I began this book by describing an early winter’s day as viewed from within the warmth of the Longview Public Library. Just a year later, I found myself in the same chair whence that picture originated, entering winter once more. We seek symmetry and continuity in our lives. In finishing these essays where they began, I felt a pleasing sense of both.
Last year, shortly after I wrote my concept of the wintergreen rain world, a dramatic snowstorm occurred. It made me wonder whether I had exaggerated to myself and to my reader the mildness of the maritime Northwest winter where precipitation is supposed to show in good, honest rain instead of sneaking into a snowsuit. Surely that blizzard had been a fluke?
This time as we drove over K-M Mountain toward Longview and the library, early November snow made the road hard to hold and the clearcuts almost pretty. I wondered if I was to confront a “real” winter’s day from the library chair—a snowy, blowing day out there beyond the pane? Instead, we left the snow back on the Columbia somewhere around Stella, came into rain, and rode it on into a damp, gray day of sunspots chasing saucepan clouds across the sky. In other words, a normal winter’s day in Willapa.
On the sidewalks that cross the town green, dense, wet moss filled the cement cracks like mortar. Those green stripes ran out to join the verdure of the lawn, little faded from spring, revivified from dry summer. Rosettes of the cat’s ear, a wild dandelion, sprouted from fissures in the ponderous tumors of maple trunks. If you regarded the crowns of the naked eastern elms and oaks of the green, or stands of alders, stripped of leaves, on the near hills that showed between buildings, you might have thought “winter” in its New England sense. But if you considered instead the prevailing shades, in firs and grass and moss-mortar, and if you were from around here, you’d still think “winter;” but with an entirely different season in mind.
Winter—wet, green, slowly growing, cool, fresh, rainy, dripping winter. Only in winter, I believe, can one feel the full force of the rain that makes Willapa wintergreen in every sense. This year again, following my library session, a snowstorm set in—and lasted for an unprecedented two weeks! Yet when it melted, the green came back, only slightly bleached by the cold, white burden it had borne. My faith in the Washington winter was restored; snow or no, the gentle influence of the sea wins out.
Late last winter, deep in February, I drove a long circuit of the near rivers and ridges in order to win a sense of the season. I began in the Gray’s River Valley by the covered bridge. Right away I saw a hundred or more mew gulls moored up against a pond’s banks, looking like so many Styrofoam cups washed up on a shore left lonely after the regatta. Moving in every winter like a cold air mass, the small, pale mews worm the water meadows when the floodwaters drop. Nearby, from a salmonberry brake beneath spruce and maple, in a corner of the valley, a winter wren piped through the wet, green veil. Its song has as many notes as needles in the dripping hemlocks. Wrensong lends a sweet quality that instantly negates any dour aspect the gray day may possess.
The next pond down the valley, beneath the old Durrah farmstead, had buffleheads. The fluffball ducks bobbed, dipped, then deserted the surface before popping up again like black-and-white corks. As in the lily pond upstream, females outnumbered the drakes by two or three or more to one. Are the males shot more often? Who could shoot a bufflehead anyway and disturb that perfect plumage with shot, stain the silky white parts red? Some do. No hunters out that day to scatter the dabblers and divers.
Over the low divide and into the next drainage, down to Deep River. Driving upstream I noted the different colors of the bottoms—olive of the feggy Scirpus swamps; pastures brown-spotted where heavily trodden and muddy; yellow swatches of the reed canary grass, tall and unwanted in summer, dying back and still unwanted in winter; and emerald where low and wet but not so much as to be ponded. Straw, swampy swales of grass and brambles. The flats that hard labor won looked as if they’re returning to the primitive state. Their cattle looked forlorn, sunk in cold mud to their knees. But skunk cabbages crouched in the pasture, preparing to pounce and steal the fields quite soon.
Up into the clearcuts, and the young, solid stands of hemlock and Douglas-fir where they have taken hold. Every hemlock owns a weepy, bent-over crown. Short, flat needles glistened with apprehended drops; wispy limbs seemed to show the very weight of the rain. As if more used to it, the firs stood more supple and erect, but their green seemed even more bleached out by the potent cleaning fluid of the rain.
The road climbed. The banks ran red, not Colorado maroon but orangy, as if even the land can’t be left out in the rain without rusting. These banks are flat-faced, loosely lithified, ready to roll to the angle of repose. Deer ferns leaped: dark green fertile fronds, paler infertile fronds, dead deer-colored fronds of both types. Ferns, mosses, and conifer seedlings ran into one another in pattern and size.
These rivers, too, run close together, only the narrow wrinkles of the hills keeping them apart. The streams eat away at the edges, while the loggers work on the tops and sides. This must be how peneplains form. When erosion finally links all these streams, the ridge and ravine topography of Willapa will vanish, perhaps in time for the crust to thrust from beneath, creating the next great mountain range. But I couldn’t wait for the peneplain; I had only hours of light left and had to cross the ridge to reach the next river, Salmon Creek.
Here, maples and alders leaned across the stream, the former almost entirely clad in mosses and licorice ferns, the alders daubed with green and the white lichens that make people think they’re birches. Ferns stuck out at angles like poles with fish on, out, then down. Above, tall firs inhaled the mist, alder catkins caught the rain. The river ran bluish-brown between banks bright with the rosettes of saxifrages and foliage of buttercups.
