Willapa Since WintergreenWillapa Since Wintergreen
I’ve come inside, reluctantly, to complete this revised coda for an old friend. My reluctance is not for the writing, or for the friend: I am delighted beyond words that Wintergreen is making a reappearance in this beautiful new edition, and nonetheless happy as pie to put down some new words for the occasion. My reluctance comes from the fact that five different species of butterflies are flitting about out there, nectaring on cherry laurel, Asian pear, salmonberry, and bluebells—in the middle of March! I’ve never seen such a thing here before. Willapa, like the World, is warming, and the land of wintergreen is not the same place it was when I wrote this book, thirty years ago.
Yes, thirty years have passed since Wintergreen first came out, fifteen since the last paperback edition, and I’m still here. No one is less surprised that things have changed in Willapa; perhaps no one is more surprised than I at the nature of some of those changes. Now, with the publication of this new Pharos edition, I have the rare opportunity to reflect on the seasoning of my previous thoughts, the metamorphosis of my subject, and the outcome and aftermath of some of the stories I was obliged to leave hanging in earlier editions. I have fixed some errors and infelicities in the main text, but have made no attempt to alter the original time frame. Some details, therefore, will seem dated; but that’s the way they were. Hence this afterword, to bring things up to date. Not that this is the last word. In real communities of humans and other species, sharp endings seldom occur; life is preparation for change, and the stories go on and on, like the land.
First, how has the book held up factually? I am happy to say that no serious challenges have arisen to the main facts in Wintergreen, although not all of them were welcome in some quarters. My accounting of “the sack of the woods” has withstood scrutiny at the level of what happened and what didn’t. My opinions and conclusions based on those facts, of which personal essay must largely be made, differ of course from those of some readers. But on the whole, I feel confident that the reportorial side of Wintergreen can still be relied upon by careful students of Northwest land use, history, and politics of ecology. Several fine, more recent books, including William Dietrich’s The Final Forest, Robert Heilman’s Overstory Zero, Kathie Durbin’s Tree Huggers, and Chris Maser’s Forest Primeval all help to bring the saga of the deep dark woods up to date. James LeMonds’s Deadfall, sprung from the opposite corner of the Willapa Hills over by Castle Rock, gives the best picture yet of logging life (and death) in southwest Washington.
When the first edition of Wintergreen was published (Scribner, 1986), we knew of little old-growth forest left in the logged-over landscape of Willapa. I highlighted the already-famous Long Island grove of ancient cedars and a small but rich remnant called Hendrickson Canyon. When we left the former, Congressman Don Bonker (D) was determined to wrest the money from Congress to save the second half of the cedar grove from cutting by Weyerhaeuser, who were holding out for top dollar. With Senator Slade Gorton’s cooperation in the Senate, he succeeded, against all odds during the Reagan administration, and the cedars were protected. Years later, Bonker’s successor in the Third District, Rep. Jolene Unsoeld (D), managed to secure additional appropriations to purchase second-growth buffer lands around the grove to protect it from windthrow. Now all timber harvest (second-growth federal trees swapped in partial exchange for the cedar grove) has been completed. Jody Atkinson oversaw the logging for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Weyerhaeuser loggers cooperated, and the damage was minimized. At last the entirety of Long Island is protected within the Willapa Bay National Wildlife Refuge. It is good that these things transpired under Bonker and Unsoeld: their conservative successor, Rep. Linda Smith (R), made it clear that she was no friend of endangered species or federal “set-asides.” Smith’s own successor, Rep. Brian Baird (D), presided over further critical refuge additions, including prime on-shore elk habitat; but his follow-up act, Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler (R), has nixed some further refuge expansion. Conservation comes in waves and windows, but thanks to recent gerrymandering of the Third District, this R/D teeter-totter may be stalled for now on the R side. Not that the Republicans have always resisted conservation, as the next stories show.
After local resident Jack Scharbach brought it to their attention, Hendrickson Canyon attracted much interest from state ecologists. We found others eager to protect a heritage forest in these hills, including loggers and their families. I sat on the Commissioner of Public Lands-appointed Natural Heritage Advisory Council for eight years, pestering my colleagues incessantly, as Hendrickson slowly rose from a proposed preserve to the number one candidate for protection under the Trust Lands Transfer program (TLT). An innovative approach, TLT allows trust land, administered by the Department of Natural Resources (DNR) for income to schools and counties, to be transferred into protected status as either a Natural Area Preserve (NAP) or Natural Resource Conservation Area (NRCA). This minefield of acronyms is a small miracle, taking ecologically unique state lands, not the best for logging anyway in most cases, off the rolls of the money-making acres, while losing nothing for the trusts. Tracts are purchased with general funds which then go directly into school accounts, as would normally occur only when the land was logged: a win-win if ever there was one. But just as Hendrickson Canyon was poised to be transferred, the legislature approved no funds for the program, and we went back to waiting and lobbying for another five years.
