Misty Micheau Bushnell looks over the memorial marking the spot where her boyfriend Shawn Vann Schreck died two days before in a homeless encampment where they live along the river in Aberdeen, Wash., Wednesday June 14, 2017. Bushnell, said his death shook her so much she thinks she's ready to move away, someplace inside, and she hopes her methamphetamine addiction won't follow her there. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

Misty Micheau Bushnell looks over the memorial marking the spot where her boyfriend Shawn Vann Schreck died two days before in a homeless encampment where they live along the river in Aberdeen, Wash., Wednesday June 14, 2017. Bushnell, said his death shook her so much she thinks she's ready to move away, someplace inside, and she hopes her methamphetamine addiction won't follow her there. (AP Photo/David Goldman)

In Grays Harbor County, a rural community on the coast of Washington state, the rate at which people die from despair _ from drugs, alcohol and suicide _ is nearly twice the national average. The county embraced Donald Trump’s call to America’s forgotten corners, and flipped Republican in a presidential election for the first time in 90 years.

Many of those caught in the cycle of addiction did not vote; they are either felons or too consumed by the turmoil of trying to claw their way out to be engaged in society.

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Here are their stories.

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Misty Micheau Bushnell stoops to light a candle at the foot of a cross standing 8-feet-tall in memorial to the boyfriend she’d been with so long she called him her husband. She found him dead here two days earlier, near the tent they shared on a riverbank in Grays Harbor County.



She looks out over the calm water. It gets rough sometimes but not today, and she takes that as a sign from her lost love: Peace. Hope.

“I believe in that stuff,” she says. She thinks he sent another message, too: It’s drizzling outside. “I think he made the mist for me: Misty.”

Shawn Vann Schreck, 42 and an immense man of more than 300 pounds, was so beloved on the streets many called him “Mayor.” He died slowly from heart and lung ailments made worse by infrequent medical care and longtime addiction _ problems plaguing far too many in a county that voted for Donald Trump in hopes of turning things around.

Bushnell’s father was a logger in Grays Harbor, and she and Schreck met in the sixth grade. With the timber industry in ruins, they both struggled to figure out a future. Schreck couldn’t find steady work, and so he did odd jobs and tried to make do. Eventually, both wound up addicted to methamphetamine and found themselves living by the river in a tent camp, with dozens of others like them.

Bushnell thinks Schreck knew he was dying. He took her daughter aside the day before he passed on and told her he loved her, but that he wouldn’t be around much longer to look after her. He said to be safe, and to live better. Bushnell wants to move now and hopes the drugs won’t follow.

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“That’s what he would want. He would want me clean again.”

She keeps some of Schreck’s ashes inside a locket that she wears next to her heart. The rest, she sprinkled in the river.

“We will meet each other on the other side,” she says, wagging a finger. “But not too soon.”

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Read more in the Trump Country series: https://apnews.com/tag/TrumpCountry