The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (30 page)

“You may not like living with us now,” said Andy Kerr, a leader of the conservationists. “But we make great ancestors.”

Between court injunctions, when bits and pieces of the wilderness area were nibbled up by the loggers, acts of sabotage increased. Near Holcomb Peak, for example, a zigzag pattern of spikes was nailed through dozens of ancient trees. Few noticed the ironic reappearance of a symbol not seen in these woods for half a century. Sheriff’s deputies found posters of a screeching black cat with the words: B
EWARE
! S
ABOTAGE
! And in smaller type, “We never sleep.… We never forget.…”

At the Rough and Ready mill in Cave Junction, Lew Krauss can barely control himself when he tries to talk about the conflict raging outside his office window. In his late fifties, Krauss is a tall, angular man dressed in plaid shirt and workboots. Nothing corporate or stuffy about him. Jimmy Stewart would fit in those clothes. He is likable, as Stewart is when he holds his finger up and says, “Now, wait just a minute.…” His grandfather would not understand this fight, Krauss says. In fact, as he talks, the land of his grandfather is enmeshed in a struggle brought by the Green Movement, whose members in Germany speak much the same language as the young residents of the communes outside Cave Junction. The planet is exhausted, they say; nothing short of direct action will save it. Krauss blames those who live in the communes and shacks down the river for holding up a timber sale in the national forest which he needs to keep the 220 workers at the Rough and Ready mill employed. Working with lawyers from the city, conservationists have held up numerous timber sales on the Siskiyous, claiming the spotted owl is being killed off by the loss of its old-growth-forest habitat. The owls, which nest in pairs, need up to five thousand acres per pair to live. The species is a barometer of the ancient forest; when spotted owls disappear from an area, it’s a sign that the world of the forest is in deep trouble. Citing government studies that showed clearcutting the old trees has caused a steep decline
in the population of the spotted owl, environmentalists in the 1980s found their best legal tool yet to slow logging in the national forests. In the parking lot at the Rough and Ready mill, some of the pickup trucks have bumper stickers which read, “Save a Logger. Kill a Spotted Owl.” Inflatable owls are hung by their necks with ropes attached to the trucks. And when a convoy of logging trucks blocked the roads to protest Forest Service consideration for the spotted owl, a sign appeared in a local cafe which read: “Today’s Special: Spotted Owl Stew.”

The smell of fresh-sliced pine fills the air at the Rough and Ready mill. Two-by-fours and two-by-sixes are stacked thirty feet high for a quarter-mile in the lot outside the mill. After a long recession, times are good again. Never before have so many trees been cut at one time from the national forests of the Northwest. Lumber prices are approaching an all-time high. But Krauss can see the future.

“Spotted owl! Dammit, what’ll it be next time? Because of that owl, they’re holding up a billion board feet of timber on nineteen national forests.”

Outside of court, more danger lurks. In California, a logger’s saw exploded after hitting a spike in an old tree. He nearly died. Bad enough that a third of all loggers in the Northwest will be seriously injured at some time during their careers: Trees fall the wrong way. Chokers don’t hold. Boughs snap when they aren’t supposed to. Logs fall off trucks. Trucks fall off cliffs. Then there’s the after-work hazards, like eight beers and a long drive home down the winding road. According to medical-insurance records in Washington and Oregon, only two lines of work are more dangerous than logging—professional football and crop-dusting. Krauss, afraid of losing a man to a tree-spiker, recently ordered that all trees be screened with a giant magnet before they are run through the mill.

On his wall are black-and-white pictures from the early days of logging, an era without limits, when seventy-two men once posed atop a cedar stump. Every timber town on the west side of the Cascades has a similar picture, or a stump. Few trees of such size are left in the woods of the Northwest. The first tree farm in America was planted in 1941 on the Olympic Peninsula. Should the trees from that plantation be cut today, their stumps would barely hold the boots of a single logger. Krauss realizes the big trees are fast disappearing, going to Japan, colonial masters of these woods. In the late 1980s, about 4 billion board feet of raw logs from the Northwest were sent overseas every year—almost a third of all the wood cut on private and public land in Washington, Oregon and northern
California, timber worth $2 billion. For every log sent overseas, four jobs go with it. And so in Coos Bay, the harbor is full of raw logs, and trucks bring a steady stream of fresh-cut timber into port from Weyerhaeuser’s Millacoma Tree Farm, all of it consigned for shipment to Asia. But for the first time in memory, not a single plywood or lumber mill is operating in Coos Bay, because all the local wood is going overseas. The Philippines, Indonesia, Burma—these countries have long since stopped exporting raw logs from their declining hardwood forests. Only the Pacific Northwest continues to do so. The owners of these exporting timber companies blame the spotted owl for the log shortage. The small mill proprietors know better.

