Washington

   Travis Daigle has compassion for everyone out there who – yet again – has made a list of resolutions to tackle in the New Year. But he warns that goals like losing weight or curbing spending habits are always peripheral to the bigger challenge, which is acquiring the mental toughness to do hard things. 

   For more than a century, the town of Centralia in southwestern Washington has largely depended on extractive industries for its economy. Logging and coal mining typically provided jobs that paid pretty well. But the forestry industry took a big hit back in 1981 when Mt. St. Helens erupted, and then the coal mine just outside of town closed in 2006.