By JACK HOPKINS
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Many Key Peninsula residents feel warmly and strongly attached to the place they call home -- a heavily forested area where towering firs and large madrona trees reach into the sky and where access to a boat launch or a sandy beach is never more than a few minutes away.

The peninsula is home to two major state parks _ Penrose Point and Joemma Beach -- and a large number of private campgrounds, many of them run by church groups, charities and civic organizations.

"It's not that far from the heavily urbanized parts of Puget Sound," says Karen Biskey, the Pierce County councilwoman who represents the peninsula. "But it is like another world. It is a place to have a little retreat from the rest of the world you live in. It is a get-away."

Getting away from it all is serious business on the Key Peninsula where a visitor might see an expensive large home on a hillside overlooking the water but have no idea that hidden out of sight only a stone's throw away are trailers and makeshift shacks without electricity or running water.

"A lot of folks live out there because they don't want to be part of the mainstream," Biskey explained. "They want to get away from everybody and everybody else's eyes and ears."

Sometimes that means living under primitive conditions.

Key Peninsula has many wealthy residents. But there also is a fair amount of poverty. "There are homeless people out there who live down narrow, tiny roads in tents and places like that," Biskey says.

Life on the peninsula, whose isolated coves attracted smugglers and bootleggers in years gone by, can be a little rough around the edges.

There are problems with illegal methamphetamine labs and marijuana being grown at the end of some of the remote gravel roads. Domestic violence is a concern. And the transportation system leaves something to be desired because the buses don't go south of Key Center.

Another problem is the lack of jobs. The school district is the biggest employer and the grocery store runs a distant second.

The only other major employer, Custom Cameras, shut down recently and pulled out of town, says Marty Marcus, Key Peninsula Civic Center Association president. "They're gone and won't be back," he says.

As a result, many residents commute to work in Bremerton or Tacoma.

Biskey doesn't expect that to change. And residents are divided over whether they even want more commercial development on the land, nearly all of which is zoned to remain rural.

Chuck West, a Fire Department lieutenant who lives in Longbranch and owns Longbranch Self-Storage, would like to see the business community grow.

"It is a long drive across the (Tacoma Narrows) bridge, fighting traffic all the way," says West, president of the Key Peninsula Business Association. "So it would be good if we had more services here."

Plans for a second bridge across the Tacoma Narrows are never far from the minds of many peninsula residents. Nor are plans to collect tolls on the new bridge, a change from the existing toll-free structure.

Biskey worries about the strain tolls will put on the working poor who must commute to Tacoma on a daily basis. "They aren't going to be able to pay those tolls," Biskey says. "It's going to be rough on a lot of people."

But Key Peninsula, for all its challenges, is a place where people prefer to do things for themselves and shy from asking for help.

"They are a pretty independent group out there," says Biskey. "They don't come running in to my office asking for things all the time. And when they do, we generally try to work it out so they do it themselves as much as possible. They are a self-supporting group and they like it that way."