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NORTH FORK -- Just down the road from the "Crazy Y" intersection, and next door to The Looney Bin, a crowing rooster heralds the arrival of e-mail at Bob McKee's shop.
McKee, owner of North Fork ACE Hardware and president of the local chamber of commerce, chuckles over the electronic alert and his decidedly low-tech security: creaky wooden floorboards.
Like many others in this eastern Madera County town, McKee has a fully developed sense of humor.
He also has an instinct for survival.
After the town's lumber mill closed 11 years ago, McKee's hardware store diversified its inventory and now sells stuffed animals and handmade decorative plaques along with the plumbing pipe and deer repellent. A handful of markets, gas stations, specialty shops and others simply melted away along with North Fork's biggest employer.
Now this old logging town of about 3,500 is struggling to rebuild its economy while still respecting the sawdust in its soul. Local leaders say they want controlled growth -- the kind that would lure tourists, create new jobs for those who lost them and reinvigorate the largely dormant 135-acre lumber mill site. The biggest builders in town today are its original inhabitants. The North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians is working on a tribal community center and plans for about 30 new homes. Its biggest venture -- a $250 million casino resort -- is proposed on the Valley floor near Madera some 45 miles away.
For many in North Fork, a casino was more than they had in mind anyway. Most ideas run toward developing the mill property -- perhaps with light industry, offices, community trails and some housing -- while cementing North Fork's rustic, rural look through a new set of development and design guidelines.
Today, the main tenant on the mill site salvages and sells old-growth timber. Nearby, a meditation center offers 10-day courses on the grounds of an old church camp. In town, an authentic Mexican restaurant serves up molotes and sopes down the street from The Buckhorn's hearty promise of "food and grog." And a growing numbers of retirees and artists are neighbors of families whose roots reach back for generations.
McKee, a 16-year resident, says the town offers an unmistakable sense of belonging. He talks about his "daily constitutional," a walk from the hardware store to the post office, like it's a full-body workout.
"My arm usually gives out because everybody's waving at me," he says.
An industry is born
The bumper sticker reads: "North Fork, California. Centrally isolated." At an elevation just above 2,600 feet, the town sits six miles from Bass Lake and 40 minutes from the southern entrance to Yosemite National Park.
A few miles outside North Fork is the exact center of the state, a point finally settled with the help of modern technology a decade ago. North Fork -- named for its position on Willow Creek -- was the original territory of Mono Indians, hunter-gatherers who traded with other American Indians in Central California.
Today North Fork Mono Indians say that the Gold Rush, and later the influx of loggers and herders, ended their original way of life. They say thousands lost their lives and historic lands in clashes with newcomers.
It was mining that first rooted the town of North Fork. In the late 1860s, according to the North Fork History Group, miner Milton Brown built a cabin on the bank of a small creek. "Brown's Place" soon became a supply center for miners and stockmen. When ranchers began moving sheep from the Valley floor into the foothills, they chose the route passing Brown's Place. The traffic spawned another store, a few saloons and a community big enough to have its own election precinct.
Although the prospect of gold drew people to the area, it was lumber that eventually sustained the town. The first of several sawmills opened in 1860 and other industries followed, feeding on the bounty in the Sierra National Forest.
A growing state needed a steady diet of lumber, and the town prospered along with North Fork's mills. In 1941, the Associated Lumber and Box company bought 135 acres and sawed its first log into lumber two years later.
By 1948, the community had four grocery stores, a pharmacy, gas stations, a movie theater, a hardware store, several inns and a school with more than 200 students. The mill -- which one logger says eventually "changed names like diapers" -- had an annual payroll of $1.25 million in 1968.
Logging was the area's economic giant. From 1985 to 1990, peak years of the timber harvest, loggers in the 1.2-million acre Sierra forest felled an average of 143 million board feet a year -- enough to build about 12,000 single-family homes.
