Ryderwood: A home amid the stumps
Ross Anderson
Sun City it is not. But for a certain breed of hardy Northwesterner, given to Douglas firs and stubborn independence, this was a pensioner's paradise.
It was, at least, until that day a few years ago, when a fire burned the town's cafe and store to the ground, searing the soul of this remote retirement community. Since then, the community has been ripped into two warring camps, each with its own idea of how to rebuild. And not even the benevolence of billionaire Bill Gates, whose foundation offered to help, appears able to heal the wounds.
Today, as always, only the most adventurous or hopelessly lost find their way to Ryderwood. It is at the end of a long, narrow road that snakes into the obscure, logged-out woods north of Longview. The unincorporated town consists of a block of community buildings surrounded by about 200 simple frame houses and double-wide mobile homes on small lots. There are no landmarks, no tourist attractions, no reason to come unless you know somebody.
But to about 400 souls, it is home. Each Ryderwood resident made a conscious choice to live here. And most intend to die here. "We looked all over the Northwest for a place to retire," says Harold Barnes, a retired Boeing worker formerly of Edmonds. "Nothing felt right until somebody told us about Ryderwood. We drove into town and we knew we were home."
It is a self-governing community, a cross between a modern condominium and a traditional New England town meeting. Residents collectively own the community buildings, including the church. Volunteers maintain the buildings, mow the lawn at the town park, run the town library and police their streets in the evenings. The average age of the volunteer fire department is around 70.
All of this worked pretty well, until recently.
Ryderwood owes its existence to R.A. Long, the Midwest timber tycoon who bought a huge expanse of timberlands and moved his operations to Southwest Washington in the 1920s. Long, still referred to locally as "Mr. Long," built the world's largest lumber mill at Longview, plus a complete town in the woods to house his logging crews. Unlike most company towns, Ryderwood was built to accommodate families instead of single workers; most of the several hundred small frame houses have two bedrooms and a bath.
"Mr. Long was a generous man," recalls Bud May, a retired newspaperman who grew up in Ryderwood at its peak in the 1940s and now lives in nearby Castle Rock. "We had our own water and sewer system, school, community hall, a big theater and a big mercantile store that sold groceries, hardware, drugs, clothing, everything you needed."
Days began at 5 a.m. when a train whistle sounded to haul loggers into the woods. "It was risky work. Now and then, we'd be at school and hear that long, low train whistle, and we all wondered whose dad had died in the woods."
By the early 1950s, those woods had been logged out, leaving Ryderwood an island in a vast landscape of stumps and slash. Most of the loggers moved on. A private developer bought the entire town for $90,000 and turned it into a retirement community open to people over age 55. Homes sold for as little as $2,500 - affordable to even low-income retirees.
Eventually, the developer went broke, but the community survived. About 20 years ago, the residents' nonprofit Ryderwood Improvement and Service Association (RISA) bought the town. Each resident owns a home, plus a share in the community buildings. The water and sewer systems were turned over to the county.
"A lot of people stay because it's affordable," says Barnes. "We pay $18 a month to RISA for garbage collection, street lights. The total budget is about $50,000 a year. No employees. Volunteers do everything."
Housing prices have increased, of course. But even today, pensioners can buy a home for as little as $40,000.
Many of the recent arrivals are relatively wealthy, and most are drawn because of the lifestyle. "I was struck by the quiet," says Tom Burris, 67, a former military officer and Boeing worker who retired here in 1996. "We're right on the edge of the forest. We get deer and elk wandering down Main Street. There are otter in the lake, birds and coyote music with every full moon."
To pass the time, there are poker games or bingo at the community hall, weekend dances, church activities, a sewing circle and lots of volunteerism.
"The key is feeling useful, like you're contributing to the community," says Burris. "You start declining when you don't feel the world needs you anymore."
For years, life revolved around the Ryderwood Cafe and Store, the only private business in town, a western-style two-story building next door to the post office. Folks gathered there to sip coffee and exchange gossip. They did until the fire of Dec. 6, 1997. Nobody's sure how it started, but the 75-year-old wood-frame building burned "like a blowtorch."
"All we could do was contain it," Burris recalls. "One local hero managed to attach a chain to the propane tank and pull it down the street; if that had gone up, it would have taken the whole block with it."
Nobody was hurt, but Ryderwood is not the same without its cafe and store. And it's six miles of narrow road to the closest food store.
Residents vowed to rebuild. Burris, newly elected to the RISA board of trustees, took control and contacted the Gates Foundation, the well-endowed charity of the Microsoft billionaire.
Last April, 16 months after the fire, William H. Gates Sr. notified the town that the foundation would pick up the $300,000 cost. "The gift was made in hopes we could help solve a problem that might not otherwise be solved," said foundation spokesman Trevor Neilson. That should have been that. Instead, things have gone from bad to worse.
Burris arranged for the purchase of the store lot from the former owners and started buying second-hand commercial kitchen equipment. Resident Glen Marchbanks, a retired architect from California, spent months drawing plans for a new, 7,800-square-foot cafe and store patterned after the old one.
But some residents didn't like the design, or the undemocratic way it was drawn up. "It's too big," says Barnes. "They'd need two people to run the cafe, and they'd have to sell 100 meals a day; the old cafe served about 40. It won't work."
"They tried to make a destination restaurant, and that's not what people want," adds 67-year-old Dan Alston, who moved here 10 years ago.
Some residents went so far as to ask the Gates Foundation to withdraw the grant.
Burris says it was all a misunderstanding. He posted the trustees' plan and a smaller alternative on the post office wall and called for a vote. His plan won with 58 percent of the votes. Opponents, however, say the vote wasn't fair, that Burris tries to run the town like a military camp. "He's a control freak," says Alston.
Over time, the town has broken into two camps, each suspicious of the other. "We don't need this," says Barbara Alston, 71, who met and married her husband here five years ago. "I never lived anywhere where people are so nosy."
Alarmed by the fight, the Gates Foundation has backed off from its promise. Burris and the trustees violated their trust, the elder Gates said in a letter to the town, by spending foundation money to purchase the land rather than on construction. "You have, in our view, misapplied some $43,000 of funds we placed under your control," Gates said in his sternly worded letter of Jan. 18.
However, the foundation leaves a tiny crack in the door, a slim possibility of a new grant - but not unless Ryderwood residents reach some genuine consensus on what they want to build. That appears unlikely any time soon. In a stormy meeting last month, critics called for Burris and other trustees to resign. They refused, and instead formed a new committee to come up with one or more new construction plans. "This is as bad as it gets," says Burris. "We really need that grant. Otherwise, we're looking at five years of bake sales and garage sales."
The board has asked residents to vote Feb. 21 whether to begin raising money on their own. "The option is to sit and look at that empty lot," says Burris.
Ryderwood remains stalemated while aging residents drive 12 miles round-trip to get a loaf of bread or a hot lunch. Still, folks here expect to weather the storm. It's all part of a community learning how to govern itself. "I suppose it's par for the course," chuckles longtime resident Alston, "in a small town full of old coots like me."
