A Hard Road When Money No Longer Grows on Trees

Dave Michel doesn’t want to talk about how he lost his arm; he’ll get to that later. Right now, he wants to talk about how he lost his job.

Yes, he knows that workers on “the coast” -- meaning Seattle and Puget Sound -- have had it hard the last few years. He heard about the Internet bust, and all those unemployed computer people wandering the cities. He read about manufacturing jobs around the country going by the wayside.

But this is old-time logging country, and here in this mountain town in northeastern Washington, just south of the Canadian border, people have been preoccupied with their own economic demise. The county’s last sawmill, just outside town, closed last year, its boarded-up doors signaling the end of an era, possibly the end of a community.

Michel, a worker at the mill, didn’t see much in the news about it.

“Nobody seems to talk about timber workers anymore,” he said.

This while timber communities have consistently been the most economically distressed in the region. No matter how high the jobless rate in western Washington and Oregon during the Internet bust, it was higher in timber communities like Ferry County.

Ferry has held the dubious honor of having the lowest median income and the highest unemployment in the state for much of the last two decades. Today, as the state and national economies appear to be rebounding, the county’s fortunes remain unpromising.

In April, while Washington posted an unemployment rate of 6.3% -- the fourth-highest in the nation -- Ferry County’s jobless rate was 16.2%.

Ferry County’s plight in summary: Nearly all the mines have been mined and most of the available forests have been logged, and nobody has been able to forge a core industry to replace them. The young have moved away; the old and determined, like Michel, find themselves struggling to piece together livelihoods with odd jobs.

Meanwhile, businesses have shut down, homes have gone vacant and towns have deteriorated. It’s the story of logging communities all over the Northwest since the mid-1980s.

“It’s a slow death,” said Paul Ehinger, a timber analyst in Eugene, Ore., who has seen it over and over again. Since the height of the timber industry in 1987, more than 220 commercial sawmills have shut down -- eliminating 25,000 jobs -- in Washington and Oregon, leaving many rural communities destitute.

In the late 1970s, there were six commercial sawmills and three gold mines in this county. One by one, as old-growth forests disappeared and gold ore dwindled, the mills and mines shut down. Today, there’s one gold mine and one plywood mill left, but most of the workers at the mill, on the county’s eastern edge, live in neighboring Stevens County.

The last sawmill that employed Ferry County residents was the Vaagen Bros. mill here in Republic, population 950, the county seat. At its peak, the mill employed 250 people. When it closed, the mill laid off its last 87 workers, among them Michel, his father, Harold, and his brother Jerry.

County residents who didn’t work at the mill were either farmers, small-business owners or government workers. The mayor of Republic, Shirley Couse, runs a recycling business. One public utility worker, Greg Caudel, is a free-lance logger. By far the area’s largest employer was Vaagen Bros.

Harold Michel put in 37 years at the mill. Now he lives on unemployment benefits. He’s 61, a sinewy man with gray smoke lines on his face. Every weekday, he checks on his job application at the gold mine. He would like to keep working until he’s 63, he said.

Jerry Michel, 34, gangly with plastic glasses that magnify his brown eyes, worked on and off at the mill since he graduated from high school. Now he doesn’t know what to do.

Dave Michel, 38, born and raised in Republic, spent 19 years working his way up the ranks at the mill. By the time he was laid off, he had become day-shift supervisor, making $15 an hour. He had saved his money and bought a 1 1/2-acre parcel of land for $20,000.

Within months after being laid off, he got a job at Kinross Gold, the mine in Curlew, 20 miles up the road. He was a newcomer and was given one of the less desirable jobs: driving an ore truck from inside the mine to the surface. One day in February, as he was driving, his left arm got caught between the truck and a rock wall. His arm was shredded. A surgeon amputated it below the elbow.

“It took me about three days to get over it,” said Dave Michel. As he spoke, he frequently cupped the stump of his arm, which was still heavily bandaged. “As soon as I picked up my little girl, I was OK. As soon as I hugged my little boy, I was OK.”

His main concern immediately became figuring out a way to make a living. He had three children, ages 1, 12 and 15, and a pre-fab house on his land to pay for. His wife, Amanda, who earned $9 an hour as a lab technician, couldn’t support the family.

Ironically, his injury bought some time. Kinross paid him a settlement of $33,000, which is about $2,000 more than the median household income in Ferry County.

Most people will tell you that it doesn’t take a lot of money to get by here.

The average home, often with acreage, costs about $92,000. More than half the households in the county heat their homes with wood, and hundreds of homes use solar energy and propane instead of electricity.

The 7,200 people who live in this county tend to be from hardy stock. The location, near the Idaho Panhandle, is remote and the terrain rugged.

The county’s southern half is made up of a sparsely populated portion of the Colville Indian Reservation (75% of county residents are white). Much of the northern half is part of the Colville National Forest, a thick carpet of Douglas fir and larch on top of a mountain range. To get from the eastern half to the west, one must go over a 5,575-foot-high pass. From Republic to the nearest commercial airport, in Spokane, takes three hours.

“Ferry County is about 100 miles from anywhere,” Mike Blankenship likes to say.

Blankenship is a county commissioner who has lived here for close to three decades. He lives here, as he says most residents choose to do, because of its location.

Ferry County’s remoteness is its most attractive feature. Residents like the quiet and the slow pace. They like the vast open spaces. There are only three people for every square mile.

But the remoteness also is the reason it’s been difficult to attract businesses to the area, Blankenship said. There have been problems attracting even tourists, and this has as much to do with residents’ wariness of outsiders as the county’s remote location.

“But tourism isn’t the answer anyway,” Blankenship said. “Tourism would be icing on the cake, but right now we don’t have a cake.”

For families like the Michels, who’ve done nothing but sawmill work, the choice is either making do with odd jobs and depending on family and friends -- or moving to the city. Without hesitation, all the Michels said they would prefer to make do in Ferry County.

Jerry Michel found temporary, part-time work driving a truck. Other odd jobs have come his way. And, he said, he’d be willing to work minimum-wage jobs until he got hired by a place like Kinross Gold.

Dave Michel, grasping the stump of his arm, said he, too, would be willing to work “an $8-an-hour job” to stay here. He’d been to the city, and he said he’d much rather be poor in Ferry County than rich in Spokane.

“Most people around here don’t care about being rich, anyway,” he said.

As for Harold Michel, he said he’d keep checking his application at the mine. One of these days, there’s bound to be some position right for him.

No matter what, he said he had no intention of leaving Ferry County. “I’m getting a little old to be going out in the world and starting something new,” he said.