Pacific Northwest Logging Towns Find They Must Branch Out to Survive : Economy: Places like Forks, Wash., overcome drastic reduction in timber harvesting to diversify through local ingenuity and government aid.

There’s still a small sign in the middle of town that reads “Welcome to Forks, Logging Capitol of the World.”

But a truer sign of the times--two signs, really--can be found 40 feet away at a shop run by Chamber of Commerce President Bonnie Anderson and her husband, Howard.

“Northwest Select Gifts” says a wooden placard over the door. “Anderson Electric” says a neon sign in the window. Knickknacks fill the store’s front half. Shelves heaped with tools, wires and switches fill the back.

“It’s an odd combination,” Bonnie Anderson said. “But people who want to stay in Forks will do absolutely whatever they have to do to stay here.”

Once there was no question of what to do in Forks--or in Oakridge, Ore., or Hayfork, Calif., or any one of dozens of little towns tucked into the Pacific Northwest’s evergreen forest. Logging was king, and if you weren’t a logger, you probably sold something to loggers, styled their wives’ hair or taught their kids.

Those were simpler days. Today, five years after the northern spotted owl’s addition to the endangered species list ended decades of rip-roaring logging in the Northwest’s national forests, places like Forks are struggling to find new identities.

Money is tighter, but a combination of local ingenuity and government aid is helping many towns ease their dependence on timber. For the first time in years, some long-suffering residents see cause for hope.

“We’re not rolling over,” Anderson said. “This is an economy that’s not going to die.”

As a whole, the Northwest economy has stayed very much alive despite logging bans that reduced the annual timber harvest on federal lands here to one-fourth of levels in the 1980s.

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Washington state long ago weaned itself from Big Timber; now its economy rides the fortunes of Boeing and Microsoft. Even in Oregon, where timber plays a bigger role, more residents will work in high-tech industries than in forest products by the end of this year. Oregon unemployment was 5% in February, below the national average of 5.4 percent.

It’s a far cry from the economic ruin predicted by the timber industry, which two years ago forecast the spread of Appalachia-style poverty throughout the region.

But statewide trends don’t capture the grittier reality in small towns like Forks, pop. 3,300.

Sandwiched into a storm-whipped stretch of rain forest between the Olympic Mountains and the Pacific Ocean, Forks would be a place of breathtaking scenic beauty--were it not for the thousands of acres of logged-over land surrounding it.

They logged the private lands first, cutting centuries-old spruce, cedar, hemlock and Douglas fir. By 1990, when the spotted owl was declared endangered, both loggers and owls had moved to old-growth reserves in the Olympic National Forest, which rings the Olympic National Park like a doughnut.

Court-ordered measures to protect the owl reduced the amount of timber available for cutting in the national forest by 95%. Some loggers stayed busy for a year or two on harvest contracts already awarded. But then those trees were gone too.

Five years ago, 100 log-hauling trucks operated around Forks; now there are fewer than 20, said Ben Lonn, director of the Forks-based Washington Commercial Forest Action Committee.

As the rumble of log trucks grew quieter, Forks grew more desperate. Unemployment hit 19%. More families showed up at the food bank. Counselors reported domestic abuse to be on the rise. Anger ran high as unemployed loggers gathered at the Forest Action Committee’s office to plan protest rallies.

Today, it’s harder for Lonn to drum up a war party. Many loggers left town. Others left the business. The few remaining are too busy making ends meet to put much energy into political activism.

Lonn still is quick to hand out bumper stickers with slogans like “Earth First! We’ll Log the Other Planets Later.” And he’ll gladly expound on the dangers of overbearing government and a society that forgets the importance of resource development.

Most people in Forks agree with him, but few are holding their breath anymore for the old-growth forest to be reopened to logging.

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Some timber workers took advantage of extended unemployment benefits and government-paid retraining programs to learn trades such as auto mechanics or heating-system repair. Others got training as correctional officers and now work at the state prison in nearby Clallam Bay.

Dean Soderlind, 42, closed his cedar-shingle mill and opened the Sandwich Shack, a burger joint and video arcade catering to Forks teen-agers.

“I knew I couldn’t make it in mills anymore,” he said, stepping outside to escape the beeping video machines. “It was either this or pull up stakes and leave town.”

He and his wife, Cherrie, work at least 12 hours a day, seven days a week. They pay themselves minimum wage and figure their combined income is about two-thirds of what Dean used to make from his mill.

“It doesn’t sound very exciting, but I believe there’s a future in it,” he said.

Those staying in forest products have learned to make more out of less.

Loggers driving big machines called feller-bunchers snake their way through second-growth timber as young as 40 years, thinning the dense stands and pulling out poles as small as 6 inches in diameter.

At the Allen Logging Co., those skinny logs fly through a computerized saw, monitored on eight TV screens by a sawyer in a glass booth. In eight hours he’ll produce 14,000 2-by-4 studs and a heap of wood chips destined for a pulp plant--all from trees that nobody here considered salable five years ago.

“We waste absolutely nothing,” said the mill’s general manager, Gerry Lane. “We can’t afford to.”

Hard times have stirred the entrepreneurial juices of many Forks residents.

One sawmill owner closed up shop and started hand-crafting canoe paddles. A shingle-mill worker, expecting his job to end soon, is churning out birdhouses in a backyard shop. Another entrepreneur salvages laminated beams from old buildings and recycles them into new floors and walls for homes.

The city of Forks has tapped into some of the $1.2 billion in grants, loans and contracts promised by President Clinton in his Northwest Economic Adjustment Initiative.

A 77-acre industrial park, built with $2.9 million in federal, state and city funds, has attracted a company that’s building a lumber-drying kiln.

The kiln will employ 42 people, but more important, city leaders hope it will be the nucleus of a new forest-products industry, one that creates finished products such as furniture instead of merely cutting trees down and hauling them away.

Tourism also is growing. The town’s five motels are full all summer with vacationers using Forks as a base camp for fishing and forays to the seashore and national park.

Professional jobs that once were hard to fill now often get dozens of resumes from outsiders lured by Forks’ low home prices, small-town feel and rural surroundings.

Those who stay learn the Forks brand of rugged optimism, honed during wet, dreary winters. People here are willing to wait for the rare sunny day, a patience that will serve them well in the slow rebuilding of their economy.

Where a tourist sees an ugly field of stumps, a Forks resident sees the fresh green seedlings planted in between.

“We like to say logging is the first step in a new forest,” Lonn said, “and we’ve got a lot of new forests around here.”