An earlier Commissioner of Public Lands, Brian Boyle (R), strongly supported the TLT program and made an administrative withdrawal of Hendrickson to protect it temporarily. The next commissioner to be elected, Jennifer Belcher (D), maintained that status. But this could not go on forever, and there was pressure to make more state timber available for sale. Eventually, formal preserve dedication had to be achieved if we were to rest easy. When the TLT again came up for appropriations, I asked the Wahkiakum County Board of Commissioners, led by Esther Gregg, to pass a resolution in favor of a Hendrickson Canyon NRCA. They came through with key support, as did the Gray’s River Grange. Then our local senator, Senate Majority Leader Sid Snyder, a Democrat from Long Beach, gave his vital endorsement. The legislature not only passed the appropriation, but placed Hendrickson Canyon in the top “must acquire” category. But it still had to be approved by the Board of Natural Resources.
As the key meeting of the Board approached, it probably didn’t help when, as I lobbied her for the umteenth time, I swept a glass of red wine all over Commissioner Belcher’s blue suit, just before her scheduled speech. She forgot and forgave, but stood back next time. Now a new and unexpected problem arose. Because the canyon is home to nesting marbled murrelets, a threatened species that came into prominence after the spotted owl, state appraisers rated its value very low. This meant the University Trust would receive little value for the land and timber. There was a real danger of the Board turning down the transfer on that account. But DNR economists devised a bold scheme to apply substantial economic value for non-commercial habitat. Armed with this new tool, and in spite of last-ditch resistance from antis, Jennifer Belcher muscled it through in one of her last acts as Commissioner of Public Lands. Hendrickson Canyon was finally saved after a campaign of nearly twenty years, on December 5, 2000. Celebrating with supporters at Olympia’s Fishbowl Brewpub, I literally cried into my beer. And what a marvelous sequel, when Nirvana bassist/community activist Krist Novoselić bought the quarter section of land immediately adjacent to Hendrickson Canyon, doubling the amount of protected land. Krist and his wife, Darbury, became volunteer stewards for the nature reserve.
That long-awaited victory helped balance the loss of yew-rich Ellis Creek and the rare noble fir stand atop the tallest Willapa hill, Boistfort Peak, both of which Weyerhaeuser logged in spite of conservationists’ efforts to protect them. While such losses continued, several old-growth fragments unknown to me when I first wrote Wintergreen were located by Washington Natural Heritage Program biologists and others, and some were saved. One of these stands is a steep square-mile in the Gray’s River headwaters, part of which became the Willapa Divide NAP.
Well to the west, on the other side of Radar Hill, the biologists found a substantial stand of naturally regenerated hemlocks that grew up following deforestation by the great ’Twenty-one Blow, interspersed with hundreds of giant western red cedars that withstood the storm, and a great old-growth Sitka spruce forest as well. One day, with planner-birder Jim Sayce, I saw the only goshawk I have ever seen in these hills shooting over the deep green crease of the South Nemah River. When then-Commissioner Boyle came to see the incognito, he encountered friends of ours, Sue and Norm Osterman, who took him inside a great hollow cedar we all loved. He was impressed. As a direct result, I believe, he bumped up the site’s rating, and some 1,400 acres were secured as the South Nemah Cedars NRCA. Years later, on the same day they created 159-acre Hendrickson Canyon NRCA, the Board of Natural Resources acted to enlarge both Willapa Divide and South Nemah, to 587 and 2,439 acres respectively, safeguarding their big trees, marbled murrelets, and rare salamanders for as long as these hills last. Other small additions have followed from time to time, when TLT funds have become available.
The old growth inventory also includes a pair of upland Sitka spruce forests in Forts Canby and Columbia, now safe as state park natural forests; and a pair of tidewater spruce “surge-plains,” protected by DNR, The Nature Conservancy, and the Columbia Land Trust on the lower Chehalis and Gray’s rivers. Additional reserves established on the estuaries of the Niawiakum, Bone, and Elk rivers brought vociferous opposition from locals concerned that hunting and public access might suffer. Once these fears were addressed, one or two politicians continued to fight the whole idea, but their objections showed up as petty in light of the tiny acreages involved compared to the vast industrial forest estate. Other local citizens lent their passionate support, and good sense prevailed in the end. Interestingly, one of the local citizens concerned about abridgement of hunting and fishing by NAPs, Rep. Brian Blake (D), got into politics over the issue. Now chairman of the House Agriculture and Natural Resources Committee, he is a close observer of nature.
Two more new reserves give additional cause for celebration, both originating in the vigilance and creative activism of a local logger-turned-filmmaker. Situated hard by U.S. 101 where it rounds Willapa Bay, the Teal Slough giant cedar stand lies within easy reach of several schools. It is frequently visited by college and school groups, tours, and others wishing to experience old growth but unable or to go out to Long Island. But it was very nearly logged.
