The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  “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 s
ome 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.

  CLIMB TREES! screamed the headline on Earth First! publications. They also urged the climbers to bring along little plastic bags in which to store their body wastes. When metal detectors were used to trace tree spikes, some of the Earth Firsters shifted to ceramic nails.

  In an Earth First! column by someone with the byline Budworm, the writer noted the dangers of tree-spiking. “If you are spiking, assume your ass has a big green target on it. You are wanted. Don’t tell me or anyone else what you’re up to (exception: if you’re willing to be an anonymous spiker on a tv news documentary, get in touch with me for details).” Other stories carried tips for the serious monkeywrencher: “Spray paint, though environmentally destructive even without chlorofluorocarbons (weigh the cost benefits of your actions as always) still works best.”

  Earth First! put out a comic book featuring a revisionist history of the Forest Service’s favorite mascot, Smokey the Bear—in the cartoons he became Stumpy the Bear, born in a clearcut. When the Earth Firsters were called terrorists, they countered that tree-spiking was an honorable tradition first used by the Wobs almost a hundred years ago.

  “Tree-spiking is fine with me as long as nobody gets hurt,” said Bobcat, who became the spokesman for Earth First! in southern Oregon.

  The Earth Firsters quoted Bob Marshall, the Depression-era wilderness advocate who worked for the Forest Service. Marshall, raised in New York City, could walk thirty miles a day through rugged terrain, and still stay up half the night telling stories. In the 1930s, he proposed that a million-acre Kalmiopsis wilderness area be set aside. At the time, no roads penetrated the Siskiyous from Crescent City in Northern California up the coast to Coos Bay. A small wilderness was established in 1946, and later enlarged in the late 1970s. That was it for wilderness. As the Forest Service moved toward a plan in the 1980s to sever the remaining roadless area with clearcutting through the untouched forest, people threw themselves in front of bulldozers and chained themselves to the road gate. The battle centered around the Forest Service road proposed for the wilderness. If they could stop the road, they figured the forest would be saved, since helicopter logging is far more expensive. Less-militant environmental groups—the Sierra Club, the Oregon Natural Resources Council—obtained court injunctions against the logging plan. Earlier this summer, the Forest Service had stopped construction of the road when it was nine miles into the wild forest, saying further study of the spotted owl was needed. For the moment, it looked as if the forest would not be cut.

  “We thought we’d won,” says Bobcat, sitting inside his ramshackle shed deep in the forest near Cave Junction. He has a braided beard that goes beyond his navel, which he strokes as he talks. At the shack where he lives, the walls are covered with pictures of clearcuts, Indian artifacts and sayings from David Foreman, one of the founders of Earth First! Foreman’s book Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching is on a table. The shack is at the end of a dirt road, overgrown with brush, and cluttered with junked cars which are pasted with bumper stickers that read, “We Are All One Species.” Inside is a woodstove. I ask him if it isn’t a conflict to burn wood and keep junk cars while advocating a litter-free habitat for the other creatures of the Siskiyous. “Not at all,” says Bobcat. “We selectively cut the trees here for burning, without harm to the environment. And the junk cars out back? Yeah, somebody’s supposed to do something about that.”

  Tree-spiking, blockades, ecotage—those kinds of things, says Bobcat, work as delaying tactics until the lawyers can move in with court injunctions. And all those loggers at the Rough and Ready mill, what are they supposed to do? He says the future of the Siskiyou valleys must be in orchards and vineyards and farming and tourism. It’s time for the people of Cave Junction to adapt or die. In increasing numbers, tourists come to sample the local wines here and float down the wild water of the Rogue and Illinois. Californians, cashing in their home equity and using it to purchase houses here that cost a fraction of property farther south, have taken to the old ranch homes of the valley as a retirement haven. They have no interest in scarred ridges and debris-filled streams. By some measures, the most valuable resource in the West is land, and the fastest-growing Western counties are within a mile of wild areas. “We will win,” says Bobcat.

  In late August, Forest Service officials release their proposal for the roadless area of the Siskiyous. They’re done studying the spotted owl and have made up their mind: the owl will get more land set aside than previously planned, but it’s time to get on with the business of the Siskiyous. They call for a return to the previously announced logging schedule of six thousand acres a year, and construction of more than two hundred miles of roads, including completion of the symbolic main road, in the biggest tract of ancient forest up for grabs in the Northwest. Earth First! calls for battle. But two days later, in the midst of a long dry spell, on a night when the air is so still that a whisper travels far, a thunderstorm rumbles up from California.

  The sky goes very dark, then explodes in a blitz of electricity. No rain comes with the storm, just thunderbolts fired down at the ancient forest
. Boom! Crack! Followed by the smell, dry wood engulfed in a firestorm. Dogs howl, then retreat for cover. Birds screech across the sky. Horses stampede against sharp fences, panicky, looking for a way out. In Cave Junction, the loggers run outside and stare at the sky; at road’s end near the junked cars, the Earth Firsters do the same thing. The night is full of smoke and flames and desperate voices, awed by the force of nature. All the tree-spiking and lawsuits and detailed forest-management plans and blockades are meaningless: the Kalmiopsis wilderness is on fire, burning out of control. The wind pushes the flames north, making them leap from tree to tree, hopscotching over the giants. The inferno creates its own winds, and its own sound, the swoosh of oxygen being sucked out of the atmosphere and into the maw of the furnace.

  The next day the sky is dark; smoke fills the Illinois Valley, blots out the sun, and drifts east up the Rogue River Valley to Crater Lake. From around the state, firefighters are mobilized. A few days later, some reserve units from the National Guard are flown in. But it looks hopeless; there is no way to get people into the steep roadless area, and the winds are racing at such a speed as to make firefighting a fatal mission. The Siskiyou fire burns for ten weeks, consuming nearly 100,000 acres of old forest in the north Kalmiopsis—Oregon’s largest fire in half a century. When fall rains from the Pacific finally douse the great blaze, the two sides start arguing over whether the dead trees should be left as is to nurture the next forest, or harvested to keep the mills of the Rogue River basin running.

  Chapter 10

  SALMON

  The secret of life in the Northwest runs in packs of silver; as with most mysteries, it lies just below the surface, evident to anyone who thinks it important enough to look. At Willamette Falls, this secret reveals itself in rare flashes amidst the industrial clutter of Oregon City. The river here is a beast of burden, powering the street lights of nearby Portland, grinding wood pulp to paper, settling into locks that lift ships on their way. Against this metallic frenzy a few chinook salmon hurry upstream, driven by a singular impulse to pass on the baton of life and then die. To the continued befuddlement of biologists, they return to the neighborhood of their youth after seeing the world. In the fall, as the ground goes cold and the fields die, they bring a dose of fertility in from the sea, carrying the collected natural history of the Willamette in their gene pool. Fornication, in the ritualized style of the Pacific salmon, is never more charitable—or fatal.