There are periods in every young person's life that irrevocably cast the template for the future. For some, it's the military; for others, it's law school, a year spent globe-trotting, maybe just the first job.
For me, it was several years in the late 1970s and 1980s that I spent working for the U.S. Forest Service in the little Trinity County logging town of Hayfork. I learned a lot about wildfire fighting, slightly less about ranching, steelhead fishing and deer hunting. Mainly I was indoctrinated in the nuances of timber town society. I could never define it precisely, could never put it satisfactorily into words, but I somehow knew I was learning immutable verities in Hayfork: the value of work; the necessity of trusting one's neighbors; the differences that define bull -- , chicken -- and horse -- and the qualities that bind them.
Hayfork was booming during my time there, fueled by a U.S. Forest Service policy that emphasized the liquidation of big trees. The "timber beasts" ruled the agency then -- government foresters who wanted to farm federal lands for softwoods. Payrolls for the town's two big mills, numerous logging companies and the forest service were all fat. Then things changed.
Hayfork's decline began in the 1990s, as inventories of large timber declined in the Shasta-Trinity National Forest, environmental regulations tightened and mills shut down. The town's downturn attracted considerable national attention. It became a locus for Option Nine, a federal plan to help logging communities transit to new economies in the aftermath of the spotted-owl brouhaha. During his presidential campaign in 1992, Pat Buchanan made a whistle-stop in Hayfork to inveigh against fuzzy-headed environmentalists.
Nothing much came of Option Nine, and even less of Buchanan, but for a brief period, Hayfork's cri de coeur was heard. Journalists wrote about the town, and the implications its unhappy evolution held for the West in general. I was one of them, unique only because my interest was personal as well as professional: Something of value was being lost in Hayfork, something that could not be measured in dollars and cents.
A week seldom goes by that I don't think of Hayfork and its forests. I visit it often, finding excuses to detour to Highway 3 on north state trips. I keep hoping things will be different. And they are different, but not in a good way. The town was afflicted with deep malaise when I first wrote about it, but now it is dying, and its imminent demise points to a larger death: that of the logging culture.
In the late 1990s, the incipient social decay was palpable; today, it is triumphant. East of town, a log house I built with my first wife is in complete disrepair. Junked cars and trucks slowly decompose to their essential elements in the fields we once planted to oats and vetch. Some of the small, fastidiously maintained homes formerly owned by loggers and millworkers now appear inhabited by meth freaks, with garbage piled in windrows in the front yards. Others are abandoned, sheltering only bats, wood rats, rattlesnakes and skunks. The population is aging; the young flee as soon as they can. There is nothing here for them.
I keep returning to Hayfork in the way you pick at an old scab -- it's compulsive, and you somehow hope it will initiate or speed healing. The town's collapse seems like a personal affront -- a declaration that my most vigorous years were utterly misspent. I feel, somehow, snookered.
Given the Forest Service's essential mandate in the 1970s and 1980s -- the cutting of all merchantable timber -- Hayfork's crash was inevitable. The timber boom of that period gripped the West from the Rockies to the Pacific Coast, and most of the big trees came down. It was the final buffalo hunt. And like the buffalo hunters, the loggers found themselves out of work when the last great beast was laid low.
True, there are a lot of opinions on just who or what is culpable for the collapse. The loggers blamed the town's unraveling on the relatively tough environmental legislation -- personified by the spotted owl -- that was passed in the 1990s. Competition from foreign softwood producers with lower production costs was also a factor.
But one fact trumps the rest: The town's essential resource -- large-diameter conifers -- no longer existed in quantity by the late 1980s. Hayfork's mills weren't tooled to process the second- and third-growth trees that increasingly dominated the north state's national forests. Also, cutting small trees isn't as lucrative as cutting big trees, and the loggers found it financially impractical to harvest "peckerpoles" at existing prices. Finally, the Forest Service slammed the door on timber harvests. Spooked by environmental lawsuits and hobbled by metastasizing red tape, the agency slashed its timber sales in the Shasta-Trinity.
