An apple beside the trail showed that others had come this way recently, though I had the illusion of solitude. Old caddis-fly cases, cemented with sand, then dried out, barnacled the rocks. A bumblebee approached my purple pencil and yellow notebook, ignoring the red dead nettle blooming among the rocks. Such “lesser lives” surround us always, yet when big birds and mammals fail to show, a place is likely to be called lifeless.
In the Quartz Creek deepwood, between Platinum and Straight creeks, all I could hear was the breeze and needles dropping. A yard-tall stalk of last year’s pinedrops caught the sun and mirrored the red of a nearby rotting snag. A vanilla snow of its seeds rode the zephyr—so why aren’t there pinedrops everywhere? Because those seeds are packets of protein for millions of invertebrates and because the ground isn’t right everywhere and because and because . . . All my life as a naturalist, I’ve been fascinated by questions of what’s where or why not. Patchy distribution of habitat is one of the most active areas of study in ecology, especially now that the patches are getting fewer and farther apart. Endangered species are the result of habitats grown a little too patchy, snows of seeds and sperms without issue.
The silence couldn’t last. A jet, then chain saws, roared in the north. But quiet fell when I came upon the Sue Hollenbeck Memorial Bridge over the third tiny, dry, mossy stream. I wondered who Sue was and who loved her enough to build a bridge for her. Golden-crowned kinglets tinkled over the bridge, some of the still widespread bits of life that must pass this spot a few million times a season, like larger seed snows, piping in a language not far from the songs of pollen. I’d settle for such beatitudes sung daily over my bridge.
Rising to the rim of the deep, steep canyon, I could hear but not see the stream below. A big windthrow clogged the trail, and I realized how difficult it would have been to backpack through here. Sasquatch is said to vault thick logs in stride, and I’ve known long-legged hikers who do the same. But for those of us with twenty-nine-inch inseams, scrambling over downed logs can be a crotch-stretching challenge. Over or under, with a backpack, is a killer.
Doug-fir needles hanging from cobwebs right before my eyes caught me up short more than once. Big orb-weaving spiders positioned themselves at face height across the trails. Their black-and-white banded legs broke up the pattern, making them barely visible. I’ve shed the arachnophobia that plagued me as a youth, but I still bridle at big webs and bulbous bodies in my face without warning. These didn’t get me, thanks to practice with the fir needles.
I came to the juncture of Straight and Quartz creeks, a small spectacle. Straight Creek, anything but, meandered down from the north in a green mossy cleft over onyx patterns of oxides in its bedrock. Just above its mouth a single huge log spanned it, hewn on top for foot-tread. Quartz Creek flowed just below, down a broader canyon with ancient forested sides. The two merged in a pair of drop-pools before their combined forces plunged around a natural rock dam, beneath a bleached and slanted log, and down a twenty-foot waterfall into a blue pool. Even at this season, long past snowmelt, the fall was a white cataract; below it a third arm of the stream made its own broad, gentler fall. The shared mouth of the two creeks debouched into lower Quartz, broad from the force of erosion, staked with big and small trees and downwood, and scarped with green walls of maidenhair and moss. Bonsai hemlocks occupied a ledge above the falls. The slanted afternoon sun caught the cedar trunks and ruddy cliffs up and down the gorge, turning it into a foundry cooling from the day’s melt.
A big flock of Vaux’s swifts, like slender dippers, streaked through the canyon below the confluence. Dun birds of the air and the ancient forest, swifts lose their nesting places when the snags are cut or fall. Looking away from their sickle-winged flight, I saw earthbound fungi rimming the path—golden boletes, cherry russulas, peachy chanterelles. As the swifts screamed their last for the day, I returned to a supper of mushrooms and hash, washed down with good ale from the village of Kalama on the Columbia.
