Russians on the Border

“The land without trees” was how the original Native American settlers described the area around Sumas, Washington, and as you drive north from Seattle through a flat, lushly green and flood-prone valley, it’s easy to see why they did.

Nudging the Canadian border, Sumas today is a community of some 1,400 souls (almost twice that of twenty years ago), with a classic Western-style main street lined by low-roofed storefronts, a couple of modest restaurants, and a bingo hall. Back in the 1890s, it was something of a boomtown. There was gold to be found in the foothills of nearby Mt. Baker, and the place quickly became a supply center and jumping-off place for prospectors – a lively frontier outpost where store owners kept a shotgun under the counter, women in tight skirts loitered in doorways on Cherry Street, and whiskery Russian, French and Swedish immigrants drank and gambled away their newfound wealth in one of the town’s twelve saloons.

But, as so often happens with gold, the good times ended as abruptly as they came. Sumas today is an agreeable if sedate little place, its mines long since spent, and chiefly notable for its both busy and wrongly-surveyed international border crossing. When the line was drawn between the US and Canada following the 1846 Oregon Treaty, there were no such things as satellites or computers, and Google Maps had yet to be invented. In their absence, the job was done by an ill-paid crew of volunteers who tramped around in the hills and woods along the 49th Parallel, armed with sticks and twine. As a result, Canada and the US still employ a full-time boundary commission in order to iron out the nineteenth-century navigational errors. Meanwhile, a large chunk of Sumas sits on ground north of the true spot that should rightly be Canadian soil.

About eight miles south of the border, and thus safely within American territory, the small town of Everson rests on the gently winding banks of the Nooksack River. At one time it was heavily influenced by Russian settlers who established dairy farms on the fertile flood plains, or hauled logs down from the foothills of the Cascade Mountains. The region’s chief characteristics today are the near-constant winter rain, meaning that the storefront lights on Main Street are left on even during the afternoon, and a series of small festivals, rodeos, and picnics that are held during the summer months.

Anyone familiar with the original 1990s series of Twin Peaks (filmed in part in nearby Snoqualmie) need only think of that classic drama, though without some of its surreal horror, to get the flavor. The residents of Everson describe their town as “earthy,” by which I think they mean tolerant, informal, and supportive of the farmers’ market and the organic coffee house.

Everson is also home to St. Innocent Orthodox Church, a startling oasis set among the area’s narrow lanes, alpine meadows, and the foggy peaks of the neighboring hills.

The church is nothing less than astonishing. Passing down an outer hallway, you reach the sanctuary itself, a spiritual treasure of luminously painted portraits and iconography. The effect is startling, almost “as if a window to God [has] been opened, and the treasure of heaven made known,” one parishioner says. Father James Robinson, the parish priest, is a distinctly muscular Christian who was appointed to his post after lengthy careers in the US Navy and the local fire department, and who still looks as though he might be able to handle himself if the need arose.

“We have about 100 active members,” he said. “I think one of the attractions is that, unlike other religions, Orthodox Christianity really doesn’t try to add or subtract from established faith. We’re called ‘Orthodox’ because we subscribe to the Orthodox teachings defined in the earliest Church, as well as in the Bible and other ancient traditional sources. It’s a sense of stability in a turbulent world.”

Fr. James leads us to a less opulent room, where he introduced his 81-year-old parishioner, Alla Alekseyevna. Alla’s mother hailed from Samara, on the banks of the Volga, and her father grew up 1,300 miles away, in Leningrad Oblast, close to the Finnish border. The family emigrated to America in 1948.

Alla spoke at length about her growing love of the Pacific Northwest, with its turquoise lakes, dense forests, and snow-fringed mountains, and also of the important life-lessons of her youth. “One thing the Russian experience does is to prepare you for the inevitable,” she said. “Russians expect things to whither away. You tend to take death calmly.”

It would be hard not to warm to this gentle, self-deprecating, and drily funny lady who spoke in a level voice about the horrors experienced by several of her family members at the time of the Revolution. “My grandfather got out of the condemned cell only because he fell desperately sick with diphtheria,” she recalled. “The jailer looked at him and said, ‘Why waste a bullet on the guy when he’s going to die anyway?’”

It seemed almost absurd to be sitting around, 100 years later, discussing such matters in the comfortable vestibule of a modern American church. “You never quite leave Mother Russia behind,” Alla reminded.

Alla returned to Russia in 1989, she said, but the trip was marred by the constant intrusion of the state security services into the holiday plans of the 52-year-old American visitor. “I wasn’t allowed to see a cousin who lived in Tashkent,” she said, “nor to visit my mother’s old home in Samara. The KGB followed me wherever I went. It seems incredible that they had nothing better to do in the dying days of the Soviet regime but to chase around after a middle-aged American tourist.”

