That's a grilled club, piled high with ham and turkey and spicy Parmesan, topped with Swiss and bacon and named, not by accident, for what appears to be Eureka's new town mascot.
At Cafe Jax, you can also get an earful of local opinion about the building boom that's turning farmland into real estate. Just show up early, with the coffee klatch regulars, and eavesdrop a bit.
What with the local lumber mill recently shuttered, many if not most, appear to be embracing the building boom with open arms. Especially if they happen to have some land for sale.
But people like Eureka because it's Eureka, and they're wondering how long Eureka can survive in the face of such fundamental socioeconomic change.
“People are concerned that it's happening too fast,” Schuhmacher said. “It's always been the same, and now all of a sudden it's become a whole new reality.”
That new reality, she said, demands some “structure,” some “guidelines for growth,” some “plan so we can keep the integrity of our small town.”
Easier said than done.
In the middle of a warm, sunny Wednesday afternoon, in the first real warmth of spring, about 50 people sat tight in a stuffy meeting room, listening to a pitch by Neil Longhurst and his partner, Dave Rogers.
It was a scene straight out of central casting. The locals always in flannel, the developers always tanned white men with gray hair and thin mustaches, boots just a bit too shiny, jeans just a little too crisp.
Longhurst's from Florida, Rogers from Canada, and they're here to build a 300-home golf-course community north of town.
Thing is, Longhurst's never done anything remotely like this before. And Rogers tells the crowd that while he has developed some real estate, he's never engineered a project this big.
Likewise, Eureka's never been propositioned quite like this, and it's apparent everyone has a steep learning curve to climb.
In fact, what's most telling about the meeting, perhaps, is what did not happen.
There were no questions about how the development might impact property taxes, how it might affect local services, how resources at the town's brand-new school might be stressed. No questions about annexation, about sewer and water hookups, about costs to community coffers, about police or plow services. No one mentioned impact fees, or cluster development, or the fact that, at least sometimes, residential growth does not quite pay for itself.
Schuhmacher looks a bit wild-eyed.
“We've never even heard of those things before.”
In fact, Lincoln County, home to Eureka, is just now forming its first-ever planning board, and might soon tackle a countywide growth policy. Unfortunately, with two golf-course communities and at least one gated neighborhood in the works, the board is not yet up and running.
There's no zoning, no land-use restrictions, no way really to tell a developer “no.”
“Without zoning and a master plan,” Longhurst said after the meeting, “they don't have the legal basis to deny us.”
Still, public sentiment carries considerable weight, and during the meeting the men make a soft-sell, a plea almost, coming on as if hat-in-hand to the townsfolk.
“We absolutely want community buy-in,” he said.
They'll open their private trail system to the high school cross-country team, he says, open their private pool to the swim team and the community at large. The school's golf team can use the development's links, and doctors can prescribe the pool for therapy.
There will be architectural standards, height restrictions - “we don't want our subdivision to become visual pollution,” Rogers said.
But the details behind all these promises are hard to pin down, and few can doubt that 350 new homes complete with greens fees won't change Eureka in some pretty basic ways.
Eureka has surely been discovered, particularly by Canadians with considerable disposable income, and life is changing fast.
“You can't have it both ways,” warned local resident Robert Gansel. “You either want to have a rural flavor, or you want big subdivisions.”
You can be Eureka, he said, or you can be an extension of Whitefish.
“It's your choice,” he said. “It all depends on what you want.”
These days, what Eureka seems to want most is a vision for the future. Not so many months ago, the local lumber mill closed, putting nearly 100 people out of work.
More than a few saw the shutdown as the beginning of the end. Schuhmacher was not among them.
“A lot of people talked that gloom and doom,” she said, “but I never thought that would happen. This town has too much going for it these days.”
To be sure, downtown is vibrant and alive, funky even, if not downright hip. It is not, by any measure, what you would expect of a timber town on the ropes.
“I don't know anybody who's out of work who wants work,” said Realtor Terry Comstock. “If you want a job, you can paint houses, or do drywall, or hammer nails. The subcontractor business here is huge.”
Comstock points, literally and out the window, to Wilbur Keller, who's bouncing along in the seat of a dozer, cutting a road for another new subdivision.
“His family's been logging here all their lives, but now he's embracing the new Eureka,” Comstock said. “This is the new wave of how they're making a living.”
Chris Neill, a local cabinetmaker and builder, agreed that he and other contractors simply cannot find enough people who want to do the work of building Eureka.
“Logging's not dead here,” Comstock said. “It never will be. But it's not the future. Learn to be a builder, learn a trade and a craft. There's more than enough work. These guys who make the switch are going to earn a whole lot more money than they ever did at the mill.”
It's 11 a.m., and he's already had three calls today from new residents looking for a local landscaper.
“We don't have enough,” Comstock said. “I gave them numbers of landscapers over in the Flathead.”
Longhurst likewise agrees that good help is hard to find, and although he hasn't broken dirt yet he's already talking to contractors, lining up jobs for the coming year.
Yet somehow, despite all these opportunities, Eureka seems almost desperate to sell itself to the highest bidder.
“There's definitely something of a grow-or-die attitude here,” Longhurst said, and that certainly can't hurt when he comes knocking with a big proposal.
“We've generally heard pretty good things from the community,” he said. “Sure, there's a little bit of frustration sometimes from the old-time residents - you know, ‘I got here first and now I'm closing the door.' But most people see it as a boom. They want to be part of it.”
There is, to be sure, a sense of inevitability about it all, a sense of opportunity like only a land rush can inspire. It's that excitement Schuhmacher talked about.
The thing is, she said, “we've got to get it together. We need to be talking about zoning and growth policies.
“People are nervous; they're used to living their quiet, simple lives. Well, if they don't get involved, the door is going to get slammed on them hard.”
“Growth?” wonders developer Rogers. “You're not going to stop that. Nobody's going to stop that. The question is when and where and how it's going to happen.”
He's probably right.
“But you can't have it both ways,” insists Gansel. “We've never learned to have limits in this country; we're going to have to start thinking about that.”
He's probably right, too.
Because the patch of paradise that Canadian developer is inevitably selling is the same patch of paradise the local inevitably loves. You can't have it both ways, but some ways are surely worse than others.
“This is the new industry, serving the transient new resident,” Longhurst said. “And maybe that's not as attractive to some people. I mean, it does imply more people.”
Which is exactly what Gansel, and not a few others, don't want.
“If your backyard only holds 10 people,” he said, “but 50 people come in for a party and you keep letting more and more in, well pretty soon nobody's having any fun.”
Except perhaps the builder.
And you can get one of those at Cafe Jax, too, complete with Canadian bacon.
Reporter Michael Jamison can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at mjamison@missoulian.com
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