Residents are fiercely loyal to small town

By REBEKAH DENN
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

James Anderson saw tears in his wife's eyes when he brought her from Bellingham to Darrington as a young bride.

She looked at the wild land, the 82-year-old recalls, and called it "the country that God forgot."

But for Anderson -- and for hundreds of others who sought out the remote mountain town -- the Darrington region was a place of beauty, truly "God's country," Anderson says.

Within a year, he says, his wife came to love Darrington so well that even blasting powder wouldn't have dislodged her from town. She stayed for more than 50 years, until her death in 1996, and Anderson turned down promotions at his Forest Service job that would have moved them away.

An old logging town now searching for a new identity, Darrington inspires fierce loyalty and love from its residents. They say it has the values of a 1950s Midwestern town, mixed with the neighborly clannishness of the South, all plunked into an isolated Northwest wonderland.

The roughly 640-acre town is located on the outermost edge of Snohomish County, 35 miles down a two-lane road from I-5, with as much allegiance to places like Concrete and Sedro-Woolley as to Everett and Seattle.

"We like the small-town community . . . we don't like the rat race down in Arlington and Everett and Marysville," says town native Melinda Holm.

Darrington's setting is majestic, surrounded by national forest and wilderness. Snowy mountain peaks break through the clouds as next-door neighbors rather than distant scenery. Seemingly endless trails in the region lead to hiking, hot springs, fishing, snowmobiling and dazzling views.

"Darrington to me is the last best place," says Marlene Ross, who has raised Appaloosa horses and Alaskan Malamute dogs on her Darrington ranch for the past 10 years.

Ross, a Washington native whose relatives were pioneers in the area, says she was disenchanted with the so-called progress of other Puget Sound towns who exchanged trees and open space in favor of condominiums.

"I love the beautiful mountains and the pristine fields. (Darrington) is full of birds and game and nature as it should be," she says.

Shari Brewer, who came in 1979 for a logging job, found she couldn't leave when federal logging restrictions began eliminating such work.

"It's one of the last places where you can find solitude just about any time of the year," says Brewer, who is trying to develop a business as a trail guide.

She points out edible and medicinal plants in the hills to her clients: Spring mushrooms and summer berries, coltsfoot for coughs and nettles for tonics.

"I love being able to walk out of my door and be in the woods," she says.

The woods and other natural resources have defined the area from its beginning, when Indians lived at the juncture of the Sauk and Suiattle rivers north of the present-day town.

"We've been here, if I go back to the legends, since right after the ice age," says Sauk-Suiattle natural resource coordinator James Joseph.

The tribe shrank from 3,000 members to just 17 in the 1920s after white settlers passed on smallpox-infected blankets. But it has grown back to 235 strong, Joseph says, and is working on buying land to expand its 23-acre reservation and bring more opportunities to its people.