The Journey Begins, Part One

©2013 by LeeZard

In reality, my journey begins tomorrow when the rubber literally meets the road and I begin THE Road Trip. My literary journey began today in Everett, WA, however, with my first set of interviews.

For those of you who’ve missed the agonizing run-up to THE Road Trip, I am driving around the country to gather people’s stories about how their lives were affected by The Great Recession. You can follow my journey here on the blog and, ultimately, in the book that will follow.

The journey began today because I squeezed onto the schedule of Mayor Ray Stephanson at ten this morning. I made a couple of stops before my meeting and gathered some other stories. 

First, an observation; if you tell someone you are writing a book, more often than not they not only open up to you, they are both friendly and encouraging. That might change down the road but that’s they way it is in Everett.

The City of Everett (pop. 103,000) sits in Seattle’s shadow 25 miles to the north. This old mill town is a fitting place to start my journey. Early in its history Everett rode the economic ups and downs of the railroad, mining and timber industries.

In 1916 the city endured one of the early labor movement’s most violent confrontations, The Everett Massacre, between members of the Industrial Workers of the World (The Wobblies) and local authorities aligned with the business community. It came during a shingles workers strike and an economic depression. Twenty people died with more than 40 wounded in the gunfire.

While big brother Seattle to the south is the great Northwest Metropolis, Everett basks in its small cityhood.  Parking on many of the downtown streets is still diagonal and traffic-clogged streets are nonexistent. Most of the businesses are small, locally owned shops and pedestrian traffic is steady but light.

What sets Everett apart from most small cities are two major economic engines: one of Boeing’s major airplane construction plants and a U.S. Navy Home Port. Both provide thousands of local jobs while the Navy alone pumps an estimated $300 million into the area's economy. As a result, the city is ahead of the nation’s economic recovery. Its county, Snohomish, has the second lowest unemployment rate in the state at 4.9% but that doesn’t mean the Great Recession went down easily here.

My first stop was a Safeway along Highway 99 about seven miles south of downtown Everett. This part of 99 is six lanes peppered by traffic lights and dotted with strip malls, used car lots, casinos, cheap apartments and cheaper motels. Safeway’s customers reflect the surroundings.

Standing for about a half hour in the parking lot I talked to a retired Boeing engineer who told me the recession left him mostly untouched. “Maybe inflation hurt a little,” he said, “but I kept my head down and Boeing’s pension plan is pretty good.”

Not true for the woman who is both nameless and homeless. She wouldn’t share her name but she did share her story. Before the recession she’d been in her home for fourteen years, supported by her boyfriend’s income as a carpenter. As the housing market crashed, the carpentry work dried up until her boyfriend could no longer meet his house payments. Unfortunately, he turned to dealing, then using, methamphetamine (meth) to try to make ends meet. You know how that story ends. This 46-year old woman, who looks at least 15-years older, now lives under a bridge and takes in small sewing jobs to buy food. The boyfriend is gone.

Moving north to the Amtrak/commuter rail station and transit center near downtown, I heard from a 25-year old woman who writes materials for corporate clients. As the recession deepened the jobs became fewer and fewer. “It was tough,” she told me, “but I learned how to persevere and how to handle a crisis. Today I save more of my income than I did before the recession.”

Then there was Neil Tilly, a 35-year old roofer waiting for an Amtrak train to take him home to Wenatchee, across the Cascade Mountains in Eastern Washington. Before the recession he spent four years working construction in Reno. As construction slowed to a standstill he found himself out of work and back home in Wenatchee.

“Instead of working,” he says matter-of-factly, “I was sitting in bars and drinking too much. I got into a bar fight ended up with a two year prison term – first time I’ve been trouble. The whole experience changed me, both unemployment and prison. Today, I’m more cautious in life and I don’t drink anymore.”

Tilly is employed again, doing commercial flat roofs in Wenatchee but, he says, there’s not as much work as there was before the crash.

My last interview was Mayor Stephanson. It’s a whole different ball game on the tenth floor of the commercial building that serves as City Hall. Mayor Stephanson’s emerges from an earlier meeting dressed in a conservative yet natty suit, his blonde hair streaked with grey and neatly coiffed.

We sit in a big conference room with a huge picture window showcasing one of Everett’s greatest assets, a panoramic view of Puget Sound to the west and the mighty Olympic Mountains hovering on the horizon across the sound on the Olympic Peninsula. I’ve lived in the Pacific Northwest for 39-years and it still staggers me.

Stephanson has ten years in office and even before the recession, he says he took measures he called protective in the face of any economic situation, cutting costs, reducing debt and basically streamlining. Still the recession hit hard.

“Because we were as ready as we could be,” he told me, “we did not have to cut first responders’ services but we cut in many other small ways to face the crisis and we came through it pretty well compared to other cities.”

Post recession, though, things are different. “It significantly affected peoples’ spending habits,” he says. “Our sales tax revenue hasn’t recovered yet; it is down 20% from pre-recession years and I call that the ‘new norm.’”

In 2012 the mayor earned $154,956.72. I have no idea how the city council arrived at that figure. During the recession, though, the belts tightened in the Stephanson household.

“No more new car every year,” he said. More significant, however, is the Mayor’s housing situation. He’s an empty nester but, because home prices dropped so dramatically, he cannot afford to downsize out of a house that is now way too large for he and his wife. Even at the top, “hard times" happened.

Tomorrow I set out northward again, stopping for a quick farewell with to dear friend Jim Stutzman on Guemes Island (http://leezardonlife.blogspot.com/2013/02/time.html?zx=7d3f316a50e11dbc). On Friday I'll turn east across the magnificent North Cascades highway and the real journey.