There have been undeniable environmental benefits to the unraveling of the county's timber industry. Most pertinently, sedimentation from ill-engineered logging roads and scalped mountainsides has decreased, benefiting fisheries on the Trinity River and its tributaries. But the utter collapse of the timber economy also has been tragic, because it's not just an industry that has disappeared; a way of life has passed.
Logging had its own language, social values, ethos. Though the work was arduous and dangerous, it was not brute labor. It encompassed a set of skills that required years of study and practice to master. Those who didn't attain proficiency sought other work -- or died.
The difficulty and hazards of the work, the sense of shared purpose, the isolation of the venues made logging and its ancillary industry, milling, a culture. And the demise of logging culture has impoverished the state. Think of the Castro without gay culture, or the Mission without Latino culture. The sense of loss would be incalculable for San Franciscans. Hayfork -- all the little towns in California, Oregon and Washington that once derived their economies from the woods -- are now grappling with an analogous situation. The very essence of what they are has disappeared.
Jim Jungwirth, a scion of one of Hayfork's most venerable logging families, told me not long ago that the greatest loss to the town wasn't the timber revenues. It was, he said, the displacement of the "blue-collar professionals" who constituted the backbone of Hayfork's social structure.
At one time, Jungwirth said, Hayfork had seven mills. And every mill had four or five highly skilled people -- the millwright, the sawyer, the saw filer -- who had deep roots in the community. The same was true for loggers. There was a corps -- the fallers and buckers, the cat skinners -- who had served long apprenticeships and were deeply invested in the town. They all owned property and had families. They didn't control the town -- they were the town. They were the caretakers of what Jungwirth calls "woods culture." They did everything worth doing. They coached Little League, went to the school plays and served on the board of the county fair. When somebody was hurt or killed in the woods, they took up collections for family members. They were all in the volunteer fire department. When they lost their jobs and moved on, said Jungwirth, that's when the town really started to die.
One of those social guardians was Larry Wasson, who worked in a variety of technical and managerial capacities at the town's mills. Wasson served on the school board for many years, and the student enrollment numbers, he notes, say it all. There were 460 kids in elementary school in 1996, he said. Now there are 230.
"You still see people moving in," Wasson said. "Old people. Retirees. It's not the town it was."
I had many mentors in Hayfork. Some were like Wasson -- community leaders. Others were simply people who had lived in the mountains for years, and knew the way things worked. There were loggers who taught me the wisdom of running my chain loose to increase my saw's torque, or techniques for placing wedges in a back cut to precisely guide the direction of a falling tree. Ranchers who showed me how to split elegant fence posts from incense cedar logs. A bear hunter who schooled me in the music of the hounds -- the difference in timbre between a bluetick baying a bear's trail and one that had treeed the bear.
And scores of people who immersed me in the rich language of woods culture: "cull," used to describe both a worthless log and a deeply flawed human being. "Widowmakers," the large limbs that fall from old pines and firs to threaten logging crews working below. "Schoolmarm," a conifer split in its upper reaches to form two trunks, evoking a woman's thighs.
I was low in the valley's society: A Forest Service employee, or "Piss Fir." Our sobriquet derived from the white fir, which smells like urine when burned. White firs have little commercial value, and are disdained by loggers -- like Forest Service employees. Loggers tended to favor the Timber Beasts over the wildlife biologists, but in the final evaluation, we were all Piss Firs.
Still, I owned land, I lived in the valley year-round, and I was a member of the community -- the most egalitarian I've known. Ultimately, you were judged by your dedication to hard physical work and your willingness to help your neighbor in times of need. I wasn't the most ardent communitarian in the valley, but neither was I an arrant cull. I was accepted, and encouraged to improve.
Hayfork's downtown has never been more than a strip of modest businesses along Highway 3 in the center of the Hayfork Valley. Twenty years ago, however, the town was -- for a rural community -- flush. Two large mills ran 24-7. Log and chip trucks clogged the highway. There was a movie theater and a couple of restaurants, a feed store and hardware store, three gas stations, various markets and shops; all did well.
