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In ninth grade, when I was called upon to write a career report (and thereby to declare a career choice), I chose forest ranger. I had no idea that district rangers spend much of their time and energy administering timber sales, and when I finally got to college and looked into the forestry school, I quickly changed my mind. I later pursued three graduate degrees in forestry, but in the nature interpretation and ecology branches of the field, which provide a counterbalance to the timber beasts both in and out of the forestry schools.
One thing I learned was that people enter forestry for many jobs and reasons, but they all start out loving the woods—or the idea of the woods. That many of them end up sacking the woods for a living is no different from the fact that many professional entomologists, who begin with a love of bugs, spend their careers broadcasting toxins to deal with “pests.”
The Forest Service offers as diverse a collection of people, with as wide an array of motivation, background, and outlook, as any resource agency. From firefighter hotshots to rare-plant mappers, from backcountry rangers to timber cruisers, from tree fellers to tree huggers, the Forest Service has been home to all sorts of men and women enamored of the woodsy life.
Perhaps none of Gifford Pinchot’s club of individuals has struck me as more of a one-off, break-the-mold guy than Captain Gutz-Balls. Back in the late summer of 1987 I received a handmade postcard that read in part: “Just finished Wintergreen as did my parents . . . and the retired forester in the Winnebago three spots down. I was born in Skamokowa where my father tot 3 yrs at the deceased school . . . You can tell you’re an out of stater as you love slugs and us Warshingtonians hate them almost as much as Caliphonians. Just remember that progress is the development of more machines to provide more people more time to be bored in.” It was signed “Capt. Gutz-Balls.”
This sounded like my kind of guy. I wrote back, and from time to time I’ve received bizarre missives from the captain. Most of them are color-Xeroxed old-fashioned postcards showing dinosaurs stepping out in various beauty spots—Tyrannosaurus rampant at St. Petersburg; Pteranodon over Santa Cruz and Skamokawa, Washington; Brontosaurus on the capital’s mall at cherry blossom time; Triceratops balanced on a high gorge bridge in Oregon. Or they might depict the good man himself—his top-hatted visage winking out of a crèche, or at attention in a ranger suit with Smokey hat or hardhat, standing guard before the Gray’s River Covered Bridge, a ranger truck with Bart Simpson at the wheel or the erupting Mount St. Helens from various perspectives.
Packets might come with enclosures such as prehistoric sharks’ teeth from Florida, Woodsy Owl or EarthFirst! stickers, Smokey Bear patches, or a Capt. Gutz-Balls Fan Club sticker with a spaceship motif. An envelope might be addressed to “Mr. & Mrs. Robert Pyle Family, The Butterfly Folks, Gray’s R. Covered Bridge” and bear the return address “On the road—Trapper Cr. Wilderness Area & Carson Hot Springs” or “From the Hollowed Halls of the Mt. St. Helens Gonzo Gallery.”
The captain’s Christmas message one year was a typical mix of nonsense, self-pointing fun, and cryptic aphorisms. “I’m sending this processed tree carcass now because I’m horizontally challenged and a person of torpor and motivationally deficient . . .
but that’s what I get for being a uniquely-fortuned individual on an alternative career path, or a person with temporary unmet objectives! So how come by the time we’ve made it, we’ve had it?”
One pastel card from the fifties showing Stegosaurus at Balboa Park informed me that Gutz-Balls had “started our sentence for the gov . . . thru typo my Uzi training was changed to ‘squeegee and I am in the midst of a 4 week refresher seminar at the Cougar Condo & Bar facilities for the governmentally infirm and insane!’ Yours, Ranger Rance” (one of his aliases, along with Ranger Rex and Ranger Rocco).
By an astonishing coincidence, I had a chance to find out first-hand what he meant about the squeegee. That fall Thea and I drove up to the Boundary Trail access above Yellowjacket Creek for a hike. We had just turned off the Yellowjacket road and were starting up the abominable Forest Road 2810, when we encountered a green Forest Service pickup. The driver stopped and so did we, to ask conditions and chat. He looked familiar . . . slender, fair, mustachioed, ranger suit . . . it was Captain Gutz-Balls! His FS duty for the summer consisted largely in cleaning outhouses (he and his colleagues refer to themselves as “turdbusters”), hence the squeegee reference. He was as surprised to see us up there as we were to encounter him.
