Forks — the Town That Died Twice

Pull up a seat for this one, because the town you're rolling through has died once already and come back wearing a borrowed coat. Folks call me Ranger Boone Merrick, and I have a soft spot for places that get knocked flat and find a reason to stand back up. Roll your window down a crack. Smell that — wet cedar, diesel, cut wood. That's the smell of Forks, and it's been the smell of Forks for a hundred years. Now here is the honest history, and I'll give it to you straight before I give you the strange part. For generations this town called itself — and these were its own proud words, painted right up on the sign — the Logging Capital of the World. And friend, it earned the title. The big trees came off the national forest all around — Douglas fir and hemlock six and eight feet through, trees that were saplings before Columbus — and that timber WAS the town. The mill, the trucks, the paychecks, the whole life of the place ran on it. A man could leave high school on a Friday and be working the woods on a Monday, making more than the schoolteacher and the banker both. There were fallers and buckers and choker-setters and truckers, and on a payday the diners and the taverns up and down this street were full to the door. The whole town moved to the rhythm of the mill whistle. Then the bottom fell out. Folks around here remember the spotted owl — a little bird that nests in old growth — and the fights in the late nineteen-eighties over whether to keep cutting the last of those ancient trees. When old-growth logging got shut down across the Northwest in the early nineties, Forks was gutted. Mills closed, one after another. The whistle that had set the clock of this town for a lifetime went quiet. Families packed up and left, and the school rolls thinned out, and the for-sale signs went up faster than anybody could take them down. But I'll tell you something true that you don't always hear: that little owl took more than its share of the blame. The machines had already been doing the work of ten men — one fellow in a big yarder could do what a whole crew used to — and the country had been cutting faster than the forest could ever grow back, year after year, for decades. The reckoning was coming with or without the bird. The owl just became the face of it, an easy thing to be angry at. The hardship, though — the hardship was real, and you can still read it on some of these closed-up storefronts and in the men who never did find work that paid like the woods. Now here's the strange part, and I'll keep it quick, because it's not really Forks's story to tell. The story goes that a novelist went hunting for the gloomiest, rainiest, most fog-bound town in all of America to set a book in. Never came here — just searched it out, and Forks came up wettest. Vampires, as it happens. And the readers came, and they spent their money on Main Street, and slowly the lights came back on. Think on that. A town that made its living cutting down the rain forest got its second life out of a tale about how hard it rains. Same rain. Same town. Whole new reason to stay.