The Final Forest
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The Final Forest

Big Trees, Forks, and the Pacific Northwest

William Dietrich

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eBook - ePub

The Final Forest

Big Trees, Forks, and the Pacific Northwest

William Dietrich

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About This Book

2011 Outstanding Title, University Press Books for Public and Secondary School Libraries Winner of the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association Award Before Forks, a small town on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, became famous as the location for Stephenie Meyer's Twilight book series, it was the self-proclaimed "Logging Capital of the World" and ground zero in a regional conflict over the fate of old-growth forests. Since Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist William Dietrich first published The Final Forest in 1992, logging in Forks has given way to tourism, but even with its new fame, Forks is still a home to loggers and others who make their living from the surrounding forests. The new edition recounts how forest policy and practices have changed since the early 1990s and also tells us what has happened in Forks and where the actors who were so important to the timber wars are now. For more information on the author to to: http://williamdietrich.com/

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Year
2011
ISBN
9780295802251

1

THE CUTTER

It is 6 A.M. and still dark this late September morning when the loggers begin crowding into Jerry's saw shop. Although the fir and hemlock in back of the store are still just silhouettes against the fading stars, the town of Forks is awake and moving with men on their way to the woods. At this hour it is still too gloomy for a logger to read the twin yellow banners that hang over the street at either end of the half-mile-long business strip: THIS COMMUNITY SUPPORTS TIMBER, TIM BER SUPPORTS THIS COMMUNITY. But there is no need to. That banner expresses bedrock sentiment. Timber is what is making the darkness before dawn hum. Highway 101 that runs past the front of the logging supply store is a steady stream of commuting pickups, their headlights blowing through occasional pockets of fog. Of course 5 or 6 A.M. isn't even early. In midsummer, when the days are really long, a log truck driver can be up at 2 A.M. to eat breakfast and get first load.
The self-proclaimed “logging capital of the world,” Forks is neither as rough nor as raggedy-ass as it once was, just a plain little timber community with about 3,000 people, 120 inches of rain, and a chewed-up forest where conifers grow back like weeds. The people here call their part of the Olympic Peninsula “The West End.” The term signifies not only its location on the compass but also its sense of isolation and independence. “Forks against the world” is how the town's activists wryly put it. This is a community that proclaimed a “James Watt Appreciation Day” in 1983 when the controversial interior secretary was pushed into resignation by polls showing that Americans opposed his policies three to one. That erected a cross topped by spotted owls. That posted reader-board signs with defiant messages that sometimes irked the tourists driving through: JUST SAY NO TO THE BIGGEST LAND GRAB IN HISTORY, for example.
Forks's identity is so tied to harvesting the forest around it that it has gained a notoriety for resisting proposals for change. There is a big fight now over the last old trees, so nonsensical to most people in this town that they can't quite believe the scrap has gotten as far as it has. It is as if there weren't already a huge Olympic National Park a few ridges away, locking up whole valleys of trees forever. It is as if, out here in this worked-over country, there were really that much to fight over. A veteran cutter like Larry Suslick, who has thirty years in the woods, sees a bit of irony in having this fight now, after most of the big trees are gone. “When I started here, this whole peninsula was one, vast, huge forest,” he recalled. “They're too late. They're fighting over the few little trees they call old growth, and half don't even know what real old growth is.”
Maybe so. But the woods are shutting down over an owl few loggers claim to have ever seen. That may just be the beginning. There is also excitement about a seabird, a marbled murrelet, so elusive it took scientists years to actually find a nest in the big old trees on the Peninsula to prove what they had long claimed must be there. There's the pileated woodpecker, which pecks at the insects that invade the dead and dying trees found in ancient forests. And Vaux's swift, called a chimney swift back East, which in this part of the country likes to nest in the hollow snags.
“Tweety birds”—that's what Jim Bleck of the state's Department of Natural Resources calls these symbols of this strange, disruptive debate. Every month, it seems, the biologists have some new idea of what to do for the tweety birds. Bleck figures state government in Washington is giving up $40,000 in good timber for every acre of trees it leaves alongside streams; and $45,000 to leave occasional snags and other wildlife habitat scattered on one hundred clearcut acres. “To me, that's a lot of money.”