It wouldn't last. A shift toward "ecosystem management," coupled with new rules to protect the California spotted owl and other sensitive wildlife, helped curtail the timber harvest.
By the early 1990s, the town that celebrated its signature industry with an annual loggers jamboree watched as the mill laid off workers. On Feb. 25, 1994, then-South Fork Timber Industries mill sawed its last log.
Determined to stay
Just off Road 200, before the two-lane pavement becomes North Fork's Main Street, the sound of blade hitting wood cuts through a still morning. Logging company owner Russell Walsh, 49, sends up sprays of sawdust as he mills Ponderosa pine for corral lumber. Tom Wheeler, regarded by some as the unofficial mayor of North Fork, explains the craft involved in extracting the most boards from a log: "It's an art."
But these days, the canvas is smaller. With the timber harvest limited in the national forest, loggers such as Walsh usually can buy only dead or dying trees.
The mill's closure cost many their primary source of income. Even those who didn't have jobs there often relied on spin-off work in the lumber industry.
Some figure one job in the forest for every job at the mill. Beyond that, local merchants relied on loggers and others to spend their paychecks in town.
After the mill closed, those determined to stay in North Fork found a way -- even if it meant commuting to jobs on the Valley floor. Others were forced out.
Says Wheeler, 62: "Some of our best friends are now living in Idaho, Montana, Nevada ... "
Longtime residents like Walsh didn't really think about leaving. He simply asks: "Where would I go?"
Walsh has lived in North Fork since he was a teenager. He soon felt connected to a place that lived off cattle, mining and timber. "It was exciting to be involved in an industry where you were actually making things, where you would go out and take a resource and make something out of it," Walsh says. In the 1970s, he says, jobs were easy to find: "You could actually quit a logging job and that day or the next day be on another job" in the timber industry.
"That's all changed, now."
Walt Ellis' family roots in North Fork reach all the way to 1888. Back then, his grandfather would spend three or four days on the road to haul a wagon-load of lumber from nearby Peckinpah Ridge to Fresno.
The family never left. Ellis, 56, naturally holds P.O. Box 1 in North Fork. He's even thinking about writing a book with his family's stories and sayings. A sample: "Even a blind man on a fast horse could see that one."
Over the years, Ellis has been a logger, a cattleman, a fuel-management contractor, a driver for the Strawberry Mine and more. Today, he keeps a hand in logging and ranching and worries whether his three children will have the option of preserving the family roots in North Fork.
With three children of his own, Walsh shares the same concern.
Wheeler says: "We need some businesses to move into town. ... We need another saw mill."
Developers stay away
Many in town view the old mill property as a major player in North Fork's future vitality. But the plans on paper these days don't rely on the timber industry.
The old mill's hidden legacy -- such as leaky underground diesel tanks -- has helped keep most of it empty for more than a decade. More than $300,000 has been invested so far to evaluate the level of contamination and build infrastructure to assist in cleanup. State and federal sources cover most of the cost.
The county holds the deed to the 135-acre site; the nonprofit North Fork Community Development Council manages it. The council is pushing to complete the cleanup, tear down old buildings and turn the land into a master-planned complex that could include light industry, housing, offices and recreation.
Some of the old buildings are gone. A crew filming the low-budget action movie "Warpath" blew up an unwanted trailer five years ago. Others were cleared by more traditional methods.
Last fall, the county and council invited applications for a master developer. No one bit.
Today, the mill site holds the council office and a chipping operation. Its main tenant is Crossroads Recycled Lumber, which occupies about 5 acres that include the lumber mill's old planing shed.
Owner Marc Mandel, once a logger in North Fork, buys and sells old-growth timber largely salvaged from deconstructed rather than demolished buildings. Forklifts that run off cleaner-burning biodiesel move around an inventory of 50- to 100-year-old Douglas fir, Ponderosa pine, redwood, sugar pine and other timbers.
