Little community offers peace and quiet to spare

By JUDD SLIVKA
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Heading east into town, there's a sign welcoming drivers to Brier and another that warns: "Traffic laws strictly enforced."

It is an appropriate welcome to the town where the former police chief was fired by the mayor for setting speed traps and then illegally impounding lawbreakers' cars.

In fact, the town's reputation as a speed trap even got a mention on the Internet, at a site of infamous Washington speed traps.

"Just about anywhere in Brier is a speed trap, as there is no other industry in Brier," according to one comment on www.speedtrap.com.

At first blush, Brier looks like a carpet of homes. But there is industry, just not very visible, in part because of strict single-family zoning.

"People can work out of their homes here," says Jim Vaughn. "This is one of the few places you can have a business out of your home and be legal."

Vaughn did that for several years before he retired, running his masonry refinishing business out of his den.

Now, though, he uses land -- about an acre and a half, with his old house and his new house on it -- as a place to entertain his eight grandchildren and 18 grandchildren, and tinker with his antique tractors. Vaughn's business now is leisure.

Throughout the town are a few signs advertising home-based businesses -- a hair salon, a tanning center -- but mostly people leave early in the morning and do their work and errands in Seattle, Everett or the Eastside.

"If people need to be at work at 9, I get busy around 8:30, just right on the half-hours," says Jason Weber, owner of Jason's Java, halfway down the town's commercial strip. "They come in as regular as clockwork, every day."

Weber was born in Brier, then moved with his family to Edmonds before returning three years ago to open the coffee stand. Much of his day is spent doing the nit-picky things that a business owner does: inventory, cash control, trying to think ahead to the next rush. But on a sunny day, Weber still has enough time to sit outside on the old lawn chair outside the stand's door.

But mornings leave no time for sitting, as people queue up for caffeine before taking the kids to school in the Edmonds or Northshore school districts and themselves to work. For many, Jason's Java is the last stop before deserting the town for the day.

Like many bedroom communities, this is a virtual ghost town after 10 a.m. Dogs run across Brier Road with no fear of getting hit. Construction crews are rowdy, breaking the prized rural silence with no fear of reprisal.

Vaughn kind of likes that.

"I moved here for the peace and quiet," he says, watching a grandchild fall off her scooter in his back yard. "It's gotten busier here, but we've got peace and quiet to spare."