Timber is king in Oregon, the number-one industry in the number-one lumber-producing state in the country. Same in British Columbia. Not so in Washington, where the economy has diversified considerably, and less than one percent of the jobs are directly tied to wood products. During the last recession, the timber towns of the Northwest were full of heartbreak—thirty percent unemployment, boarded-up stores, foreclosed homes, divorce, alcoholism, child abuse. Around Aberdeen and Darrington and Forks and Morton and Sweet Home and Coos Bay and Butte Falls and here in Cave Junction, happy families were in short supply. The woods bordering these towns were all used up, just like the people.

When the industry bounced back, more roads were built deeper into the national forests, and record profits were reported, but the timber towns remained depressed, with some of the highest unemployment rates in the country. The spotted owl had nothing to do with this. After the recession, the timber companies thinned their operations down, turning to automation and getting wage concessions from the unions. It wasn’t so long ago that Stewart Holbrook wrote: “Our classic symbol is a man with an axe. The sounds that have influenced us are not those of the oboes and strings of symphony groups, but the savage music of the whining headsaws down on the sandspit. The aroma that moves us most is that of sawdust wild on the wind.” But now the man with the axe has been replaced by the latest tool of the timber-cutting trade, the massive Tree-power FB-1, which can move up seventy-degree slopes, snipping twenty-inch-thick trees at their base. The FB-1, lumberjack of the future, sells for $300,000.

Now, in the best of timber-industry times, the companies are employing twenty thousand fewer people in Washington and Oregon than ten years ago, during the last boom period, and they are stripping public land of
old-growth trees at a rate that will deplete the remaining stands within a few decades. The plates of armor which Winthrop thought so impenetrable are falling like a retreating army in midwinter. And the Forest Service, set up to protect against the avarice of timber companies, has become the industry’s best friend.

What to do? Stop acting like a Third World country, says Krauss. As long as the Northwest is a resource colony for other countries, it will never get out of the cycle of heartbreak. What of the Kalmiopsis, the last big stand of unprotected woodland? All the previous battles, beginning with Teddy Roosevelt’s creation of the national forests and continuing through the fight to create the Olympic, Rainier, North Cascades and Crater Lake national parks, have led up to this, the struggle for the Siskiyous. Should the big trees just up the hill from Cave Junction be cut because companies like Medco have used up all their private land around Butte Falls and Weyerhaeuser ships all its logs from Coos Bay overseas? Should the capital demands of a Texas billionaire determine the rate at which public forests are cut?

In the town of Ashland, population 16,000, just over the mountains from the Rough and Ready mill, the regular sunset staging of
Henry IV
is getting underway. The moon has started to cross the sky over the ridge. Stars are pressing through. The crowd quiets, and for the next three hours this part of the Siskiyous is alive with the old truths and shopworn jokes of Shakespeare. Every year, a quarter-million people visit this town at the edge of the mountains. In the winter they come to ski and watch Shakespeare indoors; in the summer they come to hike and watch Shakespeare under the stars in the clear nights of the southern Oregon summer. The fifth-largest theater company in the country is based in Ashland. Here is Winthrop’s vision in full technicolor, the best product of the human heart on display in a natural setting that adds rich tones to the production. Like food eaten around the campfire, Shakespeare is better in the outdoors. Ever since this former mining town hooked its economic destiny to Shakespeare, there have been few of the economic downturns that have so decimated other towns in the Siskiyous. Just like the warm springs that bubble up in the center of Ashland, the Bard seems an eternal resource.

