Forks: From Spotted Owl to Vampire Tourism

Forks, Washington, was built on timber. The town sits in the heart of the Olympic Peninsula's old-growth zone, and through the middle decades of the twentieth century, the mills and logging operations that drew from that forest employed most of the county. Forks was not wealthy, but it was working. Families built houses on timber wages, raised children on timber wages, and expected to die within reach of the same work their parents had done.

The northern spotted owl changed that. In nineteen ninety, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service listed the owl as threatened under the Endangered Species Act, and federal courts issued injunctions halting timber sales on old-growth federal land throughout the Pacific Northwest. The injunctions came in waves between nineteen ninety and nineteen ninety-three. Clallam County's unemployment rate roughly doubled. Bumper stickers appeared: Protect a Logger, Shoot an Owl. The resentment was real, the loss was real, and the environmental advocates who celebrated the ruling had, in most cases, not spent a winter in Forks.

The nineteen ninety-four Northwest Forest Plan was the political settlement. It protected more old-growth land, reduced allowable timber harvest on federal lands significantly, and created a retraining and economic-diversification fund for timber communities. The fund was real. The diversification was slow.

Then Stephenie Meyer published Twilight in two thousand five and set her novel in Forks, choosing the town because she needed the rainiest location in the continental United States, which Forks often is. Within three years, tourists were arriving from Japan and Germany to photograph a high school and a police station.

Tourism revenue in Clallam County now exceeds timber revenue. The town that the spotted owl took from the timber industry was returned to economic function by a vampire. The irony is not lost on anyone who lived through both.