Puget Sound Journalism and Local Issues : Ross Anderson : RossInk

    Okay, I'll say it: life's good out here with the old folks. It's taken a couple of years to admit it, but there it is.
    Last year my wife and I, both of sound mind and body and still a few years shy of 60, willfully sold our home in a very nice Seattle neighborhood and moved to a senior enclave a few miles outside Port Townsend.    Cape George Colony, our new neighborhood, is not exclusive; a few forty and fifty somethings do live here, and some actually appear to have day jobs. There's no minimum age, no rule against kids or baggy pants or spiky haircuts.

   But there are no spiky haircuts here, and the closest things to baggy pants are Sears overalls with pockets full of screwdrivers. Port Townsend is gray and getting grayer; nearly a quarter of its population is over 65, twice Seattle's senior quotient. The figure for Cape George must be at least 75 percent. 
    What possessed us to make a premature transition to senior citizenship? Economics, for starters. Thirty years of newspaper work were lots of fun but not very lucrative. We faced a choice: keep working to support that big old house, or sell the monster, downsize and reinvent ourselves on a budget.
     So we were out of there - but on to where? I'd been drawn to Port Townsend for some 35 years. Initially it had to do with those charming Victorians on Water Street. But the more I visited, the more I learned there was soul behind the brick facades - a town of fewer than 10,000 that supports two good movie theaters, a dozen decent restaurants, blues and country music festivals, a damned good local newspaper, a lovely city park, two brewpubs and three excellent bookstores. 
    Nothing happened until Mary and I visited an old friend, a college prof who had built her retirement cottage at Cape George. Our first impression was of a 1960s development: middle-class ranch houses on quarter-acre lots strewn along winding streets and cul-de-sacs. Definitely not our style.
     But then there were the "amenities": the full-size indoor pool and exercise room, the little marina where I keep my old Monk motor cruiser for a fraction of the cost of a Seattle slip. There are greenbelts and two miles of community-owned beach overlooking Discovery Bay and Protection Island. Mary could have ample room to garden in the middle of the Olympic rain shadow, with twice the sunshine and half the rainfall of Seattle.

   So we took the plunge, bought a lot and built a three-bedroom shingled cottage with a broad deck and a filtered view of the water-all for about one-quarter of what we got for our Madrona house.
    There are downsides. When we asked permission to exceed the building height limit by a few feet, I found myself facing a grim panel of elders who would have none of my nonsense. We witnessed a gurgling community fight over trees and views, and heard the usual elderly worries about security. Every neighborhood has its cranks and whiners, but seniors seem to have more to be cranky about and more time to whine about it.
     Still, we're a diverse group of people living diverse lives. Take our street: a retired airline pilot, a former history professor, a nurse-turned-part-time gardener, a software engineer, a retired physics professor who runs a small technology company in town, a couple of ex-schoolteachers, and Mary and me. One of my friends is a former Fulbright Scholar who's written a novel about revolutionary China. Another spent 30 years building Boeing airplanes.
     Some of us have PhDs, and others barely got out of high school; I forget which is which, because it really doesn't matter anymore. Some have plenty of money; others don't. Conventional wisdom has it that aging gracefully depends on income, but life at Cape George suggests otherwise. You need to pay the bills, but beyond that income seems irrelevant Quality of life hinges on more important matters; how people work and play, how they treat each other and how they cooperate. Cape George is a community of about 480 homes and good people run almost completely by volunteers from the board of directors to the marina committee and block watch captains.
    After just six months as full-time Cape George residents, we already know our neighbors better here than we ever knew them in Seattle. We have keys to their houses, and vice versa. We meet them for impromptu barbecues and pilgrimages to the brewpub for $2 pints. When Home Depot delivered a truckload of drywall to my back door, three neighbors showed up unsolicited to help
    We have seen the future, and it is grayer. Get used to it. Keep building those 401K accounts. Find yourself a good financial planner. But most important, find a community of people you'd want as neighbors.

