We moved here from Spokane (my native city) at the same time the Olympia portion of I-5 was complete, so I just missed fun things like the destruction of Moss Lake . However, I do recall trips to Seattle on the old 99 and seeing landmarks like the Hats and Boots gas station in its prime when we sped by in our '53 Buick . When we finally made it to Seattle, my Dad would point to the Smith Tower and proudly inform us we were looking at the tallest building west of the Mississippi. Then we started noticing a big stick going up on the other end of Seattle. After that was finished and the Century 21 Exposition was complete, Washington was never the same. The Seattle World's Fair even had a "Gayway," which shows how innocent we were tucked up here in our little forested corner.

I-5 is the Roman Road. Like a trickle of ink on a napkin, the influence of this thin ribbon of asphalt has spread over the years, so in order to find the Washington us Boomer natives grew up with you have to seek out those special pockets flung far afield. Yet, all the outsiders moving here is not really a bad thing. Many of my fellow natives do not realize just what a special place this is compared to the rest of the country, and are more than willing to wreck the landscape and destroy the environment for a few bucks. Some of these outsiders who have moved here have rescued us from ourselves. You will not hear this Washingtonian complain about Californians moving here.

I also recall the long, torturous route of Highway 410 from Olympia to the Coast before SR 9 (later called SR 8) replaced it. Sometimes it is hard to remember just how much has changed in such a short time. But other times I find myself looking at something, like the corner of 4th and State St. and seeing it from the late 1950s to the present like some kind of fast time lapse. Maybe the time has come for me to get out of Dodge.

First off, my subjective perspective is that of a Puget Sound Boomer, which would be different than yours simply by virtue of our experience here. My memory of Olympia starts in the late 1950s, when the town was mostly blue collar, when the Capitol Campus was on only one side of Capitol Way. When the population of Olympia was only 15,000 and the municipality of Lacey didn't exist. Business districts were centralized and malls and created communities like Ken Lake were yet to be.

I'm not saying the pre-I-5 Washington was a better place, but it does have a certain nostalgia for me. I attended plenty of land use hearings in the 1970s where recent California transplants stood up and basically said, "Are you people crazy? Don't you know realize what you have?" And of course my fellow natives sat there with blank expressions, and voted to wreck another tract of land in the name of commercial progress.

By 1976, the year you were born, downtown Olympia looked the way downtown Aberdeen looks today-- rundown and depressed. What saved Oly's business district were the Evergreen transplants. What an ironic twist of fate! And that is back when TESC was really a radical and experimental school, not the namby-pamby mainstream sellout it has become today in order to survive.

So in some ways I have my cake and am eating it too. And, in keeping with this thread, get to benefit from the upgrade from Highway 410 to SR 8. I live in Grays Harbor County, which is like living on an island away from the Roman Road, yet commute to Tumwater, where I get to benefit from being employed in the modern Washington.

I know you covered this neck of the woods as a journalist in your past life. This area (East County) has always struck me as being in a place where the Aberdeen and Olympia spheres of influence don't quite meet. In short, we are in our own little time warp here. Although in recent years it seems the Oly influence has caught up to us.