Boundary Springs boils up from the ground just west of Crater Lake and quickly forms the headwaters of a legendary river. Such turbulence from birth is appropriate, for the Rogue River, on its way to the Pacific, drains a country that is at war over its resources. To save a forest with a botanical gene pool older than any other living thing in the Northwest, men who call themselves Doug Fir and Bald Mountain Bill are perched in trees, ready to fall with the front line of the wilderness. In strategic places throughout the million acres of the Siskiyou National Forest, ancient evergreens are spiked with steel to sabotage mill saws, and bulldozer gas tanks are filled with sugar to foul the engines. At night, in the valleys shared by pot-growers and tree-fellers, gunshots are fired, windows are smashed. “Somebody’s gonna get killed,” mutters the old man on the porch in the timber town of Cave Junction. In court, pricey lawyers from the city try to answer the question: whose life is more endangered, the spotted owl’s or the logger’s? Victims of mutual incompatibility, both owl and logger are disappearing in Oregon, a state that once had enough standing timber to rebuild every house in America. And so men with braided beards sit in tall hemlocks trying to block the advance of loggers, and timber companies cut at an ever-faster rate, hoping to get the centuries-old giants before court injunctions on behalf of a small bird that can live only in the ancient coastal evergreens get at them.
Following the Rogue west from its source in the soft shoulders of the Oregon Cascades, I have trouble staying with this river as it hurls itself through deep basaltic trenches and forests congested with green life. The banks of the Rogue are a tribute to the imagination of nature—rain forest ferns mingle at the same party with blossoming azaleas, and dry-country pines tangle with the boughs of moisture-loving spruce. An oddity among the wet woods in the temperate zone that runs along the coast from Northern California to British Columbia, the Siskiyous bake under hundred-degree temperatures in summer, but take in enough rain during the dark season to boost the conifers to astonishing heights. The Ice Age glaciers which buried the rest of the Northwest, effectively killing all plant life and then carving the U-shaped valleys as they retreated, never made it this far south; the buckled clumps of red earth here are remnants of a forest that predates all life to the north by several million years. While most of the Pacific Northwest, covered by an ice sheet a mile thick, was unveiled a mere twelve thousand years ago, the Siskiyous have lived uninterrupted for perhaps 40 million years. Twenty different conifers and 1,400 plant species thrive in the Siskiyous, home forest for the greatest biological gene pool of the West, much as the Smokies are for the East. Three times as old as the Cascades and the Sierras, these mountains are resonant with life from the adaptations of those many centuries. They are not craggy or sharp or even particularly high. There are no glaciers, no granite spires, no volcanic cones, and only a few alpine lakes.
Like a stranger who defies stereotype upon first acquaintance, the Siskiyous are hard to figure. A little incongruent, at times spooky. Bigfoot, in this part of the country, is known as the Hermit of the Siskiyous—just under seven feet in size, smelling of body sweat and sticky hair, with yellow-tinged fur. He’s been spotted by loggers and prospectors for years, but their cameras have always failed them when the beast came within focusing range.
Before the Rogue cuts its gorge in the Siskiyous, the river courses through the western slope of the Oregon Cascades, changing its look with the frequency of a fickle teen on an extended trip to the mall. In the higher reaches, the river is clogged with boulders that were tossed in its path by the eruption of Mount Mazama nearly seven thousand years ago. Even in midday, late summer, sunlight does not penetrate the canopy here, which is overwhelmed by the green of chlorophyll. Gathering strength from the waterfalls squeezed out of the upper woods, the Rogue roars through a dark canyon farther west of Crater Lake. I find salmon jumping from the Rogue’s torrents—big chinooks, throwing themselves against the current. Farther down, light cuts through the thinning treetops, and the perfume of ponderosa pine predominates, carried by the wind. All is sweet and cleanly cluttered in the way of a pine forest. But then the lovely scent disappears, and the Rogue turns sluggish and flat and quiet. The only dam to block the river’s 212-mile path to the Pacific appears here, backing up a reservoir surrounded by brutally shaved hillsides. Now I’m on private land, out of the national forest. Nearby is Butte Falls, a timber town on the way down.