One man spearheaded the effort to save the stand. Rex Ziak belonged to a four-generation logging family and had worked in the woods himself. Familiar with the timber business, he spotted the flagging that signaled a future timber sale. Determined that the trees should stand, he went to work convincing others. An Emmy-winning cinematographer, Ziak took time out of a busy filming schedule to lobby the owners, at his own expense. Doing everything right that Michael Moore did wrong in Roger and Me, he donned a sport jacket, plied secretaries with gifts of canned salmon, and penetrated the upper floors of the John Hancock Tower in Boston. Belling the cats in their executive lair, he sought clemency for the remarkable educational opportunity represented by the little Teal Slough eyebrow above the bay. Before they knew what he was doing, he took out a rope the circumference of the trees Hancock was about to cut, spread it on the boardroom floor, and invited the absentee landlords to step inside. In the end he persuaded, cajoled, and/or shamed John Hancock executrons into sparing the grove for the time being. Eventually, The Nature Conservancy (TNC) stepped in to help the state buy Teal Slough from Hancock for dedication as an NRCA. Now, when we wish to show students a bit of forest as it was and could be; share with visitors a cedar that predates Shakespeare and rivals the redwoods in size; or take the tonic of the deep old wood for ourselves, and haven’t time to canoe to Long Island or hike into the South Nemah, we come here.
Rex’s influence didn’t stop with Teal Slough. Hancock held another hunk of leftover old growth in the misty heights above the Naselle estuary. Most of my previous experience with Ellsworth Slough had come from a couple of memorable outings. The first was a hot, birthday paddle with Thea up the creek, swimming from the canoe and discovering a colony of dun skippers at the forest’s marge. On the second occasion, we accompanied a bizarre expedition of young ancient forest advocates who stormed in from Seattle to demonstrate their solidarity with the woods. Bizarre, because their zeal was unmatched by any experience afield. One of them promptly got lost. Our vigil ended with pancakes at the house of friends on Parpala Road and the radioed news that the ardent urban warrior had walked out the long way and hitchhiked home.
Ellsworth is a wonderland of steep ravines, gin-clear streams, massive spruces and cedars, giant sword ferns, and arm-deep sphagnum mats—a republic of Deep Green. Recently, prowling the canyons and flats with Rex Ziak and Cathy Maxwell, I found the first woolly chanterelles I’ve ever seen in Willapa, and red-breasted nuthatches, rare in the logged-over hills, beeped in abundance. For a long time it seemed as if the place was doomed to certain logging, and indeed parts of it were carved away. Roads and landings stood ready to take the rest. But in view of the attention given in Orion Afield magazine and elsewhere to Ziak’s earlier campaign, the company decided it would rather not attract the harsh PR that cutting this site would bring, and they offered it for sale. The Nature Conservancy announced plans to buy and restore the entire 5,000+ acre watershed of Ellsworth Creek, assembling the whole from the remaining old growth acres cobbled together with diverse, older second growth and some recently logged lands. The DNR abetted the effort by establishing an NRCA on adjacent Elkhorn Creek. Not long into the campaign, the Paul Allen Foundation kicked in two and a half million dollars to get it going—the largest contribution TNC’s state office had ever received. The full-time manager, Tom Kollasch, has a challenging job balancing restoration with an unruly pack of opinions about how the site should be managed to serve the community as well as the creatures. TNC has since pulled out of its smaller holdings in southwest Washington, but retains Ellsworth as a showcase landscape-level project. All this in little old, post-old-growth Willapa—unimaginable a few years ago! Now it seems that Ellsworth and Teal Slough’s forests will continue to stand, to signify that big old trees and their communities still matter in the wintergreen land.
Lest it seem as if the land is all being locked up, as the zanier antis contend, let’s place it in perspective: The remains of the ancient forest of Willapa amount to well under ten square miles, out of some 2,500 square miles formerly graced by one of the greatest woodlands on Earth. Anyone who contends that the conservationists have been grabby had better be good at keeping a straight face. It may not be much, but the fact that we’re in better shape on old growth than I thought we were in 1986 has come as a pleasant surprise. An even larger surprise has been the rapid liquidation of the second growth.
When I came to Gray’s River in 1978, I found much naturally seeded second-growth forest, largely western hemlock with some Douglas-fir, western red cedar, and other species. Some of it had been planted, but without the slash burning and herbicide spraying that are standard practice today, and not in rows of genetically selected, engineered, or cloned supertrees. The trees became big and nicely spaced; the understory not too tangled, yet relatively wild and growing in diversity by the year. There were lots of chanterelles, torrent salamanders, and other life forms intolerant of freshly disturbed, over-young, or simplified monoculture woodlots. In short, these were woods on the way to becoming real forests. We took a lot of pleasure in them, and yet we also took them for granted, because they were not old growth. How could we have known that vast tracts of the good secondary woods would be liquidated in between editions of this book—literally shaven in fifteen years’ time? Woods that could and should have provided jobs, fiber, and diversity for fifty years plus.
