By Ralph Thomas
Seattle Times Olympia bureau
Judy Clark yells out to greet a neighbor in Stehekin. At left is the community's only public phone. Clark is against expanding phone service, saying it will change too many things here, including face-to-face contact with people in this remote area.
Phil Garfoot, who turns 68 Wednesday, shoes a horse in Stehekin. Garfoot doesn't want phone service coming to the remote community and he isn't alone. STEHEKIN, Chelan County -- Ana Maria Spagna has to think hard about how long it's been since she talked on a telephone. Two months, she figures, maybe longer.
It's not that Spagna is anti-social or suffering from some weird phone phobia. It's just that she, like nearly everyone else here in this remote mountain village, doesn't have a phone.
And she'd like to keep it that way.
More than a century after telephones came to towns like Seattle, a small company called WeavTel is pushing to connect Stehekin (pronounced sta-HEE-kin) to the outside world. But instead of embracing the idea, many of the town's 100 or so year-round residents are fighting hard to keep WeavTel and the telephones out.
"Why can't we have one place in this world where there aren't any phones?" said Spagna.
Spagna and many of her neighbors have numerous arguments against bringing phones to Stehekin. They say it will damage the town's rustic but neighborly nature and ruin its reputation as a place where tourists can truly escape their hectic city lives.
Some lifelong residents, descendants of Stehekin's first white settlers, fear the phone system would further diminish the town's already eroding spirit of self-reliance. They fume over a federally mandated subsidy program that would enable WeavTel to make money even if many of the residents never hook up.