Cave Junction and Butte Falls will never be Ashland. Loggers do not become thespians, at least not overnight. But Ashland has shown the depressed timber towns of the Siskiyous that there is a way to stay alive
other than turning the countryside to stumplands. When I ask Krauss about that, he says some towns belong to Shakespeare, others belong to the mill. If the remaining open forest of the Siskiyous were turned into a national park, Krauss is certain that Cave Junction, population 1,175, would fold up and die. Anybody who tells you otherwise has probably been smoking dope in those communes near the state border, he says. “Fugitives,” he calls them, with a sneer that overwhelms the Jimmy Stewart face, and then adds the ultimate insult. “Fugitives from California.”

One of those fugitives who came here during the early commune days was a young University of California graduate student named Robert Brothers, a slight, balding man with spindly legs who changed his name to Bobcat and took up with the tree-sitters. He grew up in Chicago, the son of a state worker, and moved west for college. While at Berkeley, he counseled people with psychological problems, but soon developed a distrust of his chosen field. When a patient would complain about his job being the source of his malaise, Bobcat would say, “Quit your job. That’s what I’d do.” Fifteen years ago he moved to Siskiyou country, which was full of change as the communes swelled with expatriates from the cities. Some lived for free on public land, setting up small lean-tos near summer marijuana farms. Others took up organic gardening, or tended small orchards, or sold handmade crafts at local markets, or started vineyards. Nobody needed very much money to get by. Bobcat lived off the income he got from family rental property in Chicago. The loggers and the back-to-earthers in the Illinois Valley coexisted—sometimes off the same, shared marijuana farms—though mutual suspicion prevailed.

Then in the early 1980s some of the organic farmers started to get sick. They had always drunk the water from streams which poured out of the Siskiyous in early spring. Cleanest water in the world, it was called, but suddenly it was poisoning the valley residents. Much more than nausea, the illness caused headaches, blackouts, coughing spells. A few years went by, and then some of the seasonal forest workers developed cancer. One young man died. His death was caused by malignant lymphoma, and his doctor blamed it on his continued exposure to a herbicide, 2,4-D, developed by Dow Chemical Company to kill vegetation in Vietnam. For years the Forest Service had hired teenagers to clear unwanted brush in the woods and near roads—summer work, clean and healthy. Then government officials in Washington, D.C., came up with another
idea, and the Forest Service switched from handheld clippers to a program of spraying massive amounts of 2,4-D—a fast, effective way to defoliate certain areas, and, the Forest Service officials pointed out, cheaper than hiring teenagers to clear brush. But the chemical product of American war research often landed on blackberry bushes, poisoning berry-pickers, and with heavy rains it trickled down the streams and into the makeshift homes of the organic gardeners.

Joined by older farmers whose families had lived in the Siskiyous for generations, Bobcat and others in the valleys started asking questions:

Why was the Government spraying public lands with herbicides?

To control unwanted brush.

Why was the natural ground layer of the forest unwanted?

Because it slows the growth of trees planted for commercial timber harvesting, competing for nutrients.

That led to questions about the Forest Service itself:

You mean you’re managing this forest, through chemicals and costly road building and replanting of a monoculture, for private industry? Doesn’t every citizen of the country own the national forest?

At demonstrations, some of the valley residents would perform skits, acting out what happens to an unwanted conifer when it comes in contact with the herbicide. By 1984, under legal pressure, the Forest Service declared a moratorium on the use of 2,4-D. It has not been used since. But the Siskiyous would never be the same.

Some of the organic farmers and marijuana growers and urban dropouts began to show up at timber sales, which used to be routine exchanges between Forest Service land managers and their friends in the industry. The slogans, tactics and pamphlets from Earth First!, a militant environmental group whose motto is “No compromise in defense of Mother Earth,” became influential. Earth First!, with its hammer-and-monkey-wrench symbol, espouses a hybrid philosophy of Wobbly sabotage tactics and suggestions from writer Edward Abbey. Tree-sitting, gate-blocking, timber-spiking—the tactics of
ecotage
, as they call it—are used when court injunctions and media pressure do not produce the desired results. The ecoteurs flooded Cave Junction with newsletters telling people the proper way to chain themselves to a bulldozer or sit in a tree.