They’ve never thought they couldn’t do whatever they wanted. “We’ve always been told ‘You’re special, you’re great, you can do anything,’ ” said Erica Rainford of Woodland. “I believed it.”

Merry Swanberg of Woodland agreed. “They told us in high school that we could be president. We believed it; yes, yes, absolutely.”

Swanberg, Rainford and three other young women, all involved in public service jobs in Cowlitz County, sport the independent streaks, professional aspirations and wide-open futures their mothers and grandmothers mostly dreamed of, fought for, or never even considered.

As for struggles, they describe “overwhelming” choices and ramped-up routines that force them to “adjust to the level of chaos.”

We gathered the group at The Daily News to talk about being young, female and ambitious.

Ashley Opsahl-Scibelli, 26, graduated from Kelso High School and the University of Washington. She is communications and public affairs manager for the Port of Longview. She’s single and owns her own home.

Rainford, 26, graduated from Woodland High School and Clark Community College. Married for 8 years, she’s licensed to sell real estate, has owned her own cafe, and is currently executive director of the Port of Woodland.

Marin Fox Hight, 33, graduated from Kelso High School, earned her degree from The Evergreen State College and recently became director of Cowlitz County Department of Corrections. She’s been married for 10 years and has a 4-year-old daughter.

Mary Brown, 23, graduated from Columbia River High School and the University of Washington.

Single, she’s the vice president of the Economic Development Council of Cowlitz County.

Swanberg, 30, graduated from Woodland High School and Central Washington University. Until October, she was vice president of the EDC. Married and expecting her first child in March, she’s already scoping out plans for her own business.

This quintet moves to the same beat, but their inspiration came from a variety of experiences.

Rainford calls herself “driven” by an energy she’s always had. “From birth, I needed to do better,” she said. The oldest of five children, she couldn’t “sit idle.”

“My parents were both teachers, and they were very encouraging,” she said. “We had a strong family structure. … My husband always puts me up to the challenge in every element of my life.”

Rainford seems to have inherited the feisty resolve of two grandmothers, too. One, Maxine Rodman, taught for 21 years and “has the patience of Job,” she said. “She taught all of us kids to play piano.”

The other, Edna Braden, “shot a bear in the ’60s and got her first elk at 79,” Rainford said. Braden, who died of cancer in December, “could hunt anything, cook anything, sew anything and grow anything,” her granddaughter said. “She read the dictionary for fun. …

“Her life was not peaches, but she made it peaches.”

Brown, who moved to Vancouver from New Jersey when she was a child, was inspired by an older sister who’s in human resources with the Army Corps of Engineers, and by her mother, who taught English as a second language.

“She had a lot of patience,” Brown said. “She bought school supplies for (her students) on her own.” Accepting that the children’s immigrant parents were doing the best they could, her mother “made house calls,” Brown said. “She was that dedicated.”

Opsahl-Scibelli grew up surrounded by women at work, she said.

“There was no split between men and women. We missed that time in the workplace. From the time I can remember, women were running their own companies.”

Her mother, Jeanette Scibelli, was in marketing, first as manager of the Three Rivers Mall and later with the Lower Columbia Contractors Association.

Although her Filipino grandma brought up eight children, “that was her role,” Opsahl-Scibelli said. “I didn’t associate myself with that. We grew up thinking girls can do anything boys can do.” She also credits her boyfriend, Adam, for championing shared roles and equality.

Fox Hight is one of four children in a “very supportive” Rose Valley family, all “raised to be high achievers,” she said. “My mom (Pilates instructor Rene Fox) stayed home with us. She has a sense of humor, an irreverence. And she’s stubborn beyond belief.”

Fox Hight said she blazed a trail that sometimes worried her parents. She studied criminal justice at Washington State University, and when she first told them she wanted to be a police officer, they balked, Fox Hight said.

“I dropped out and applied at the jail,” becoming a corrections officer. “My mother is very traditional. She’d say, ‘Can’t you find some nice lawyer and go to work for him?’ ”

Since then, Fox Hight finished a degree in management at Evergreen and was promoted to the top job in Corrections, supervising approximately 75 workers. Her mother “is very proud of me,’ she said.

Swanberg loved coming home to the cookies her mother baked. Later, she watched her mom go back to school and finish her degree at the age of 50 — at the same school, Central, where Swanberg went.

“My grandmother and two sisters went there, too,” said Swanberg, one of four kids who had to pay their own way “and set our own directions.”

Her mom went to work teaching Honors English in Woodland and is now getting her master’s degree at WSU’s Vancouver campus.

Swanberg saw no obstacles as she grew up, she said, but she grew up aware that it wasn’t easy clearing the path.

“I learned about the women’s movement, the right to vote, the fight for equal pay,” she said. “We were taught that. I have a tremendous respect” for the movement.

