Mary Elizabeth knows about power dynamics. Not the kind wielded in corner offices or campaign headquarters, though she's navigated those spaces for two decades. She knows about the subtler architecture of community, how people gather, how they hurt each other, how they show up when everything falls apart. 

At UC Santa Cruz, she studied community studies with an emphasis on resistance and social movements—learning community organizing, how to create campaigns for positive social change, the history of communes in the '60s, conflict resolution, power dynamics. She got her master's in public policy in Oakland, then practiced it all with the ACLU, organizing campaigns across California and Arizona. But nothing in her training prepared her for the specific, intricate ecosystem of Idyllwild.

"It feels like a high school," she says, and the comparison isn't dismissive, it's anthropological. "Walking through town is like walking through the halls. You're going to see people you know. You're definitely going to see people you don't vibe with. And you're going to have to accept that on some level."

In the city, you could avoid. Here, avoidance is a luxury no one can afford.

The Weight of Arriving

Six years ago, Mary Elizabeth and her husband arrived on the mountain with two small children and an impossible hope: a three-bedroom, two-bathroom cabin with a detached garage and big yard, listed at $1,400 a month. In San Diego, they'd been facing a 70% rent increase that would have swallowed their budget whole: two kids in preschool, two bedrooms that had become too small, a future narrowing into financial impossibility.

"We kept expanding the bubble on Zillow," she remembers. "Like, where can we possibly afford?" The cabin appeared like an answer to a prayer she'd written down but hadn't quite believed in.

She'd never been to Idyllwild before, but Santa Cruz had taught her something about loving trees, the way the redwoods held you. When they drove through town to see the cabin, something familiar stirred. They got the house because they didn't have a dog. Everyone else applying did.

It was 2019, just after the Cranston Fire, and the stories from neighbors sent her into research mode: forest management, home hardening, fire insurance. Now, in a strange cosmic irony, she works as the Chief Conservation Strategist for California with the Sierra Club, advocating for the very policies she once had to teach herself as a frightened newcomer.

The Curriculum of Small Towns

The first lesson came in waves. The Idyllwild wave—literal waves of hands, through car windows, on walks with the kids. "It's a thing," Mary Elizabeth says. In the city, you exist in your own bubble. Here, everyone waves at everyone.

"It took me maybe six months, even a year, to fully become comfortable with it," she admits. "Now it feels good."

But the warmth has its shadow side. In a town this small, you can't curate your social circle with urban precision. There are people with serious issues, and you can't always avoid them. Her training gives her language for these patterns, but not always solutions. She's learned to distinguish between gossip and information sharing that serves the collective good, warning someone about a contractor who overcharged you, for instance.

Still, that kind of honesty can bite back. She's navigated her share of drama, including a failed business partnership.

The Politics of Neighbors

Mary Elizabeth has worked in progressive politics her entire career. When she first arrived in Idyllwild, she knew the mountain held a spectrum: Trump supporters, anarchists who just want to be left alone, hippies, artists, fellow organizers.

She thought it might bother her more than it does.

"I can honestly say that I do not care if any of my neighbors voted for Trump," she says, wonder in her voice. "I didn't vote for Trump, but I don't really care."

There are lines, of course. She wouldn't share space with someone openly racist or sexist. But everyday people who want the best for their families? She's learned to accept different ideas about how to achieve shared goals.

"What if there was an earthquake and we had to get off this mountain?" she asks. "I want them to know they could come to me. I really see people as humans."

Her younger self would have been more judgmental. Now she's discovered that commonality doesn't require agreement, and community doesn't require conversion.

The Storm That Showed Her Everything

Last year, Mary Elizabeth had a miscarriage. She was 42, and while the pregnancy had been unexpected, the loss was devastating. She hadn't experienced one before, didn't understand the physical toll, the pain that felt like labor, the grief that lived in her body.

And then the storm came.

"When I was going through it, there was this huge storm," she says quietly. "Thunder and lightning struck our street. It blew out windows in eleven houses. None of my windows broke, thank God, but we lost power."

She was in candlelight. In darkness. In pain. Grieving.

She texted a few friends to check if they were okay. They checked in on her too. Within hours, it was like a phone tree had activated. Gift bags appeared. Women she was close with, women she barely knew, they showed up.

"It wasn't gossip," she says. "It was love. I was overwhelmed. I felt so cared for."