Bleck, who helps administer timber sales in the Forks area, doesn't necessarily disagree with the state's decisions. By and large, he approves of the reforms that have swept over logging the past generation. But change is being heaped upon change. First the experts wanted logs hauled out of streams to clean them up. Now they want them left in, even put in, if you can believe that, to improve fish habitat. What will they want next week? “Scientists are fickle,” he said. “They're like the wind, blowing every which way. They've got us chasing our tail.”
One saw shop in Forks has already folded, and the owner of the last one, Jerry Leppell, just hopes he doesn't follow suit. Leppell figures his business was worth half a million dollars a couple of years ago, when timber was riding high. Now, with every suburbanite and his cousin in America trying to rein in logging, he thinks he'd be lucky to have a buyer pay $75,000 for the repair shop and store.
The saw shop is modern, but homey. There is a double-barreled wood stove made out of two fifty-five-gallon drums stacked on top each other, and a coffee pot, serve yourself. There is a Pepsi machine inside, Coke outside, take your pick. There is rough-sawn wood on the walls that sport mounted bison, deer, and bear heads. Under the main counter are posters that read ENDANGERED SPECIES and picture a trio of loggers, one of them a child. Back in the repair shop, where the carcasses of worn chainsaws are broken open to show their metal bones, there are more posters with scantily clad models touting the advantages of Stihl or Husqvarna chainsaws. A workaday chainsaw costs $900, and the loggers who actually cut down the trees—known as cutters or fallers or bushelers—are expected to bring their own to the job. A good cutter will wear out two of them per year.
Half of Jerry's business is servicing these saws. There is a pile of logs outside the shop door, their tops slit with a hundred cuts from the testing of repaired machines. Inside are displayed the rugged items loggers need: different lengths of saw bars the chain revolves around (up to sixty inches long, in memory of the biggest trees and the deepest cuts), extra chains, shovels, axes, and mauls. There are the round silver mallets used by “shake rats” to split out bolts of cedar that will be sawn into shakes for American roofs. There are pipe wrenches for field repairs and come-alongs for winches, leather tool belts and bright plastic wedges pounded into a saw cut to help direct a tree's fall. The plastic is replacing the old steel variety because it is lighter. Still, a cutter can find himself lugging 60 or 70 pounds up and down the steep tree country.
All around the shop there are gas cans and engine lubricants and spray paints to mark trees due for cutting or survival. There are spools of thick steel cable and fine sharpening files for chainsaw teeth. There are the hobnail logging boots spelled “caulks” but pronounced “corks” that let loggers stride along the tops of wet logs without slipping into the dense underbrush below. There are gloves and rugged jeans and rain gear and rip-resistant pin-striped shirts called “Hickorys” for their toughness, even though there is no hickory in these Pacific Northwest woods. There are sweatshirts emblazoned with sayings that reflect the tense undercurrent of economic fear:
MY FAMILY IS SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS.
SUPPORT YOUR LOCAL SPOTTED OWL: FROM A ROPE.
IF WE'D KICKED THE SHIT OUT OF THE PRESERVATIONISTS,
WE WOULDN'T HAVE THIS PROBLEM TODAY.
Russ Poppe, twenty-nine, ambles in: a tall, rangy, friendly looking man with a toothy smile and the spare, sinewy look of one who truly earns his keep. His workday clothes are typical, part of what almost seems a uniform in timber country: billed cap, dirt-stained jeans with the bottoms cut high, or stagged off, to avoid catching branches and dirt, worn suspenders, a ragged flannel shirt, and the scuffed running shoes he drives to the logging site in so he won't pock the floor of his pickup with his caulks. If Poppe was to conform fully to the Forks stereotype he would have a snoose can and drive a Ford: back in the boom years of the 1970s you could buy a Ford in Forks's only auto dealership about as cheap as anywhere on earth, so everyone had Fords. Now you see Dodges and Chevys, even Mazdas and Toyotas.
The suspenders are usually deliberately dirty, a mark of hard work. Sometimes they sport a worn saying, such as a neutral FORKS LOGGER or, more belligerently, SAVE A LOGGER and SHOOT AN OWL. Suspenders out here are a necessity. Belts don't work in the woods: there is too much stooping and twisting and reaching and scrambling going on for it to make any sense to cinch yourself in at the waist.
Inside Jerry's there is the usual morning banter of men meeting briefly who have worked shoulder to shoulder on other crews, the words less important than the acknowledgment of each other's presence. The talk is barbed a bit by their uncertain future and the recognition of how controversial their work has become. “Ready to kill more trees?” Russ jibes with one of the saw shop men.
Out in Russ's idling yellow pickup, Joe Helvey waits to go. He was able to sign on for work today because Russ's usual cutting partner has gone to Mexico for vacation. Cutters like to work in pairs: enough company for safety, not so much you get in each other's way. Once Russ had worked for Helvey, in forty-five. Now, after Helvey's sawmill failed in Montana, the older man is back on the Pacific coast, getting work where he can.
