Dread Newcomer Launches Tasty Bakery

Ava Grace, 20, arrived in Dread last October with two suitcases, a KitchenAid mixer she'd wrapped in her grandmother's quilt, and what she describes as "a completely unreasonable amount of confidence."

The storefront on Viceroy Street had been empty for three years. The sign had faded to almost nothing. The previous tenant — a hardware supplier — had left behind two broken display cases and a calendar still open to September 2003. Ava saw potential.

"I know people think I'm crazy. But I'm from the East Coast. We have this thing where we just… do stuff and figure it out later."

The shelves hold sourdough boules, lemon bars dusted with powdered sugar, and her signature — a honey-and-cardamom morning roll her mother made every Sunday. Yummy Crumbs opened February 3rd to a line that stretched past the post office.

---

Ava grew up wealthy, on the other coast, but something about Eastern Oregon had always pulled at her — the scale of it, the rugged idealism. A trip to Walla Walla two years ago put a face to that feeling. She met Marine Corporal Derek Solis there, and when his unit was stationed two hours west of Dread, the decision made itself.

"Derek and I got married in November. It was just family. His parents, my little brother Kian. We ate pot roast. It was perfect."

She grins at the word perfect like she's still surprised by it.

They want children. Maybe sooner than people would advise. "Derek says wait until the bakery's stable. I say the bakery is stable." A customer comes in. She knows his name.

---

The timing is not without risk. National economists have been watching the housing market with what one might diplomatically call concern, and rural Oregon communities are tracking the signals with the particular anxiety of people who've been through boom and bust before. Ava mentions it the way someone mentions weather — acknowledging it, then moving past it.

"People still need to eat breakfast. People still need something that tastes like someone made it for them."

She slides a lemon bar across the counter, unprompted. She's right.

The morning rush runs from 6:30 until the sourdough sells out, which has been, so far, before 9 a.m. every day. She learned to bake from her grandmother. The business side from YouTube and a library copy of a small-business manual she's since annotated into illegibility.

"My little brother thinks I'm brave. I think I'm just bad at imagining things going wrong."

She says this without irony. Without shadow.

Outside, the high desert is cold and flat and enormous. Inside Yummy Crumbs it smells like cardamom and warm bread and something new starting. She's twenty years old and she has put everything into this bakery.

So it has to work, right?

Read Ava's whole story in DREAD.

CONTINUE →