The sack of the second growth came about for several reasons. The unions were largely gone from the woods, and the incentive was therefore raised for independents and contractors to cut as much and as fast as possible to pay their bills. There was a rush to export timber at peak prices before state and federal restrictions on exporting raw logs came into effect. Reduction of federal acres open to timber sales due to President Clinton’s Northwest Forest Plan put a premium on private stumpage, encouraging gyppos to scour the hills for every widow’s back forty or front-yard five. A new influx of settlers and developers raised land prices for homesites, inspiring some owners to barber the trees and bulldoze the stands for quick conversion to real estate. But the most important element was the transfer of enormous acreage from old timber concerns to general investors and holding companies.
Weyerhaeuser and Crown Zellerbach companies catch some severe criticism in Wintergreen. Yet, for all their rough handling of the woods and the people of the woods, they at least seemed devoted to forestry in the long term back then. But as Weyco converted more and more land to commercial real estate, I wondered. Then Weyerhaeuser, in rationalizing its holdings, sold thousands of acres in Willapa to the John Hancock insurance giant. Crown Zellerbach was snapped up by British junk-bonds investor Sir James Goldsmith and later converted to Cavenham Forest Industries under the U.K.-U.S. firm, Hanson plc. Neither Hancock nor Hanson had any history of commitment to sustainable forests; shareholders’ profits were their sole concern. With decisions now coming not from Tacoma and Portland but Boston and London, these entities proceeded to log the second growth at rates undreamed of by the former landlords. Crown’s former Cathlamet Managed Forest has since changed hands at least twice more. My visionary neighbor Bobby Larson sagely proposed that the county should acquire the whole vast estate, thus bringing its future back home; but this was never pursued. Had it happened, our income-starved little county would have a steady flow of timber receipts into the budget, instead of waiting every year to hear how fluctuating stumpage prices and diminishing state timber sales will dictate economies and cuts. At least a state bill was passed, pushed hard by Wahkiakum County Commissioner Dan Cothren, requiring timber-rich counties to share receipts with timber-strapped counties.
Now one wonders if Weyerhaeuser is having second thoughts about trimming its kingdom, having recently purchased 645,000 million acres from Longview Timber. But however much the principals in the woods have played musical chairs, the outcome was the same: before we could turn around, the chanterelle woods were gone. In their place, vast expanses of dense young doghair hemlock and attempted Douglas-fir plantations covered the slopes. Willapa is still wintergreen, but the overstory often looks like undergrowth.
Nor is the horizon likely to change back into big trees. The American and Japanese appetites for cellulose pulp have converted much of the Columbia River lowlands from Skamokawa to Puget Island to Kalama into hybrid cottonwood plantations scheduled for cutting every seven years, and the uplands into hemlock thickets that will be lucky to stand for thirty. Friends in the mills tell me not to look for many sawlogs being grown any more, but to expect chipboard and other composition products made from smallwood fiber to take over. That means shorter and shorter cycles of rotation—sticks barely old enough to vote now go down the road on the logging trucks in bundles smaller than single trees of yore. Skinnier and skinnier trees are going to make up the forests of tomorrow. And when the reprod is all doghair, the diversity goes to pot.
State timberlands, the only public forests in Willapa and not much compared to the private holdings, have been managed somewhat more conservatively. Yet in spite of grumbling over new regulations, DNR field personnel and contract loggers continue to cruise and harvest plenty of board feet. The September 14, 1995 Wahkiakum County Eagle announced that “Conservation pressure hampers DNR harvest,” and went on to detail officials’ concerns over the rules. Yet two weeks later, the Eagle reported: “State trust lands expected to produce highest revenue in history for next six years.” This level of cutting is good for taxpayers, but whether the forest can sustain it remains to be seen. Forest practice regulations have been slightly stiffened, and “new forestry” leaves a few standing live trees and snags behind as well as woody debris on the ground. But these “reforms” often lead to self-parody: “green-tree retention” amounts to two trees per acre in one current harvest scheme. Examples of bad logging still abound. The gouged-out road and take-some, leave-some logging committed on the once-beautiful forested knoll above Naselle School looks like the most bizarre of the kids’ sculptured buzzcut hairdos: uglier than sin. Enormous, old-style clearcuts are not yet merely memories. Nor are jokes of streambank buffers, one alder deep. Smaller streams, Class IV and V in the state rating system based on anadromous fish, still require no setbacks at all, and I have seen recent clearcuts right down to the shoreline of the Class I Naselle River. Thinly stretched enforcement and paltry fines, easily absorbed as the cost of doing business, encourage some operators to ignore even mild new initiatives toward better forestry. Soil still runs into the salmon streams, and the herbicides still make bitter rain in spring.