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      PUSHING OFF FROM a muddy bank, we nose our kayaks through a clump of submerged saplings and into the gravitational pull of the Great River of The West. A few feet from the shore, our boats are gripped by the current and pulled gently but inescapably downstream. From the shore, the surface appeared deceptively calm. But here it swirls and hisses and gurgles like a pot ready to boil. We are riding a whispering torrent that drains the wet corner of a continent at a pace of more than 200,000 cubic feet of water per second, and there is no turning back.
     We are a flyweight fleet of four, drifting like flotsam toward the steel span of the Vernita Bridge, where the river collides with a dull roar against concrete columns. For decades, this bridge marked the end of the known, workaday world and the beginning of a closely kept military secret, where intruders were confronted by armed guards and helicopters.
     We have entered Hanford Reach, the last 50 miles of free-flowing, undammed river above Bonneville Dam. Few Washingtonians outside the Tri-Cities area have ever seen this place, yet its future is bubbling into a regional debate. We - Glen Sims, kayaker extraordinaire; Dan Evans, staff director and river adviser to Sen. Patty Murray; photographer Tom Reese; and myself - have come to see for ourselves.
     The river carries us eastward through an arid, treeless landscape, the most prominent landmark being the gray silhouette of Plant B, perched on the right bank five miles downriver from the bridge. Fifty-two years ago, this concrete hulk was constructed in a matter of months to produce the plutonium for the atomic bomb that leveled Nagasaki. It closed down nearly three decades ago, but the plant remains sealed tight, unsafe for human beings, tumbleweed piled against its barbed-wire fences as a reminder that the desert, given a few hundred or thousand years, intends to reclaim its turf.
     We paddle furiously across the current for a closer look. At the river's edge is a concrete pumphouse that once sucked enough river water to service the population of Seattle, pumping it through the superheated core of the reactor and immediately back into the river.
    There were several reasons wartime engineers picked Hanford for their nuclear-weapons project. It was remote, far from population centers and major highways - a good place to keep a secret. There was ample hydro-electricity. And there was the river - a seemingly infinite source of water for cooling hot reactor cores.
   That project changed the course of human history, but its impact on the river and sagebrush environment has been oddly mixed. On one hand, poorly designed waste dumps continue to pose a threat to the surrounding environment. Yet the same project also helped to preserve it. For the next 10 miles, the river bends to the northeast, bisecting an ecological contradiction. On the right-hand bank, we pass within yards of one of the most polluted places on Earth. Some 61 million gallons of radioactive waste are stored in 177 underground tanks, the legacy of 50 years of experimentation with things the experts didn't fully understand. Three miles downstream we pass within sight of the notorious K-Basins, concrete pools filled with river water that cool radioactive canisters just 1,000 feet from the river bank. Cleaning up the mess will take decades and billions of dollars.
   Yet on the other side of the river is the marshy edge of the 90,000-acre Saddle Mountain Wildlife Refuge, home to mule deer, coyote, jack rabbit, rattlesnake, sage grouse and scores more desert-dwellers that have been pushed out of their habitat elsewhere. Blue heron and glistening white pelicans swoop low over the river, protesting our intrusion. For them, Hanford is a godsend.
    The river itself remains one of the the finest salmon-fishing areas in the state. Each fall and spring, up to 100,000 king salmon and steelhead migrate from the Pacific up the Columbia, struggling 400 miles and around four dams to spawn in the bottom of Hanford Reach. Sports fishermen converge on this place in hip waders or aluminum boats, drifting in the current and casting their lines, while bald eagles and coyotes patrol the river banks, feasting on the spawned-out carcasses.
      Fish thrive here not in spite of nuclear energy, but because of it. A generation ago, Army engineers planned yet another dam, just upriver from Richland, that would have backed the river into yet another lake, silting the bottom just as it has most of the way from Bonneville to the Canadian border. The Pentagon vetoed that plan; the generals didn't want anybody that close to their secrets. So the river flows free, scouring its bottom for salmon spawning. Now scientists cite Hanford Reach as a example of how salmon runs could be restored by lowering reservoirs, allowing the river to flow free again.
   AT THE 20-MILE POINT, the Columbia takes a sweeping turn to the east and immediately southeast. Here an ancient lake bed called the Ringold Formation was thrust upward eons ago, allowing the river to sculpt vertical bluffs up to 300 feet high on its northeast shore.
    We beach our boats on a steep, sandy stretch decorated with fresh deer tracks and pitch our tents in ankle-high grass on a plateau at the foot of the bluffs. Here we are joined by Rich Steele, a semi-retired construction worker and self-appointed caretaker of Hanford Reach. He has driven his 20-foot aluminum jetboat 40 miles upriver from Richland to deliver a bottle of decent merlot and a passionate defense of his cause. He will be the only human being we will encounter in 24 hours and 40 miles of river.
      Beneath a darkening sky, we hike past the remains of a turn-of-the-century homestead demolished decades ago by the military (no cover for snoopers!) and climb a steep game trail through the grass and up the back side of the bluff. From here we can scan most of the vast Hanford site, from the Vernita Bridge to the Rattlesnake Hills and the braided channels of the lower river. The treeless, monochromatic panorama, studded by the dark, brooding towers of nine nuclear reactors, is a landscape that might have inspired Salvador Dali.
    "I never get tired of it," says Steele. "I can't stay away."
     For Steele, this place has become an obsession. It began decades ago, when his family moved to Richland and he discovered steelhead fishing that was beyond his wildest dreams. He worked his career at Hanford, building and operating the nuclear plants, returning on the weekends to fish. Like the military, Steele kept his secret as long as he could. Now he can no longer afford to stay quiet; he has become a near full-time tour guide for politicians, scientists, environmentalists, filmmakers and the occasional journalist.
     "What you see should never change," Steele says, gazing across the river. "It should stay just the way it is."
    This is no certainty. The future of the Reach is being debated from the Tri-Cities to the floor of Congress. All except one of the nuclear plants were shut down years ago. The local economy now depends not on nuclear production, but on cleaning it up. The river, however, and its northern shores are another question. Pollution from Hanford is not the issue. Instead it is a clash between federal and local officials, between farmers and environmentalists.
     Standing atop the White Bluffs, we survey the alternatives. Turning north from the Hanford site, the landscape consists of dry hills, speckled with sagebrush, rising gently toward the Saddle Mountains. Halfway up this rise, known as the Wahluke Slope, the desert gives way abruptly to regimented rows of green fruit trees.
     When the Hanford site was laid out, a buffer zone was created extending several miles north of the river. About 1,200 people in and around three small communities were forced to sell and move out. Since then, farmers have used Columbia River water and hydropower to transform much of the Columbia Plateau, including the northern portion of the Wahluke Slope, into a garden. Now farmers want to reclaim some 57,000 acres of that slope, bringing irrigation to the area.
The agricultural community has enlisted the support of county commissioners in Grant and Adams counties, who covet the expanded tax base. They are supported by Republican Rep. Doc Hastings and Sen. Slade Gorton, who argue for local control.
    Steele doesn't understand why anybody would want to do this. He points downriver, where massive slides have dumped millions of yards of earth from the bluffs into the river. Federal geologists blame those slides on irrigation miles behind the bluffs, a dry landscape suddenly saturated with water that seeped downhill and undermined the bluffs. So Steele has allied himself with fishing and environment groups, who favor federal control. Sen. Patty Murray has taken up their cause, formally proposing that Hanford Reach be protected as a "wild and scenic river," and the Wahluke Slope maintained as federal wildlife refuge.
    Last spring, Murray toured the Wahluke Slope with a delegation of local farmers and county commissioners. At one point, the issue was neatly laid out through the windows of her tour bus. On the right, she scanned miles of dry, seemingly empty desert; on the left, irrigated orchards.
Eventually, the group sat atop the bluffs, many miles downriver, debating the issue. Mark Hedman, a compact West Point graduate who came home to his Wahluke farm, explained why the slope is prime agricultural land - fertile, volcanic soil in proximity to irrigation. All it needs is water and sweat. 