Logging trucks, carrying pine and fir of a girth that says the trees have lived three centuries or more, crowd the roadway. Walking up the hills, I can’t find a trace of the original forest, the lungs of this land. All is gone—cut and bulldozed into slash heaps. In the hamlet of Butte Falls, population 428, there is confusion and anger. Residents of fifty years do not recognize the hills around their town. Lost in their own backyard, they talk as if collective Alzheimer’s disease had taken over Butte Falls—like the Pretenders’ song about a native daughter’s return to Ohio: “but my city was gone.” The favorite hunting spots have disappeared. The picnic meadow that used to be … here—gone. The woods where they first made love—a sunburned junkyard. The winds kick up dust instead of tossing evergreen branches against each other, and it seems much hotter than ever before. When it rains hard, water cuts new channels in the bare earth, clouding salmon streams. People shake their heads, sad as hell, and then trudge off to cut the remaining trees left near Butte Falls.
Global economics is wiping the green and the shade away from this timber town. For three generations the Medford Corporation has been the lifeblood of this community, gradually cutting away the old-growth trees on its ninety thousand acres. Historically, the company always logged just enough to make a profit and keep the town alive, ensuring a steady supply of trees. Then, in 1984, a corporate raider named Harold Simmons from the treeless canyons of Dallas paid $110 million for Medco, as it’s called here, an acquisition added to a $2 billion empire of sugar, petroleum, chemicals and fast-food restaurants. Because the buyout ate up so much capital, the Texan ordered all the old-growth trees near Butte Falls to be cut as fast as possible while the market for timber was still hot. Old conifers from the Northwest, straight and fine-grained, make the best building wood, any lumberman will tell you. But they take a few centuries to reach the astonishing heights and level of strength so valued in world markets. Patience is not a virtue of late-twentieth-century corporate raiders. Before the sale, about 80 logging trucks a day rolled out of this town with Medco timber. Now, the pace is nearly 130 trucks a day. Off to Japan and Taiwan go the woods around Butte Falls, a third of an acre with every truck. Throughout the Northwest, 170 acres a day of ancient forest are being cut, 62,000 acres a year. In a few years, the residents of Butte Falls say, all the trees on Medco’s 90,000 acres will be gone.
And what will become of Butte Falls? To survive, the loggers who live here on a wage of eight dollars an hour will have to look farther west and down the Rogue to the million acres of the Siskiyou National Forest—dry and wild and mostly uncut, home of the last big unprotected roadless area of forest left in continental America. A few groves of redwoods, the tallest trees on earth, some in excess of two thousand years old, live in the Siskiyous. Every timber company in the Northwest has its eyes on this public land, which is managed by the Forest Service, a branch of the Department of Agriculture. In a typical timber sale, the government builds roads into primeval forests, logging companies buy rights to use the roads and cut all the trees. In time, Smokey the Bear has become the nation’s foremost road-builder, as the Forest Service has punched 343,000 miles of logging roads into the vast stands of public trees—more than seven times the 44,000 miles of road built by the national highway system.
Of late, Forest Service land managers have been treating their public trust in the Northwest like a tree farm—annual harvests reflecting market demand, and then reforesting with only one or two varieties of softwood seedlings—a process which is leading to the gradual elimination of many kinds of plant species. Few things are uglier than a fresh clearcut, with its scabbed earth, raw stumps, slash piles of debris and roads to nowhere. But a national forest replanted in the style preferred by the timber industry—corn rows of commercial trees—resembles nothing in nature. Ashamed of what the former friend of the forest had become, Jeff DeBonis, a longtime employee of the Willamette National Forest north of here, recently wrote a letter to his boss, F. Dale Robertson, Chief of the Forest Service. “Our basic problem right now is that we are much too biased toward the resource-extraction industries, particularly the timber industry,” he wrote. “We support their narrowly focused, short-sighted agenda to the point that we are perceived by much of the public as being dupes of the resource extraction industries.”