As I wrote in “The Sack of the Woods,” Willapa being essentially post old-growth, the northern spotted owl is extinct here, so the furor around its protection didn’t affect things here much, as in the Cascades. (In any case, the adaptable replacement species, the barred owl, is abundant here now.) And, these being all private or state timberlands, President Clinton’s Forest Plan doesn’t touch them much either. But one other element in recent years has touched Willapa. That was the listing of the marbled murrelet as a threatened species. Murrelets nest on broad, mossy old-growth boughs, and a few birds still commute from Willapa to the sea and back nightly. So a few parcels have been withdrawn from logging for murrelet protection, causing cash-strapped commissioners to fulminate against them (never mind their total habitat would take loggers only days to liquidate). A stroke of bad luck landed the best site for wind power production, on Rader Ridge, immediately adjacent to a major Marbled Murrelet Management Area (MOMA) overlapping the South Nemah Cedars NRCA. PUD and county commissioners trying to comply with a green power mandate from Olympia pushed the wind farm, only to find the conservationists agin ’em because of marbeled murrelets. I understood their frustration, but the windmills would have killed some number of the very rare seabirds, and the project had to die a’borning.
Against such business as usual and unusual, a remarkable development occurred that briefly cast a brighter light on the misty hills and their ring of rivers and bays. My former forestry school classmate and colleague in The Nature Conservancy, Spencer Beebe, saw the need for a) protection of the temperate rainforests, and b) homegrown, locally controlled institutions for planning ecologically sound, sustainable development. He left Conservation International, his former brain child, to found Ecotrust, a Portland-based organization dedicated to those premises. One of their early moves, in conjunction with the Washington Office of The Nature Conservancy, was to catalyze a local consortium known as the Willapa Alliance in 1992. The Alliance sought to rally oyster, cranberry, timber, fish, tourism, and other conservation-minded folk to work for a sustainable economy in the Willapa watershed. The Alliance also tried to marshal forces to combat invasive Spartina cordgrass in Willapa Bay, while spurring publication of an impressive book (A Tidewater Place, by Edward Wolf) and a CD-ROM interpreting the watershed (Understanding Willapa, Good Northwest/Pacific GIS).
Most importantly, the Alliance got everyone talking (not always comfortably) about resource issues that concern every person and every species here. As former Alliance Director Dan’l Markham said, “The Alliance provides a forum for gaining new insight into the workings of the Willapa ecosystem and for finding creative ways to ensure the longterm well-being of Willapa’s communities, lands, and waters” through science, management, education, involvement, and sustainable development. A list of social and biological indicators of regional health and sustainability was prepared, to guide the group’s further growth and programs. The timber giants were invited to participate, in hopes of developing some model forestry and eco-assessment techniques. Weyerhaeuser invested a half-million dollars in the ShoreTrust Trading Group, a lending institution started by the Alliance to fund ecologically viable projects. Cavenham/Hanson put $20,000 into local emergency services. Hancock Timber Resources Group cooperated as a businesslike but willing seller of some estuarine reserve lands.
But the problems inhering in a watershed obliged to satisfy numerous conflicting expectations are many and formidable. Cranberries crashed when the huge Ocean Spray cooperative failed to support smaller producers. Traditional oyster growers continued to spray their beds with Sevin (carbaryl) to kill mud-shrimp, and became embattled with proponents of an unpolluted Willapa Bay. (The Sevin was eventually phased out, but now they want to use a neonicotinoid pesticide (imidacloprid), which can be very dangerous to non-target invertebrates. When toxic chemicals must be employed to sustain a non-native species (Japanese oysters) against a native one (mud shrimp) in a so-called pristine estuary, couldn’t there be a flaw in the picture?) Though the neonics are a recent concern after big bee die-offs, such questions plagued the Alliance from the start.
A parallel debate played out over introduced East Coast cordgrass Spartina alternifolia, which was rapidly converting productive mud flats to pretty but biologically simplified meadows. Spartina-fighting agencies fought bitterly with organic oyster growers and other citizens opposed to spraying the bay with Rodeo. I was conflicted: while agreeing Spartina altered the estuary’s ecology, I was concerned that no one had documented the dangers of glyphosate to the phytoplankton or the bay as a whole. A plant-sucking leafhopper recruited and tested as a biocontrol agent buoyed hopes, and I had my own hope for mechanical control. But the chemical forces prevailed, aggressive spraying proceeded, and cordgrass has been impressively reduced—at what cost to the eco-system, we cannot yet know. Meanwhile, some oystermen want to begin spraying Japanese eelgrass, hard to tell from the essential native eelgrass; the bay has been invaded by exotic green crabs, and native Dungeness crabs are under threat from Army Corps plans to dredge the Columbia deeper and dump the spoils on off-shore crab beds, even as the Pacific removes the beaches of Outer Willapa faster than they can be laid down. And so it goes.
The Willapa Alliance was a good dream. But like many dreams, it grew chaotic, and eventually dissipated like mists over the oyster beds when everyone woke up to their ongoing, inexorable conflicts. Some poor staffing choices and city/country language barriers didn’t help. Maybe the job was just too big; maybe the hopes too high. Or maybe the challenges the Alliance undertook are simply intractable in a time when philistine mercantilism rules the day and population pressures, globalism, rural decay, and climate change, fueled by suspicion and ideology, make for constantly shifting ground and rising water. Eventually Ecotrust pulled back to Portland, leaving a vital presence in the form of an important bioregional web source based in Gray’s River (www.tidepool.org), run by writer Ed Hunt, for a while; and an alternative, community financial resource, ShoreBank, until some big ordinary bank bought it. And the Alliance faded away. Anyway, along came salmon, overwhelming everything else.