    Wildlife authorities are resisting. The slope, they say, is one of the last fragments of sagebrush habitat, refuge to jack rabbits and sage grouse that are in danger of disappearing. "If you want to have these species for future generations," one biologist argued, "we have to preserve what's left of their habitat."
    "There are plenty of grouse and jack rabbits," another farmer said.
     So what about these bluffs? said another official.
     Smarter, more efficient irrigation can prevent any damage to the bluffs, Hedman answered. "We have two natural resources on this slope - wildlife resources and the land itself."
    But there is no shortage of farmland, a biologist protested.
     "How can you say that?" Hedman responded. "Less than 3 percent of the globe looks like this. This land is precious. . . . Food in this country is cheap, but if we keep locking up agricultural land, that will change. Maybe we should wait until people are spending 20 or 30 percent of their income on food, and then see how people feel about this land."
    One place, two very different points of view - biodiversity versus primary producer, equally impassioned, informed and persuasive. Now, standing atop the bluffs, common ground seems impossibly distant. Can we afford to lock up productive farmlands? How much closer can those orchards march before they're growing apples at the brink of the White Bluffs?
    Steele climbs back into his boat, and we push him off. He guns his engine, banks into the current and speeds downstream toward home.
      We sift through the questions over a meal of smoked-salmon pasta as bass and juvenile salmon leap and splash in the river eddy. The last rays of a dying sun treat us to an evening light show on the face of the bluffs, accompanied by a chorus of invisible coyotes mourning the day's end.
    THE NEXT MORNING, we rejoin the river, which treats us to a leisurely ride along the base of the bluffs. Thousands of swallows swarm along the shore, carrying mud from the bank, beakful by beakful, up to the walls to construct a colony of mud nests. Why all this effort, since they appear to have abandoned an identical colony a few yards downstream?
    A mile further, the current carries us around that monstrous landslide and to the lee shore of Locke Island, a mile-long island constructed by centuries of silt. We beach our boats and explore grass-filled depressions that are the remains of ancient shelters used by Native Americans, for whom this was a favorite seasonal fishing spot.
      Locke Island faces dual threats. First, a wet winter and spring have sent record volumes of water downstream. The current has been deflected by the landslide onto the island's flank, undercutting the bank and destroying archeological sites hundreds of years old. The island also has become a popular stop for souvenir hunters in search of a genuine arrowhead or spear point to keep in the dresser drawer. At least one of the sites shows signs of recent excavation, probably by amateurs.
    Today the island is occupied by geese, heron and other water birds who protest our intrusion. We watch as a mother killdeer staggers through the grass, feigning a broken wing in an attempt to lure us away from her nest - a winged emissary, perhaps, for ancient spirits. We take the hint and return to our boats.
    The remaining 25-mile voyage to Richland is another study in contrasts. The first sign of civilization is an aluminum boat anchored near the shore, a fishing pole and a pair of Nike sneakers extending over the transom. On the right bank we drift past the old Hanford townsite, then past one mysterious complex after another. A mile from shore we can see the stacks of the huge WPPSS reactor, the only one that continues to gurgle.
     On the left, outside the Hanford boundary, the shore is blanketed with orchards - rows of fruit trees surrounding modern ranch houses with picture windows facing the river.
      To Steele and others, the orchards conjure images as fearsome as nuclear reactors. The nukes, after all, are history; more orchards, however, could be prevented.
     And they will be. Nobody - not even Mark Hedman - proposes to plant apples on the banks of Hanford Reach. The question is how close can they get without changing this place.
     But as we drift toward Richland, I wonder if Steele and friends are crusading bravely against environmental threats and overlooking another unseen enemy.
    That would be us.
      Steele's strategy is to expose as many people as possible to Hanford Reach. "I want to show people what they have to lose," he says. He is doing a fine job of it. This summer, he and his allies will escort hundreds of visitors down the river. In one day last spring, they took 38 people in eight boats. Many of those people will want to come back, maybe do some fishing, or hiking, or kayaking.
    I think back to our campsite at the foot of the bluffs. Kayakers are low-impact campers - small tents, backpack stoves, and we take our garbage back to town. But we left a well-trodden beach, tromped up and down erosion-prone hillsides, squished three patches of prairie grass for our tents and apparently irritated the neighborhood coyote.
    This landscape has a low tolerance for human intrusion. Who could be lower-impact than those Native American folks, whose campsites remain visible more than a century later?  Whoever manages Hanford Reach, and whatever they eventually call it, this place is too rare, too spectacular to remain undiscovered. People will want to come here - in kayaks, canoes, inflatables, jetboats. Soon enough there will be color brochures and expeditions organized by REI and The Mountaineers. How long before authorities feel compelled to erect information boards, picnic tables and outhouses?
     Then what? If I can come in my kayak, why not my neighbor and his Winnebago?
    The Columbia will roll on, of course. And wildlife authorities will try to fend us off. But for all the hoopla over endangered species, these battles are rarely won by the critters.
     It is, after all, our place. And we have a right to come here and see what we have to lose.

Copyright (c) 1996 Seattle Times Company,.

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 Who Will Find Solace in the Soft Waters of Soap Lake?

