Search

The article discusses how a community has chosen to live independent of the public utilities on which most residents rely in Olympic Peninsula in northwest Washington State, and mention that the community here emphasizes the importance of this landscape to their livelihood.

WHEN most people think of beaches, they think of long stretches of white sand filled with brightly colored umbrellas, muscular guys playing football and plastic buckets in the shape of castle turrets. Chances are they do not think of rugged, windswept expanses littered with boulders, starfish and driftwood, bald eagles flying overhead as gray whales spout water in the distance. Yet that's what beaches once were: wild, desolate places where the ocean fought the land to a vicious draw. And on the Olympic Peninsula on the northwest corner of Washington State, that's what they remain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

FORKS, Wash. -- The Olympic Peninsula has always felt more like the edge of the world than a mere national boundary. Its ocean shoreline, the northwesternmost coast of the contiguous United States, is accessible by a single road, Highway 101, and it has long been traveled by a distinctive fleet: loud logging trucks rumbling out of the dark and wet woods, rusty pickups with windows pronouncing ''Native Pride,'' stray Subarus hauling surfboards and kayaks to the cold Pacific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

SAN FRANCISCO -- John Anderson, a plumber by trade and a beachcomber by passion, has been trolling the shores of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington State for more than three decades, and along the way has discovered almost every kind of flotsam one can imagine: toys, refrigerators, even the occasional message in a bottle. But in recent months, Mr. Anderson has been making a new, and somewhat surprising, find: dozens of buoys marked with Japanese writing, set adrift, he believes, by last year's catastrophic tsunami. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

''TWILIGHT'' mania has made each of the four Stephenie Meyer books about a romance between an accident-prone teenager, Bella, and a dazzlingly handsome vampire named Edward into a best seller; created heartthrobs out of the little-known actors Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson, who starred in the first movie in the series; and made the second movie, ''The Twilight Saga: New Moon,'' perhaps the most anticipated film of the fall season among tweens and Hollywood moguls alike. It has also turned Forks, Wash., a two-stoplight town on the western end of the Olympic Peninsula that Mrs. Meyer used as the setting for her books, into an unlikely tourist hot spot. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]