Tough times breed tough towns

The Ohio town where I grew up — so small you could jog all the way around it for cross-country practice — recently lost its rubber-parts factory.

I worked there when I was 18. We operated machines to craft tiny rubber valves for the Rust Belt car industry. The workers earned enough money to buy little houses, and big trucks.To me, the work was so repetitive, so tedious, that I could make it through each shift only by listening to a tape of the previous night's baseball game. Twice.

When the plant closed, the local papers featured quotes from laid-off workers that, if you weren't running for president, you might characterize as "bitter."

They lamented the end of jobs where you don't need a Ph.D. They used words like "dead end." They said America is losing its way.

But notably, they didn't curl into the fetal position waiting for the government to rescue them. Some switched to truck driving. One said he was going to night school for computer training. Others said they might form a landscaping business.

I'm not claiming my hometown — Yellow Springs, Ohio, pop. 3,600 — is blue-collar central. Far from it. It's a hippie college town (at least for now, as the college also appears to be closing). If they're clinging to anything to sustain them in tough times, it's more likely yoga mats or vegan diets than God or guns.

I bring it up because small towns again are in the national spotlight. And again being trivialized, stereotyped and misunderstood.

It's a quadrennial ritual. Presidential candidates parachute in and behave as if they're on a movie set. They pretend to be duck hunters or bowlers or cow milkers. Photo op completed, they leave and don't return, like salmon, for precisely a four-year interval.

Barack Obama's sweeping analysis of small-town psychology was patronizing. But hardly more so than the sight of Hillary Rodham Clinton remaking herself into a whiskey-swilling markswoman.

It's true some in small towns feel bitter or left behind. It's hard not to when you're struggling or sense you are trapped.

What the candidates always get wrong, though, is their implicit notion that small-towners are somehow witless, buffeted victims.

Take the most condescended-to small town around here — Forks, out on the Olympic Peninsula. Once the "Logging Capital of the World," it was thought to have met its Waterloo around 1990, when lawsuits by environmentalists locked up most federal timber.

Yes, the town at first reacted to tectonic change by lashing out. They used to sell T-shirts that read: "Support your local spotted owl: from a rope."

But that didn't last. Neither did the moping.

Many loggers adapted, learning more environmentally friendly timber techniques. An export industry grew for salal and ferns used in floral displays. And did you know Forks is the virtual home of the fastest-growing high school in the state, the online Insight School of Washington?

Forks is no boomtown. But neither is it a hidebound backwater. The town is quietly doing something that presidential candidates, at their most condescending, never seem to think small towns are quite capable of.

It is out there, by itself, getting by and moving on.

Danny Westneat's column appears Wednesday and Sunday. Reach him at 206-464-2086 or dwestneat@seattletimes.com.