   Autumn in Soap Lake arrives abruptly after Labor Day, signaled by empty beaches and "VACANCY" signs at the local motels. On a bright, midweek day in September, the silence is interrupted only by the odd hay truck, rumbling down Highway 17 and barely slowing down through town, where the innkeepers grimly contemplate the prospect of another long winter.
   This isn't right, says Gordon Tift as he hobbles through the town's lakefront park. Soap Lake deserves better. He has spent much of his 80 years along these sudsy shores, waiting for lightning to strike.
   Then, just a few weeks ago, it did. "I woke up in the middle of the night, sat straight up and had this . . . well, sort of a vision," Tift says, wide-eyed with excitement. "Think Stonehenge. Five statues, solid rock, maybe 25 or 30 feet tall, right here in the city park and looking out across the lake . . .
   "Only they're a rock band! The rhythm-guitar player is over here, the lead guitar there next to the female vocalist, the keyboard player and drummer back there. They're solid basalt, held together with rebar and epoxy, looking out over the lake. The biggest rock band in the world, right here! People would come from all over."
    And so it goes down at the bottom end of the Lower Grand Coulee, where a peculiar strain of hope springs eternal from the alkaline depths of Soap Lake. In most respects, this country village resembles scores of other small towns in Eastern Washington. There is one major intersection, a drive-in where you order your burger and fries by phone from vinyl-clad booths, a block-long main street with a smattering of bars and junk stores, a nasty squabble between the mayor and the City Council, and lots of clapboard houses with "FOR SALE" signs posted in front.
    But there is one important difference. Soap Lake has no grain elevator, no pulp mill, no fruit warehouses. Its biggest employer is the local school district. And its solitary industry is its lake, two miles long and filled with mineral water that turns to soapsuds when the wind blows down the coulee.
   "We have no tax base," says Tift. "We have a bunch of retired people like me, and some people on welfare and a few people who work hard trying to keep their businesses alive."
   Sad, but true, says Suzanne Lonn, a retired schoolteacher and part-time director of the local Chamber of Commerce. "What we have is our water."
    From the earliest days, it was about those waters, soft and slippery to the touch, salty to the tongue and - if you believe the believers - therapeutic to body and soul. Soap Lake is the southernmost of a chain of small to middlin' potholes at the bottom of a 20-mile-long basalt canyon, or "coulee," that once contained the Columbia River. Fed by groundwater from the surrounding basalt, the lake has no outlet. It is a geological dead end for minerals such as sodium, carbonate, bicarbonate, sulphate - 16 minerals in all - that leach from the surrounding rock.
   This tweaks the curiosity of scientists. University of Washington zoologist W.T. Edmondson and various students have been sampling its waters for nearly 50 years, bringing back a rogue's gallery of mostly microscopic creatures - segmented worms, drifting plankton and tiny, red, shrimp-like copepods that occasionally tint the waters. One species peculiar to Soap Lake - Hexarthra polyondona soaplakeiensis - is far too small to be seen by the naked eye, which is probably a good thing, because one glimpse at its blob-like body and creepy squid-like tentacles would turn tourists to stone.
    But those chilly, mineral-rich waters are of particular interest to spa-lovers from around the globe. For nearly a century, they have come here to soak in it, drink it, sunbathe on its beaches and coat their bodies with its mud. They do this in hopes of curing, or at least soothing, the symptoms of arthritis or psoriasis or eczema or a dozen other chronic ailments. And they believe those therapeutic values are concentrated in the black mud scooped from the bottom.
    This is nothing new. Stone artifacts and Native American tradition indicate that the local Indians were true believers, building lake-shore huts where the "healing waters" were poured over hot rocks. But they, too, were mostly short-timers; they had to make a living somewhere else.
Early explorers found the water of some interest, but were distinctly unimpressed by the surrounding country. "It's a vast, sandy plain, and even the most hopeful and sanguine can see no future for it," reported an Army engineer in 1878. Late in the century, ranchers bathed their stock in the lake to fend off parasites and saddle sores, and they are credited with giving the lake its prosaic name.
   Commercially speaking, Soap Lake arrived with the railroad in Ephrata, just four miles south. Suddenly those alkaline waters became the essence of a health spa. The first sanitarium, the Lombardy, was built on the lake shore in 1905. Then came the larger Siloam, so-named for Jerusalem's life-giving pool. It was three stories, with 45 guest rooms and a grand dining room that was converted to a dance floor at night. Within a decade, the southern lake shore had become the "Palm Springs of The North," with four hotels, rooming houses, excursion boats, restaurants and businesses renting tents, boats and bathing suits. The city installed a dual water system, one set of pipes carrying fresh water, the other mineral water from the lake.
   "It was impossible to walk down the street on summer nights because of the crowds of socializers promenading the sidewalks," wrote local historian Bennye Fiege. "Eventually the town would boast an open-air dance hall right on the beach. Big-name bands were brought from Spokane."
    For years, the town's name was in dispute. Maps labeled the resort as "Sanitarium Lake." But developers of the Siloam hoped to call it "Siloam." Alas, the neighbors confused Jerusalem's pool with Salome, the dancer who took the rap for the beheading of John the Baptist. Neither name stuck. "Soap" did.
   And for all the bands and dance halls, it was still about the water. Business picked up after World War I, when thousands of American soldiers came home from the trenches suffering from buerger's disease, a frightening ailment that rots the skin. Victims discovered that the waters of Soap Lake arrested the disease.
   That's how Gordon Tift got here. His stepfather had contracted buerger's in the trenches and moved to Soap Lake to deal with it. "People came out here by the trainload," he recalls. "They were sick, missing limbs, and their only relief was aspirin, prayer and Soap Lake. They'd soak in the lake and drink the water and they'd feel better. It's simple as that. The doctors may pooh-pooh it, but I know what I've seen with my own eyes."
   Soap Lake's heyday was painfully brief. The grand Siloam burned to the ground in the early 1920s, followed by the Thomas Hotel and the Lakeview Sanitarium. Hopes rose again in the 1930s, when the government launched construction of Grand Coulee Dam. But the economic benefits flowed largely to Coulee City or to the farming center at Ephrata; Soap Lake remained a backwater. "Every few years, somebody checks into town, looks around and decides: `I'm gonna put this place on the map,' " says one longtime resident. "Couple years later, they give up and move on."
   During the 1940s and '50s, the lake itself became a problem. The same life-giving irrigation that greened the nearby desert was seeping through the aquifer and draining into the lake, raising its level and diluting its famous water. A 1936 analysis showed 13,836 parts per million of sodium; by the late 1940s, the sodium content had been reduced by more than half, with comparable drops in 10 other minerals, including carbonate, bicarbonate, sulphide and chloride.
    Meanwhile, there was evidence of a declining interest in the mineral water itself. Americans were less interested in natural cures and spas, preferring antibiotics such as penicillin. Soap Lake was dying of a deadly combination of fresh water and modern medicine.
   But the lake, and its town, persist. The groundwater problem was solved by federal engineers, who dug wells at the south end that intercept most of that fresh water and pump it into a nearby canal. Many locals believe the dilution continues, that the lake is gradually turning to fresh water, but the sudsy buildup on windy days suggests that its soapiness endures.
   This town’s character and endurance are embodied largely by two local characters. One of these is Marina Romary, innkeeper extraordinaire, Greek matriarch and self-styled Curator of the Western Myth. Romary was born in Soap Lake, daughter of Greek immigrants who arrived in 1915 and ran a lake-shore hotel and tavern. In the 1960s, Marina Romary took over Don's Restaurant, which some insist is the finest eatery between Bellevue and Spokane.
   "From the time I was a kid, I always wanted to create something special right here in Soap Lake," she says as she holds court in her corner at Don's.