Now here was a Forest Service guy who was out there to be out there. (We were a long way from any toilets, as far as I could see.) He clearly didn’t buy the timber-trimming rationale for the existence of the agency. And as for Bigfoot, he reckoned it was a matter of time until it came home to roost for the USFS.
How refreshing it was to find someone with a truly weird sense of humor and a protective attitude toward trees who had burrowed into an agency known for too little of either. The captain reminded me of the presciently named Owl Party’s 1968 candidate for commissioner of public lands, Washington’s elected official who manages some six million acres of land. When asked what he intended to do if elected,
Richard “AC-DC” Green said, “I plan to go forth and fearlessly commission the land.” Somehow I feel that we’d hardly be worse off with guys like Gutz-Balls and AC-DC Green in charge than with the “get the cut out” professionals who have left the state and national forests in tatters.
With a wave, a mock salute, and the promise of more crazy postals, Captain Gutz-Balls took off for the next outhouse as we trod toward our rendezvous at Yellowjacket Pass.
Though few can rival the captain in uniqueness, many Forest Service employees hardly fit the mold of the chain-saw dervish, the career-climbing yes-man, or the agency desk drone. I have known a strong woman who works backcountry assignments in summer and lives in a tree house in winter; a raft of full-timers who took early retirement rather than toe the line; and a pack of biologists who comb the woods for rare and vulnerable species of plants and animals, then buck the bosses to try to keep those habitats safe. Many of the most interesting people, like the captain, have worked as seasonal employees. This gives them some insulation from the pressures of government service and perhaps greater freedom to be themselves.
Paul Freeman of Walla Walla, in southeastern Washington, was a Forest Service watershed patrolman in 1982 when he had, he claimed, a dramatic sighting of Bigfoot. He said it outweighed his 325 pounds by at least 500 pounds and stank like something spoiled. His colleagues called the event a probable hoax. Hounded by reporters and anonymous threatening callers, Freeman left the service and moved away. Later he returned to the area as a meat cutter and a devoted Bigfoot hunter, intent upon clearing his reputation.
With his son Duane and fellow Bigfoot enthusiast Wayne Summerlin, the big, bearded, fifty-one-year-old Freeman unearthed a remarkable amount of putative evidence from the Blue Mountains on the Washington–Oregon border—rock art, tracks, sightings, films. These vary wildly in quality, from interesting to inept, and they seem to appear only when Freeman is around. On the whole his evidence has not enhanced his stock among the fraternity, except with Grover Krantz, who feels that some of the tracks are genuine. Freeman says the giants hole up in the Wenaha-Tucannon Wilderness on the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest. Forest Service officials remain dubious about their former employee’s stories. As perhaps the only one from their ranks to become a vocal Bigfoot convert, he is treated circumspectly at best.
Another former Forest Service part-timer, whose scientific data are beyond reproach, is Bob Pearson, a resident of a timber town on the hems of the Dark Divide. In his work on the Gifford Pinchot he came to realize that the formal spotted owl surveys were failing to record all the birds in some densely forested areas. He has since conducted his own survey, on his own time and expense and unofficially. He has detected an unrivaled density of owl pairs on lands designated as “matrix” r
ather than as owl preserves in the Timber Plan. Matrix designation equates with the old “multiple use” management that will probably amount to timber business as usual. Bob’s work demonstrates how faulty any plan can be when it is based on inadequate field work. The difference between his work and Freeman’s, aside from rigorous technique, is that the owls actually appear when he calls them—they don’t leave mere wingbeats on the wind.
Acutely aware of the motorcycle sacrifice zone (photographer Ira Spring calls it an ORV playground) that Harry Cody seems bent on making out of the Randle District, Bob has conducted a second survey. He has documented hundreds of miles of foot trails in the forest that have been abandoned or obliterated—many of them since the reign of a former district ranger whose kids liked trail bikes. By now the remaining trails have been increasingly turned over to motorcycles.