From the top of an alder hung a six-foot sash of Usnea, a damper to mute any sounds trying to get through from the canopy. The tinkle of a golden-crowned kinglet, for one, tried to break through, but it was too high to catch. River’s soft rush, rain’s hard pelt. A great spruce was itself a rain forest of club mosses, each of many dead limbs a carpet showroom in the round. Fringes many inches long grazed the ceilings of the branches below. The mossy butts of other spruces made launchpads for tall sword ferns.
Small waterfalls sprung everywhere. With leaves off the trees, I could look across Salmon Creek and see the upper half of a forty-foot fall that would not be visible in summer: an upright freshet. The whole of the canyon seemed a great sponge, squeezed by the chain-mail glove of the glowering clouds.
Not many birds about. A ruffed grouse walked brazenly onto the road verge and moved in mechanical twitches as I approached and rolled down the window. Its rich nutty plumage spanned an inner spectrum of browns that the rainbow doesn’t show. Then the bird finally saw me (the grouse would have been on its way to a potpie had I been a hunter) and it boomed off into the forest. Those drummer’s wings can make an incredible noise when the heavy bird takes to its cannonball flight. (I once came home from a week away, to find a grouse dead on the living room floor, and a large windowpane shattered as by a stone.)
A varied thrush appeared on a limb, the bright sprite of the dunwood. This one brought to mind a favorite picture by Morris Graves. The Northwest artist painted many apocryphal birds and hedgerow creatures, but his varied thrush—rendered with just a few strokes in a field of olive shadow or vegetation—is instantly recognizable. Along with the wren and the kinglet, the varied thrush signifies the rain forest. The rusty smear it makes against the green as it flies and its nasal whistle leave you in little doubt that you’re in Northwest forest, if you happened to forget. As I watched that day, I felt the only depiction of the varied thrush superior to Graves’s was the very one before me then.
I parked beside a fabulous locust tree next to a spreadout spruce in a farmyard. Nearly every surface of the locust, all but the new growth, was clothed with mosses, lichens, and ferns. Licorice ferns sprang from the deep moss pillows, like palms through a jungle canopy viewed from the air. At least half a dozen species of mosses adhered to this tree. Yet the nearby spruce dangled only a wispy olive drapery from its needled branches, a kind that seemed to be absent from the locust.
While some mosses and lichens take root on any available surface (I make it a point not to sit too long in the woods) others choose a single sort of substrate, it seems. How do they select it, locate it, maintain it? And what keeps them from spreading to the tree next door? Microhabitat is a wonderful thing. We are far from understanding the whys behind the patchy distribution of many animals and plants. A tree such as this, in its patchwork coat of mosses, shows just what I mean: who picks the pattern?
Natural selection, is who. Epiphytes arise, suited to each sort of surface in the rain world. Some specialize and do very well under limits; others generalize and do fairly well all over. Tolerance for light or shade, wet or wetter, have much to do with the ultimate arrangements. Those olive wisps on the spruces strike me as shade-loving; behind, in full sun, limegreen lichens decorated an alder in shabby style, hanging all over in tatty scraps and sashes. There are partial reasons that could be measured and modeled. But beyond that, the sociology of plants in close quarters seems to evade analysis. God’s landscape plans have been lost. Confusion reigns in the garden patch of Pan. Amen.
We lack, at least, the bromeliads of the tropics, those phantasmagorical air plants that crowd every inch of branch like the Professor’s burgeoning desk in the comic strip Shoe. The closest we come is our Usnea longissima, whose long, flowing tresses somewhat resemble the common bromeliad of the American South, Spanish moss.
Between this locust and spruce (their upper branches intermingled), and their neighbors, and the mossy-topped cedar fence posts between their trunks, we have a powerful pastiche of Willapa: native and alien, shades of the pioneer, plant on plant, the perpetual green products of rain and rot and regrowth.
I continued down Salmon Creek. Beyond the locust, a field gone to wild cherries showed bits of lichen in mahogany wet branches above rusty bunches of bracken bound with bramble twine. Dull but richly earthy colors. More: Oregon juncoes, alarmed by my arrival on the scene, flicked across the road, call notes ringing, white tail feathers flashing. A cheeky one perched and looked back. Coal head, russet back, beige sides, pale pink bill—just a junco but a prominent spot on the moment’s record. One feels sometimes it’s all green, it’s all too green; but the other colors assert themselves, if modestly. Winter hues, relief from green.
The sun slunk low; the day grew duller. I crossed the next ridge, over the Crown Main Line, from Salmon Creek to the Naselle River. These roads, along with the stumps, are among the few palpable benefits left over from logging’s extravagant past. People like me use them frequently and see them as token repayment for the damages inflicted on the whole Coast Range. We’ve no roadless wilderness left here, so we may as well explore through the agency of the roads that took it away. This route, like many in the area, used to be a logging railroad. No sign of trestle or track remains, and an old tunnel on this grade has been blasted shut. It is as if, having created a historical resource in place of the natural, the companies couldn’t wait to remove that too. The rain and the rot were all too pleased to fall into league and erase the last traces.
