The whole notion of loggin’ is very simple if you get onto it. It comes to this: the idea is to make a tree into a log and a log into a plank. Now, when it’s standin’ up vertical it’s a tree, and when it’s laid down it’s a felled tree. And then we buck it into lengths of thirty-two feet an’ them are logs. Then we drag them logs acrost to where the truck is and lift ‘em up onto the truck an’ then the truck drives ‘em down to the bridge where the government scalers cheat us an’ then we take ‘em on down to our mill an’ dump ‘em into the water. When we get enough of ‘em in the water we drag ‘em up into the mill and we cut ‘em up ‘an we got planks, lumber.
Ken Kesey, Sometimes a Great Notion
A young boy, maybe eight or nine years old, tugs at the pocket of his grandfather’s Dickies. It’s the annual Grants Pass Antiques & Collectibles Street Faire, held downtown every May, and vendors line the sidewalk’s edge for blocks, remnants of a century strewn randomly on folding tables, opening a portal to the past like a historical smorgasbord.
“Hey, what are those?” The boy points to a pair of combat-style clodhoppers that appear to have been to battle and back, perhaps aerating a few skulls in the process. The menacing leather and steel cleats lay on the ground next to a seller’s booth, inches from a stack of washboards and beneath a basket overflowing with belt buckles and boot spurs for a buck apiece.
“They’re for logging,” the grandfather says, smiling. “You’ve really never seen a pair like that? Spikes. Corks.”
The kid squints, grills his granddad, and tilts his head inquisitively. “Are they for golfing or for playing football?”
The old man laughs, then spins around looking for peers to share in his mild amusement. I’m the only person there though, comparably confused. He turns back to the boy.
“When I was in school about a million years before your mom had you, all of my uncles had pairs just like those. They’d keep them by the front door, and I remember my mother — your great-grams — used to hit the roof when she’d come out and have to wipe up all the mud.”
I witnessed that exchange nearly a year ago, and it resonated deeply as I charted my course for Oregon Tale. Before this project grew into a beast with multilateral features, touching topics ranging from foreclosures and police militarization to gold mining, I sent some rather messy early drafts to outlets for which I have previously written, as well as to one notable investigative outfit that was, to its credit, at least open to allowing me to pitch in person. But after salivating over my stories about SWAT evictions and a county so sensationally strapped for cash that sheriffs can’t protect and serve, the national editors I contacted proved uninterested in the underlying saga. The apologue. The backstory. The logging!
Detailed numbers and statistics about timberlands are important, and I’ve packed several into this installment of Oregon Tale. After all, the central reason I moved to publish independently was that I wanted to carve my narrative log cabin out of native wood, a root regional resource in both metaphor and soil. After meeting loggers in the flesh though, I understand why many are reluctant to wax scientific about their work. Maybe they were simply being short to avoid having to spend time with a nosy writer from out east who flips each of their comments into half a dozen further questions, but there’s nevertheless certain truth in their pithy job descriptions. As one retired crane operator summated in a chat over sweet buns bigger than hubcaps: “We cut down trees … A whole dirty lot of ’em, as many as we could until there weren’t any more to get. Not enough left for me at least.”
His comments made me think about the guy with his grandchild at the antiques fair. I asked if the retired logger’s son or any other younger people in his family wore hunting coats and hard hats to work. He looked down at the table, replied a silent negative, then put his arm around his wife and pulled her close.
“She’ll probably put me out in the yard later on for saying this, but if those trees came down like they did in the old days, I might just still be out there with my younger brother.” His wife then shook her head, rolled her eyes back and smacked him jokingly across the shoulder. “He’s still bitter that he never wholly broke his neck,” she said.
“Don’t worry, honey.” The husband grinned mischievously. “I only miss it on the days when it ain’t too cold.”
Oregon’s coastal economy, its past and future, is either simple or complex. Simple: All residents, either directly or through any number of municipal services, relied on logs and logging subsidies until federal restrictions closed most active timberlands in 2012. Complex: Hundreds of sawmills have shuttered throughout the Pacific Northwest in the past couple of decades, effectively eliminating anywhere from 40,000 to 100,000 jobs. Whether statistical or superficial, it’s all germane to the discussion about how impacted communities will survive once the last harvestable trees fall. Easy Street has never run through these parts; despite the likelihood of dying on the job being nearly 25 times higher than in all other careers averaged together, the mean hourly wage for an Oregon logger is only $16.67.
As with a lot of other things, the only way to truly learn this swath of Oregon is to sample it up close. It sounds cliche, but in my experience some investigative journalism is best done online — covering computer hackers, for example. Not a whole lot of revealing goodies about this area of interest are indexed on Google, however, and you can’t savor carnivorous delights at Taylor’s Sausage on a map, so on both my visits I blew south from downtown — even farther toward the coast and through the mountains than where Tom Roach and Melinda Starba live in Wilderville — to Cave Junction, population less than 2,000, one of only two incorporated cities in Josephine County.
Like Grants Pass, its larger sister village in the valley, Cave Junction, tiny as it is, requires much more than a broad brush to paint accurately. There’s a Dairy Queen and sketchy storefronts, sure, but there’s also an organic espresso shop and a yoga room. All within spitting distance of the windowless Sportsman Tavern, where brawls are known to rage behind saloon doors for in excess of an hour when there aren’t any sheriffs to patrol at night. Regardless of what kind of business, whether bars for the remaining legacy loggers or the shops that cater to yuppies passing through on their way to spelunk the popular tourist caves nearby, signs of a wooden backbone are omnipresent. At Taylor’s Sausage, a place to feast on flesh and swim in pools of pulled pork and barbecue sauce, nearly every fixture other than the pop machine and register looks as if it could have been there half-a-century ago, chairs both whittled and abused by rugged axe men who warmed up and toasted firewater in some makeshift roadside meat shack that has since returned to dust.
Quaint as I may find all the locally sourced decor, shiny redwood slabs and benches that weigh more than compact cars, the furnishings also have a bittersweet quality to them. Forty years ago, there were nearly two dozen sawmills between Josephine and the county next door. Now, just one such facility remains, producing only a fraction of its former output, and that’s only because politicians bent their budgets to save it. I drove past Rough & Ready Lumber last May; after 90 years of business its supply sheds, bare and dusty in plain view from the road leading out of Cave Junction, seemed an unpleasant reminder of past glory. But of course it’s not that simple.
Even with the industry paralyzed due to moratoriums, the Logging Era isn’t altogether over in Josephine. Pols on all levels continue to fight faithfully, in session after legislative session, to re-open additional federal lands for chopping. Most of the action has shifted though, as there’s a boom in speculation on privately owned properties. It’s a non-enviro entrepreneur’s field day, an opportunity to corner the diminishing supply of lumber. And so acreage is being hoarded in the midst of a continuing mortgage crisis.
My team worked for months on this story before coming to understand why private logging has everything to do with the spurious eviction of Tom and Melinda, and with the plights of countless other luckless longtime landowners in Josephine. Only then, after analyzing documents and notes in order to develop the big picture, did I finally see the forest for its trees. Despite the natural beauty, it’s not a pretty sight.
NEXT: A look at private timber farming in Oregon. We turn over rocks and remove a few stumps to discover an interesting pattern of investments around Slate Creek and every other harvestable corner of Josephine County.
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