Klickitat County, in Washington State, has only one stoplight. For the most part, there isn’t much to do in this sleepy county, located in the Columbia River Gorge.
This nothingness, says Seth Tibbott, turned out to be the key to his “stick-to-itiveness” – or stubbornness, as his wife says – which over the course of 40 years saw him cobble together a $50-million business out of his company Tofurky (originally, Turtle Island Foods), which produces plant-based alternatives to meat that are derived from tofu and wheat protein. “It took a long time, but I had no other option but to make my business succeed,” Tibbott said.
The idiosyncratic naturalist whose wanderlust brought him from the campus of Wittenberg to the rain of the Pacific Northwest had no other career options once he settled in the town of Trout Lake, other than working for the forest service, logging, or laboring on one of the many orchards dotting rural Washington and Oregon, farmland divided by the mighty Columbia River.