Yet, all up and down the West Coast, there are little towns much like Wakonda. Up as far as Victoria and down as far as Eureka. Towns dependent on what they are able to wrest from the sea in front of them and from the mountains behind, trapped between both. Towns all hamstrung by geographic economies, by rubber-stamp mayors and chambers of commerce, by quagmire time...canneries all peeling dollar-a-quart Army surplus paint, mills all sprouting moss between curling shingles . . . all so nearly alike that they might be nested one inside the other like hollow toys. Wiring all corroding, machinery all decaying. People all forever complaining about tough times and trouble, about bad work and worse pay, about cold winds blowing and colder winters coming . . . There will be a small scatter of boxlike dwellings somewhere near a mill, usually on a river, and a cannery on the docks, needing a new floor. The main street is a stripe of wet asphalt smeared with barroom neon. If there is a stoplight, it is more a status symbol than a safety precaution . . . Traffic Commissioner at the City Council: “Those boys up there’t Nahalem got two stoplights! I can’t see no reason we don’t even have one. The trouble with this town, by Gawd, is not enough Civic Pride.” That’s the trouble as he sees it. There is a movie-show house, open Thurs., Fri. & Sat. Nites, located next door to a laundry, both establishments owned by the same sallow and somber businessman. The theater marquee reads: the guns of navarone g peck & three shirts 99￠ this weak only.” According to this bleached citizen the trouble is not enough E’s. Across the street, behind windows filled with curl-cornered photographs of retouched homes and farmhouses, the Real Estate Man sits with a lapful of white pine shavings...The bald brother-in-law of the sad-eyed movie-laundry magnate, this Real Estate Man is known as a shrewd cooky with a mortgage and a hotwire speaker at the Tuesday Jaycee luncheons: “She’s a comin’ area, boys, she’s a sleepin’ giant. We had some trouble, sure. Still have, because of eight hard years under the administration of that tight-fisted Army bastard in the White House, but now we’re out of the woods, we’re roundin’ the turn!” And on his desk his collection of free-to-the-customer statues, little white pine replicas of Johnny Redfeather whittled by the Real Estate Man’s own skilled fingers, stand like a stalwart Community Chest army and turn their wooden eyes out the window down a long row of empty storefronts. Where for rent signs on the doors make forlorn appeals for someone to come back and take the whitewash from the windows and put it back on the walls, come back and fill the shelves with bright tin rows of deviled meat and spiced beans, fill the glass-topped candy counter with cartons of Day’s Work, Copenhagen, Skol, Climax; fill the benches around the woodstove with the booming throng of bearded, steaming, calk-booted men who used to—a while back, three or four decades back—pay three or four times the city price for a dozen eggs; men who dealt only in paper money because pants pockets weren’t mended to hold anything as measly as a two-bit piece. for rent, for sale, for lease say the signs on the doors, “Prosperity and New Frontiers,” says the Real Estate Hotwire over a glass of beer. The shrewd cooky whose only deal since Founder’s Day involved his sister’s flour-faced husband and a little rundown bankrupt movie-show house next to the laundry. “You damn betcha. Smooth slidin’ from here on. Our only trouble is we have just suffered a minor recession under the regime of that general!” But the citizens in Wakonda begin to disagree—toward agreement. The union members at first contend: “The trouble ain’t administration, it’s automation. Homelite saws, one-man yarders, mobile donkeys—why half the men can cut twice the trees. The solution is simple: the wood-worker’s got to have the six-hour day, just like the shingle-weavers’ve got. Boys, give us the Six-Hour Day with Eight-Hour Pay, and I tell you we’ll put all our members to cuttin’ twice the trees!” And all the members holler and whistle and stamp their agreement, even though they know that later, in the bar after the meeting, some wet blanket will always recall that “the trouble is we ain’t got twice the trees any more; some snake in the grass chopped down a big bunch over the last fifty or so years.” “No! No!” says the Real Estate Man. “What’s wrong isn’t the lack of timber—it is a lack of Goals!” “Perhaps,” says the Reverend Brother Walker of the Church of God and Metaphysical Science, “it is a lack of God.” He takes a calculated sip of his beer before he goes on. “Our present spiritual trouble is certainly greater than our economic trouble.” “Certainly! Far be it from me to de-emphasize that, but—” “But what Mr. Loop means, Brother Walker, is a man needs a little meat and taters to keep his morale up.” “Man’s got to live, Brother.” “Yes, but ‘not by bread alone,’ remember?” “Certainly! But not, by God, just by God alone neither.” “And I say if we ain’t got the timber to cut—” “There’s wood and aplenty! Ain’t Hank Stamper cuttin’ full time with his show? Ain’t he? Huh?” They all take a thoughtful drink. “So the trouble ain’t lack of timber . . .” “Nope. No siree . . .” They had been drinking and discussing since early afternoon at the huge oval table traditionally reserved for such caucuses, and, while they formed no official organization, this casual group of eight or ten citizens, they were nevertheless recognized as the ruling body of the town’s opinion and their decisions were as sanctified as the hall where they met. “Innerestin’ point, you know—about Hank Stamper?” This hall, the Snag Saloon, is a few doors down from the movie-show house and across the street from the grange hall. Its interior is no more out of the ordinary than its patron............