It takes up to a thousand years for a natural forest to become the rich rot of diversity known as the climax phase of the tree-growing cycle. Only a generation ago they said Oregon had so many overgrown trees that you could stretch a sixteen-mile-wide swath of this state’s old growth from the Pacific Coast to the Atlantic. No more. Less than a tenth remains of the original 30 million acres of virgin forest in Oregon. The biggest chunk of that, roughly 440,000 acres, is in the north part of the Siskiyous, the oldest living area in the state. Although 1.2 million acres of wilderness have been set aside in Oregon, only 200,000 acres is lowland timberland. Wilderness in Oregon, as in Washington and British Columbia, is mostly rock-and-ice high-alpine country. Pressed by the demands of timber companies, which have exhausted all the old growth on private land, the Forest Service has announced plans to begin clearcutting much of the remaining unprotected public forest in the Siskiyous. In the hamlets around the Rogue River, clusters of people say they will die to prevent that from happening. Few people doubt them.
In morning light, before the sun washes away the mysteries of landscape and makes the country go flat, the hills in the central Rogue Valley look Tuscan: vineyards wear a coat of late summer mist, pears hang from orchards thriving on irrigation water, and the land rolls and folds in undulations of bright beige. Summer has been dry, leaving the madrona bark curled and the river much lower than usual. I’m on my way to the timber war zone, but curiosity slows me. In this corner of the Northwest, a place Oregon Territory promoter Hall Jackson Kelly called “the loveliest country on earth” in 1831, before he’d even seen it, people say things like “Allrighty” and wave to you as you drive by. They root for the football 49ers, because San Francisco, about 350 miles to the south, is closer than Seattle, 470 miles to the north, but urban influences are minimal, even with the advent of satellite dish television receivers. A handful of homesteaders keep dairy farms alive on small plots of land. Backcountry, away from the farms and vineyards, some of those who don’t cut trees for a living grow pot. For several years, marijuana has been the number-one cash crop in Rogue River country.
It wasn’t logging that first brought crowds to these mountains. The Siskiyous, then as now, are a chore to reach. But greed has always been a terrific trailblazer; when gold was found in 1853, roads were carved from the hills in a hurry. Prospectors, up from California over the Siskiyou Trail, and across the Plains and Rockies via the Oregon Trail, soon clogged the Rogue River basin. These were not the families of Protestant farmers who’d fled the depression of the Ohio River Valley to settle in the Willamette during the previous decade. These Rogue Valley newcomers arrived without wife or kids or a past. They needed whores and precious metal, in short order, to stay alive. By the end of 1853, the Rogue River Valley had great supplies of both. Overnight, towns such as Jacksonville and Ashland sprang up, a saloon and bordello for every two dozen prospectors.
The Indians were randomly murdered, sometimes shot for target practice. For centuries, the natives had lived well off the abundant salmon runs of the Trinity, the Chetco, the Illinois and Rogue rivers. Like most Northwest tribes, they were superb woodworkers, building perfectly symmetrical canoes, split-cedar houses, sanded and painted pottery, and furniture—all without benefit of axe, saw or any other metal tool. The great forest god provided them with a prolific source of waterproof wood, the western red cedar, which was used for everything from clothing to housing. As pioneers of the concept of sustained yield—now the seldom-followed but constantly stated forest-industry policy of never cutting more trees at any one time than would grow back to replace them—the natives were conservationists to a fault, even setting fires to encourage new growth in decaying areas. They called themselves the Takilmas and Tututnis, but the whites who came in the 1850s lumped them into a generic category which was thought to be descriptive of their behavior: the Rogue Indians. The main river and lifeline for the tribes was given the same name.
