Iraq war in focus: Home-front Journal
War a world away reveals the differences next door

By Ron C. Judd
Seattle Times staff columnist

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JOYCE, Clallam County — Iraqis are looting. Syrians are getting nervous. And Leonard Pierce is attempting the darn-near impossible.

"Every time I go to town," he croons, his big voice resonating from beneath the porch of his general store as his thick fingers pluck the strings, "you guys start kickin' my dog around ...

"See?" he concludes, stopping short and busting loose with a smile. "Doesn't work."

He's right. It's not easy to play a sad song on the banjo, especially when the sky is clearing, the weekend is coming, and — oh, yeah — the war is as much as over. It says so on the front page of the Port Angeles paper displayed in the old train depot next door: "PEACE COMES TO WAR-TORN WORLD." Who cares if it's dated Nov. 7, 1918?

Let history record that the recent afternoon when the United States lowered its postwar security color to yellow was just another day, same as the last 33,580 or so, at the Joyce General Store, which seems mostly a yard sale with inventory control.

"In Joyce," Pierce says, with his can't-quite-hide-it native-Texan drawl, "good is as bad as it gets."

Above his head, a bulletin board advertises a missing cat — chubby, declawed, very dark — near a Go Navy poster with freshly posted business cards from a recruiter. Inside the store behind him, a deer head, nicknamed "Oren," looks about as good as any of us would after hanging from a wall for 72 years. There's an old wooden icebox that first gained power around the same time as Adolf Hitler.

In Joyce, where flags and yellow ribbons are duct-taped to front-porch posts, the store has been a fixture since 1911, when it essentially was moved up the hill from the old logging town of Port Crescent. Its current proprietor, Pierce, is a hulking former Washington State Cougar fullback, retired insurance investigator and, for the moment, chairman of the Greater Joyce Public Relations Department.

"It's infectious," he says of small-town life in Joyce, a loosely defined community on Highway 112 west of Port Angeles. Moving out here 15 years ago after working in Seattle, Spokane and Portland "was like coming home," he says.

He might be on to something. Joyce — to most of us, little more than a potty stop on the snaking, log-truck-jammed road to Sekiu and Neah Bay — is home, Pierce figures, to about 3,000 people between the Elwha and Lyre rivers. Some are employed in the hanging-on local logging business, others commuting to professional jobs in Port Angeles.

Joyce, which carries the last name of a pioneer man, is heavily forested, frequently damp and spectacularly situated. The Olympic mountains and Lake Crescent loom to the south; the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Vancouver Island stretch to the north. Blacktail deer and Roosevelt elk mingle with cattle, llamas and sheep.

By chance, it is the final stop on our three-week, wartime exploration of the nooks, gullies and idiosyncrasies of Washington — a road trip through the kinds of towns where the motel drinking cups are filled with a week's worth of dust. Pulling into Joyce and meeting people around the town's only buildings — the store, a Grange hall, a church, a cafe, one bar and a welding shop — we note many of the same traits we've found in other, even smaller places on the dry side of the state:

Security. A feeling of community. Family history, connection to the land and a sense of place — all a fancy way of saying my dad was a farmer/logger/fisherman and so was his dad and so on.

And, to a degree that has surprised us, despair. Much less so about war in the Middle East than the disappearance of the very way of life that defined the Pacific Northwest.

We have come to wonder out loud whether Washington's rural places, in striking contrast to the Seattle area's awkward wartime angst, seem more comfortable donning the war garb because they have been fighting their own battle for survival for decades. And losing.

It doesn't take a doctorate in economics to see the national shift, with old, resource-based jobs succumbing to a service economy, technology-based industry and, inevitably, an ongoing flight to urban areas.

Of course, many of Washington's small places still manage to have it both ways: They're rural bedroom towns, far enough out there to feel isolated, but close enough to jobs to stay alive.

Joyce is one of these. Store owner Pierce's wife, for example, is a corporate attorney, allowing him to live in bliss and "play store" while still maintaining a decent household income. Many Port Angeles professionals live around Joyce and commute into town.