I call this crossing the Lotus Road, for it has the only big stands I know hereabouts of Lotus crassifolia, the thick-leaved lotus. As green as the rest of the itinerary, the Lotus Road may be greener yet in May; this legume is the host plant of the bramble green hairstreak butterfly, a bright emerald mite that I have yet to discover in Willapa. This lotus-eater and its host are two bits of verdure one cannot find anywhere in winter, dormant as they are in chrysalis and seed. Beyond the bare bank where the lotus grows in May, out of salal erupts a cascade of yellow club moss, like a leak of molten gold flowing down onto the road.
As if stricken by the eruption, the drawn bodies of horsetails lie supine against the pebble bank. Having been green all spring, summer, and fall, in the green winter the horsetails bend and fall down the banks on their faces, finally lying dead, dried, and bleached, with inky black zigzag nodes like charts of vital signs run down. They remind me of so many many-jointed bones, stretched out with long tufts of sodden brown hair still attached. Hard to imagine that from these will spring some of April’s most urgent greens.
Below me, then, the Naselle River. Across it, the panorama of the hills, looking looming, as if struggling to break out of the mists. Interwoven patches of conifer greens and alder browns, fogs drifting in and out of every fold and hollow and blending them together, breaking down that angiosperm-gymnosperm barrier with endlessly intertraded seeds of rain. Seventy million years of evolution or more, blurred in a single day’s downpour. Alders in the foreground hung heavily with new catkins, old cones, and ageless raindrops.
I came down to the Upper Naselle, where the road crosses a high bridge and breaks into three to head toward the North Fork, across the hills on the Bonneville Line to the Chehalis, or down the Nemah to Willapa Bay. The opposite way leads down to Naselle, and that’s the way I went. Across the bridge, tall, slender alders over the gorge bank had arms all musclebound with moss and long, blond locks of lichen hanging nearly to the black water. In summer, when the river drops to expose the pebble beach below, neither the moss nor the lichen may be fully appreciated. Then they lack something of their winter’s luxuriance and hide behind the season’s new leaves.
Now, in winter, the fallen leaves signal a rest from growth, a dominance of death. In Willapa the winter wetness equals life and growth in partnership with death and rot. The volcanic reaction called photosynthesis slows down but never stops, as plants squeeze scant sun from the dull, short days. Even the great logs that form the bridge’s safety sides have grown so waterlogged that minute hemlocks, Christmas trees for beetles, spring from cracks in their slick brown sides. The real secret of wintergreen is the sea’s gift to the sodden land: mild temperatures and abundant water. Winter gardening is popular in the maritime Northwest, but it’s not really gardening: it’s hydroponics.
One sign of winter, less welcome than the monsoon, just as true, greeted me as I descended the Naselle: the sharp increase of litter in the woods following the incursions of the hunters and steelhead-salmon fishermen. That someone who supposedly loves the outdoors can trash a sylvan spot simply begs belief. The Model Litter Control Act, which the beverage bosses keep rolling out like a barrel to crush the bottle bills that arise from time to time, is a crock; and in any case the occasional clean-up crews it pays for never reach the county roads, let alone such woodland lanes as this!
Many hunters, one observes, find it impossible to keep a can in their possession; the act of throwing it out must be an expression of manhood, killing large animals with high-powered rifles not sufficing. They invariably throw every third or fourth shiny can into the salmonberries, where it offends but cannot easily be retrieved.
More offensive yet on a carpet of moss, to be sure, so visible, so violating. I filled the Honda’s hatchback with aluminum, but the large wine jugs I recycled into the river; they may reach the sea, or sink to the bottom as a hideout for fry.
Again I visited a favorite miniature rain forest above the river. A few old-growth spruces have somehow survived here, perhaps because the owners know that this stretch of river with water-carved, blue-green rock pools, known as Cut Rock, is a favorite spot for locals, for fishing, swimming, picnicking. An outcry would surely follow logging here. But that’s the price you pay for living in a loggers’ land: you grovel for the scraps they toss and learn to live without the rest.
Flowing water pounded, muted; dripping water pinged on slick leaves and fern fronds. Alders lay a white drop cloth for the greenwashing of the world.
The light diminished, and with it the intensities of green; but the shades remained many in their soft subtlety. Moss-hung arms and stumps stuck straight out from spruces a’midtrunks, dripping pitch. Looking up, I saw the spruce canopy, almost as gauzy as the moss. Winter permits conifers, as well as epiphytes, to come into their own. That certain mosses resemble the graceful boughs of western red cedar you might not notice in June, when the leaves of the hardwoods and herbs encurtain both cedar and moss. In February, the competition relaxes; flashy plants withdraw to rosette or tuber, leaving evergreens in charge.
A star-carpet of floor mosses like Lilliputian tree-ferns held two little hemlock seedlings: one was sparse with needles, heavy with mosswebs. The other grew free, was bright green and lush, yet they grew side by side. Why? Appropriation of dappled sunlight, perhaps; a root-nibble by a tunneling rodent? The limits to growth brook no backtalk from plants, even if humans seem to ignore them.
Sword ferns show no awareness of limits, shooting slick and riotous from the moss mat. They burst out from their stools into five-foot, gamboge-green fireworks imported from green-seeing Oz. Sword fern: supplier in season of spores by the bagful, merchant in chlorophyll all the year round. Sword fern, trademark of the rain forest. Rain forest, wintergreen’s apogee.