Later, an elderly friend living in rural Washington recounted much the same story. He had been posted to the US embassy in Moscow in the late 1960s, and eventually arranged to return for a private visit twenty years later. “Corny as it sounds,” he said, “a man in a long grey trenchcoat appeared on the sidewalk behind me every time I left the hotel. There were clicks on the line whenever I picked up the phone. It was like a bad John LeCarre spy novel. Once I went back to my room in the Rossiya after dinner and found it exactly as I’d left it, but for a small address book lying on the bedside table. It had somehow turned upside down in my absence.”

While on her 1989 pilgrimage, Alla Alekseyevna resorted to sarcasm when dealing with the last of a long series of Soviet officials who brusquely inquired into the purpose of her visit. “I told him I was there to buy Lake Baikal,” she recalled, softly chuckling at the memory. “That seemed to work.”

What is it about this lonely corner of the United States that makes it so attractive to the Russian exile? According to 2017 figures offered by city-data.com, this narrow strip of western Washington holds four of the top 13 US communities with the highest percentage of Russian- or Ukrainian-born residents. From 1990 to 2000, the number of local people claiming such ancestry more than doubled, census data shows. And according to the 2010-2014 ACS figures published by usa.com, in the small seaside village of Moclips (west of Seattle), a slim majority of residents – 50.7 percent – describe themselves as “Russian by first origin.” Six other towns in the same coastal area reported figures of greater than 10 per cent.

“My people came for the usual reasons,” an elderly resident of Sumas said. “They wanted to escape the Revolution, to make a better life. Six of them aged between nine and 77 made it by horse and cart to Poznan, and then by train to Bremen, where in those days you could step directly from the railroad tracks onto your ship. When they got to New York they had to fill in a form promising none of them was ‘suffering from a loathsome or antisocial disease,’ or had been ‘convicted of a crime of moral turpitude.’ Even then, they were looking for anarchists who might disrupt the American way of life. Nothing really changes. Someone eventually sent a cable from the backwoods of Bellingham, Washington, describing the beautiful and untamed countryside, with its lakes and mountains, just sitting there waiting to be settled. It took them twelve days on a train to get here, and my teenaged aunt was worried the whole time about being attacked by Red Indians. My grandfather built their first log cabin with his own hands. His wife burst into tears when she saw it. She’d never known a home with indoor plumbing before.”

In more recent years, certain Russians have faced greater difficulties when it comes to assimilating into the local community.

“Some [Americans] today are nuts,” a woman of Georgian descent said in the rural gas station she operates with her husband near Everett, about 70 miles from the Canadian border. “They think you’re a KGB spy or something. One woman who came in went crazy, yelling at me that I was ‘Putin’s stooge.’ Another guy asked me in all seriousness if I was going to use all the ‘millions’ I’d siphoned off from my customers to help influence the next US election. ‘I wish,’ I told him.”

Of course, such integration problems can cut both ways. The Pacific Northwest has been called “the hideout capital of the USA,” a far-flung outpost of the nation where hordes of the failed, felonious or fed-up have gone to disappear. Not untypical is the anonymous correspondent on the city-data.com website who wrote of his experience with his neighbors in rural Vancouver, Washington: “We live in an apartment building with many Russians. They are sooooo RUDE! I’m not singling out all, but most drive like crazies and are extremely rude. They do not want to speak English and constantly stare me down. It’s absolutely disgusting.”

There are literally scores of articles, letters, and other postings online that similarly excoriate the intolerable manners, dubious hygiene, and questionable choice in pets of stereotypical Russian settlers. Once can perhaps get a feel for the tenor of the remarks as a whole with this comment from “Rain City,” a nickname for Seattle. It counts as a model of civic goodwill by comparison with most of the others:

“Russians may be reluctant to speak English because they don’t do it very well, and they know that in the reverse case foreigners in Russia who speak Russian badly will be ignored and mocked.

“Russians are rude, especially to strangers. It is their culture. In Russia nice guys finish last. If you’re ‘nice,’ somebody is going to take advantage of you, so it’s necessary to adopt a junk yard persona to ward off anyone who has ideas that you might be an easy mark.

“On the bright side, if you do make friends with a Russian, you have a friend for life. Their friendships are deeper and more intimate than ours.”

Which brings us back to the engaging anomaly of Sumas, the beached northern outpost of the US that by rights should lie partly in Canada. Walk around the town and you walk through Wild West history. You can still get a feel for the bustling, gold-rush character of the place from the row of low-slung red brick stores and dim-lit saloons lining Cherry Street, and the two-lane road that runs through the center of town right up to the international border.