This from a woman whose love language is acts of service, who spends her professional life helping others, who doesn't often ask for help herself. But the community held her anyway, demonstrated what collective care looks like when it's immediate, instinctive, and unconditional.

The Language of Mountains

Mary Elizabeth has learned to speak mountain. 

From her kitchen window, she watches the patterns. The birds at her feeder have taught her something about community she hadn't fully understood, even with all her training. They have rules, hierarchies, decorum.

"A bird will be in the bird bath, and then another bird will show up and wait for its turn," she explains. "Their little chirping to each other is adorable. They have their own community."

Even the birds know how to live together. Even they understand the social contract.

She's acclimated to the altitude now, which means going down has become the challenge. The steep highway drop gives her headaches and nausea. "I brewed a tea blend for headaches so I could drink it before I go," she says. She also made a magnesium oil for pressure points, meeting a problem with remedies she can craft herself.

This is her work now, beyond her role with the Sierra Club. She runs Wild and Craft, an herbal apothecary, making teas and remedies, hosting workshops where she teaches people to wild-craft herbs from the mountain.

She's learned the mountain's rhythms. The way spring arrives in stages, how summer announces itself. It's June when the wild roses bloom that stops her every time, when the wind hits just right, the perfume carries everywhere. Her favorite smell here, along with pine and the way the forest exhales.

The same impulse that led her to herbalism—to create remedies, to share knowledge about the mountain's gifts—eventually led her to gather women together. In 2023, she started Women Entrepreneurs of Idyllwild. The acronym was WE, which felt perfect. It was a monthly gathering for women anywhere on the entrepreneurship spectrum: retired business owners with wisdom to share, nervous beginners, established entrepreneurs navigating challenges. Wine, snacks, learning, mentorship.

"It was really lovely," she says. The group fizzled when she took on her expanded role with the Sierra Club, when her capacity ran out. She thinks about reviving it often.

Her friend Marissa, owner of Wildlands and an actress, has been a mentor in navigating the challenges of being a woman with a public presence in Idyllwild. "She has this ability to just let things go," Mary Elizabeth says. "To extend olive branches even to people who've tried to harm her. Her fortitude is really inspiring."

The Art of Winter Warmth

Mary Elizabeth gets cold easily. She's the only one in her family who needs a fire when the temperature drops below seventy degrees. Her kids and husband are hardy, they camp in the snow. But she's from San Diego, and she wants to be warm.

When winter arrives, her life becomes about cozy. She cooks soups constantly: roasted mushroom and onion soup that tastes like comfort, red curry with chicken and vegetables, chilies with heat that warms from the inside out. She's always looking for new recipes, always recipe-swapping with friends.

She grew up with Martha Stewart, loves hosting, and winter becomes an excuse for intentional gatherings. Dinner parties where she curates the guest list, bringing together friends who should know each other better. Potlucks where everyone coordinates over text. Crochet and knit circles with her women friends, creating space for connection when the cold could otherwise isolate them.

"We know it's good for our mental health to be with friends," she says. "So we make it happen."

Her husband, meanwhile, has found his own winter calling. When tourists get stuck in the snow, and they always do, he goes out to rescue them. It's his favorite thing, this mixture of problem-solving and heroism.

"He thinks it's fun," Mary Elizabeth says, laughing. "He's like playing."

They don't monetize it. He does it for the gratitude, for the story, for whatever satisfaction comes from being the person who shows up when someone's wheels are spinning in a ditch at midnight.

Coming Home

Mary Elizabeth never expected to become a mountain person. The beach was supposed to be home—Pacific Beach, where her family had been for generations.

But then her father died. Her grandmother died. Her siblings moved away. San Diego became less home and more memory.

Meanwhile, Idyllwild grew roots. Her daughter is eleven now, her son almost ten. They run through the forest, connected to nature in ways that feel essential. She takes fifteen-minute walks between Zoom calls, gives her stress to the trees.

On weekends, they still go down the mountain for Costco runs, for movies, for trips back to the beach. It's part of their life, that oscillation between mountain and sea.

But home is here now. In the cabin they found on Zillow when they were desperate. In the town that feels like high school hallways and also like family. In the community that waves at strangers and shows up in storms, that drives too slow and loves too fiercely.

Mary Elizabeth lights the fire when it drops below seventy. She makes her soups. She watches the birds negotiate their social contracts. In June, she breathes in the wild roses and remembers why she stayed.