Bringing jobs, meting out justice, hauling pallets

Four of these five had a sense of what they wanted to do as teens.

Only Brown made a sharp turn, from college classes that would lead to a medical degree, to a double major in economics and psychology.

Hight followed through on an early fascination with law enforcement to snag a big job in the thick of it.

Swanberg and Opsahl-Scibelli got the news anchor bug in their teens, then built on journalism and public relations classes to get their current jobs. PR was more interesting, said Swanberg. “And honestly, I realized I could make more money.”

Rainford shot out of the gate as a young married woman to run a Woodland cafe with her husband, Phillip. Her real estate license honed skills that come in handy at the small but rapidly developing port, where one of her duties is to oversee properties leased by tenants.

Aside from making good salaries — some of these jobs pay in the $50,000-$55,000 range; other salaries were not available — each one of these women describes a high degree of job satisfaction.

“Working in economic development gave me such a sense of purpose,” Swanberg said. “You can make a difference in your community, providing families with opportunities to work.”

She’s proud of Cowlitz County’s high standards for the industry they seek to recruit. “They look for good, long-term businesses, not for a quick fix.”

Brown, who inherited the job from Swanberg, has had to learn to edit the Web site and meet all the county’s players. She didn’t grow up here, and she’s amazed at the cohesiveness of the county’s residents, the way everyone knows each other.

She talked about the deepening urgency of her work.

“In the end, we have to find new jobs,” Brown said. “It breaks my heart to see people out of a job. They have kids. What are they going to do next?

“Even if I bring one job in, one job is better than no job.”

Opsahl-Scibelli finds the Port of Longview “exciting.”

“You meet people from different countries all the time,” she said. “It shows how global our world is. The port touches so many different things, from what you eat to what you wear. …

“It’s a hard-working place. The jobs it provides! It’s really not just the Port of Longview — it’s the port of Toutle and Castle Rock. …

“The port is a gem in this community. My goal is to teach people what is here. I wish I could give everyone in the community a tour … encourage them to take an interest.”

Rainford said she feels “privileged to work” for Woodland’s port, which puts her high energy to use.

“We’re small, but that’s the great challenge,” she said. “I get to solve problems, whether it’s fixing a leak or hauling pallets. … A tenant calls — ‘There’s cracks in our wall, the security system is down’ — We need to keep clients satisfied.”

She sees bright promise in the port’s acres of land still waiting to be developed, Rainford said. “This port belongs to the community. That’s the public relations part.”

It’s a far cry from river ports to the cells at the county jail, where Hight sees her work “as an important piece of our commitment to safety.”

Although some in the community want to lock people up and throw away the key, she also sees Corrections’ responsibility to “make a difference in people’s lives who are in custody. We’re trying to help people; we’re trying to help people not come back. …

“It can really be a sad profession,” she said, but “it’s satisfying to see someone turn their life around.”

Of all this sunny group, Hight probably faces the toughest challenge.

She has taken on a leadership role in a place “that is still a very male-dominated field,’ she said. Especially when she was promoted, the flak was harsh. “It put a certain amount of pressure on me, being a female my age.”

“I had no thought of going straight to the top,” Hight said. “People encouraged me. They said, ‘I think you could do this.’ I don’t know that it would have occurred to me.”

In spite of being in the spotlight and managing a tight budget, she embraces her promotion, said Hight, who took over in June. “I take my job very seriously. I don’t want to let anyone down.”

New ways, new ideas

What of their futures, these intense young women?

Swanberg wants to be a full-time mother for as long as that feels right, then “definitely” go to work as her own boss, consulting in the field of public relations.

Brown is currently steeped in learning the community and helping its residents get back to work. “I plan to be here for awhile,” she said. With decades to go in her career, however, “I could see working for the feds one day, or the World Bank,” she said.

Opsahl-Scibelli and Rainford feel rooted in the communities where they grew up, and want to stay at the jobs they have now.

“It’s a new job every day,” said Opsahl-Scibelli. “There are new techniques, new ideas, new ways of doing things.”

She and Brown eventually want to have families, when the time is right.

Rainford isn’t sure. “There’s so many choices! It’s overwhelming,” she said. “We have to simplify our lives, make new economies with fewer choices.”

As for kids, “Right now, I’m not even close,” she said, musing about how she’d work a full-time job and bring up children.

“It’s definitely a challenge,” said Hight. “I remember thinking, ‘How am I going to do all this?’ You adjust to the level of chaos.”

She already knows what it’s like to juggle parenthood, a demanding job, and her pentient for running marathons. Maybe 26-mile runs have taught her not to sweat the limits.

“I want to go back and get my masters in public administration,” she said. “I don’t know what the future will hold. We’ll see.”