   She created it across the street - the Notares Inn, a complex of rustic cabins constructed of huge spruce logs - enough virgin timber to make a Sierra Clubber cry. Each of its 23 warm rooms has its own unique floor plan and theme. There is the John Wayne Room, with arrows in the walls, a rope swing and a loft; the Charlie Russell Room, for the Western artist, decorated with Russell prints, petrified wood and agates; the Outlaw Room, with prison bars and wanted posters; and so forth.
   Next door is the Soap Lake Businessman's Club, the state's last members-only "bottle club," a throwback to post-Prohibition blue laws. Romary decorated the club in the same Western motif, then lured the perfect headliner to its stage. Bonnie Guitar, the country crooner whose 1950s hit "Dark Moon" made her a celebrity, found true happiness performing a permanent gig at the south end of Soap Lake. The singer retired recently after 12 years on that stage, having helped turn it into a regional institution.
   Romary's multifaceted business continues to draw loyal fans from across the state, breathing new life into an old resort. Recently, a Seattle-area couple has renovated a handsome river-rock building next door to Marina's place, and opened the equally charming Inn at Soap Lake. There are a couple of other clean motels in town, plus a larger resort on the north end of the lake, catering mostly to Winnebagos.
   "Soap Lake can now offer comfortable rooms and good food year-round," Romary says. "You start with that, but we still need something more - a real resort-quality spa."
   If Romary is the  town's first citizen, its second was the ultimate eccentric - Sam Israel. The late Jewish immigrant spent a lifetime leveraging a cobbler's skills into a vast real-estate empire that spans much of the state. He already owned buildings in downtown Seattle when he discovered Soap Lake, whose dramatic landscape reminded him of his native Isle of Rhodes. He started buying land and in 1961 moved to a ranch on a hill overlooking the lake.
   In time, Israel became a legend, driving around town in a war-surplus Jeep, living in a gloomy one-room shack instead of the never-completed ranch house next door, his vast acreage littered with rusting vehicles and stacks of seemingly useless stuff bought from government surplus sales. By the time he died at age 95, Israel owned 17,000 acres of Eastern Washington - wheat fields, scab land, the entire western shore of Soap Lake and more than one-third of the land in the town itself.
    Today, Israel's legacy is a huge question mark. On one hand, all those acres of mostly dormant land contribute to the local sense of despair, but they also pose a rare opportunity. The latter is what excites Charles Wilson, a Bellevue consultant who has been assessing that property for Samis Land Company, which now controls Israel's real-estate empire. Wilson has combed through records, explored hundreds of parcels and conjured up a vision: Washington state's first, highfalutin destination resort, sprawling along the sudsy shores of, yup, Soap Lake.
   OK, even some locals are skeptical. The guy suffers from an overdose of mineral water, buerger's disease of the brain. Yet, holding forth with Marina Romary at a corner table at Don's, Wilson is persuasive. Washington state is flanked by world-class resorts like Sun Valley and Whistler Mountain, he says. But none in our own state. A successful destination resort requires lots of land within three hours' drive of a major market. It needs a "contemplative environment," with plenty of sunshine, and a variety of amenities such as golf, skiing, water sports. It needs a sense of place, plus all the requisite sewers and electricity and water. "And," Wilson adds, "it should have differentness."
   Sites west of the Cascades are too wet, too gray and too seasonal, he says. Soap Lake, however, has a desert climate - 7 inches of rain per year (about the same as Phoenix) and 300 days of sun. It has hot summers, cold winters and mild temperatures in the shoulder seasons. It is just three hours' drive from Seattle, with an Ephrata airport capable of handling big jets. It is not ski country, but the coulee topography begs for a unique, world-class golf course. It has a real town, with real people, real history and that all-important infrastructure.
   "And you want differentness? WOW!" Wilson exclaims. "This could be one of the world's great spas! Glass atriums with heated mineral water, steam baths, people sunbathing in February."
   Equally important, the developer does not need to assemble any land. Sam Israel has taken care of that. Wilson sees Soap Lake as a mecca for aging boomers, groping for something to soothe their arthritis or psoriasis. "You build a destination resort for tomorrow's market, not today's," he says."People are getting older. The market is changing."
   So maybe Wilson is just another city slicker who drives into town and thinks he hears voices: "Build it and they will come." But Wilson is in the development business, and he works for an outfit that owns half the lake and a third of the town. Samis has made no decisions, but they're listening.
   A few days later, Darrell Sanders of Olympia helps his 70-year-old wife, Marguerite, into her wheelchair and wheels her gently out of their room at the Notares Inn, down the walkway and onto the same empty beach where Gordon Tift envisions the world's biggest rock band. At the edge of Soap Lake, he helps her to her feet, then escorts her out into the shallows.

   Marguerite suffers terribly from arthritis and psoriasis, he says. They saw an ad for Soap Lake in a magazine about psoriasis and decided it was worth a try. "The doctor wasn't for it or against it; he just told us to come on over and enjoy the sunshine," Sanders says. "Her arthritis is no better, but I swear her skin is clearing up for the first time in four or five years . . ."
   As ever, it's about that water. Magic or medicine, nature or psychosemantics. Who cares? It feels good.

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    A lifetime after the fact, the events of that terrible day linger like an old family feud, gnawing at the soul of this all-American small town. You stroll across the town park, beneath the autumn maples, and find yourself confronted by larger-than-life memorials to men who, 80 years ago today, died violent deaths on these quiet streets.
   You step into a downtown bookstore and listen to an impromptu debate about who did what and when, and who is to blame for what historians call the Centralia Massacre. And you wonder: Doesn't this handsome old town have enough problems - a shrinking resource economy and a lack of family-wage jobs - without re-fighting an 90-year-old fight?
    "There was a time when I was fascinated with that terrible day," recalls Dave Carver as he gazes soberly across the city park. "I thought I'd gotten over it. But it keeps coming back."
     Carver is something of an amateur historian, one of many who have asked questions, then become obsessed with the events of Veterans Day 1919. As a veteran and a union man, he feels he understands a period of Washington's history marked by wild-eyed clashes between loggers and timber bosses, haves and have-nots.
   "It shouldn't have happened," he says, sadly. "None of those things should have happened."
    On a drizzly November afternoon, Carver revisits the tree-lined streets where events unfolded on a similarly gray day so long ago.
     In 1919, Washington was a rough-edged pioneer state blessed with seemingly endless resources. Thousands of Americans had come home from the trenches of Europe, eager to enjoy the fruits of victory. But populist labor unions were beginning to resist the excesses of the market economy; strikes sometimes erupted into violence. The conflict was particularly acute in mill towns like Centralia, where it was hard to ignore the enormous gap between wealthy timber barons and hapless loggers.
     It started as a peaceful parade. Members of the local American Legion, including young war veterans, marched up Tower Avenue to observe the first anniversary of the Armistice that ended the War to End All Wars.
    "Things went wrong right here," Carver says, pointing to a block of aging single-story businesses. At this intersection, the American Legion contingent stopped in front of the Roderick Hotel, which served as a local union hall for the Industrial Workers of the World. The IWW, or "Wobblies," were the left wing of the Northwest labor movement, considered radical because they supported worker ownership of factories, a 40-hour work week and sanitary conditions in logging camps. Whether it was the union itself or the ideas it supported, the IWW was seen as a threat to the local establishment.
    The union had been warned that the Legionnaires would attack their hall. It had happened before, the previous year. A lawyer advised they were entitled to defend their property. So they armed themselves.
    What happened next goes to the heart of the debate: Who fired first and why? Within minutes, four young Legionnaires lay dead or dying on the street.
    The town went crazy. Citizens become vigilantes and descended on Wobblies and other union members, arresting them in their halls or homes and throwing them in jail.

   Wesley Everest, a 31-year-old logger and IWW member who had fired some of the fatal shots, was pursued through the streets, cornered, beaten and thrown in jail with the rest. Later that night, the city lights went out. An angry mob dragged Everest out of jail, drove him to a bridge across the Chehalis River and hanged him. Witnesses said he had been castrated.
    Just 10 weeks later, 11 union members were put on trial for the murder of Warren Grimm, one of the Legion members. After a stormy trial, tainted by the presence of troops, seven were convicted and sentenced to 25 years. Many observers, and even some jurors, complained the trial and sentences were unfair.
     The convictions only deepened passions in a state already known for its populism. The tragedy was revisited by appeals courts, by John Dos Passos in his novel "1919," and by a panel from the Federal Council of Churches. It has been the topic of countless books, pamphlets and magazine articles.
    Of the seven men convicted, one died in prison, five were paroled in 1930 and the last, Ray Becker, saw his sentence commuted in 1939 after 19 years in prison.