To protect them from further slaughter by renegade whites, the government opened up nearby Fort Lane for the tribes shortly after the waves of prospectors arrived. As the women and children were leaving the village for the safety of the fort, they were ambushed by a group of Oregon volunteers, who killed two dozen defenseless natives. In retaliation, the Indians killed twenty-seven whites. The war that followed lasted five years. Defeated, the Rogues nonetheless held out against removal to the arid wasteland of Oklahoma, which was the official Indian Territory and dumping ground for all tribes whose homelands had been pre-empted during the great western land-grab. Instead, the Rogues were sent north, to the Siletz reservation west of Portland, which was itself later taken by whites when the local timber was deemed valuable.
Young Theodore Winthrop, looking for acid-tongued pioneer Jesse Applegate, visited southern Oregon in 1853. Six thousand people moved to Oregon that year, drawn by gold and the Donation Land Act, which gave each male white citizen the right to own 320 acres and his wife 320 acres if they stayed on the land for four years. By the time the act was repealed in 1855, more than 2.5 million acres of Oregon were in private ownership. Winthrop was uncharacteristically silent on the hordes of prospectors panning the deep canyons of the Rogue for gold, perhaps because they didn’t fit his prophecy of the Oregon Country’s becoming a New England of the West, whose people would be ennobled by the stunning landscape. Yet he had plenty to say about the deep forests and rich river country. Surely, man would never conquer the biggest trees on earth, he said.
Wading through the tangle on the west side of the Cascades, Winthrop offered a typical reaction of the time. “These giants with their rough plate armor were masters here,” he wrote. “One of human stature was unmeaning and incapable. With an axe, a man of muscle might succeed in smiting off a flake or a chip, but his slight fibres seemed naught to battle, with any chance of victory, the time-hardened sinews of these Goliaths.”
Forty-three years after Winthrop wrote those words, a young German immigrant was hobo-hopping his way around the country when his travels took him to the Illinois Valley, named for the river that flows north from the California border into the Rogue in the heart of the Siskiyous. The trees towered higher than anything he’d ever seen in the Black Forest or along the Rhine. Even Switzerland’s alpine valleys couldn’t compare with the jumble of mountain country in the Pacific Northwest. He wrote his brother in Germany about the free land, the opportunity for quick money, the swift-flowing rivers. When Frederick Krauss received the letter in 1896, he promptly left Germany with his wife and two kids and headed for the Siskiyous. He had a small stake, and didn’t speak the language. The rain could be a bit much, sixty inches a year on average. Summers tended to dry everything out and bring fire to the woods. But overall, this Oregon country agreed with Krauss.
During the time Frederick Krauss was establishing a hardscrabble home in the Northwest, another German-American, Frederick Weyerhaeuser, moved into a new mansion at 266 Summit Avenue in an exclusive neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. His next-door neighbor at 244 Summit was James Hill, the Great Northern Railroad tycoon. Weyerhaeuser, by then the dominant lumberman of his day, had made his fortune stripping the trees of the Great Lakes area and the upper Mississippi Valley, and he knew that the mature white pine in that area was just about gone. Within his lifetime an area half the size of Europe—Michigan, Minnesota, Wisconsin and parts of bordering states—had been deforested. Paul Bunyan and his blue ox Babe sprang from mythology in the North Woods lumber camps, but by the turn of century big Paul and every other timberman was looking west at the greatest stands of softwood the world had ever known, on the west side of the Cascade Mountains. Problem was, how to get all that wood to market. Hill had an idea, and more land than he knew what to do with to back it up.
