Why I Stayed in Moses Lake When I Could Have Gone Anywhere

After you graduate from Washington State University with a business degree and spend three years working on commercial fishing vessels in the Bering Sea, people assume the next chapter takes you somewhere big. Seattle. Portland. Somewhere with a skyline and a scene.

I came back to Moses Lake.

Not because I failed to find anything better. Not because I ran out of options. I came back because when I was honest with myself about what I actually wanted, Moses Lake kept showing up as the answer.

I wanted to raise my son somewhere people still wave at each other. I wanted to work hard at something that mattered and come home to wide open sky instead of traffic. I wanted to go to a church where the pastor knows your name. I wanted to be close enough to my family that showing up for them wasn't a production.

Moses Lake gives me all of that.

Now I'm a Mechanical Technician at Group 14 Technologies, working in advanced materials manufacturing right here in Grant County. It's exactly the kind of work my background was built for — industrial, technical, demanding, important. And it's happening in the town that made me.

I've lived enough of a different life to know what I was choosing between. The boats, the campus in Pullman, the idea of somewhere else — I did all of that. And I kept coming home.

Some people need to leave to figure out where they belong. Moses Lake is where I belong. I stopped apologizing for that a long time ago.

Jason David NewtonMechanical Technician | Moses Lake, Washingtonjasondavidnewton.com