Sometimes leadership isn’t about budgets or policies. Sometimes it’s about creating stories that make a town unforgettable.
Why Peacocks?
Every small town has its lore. Tenino has the Quarry Pool, a place of mystery, legend, and exaggeration depending on who you ask. I’ve always believed that local myths are part of what give a place its soul.
Back in the early 2010s, I was experimenting with ways to build that sense of wonder. We’d launched the Yellow Bicycle Project, which became a local phenomenon and even made the Seattle Times. We were reviving interest in the Quarry Pool and its history.
And then I got another idea: What if our city park had peacocks?
As a kid, I’d visited a park where a peacock wandered the grounds, and I never forgot it. They’re hardy birds, beautiful to look at, and their wild, prehistoric call sounds like something straight out of Jurassic Park. If Tenino could pull this off, I thought, it would add a layer of magic to our 66-acre park — something you couldn’t find anywhere else. Like a lot of my early experiments, this wasn’t exactly “on the books.”
The Peacock Deal
I found sellers on Craigslist in Portland and made arrangements to meet them at a rest stop halfway between Portland and Tenino.
When I arrived, they popped open the hatchback of their car, and there they were: two full-grown peacocks staring back at me like they knew they were about to be drafted into something unusual.
For a moment, it was just the mayor and his new feathered constituents, exchanging glances as if we were all in on the plan.
The peacock dealers looked like they’d been styled by the birds themselves, brightly dressed, spiked hair like tail feathers, colorful personalities to match. They gave me a crash course in peacock psychology, I gave a fake name, they took my $100 cash, and just like that, Tenino had two peacocks.
Release Night
I’d built a small pen to help acclimate them to the park, but after a short while I decided it was time. One quiet evening, I opened the gate and released them into their new home, imagining them roosting in the tall trees and greeting visitors for years to come.
That… is not what happened.
The Great Peacock Escape
By the next morning, my Facebook feed was in full crisis mode.
“There’s a giant bird on my roof!”
“A peacock just strutted past my kitchen window!”
“Does anyone know why peacocks are wandering downtown??”
The birds hadn’t settled into the park, they’d taken a grand tour of Tenino.
People posted photos, swapped stories, and tried to catch them. At one point, a woman showed up with a giant salmon net and chased them through the streets like something out of a slapstick movie.
Mythmaking in Real Time
So no, Tenino doesn’t have peacocks in its park. But for one glorious day, we did. And the whole town was in on the adventure.
Occasionally, someone still brings it up, “Hey, remember the peacocks?”, and smiles. Most don’t know the full story, or that I was the culprit behind the chaos. Until now.
The truth is that local leadership has to be about more than fixing potholes and balancing budgets. It’s also about creating stories that give a place character. Civic leadership needs to be equal parts imagination and responsibility, because a community that only manages itself will survive, but a community that dreams will thrive.
The Quarry Pool. The Yellow Bikes. The Peacocks.
Each was an experiment in mythmaking, in making Tenino more than a dot on the map. These stories become part of our shared identity. They remind us that living in a small town can be surprising, whimsical, and memorable and that leadership can be, too.
The Philosophy Behind the Feathers
When I look back on my time as mayor, I think about all the spreadsheets, ordinances, and policy memos. But the things people still talk about, the things that lasted, are the ones that sparked imagination and can’t be found on an excel spreadsheet.
There’s a lesson there.
People don’t connect to line items in a budget; they connect to stories that make them proud of where they live. A good leader can’t just manage the practical; they have to cultivate a sense of possibility. Sometimes that comes through infrastructure, and sometimes it comes through something that makes kids point and say, “Wow.”
Tenino’s history is full of bold, quirky, and slightly ridiculous ideas that worked, from printing wooden money during the Great Depression to building a quarry pool that became a state legend. Those moments gave the town a sense of identity bigger than its population.
So when I bought two peacocks off Craigslist, it wasn’t just mischief, it was instinct. I wanted Tenino to have a story. And it did. Would I do it again? Absolutely. Because sometimes, building community isn’t just about passing laws. It’s about creating lore, the kind of stories people tell years later, laughing, shaking their heads, and saying, “Only in Tenino.”
That’s what imagination looks like when it meets responsibility. And that’s how a town builds a soul.
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Wayne Fournier is a Thurston County commissioner, former Tenino mayor, firefighter and lifelong community advocate. His column appears in Nisqually Valley News every two weeks.
