Here, nothing is quite what it seems

By JOHN MARSHALL
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Wisteria Wildwood is going full-throttle at the stove in the Wild Coho Cafe, her braids flying around as fast as the frying pans in this homey haven.

That someone named Wisteria Wildwood is in the kitchen might seem a throwback to Port Townsend's days as a countercultural outpost on the left coast of America. But like so much else here, such a hippie assumption about Wildwood would be sadly mistaken.

Yes, the 48-year-old woman did change her name way back in the Age of Aquarius. But since then she has hardly been communing with rutabagas. Wildwood has driven cement trucks as a Teamster in Seattle and captained tugboats in Alaska. Now she cooks all the meals at her cafe, which she opened four years ago with help from local private investors.

"I opened the cafe with $100 in my pocket and now I've got $101 in the bank," says Wildwood amid orders. "The staff is what makes this place. I'm just happy to be able to eke out an existence for myself."

This is Port Townsend 1999, an enviable place of small-town pleasures and passionate community spirit, a national historic treasure that is one of the country's three remaining Victorian seaports.

Its many charms -- the handsome brick buildings downtown, the stately homes uptown, the resplendent setting of seaside and hillside -- will be on display this weekend when 25,000 people descend on this city of 8,400 to partake of the Wooden Boat Foundation's 23rd annual festival. This is the biggest annual draw in a place that seems to host a festival every other week in its very effective effort to draw tourists (too effective, say some residents).

But the Port Townsend that beguiles tourists and turns some into new residents is only part of the story of this so-called City of Dreams. It is also a complex place where nothing is quite what it seems and where everything has, as newspaper co-publisher Scott Wilson puts it, "a wild twist, a Port Townsend twist."

So Kristen Anderson, the city's new police chief, is a former aerobics instructor. Susan Claire Walker, who just opened Wild Sage -- "an espresso healing center" with coffee drinks and herbal products -- is a former geochemist. The Port Townsend Industrial Park includes some industry, but also a fish market, a coffee roaster, a microbrewery and a building materials recycler (Waste Not Want Not).

And the new City Council elected last February in a city that has long been known for laid-back liberalism, is an all-male assembly of conservative businessmen who are working on campaign promises with echoes of the Reagan era: running government like a business, accountable to "the shareholders" and with "no excuses."

"The whole Zeitgeist here has changed; it has been electrifying," says new council member Geoff Masci, a 51-year-old chiropractor.

Masci was one of the leaders of the group of citizens fed up with "dysfunctional" city government. They called themselves MOCCAA (Make Our City and County Accountable and Affordable) and first pulled off an initiative to adopt city manager government, then the council coup, electing their complete slate of five candidates to the seven-member body.

Masci's enthusiasm for the mission ahead knows no bounds, especially since new city manager David Timmons is already earning raves for his take-charge decision-making. But other observers of the city's zeitgeist also know that Masci would be wise not to bank on a long run for conservative government here.

"The pendulum swings again," emphasizes former Mayor Brent Shirley. "It is absolutely predictable."

The civic symbol could indeed be the pendulum, since Port Townsend always swings back and forth between extremes, from boom to bust, from growth to no-growth, from liberal to conservative, from commerce to the arts. As attorney Karen Gates Hildt observes, "We don't do happy medium very well here."

Peter Badame agrees. The former head of Jefferson Transit now directs the Marine Science Center, an educational facility that is joining the Burke Museum in Seattle to create a new natural history center at Fort Worden State Park. This is one of the ambitious new plans here, along with the Northwest Maritime Center at an old oil storage facility downtown.

"Port Townsend is a town of extremes," says Badame, 51, who came to town in 1977. "What a lot of people miss when they see this cutesy, arty town is that it is basically a mill town. The mill is a major player."