The area is a popular recreation spot for campers, hikers, anglers and surfers. A lot of people here are just passing through — some slowly. Richard and Jana York, two Montanans fleeing a messy situation and health problems in Montana, arrived at Salt Creek Recreation Area, a beautiful campground on a knoll above the Strait, last summer. And they haven't left.

Home for the Yorks, who have worked as campground hosts through the winter, is a converted school bus with a wood stove and chimney. It's connected by 325 feet of coaxial cable to a satellite dish on a bluff above Crescent Beach.

The Yorks have watched much of America's latest war out here alone in the woods, with wintry gales lashing outside and more deer and otters for company than people.

Don't they feel isolated?

"No. I feel peaceful here," says Jana, 50.

Up the hill behind her, the old remnants of Camp Hayden, a coastal artillery installation, have been turned into a tourist attraction. The fort's menacing guns, which protected the land of opportunity from all invaders, are long gone. But some of the massive artillery shells — each the height of a 12-year-old and with the weight of a Volkswagen — stand on display, poignant reminders of another era's weapons of mass destruction, never deployed.

In some ways, that war is more tangible than this current one to most Americans, and that's the problem, York says. She laments the "fantasyland" that Americans — even its soldiers — have come to reside in, with their war sanitized and packaged like a video game.

We all might feel differently, she suggests, "if we were on the other end of the explosion for a change."

It's not that we can't empathize, she suggests. We simply choose not to.

Her words are settling in as we drive Highway 112 and spot several NO IRAQ WAR signs, then stumble upon one resident's response, scrawled, Burma-Shave-sign style, on a series of placards tacked to fence posts.

IRAQ EL QUIEDA WAR YES APPEASEMENT NO, they read in a line between a street called Bytha Way and a stream labeled Itsa Creek.

We pull into the driveway beneath an arch labeled "El Rancho Not So Grande" and find Bill Roden out in his back shop.

He was motivated to put up the signs in response to the "so-called peaceniks" who rallied in Port Angeles during the early days of the war.

Roden is 75, a Korean War veteran with kind eyes and a firm handshake.

He has lived on these quiet 15 acres, where ducks don't see the need to warily circle four times before landing, for 30 years. Some people, even out here, oppose the war, he acknowledges. But in nowhere near the numbers along the Interstate 5 corridor.

He shakes his head in puzzlement about that and, without realizing it, manages to crystallize much of the small-town frustration with city folks we've been hearing across this state for weeks. The differing approaches to war are the tip of an iceberg.

"People who live in the cities don't understand the mentality of rural people," he says. "The problem is, with the population they have, it's become the tail wagging the dog."

He and many others say they don't feel represented in Congress since the ouster of former Sen. Slade Gorton. And city folks unwittingly pass do-gooder laws, such as the state initiative banning trapping, that do bad out in the country. It's not malicious, he says, just ignorant.

To call this a disconnect would be too charitable: That would imply some connection ever existed in the first place. Many Puget Sound residents have family in rural Washington communities, and some have a dormant open-range gene buried somewhere beneath three-car-house mortgage payments. But other city people are in their own universe, Roden believes.

"They're less self-reliant," he says. "They're more dependent on (government) social services. All of that has to be at the expense of something, and it's been the rural people. It's created an antagonism."

He doesn't sound bitter. Just perplexed.

"They don't have a clue what's out here," he concludes. "And we don't have a clue what's in there. We're two different worlds."

Standing here, at the end of a trek through the little places, it is almost impossible to argue that point. The war that has done much to highlight America's common bonds and deep differences has been a sobering magnifier of divisions right in our back yard. A pessimist might even say our two worlds are in a decaying orbit, with a major collision pending.

Bill Roden is not necessarily one of them. He seems happier just to have talked about all of this. The man we Seattle types barged in on, uninvited, 20 minutes ago holds out his hand and says it's been a pleasure. He invites us back for coffee, anytime.

We point the car back toward home and, just like that, the lesson of our recent past — and approaching future — is right there in our faces, as plain as the flat waters of the Strait.

Maybe we should take him up on it.

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

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