An erratically lettered sign hung above Bromley’s IGA Market, the town’s only sizeable grocery outlet: “CLOSED. Thanks for 57 Years.” The store’s co-owner and the former mayor, Bob Bromley, a Libertarian, blamed the closure in large part on the steady decline of the Canadian dollar. Tourists from north of the border have all but disappeared in recent years. With a more favorable exchange rate, “all ships rise in Sumas,” Bromley said ruefully. “It affects everything.”

Just a block away, across Front Street, draft horses pull covered wagons at Galloway’s Ranch. A little off to the west are the acres of dead railroad track that at one time made Sumas, where three major train lines converged, one of the busiest transportation hubs on the upper west coast. Yet today the chief panorama is one of dusty, narrow streets and rickety bars and gambling establishments wedged up against the occasional modest family motel. It’s hard to believe that Seattle is barely ninety minutes away by car.

What makes Sumas a living city is its lovingly-preserved sense of history. It may not be classically beautiful, like the dazzling tulip country of nearby Skagit Valley, but it’s a lot more interesting.

Lizette Custer, at the Sumas Historical Society and Museum, a prim building tucked away in a former Methodist church parsonage, echoed Bromley’s point about the area’s vanishing Canadian presence when talking about the 3,000-strong community of Peaceful Valley, which lies a few miles down Highway 547 to the southeast. “It’s a little haven where more than half the buildings are small cabins or mobile homes,” Custer said. “At one time it was a resort for middle-aged Canadian vacationers. As they grew older, and the exchange rate collapsed, it changed character.” In fact, Peaceful Valley – perhaps ironically named – became something of a modern-day outlaw town, an unpoliced enclave where “you had churchgoing families living alongside a hard core of troublemakers, [and] you heard stories about people taking the law into their own hands.”

Today, according to the 2000 US census, Peaceful Valley boasts America’s highest per capita concentration of residents of Russian origin.

“I feel comfortable here,” said Nadia Lagutochkin, a Russian immigrant who teaches English as a second language at Peaceful Valley’s elementary school. Like many Russians who moved to the region in the early 1990s, she was drawn by the abundance of both cheap housing and Orthodox or Pentecostal churches. Many of her fellow émigrés describe themselves as evangelical Christians who fled their homeland at around the time the USSR dissolved into the Commonwealth of Independent States. Their status as refugees allowed them to bypass US immigration quotas. Today 34.7 percent of the children, and 24 percent of the general population of this cloudy backwater speak Russian as a first language, and 12.2 percent of the population was born in Russia. More than a third of the total population lives below the official poverty line, including 52.8 percent of those under age eighteen.

Not everyone appears to have assimilated into the Peaceful Valley community quite as well as Lagutochkin and her fellow attendees at the local Russian Pentecostal Church, which draws about 400 devotees each Sunday. Several locals said that there is also an “unruly” and “gangbanging” element here that rivals anything out of the area’s rowdy past. Where once every saloon up and down the road to the Canadian border was filled with hard, weatherbeaten characters of the roughest sort – desperadoes and thugs, working in the lumberyards or mines by day, and drinking away their wages by night – their modern equivalent favors a wardrobe of gold rings and Versace T-shirts, a cellphone permanently glued to their ears.

“In many cases, social integration isn’t a top priority for these folks,” one local said, requesting anonymity. “You have situations where the family stays home all day, speaking only Russian. If they work at all, it tends to be in jobs that involve prostitution, gambling, or drugs. Money laundering isn’t unknown. On Saturday nights, the place is like Dodge City, complete with shootouts and guys tearing up and down Highway 547 in loud cars, and on Sunday morning they’re all back in church again. A century ago, this area was a bastion of grizzled cowboys who worked the land and didn’t give a damn for authority. That spirit of rebellion and freedom still imbues the place. The difference is that, instead of being a lone horseman with a gun at his hip, nowadays it’s apt to be some heavily-tattooed guy named Ivan with half-a-dozen medallions round his neck roaring up and down in a car with no muffler.”

Of course it’s not all a case of a misty northern hamlet, largely forgotten throughout most of the twentieth century, suddenly becoming a neon-lit urban sprawl where feral adolescents run wild in the streets at night. There are plenty of Russians and non-Russians alike in the Peaceful Valley area who live quiet, productive lives, many of whom have found work in the metropolis of Bellingham (nicknamed “The City of Subdued Excitement”) 20 miles to the south. Nowadays there’s even a county sheriff assigned to the town. But, as one elderly resident remarked, “It’s an unholy mix. You think of us up here as a peaceful little spot with some mobile homes and a couple of wooden churches, but on a weekend night it’s like downtown Moscow in the middle of a vodka fair.”

Somehow, it seems only fitting that this long-dormant relic of the Wild West should have become a party town again, even if its younger inhabitants now prefer to go by names like “Cobra” and “Speed,” and the only horsepower that matters is the kind to be found under the hood of a customized Corvette.