There were three bars: Tommy's Joint was for loggers, and interlopers were sometimes assaulted, Forest Service employees drank at the Lookout, and the Hayfork Hotel -- as close to a historic building as Hayfork could boast -- was a kind of DMZ where everyone -- loggers and millworkers, Forest Service grunts and ranchers, placer miners and pot growers -- could mingle and imbibe freely.
The town's demographic profile was young: If you started working in the woods at 18, you were old at 40, with dysplastic hips, an arthritic spine, many large and interesting scars, and perhaps a few excised digits or a missing eye. But the youth of the workforce kept Hayfork vibrant -- with fights and complicated love affairs that sometimes went criminally askew, of course, but also with a certain pure, wild, high-flying joie de vivre that was bracing.
And now: ghosts and rust. On the outskirts of town, the huge Sierra Pacific mill that was once Hayfork's main economic engine is a hulk; it closed in 1996. Its payroll had sustained hundreds of families. I can still recall the tang of pine resin in the air from the giant planers and saws as you drove past on Highway 3.
Today, the mill site looks like ground zero for a small tactical nuke. Everything of any value has been carted off, either as salvage for other mills or as scrap. A few dilapidated buildings, some piles of twisted metal and a vast concrete slab are about all that remain.
Still, locals have been struggling for years to make some use of the site. Not a hell of a lot has come from the efforts. Today, Timber Creek Forest Products, a small local firm, produces hardwood wainscoting and flooring and cedar fencing and siding at the facility. When it can.
The demand is there, said Candi Geraths, the site manager. People like the products, but it's difficult to obtain the raw material: incense cedar, madrone and chinquapin logs.
And not big dimensional timber, Geraths told me when I dropped by her office recently. She can take anything down to 8 inches in diameter -- stuff you'd get from a thinning operation, the kind of trees that rim the valley. But the Forest Service won't conduct the sales.
Jungwirth also runs a small wood products company in town, and it's quite successful. But not, he allowed, as successful as it could or should be.
Jefferson State Forest Products specializes in cabinetry and bins for upscale supermarkets. It makes most of the bins for the Whole Foods supermarket chain, and it employs 34 workers, all local, all unskilled when hired and trained by Jungwirth's managers. Average wage: $10 an hour, good money by post-timber-crash Hayfork standards. Jungwirth has been slowly expanding his business over the past several years, but he wants to take it to the next level. He envisions a new economy for Hayfork, one based on sustainable forestry practices and value-added wood products including furniture and kitchenware. But, like Geraths, he's hobbled by a lack of logs. Virtually all the wood he uses comes from private producers in Oregon, driving up his costs. If he could obtain a steady supply of thinnings from the 35,000 acres of softwood plantations rimming the Hayfork Valley, he said, the benefits would be manifold: sustainable forestry jobs, millwork, reduced costs, greater profits, vastly enhanced community revenues.
And there could be other benefits.
Jungwirth's wife, Lynn, runs the Watershed Research and Training Center out of Hayfork, a nonprofit group that promotes community-based, low-impact forestry practices. Right now, she notes, the valley's softwood plantations -- established after the great orgy of cutting 20 years ago -- are lying fallow, with no active management.
"It's thick as dog hair in there," she said, "just waiting to burn." She pointed to a scorched patch of brown and gray marring a verdant plantation on a mountain looming above the valley floor.
"One hot summer, a few lightning strikes, and it will all look like that," she said.
Thinning the plantations, Jungwirth notes, would make the stands more fire resistant. Selective thinning, she said, would also hasten old-growth forest characteristics: Remaining trees would become bigger faster -- and presumably more attractive to ancient forest species such as the spotted owl.
Additionally, said Jungwirth, small biomass power plants could be established in the valley to burn the sawdust and other waste from logging and milling. Not only would the town be self-sufficient in electricity, she said, but there would be enough power to export out of the valley.