Not that salmon are anything new here. They were, after all, one of the three great legs of the economy that built the place, along with logs and milk. While dairying has largely left and logging has metamorphosed into pulp farming, the fishery too went to hell. Between dams on the Columbia, overfishing, degradation of spawning beds from upstream road-building and steep-slope logging, herbicides and industrial runoff, and other factors, the great fish haven’t had a chance. The federal listing of eleven runs of Northwest salmonids as threatened or endangered species under the Clinton regime sought to turn that around. Native fishing rights (complicated by the rise of reservation casinos and federal recognition of the Chinook Tribe, accomplished under Clinton and immediately retracted by G. W Bush), the future of gillnetting on the Columbia as a way of life, the role of hatcheries as policy favoring genetically native stocks replaces the old mix’n’match philosophy, and a thousand other issues will all be militated by Grandfather Salmon. Grandmother Salmon’s First Harvest may even come back to waters long deprived, if blocking dams on the Snake and other rivers actually come down, as they already have on the Elwha and White Salmon. Monthly, one reads of new salmon plans, compacts, consortiums, and commissions. The Columbia deepening was held up by salmon. Caspian terns, elegant black-capped fishers with fire-engine-red bills, as well as double-crested cormorants, have become public enemies, because they nest on dredge-spoil islands in unprecedented numbers—and eat salmon. Marine mammals pit their protectors against those who feel sea lions eat too many fish. Water-quality decisions are driven by salmon as much as people. Everything that happens from here on out will have salmon scales all over it.
I earnestly hope that the infinitely complex brokerings and tinkerings to come will somehow restore the viability of the Columbia gillnet fishery. This may be asking too much. The old tension between sport fishers and commercial fishers has come to a head with the governors of both Washington and Oregon bowing to their fish and wildlife commissions’ desires to favor the more lucrative sport lobby and all but kill off the traditional, sustainable, and culturally and economically vital gillnetting industry on the main stem of the Columbia. The architects of this plan say it’s for conservation, but I believe that is them being cynical: they just prefer thousands of fishing licenses and boat-and-gear-sales taxes over the families—30-40 in Wahkiakum alone—who still depend upon commercial fishing.
One only needs to read Irene Martin’s elegant history of Wahkiakum County, Beach of Heaven, and her other books drawn from that rich culture, to see what gillnetting has meant to the human texture of the place. Irene and her fisherman husband, Kent, have toiled and agitated in the salmon battles with an intelligent and informed vigor that activists who love their place anywhere on earth might well emulate. Another couple, Cathy Maxwell and her late husband Ed, have done the same from different vantages—Ed as the supervisor of salmon hatcheries in the region, Cathy as the consummate plantswoman. In the process, people like the Martins and Maxwells have taught me much of what I know about this place.
For it is the people of Willapa who have been Wintergreen’s greatest gift to me. For an upstart outsider to be able to come in and comment, not always gently, on a rich and settled community’s way of life, and to be tolerated, is a mark of a good people in a good place. There have been a few threats and jake brakes from those who never read the book and assumed the worst about me; but there have also been loggers in red suspenders and tin pants knocking at my back door, asking to buy the book, and would I sign it? Sadly, much of the community’s human old growth has passed in my time here. Bob Torppa, Jim Fauver, Ed Sorenson, Walt and Mary Kandoll, Harold Badger, Johnny Kapron, Norman Durrah, Veryl and Barbara Chamberlain, Helen King, Opal Kraft, Norman and Myrtle Anderson, Jenny Pearson, Glenrose Hedlund, and postmaster Jean Calhoun have all gone on, and most recently, my oldest friend in Gray’s River, Marilyn Gudmundsen. Yet Bobby Larson still holds forth at Grange, and Carlton Appelo at the telephone company. New folks come in, some of them influenced by the book; my friend and neighbor Steve Puddicombe even named his pretty spread, the old Kandoll place on the banks of Gray’s River, “Wintergreen Farm.”
Rex Ziak of Naselle is one of the delights among the people I’ve come to know since I wrote the first edition. Krist Novoselić, who became and remains master of Gray’s River Grange, is another. Then there is Walkin’ James Powell. One day I got a letter from a boy across the hills in Menlo. Soon thereafter, he walked the ragged way from Menlo to Gray’s River, thirty miles across the hills on logging roads, to visit us. He had read Wintergreen and felt he’d found a soulmate . . . not much of a fieldmate, however: James routinely walked dozens of miles a day across rough country, and I never could keep up with him. But it’s been a marvel to watch this naturalist prodigy, who began with birds and big trees and moved on to plants and the rest, develop into a grown and educated resource professional who has mapped the land for Ecotrust, pruned trees for future forests, and gobbled the Willapa with the walker’s appetite, naturalist’s hunger, and lanky stride, like some Bob Marshall of the clearcuts instead of wilderness.