Once out of the big spruces I came to one of my favorite stumpfields. A tall hemlock nursed from a high cedar stump had nearly eaten it with its stout aerial roots, tropical-fig-like. Many things seem tropical here, even the clearcuts, which resemble the devastated tropical rain forest prior to the planting of oil palm plantations. But there was nothing tropical about the temperature, in the high forties or low fifties from which it might not vary in twenty-four hours. I followed the Naselle River down into the valley, leaving the rain forest behind; but not the rain.
The rain had fallen nearly all day. Then, before it set, the low, post-equinoctial sun sneaked out of the cloud bank and dissolved the rain. Blue spread. Sun struck wet ponies, made them shine and strut. Crows spattered a pasture like black fen turves, punctuation marks for winter’s concision.
I hit the highway and turned east for home. Slick osier dogwoods in the roadside ditch glimmered like ruby wands. All the colors intensified in the last stray bolts of sun. Steam rose, wraiths wandered the valleys in search of damp retreats. Spring seemed imminent. Then the clouds began to close again around the sun, which set in any case; rain resumed, colors faded, and the green, wet winter went on. Night fell on the February fields.
The river route showed me again that rain makes the world go green. But rain also sponsors rot. Without rot, no renewal; without rain, neither. So as the winter drips through, the great compost heap of the land cooks away, preparing its own spring feed. Whether the harvest of the leaves comes all in the fall as in the North, all year around as in the tropics, or some of each as here, there can be no new buds without the silage of the old.
The nature of rot and renewal are little known to us, and we like to keep it that way. Rot, we do not wish to accept into polite company; only growth seems an acceptable state. This is another denial of death (we have so many) but more than that it is a denial of life itself, for without decay there can be no regeneration. No room, no food: we organisms die to make room for the next and to feed them on our leavings.
People used to be allowed to take part in the process, only a pine box between them and the soil. Modern bodies become sealed in cement cases, hermetically, following chemical preparation of the body for the fiberglass coffin. In this way we deny our elements return to the earth until orogeny itself breaks and spills our concrete cocoons. This is my idea of perfect purgatory. So many die, yet so few are allowed to feed the future. Northwest Indians arrayed the dead in tree platforms, to speed the process; we ingeniously delay it, as if to frustrate forever the human compost. Why the terror of the worms? That way, through the gut of worms, say I, lies heaven: to be recycled in a worm casting, to feed the green grass itself.
In the same way, when the great logs are taken from the forest, the forest is denied its refreshment. How can any organic system go on, whose bodies are robbed one by one? The soil cannot put out forever in the absence of composting. Artificial fertilizing of forests isn’t the answer; it just means robbing from one part of the corpus to feed another. The forests need fertilizing by their own kind. Something more needs to be left behind than commonly is, or the soils will stop putting out.
When I empty our chamberpot and eggshells into the compost pile, it feels like a small rite. To keep the atoms in flow, that’s the idea. It is as much to keep the aluminum flowing that I fetch it from the littered woods, as for looks or pennies per pound. Recycling is one of the few completely good things there is, as much for the pure idea of it as the resource sense it makes. And when it comes time to recycle ourselves, we should revel in it. Morbidity comes from holding on to bodies; letting go is not morbid at all, but cause for celebration.
Perhaps our inability to understand the need for renewal comes from our visceral rejection of its flip side, rot. Some go to the desert to desert rot altogether, only to end up mummified. We who are left behind in Willapa cannot avoid it. Rot’s agent is named damp, and the damp demands attention. In England, another wintergreen land, the natives complain of “rising damp” in their walls and employ contractors to install “damp courses” to prevent it. Perhaps, with gravity on their side, they can succeed in keeping down the rising damp. But short of a futuristic dome, I cannot conceive of the damp course that would hold back our dropping damp.
When decay overcomes renewal in the cycle of the seasons or in the course of lives, a state of senescence sets in. This happens every autumn in Willapa, for although green prevails, active growth slows down and the rate of rot picks up beneath the dead leaf layer. So the well-trodden metaphor of autumn for aging makes sense. Senescence, in fact, means growing old. To senesce is to age, to slow down the vital processes, to prepare for death. But senescence has another meaning in biology, since a system never dies, it just changes. It means to age, all right, but to be reborn in the process. A lake senesces by filling in with organic matter and ultimately becomes born as a bog, then again as a meadow, then as a forest. Senescence holds terror or sadness only when it’s a dead-end street. And there are no dead ends in nature, since mortal individuals = species = matter = energy, which is immortal. Senescence, then, is relative.
I like a quotation in support of the definition in the Oxford English Dictionary: Woodward, in his 1695 Natural History of the Earth, wrote that “the Earth, Sea, and all natural things, will continue in the state wherein they now are, without the least senescence or decay.” Of course, the hoary monographer had it exactly wrong, since all natural things will and must decay and regenerate. But I believe that what he had in mind was the continuing vitality of the whole, which, as long as the cosmic climate permits, is exactly what all that decay and growth balance out to preserve. When our sun becomes senescent in absolute terms, an eventual condition that Woodward could not have anticipated, it will be a whole new ball game in which you-know-who bats last.
