Twilight in the Logging Capital of the World
I liked it better when no one had heard of the place where I grew up. Its obscurity was part of my personal story, part of what I liked about telling people where I’m from. Mine was a well-rehearsed story about a soggy one-stoplight town in the boonies, a place the seventeen-year-old me couldn’t wait to leave. I’d make a fist with my left hand, knuckle-side-up, palm facing in, and point to the peninsula of my thumb, and then to the very tip of the thumbnail. Right there, that’s where Forks is.
These days there’s often no need for explanation or visual. Forks has become a place young girls gush over. As one named Ashley blogged recently: “omg! im goin to forks this summer! i cant wait!!!!! ive seen the movie and ive read the books so many times i lost count!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
So maybe it’s natural I would be skeptical about the crazy popular series of young adult vampire novels that have been set in my town. One of the first things I learned about Twilight was that the author, a woman from Phoenix, Arizona, hadn’t visited Forks when she decided to set her series there. This desert dweller had been looking for a small town in a rainy, remote setting, and there are few places in the United States more rainy and more lonesome than Forks, Washington, a speck on the map—if on the map at all—on the Northwest corner of the Olympic Peninsula.
We moved to Forks in 1975 when I was one. The logging boom triggered a building boom for the growing town, and my electrician father and his electrician father wired “pretnear,” in Grandpa vernacular, most of the new houses.
We settled in to a two-story on the corner of Robin Hood Loop and Maid Marion’s Way, and I grew up there believing that sunny days were special occasions. I don’t remember owning a raincoat or rainboots or an umbrella. This wasn’t the REI-outfitted Northwest that I know today, but a wild, mossy place where children were allowed to explore the forests behind our houses for hours, coming in at twilight, muddy and clammy from kid-sweat and rain. I remember stripping to my underwear on the cold black tile entryway of our house before I was allowed to enter the living room.
I remember the smell of damp school bus vinyl and shivering through my classes at school, my hair almost dry by the time the bell rang. I remember my Dad’s friends gathered in the back of his shop at twilight every Friday, drinking beer, swapping stories, their work boots still muddy, their black and white-striped hickory shirts unzipped to show a little chest hair that was, to me, either intriguing or gross, depending on the guy. I remember being eight or nine and bumping around on old logging roads in my Dad’s ancient hulk of a Chevy pick-up, Sunday drives just for fun.
While many of my childhood memories are similarly wistful and soft-focused, I know that Forks was not an easy place to live. So physically remote and so impossibly wet all of the time—averaging twelve feet of rain per year, you had to be just a little bit difficult and a little bit stubborn and a little bit strange to live there.
Without reading them, I knew that Stephenie Meyer’s books wouldn’t capture this local character. Nor the sadness I felt last year when I heard that the long-time grade school librarian Inez “Halvie” Halverson had passed away. Halvie was an ornery matriarch, active in 4-H and known to leave jars of blackberry jam on doorsteps each August. I looked forward to Halvie’s jam until a friend told me that Halvie strained blackberries through old pairs of pantyhose. We called it “crotch jam” after that, and I wouldn’t touch it.
Nor would these vampire love stories touch on the truly dark things that happened when the timber industry collapsed in the late eighties and early nineties, largely because of a little bird called the spotted owl and the people who wanted to protect its habitat. It was inevitable that the rapid pace of logging was going to have to slow at some point, though many in Forks, the self-proclaimed logging capital of the world, were not prepared for a sudden clampdown. As the unemployment rate rose, so did the anger and the alcoholism, the drug use and domestic abuse. Many residents were already suffering from shades of seasonal affective disorder, and the loss of jobs triggered so much latent depression. Combine that with hunting and car culture and all those dark forests, and you have dozens of storylines far more sordid than a family of bionic bloodsuckers.
During three consecutive Augusts when I was in high school, a popular high school senior-to-be died unexpectedly. The first girl died in a car accident on a slick winding road. She was probably driving too fast, maybe reaching down for a second to change the tape player. The next summer, two boys were shooting in the woods, not an uncommon activity, and hit a shed full of dynamite that was stored for a logging operation. One lost his life and the second lost his leg. The third summer, the first boy I ever loved died of complications after surgery for a congenital heart problem.
I was heartbroken and spooked, more so each year. The fourth August, I walked on eggshells, but nothing happened. The spell was broken, everyone said. I still think about those kids every August and every time there’s another headline about some rural teen who has crashed his car into a tree. Those August deaths were unrelated to the spotted owl mess, but, in my memory, it’s all connected, a streak of misfortune, as intrinsic to Forks as fog and moss and rust and mold.
Even though I hadn’t read her vampire books and even though I hadn’t lived in Forks for fifteen years, I believed Meyer’s approach to setting was an insult to a place drenched in human stories.
