing. But a short while later we came to the exit for Morton and, well, it seemed like a fun riddle to solve. What made Morton woke?

We started at the visitor center. Or at least we tried to. Lots of arrows pointing us somewhere led to a small building with an empty parking lot and a big open sign on the door. It was closed. Across the street was a small home with a Trump flag. So far it seemed Woke zero, MAGA one.

Made our way into town and saw our first Woke clue. It was a bench dressed up in Pride colors. Beside it was a mural starring a gay Yeti (he flew the Pride flag) and a defiant message stating “Those who broke our windows cannot break our spirit.” Now we were getting somewhere.

We started asking around at the local businesses.  Nothing to direct. Not, “Do you agree with the homophobes?” Just a little bit of open ended comments. No one wanted to comment. Not at the thrift store which was tended by a young woman with colorful tattoos. Or the coffee shop people who served incredibly delicious food along with their eclectic personalities. It was just a couple of MAGA signs in town, a few broken windows (a Google search found it happened on June 26, 2023 with several Pride related symbols attacked), and a whole bunch of townfolk not wanting to talk about it. Someone did say that they felt the town was split pretty much in half with some folk “conservative” and others not. I asked what was conservative about committing a hate crime. They had no answer. But in their silence was one definite truth. Morton is not nearly woke enough.