    Meanwhile, the people of Centralia resumed their lives. The American Legion erected a war memorial to the four Legionnaires, depicting them as innocent martyrs; the statue still dominates the city park.
    But while the episode became a national cause celebre, it was virtually banned in Centralia. For years, there was not a written word about the episode in the town library, and it was not discussed in local schools.
    "I'm a native of this town," Carver says. "When I joined the military, I was amazed how many people asked me about the Centralia Massacre. I couldn't tell them anything, because nobody ever told me."
     Still, the debate continued, mostly in hushed tones. Roger Stewart, a bookstore owner who moved here in 1964, recalls hearing stories from aging witnesses. "The feelings were made all the more intense by the Cold War," he recalls. "To them, it was all clear-cut. The Legionnaires were victims and the Wobblies were the guilty party."
   These days, Centralia remains a tidy, well-preserved and unpretentious town of 12,000 alongside the Chehalis River. It is best known for its winter floods, antique shops that fill aging downtown storefronts, and for its conservative politics.  The town struggles with many of the same economic woes experienced by other resource-based communities. All three of Lewis County's economic mainstays - timber, mining and farming - are in decline, says Bill Lotto of the county Economic Development Commission.
   The Wal-Mart and factory outlet stores that have sprouted alongside I-5 generate low-wage jobs that don't begin to compensate for the loss of well-paying mill or logging jobs, Lotto says.
"Our average wage has gone from 97 percent of the state average in 1970 to 73 percent in 1998," he says. "It has been a constant, long-term decline, and it hurts."
      But the city and county have some things going for them: the huge coal-fired generating plant outside town that employs 670 people, a regional hospital with 700 jobs and a new Fred Meyer distribution warehouse. And the county has plans for a new industrial park on the site of the former coal mine. "This community has a tremendous sense of pride and of history," Lotto says.
    And the events of 1919 now are formally part of that history. The library now maintains a collection of material on the tragedy, and the local antique mall sells copies of John McClelland's "Wobbly War: The Centralia Story," the most thorough historical account.
     Perhaps the most visible change is the two-story mural, painted two years ago on the wall facing the park. It depicts Wesley Everest as the martyr, arms outstretched, breaking his chains while corporate pigs sneer and pollute the air. The mural, erected by a local antique dealer, is designed to offset the one-sided message of the Legion statue, says Stewart, the bookstore operator.
    "It's painted in a kind of socialist style that a lot of people find offensive," he says.
     Still, people put up with it, suggesting that Centralia is coming to grips with its past.
It's even addressed in school now
    In 1987, the local school district published a pamphlet that even-handedly explores the episode, so teachers could discuss it with classes.
     "It's different now from when I grew up here," says Ron Breckenridge, the middle-school history teacher who co-authored the pamphlet. "The people who had the strongest feelings are gone now."
    The pamphlet drops the word massacre, referring instead to "The Centralia Tragedy," which seems more suitable.
     And what is the lesson to be learned? If history assigns blame for the violence, Breckenridge says, it must be spread among the Legionnaires, who planned to attack the IWW; the Wobblies, who overreacted with deadly force; local police, who refused to protect people they didn't like; and the public that became a mob.
     "The Centralia Tragedy might never have happened if each individual involved had exercised his responsibility as a lawful citizen," the pamphlet reads. "Anyone who allows anger, prejudice or extreme patriotism to cloud his judgment leaves himself open to be swept up in the mood of the mob. . . . Human emotion unchecked by reason may lead to tragedy."

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NW Places: Port Angeles born again
By Ross Anderson 

     When the big Rayonier pulp mill closed down here in 1997, Fred Michalscheck now admits, he almost panicked at losing his job. "After 22 years working in the same place, you begin to wonder if you can do anything else," he says.
    Today, Michalscheck runs a successful used-car business, The Other Guys, alongside Highway 101 east of town. And he wouldn't think of going back to the mill - even if he could.
     Much the same goes for his friends in this handsome town perched dramatically on its narrow ledge between the Olympics and the Strait of Juan de Fuca. When Rayonier moved away and laid off 360 workers, many asked openly: What is a mill town without its biggest mill?
    Four years later, Port Angeles is still groping for its identity. But the town has fared surprisingly well without Rayonier's jobs and industrial-strength influence.
    This is no boomtown. There are no new office buildings or malls. At 19,000, its population hasn't changed much since 1980, and its 7.5 percent unemployment is nearly twice the state rate. The average home price of $200,000 is $50,000 lower than neighboring Sequim.
   And the economics could get worse. There are recurring rumors - firmly denied by the company - that the town could lose its other major mill, Daishowa, because of rising electricity prices.
Yet the community is amazingly upbeat.
     "People didn't spend a lot of time wringing their hands," says Bart Phillips, former director of the local economic-development commission.
    They owe their survival in part to Daishowa, which employs 300 people. But much of Port Angeles' resilience can be traced to a gradual shift in the local economy - from a blue-collar town dependent on timber, salmon and farming to a more recession-proof economy rooted in government and service jobs.
   As the Clallam County seat and service provider for the northern Olympic Peninsula, Port Angeles has a solid base of living-wage jobs. Its largest employers, other than Daishowa, are a hospital, the school district, the county, the Coast Guard and Olympic National Park.
The town also benefits from its chemistry of history, geography and civic character.
   Port Angeles owes its name to a little-known Spanish explorer, Don Francisco Elisa, who sailed by in 1791 and was so impressed with its natural harbor that he named it for the angels - Porto de Nuestra Señora de Los Angeles.
   Its character can be traced in part to a failed experiment. In the 1880s, a charismatic lawyer, George Venable Smith, organized a cooperative colony, promising "free land, water and light" and "equal pay for women." By 1890, the colony had a working lumber mill and a dairy herd, and was advertising nationally for settlers. By 1900, the commune had failed, and Port Angeles became a more traditional town heavily dependent on the lumber and pulp mills that lined its harbor. At one point, the mills employed nearly 1,000 people - one of every 10 residents.
     Now the mills are succumbing, one by one, to a combination of factors: environmental restrictions, rising power costs, international competition and more. Some of the Rayonier millworkers found jobs at Daishowa or in Port Townsend. Others took welding classes and went to work at a new shipyard. Another took an auto-mechanics course and started a bicycle shop downtown. "The millworkers had a strong support system," says Patty Hannah, who runs the local United Way. "The mill offered counseling and retraining, alcoholism treatment, family planning. And those things made a difference."
    The town prides itself in its community spirit. Two years ago, people rallied behind a local doctor who had been accused of killing an infant child in his care. Last year, they rushed to help the family of a deputy sheriff shot to death by a mentally ill gunman.
    Those qualities attract newcomers. Alan Turner was a corporate manager from New Jersey when he passed through about 20 years ago. Several years later, he bagged the corporate life and opened a downtown bookstore, Port Books and News, where he sells both new and used books, luring authors from around the region for evening readings. "We'd only been here a couple of years when we had a fire at our house," Turner recalls. "Word got out, and people we'd never met stepped forward to help."
    Employers such as the National Park Service, the schools and a community college attract a better-read work force than the mills, Turner notes.
    As the mills have declined, Port Angeles has reclaimed much of its waterfront with a new harbor complex and park. Local officials have remodeled the old courthouse and built a new library.
The town still offers some unusual cultural life: lectures at the community college, a 60-year-old symphony, a fine-arts center. And Turner loves to take the ferry across the strait to Victoria, B.C., for the theater.
     Still, locals readily acknowledge that Port Angeles is struggling to maintain its identity - or to find a new one.

