The Bremerton/Bainbridge Divide

Rain and slush pound the downtown pavement on a cold December Sunday in Bremerton, where a few proud members of this town's working class are huddled beneath the awning of the Drift Inn, trying desperately to stay dry while sucking down cigarettes.

The Drift Inn sits across the street from the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard (PSNS), the place of business for several of the convened smokers and thousands of others in the region, including Seattle. Adjacent to Kitsap County's largest employer is the Bremerton ferry terminal, gateway to day jobs for another chunk of the county's population (including this reporter). As the crow flies, Bainbridge Island is barely three miles away. As the car drives, however, it can take an hour.

It doesn't happen very often, but occasionally, according to Aaron Bausch-Green, Islanders catch the boat from Bremerton to downtown Seattle. "You can always tell a Bainbridge Islander at the ferry terminal, especially if you're smoking," says Bausch-Green, an art framer who has temporarily abandoned his hot toddy. "They're the first ones to give you a dirty look. I'm sure there are a lot of nice people who live on Bainbridge Island, [but] most of the ones I've met are real tight asses. They're just snooty. It's like they don't want to be here. They're slumming."

One recent morning on Bainbridge Island, the boomer clientele at Andante Coffee is listening to Jack Johnson and the Steve Miller Band. Take a few steps toward Eagle Harbor and you can see the healthy live-aboard community, a perennial thorn in the sides of homeowners who invested in a view that extends all the way to Seattle.

Libby Anderson is a librarian who has lived on Bainbridge since 1977. Back then, she says, "you could roller-skate down Winslow Way on a summer afternoon and there wouldn't be traffic." Cross the street today and you're likely to play chicken with a BMW, Volvo, or Prius that can't be heard through the headphones on your iPod. Anderson loves her island, and has nothing against Bremerton, but, like every other person who was interviewed for this story, she recognizes a palpable rift dividing the two communities.

They're in the same county, share the same courthouse, and are separated by less than a mile of water. But for many of the roughly 60,000 residents who call Bainbridge and Bremerton home, there's been a chasm, sometimes real, sometimes purely perceived, between them. Islanders, so the story goes, are the rich elitists who make local calls to Seattle and would rather be part of the King County conversation than that of Kitsap. Then there's Bremerton, cast as a Navy town with stabbings, ax murders, cheap housing, and a fondness for NASCAR.

Nothing articulates the perceived class struggle as well as the ferry system. Whereas Islanders get the nice boats, the quick, 35-minute rides, and the frequent trips, Bremerton commuters spend two hours a day on board and have to choose between the 10:30 p.m. and 12:50 a.m. boats during Mariner games. They're also stuck with the leftovers, literally. The Hyak, which was only good enough to sub for the Bainbridge run until it got new boats in 1998, is a Bremerton regular, and was pulled from the route in the middle of the day recently for rudder repairs, canceling several sailings.

Because of disparities such as these, every few years the class war between the two communities flares up again, whether it's about a bridge, beach-eroding foot ferries, a NASCAR track, or wireless Internet. It's not exactly a feud, nor an enduring conflict, as you'll be hard-pressed to find a person in Bremerton who flat-out hates Islanders. You'll be equally challenged to find an Islander who admits they do their best to ignore their blue-collar neighbors to the south. But you could go all day without finding a member of either community who is ignorant of the divide.

"To a big extent it has to do with money," said Julie McCormick, a reporter who covered Bainbridge Island in the late '80s for the Kitsap Sun, the region's daily newspaper. "I mean, [Islanders are] richer. They're also politically liberal compared to other parts of the county. The county's more militarily oriented. It does boil down to class as much as anything."

Lance Sutton is finished with his beer and his day at the office, and the Chelan ferry is carrying him home to Bremerton from downtown Seattle's Colman Dock. Sutton lives in Manette, a neighborhood within walking distance of the ferry terminal, and he doesn't need a car to get to his IT job at a major financial corporation in Seattle.

If Sutton lived on Bainbridge and commuted from the island's downtown Winslow district, he'd only be on the water for 35 minutes each way and would be riding the nicest boats Washington State Ferries has to offer. "What is it with Bainbridge always getting all the best?" Sutton wonders aloud. "It does seem like the ferry system is bending over backwards to give the Bainbridge Island executives all the perks."

The Bainbridge route has had Wi-Fi since a pilot program was rolled out in 2005, yet riders like Sutton and the regulars on WSF's 55-minute run didn't receive Wi-Fi until last week. Parsons Corp. currently provides service, and the Bainbridge route has had access to the Columbia Tower's signal. But Parsons had a harder time getting a signal to reach all of Rich Passage, the winding, narrow body of water upon which the Bremerton-bound boats run between Bainbridge, Manchester, and Port Orchard. Service was set back several times, once when the city of Bainbridge denied Parsons' request to put an antenna on a pole because it was within 200 feet of Bainbridge's shore. Parsons says it has since found alternate locations on the island for antennas.