A climax forest exists too in a senescent state, where aging and rot roughly balance, or may even overtake for a time, regeneration. I suppose it is the mistaken idea of very old-growth forest aging toward ultimate rot that gave rise to that sillyism some foresters spout about “overmature” forests. We know, of course, that climax forests age like good brandy—they just get better. The wonderful cedar grove on Long Island in Willapa Bay demonstrates this clearly: four thousand years without significant disturbance and getting stronger all the time in its old age. In the fullness of time, natural factors open glades and thus prospects for successors. Forests did manage to replace themselves, somehow, prior to the advent of modern forestry.
You have to look hard to find anything approaching a climax forest in Willapa, the Long Island cedar grove being perhaps the only example. But a different sort of senescence is much more apparent, everywhere you look around here in fact. That is the senescence of a culture.
Societies tend to remain emergent for centuries, viable for more centuries, before becoming decadent and finally being replaced by other societies: much like forests, which are societies also. Along the way, they attain periods of maturity that may be lengthy and rewarding, after the disruptions of early growth and prior to the throes of demise. This is simplistic, but we have some cultural models for such a pattern. They suggest that protracted senescence can be one of the best periods in the life of a culture.
There was no time for such a genteel evolution here in Willapa. As if afflicted by some disease that strikes down youths in their prime, southwest Washington culture barely reached adolescence before senescence set in. Now, apparently accelerated toward the latter stages, we watch for a renewal that may or may not come.
I could be on thin ice here, taking liberties by drawing parallels between cultural and biological situations, and telling my neighbors, sons and daughters of the pioneers, that their culture is old before its time. Rot, decay, senesce: these are strong words. And as I’ve already suggested, they are not popular concepts in our modern, youth-dominated, growth-oriented society. No one can deny that we have economic problems in southwest Washington; but senescence? Isn’t that a bit extreme?
I don’t think so. Just look at the evidence. Houses and barns rotting into the brambles at every turn in the river, and many of those that aren’t abandoned, for sale with no takers. Businesses shut. The Cathlamet Hotel, finest structure in Wahkiakum County next to the courthouse, standing empty and in decay. (We attended the auction when its furnishings and fixtures were sold: it was like witnessing a public disembowelment from within.) The woods abandoned for now by “the tree-growing people,” their former faithful out of work on all sides. It’s not a pretty picture. Today’s paper carried a letter about a family, hungry, about to be had up for possessing a poached elk. There is poverty in the High-Yield Forest.
I think the most striking demonstration of senescence comes from a comparison of the present with the pretenses of the settlers. Old photos in Carlton Appelo’s telephone books or in the museums show men in suits and women in broad hats, bustles, and all manner of lacy finery, posing in front of huge, whitewashed new stores and hotels, on the decks of the daily packet steamers from Astoria or Portland, perched on immense stumps of old-growth firs, or, stiffly, standing on the porches of New England-steepled white churches.
Little if any of this may be found today. Their descendants may be seen instead wearing nylon windbreakers with tavern ads on the back, chatting colloquially by their pickups at the gas pumps. Nothing wrong with that, styles change. But the trappings of genteel society preserved precariously on the forests’ edge bespoke something more than late-Victorian fashion. Along with the many theaters, newspapers, schools, churches, lodges, civic and cultural organizations, they spoke of hope. High expectations. An intent to create the culture they knew in Stockholm, Helsinki, or Chicago here in the Great North Woods. It’s not that nothing of this remains, but that it has so contracted as to give one an overwhelming feeling of its being well past bloom.
I have before me a 1979 reprint of a circa 1910 booklet entitled Pacific County and Its Resources, a small masterpiece of boosterism aimed at luring investment and settlers and raising home pride. The rise in the booklet’s price from $.25 to $4.50 says something, but a comparison of the period advertisements with the current yellow pages tells much more. The sheer number and variety of extinct businesses in the northern and western parts of Willapa are astounding. Accommodation and transport alone make it sound a better time to be alive and exploring the area, which was doubtless more interesting then in almost every way. And there were hotels, guest houses, and restaurants in every community, regular public transportation by steamers and trains over much of the region. No doubt life was much less convenient then and imposed many more hardships; but it also appears to have been more colorful. Trains and steamers—it is difficult, and quite painful in contrast with our automotive monotony, to picture!
Advertisers proffered their goods with a sense of beneficent pride seldom heard today. C. B. Handy, “Universal Providers of everything to eat and wear,” resided in Lebam, now but a pleasant wrinkle in the highway east of Raymond. Next door in the Willapa Valley, tiny Frances boasted the Custer Mercantile, dealers in “Fancy and Staple Groceries, Shoes, Hardware, Grain and Feed and Agents for the Celebrated De Laval Cream Separators and Dairy Supplies and New Royal Sewing Machines.” And these were the small settlements—South Bend, Raymond, Naselle, and the Wahkiakum County towns offered many of the goods and services we drive one hundred or two hundred miles for today.
It would be unkind to continue making invidious comparisons based on an ingenuous spirit of enterprise, civic optimism, and faith in the future of the country and the region. Unkinder yet to quote the descriptions of each of the young towns in the county. Just one heading will give an idea of the pathetic optimism that beat in every heart in the Willapa of 1910: “South Bend—The Baltimore of the Pacific.”