In the gloaming I walked up Quartz Creek to wash dishes where arnica and aster made pale moons midstream on a mossy rock. Fir needles plastered a gray chunk of granite in a sandstone bowl of its own making. Grass-green tresses of algae waved below the water line, blackening with the coming dark. An ouzel dipped in alarm at seeing me, then shot past to the rim of a falls. Who would credit this plumbeous slug as a bird, so fishlike at times, so versatile in making water work for itself? One might ask whether dipper, in all its shades and ways, is more or less believable than Sasquatch. Or swifts, scything the sky with all the elegance of an ouzel underwater, making nonsense of gravity itself.
A pygmy owl chink-chink-chinked on into the campfire hour, which I spent with Alan Cossitt, a Portland photographer I’d met at the previous campsite. He told me of tracking and photographing old growth in hopes of stemming its decline. As an autumn hatch of maple thorn moths, stoneflies, caddis flies, mayflies, and wasps buzzed his Coleman lantern, we swapped stories of forests lost and found. Then I slept, in a circlet of five old-growth firs and cedars.
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What is this thing called old growth? We used to call it virgin forest or forest primeval; lately, the terms primary and original forest have been used. Textbooks speak of climax communities, bioregionalists refer to the temperate rain forest, foresters speak of overmature stands, and conservationists rally to the battle cry “Save the Ancient Forests.” Overall the term old growth prevails. By whatever name, these woods are the nexus of the bitterest battle in the environmental history of the Northwest. Not Hanford and its radiation, not the Columbia and its obstructions, not fish, not offshore oil, not growth management—nothing has aroused the fear and loathing, spit and hiss, loyalty and love that old growth elicits from those who wish to cut it and those who do not. The story is complex and will change ten times before this book goes to press: the details do not belong here. But in its essence, the struggle is about the future of the remaining one-tenth or less of the Northwest forest cover that still resembles the condition of the whole before the arrival of ferrous metal saws.
Some say a quarter or more remains, counting high-elevation, subalpine smallwood. Others insist we’re down to a twentieth or less. While some scientists and managers contend that any stand more than a century in age should be called old growth, other ecologists reserve that term for trees at least three hundred years old, and still others contend it is a matter of disturbance history and forest structure, not age as such. Tree size and spacing, soils, component species, amount of deadfall, slope, and climate all influence how older forests behave and when they qualify as “late successional,” the latest label applied by the Forest Service. I think of old growth as woodland that harbors all or much of what a biologist traveling with Lewis and Clark would have found. And by that measure, one-tenth of the original growth is a very generous guess.
A disinterested observer would find it astonishing that we could remove the last part of something as grand as old-growth coniferous forest. But hardly anyone is disinterested. As soon as they experience ancient forests, almost everyone becomes interested. The currently trendy term for those who engage in public conflicts is “stakeholders.” Certainly most of us who know the woods at all consider ourselves that, for we do have a lot at stake in these trees. In public forums, so-called facilitators try to forge consensus among stakeholders. But common cause seldom arises from joint stakeholding, because we share few goals. Our values differ radically—and where they overlap, our stakes get in the way of dialogue even more than the facilitators do.
Big old trees are board feet, specialty products, stumpage, jobs in the woods and the mills, livelihoods for families and communities and cultures; or they are holy groves, grand spectacles, guardians of unduplicated diversity, homes for spotted owls and swifts and wood roaches and thousands of other rare species, sites of unrivaled inspiration, and an inviolate trust. Individuals can hold shades of both views, but when they do, they either fail to appre
hend the absolutism of the other side or they become speechless from guilt and confusion. Log-town folk who love the trees love young ones as well as old, love regrowth and promise, think that the big trees already protected are enough; or they don’t know or don’t care about the breadth of life forms that are at risk. If a feathered vertebrate arouses ridicule and hate, a forest moth or midge will get no sympathy.