Although the first sawmill in the Northwest was a Hudson’s Bay Company contraption built in 1827 and powered by water near the Gentlemen’s fort on the Columbia River, commercial logging never took off on a big scale, because of the distance from forest to market. Timber was scooted downslope to a river or salt water bay, and then shipped to San Francisco. Getting a boatload of heavy logs around Cape Horn to reach the East Coast was financially prohibitive. The railroads changed everything. When President Lincoln signed legislation in 1864 which chartered the Northern Pacific Railroad Company, he authorized a giveaway of vast sections of the West as incentive to complete a line from Lake Superior to Puget Sound. The company would get a checkerboard land grant of ten square miles for every mile of track completed in Oregon and Minnesota. In Washington Territory, they would get twice as much. All told, the Northern Pacific was deeded 38.5 million acres of public land. By the time Frederick Weyerhaeuser moved into the house on Summit Avenue, his neighbor James Hill controlled the Northern Pacific and all the western land which the government had given away. Hill offered this proposition: Weyerhaeuser would get 900,000 acres of Northern Pacific land grant property for $7 an acre. Weyerhaeuser, a shy man whose only hobby was beekeeping, thought this over, and then offered $5 an acre. They settled on $6. On January 3, 1900, Weyerhaeuser took title to 900,000 acres in Washington for a price of $5.4 million—the biggest private land sale in the country at the time. He paid about ten cents per thousand board feet—a dime per tree, on average—for timber that now sells for five hundred dollars per thousand board feet. The land was choice: the forested slopes around Mount Rainier and Mount St. Helens; acreage from the Cascade Crest to Puget Sound; the lowland woods near the Columbia in southwest Washington, and the temperate jungle near Naches Pass above the Yakima Valley, the spot where Winthrop had written that the forests of the Northwest were thick enough to keep man at bay.
By 1914, when the first Krauss boys born in the Siskiyous were working odd jobs in the woods, the Weyerhaeuser Company had expanded its empire in the Northwest to just under two million acres—about twice the size of the state of Delaware—and was well on its way to the claim of world’s largest forest-products firm. There were howls of outrage from populist stump speakers and radical union leaders. Teddy Roosevelt called Weyerhaeuser a “curse.” In reaction to the land-gobbling, Roosevelt established the national forest system in 1905, putting 150 million acres in public trust, to be managed by a corps of professional conservationists, the Forest Service.
Of course, some still believed that the dark, brooding stands of timber on steep mountain sides were protected by their very size. The supply was inexhaustible; at times, it even seemed to rain timber. During the summer of Winthrop’s visit, a settler named Ezra Meeker built a cabin near the Columbia River town of Kalama, Washington. A spring freshet carried a load of lightning-felled logs down from the hillsides to his homestead. Meeker guided his manna down the Columbia to a mill, where he was paid six dollars per thousand board feet.
But such stories were rare. More typical was the logger, a missing finger or two on each hand, who drifted west as the Great Lakes timber disappeared and found he had to work six days in the woods to pay for a one-night drunk. Weyerhaeuser lumber camps were run like prison yards. No conversation was allowed at meal times, no booze, no women, and, for several bloody decades, no unions. Until the labor revolts of 1917, the average pay was no more than two dollars for a ten-hour workday. Men were fired without prior warning. Pay was deducted for use of boots, blankets and bunkhouses, most of which were not heated. Little wonder that membership in the radical Industrial Workers of the World spread like jug whiskey through the logging camps. The constitution of the Wobblies didn’t mince any words: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common.” Their black cat symbol, emblazoned with the words BEWARE! SABOTAGE! and WE NEVER FORGET, began to pop up at scenes of industrial sabotage. When Longview, the world’s biggest planned timber town, opened on the banks of the Columbia with a company band playing “Nearer My God to Thee,” the headline in the Wob newspaper was: LONG-BELL HIRES JESUS MAN TO QUIET SLAVES.
The turbulence was not as bad in the Siskiyous, where most of the mills were small, family-run affairs. Lew Krauss, grandson of the poor farmer who left Germany in 1896, began work at his father’s mill as soon as he came of age. When he started a mill of his own—the Rough and Ready Lumber Company in Cave Junction, the principal hamlet in the Illinois Valley—there were more than twenty-five small timber operations. Krauss loved the Illinois Valley; he climbed the hills of the Kalmiopsis, fished the Rogue and the Illinois, panned for gold. As playground or income source, the natural world of the Siskiyous seemed to have no limits; as long as people used wood to build homes, the Krauss family would live well, and so Lew Krauss never gave a thought of going into anything but the timber business. He married, moved into a home not far from the house of his grandfather, and raised seven children. As the timber industry grew with the postwar construction boom, Rough and Ready prospered and expanded. By the standards of the Illinois Valley, where seasonal work was the norm, the Krauss family was rich.
