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Kristen
Stewart, left, and Robert Pattinson star in "The
Twilight Saga: New Moon." The series is
set around Forks, Washington, which has boosted
tourism in the small town.
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FORKS, Wash. — For some
reason, Randy Lato's "Vampire Voyages" boat
trips just haven't brought in the big tourist bucks yet.
He hasn't quite worked out a plausible connection between
fishing and the fictional "Twilight" series
author Stephenie Meyer set in this little Olympic
Peninsula town.
Hey, look: "I've only
read two books in my entire life," he said. And
"Twilight" wasn't one of them. (Although it's
his understanding that heroine Bella's dad was a pretty
good fisherman.)
So when people ask what
fishing has to do with vampires, Lato says, "We're
going to float down the damn river looking for vampires
climbin' up the trees just like in the movies."
He exemplifies the major
blessing and slight curse that "Twilight" has
become to this town of 3,000 or so, ambivalent at best
toward the source material and the "Twilighters"
who've overrun the place in the last year or so, but
anxious to partake of the financial boon they bring. The
next "Twilight" movie comes out Nov. 20.
Most other businesses
haven't been shy about it, no matter how tenuous the
connection — one restaurant's "Cullen's Clam
Chowder" (named after the series' vampire family), a
sandwich board trumpeting a pharmacy as "BELLA'S
FIRST AID STATION," an espresso stand's
"Twilight Brew."
"It's a huge boon. We
couldn't get publicity like this ever, paying for
it," said Marcia Bingham, at the Forks Chamber of
Commerce — which has a red truck like Bella's parked in
front.
With the town's logging
industry in a slump, being overrun has been a godsend. For
instance, the month of July brought nearly as many
visitors — 16,000 — as the entire previous year.
Are there any drawbacks to
all of it?
"You can't drive
through town sometimes easily because there are fans
taking photographs all along the way and they slow the
traffic down," Bingham said. "It's a pretty
minor price to pay."
Annette Root, owner of
"Dazzled by Twilight," a large gift shop devoted
entirely to the series, said more than 5,000 people from
around the world have taken her $39 Twilight bus tour of
the area.
"I think a lot of the
ambivalence comes from this being a very small, tight
community struggling with the leap from a logging
community to a tourist location," she said. "But
it's been a very welcome gift."
Sergei Holmquist works at
one of the local businesses that "Twilight" has
brought from the red into the black — the 3 Rivers
Resort & Store that sells the Cullen chowder.
"I do think it's a
wonderful thing for our town, but it's definitely changed
it, to say the least," he said. "So many people
are upset."
Others are simply baffled,
such as Andrew Roberts, of Gig Harbor: "I don't
really understand why people come up to Forks because of a
fictional book," he said.
He read the first two books
in the series to try to understand the phenomenon. Did any
of it touch him on as deep an emotional level as it has
the visitors? Yeah, he said: "The ending, where I
realized that I finished the book and got nothing out of
it."
"How much do I
personally love 'Twilight'?" asked librarian Theresa
Tetreau, searching for a diplomatic answer to the
question. "I think what I love most about 'Twilight'
is that it has introduced so many young people to reading
that might not otherwise be picking up a book.
"I think it's a good
thing, but there are some days when I think most people
would probably tell you that they've they've got a little
bit of "Twilight" fatigue, maybe."
What if Forks had been
overrun by zombies instead of vampires?
Back at the Chamber of
Commerce, Bingham said, "We'd find a way to make that
positive, too."
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