Or maybe it was jealousy I was feeling. As a sometimes writer, it had crossed my mind that I might write about Forks someday. But not now. Meyer’s series of four books has sold more than 17 million copies worldwide. She’s made more money than anyone in Forks ever did, even when the woods around the town were a conveyor belt for logs. Worse than that, they LOVE Meyer in Forks. They celebrate Stephenie Meyer Day every September 13 (the birthday of her main character, Bella). I know this because, even though my parents don’t live there any more, I read the weekly Forks Forum online every Wednesday, and not an edition passes that doesn’t celebrate Twilight.
Young women from all over the world have convinced their parents to make the pilgrimage, which is no small thing. They fly to Seattle, still more than four hours away, and then drive or fly to Port Angeles, still more than an hour of winding two-lane road away. As long as they’re in Forks, they might as well stay and drop some money on Bella Burgers, Twilight-inspired sea glass necklaces and T-shirts that say things like “I was bitten in Forks, WA.” The Chamber of Commerce has even launched a van tour that highlights sights related to the book. One destination is my second-grade teacher’s bed and breakfast, which is said to be home to Edward, Bella’s love interest. Kalaloch Lodge, where I ate dinner just before my junior prom, offers a two-night “Twilight Package” starting at $349.
In other words, Twilight is just what Forks needed. After the timber industry crashed and the town’s businesses suffered, city leaders tried to repackage Forks as a fishing and tourist destination. Tourism was a tough sell given how far away it is from anything and all that rain. Twilight gives Forks a theme and tourists a reason to visit an otherwise beautiful place.
I do see the good in all this. But I can’t help thinking that, vampires or not, if someone had written a more authentic portrait of Forks, there would be no such fanfare. There’d be no Twilight special at Sully’s Drive-In, no new walkway in front of the city’s welcome sign, built so tourists wouldn’t muddy themselves posing in front of it. I’d read what Meyer had to say about Forks on her website. She had visited in 2004 after she’d written the first novel. She’d called her visit “the most incredible experience” and believed that the town matched the Forks of her imagination. “There were a few small differences” she wrote. “The logging presence was much more evident than I’d pictured it—the clear-cuts put a bit of a lump in my throat, and the constant, gigantic log haulers barreling down the wet highway made driving a thrilling adventure . . .”
When we talk about who’s allowed to write about the places where we’re from, I can’t help but think of fiction icon Raymond Carver. Carver wrote about the people of the rural Northwest in a way that was somehow both tragic and beautiful—and also very real. He grew up in Eastern Washington and lived much of the last ten years of his life in Port Angeles. Carver’s characters are usually working hard at a job that puts grime under their fingernails or are out of work with things almost always just about to look up, maybe after just one more drink. He understood the hour of twilight and the darkness that follows, and yet there’s a tenderness and a dignity to many of his characters that shows how much he sympathized with them, understood their struggles. You don’t have to be from a place to understand its people, but you do have to care for them.
The funny thing is, I didn’t hear about Raymond Carver until I was in my late twenties, living in Eugene and just discovering short stories. The high school me would not have appreciated his authenticity, would have called him depressing. Likewise, Clatskanie, Oregon, the mill town where Carver was born, doesn’t celebrate Raymond Carver Day.
A friend gave me a copy of Twilight, the first novel in Meyer’s series, as a joke. I laughed. I set it aside. And then one night I picked it up. I read until three in the morning. It was many of the things I expected it to be—trite and bubble-gummy with mediocre writing full of gray skies and pounding rain. Many of the scenes take place at Forks High School, and, aside from a few small-town clichés, Meyer wrote it as a bland suburban high school attended by middle-class kids. There’s no mention that this was ground zero for the spotted owl crisis or that most of the kids are working class.
But the novel grabbed me. Its fast-paced plot made my heart race in a way that embarrassed me. And its rendering of that first high school crush and all the torture around it was charming. It’s not a book about Forks or its people. It’s a love story about an impossibly mature vampire boy-man and an impossibly mature loner of a girl-woman whose attraction to each other puts her life in danger. I was rapt like I hadn’t been since I stayed up all those nights in junior high reading Sweet Valley High books. My criticisms weren’t resolved so much as moot—and not entirely fair. The book was enough for what it was: simple escape—sweet, uncomplicated, stay-up-all-night escape. Forks deserves that kind of escape.
And if another chapter gets added to my personal story, I can live with that, though, for me, it will always be a complicated chapter. I met a woman at a party recently who was fascinated by Twilight. As a Forks native, I held minor celebrity status, which, I’ll admit, I enjoyed. We huddled in a corner and talked about Twilight from every angle.
Jamie Passaro, M.S. ‘01, lives in Eugene.