Still, no one expects miracles -- or even success. The townspeople have hope -- but no expectations.
"I respect the Jungwirths, and I applaud what they're trying to do," said Wasson. "But I don't think much will ultimately come of it. I don't think the timber industry will ever really come back."
Certainly, federal policy seems to support Wasson's point of view. The Bush administration has pushed thinning plans on federal lands as a means of cutting fire risk and creating a sustainable wood supply, but environmentalists balked when it became clear that significant numbers of large-diameter trees would be included in the sales. Nothing much has come of the initiatives -- at least in California's national forests.
There's a lot of local grousing about the Forest Service, but none of it is truly heated, because everyone understands how the agency works. The service, like any federal agency, is large and slow, and moves only when the pressure to rouse it from inertia is sufficiently intense. Then it moves in the direction it is prodded until it hits a wall, and then it stops.
In a very real sense, this demonstrates that the agency is truly responsive to public sentiment. During the Timber Beast era, the service authorized the cutting of every merchandizable stick of timber in the Shasta-Trinity, because that action coincided with the views of rural constituents and the legislators who represented them.
Then two things happened: The inventories of big trees were liquidated, and urban environmentalists gained in influence. As a concomitant to growing Green power, spotted owl lawsuits hit the courts, enforcing major changes in timber sale policy. The service adroitly adapted to the times, emphasizing forest biodiversity and recreation.
Today, things are again in flux, but no new direction is clear. Dueling versions of "fire proofing" policies are flying through the air. General uncertainty prevails in Washington. The Forest Service understandably is in badger mode, hunkered down in a hole.
In other words, it's unlikely Hayfork will obtain any reliable supply of thinnings in the foreseeable future.
Jungwirth acknowledges that urban environmentalists must be able to trust the essential concept of new wave logging before anything comes of it.
"We have to make it clear we're not interested in clear-cutting, not interested in taking large trees," he said. People can have it both ways, he said: Vibrant woodlands with old-growth characteristics and commercial forestry.
For someone who knew Hayfork in better times, Jungwirth's vision is seductive, implying as it does the right of rural communities to, well, exist, with functioning schools, fire departments and economies.
During the U.N. World Environment Day conference held in San Francisco last year, some activists posited that the urban model, in concept, is ecologically sound. If properly designed and managed, they said, cities provide the greatest possible economic and cultural opportunities for human beings with the least possible impact to the planet.
No doubt that's true. In the best of all possible worlds, we would all live in pristine glass towers, hold hands when crossing the street to avoid being hit by the hydrogen-powered cars zipping past and sip lattes brewed from algae trimmings. We would vacation in old-growth forests brimming with spotted owls and Pacific fishers and marvel at -- but never eat -- the salmon spawning in the streams.
But we don't live in that world. And in the imperfect world we live in, our forests have been despoiled and degraded by unenlightened harvest practices. It's a damn shame -- but bewailing old outrages isn't enough. Nor is it enough to simply leave these damaged woodlands largely alone, visiting them only on occasion for picnics and campouts.
To regain old-growth characteristics in a reasonable period of time, new wave logging advocates say, these forests need active management. Not clear-cutting -- but sustained judicious thinning and prescription burning, with emphasis placed on minimal land disturbance. And the lumber and fiber yielded by such enterprises could make up the base of an entirely new economy, strengthening the local constituency for forest biodiversity and health.
In theory, at least, it all sounds good. And I see something else that might be saved by taking this path: woods culture. The recent U.N. conference notwithstanding, there are many people who can't abide cities, and want no part of them. They are square pegs who can't be hammered into the urban round hole; they are miserably unsuited for white collar or service work, and they are miserable when forced to do it. We need these people back in Hayfork, and all the other little Western towns where trees were once central to the way of life. We need to let loggers be loggers, albeit with some very tough ground rules. They contribute nothing to the richness of our society when we force them to work for Wal-Mart or Burger King.San Francisco Chronicle
