The Final Forest: Big Trees, Forks, and the Pacific Northwest

Preface, 2010: Twilight Town

11 Life surprises. Of all the possible outcomes for Forks, Washington, that I might have imagined in tumultuous 1990–91, when I first worked on The Final Forest, the unlikeliest would have been the Olympic Peninsula town’s destiny as an international tourist destination. But in 2009, the Forks Chamber of Commerce recorded 70,000 visitors from all over the globe. The pilgrims were excited readers of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series of four vampire novels set in the timber community, the first published in 2005. By late 2009 the books had reportedly sold 85 million copies worldwide, Forks was offering a “Twilight Tour,” and its tiny downtown boasted several stores selling Twilight memorabilia. One of these stores, Dazzled by Twilight (the book’s heroine, Bella, is dazzled by vampire beau Edward), turned its interior into a spooky replica of the outdoors, with plastic grass on the floor, trees reaching to the ceiling to entwine, water spilling in an artificial stream, and a mural of the Olympic coast featuring werewolf Jacob. The store offers a mind-boggling array of merchandise , including Twilight dolls, lunch boxes, water bottles, T-shirts, magnets, bookmarks, sweatshirts, hats, jewelry, cosmetics, calendars, coffee, postcards, and cigarette lighters. PreFace, 2010 Twilight Town 12 the final foreSt The store’s owner is Twilight fan Annette Bruno-Root. She was a social worker in Vancouver, Washington, when she visited Forks, saw an opportunity, and created a small empire. “I came to Forks and didn’t see any evidence of Twilight,” she said. “It was empty storefronts. It was like going to Disneyland and finding Mickey and Minnie had been stricken from the cast. I wanted a place where someone like me could come.” She took over the tour buses, opened three stores, and at this writing was planning a Twilight-themed restaurant and lounge in the former Vagabond , a mainstay eatery in the timber days. By the time of Twilight’s triumph, The Final Forest had sold about 36,000 copies. When Twilight sequel New Moon set first-day sales records, Meyer sold more books in twenty minutes than I’d sold of The Final Forest in almost twenty years. When I returned to Forks in 2009 and 2010, several people I met had never heard of my non-fiction depiction of their town. The Forks library had lost its only copy. The height of the timber war was not a happy time, and if many in Forks respected The Final Forest, they did not embrace it. Real people suffered real loss from environmental decisions that are bitterly remembered, and some found this book as painful to read as I at times found it to write. Now, almost two decades later, I’m writing a preface for what has moved from journalism to history, but still timely history. We may never be finished arguing about forests, and the evolution of the debate is as fascinating as its origins. The final forest still has things to tell us about ourselves. Sandwiched between the Twilight shops is the stump and sign proclaiming Forks as “The Logging Capital of the World,” but the claim is obsolete. A few logging trucks still rumble along Highway 101, but the majority of the city’s employment today is tourism and government. Nearby Clallam Bay Prison opened in 1985, had doubled in size in 1992 when The Final Forest was published, and by 2010 employed about 440 people, half of whom live in or near Forks. Criminal justice and vampire romance are the new mainstays of the town. When I first visited shop owner Jerry Leppell in September of 1990, he was selling 2,200 chainsaws a year. By the end of 2009, he was selling 70. Not only has the timber harvest declined, but harvesting methods have drastically changed to mechanical feller-bunchers operated from PrefaCe 13 a cab. “Even the work clothes are out,” Leppell said; you don’t need a hickory shirt to operate robotic levers that snip off trees. The saw shop still exists, but it now rents landscaping equipment to homeowners and sells rain gear to people who pick brush for floral displays. Most of those people are Hispanic, and the town has gone from having relatively few minorities in 1990 to being 15 percent Latino by 2010. In Leppell’s store, the spotted owl posters of 1990 have been replaced by some featuring Twilight. The owner estimated that...