One mass of douglas fir came from a 90-year-old gym recently taken apart at Stanford University. Another stack, believed to be destined for England in 1909, first washed ashore at Grays Harbor in Washington. Mandel believes the material would have been devoted to building boats for Her Royal Majesty's Navy.
In short, this is no ordinary lumber. Mandel, 54, says the quality -- and therefore the cost -- is higher. Once cleared of nails and processed, these timbers are used in homes, commercial buildings, even in restoration of the 19th century schooner "Wawona" and tugboat "Arthur Foss" in Seattle.
Mandel and council officials believe there's a home for his by-appointment business on the mill property as it develops. He sees the poetry in reclaiming a piece of the old mill for a lumber recycling business, and in honoring those who first hauled trees out of the forest. "People died getting that wood out of there," Mandel says. "We should pay them more respect for their work than just crushing it."
Preserving its rustic charm With Mandel's business, relocated from Madera to the mill in 2000, North Fork has a business true to the community's heritage. Many also want to capture visitors who virtually have nowhere to stay and development that blends into the town.
In January, the county adopted new planning guidelines for about 1,900 acres in the North Fork area. Shaped by town leaders and the community, the new plan establishes architectural design criteria for commercial, industrial and institutional areas.
For example, new commercial development downtown is expected to continue in the rustic vein. Pictures of traditional McDonald's and Taco Bell franchises are displayed as unacceptable styles of architecture. New commercial buildings cannot exceed two stories. And there are limits on the number, size and illumination of signs.
One irony: The county Fire Department recommends against the use of wood material to perpetuate the old logging town's rustic appearance. Like other foothill towns, North Fork is vulnerable to fire.
Supporters of the new guidelines say they want to ensure the visual charm of North Fork. Says Rebecca Wamsley, 53, a landscape architect and longtime member of the development council board: "We want economic development, but we don't want to look like a hodge-podge. We want it to have its small-town character."
Planners say such protections are increasingly in vogue in places such as Santa Barbara, Carmel and downtown Clovis. Dave Herb, formerly Madera County's planning director, says, "It's the kind of thing that communities up in the foothills in the gold country do all the time. And they become major tourism destinations based on the idea of preserving what they had in history."
Some of the history of the area's earliest inhabitants is assembled in the Sierra Mono Museum. The museum helps preserve the legacy of the two clans of the North Fork Mono Tribe, such as the artistry of beadwork and baskets.
Elaine Bethel Fink, tribal chairwoman for the North Fork Rancheria of Mono Indians, says the stories of elders are being collected and someday may become a book. Cultural traditions have been handed down over many generations.
She describes how artists collect deer grass, sourberry and other native plants to make baskets. The sourberry scent can linger on the skin so much that some jokingly call it "Mono perfume."
In the North Fork cemetery, studded with old graves marked by wooden planks, Fink points to dozens of her ancestors. Tribal Vice Chairman Patrick Beihn can do the same, noting the marker of "Singing Jack" -- either his great-great- or great-great-great-grandfather. The tribe is invested in all of North Fork's history. Last year, the rancheria unveiled a remodeled hotel/restaurant as its tribal office. Crews essentially dismantled the landmark three-story building, rebuilt its plumbing and electrical systems and then reassembled its wood-paneled floors and walls.
Fink, 58, says many longtime residents -- she and Wheeler, among others -- attended school together. They share the goal to improve the town.
Wheeler, who retired Jan. 1 as manager of the Circle W Ranch in North Fork, is working on another piece of history: the 1945 theater. Closed for decades -- once a warehouse for washing machines and dryers -- the 400-seat theater may have new life as a retail/office complex.
Wheeler says Frank Wyle, who also owns the Circle W Ranch, plans to add a second floor within the building without changing its exterior bones.
Today, sunlight piercing the back pine wall casts pinpoints of light over the old stage and onto theater seats. Some chairs and the old projector may find their way into a display in the remodeled building.