On the other shore, conservationists come largely from the city don’t know much about life in one-show mill towns, and either don’t believe all the little green this family supported by timber dollars signs or don’t care. Often they have little sympathy for timber towns or ridicule them outright. Three regional portraits published nationally, Bill Dietrich’s The Final Forest, Sallie Tisdale’s Stepping Westward, and Tim Egan’s The Good Rain, singled out Forks, Washington, as a true-blue logging town. None of these writers felt comfortable in Forks. Dietrich tried to portray the plight of displaced timber workers with fact and compassion. Tisdale likened her immersion in Forks to going home to her native Yreka, California, or to any other small town: “If I am an interloper in Forks, I am an interloper . . . in my own childhood.” Egan, in his otherwise laudable book, wrote that “Forks is to the Olympic Peninsula what a butt rash is to Venus.” Such an egregious remark made me wonder if Egan temporarily forgot the source of the paper his books were printed on. But even if they are more sensitive to someone else’s hometown, sometimes it must seem to the good people of Forks as if the writers of the world are lined up against the workers in the woods. Upon reading one such broadside, one of the gentlest people I know—a fine writer and a conscientious timber worker—said to me, “It makes me want to kill these people.” It was more an expression of frustration than a hateful threat. But in the face of a vanishing resource base and tighter restrictions on all sides, it is no wonder the folks of Forks and their ilk react with venom to what they see as the urban environmentalist mafia.
So this fight will never be reconciled; it will just wear out, as the Clinton timber plan—acceptable to neither side—or some judicial or congressional Yalta draws the “final” lines on the Balkans of the western woods . . . lines that, like those on any map or landscape, can always be changed.
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The outcome of the battle for the old growth clearly has everything to do with the ultimate nature of the Dark Divide and indeed the entire Gifford Pinchot and Pacific Northwest. I’ve found it to be widely assumed that if Bigfoot exists, it must depend on the ancient forest; that as ancient manifestations, they must be mortally linked. Thus the fate of the forest seemed to embrace the future of Bigfoot, if indeed it had a past. I am an advocate for every last stick of old growth, a believer that future forestry must get by on the cutover lands (for reasons I detailed in my book Wintergreen), but the emphasis in this book on big trees depends on that presumed linkage between them and Bigfoot—if there is no such link, I should change the subject.
I hadn’t questioned this connection until a member of my writing group objected to the position I expressed in an early draft. A member of a timber-dependent family, she suffered from the sense of persecution that all logging communities feel these days. The spotted owl and marbled murrelet seemed enough to contend with, and here I was trying to pin a rap on her people for wiping out an animal that isn’t even known to exist! It was too much. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, when petitioned to list Bigfoot as a precautionary measure, thought so too: how can you designate critical habitat for a myth?
I acknowledged my friend’s frustration at what might well be a fatuous attack on a beleaguered industry. She went on to ask, “How do you know that Bigfoot even prefers, let alone requires, old growth? Maybe it’s perfectly happy in second growth, like deer and bear.” She had a point, and my mindset, already wobbly in this matter, slipped a notch.
Well, what about it? Bear, deer, and elk are all said to thrive in the productive second- and third-growth “reprod,” as foresters call it. This can be true if those woods have not been intensively managed with slash burns and herbicides to encourage the worst—least-varied—kind of forest monoculture. Sprayed zones, meaning much if not most of the logged acreage, lack the vigorous and varied shrubs and herbaceous growth that ungulates and bears exploit. Even sprayed plantations, if they are allowed time to mature before the next cut, may in time acquire some variety of life forms. But as cutting cycles get shorter to provide quick pulp chips instead of sawlogs, diversity dies. When you cut the regrowth in thirty years, little wildlife value accrues; then, if you spray the leavings to prevent alders from competing with conifers, the next potentially useful period is lost as well. This is one reason the timber giants clamor for federal old growth: having logged off their own estate and converted it to pulp rows, they need our mature trees for the lumber mills.
Even if blacktail deer and blue grouse do frequent the secondary forest, a great many other species do not and cannot. The disruption of soil structure, hydrology, and microorganisms, the alteration of ground cover and canopy, the simple removal of biomass, not to mention the depletion of carbon and nitrogen—all these inevitable changes make it impossible for many animals and plants dependent on those features to survive or recolonize. Even if the land can restore itself, species will not return unless sufficient nearby habitat remains—thus the curse of the fragmented forest.