A logger named Steve spots Joe Helvey and walks over to the pickup to say hello. Joe cranks down the window of the overheated cab to talk and let in the slight chill of early autumn. Steve joshes that Joe has signed on for a rough job. “S'posed to be scary,” he relates.
“S'posed to be steep, and s'posed to be pretty rough,” Helvey agrees.
Poppe and Helvey are doing the cutting on a blown-down twenty-acre quadrangle of timber in the foothills of the Olympic Mountains. It is a snarled, dangerous mess. The blowdown occurred after the U.S. Forest Service clearcut a fan-shaped bite of trees on the slope. Clear-cutting—taking down every tree on a swathe of land—has been the practiced method of logging in this region for two generations. It is cheap and efficient and leaves a clearing so barren that it gives the most desired tree to replant, Douglas fir, a chance to outgrow its shade-tolerant competitors. However, clearcutting also opens gaps in the forest as potentially calamitous to the neighboring ranks of shallow-rooted conifers as cracking the shield wall of a Roman legion. As the Northwest's forests have become increasingly fragmented by clearcut ting, more and more miles of “edge” are exposed to the wind. In this case, the wind took a straight shot at the hillside from the restless North Pacific out on the horizon, striking the next draw full of trees and promptly knocking most of them over. Some had been growing two or three centuries. Now the government wants the downed trees salvaged before they decay, along with most of the survivors still standing. Just to complicate things, however, some of the biologists have spray-painted big blue W's on the bark of a few trees they want left for wildlife. Of course, what will happen to those wildlife trees, or to the next rank of unprotected trees, when the next big winter storm hits, no one professes to know.
Poppe had looked at the site in early summer and turned it down. The hillside is steep. The wind created a chaotic tangle of trunks and branches. The downed logs must be bucked, or cut into correct length, to fit on logging trucks and produce dimension lumber. Bucking can be even more hazardous than falling standing trees. When sawed into length, the downed logs have a tendency to lose their grip on the slope and careen downhill. The surviving trees must also come down. Some are half-rotten, others hung up and leaning from the weight of fallen logs around them. The roots that exploded out of the ground in the storm created craters of dirt and broken sandstone, walled on one side by the upturned root ball. Other sections of the site are thick with sword ferns, blackberry brambles, thistle, and fireweed.
Twice Poppe told the man who won the Forest Service bid for this mess, Rick Hurn, that he didn't want the job. Hurn persisted. It looked worse from the logging road on top than it really was, Hurn assured him. He called several times, an indication that he was having difficulty finding a good cutter. Finally Poppe, afraid his refusal could cost him future jobs in what promised to be a lean winter, reluctantly agreed. “For $300 a day, a man will do just about anything,” Steve jokes to Joe. The figure is a deliberate exaggeration—good cutters only earn half or a third that— but the meaning is clear. The woods are being locked up by the preservationists. A man can't afford to be too choosy. Take work where it comes.
“It's going to be a tough winter,” says Steve.
Poppe emerges from the saw shop and we start up the Calawah River drainage, the brilliant stars fading now. He explains his trade. Poppe is a cutter, and thus at the top of the logger's pyramid in the way fighter pilots are atop the flier's pyramid. Of course falling trees are only the first part of logging. The logs then have to be dragged, or yarded, to a flat clearing called a landing, using steel cables pulled by massive engines. Then they must be trimmed of any branches, loaded on trucks, graded, and then taken to the mill. The chokers who go into the clear-cuts to loop steel cables around the logs have one of the roughest and lowest-paying jobs. “Worst job in the world,” said Bleck. “How'd you like to get up in the dark, at four or five in the morning, drive an hour, get out all stiff, look two thousand feet down the hill, and then scramble down there and start choking logs? If the sun ain't blazing, and if it ain't one hundred twenty degrees, it's pissing rain.”
The truck drivers work some of the longest hours. The hook tenders, who set a network of supportive steel cables to brace the steel spar tower that is used to haul up the logs, need to have a common sense judgment equal in calculation to an engineer's. The shovel operator who maneuvers the mechanical pincers that load the logs onto the truck sets the pace for the whole operation. The side rod that runs the show is a jack-of-all-trades, supervisor and mechanic. But before any of them arrive at the logging site, it is the cutters who go into the lonely woods. Theirs is the job that is the most dangerous, the most solitary, the most dramatic, and in some ways the most skilled.