We know so much more now about the natural history of the Willapa Hills. Alan Richards, Ann Musché, Andrew Emlen and others have traced in the birds nicely, Jim Atkinson the herpetofauna. Ed Maxwell found more western toads and tailed frogs along the Naselle River, though in small numbers; and Thea, with Bruce and Terry Satterlund, finally discovered masses of toads breeding almost in our backyard, on the West Fork . . . after all these years of searching all over the Hills! Cathy Maxwell has recorded many more plants in the hills, including some first state records and some disjuncts from the Olympic Mountains and Oregon Coast Range, and published her opus: “Vascular Flora of the Willapa Hills and Lower Columbia River Area of Southwest Washington” (Douglasia Occasional Papers iv: 1991). We have gone from next to no knowledge about our butterflies to a known fauna of some fifty species, many found in our own butterfly garden, ten percent of which were here today. The subtle and often-ignored aspect of Willapa has its advantages in rendering discovery easy to come by. For example, no one has ever attended much to the moths and dragonflies here; Lars Krabo and Dennis Paulson, respectively their leading Northwest authorities, are helping us to flesh out lists. The highly diverse flies, the waterbears, the lichens, and such await their chroniclers. Meanwhile, the flora and fauna don’t sit still: elk are still caught in nets and transferred out of the Columbian white-tailed deer’s reserve, now known as the Julia Butler Hansen National Wildlife Refuge. Bears have been on the increase, since the people of Washington passed an initiative aimed at ending the hunting of bears with hounds and baits; but I have yet to see one here.
If nature’s close study remains the domain of the few, conservation has become everybody’s business. When I wrote Wintergreen, except for reports on timber harvest levels, resource stories were rare in the local press. Now you can’t pick up a paper without reading headlines such as these, hot off the press as I write: “Senate Democrats seek to protect rural areas from Shoreline regulations” (Wahkiakum County Eagle), “Crucial habitat project adds 871 Chinook acres” (Chinook Observer), and “Fishermen, environmentalists sue EPA over pesticides and salmon” (The Daily Astorian). Among the heat and bluster, real advances take place. For example, the Columbia Land Trust has used salmon recovery money to purchase and restore several major floodplain and abandoned farmland habitats, though not without ruction among those who think they are gobbling up the county. The Grays River Habitat Enhancement District and a dozen other agencies and programs try to bend the river to their will, and the river flows on regardless, and pretty much does what it wants.
Historical preservation has also made gains. Across K-M Mountain from here, in the river-village of Skamokawa, a handsome old wooden belltower looms out of the “smoke on the waters,” which is what Skamokawa means in Chinookan. Once a schoolhouse, then a lodge, Redmen Hall has been restored by Friends of Skamokawa into a fine Riverlife Interpretive Center and a locus for music and the arts. Across Brooks Slough, Silverman’s Emporium once served steamboats calling at the town. Its pilings rotting, the venerable riverside mercantile seemed doomed to slide into the Columbia. But it was found, rescued, and carefully restored by Arnold Andersen, who made its beautiful Lurline Auditorium available for annual community shows and auctions; now, offices and a B&B. The county’s first condos mounted an invasion on the mouth of Skamokawa Creek, but the project failed, leaving a renovated village shop, a popular B&B, and a kayak center in its wake. Historical churches have been restored in Cathlamet and up Deep River, and the stately Cathlamet Hotel is in business again. The much-beloved Gray’s River Covered Bridge has been rebuilt to its old plan (except strong enough now for the school bus and milk truck), and for several years had its own festival each August, when the county’s population would double for a day. Too much work for too few folks, this became a simple picnic, and then an annual 4-H dinner inside the bridge; all ways to honor the grand old structure. The Grange’s Ahlberg Park beside the bridge, formerly part of Bobby Larson’s dairy farm, welcomes all visitors and honors H. P. Ahlberg, who built my house, started the Grange, and then went back to Sweden, leaving his daughter Ebba and the Sorenson family she married into to carry on Swede Park.
What with the dairy herds nearly all shipped out and the post office stolen off to Rosburg, our village has fallen into an even deeper torpor, not to say that it’s moribund. One fine dairy remains, the Burkhalters’ of Rosburg, certified to milk for Organic Valley. The cafe and the store are temporarily closed again, but Duffy’s Irish Pub thrives in Gray’s River, having arisen from the ruins of the long-dead Valley Tavern. Restarauteur Al Salazar has created an almost baroque collection of funky and charming buildings alongside the riverbank, and bartender-without-peer Lorraine serves a perfect Guinness or Dick’s IPA from Chehalis for sipping on the porch among the swallows and bald eagles. Only twenty miles to the east, the redoubtable River Mile 38 Brewpub has materialized beside the Cathlamet Marina, serving superb local ales. Now this one never would have guessed or believed, back in the early Wintergreen days of nothing to drink but Rainier Ale! And fifteen miles west in Pacific County, a fine branch of the Timberland Regional Library arose close enough to make its beneficent presence felt, after the good folk of Wahkiakum County twice turned down a library district initiative by a few votes. For all the gains and losses, we still have no traffic lights in the entire county, deer and elk still outnumber people except during hunting season, and the night skies are still dark.