The founders had good reason to be optimistic about growth. The seemingly unlimited supplies of timber, water, power, oysters, fish, farmland, and other resources promised no end of opportunity for expansion. The booklet tells us that, in 1910, Raymond had a payroll larger in proportion to its population than any other city on the Pacific Coast. How could they have foreseen the mill closures and chronic, acute unemployment that lay in wait three-quarters of a century later? Opera houses and dance halls situated in remote logging towns displayed the people’s unwillingness to be without the amenities they considered proper to civilization, as well as their belief that true civilization would surely arrive if only they made it so.
But the big timber ran out. The native oysters were depleted and the transplants proved problematical. The rain discouraged settlers who were supposed to be enamored of the region’s “antiblizzard, anticyclonic” conditions, lacking a “single death from any malarial disease,” and possessing “varied industries.” At that time the industries were indeed varied. Farms proved productive in places, but the lack of good transportation to the cities and other factors caused market centralization, the closing of the area’s excellent creameries, and a sharp reduction in the number of dairies. Many of the anticipated crops never materialized in market quantities, cranberries proving the strong exception. The sublime, benign region proved less tractable than had been thought.
What went wrong was less the fault of the rain than that of the overeager takers. With “miles of deep water frontage, free mill sites,” as one panoramic photograph advertised, timber giants moved in, co-opted the labor force, undermined diversity, and left the towns high and dry when the logs and jobs ran out. The author of the booklet can be forgiven his exuberance in the spirit of super-boosterism that marked the times. But he simply misjudged when he wrote, “The year has never come and never will come when the lumber, fish, oyster, dairying, general farming and summer resort business . . . are all in the dumps.” He believed, of salmon, timber, and the rest, that the “supply can be maintained provided the advancing wave of civilization does not engulf the [industries] with its destructive tendencies.” That “advancing wave of civilization” never came, but the “destructive tendencies” evidenced themselves just the same, and now it’s the dumps after all.
Willapa had already just about peaked when that booklet was written. Of course, there were further developments and quite a prosperous period following World War II. But the anticipated metropolis never came to be, and the trend has been steadily downward for many years now. Rather than the prospectus for future growth that it was intended to be, the book became a wistful chronicle of a fleeting period when growth had gone about as far as it was going to go. Hence, its recent reprinting.
The signs of senescence are all around. A more conservative expenditure of the resource base might have permitted a longer wave in the cycle of growth, and a few more of the dreams might have come true. If not the new Baltimore, then at least a stable city of unpretentious dimension. Even if the second-growth timber had been fostered in the fifties, instead of being cropped still more intensively than before, the forest-products industry might still be on its feet in Willapa. But market factors beyond the subregion have played a role, and these might have thwarted the growth of a new Bay Area just the same. In any case, the boom burst, and now senescence reigns. To all appearances, Willapa is going back to nature rapidly.
Now let me backtrack a moment. How bad is senescence? Would anyone who lives here now really like to see another San Francisco filling Willapa Bay and spilling over the hills? What’s left is not so bad. We have the benefit of still better services half a day away by auto, though it would be more fun to be able to take a packet steamer still. One or two spired churches have been restored; new ones have arisen. Schools have been consolidated and might be better for it. The minute marts lack the charm of the mercantiles, not to mention the selection, and the general stores that remain have long since given up the range of “fancy goods” their predecessors carried: no more cheese wheels or pickle barrels. But we lack nothing necessary to life, and we have the bonus of an interesting (if brief) history bequeathed by the big dreamers.
Life in Willapa is generally adequate; for some, more than that. We have pulled in our horns, diminished our expectations, and made do. In a sense, that has prepared us for the mood and realities of diminished expectations that have overtaken the country as a whole in recent years.
Population, that perennial measure of prosperity, no longer works as such (consider Mexico City). So when we confront the depopulation of this region, we needn’t consider it a blatant failure. In fact, failure needn’t enter into the discussion, beyond a recognition of failure to steward our resources. Yet the results translate into failed businesses, lost farms and homes, and emigration. Jobs go, people go, and don’t return. As Bruce Springsteen wrote in “My Hometown,” “Foreman says/these jobs are goin’, boys/and they ain’t comin’ back.” In fact, the whole area has something of a Springsteenesque feel to it these days—mills closing, the young leaving, a melancholy refrain.
Yet, there is something else here that is distinct from all that. When the mills close, the log trucks stop rolling, the dairies go to summer beef or weeds, the fresh, wet green remains the same. It is something the mill towns of the East may not possess. The essential beauty of Willapa has been marred, but not erased. The quiet can only enhance the appeal of the landscape. It keeps stubborn people here and brings new ones. While depopulation inevitably followed the successive turndowns of industry and families have been hurt and all but exiled, others, better suited perhaps to the new conditions, will remain. That’s evolution.
One of the difficult things for people to realize is that senescence (a prettier word for rot, reminding one of the susurrence of the wind) is not all bad. In ecological terms, senescence must precede (and is normally accompanied by) regeneration. All communities must senesce in order to be renewed. Renewal can occur continually in a climax state, as in the Long Island cedar grove or in New York City; or it can take place episodically, as following a forest fire or a bad recession.
A mature rural economy, like that of England prior to World War II, is one in which senescence and regrowth occur together: a kind of a climax state of the countryside and its settlements. Willapa never had a chance to get there, or to come even close. Instead, it followed another classic pattern in ecology: boom and crash. It is an uncomfortable way to go, it hurts people and their pride. But it leaves open the door for stability next time through a different model from the one that created the crash.