There are a thousand ways to die in the woods, and everyone knows people who have. A cutter like Larry Suslick considers himself lucky after a quarter century in the woods with only a broken knee, torn muscles, and blows on the head and side from falling or rolling wood. He watched a lot of friends die; Forks can turn out for logger funerals two or three times a year. “There was one final blow that made me decide to get out,” Suslick recalled. “There was a guy working for me who got hit on the neck and paralyzed from the neck down. Looking at him, laying there in the woods, knowing there was nothing we could do for him … well, it was time to just physically back away from it.” Suslick took a shop maintenance job with the state Department of Natural Resources.
The danger has been there as long as anyone can remember. One historical study concluded that between 1870 and 1910, the life expectancy of a man starting logging was on average only seven years. Safety has improved since then, but even today loggers figure there is a one-in-three chance they will be killed or seriously injured during a career in the woods.
There is almost a spookiness about the randomness of calamity in the forest. I talked a bit to a young logger named Dewey Rasmussen, his restless energy still burning in what had become a broken body. One of six sons of a man who worked for Weyerhaeuser, he was the only one to follow his father into logging.
Rasmussen's passion was to climb old-growth trees. He would strap metal spurs to his ankles and loop a climbing rope up to sixty feet long around the massive trunks. He hitched the rope upward as he climbed, using a chainsaw to cut branches out of his way. The purpose of his climbing was to attach a steel cable to the upper part of a tree. Tension could then be applied so that when the tree was cut, it would fall uphill instead of down, building less momentum and thus being less likely to crack or break when it hit the ground. A generation ago, trees were so plentiful and cheap around Forks that the expense of sending Rasmussen up a tree would have been unthinkable. But wood prices skyrocketed fivefold in the late 1980s and preserving the soundness of a log became cost effective.
It was a daredevil job, climbing up these giant beanstalks. The climbing rope had a steel center to help guard against accidentally sawing through it. Then there was the problem, one hundred feet up, of getting the thick cable that dangled from one hip around the thick trees. Rasmussen would tie heavy fishing weights onto the cable's end and begin swinging it in an increasing arc. When the weighted cable had enough momentum he would snap his arm to hurl it in a circle around the tree's girth. Aim was crucial. He had to take care that the whizzing end that whipped around the trunk came near enough to grab, but not so near it would hit the climber on the head. Rasmussen loved this job: the heights, the danger, the skill. “I couldn't believe they were paying me to do it,” he said. “It was like a sport.”
Rasmussen got so good he entered spar-climbing contests at summer logging shows. As an amateur he wasn't beaten for five years, and was considering turning professional. A good climber can earn $25,000 or $30,000 in prizes during a summer of logging exhibition shows around the United States. Dewey's arms and chest and stomach were so strong that he liked to grasp a metal pole on the stairway of his Forks home and hold himself out horizontally, like a flag.
But on May 9, 1989, an eight-foot-thick cedar no one had yet touched went over as Rasmussen's crew worked in the woods. There was no warning except the growl and squeal it made. Rasmussen was on the ground and scrambled too late. A few hundred tons of wood clipped him, breaking his back. The doctors in Port Angeles, who had seen this kind of thing too many times before, put steel rods in Rasmussen's back and pieced him back together enough that he could walk. His logging career was over.
The old energy is still there: Dewey and his wife Dana have converted some cabins into a small motel in Forks, and his restless mind tackles other projects. He has drawn up plans for a commercially producible rocking horse. He has invented a mushroom-cleaning machine. But he wishes he were back in the woods. “I just like being outside,” he said.
Given such dangers, one has to wonder what draws men to this job. Poppe explains that the cutter is his own boss. There is no second-guessing, no nagging supervision. A cutter makes his own decisions at each tree, earning more if he calls it right, risking his life if he guesses wrong. Most of the time a cutter works alone, at his own pace, one man at one tree. All he has to answer for is how much wood he's laid down, how well, at the end of the day. He sights the tree, peering up its trunk to judge its curve and twist and lean. He looks for weak branches, called widow makers, that could fall on him with the force of a hurled spear. He judges the rot that can cause a tree to kick or pivot prematurely when cut. A good cutter likes to boast that he can fell a tree so accurately that it will hit precisely enough to drive a stake into the ground. But every tree is a bit of a mystery until it's cut. This danger, this challenge, is what makes men fall in love with a hard, dirty, dangerous job.
“It was exciting,” recalled Suslick, a bit wistfully. “It took your all, and you had to be on the ball to survive.”
Cutters also work the shortest hours, because the job is so exhausting and the misjudgment that comes from exhaustion can be so dangerous and...

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