ABERDEEN, WASH. - One hundred fifty baskets of pink petunias hang from the light posts all over this city, watered regularly by residents trying to make their community feel alive again. A local artist spends his afternoons high in a bucket truck, painting a block-long mural of a little girl blowing bubbles, each circle the scene of an imagined, hopeful future.
But in the present, vacant buildings dominate blocks. A van, stuffed so full of blankets and boxes they are spilling from the windows, pulls to the curb outside Stacie Blodgett's antiques shop.
"Look inside of it," she said. "I bet you he's living in it."
Around the corner, a crowded tent city of the desperate and addicted has taken over the riverbank, makeshift memorials jutting up intermittently from the mud.
America, when viewed through the bars on Blodgett's windows, looks a lot less great than it used to be. So she answered Donald Trump's call to the country's forgotten corners. Thousands of her neighbors did, too, and her county, once among the most reliably Democratic in the nation, swung Republican in a presidential election for the first time in 90 years.
"People were like, 'This guy's going to be it. He's going to change everything, make it better again,' " she said.
Blodgett stood at the computer on her counter and scrolled through the headlines. Every day it's something new: details in the Russia campaign investigation, shake-ups at the White House, turmoil over Trump's response to race-fueled riots. His administration's failed plans to remake the health care system may or may not cost millions their coverage, and there's a lack of clarity over how he intends to eradicate a spiraling drug crisis that now kills 142 Americans each day — a growing number of them here, in Grays Harbor County.
"Has he done anything good yet?" she asked. "Has he?"
Blodgett was born and raised in this county, where the logging economy collapsed decades ago, replaced by a simmering sense of injustice that outsiders took the lumber, built cities around the world and then left this place to decay when there was nothing more to take. The community sank into despair. Suicides increased, addiction took root. Blodgett is 59, and the rate at which people here die from drugs and alcohol has quadrupled in her lifetime.
She thought opening an antiques store and pawnshop with her boyfriend on a downtown street bordered by petunias would be fun. Instead, she's confronted every day with her neighbors' suffering. They come to pawn their jewelry to pay for medication. They come looking for things stolen from them. They come to trade in odds and ends and tell her food stamps won't cover the dog food.
She keeps a bag of kibble behind the register.
Now they come to discuss Trump, and their differing degrees of faith that he will make good on his promise to fix the rotting blue-collar economy that brought this despair to their doorstep.
Many here agree that the thrashing and churning in Washington looks trivial when viewed from this place 3,000 miles away that so many residents have been trying so hard to save. Some maintain confidence that Trump will rise above the chaos to deliver on his pledge to resurrect the American dream. Others fear new depths of hopelessness if he fails.
Blodgett just prays Trump understand the stakes — because in places like this, there is little room left for error from Washington, D.C.
There, he is tweeting insults about senators and CNN.
Here, her neighbors have been reduced to living in cars.
Across the country, Trump disproportionately claimed these communities where lifetimes contracted as the working class crumbled.
Pennsylvania State University sociologist Shannon Monnat spent last fall plotting places on a map experiencing a rise in "deaths of despair" — from drugs, alcohol and suicide wrought by the decimation of jobs that used to bring dignity. On Election Day, she glanced up at the television. The map of Trump's victory looked eerily similar to hers documenting death, from New England through the Rust Belt all the way here, to the rural coast of Washington, a county of 71,000 so out of the way that some say it feels like the end of the Earth.
Aberdeen was built as a boomtown at the dawn of the 20th century. Its spectacular landscape — the Chehalis River carves through tree-topped hills to the harbor — offered ships easy access to the Pacific Ocean. Millionaire lumber barons built mansions on the hills. There were restaurants and theaters and traffic that backed up as the drawbridge into town seesawed up and down for ship after ship packed with timber. Now that drawbridge pretty much stays put.