So we have senesced without the concomitant regrowth that denotes gentle maturity. That way lies obliteration. If we are not to fade away, we need to begin to grow again. But we would be wise, I feel, to avoid setting ourselves up for another crash—not that there is much worry of that. The chamber of commerce types have a hard time buying the “senescence is okay” argument, as do the displaced families. They may cling to the hollow husk of hope that another boom will come. But theirs is a faith in what’s not going to happen. They are the casualties of simplification.
We know that a diverse ecosystem is a stable one. The simplification of the Northwest woods will lead to instability, just as lack of diversity in the workplace led to the unstable present situation. Those early boosters had it right when they plumped for a highly varied agricultural and industrial base. Had it worked out that way, their plan might have come to something.
Now, in our winter of disconsolance, a new diversity is beginning to arise. Drawn by the very features that represent economic decay—empty old houses, lower land prices, the uncluttered countryside of the largely abandoned valleys—a new sprinkling of settlers has been arriving in Willapa. They include the naturalists I wrote of, as well as retirees from the merchant marine or the military, industry or the office; yuppie dropouts and seasoned hippies, all anxious for a taste of the land; young farmers and traders and technicians willing to work hard to buck the tide; craftsmen and -women, artists and artisans. Natives, having left for the lure of the city or the lack of a job, come back to make one. That is the essence of the new colonists: they make their own jobs with an astonishing range of skills and resources. In so doing, they begin to bring back something of the living human diversity that’s been lost.
Meanwhile, the old-timers who remain, the Finns and Swedes and Swiss and others, furnish the essential matrix for regeneration. That’s what an enormous clearcut lacks: old-timers to tell the tales, to pass on the locally adapted genes and knowledge and skills and traditions that successful regrowth requires. The purge of the local population began to look like a clearcut, until it became clear that a good many of the locals were loath to leave. Some, having become prosperous off the land when it was still giving, have kept their money here. Others remain on scant resources, bolstered by the nearness of family and friends. Family looms large in Willapa society. While extensive intermarriage can prop up provinciality, it also lends texture to the community. As newcomers arrive, the incestuous features of the towns and country give way to their refreshing influences; still, the strength of families remains.
Among the rotting homesteads one sees many tidy homes in good repair, proof against the agents of senescence, ready to shelter another generation from rot’s best friend, the rain. Nothing shows the evergreen possibilities of any region like those who stay, for they are the ones who have seen the boom, lived through the bust, and still believe in the land.
One still sees mobile homes plopped down beside fine old houses left to return to the humus. It’s cheaper, and a lot easier, than fixing up the old. But just a few of the original homesteads are being reclaimed, lovingly restored, or remodeled into places where life can take over again. The germ cells of regeneration have been planted; now it’s up to initiative and evolution to decide what happens next.
Fortunately, the infrastructure is still intact. Wahkiakum and Pacific counties, the latter bolstered by the still fairly prosperous Long Beach that lies outside this book’s concern, have been well enough managed so that essential services remain intact. Water and electrical systems, roads, schools, and such still work. Pacific County has a bus system, and Wahkiakum has a ferry from Puget Island to Oregon, the last ferryboat on the Lower Columbia River. This is no string of ghost towns along U.S. 101 and the Ocean Beach Highway, yet. But they’re running scared. Everyone sees the signs of senescence, and wonders how to get young again.
A comprehensive plan for Wahkiakum County was adopted over great resistance. People saw it as a barrier rather than a tool for intelligent regrowth. They did not realize that without a plan you are forced to just sit back and let things happen to you. The plan was drafted at the state’s insistence, but it is so general that it cannot accomplish much on its own. At least it states the majority of residents’ desire to keep the county largely as it is, while creating new opportunities. A citizen advisory vote to reject a nuclear power plant some years ago expressed the same attitude. Few of us wish to exchange our depressed condition for prosperity at the expense of that which makes it worth living here: Bhopal instead of Appalachia is no deal.
In line with a similar movement statewide, the Lower Columbia Economic Development Council arose to promote appropriate growth. Efforts are under way to lure light, clean industries to the area. Many people feel that a more realistic tack would be further development of the tourist resources, hand in hand with cottage industries that would appeal to visitors. A survey was taken of services people wish to see here and which they would patronize. Suggestions for new directions have ranged from Finnish food factories to a real-ale brewery and an arts center, utilizing derelict structures such as solid old creameries and immense barns now standing empty.
Little of this has come about yet, but bed-and-breakfast houses have been opening, and a crafts center, a gallery for local artisans, is planned for the historic Redman Hall, an imposing structure in Skamokawa’s National Historic District. The small but strikingly situated Cathlamet dock is to be restored in the suitable milieu of a Norwegian waterfront in hopes of emulating the highly successful ersatz Bavarian village of Leavenworth in Washington’s Cascades. The Columbia River flows by, waiting.
Things are happening. Congressman Bonker came to the county to open a computer-cover factory. The business, which moved to an old farm in Deep River from California, will create twenty jobs. Silicon Valley it is not—but it’s something. Even as families continue to leave and businesses close, new ones come and open. That is the nature of senescence: death and replacement, rot and regrowth. Those who want to be here badly enough will find a way to be here, as friends of mine laid off from Crown and Weyerhaeuser have told me. They have faith in their skills and willingness to adapt. They will find an increasingly diverse community evolving around them, without the stresses and impurities that realization of the old dreams might have brought: our air and water are still very pure.