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The yeoman foresters of the Gifford Pinchot have been outdoing themselves in soliciting public input and informing us of their management process. It is almost as if, having been slapped silly by the courts and Congress, they are appealing to the people to validate that they are doing something right. In the past few years I have received a steady stream of mail from the Gifford Pinchot managers. Here is a list of some of what I’ve saved:
• The Forest Land and Resource Management Plan (“Forest Plan”), a massive document detailing all aspects of future management, dense and rendered largely redundant by Clinton’s Timber Plan
• Decision Memos for amendments to the Forest Plan, concerning the management of noxious weeds and unwanted vegetation, scenic and wild rivers, reforestation, monitoring of goldeneye and wood duck as indicator species, snowmobiles, cattle and horse grazing allotments, and so on
• Annual monitoring and evaluation reports and a long errata list for the Forest Plan
• Watershed and landscape analysis reports
• Integrated Resource Analysis input requests and position statements
• Access Travel Management questionnaires
• Various “scoping” documents for future projects
• McCoy Timber Sale and other draft environmental impact statements
• Position statements on specific timber sales
• Findings of No Significance for various actions
• Invitations to open houses “to get to know you and to identify any concerns you might have” about Indian Heaven and recreation, timber harvest, silvicultural, and wildlife projects
• Invitations to town hall meetings about the president’s Forest Plan
• A six-page memo entitled “How to Work with the Forest Service,” which asks the reader to “share your vision with the land manager”
In addition, a series of newsletters arrives at frequent intervals: Pinchot Perspectives, headed by portraits of the young and old Gifford Pinchot himself, asking “What’s happening with the Forest Plan?”; Pinchot Projects, with a female field worker on the cover, which summarizes all National Environmental Policy Act–related projects on the forest, an impressive catalogue of activity; GPNF Wilderness, using as a logo a songdog howling at the moon, explaining changes in methods and goals for monitoring and responding to wilderness damage; and DEMO Newsletter, on the Demonstration of Ecosystem Management Option Project, a scheme to find out whether the “new forestry” (later called “new perspectives”) really works. The newsletter plans to compare “silvicultural options for maintaining, enhancing, or re-creating late successional characteristics in managed forests in the Douglas-fir region of the Pacific Northwest.” In other words, how many trees can you cut down, and in what ways, and still have some of the benefits of older forests?
Finally, there came to my mailbox a brochure titled The Reinvention of the Forest Service: Charting Our Course. In keeping with the Clinton administration’s task of “reinventing Government . . . we on the Gifford Pinchot National Forest are asking you for your ideas on how we can be reinvented.” The Gifford Pinchot Task Force of concerned citizens would love to take the managers seriously. But according to some Forest Service critics, it’s too late for that.
Although they consumed enough paper to keep at least one pulp mill busy, and staff time that could have done a lot of good on the ground, all these efforts to keep abreast of public desires and to keep the public abreast of their intentions seem laudable. How likely is it that the dialogue will truly affect policy?
Undoubtedly the manufacturers in this paper mill include many dedicated individuals who mean what they say about public involvement. But some forest users are convinced that when all the questionnaires are sifted and newsletters recycled and memos revised and open houses closed up, the Gifford Pinchot will go ahead and do what it wants to do. Some footnotes may be added to the Forest Plan based on popular comment. But as Randle District Ranger Harry Cody has demonstrated with trails and motors in the Dark Divide, and as the timber sellers have showed again and again, bringing about meaningful reform finally rests with the courts. Now, with the adoption of the frightening phrase “ecosystem management” in all its staggering arrogance as the service’s slogan, many feel the USFS is beyond redemption. As Andy Kerr of the Oregon Natural Resources Council said at Clinton’s timber conference, “I hear ecosystem, and the forester hears management.”
In a September 20, 1993, editorial titled “It’s Time to Clear-cut the Forest Service,” High Country News publisher Ed Marston portrayed decades of empire-building, nonresponsiveness, and “roguish” behavior on the part of the service in Colorado and elsewhere. He pointed out that in addition to John Mumma, “nine of the 13 Northern Region forest supervisors” who had signed a letter in 1989 saying the agency had lost its sense of mission were no longer on the job. Instead of taking the letter as loyal criticism, Forest Service brass had treated it as treason.