   Just up the hill from the waterfront is a retail landmark known across the peninsula as Swain's General Store. It's a bright-blue, supermarket-size emporium that sells logging shirts, jeans, rifle ammunition, fasteners by the bin, insulated boots, 100 kinds of hardware snaps and fireproof safes priced as high as $1,600.  After 50 years, Swains' future looked grim when a Wal-Mart opened a few blocks east.
   So far, the local favorite is faring well, says Mike Mudd, who has worked there more than 20 years. "We adjusted." Swains turned more to brand-name merchandise such as Pendleton, Woolrich and Levis, relying on quality and service while surrendering the low-end sales to the new competition.
    Port Angeles' struggle, like its best-known store, is to adjust to the New Economy without selling its soul. "The town is on a plateau," says John Brewer, publisher of the Peninsula Daily News in Port Angeles. "Obviously, the old days, when you could drop out of school, marry your high-school sweetheart and make a good living at the mill, are long gone. But people don't really know what they want to do next."
    The town remains the gateway to Olympic National Park and its 4 million-plus annual visitors. Nearby Sequim has attracted increasing numbers of retirees. Local entrepreneurs are promoting sea kayaking and other "adventure tourism." But tourism remains highly seasonal, not the kind of work likely to replace year-round jobs at the mills. Besides, Port Angeles is not sure it wants to be a tourist attraction.
    That economic limbo is one of the reasons Bart Phillips left his job at the economic-development commission and took a similar job in Vancouver, Wash. "Vancouver is finally coming into its own," he says. "There is enormous growth here.
   "Port Angeles hasn't hit that point yet. There is a new-car dealership, a new cinema. They have a great cadre of professionals. But there's never enough money to do what needs to be done. Port Angeles is on the cusp."

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   When 500 folks assembled for Mount Vernon’s biggest party one spring weekend, the only building big enough was a massive flower warehouse somewhere out in the tulip fields. Dressed in everything from folk-dance costumes to tuxedos and evening gowns, Skagit County's finest parked along a narrow road, promenaded through the din of evening frogs and into the cavernous warehouse, where the scents of perfume and after-shave blended with resident aromas more, well, agricultural.

    Inside, they lined up at the bar and traded gossip while Skye Richendrfer, the town mayor, paraded around the hall in his kilt and bagpiper's regalia, serenading constituents.
The community bash kicked off the Tulip Festival, during which up to 1 million visitors from Seattle and beyond converge on this town of 22,000 and its lush river delta now splendidly arrayed in springtime blooms.
   To the locals, the festival is good news: Organizers project millions of dollars to be spent by visitors eager to glimpse the tulip fields. And bad news: two weeks of traffic jams to rival Seattle's evening commute. These things cause Skagitonians to worry that their best-kept community secret is getting out.

