FORKS — A trip down Forks Avenue at lunchtime provides a fast tour of this town’s tossed salad of cultures.
There’s the Tienda Latina grocery store, packed with Boing! fruit drinks from Mexico, sweet Mexican cakes, hot chiles from Los Angeles and a row of rose-colored and royal-blue guitars.
Across the street is J.T. Sweet Stuffs, a popular hangout for Forks High School students and men who work in the woods.
Tucked in between is Cafe Paix and A Work in Progress, an espresso bar and antique-consignment shop run by Richard Chesmore.
“I’m only a pilgrim. Been here just 18 years,” Chesmore said.
In his cafe, people are talking about the thing that has reverberated across the Forks area.
The U.S. Border Patrol has intensified its presence around Forks, setting up a checkpoint north on U.S. Highway 101 and deploying larger numbers of agents across the West End.
It’s part of increased enforcement of immigration laws on the North Olympic Peninsula.
Border Patrol agents also staffed a checkpoint on state Highway 104 near the Hood Canal Bridge on Aug. 22, and Joseph Giuliano, deputy chief Border Patrol agent, said a third location eyed for a checkpoint is on Highway 101 south of Discovery Bay.
Their mission, Border Patrol spokesman Michael Bermudez said, is to apprehend terrorists, drug traffickers and illegal immigrants.
Late last month, two Forks teenagers were caught by the Border Patrol: 16-year-old Carlos Bernabe and Edgar Ayala, 19. Both have agreed to be voluntarily deported to Mexico.
Others have been detained since.
Chesmore, meanwhile, has heard from men who’ve gone out of state to work and are afraid to return to Forks, and from a musician who planned dances at the Rainforest Art Center, but canceled because he doesn’t think there’ll be much of a turnout among Hispanics.