In a senescent state of affairs, specialists survive. Climax forests support specialized organisms that do very well there but could not compete in the rat race of regrowth. That’s why species such as the spotted owl become endangered when the old-growth forests disappear. As a community matures in late senescence, so it is with its occupants. Those who succeed will be those who can do something very well. A few generalists, jacks-of-all-trades, will make it around the edges. In a period of rapid regrowth, the reverse takes place. Adventive, opportunistic types thrive, while the specialists must move on or face intense competition that they may not be able to withstand.
Earlier I said that the people here were weedy types, able to adapt quickly to available opportunities in a disturbed situation. But as senescence advances toward a new maturity, the survivors will tend to specialize. While retaining a degree of elasticity, they will refine their functions to fit closely the niches they have seized. It has to do with putting all one’s efforts into skills for fitness, as opposed to skills for rapid expansion. Up in the logged-off hills, generalist organisms are doing their best to rebuild the shattered structure of the forest. If they have time to succeed before the next shave, specialists will return and contribute diversity. Down here in the senescent valleys, the new specialists are beginning to make it, just. This may not be a bad time coming up for them.
People speak of economic recovery everywhere these days, as if it were the new grail. It’s the same in Willapa as in Springsteen’s New Jersey, and everywhere else the boom-bust cycle has ruled. Boom-and-crash may suit the shifting needs of capitalists and locusts, but most species and most people are happier in a more or less steady state. Sufficiency, security, and modest expectations for growth: these are to be desired. Change and trauma enough will occur to provide renewing influences. Peaceful, creative stability makes more sense than rapid growth that outstrips its resources and is bound to bust again and again. In this sense, Willapa makes a model for any crashed community in the postindustrial wasteland.
If the planners succeed in attracting more opportunities for those who are already here and encouraging the settlement of a variety of newcomers with skills and services and talents to offer, then little will change except for a subtle strengthening of the fall-back position we find ourselves in now. A more interesting, more stable, and more mature community would slowly grow.
If they do not succeed at all, nature will slowly reclaim the region. The towns will grow still more skeletal and the countryside really depopulated, run by a few absentee lairds, containing mostly beef cattle to be shipped in and out according to the growing of the grass; a sparseness of farmers; a seasonal flush of hunters and fisherman; and a low level of logging. Any culture that remains, such as it is, will surely die out.
But if economic development should succeed in stimulating a dramatic recovery, through the advent of major new industry, so that booster time is here again and crazy high hopes spring internal, then everyone involved should know what changes would be in store. They would mean more than jobs, taxes, kids for the schools, and customers for the shops. In a period of active renascence, ecologically or socially, great disruption occurs. The adventive species move in and frequently displace those that were keenly adapted to the gentle state of senescence. Just look at Rock Springs, Wyoming, or any of the new energy towns of the West: they have gone from quiet and peaceful to busy and trouble-plagued. And some, like the oil shale new-towns of Colorado’s western slope, have already crashed. Who needs that? Someone always profits in the boom-bust cycle, but it isn’t usually the local people.
The likelihood of that happening here is so remote that I scarcely worry about radical change coming to Willapa. Somewhat more likely, and a far healthier prospect, would be modest regrowth based on appropriate use of the fallow land. The need is to reinforce the qualities of the land and its people with immigrants and visitors who come on account of what may be found here; then to keep it that way, and enjoy the results. This way we could someday regard our senescent state with happy heart and goodwill. Bishop William Stubbs in 1884 observed, about the English tongue, that “It is not a dead but a living language, senescent, perhaps, but in a green old age.” Is this not a congenial way in which to regard a language, or a landscape?
What we want, then, is to develop a kind of permaculture. This term was coined in 1975 by Australian landscape ecologist Bill Mollison. It describes a state of “sustainable land use within the context of a sustainable and humane culture.” Mollison believes this can be accomplished, on different scales, by “designing ecosystems that are food and energy producing while conserving of resources and wildlife habitat.” If ever there was a place in need of permaculture, it is Willapa today.
Without calling it permaculture, Richard Mabey described such a state, once prevalent in the English rural landscape, in his book In a Green Shade: “There is a sense in which a settled rural landscape, whose pattern of fields, farms and churches embodies the history of a hundred generations, is a vision of Eden, no matter what temptation and toil lie behind it.” Willapa, with only four or five generations under its belt and running down fast, has a long way to go toward such an ideal. We may never get there. But if we should, the rewards would be great.
Whether all else changes, stays the same, or just fades away, the seasons at least are immutable. Of all four, the green winter here makes the deepest impression, through the sheer persistence of its pervasive, dripping, rising and falling damp. The rivers flood across the valleys, and the buffle-heads and mew gulls settle in, as mists descend into shaggy hemlocks and pale green lichen seems to swaddle the world against all danger. Green drips into deeper green. This is winter in Willapa, where the pelting rain brings the promise of recovery to the bruised hills. Later, when the washing relents, the brighter shades of spring green always arrive.
Will the people be refreshed, along with the used-up year and the ravaged land? Maybe, maybe not. But at least the seasons will survive. And I suspect Willapa will as well.