    Recently, the magazine American Demographics, which turns statistics into stories on trends, rated 193 small American cities (between 15,000 and 50,000 and outside major metropolitan areas) based on quality-of-life factors ranging from climate to crime rates. Better-known places such as Bozeman, Mont., Bend, Ore., and Hilton Head, S.C., all rated high. But, when the data was all compiled, Mount Vernon emerged at the top of the list.
   Author Kevin Heubusch explained that Mount Vernon rated particularly high in personal income, parks and proximity to urban amenities, while enjoying lower-than-average property taxes and crime rates. Most of all, the town rated high in "community investment;" folks here are willing to spend money on public goods such as schools and farmland preservation.
   Of course, people here already knew that Mount Vernon is the best little city in America. "We're at the foot of the Cascades and the doorstep of the San Juans," says Don Wick, director of the local Economic Development Association. "We're halfway between two of the finest cities in the world, but we don't have to live in either of them."
   Like many of his neighbors, Wick is a refugee. He grew up in Ballard and took a job 15 years ago as a disc jockey at the local radio station. "I expected to stay two years MAX! And here I am."
   The economy, still heavily agricultural, is healthy, he says. While incomes lag slightly behind King County and the state, housing costs lag much further; you can still buy a three-bedroom rambler for $200,000. Unemployment is higher than Seattle's, but it's declining. "We have it all - a small-town atmosphere, good schools, low crime," adds Tom Verge, a native who went away to law school, then came home to raise his family. "I don't see any downsides."
   This is Mount Vernon's secret, and folks here aren't sure they're ready to share it with anybody down south. To most Seattleites, Mount Vernon is where you turn left en route to the San Juan Islands. Seen from I-5, two images dominate: the Skagit River Delta and its vast green fields speckled with whitewashed farmhouses and big red barns; and the equally flat expanses of asphalt parking lots surrounding new strip malls and national retail outlets just north of town. Both are important facets of Greater Mount Vernon, and they add up to an inevitable collision between things urban and rural. American Demographics also lists Mount Vernon as one of the nation's fastest-growing small cities. The city grew by a staggering 30 percent in the 1990s -- three times the King County rate over the same period.
   Skagit County, which stretches from Anacortes to Sedro-Woolley, grew by 25 percent to 100,000 people. While most of the county remains rural, newcomers are arriving en masse in the hills east of Mount Vernon, where new housing developments bear a striking resemblance to King County's Sammamish Plateau.
   Inevitably, such growth brings problems - overloaded sewers, crowded schools, clashes over the state Growth Management Act. Despite the low crime rates, Skagitonians now hear about minimart stickups, even a drive-by shooting earlier this year. They worry about traffic jams and cellular-phone towers. Family farms face ever-increasing pressure to sell some of the world's most fertile land to those growing malls.
   At least some locals worry about how to bring the fast-growing Hispanic community - 7,700 strong countywide - into the mainstream. While hundreds of Hispanics work the fields, harvesting the tulips that are the local emblem, virtually none were evident at the festival kickoff event.
   Through these other tensions, Mount Vernon clings stubbornly to its small-town atmosphere, especially in that cluster of brick buildings sandwiched between I-5 and the Skagit River - downtown. Like most cities, downtown long ago lost its major retail stores like Sears and JCPenney. But the town has built up its government center and supported the renovation of the elegant, 70-year-old Lincoln Theater, a nonprofit venue for anything from film symposiums to Celtic string bands. Vacated stores have been filled by new ones, or by local-government offices, lawyers, accountants and other professionals who don't want to work in a mall. As a result, the vacancy rate is near zero.
   For the die-hard retailers, competition is tough. Less than two years ago, Rich Allen and his wife bought the well-established Collins Office Supply, where everything from staples to office desks and tulip-decorated stationery can be found in one small corner store. Since then two national chains, Office Max and Office Depot, have opened new stores at the nearby mall. "We saw an immediate decline in sales," Allen says. "We cut our prices, started buying directly from vendors, and now our prices are competitive." Customers are coming back, he says. They like the personal service and the familiarity - especially 72-year-old Betty Hauser, who has been selling supplies at Collins for 38 years and knows every customer by name.
   Mount Vernon is that kind of place. Locals can't cross the street without meeting a friend. It is a place where folks still think it's important to be active in Rotary or Kiwanis or the Moose Lodge. Stop by Coffee Corner, a clean little eatery across from the courthouse, and you find a classic lunch counter surrounded by a half-dozen Naugahyde booths, the largest of which is reserved for the daily lunchtime card game involving a city councilman, a local judge, the part-time prosecutor and anybody else with a yen for gin rummy or hearts.
   Steve Skelton, the judge, appears anything but judicial in his leather bomber jacket, full beard, dark glasses and diamond stud in one ear. "I live here because I chose to," Skelton says, his pals nodding their agreement while studying their cards. "I like practicing law in a place where I know who I'm working with - the lawyers and most of their clients."
   Skelton grew up in Seattle, flunked out of the University of Washington and worked three years as a Seattle cop before going back to school. This time he earned his law degree and got out of town, starting up a criminal-defense practice in Skagit County. That was 20 years ago, and he has never looked back.
    Next to him, City Councilman John Cheney is a retired architect who remains deeply involved in civic life - be it land-use disputes or weekly "roundtable discussions" over heady stuff such as "prehistory notions of evolution."
   Today, downtown's greatest fear may not be abandonment, but too much success. It hasn't happened yet, but locals figure it's a matter of time before the place is "LaConnerized," rendered altogether too cute by gift shops, trendy bars and Starbucks carts. One local businessman warns the jig is up "when the corner pharmacy becomes a Williams-Sonoma."
    Mount Vernon's real secret appears to be a local culture that values civic activism and can-do politics - or what Mayor Richendrfer calls "synergy."
   "People here still believe they can have an impact on their community, and so they do," he says.
   The proof comes with the periodic floods, when bankers and clerks leave the office and work elbow-to-elbow with housewives and field hands, piling up sandbag dikes. Voters are willing to tax themselves for public benefits. Local taxpayers recently approved $10 million in levies for two new schools and $4 million more for a police station. Senior citizens alone donate thousands of hours of volunteer time to 87 agencies. United Way just finished a record year of fund raising. Last year, American Demographics analyzed data on civic involvement in nonurban counties across the nation and Skagit County ranked in the top 20. "That ranking for civic engagement helps explain the No. 1 rating for our quality of life," says Wick.
   Local politics are moderate, bipartisan and positive. The county commissioners and auditor are Republican, the sheriff and state legislators Democrats. They all belong to the same civic clubs. They even seem to like each other.
    Richendrfer, whose job is nonpartisan, is a Bellingham native who moved to Mount Vernon years ago and started up a business developing accounting software. In 1995, he was the unknown candidate who used computer-assisted tactics to emerge from a field of six candidates for mayor.

   He has promoted public-private partnerships and high-tech innovations. The town has a brand-new Web site and is burying fiber-optic cable in the same ditches as new sewers. There is a new brew pub and a French restaurant and plans to redevelop the aging grain elevator that serves as a downtown landmark. The city is starting work on a milelong park along the river where old-timers have gathered for years, fishing for the elusive steelhead, with a thermos of coffee and a box of doughnuts perched on the hood of a pickup truck.
   "We need to do a much better job of showing off what we have to offer," Richendrfer says. "We're playing catch-up with the rest of the state. We need parks, salmon fishing, a stern-wheeler on the river."
   Public relations aside, Richendrfer and others insist that the town's biggest challenge is to preserve its agricultural roots - a mission supported by an overwhelming majority of voters. While founded in the 1870s as a fur-trading post, the earliest settlers soon discovered the fertile soils deposited here by the Skagit River. By the 1930s, one journalist reported that the town consisted of about 4,000 souls, plus "two pea canneries, two milk condenseries, an egg and poultry plant, and a chicken and turkey hatchery."
   Sixty years later, the pea canneries have been replaced by climate-controlled warehouses and freezer plants. While the new neighborhoods sprawl eastward, one can still walk easily from downtown Mount Vernon across the aging iron bridge and into farm country. For this, locals can thank the river, which created the flats and still insists on overflowing its banks now and then - despite 100 years of dike construction. "The floods are a blessing," says Tom Verge, a local lawyer who grew up here. "Nobody wants to build on the flats, because they know it's a matter of time before they get flooded out."
   The pressures on farmers are well-known. No matter how rich the tulip crop, any given acre of land is far more valuable to a commercial developer. And folks here are firm believers in a citizen's right to do what he pleases with his property. As a result, the number of cultivated acres is shrinking. Just last week, local officials formally broke ground for a state-of-the-art hardwood mill, their ceremonial shovels turning over a rich, dark soil that most of the world's farmers can only dream about.
   Yet 100,000 acres continue to be farmed, mostly by individuals and families. And, thanks in part to the floods, the delta farmlands have escaped the worst of the development pressure, says EDA director Wick. Some leading farmers have organized Skagitonians to Protect Farmland, raising money to buy development rights to threatened farms and looking for ways to buy more. One possibility is a countywide bond issue, an example of the kind of public-private partnership that the mayor and others talk about.
   These are the strategies for preserving the town's "Norman Rockwell character," Richendrfer says. The nagging question is how much growth can be sustained without diluting the very quality that draws people here. "I think most of us agree about what we like here," he adds. "Now the challenge is to agree on how to not screw it up."

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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."

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