Wheeler, now a consultant, has a bit of his own history with the movie theater. He remembers scaling a pipe to the projector room's window and sneaking in when he didn't have money. There, with his friends, Wheeler would watch the same movie over and over. The only one he remembers, with substantial prodding: the 1958 cult classic "The Blob," Steve McQueen's first big film.
An influx of new neighbors
Most of this town holds memories for Wheeler. He won the logger's jamboree -- demonstrating skill in seven events -- a total of five times. He finished second six times.
At The Buckhorn, Wheeler greets customers and workers as old friends. A pair of antlers hanging over the door is tagged with his name; he bagged the "biggest buck" two years ago.
Wheeler says he once knew every person in town. Now, it's down to 90 percent.
While there are no hard numbers on newcomers, residents like Wheeler recognize them. At its core, North Fork is so compact that a group of youngsters easily walks from an aikido class at one end of town back to the schoolhouse on the other.
Longtime residents now see an influx of retirees, artists and others moving into the area. One newcomer is the California Vipassana Center, situated on 109 acres once home to a church camp. The center offers 10-day courses in Vipassana -- meaning "to see things as they really are" -- an ancient meditation technique.
Up to 100 students are enrolled in each 10-day course, which requires near-silence and segregation of men and women to minimize distractions. Coordinator John Beary, 56, says the center, which opened in 1991, fits in well and helps support the town economy.
Other relative newcomers include Anne Bredon, 74, who sells hand-crafted jewelry and crafts along with her late husband's photographic work at The Looney Bin.
She gravitated to the name after seeing a sign that promised: "Unusual things happen here." A friend provided a clock that strikes the hour with a loon's call.
Bredon, a resident for 13 years, says the couple fell in love with North Fork. So did Joan Constable -- or "Joan of Art" -- who settled in town for the second time in 1996.
"My heart was lost to North Fork long ago," says Constable, founder of the North Fork Arts Council. A painter and sculptor, Constable runs "The Burning Brush" just outside town.
Constable, who declines to give her age, jokes about buying her zebra sandals at the "North Fork Macys" -- otherwise known as the Grace Community Church thrift store. Some of her smaller paintings hang on the walls of La Cabana restaurant, where her lunch of black beans, rice and organic greens isn't on the menu.
She just tells them: "Give me the Joan special," and co-owner Patricia Arce obliges.
In April, Constable unveiled North Fork's first outdoor mural, an 11-by-7-foot painting honoring the dynasty of gardening grandmothers in the local Radman family. The mural sits in front of the house that bears the Radman name on its gate. The family still lives there. Constable points to the success of Chemainus, British Columbia, a similarly small town that redefined itself -- and raised its tourism profile -- through a collection of historic murals. Constable believes North Fork can reinvigorate its economy in the same way. Ginny Smith, 71, of the North Fork History Group, also is interested in preserving the town's past. Smith and her husband, Vince, moved up from Southern California to build a house about 16 years ago.
One of her first thoughts was: "Are these people for real?" While Southern California could sometimes be "dog-eat-dog," Smith says, the people in North Fork were friendly and trusting.
The couple ran a tab at the hardware store. At Goodwin Lumber, the Smiths sometimes took what they needed and left a note under the door. Neighbors gave them water when they ran short.
"I think that's what makes North Fork the community that it is," she says. "It's the people."
At the hardware store, McKee, 61, backs up Smith's talk about the town's charm. After all, this is the place that threw a party when it put in new sidewalks.
The Crazy Y -- actually the intersection of Main Street, Road 225 and Road 222 -- even appears by name on the chamber's town map. McKee says it's named for the imperfection of the "Y" and because long big rigs can bottom out making the turn from Main Street onto Road 222. He laughs. He doesn't want to live anywhere else.
Learn more about this city
City of NORTH FORK, CA chamber of commerce
City of NORTH FORK, CA general information
County of MADERA, CA official site
State of California official site