Marston maintained that environmentalists should resist Clinton’s Option Nine forest plan because it involves experimental forestry instead of outright no-cut zones, and “we know the Forest Service can’t implement a policy that requires good science and ecological integrity.” He went on, “Given how the agency has isolated itself from the ground and from communities, and given its contempt for science, there are no options: The Forest Service . . . should be abolished.” Though difficult, “abolition . . . wouldn’t be as impossible as reform. And debate over how to replace the Forest Service would invigorate the West.”
Of course, the service isn’t going to be abolished. And I’m not sure that it should be. When Clinton appointed Jack Ward Thomas, a respected scientist, as Forest Service chief, conservationists hoped the agency might be poised for meaningful reform. As the leader of the original spotted owl study that led to the defining crisis in Judge Dwyer’s courtroom, he was an unlikely, exciting choice for chief. If he would chain-saw the logjam and light a fire under the decadent deadwood of the bureaucracy, Thomas might be the man to save the service. But his ratings during his first year (1994) were poor in all areas except FS morale. Furthermore, in a June 13, 1994, memo from Thomas to regional foresters, he showed himself as no friend to de facto wilderness areas such as the Dark Divide: “Unless these roadless areas are removed from the timber base through forest plan amendment, you should proceed in an orderly fashion to enter more such areas and manage them.” Is it any wonder environmentalists fear that Thomas might turn out to be another casualty of pulp politics?
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Orlo, subtitled The Bear Essential, is an apostate environmental paper out of Portland edited by folks who would feel at home with Captain Gutz-Balls. The summer 1994 issue helped Smokey the Bear celebrate his fiftieth anniversary. “This amiable symbol of fire-as-evil-force,” Charles Little wrote, “has turned on his masters and helped to create today’s ‘forests of torches.’” Little called this “Smokey’s Revenge.” The issue also included a section called “Bigfoot among Us,” with an article titled “Believing in Bigfoot” by Michelle Allen, and �
��Bigfoot Speaks!” a mock-tabloid interview with the big man by Samuel J. Freehold. As the satirical piece begins, Bigfoot lights a cigar and taps the ashes into his paw. The interviewer reminds him that it is a nonsmoking room. “I know, I know,” Bigfoot retorts. “It’s just that Smokey is always getting on my case about smoking in the field.”
Maybe it’s time that Bigfoot gets on Smokey’s case instead. As recent tragedies in fire management and the parlous condition of Western forests attest, the day of this gruff but pleasant ursine archetype may be past. Perhaps the next half-century should have a different front man . . . hairy like Smokey, but a lot smarter.
What would the discovery of Sasquatch mean for the United States Forest Service and its motley band of managers? If the Gifford Pinchot, just to take one national forest of the many involved, seems to have generated a paper storm over owls and martens and pileated woodpeckers and timber sales and trails and rivers and roads and cows and elk and meetings, meetings, and more meetings, imagine the parade of pulp that Bigfoot’s arrival on the scene would inspire. As the greatest anthropological, zoological, and evolutionary discovery of our time, the animal would elicit a “management mandate” that would—or should—completely unseat the reigning model.
“Ecosystem management” terrifies disinterested ecologists precisely because it assumes that people have the godlike ability to “run” something as complex as an entire biophysical system in nature. As a former land manager, I would be the first to say that no combo of science and mechanics exists that can begin to do this. All the Forest Service can do is to make decisions based on the best available knowledge, then see what happens. This is merely monkeying around; it is hardly managing the ecosystem.
The Greater Ecosystem Alliance, a nonprofit organization devoted to maintaining the international ecosystem of the North Cascades, takes a radically different approach. At first glance, its goal of “integrated ecosystem conservation” might seem just as presumptuous as the Forest Service slogans. But the humility of the Alliance attitude separates it from the Pinchot perspective.
Where Bigfoot Walks Page 28
