Politics roiled a community. It worked to rebuild trust with trash and flowers.
Before the troubles started, Melanie Wilson believed she’d finally found paradise.
She and her husband had moved from Washington, D.C., to Washougal, Washington, in 2019. After the cacophonies of the U.S. capital, they immediately felt at home with tranquil views of the mountains, including the snowcapped peak of Mount Hood in the Oregon distance. Lewis and Clark once camped here on the banks of the Columbia River over two centuries ago. The pace of life here is as unhurried as the logging barges wending through its gorge.
“I’ve been looking for a home my whole life,” Ms. Wilson says of the town of 17,000 people. “I want to make friends here. I want to put down roots here.”
That was five years ago. Then the pandemic hit in March 2020. Two months after that, George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. And the Wilsons’ paradise, it seemed, suddenly erupted into the kind of rancor they thought they had left in Washington, D.C.
Protests sprang up in the conjoined towns of Washougal and Camas that summer. By August, pro-police rallies were attracting hundreds of supporters waving American flags in support of law enforcement. On opposite sides of the street, half as many counterprotesters hoisted Black Lives Matter signs in a clash of highly charged remonstrations.
The area has been called the “crossroads to discovery.” Today both towns are at the crossroads of America’s deepening political and cultural divides. The bedroom communities are just a 30-minute drive west from progressive Portland, Oregon. A few miles to the east, however, horses, cows, and alpacas graze on gentle swells of verdant farmland, scattered with barns and houses displaying enormous signs supporting Donald Trump.
The protests in Washougal and Camas were mostly peaceful. Mostly. The police broke up a couple of push-and-shove scuffles. Demonstrators in pandemic masks chanted “I see a racist” at Trump supporters. In one instance, a man driving past
