Iraq war in focus: Home-front Journal
As war occupies a nation, a small town quietly dies

By Ron C. Judd
Seattle Times staff columnist

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GOLDENDALE, Klickitat County — As her government rained multi-million-dollar munitions on Baghdad, Michelle Dix was perched on the front stoop of a small rental house, counting one-dollar bills.

Eight, maybe 10 of them were in her hand. Not a bad morning's work for a get-outta-town yard sale — one of southcentral Washington's few growth industries these days.

"Everything must go!" the sign said. A Britney Spears CD here, a nonessential pair of skis there, children's clothes everywhere.

Within a couple of months, Dix and her family will be down the road, southbound, back to Baker City, Ore., the similarly small town from whence they came years ago. They were lured north by a high-paying job for her husband, Dan, at Goldendale Aluminum, a sprawling complex on the banks of the Columbia River.

It was good while it lasted. Goldendale, nestled on a high plateau between the rolling Columbia Hills, the piney Simcoe Mountains and the Columbia River Gorge, is by all accounts a grand place to live.

But like many other rural outposts in the Northwest, it is not a good place to find work. Not since the smelter, poisoned by the same economics strangling other aluminum plants in Washington, Oregon and Montana, finally went cold.

At full operation, the smelters at Goldendale and nearby The Dalles, Ore. — both owned by Portland businessman Brett Wilcox — employed more than 1,100 workers. In late March, the same week the war was launched, the company sent layoff notices to its final batch of Goldendale employees.

About 150 of the town's most veteran working-wage earners are out of work, or about to be. Most of them are union laborers who endured the unbearably hot and sooty work of aluminum production — summer smelter temperatures in excess of 150 degrees are common — for a good wage, up to $52,000 a year.

Layoffs at the plant have been squeezing Goldendale for years. But locking the doors — for good this time, many speculate — was a punch to the gut. Especially coming so close to the start of the war, in which at least a half-dozen of Goldendale's sons are fighting.

Despair is in the air. "You're looking for a story? How about the one where everything is closing, our jobs are gone, and the whole town is drying up and blowing away?" one woman offers, unsolicited, on the main drag in this town of 4,500.

There is a strong sense here that people in Western Washington don't understand the pain — and that people in Washington, D.C., don't care.

"I think the amount of employees displaced in Goldendale has a greater overall impact, per capita, than Boeing leaving Seattle," says Ben McCredy, owner of a downtown dry-goods store.

His business is down 40 percent over the year before. And he's a lucky one: About half the businesses that once lined the streets here are gone, making a mockery of a '60s-era sign downtown declaring "Goldendale Shopping Center — Sportsman's Paradise."

It's the center, all right. But most people do their shopping across the bridge in Oregon.

Houses are for sale all over town. Goldendale is dying, one outbound U-Haul at a time. Even the most optimistic can't imagine a quick cure.

"It's been kind of like a one-two punch," says Ken Berry, a soft-spoken, longtime aluminum-plant worker sitting at a metal desk inside the nondescript Goldendale office of United Steelworkers Local 8147, which he heads.

The culprits are high energy costs from the Bonneville Power Administration and competition from China and South America, says Berry, whose eyes show the tired look of one trying to give hope to people who have little. The victims are some of the last well-paid blue-collar workers in the region.

He doesn't sugarcoat it. "There's really nothing else for these people out there."

Heavy industry, he says, has all but bailed out of America — and met little opposition at the borders.

In Central Washington, that industry always has come largely courtesy of the federal government, whose dams on the mighty Columbia turned a desert into a fertile basin — and had powered the aluminum industry with cheap electricity since the 1940s.

But the government, people here lament, doesn't seem to be in the jobs business anymore.

This can be a touchy subject when your nation is at war, spending $100 billion or more on its engagement in Iraq, and facing an ominous, blank-check future rebuilding project.

Berry, who says he's a strong supporter of troops in the Gulf, is one of few in town to address the connection head-on.

"When President Bush sets aside $900 million to rebuild a country (like Iraq)," he asks, "why not set aside the same amount to rebuild our own?"

Others, with their friends and neighbors' children in the war, are more reluctant to go there. Possibly because the cost is still unknown, people here blame their predicament less on war spending than on government pork — or on environmental rules that have curbed dam flows and slashed logging in the Mount Adams foothills to the west.

Mostly, they curse the lack of attention to, and prosecution of, the maddeningly faceless people responsible for the Enron debacle and accompanying energy crisis — the final blow to their struggling industry.

But even some strong proponents of the war can't help worry about the cost, especially in the face of a burgeoning federal deficit.

"The war needs to be fought," says Fred Krueger, a Vietnam-era Army veteran laid off from the aluminum plant last year. "The war is a necessity. But we're going to pay for it."

In a way, the bill already has come due in Goldendale. The thinking: If the government didn't keep cheap juice flowing to smelters during good times, what are the odds in bad?

A couple of blocks away from the Steelworkers' hall, Kathy Norton stands by her desk and shakes her head.

"It's been a real tough time here, and then this (the war), on top of it," she says.

Norton gets it with both barrels. She works in the local economic-development office for people trying to turn Goldendale back upright. And her bookshelf is adorned with photos of her son, Dennis, 27, a member of the Army's V Corps perched on the outskirts of Baghdad.

Her husband, Don, lost his aluminum job last May. Today, he works a mill job for Louisiana Pacific — 200 miles and a mountain range away, in Tacoma.

The Nortons meet up on weekends. It's not perfect. It's reality.

And relief, realistically, is years away.

"Losing the aluminum plant will be terrible," Norton concedes. "People will never see those kind of wages again."

A scant few get lucky. Krueger snared a hydropower job with the U.S Army Corps of Engineers. Most of his fellow workers take community-college retraining courses, then leave the area for other jobs. Some just fade out of sight, simply walking away from mortgages.

"Some of these people have lived and worked here their whole entire lives," laments Dix, a nursing assistant unable to find work in the area. "Where do they go?"

Nobody has good answers. But many here believe their problems are caused by a federal-government betrayal so monumental that it requires a federal-government fix.

They wait and write letters and try to muster hope. The war rages on in Iraq, and people in Klickitat County watch on satellite TV as the nation pulls together.

They understand why war is on everybody's front burner, and that it will stay there for now.

But they fear that when it's all over, the attention of Washington, D.C., will simply drift, as it usually does, somewhere else, far away from the stunning place where the Cascades meet the Columbia.

It's all a matter of national priorities. And the people of Goldendale are getting quite accustomed to not being one of them.

Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280, or rjudd@seattletimes.com. Harley Soltes: 206-464-8145, or hsoltes@seattletimes.com.