In time, the small mills were consolidated or folded and the construction boom tapered off. By the 1970s, Rough and Ready was the only mill left in the Illinois Valley and was the chief source of income for residents of Cave Junction, employing more than two hundred people. By then others had moved to the red-earth hills and deep valleys of the ancient Siskiyous. They lived in communes around the old Indian village site of Takilma, just a stone’s throw from the California border, but their lifestyle did not sit well with the loggers of Cave Junction. They ran nude in the woods, smoked prodigious amounts of dope, gathered for mystic chants and grew organic vegetables. What particularly bothered some residents of Cave Junction was the new land ethic of these mostly well-educated residents of the Takilma communes, who revered the practices of the all-but-forgotten Rogue River Indians. Some of the younger residents of the Illinois Valley, however, sons and daughters of loggers, who didn’t want to work at Rough and Ready or be married to somebody who did, were attracted to the Takilma communes.
While the back-to-earth movement faded in other parts of America, it flourished here. Even when some of the young Cave Junction residents became disillusioned with commune life and returned to conventional society, their attitude toward the bountiful resources of the Siskiyous had changed. The vast tracts of old evergreens, they realized, were fast disappearing. “It’s the last great buffalo hunt,” said Lou Gold, a former Portland college professor who took up tree-sitting on behalf of the ancient forest.
As the timber companies cut all the trees on their private land, the pressure on the national forest reserves increased. Forest Service logging roads into the sanctuaries set up by Teddy Roosevelt tripled in the thirty years following World War II. The thousand-year-old trees were considered dead and useless by the people who ran the national forests. “One of my major initiatives has been to speed up harvest of the slow-growing or decadent, overmature timber stands in the Pacific Northwest, the old growth,” said John Crowell, the chief of the Forest Service, in 1982. At the same time, visitors started showing up from Europe and Southern California and Florida asking to see the old trees, the ones with trunks as wide as garage doors and canopies that blocked the sky. As interest in the old forest increased, Dr. Jerry Franklin, a forester, the son of a Columbia River mill worker, was asked by the Forest Service in the early 1980s to do a study of the old growth. Contrary to the conventional view at the time, Franklin found that these forests were not biological deserts, but unique ecosystems, the jungles of America, whose rotted snags provided homes for the spotted owl and fuel for the next generation of thousand-year-old trees.
Some of the younger residents of Cave Junction saw in the forests of the Siskiyous and the torrents of the Rogue and Illinois rivers another future: tourism. Sons and daughters of third-generation logging families, they set up whitewater rafting outfits or took the family homesteads and converted them to bed-and-breakfast guest houses. Their livelihood became dependent on the very scenery which their neighbors and brothers were tearing up. Battle lines were drawn, as clear as the physical difference between one side of the Illinois River and the other. East of the river is a patchwork of logging roads and clearcuts, and the red earth is warm to the touch on large sections of denuded land. West of the river is the only big wilderness area in the Siskiyous, the 200,000 acres of the Kalmiopsis, where no roads penetrate a crowd of madronas, conifers, wild rhododendrons and the rare, pink-flowered Kalmiopsis plant, a cousin of the azalea which was thought to be extinct before it was discovered here.
For the last decade, the fight here has been over a roadless 400,000 acres just north of the formal wilderness. Conservationists want that section of land and the wilderness lumped into a 700,000-acre Siskiyou National Park—all of it off limits to the chain saw. Timber companies, including Medco of Butte Falls, and Rough and Ready of Cave Junction, asked the Forest Service to build 214 miles of roads into the area and allow them to cut nearly six thousand acres annually. When the Forest Service announced plans to do just that, some Oregonians said that punching a road through the sacred heart of the Siskiyous and stripping all the trees on either side of it in order to save a few hundred jobs would be no different than trashing a cathedral to get at the candle wax. A lawsuit, filed on behalf of the endangered spotted owl, blocked the immediate cutting. Some of those who filed the suit received death threats.
“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: BEWARE! SABOTAGE! 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.
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.