Many people are familiar with the short list of protected birds that cannot survive outside the old growth, or at least big, mature, interlinked stands. Not ten people on the West Coast can list the almost countless other species dependent on old forests. Largely plants and invertebrates, these species are not figured in the political mix, and decisions about logging are made on the basis of a few “keystone” species that might or might not represent the rest. Even when so-called lesser forms of life are brought to light, conversants tend to dismiss them. “When I raise the question—do we need to consider the slugs and snails and lichens?—people are just appalled. They just can’t believe it,” said Chris West, vice president of the Northwest Forestry Association, as quoted by the Chinook Observer. Yet without mollusks and lichens, the forests as we know them could not exist.
Now, as forest practices change toward the rough rubric and rougher concept of “new forestry,” one begins to hear of “green-tree retention blocks” and other fancy terms for old-fashioned selective logging. The hope is that by leaving some live trees standing and others dead as snags or on the ground, a logged forest will approximate some of the function of old growth while still providing a crop. Some politicians have jumped on this approach to save their skins in split constituencies.
Certain companies have embraced the idea of new forestry also, at least in name. For example, Plum Creek, Inc.—guilty of appalling logging practices along the highly visible I-90 corridor over Snoqualmie Pass, as well as in Montana—now advertises itself as a practitioner of “Environmental Forestry.” Their ads, showing colorful artist’s versions of diverse woodlands, go way beyond even Weyerhaeuser’s time-tested and hyperbolic calendar pictures of fairy-tale forestry. Acknowledging Professor Jerry Franklin as the bringer of light and giving a simplified ecology lesson, the Plum Creek ads ask, “What is Environmental Forestry?” The answer: “Created by us, it’s an innovative management plan that goes beyond today’s standards to recognize that forests are complex ecosystems, not just stands of trees.” Of the plan’s “ten principles,” one is to “protect and enhance all wildlife species.” Bully for any corporation that actually practices a less destructive form of logging—but in fact the companies still spray their cuts with herbicides, killing thousands of nesting songbirds and other life forms.
New forestry—environmental forestry, green-tree retention, whatever you want to call it—is not the same as old growth and never will be. The Forest Service has adopted the stunningly hubristic phrase “ecosystem management”—implying that they, too, will save all the pieces of the forest puzzle. In fact, many species will fal
l through the cracks in the plan and will be lost, and with them the fabric of the forest will unravel.
Does Bigfoot belong to the guild of the adaptees or the fellowship of the forlorn? At least one Bigfoot researcher, Jim Hewkin, takes the position that the animal not only exists but thrives in disturbed secondary habitats. As a retired Oregon Fish and Wildlife biologist, he deserves a hearing when he says that the kind of landscape produced by human uses is exactly what this adaptable ape likes. Perhaps he is right. To find out, all we can do is examine what we know about what and where such an animal might be, then guess.
First it might help to take a look at adaptation, the lingua franca of evolution, the Rosetta Stone of inheritance, the sine qua non of survival. In the old-growth and logged-off lands of the Dark Divide, I encountered one of the most striking examples of adaptation I’d ever seen, and it made me think.
Sometime after Quartz Creek, hiking below Dark Mountain, where a noble fir forest used to be, I heard a pika call from the clear-cut rubble! As I walked up a Cat-track on the south side of a clear-cut “unit,” one pika called nearby and two others farther off. I was amazed. I’d know a pika’s voice anywhere. But no rockslides were visible. Pikas without rocks seemed about as probable as woodpeckers sans trees.
Pikas, sometimes called conies, rock rabbits, or boulder bunnies, are lagomorphs—relatives of rabbits. Small as a Netherland Dwarf bunny, compact, agouti-gray and rust, with little round ears and prominent whiskers, they look about as cute as an animal can. Yet pikas are tough, competent organisms of demanding environments. Instead of hibernating, they harvest and dry plants to make the hay that sees them through the harsh winter season on the talus slopes or scree. Pikas occupy alpine rockslides around the northern hemisphere. I was used to seeing these small, geeking beasts in the high Rockies and the North Cascades. But here, where were their rocks?
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 8