Realizing they could do better raising trailers than trees, a few folks have cleared chunks of forest for homesites, and manufactured homes and a few stick-built houses have sprouted here and there on scraped-off benches above the river. Fair enough. For a while, an unsuitable subdivision planned for the floodplain threatened to change the valley significantly. But after a struggle, cooler heads prevailed, and a better future for everyone came about. Now those fields are thick with red clover and orange sulfur butterflies in high summer, and beautiful Wagyu cattle the year round.
For now, unimpressed by people’s plans for the valley, the elk walk where they will, although of late they are limping, thanks to a troubling epidemic of foot-rot. The river still rises and falls to the venting of the clouds, the petitioning of the salmon. As predicted in an earlier edition of this book, Captain Robert Gray and crew indeed came back to the Gray’s River tidal basin on May 15, 1992, the bicentennial of his crossing of the bar in the Columbia Rediviva. Lots of people came after all, including schoolchildren, folksingers, and Chinook Indians beating drums in Plains Indian headdresses. Grangers in period boats and dress approximated Capt. Gray and mates, rowed up the river by the local basketball team not quite in period dress but still wearing the pioneers’ Nordic names. Wirkkalas and Penttilas, Johnsons and Ericksons were much in evidence. Old families, and some of the old ways, persist among the new. Next, the Lower Columbia region braced for the bicentennial of the coming of Lewis & Clark, who spent the wettest, most uncomfortable nights of their entire trip at a place near here they called the “Dismal Nitch,” at the onset of the autumn rains of 1805. That was a five-year orgy of remembrance and pilgrimage, which left us (thanks not in small part to Rex Ziak) with a new national park, lots of tourist dollars, and the hope that California condors, such as Clark and Lewis found here, might one day come back too.
For now, even in Willapa, comes the time of the three C’s: carbon, climate, and catastrophe. Concerning carbon, we lie happily outside anyone’s idea of a good place to frack or drill. But we have just lived through a citizen’s Battle Royale to beat back a plan most foul, to install a liquified natural gas terminal across the Columbia from Puget Island. After the speculators left town, among their debts and detritus was found a list of the places that would be incinerated in case of an accident, in order. The home and farm of some dear friends of mine were # 8 on the list. Need I say more? Two other LNG proposals survive for now, but I have faith that they will go down as well. Meanwhile, the folks of Longview, in southeast Willapa, and Grays Harbor in the northwest, are fighting off coal and propane and oil trains and terminals right and left.
As for climate, wood nymphs seem to have colonized western Wahkiakum County for good, and the five kinds of butterflies out there today in March tell the same tale, as does frogsong hitting its full pitch in January, daffodils outpacing crocuses, and various other phenological disconformities such as this very spring has exemplified: we too will experience the sharp edge of change, the great warming and drying that will render many places harder and harder to occupy. We may get the easier end of things to come in this green and pleasant corner; but even that may bring change, if we are finally discovered, heaven forbid, as a viable place to live, as the rest of the continent withers, freezes, or just blows away.
But the third coming thing is one from which we shall have no escape, at least on our coastal margins and sea-level invaginations: catastrophe, and its aftermath. For the sea level is rising, and the Cascadean subduction event and its attendant tsunami are on their way, already overdue. The Juan de Fuca Plate is slipping beneath the North American Plate, and is presently hung up. When they crack free, in a nine-point earthquake, the coast will drop several feet, the great wave will follow, and our shores and valleys, peninsula and estuaries, flats and floodplains, hollows and homes, will become very different from the way we know them, very fast. We can all hope it holds off, and if the crack-up comes up or down the coast we may not get the worst of it. But the Great Adjustment will surely come in the next century or two (current estimates give it 17-35% chance in the next fifty years) and the bones of the land will roll again in the rapture of orogeny.
Meanwhile, my old home place, Swede Park, has stood here for more than half the time since Lewis and Clark came. It perches above the registered hundred-year farm of the Ahlbergs and Sorensons, returning now to marsh and willow-brake. One Swede, Thea Linnaea, lived here until she passed way too damn soon in late 2013. Our honorary Finn, the great cat Bokis Volkilla, lasted nearly twenty years, and resides beneath the plum grove where fringe-cup blooms in a wave of fragrance each May.
Now one Anglo-German writer with a long-ago tincture of Algonquin lives here still, with a shelter-cat named Bo Diddly who keeps the Steller’s jays on their toes but mostly bedevils the garden voles. European maples, English oaks and ivy, and Armenian blackberries compete with native alders and spruces to see who will finally overwhelm the place. Across the valley, the Timbered Tor is timbered again. Both frosts and floods became more frequent and severe for a while, but have backed off again. And even though we have just endured the sunniest late winter in forty years or more, the long range forecast is still for rain.
Gray’s River
March 18, 2015