Iraq war in focus: Home-front Journal
At a lonely crossroads sits Bagdad Junction

By Ron C. Judd
Seattle Times staff columnist

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BAGDAD JUNCTION, Lincoln County — The road home, they kept saying on talk radio, leads through Baghdad.

Well, this as close as we could come. In spelling terms, it's only an "h" off. In every other respect, it feels a world away.

The road to this Bagdad, in fact, doesn't lead home at all. Unless your name is "M. Eagle," which is posted in block letters on the only rural-route mailbox out in this part of wheat country, Washington.

Aside from an old, chipped-paint Grange hall across the road, the Eagle place is the only structure at Bagdad Junction. Knocking on its door and finding no one home, we set out to see the rest of Lincoln County, vowing to return.

The road from Bagdad to Almira goes up and down through wheat fields in a series of whoop-de-dos that, viewed from the end, looks like a sea serpent half-buried in the rich soil.

Like a lot of this country, it looks like one of those places where they film Japanese car commercials. It is. A crew was here just last week, creating, for city dwellers, that fantasy image of an out-there place where you can go out and put your top down, unfurl your hair — forget about life, death and the Axis of Evil.

At the end of it, Almira, on a Sunday afternoon, looks like a movie set for a film about the rapture. There's absolutely nobody here, save for a painted man grasping the bars in a squatty, windowless, box-like building marked "Almira Jail." When we get out and walk around, we feel compelled to whisper.

Outside town, our car radio is relaying chaos and looting in Iraqi cities. We spot an old school house. It is a grand old lady of a building with a stone foundation, assembled one single rock at a time. The roof is going, going, but somehow holding on. Shreds of wall covering still cling to boards inside. Missing planks give the floor a gap-toothed smile. The wheat fields — just about all that's left of the whistle-stop town of Govan — are plowed right up to the front door.

You can imagine generations of kids inside and guess what happened. She's well beyond her last legs. But nobody has the heart to push the old girl over.

We drive south on Highway 21 through Odessa. A right-hand turn and another 20 miles later is Harrington, pop. 500, give or take a hundred. Flags fly up and down the main drag. An agenda for last week's City Council meeting is stapled to the door at City Hall. Among the business items: "Update on pay phone." Photos of six Harrington sons and daughters in the military beam through the window.

Across the street, Pam Dietrich, 52, is frenetically tending to her lone customer — a guy passing through from Coeur d'Alene — at Pam & Vern's Harrington Haus, the town restaurant. When we choose a table near the window, Pam scurries to wipe it off.

"Nobody's sat in that one in quite a while," she explains, apologetically.

She tells us what's available from the menu: Namely, burgers. They're out of almost everything else. Not from robust business, but lack thereof.

TIMES ARE TOUGH, a sign above the counter says. No more charging on accounts, folks.

The town is shrinking. "The old ones are going into nursing homes, the young ones moving out," Pam says.

She is a third-generation restaurateur in Harrington. In the old days, it took 20 or 30 guys to bring in the local wheat. They ate breakfast at the café. They took their boxed lunch from the café. They came back for dinner.

Now the same wheat is brought in by three guys on big machines. They bring their own.

"I didn't pack a single box lunch this last year," Pam says, moving around constantly, as if stopping will allow the finality of it all to catch up and overwhelm her.

On an old ceiling fan over her head, two M&M-character figurines are taped to the blades. They chase one another slowly around in dusty circles. Pam knows the feeling.

Both her parents died in the same month in 1991. She has a sister in Olympia. "If it wasn't for her helping us out, these doors wouldn't be open," she says. Her husband, Gene (not Vern; long story), was a logger and farmer, two tough businesses these days.

Mr. Coeur d'Alene pays in cash, and Pam says: "Good. Now we can buy some more stuff."

She's heard rumor of a big Bonneville Power project coming through the area — a new line from Grand Coulee to Spokane. She's already printed up fliers and created a menu item — the Bonneville Burger — to lure the rumored workers. Worth a shot.

She stirs the fire in the woodstove. The furnace went out two years ago. "Are the burgers OK?" she wants to know. They're outstanding.

The war is on Northwest Cable News. Gene comes in. This town, he notes, has a golf course. Somebody said it was the third-toughest in the state. He doesn't know how a town like Harrington will turn the corner. Maybe, he thinks, through niche businesses, like selling doorknobs collected from old farmhouses.

"Gene, can you help me out?" Pam calls from behind the counter.

"Sure lover," he says.

We drive through Davenport, Creston and all that big empty white space on Page 86 of the Gazeteer. Back at Bagdad Junction, we find a red pickup in the lone driveway.

Nicky, a border collie, wags at the front door. When we knock this time, the only residents of Bagdad Junction promptly invite us into their kitchen. Melvin and Margie Eagle are retired farmers. Melvin was born on this spot and has lived here 69 years. As we chat, all those sights on our road to Bagdad take on meaning.

He chuckles about "Bagdad."

"You did see the tanks, didn't you?" he jokes.

Bagdad Junction was named after someone named Bagdad. It used to be a major corner on U.S. 2, back in the days when highways went around farm lots, not through them. It had a motel and a Texaco and a store. Now the highway has been rerouted and it's all wheat, but the name remains.

That old school at Govan was the only school in these parts for a long time. "Lots of people that lived around here went to school there," Melvin says. "They're all gone now." He believes the school closed in the 1930s.

The Almira Jail really was a jail — not exactly up to humane standards of today. One time, for fun, Melvin and some friends pulled the bars off a similar one up in Nespelem with a pickup truck, freeing some teenagers.

The Eagles have two sons. One has taken over the farm; the other lives in Grand Coulee. The pain felt in Harrington, well, it's just the way things are.

"A young guy who wants to farm can't afford to start one now," Melvin says. "About the only way you can work a farm anymore is inherit one."

The wind — a steady, 20-30 knots — is the main commotion at Bagdad Junction, where it gets to 25 below some winters and up to 100 in the summer. You find ways to keep entertained. One time, back in the '60s, Melvin saw blueprints in Popular Mechanics to Build Your Own Satellite Dish and did just that, using wood poles and metal screening.

He remembers when he first plugged it in. "Oh, it was beautiful," he says, looking wistful. "We was used to that old fuzz (from an aerial). You could get everything; the dirty channels and all."

The old dish is still there, but a tiny modern one has taken over its role as link to the outside world.

The Eagles have watched a lot of the war.

"I feel sorry for those people," Melvin says. "I truly do. They went through hell."

Margie nods in agreement from the kitchen as Melvin pauses, looking sad. Seems they've been fighting the Middle East for as long as he can remember, and he doesn't have much faith this war will change that.

"I'm afraid they might have to kill all those people over there and start over," he says.

Outside, across the road, the old Grand Coulee Grange hall is being battered, like usual, by the wind. The door to the men's outhouse slams angrily open and shut. A set of ancient, rusting metal folding chairs lean against the leeward wall, waiting for community meetings that never happen. For a terrible split second, the other Baghdad, a world away, feels awfully close.

It's bitter cold in April at Bagdad Junction. The winter is hard to imagine.

Ron C. Judd: 206-464-8280, or rjudd@seattletimes.com

Harley Soltes: 206-464-8145, or hsoltes@seattletimes.com