Tree hugging, tree cutting...

It is well that you should celebrate your Arbor Day thoughtfully, for within your lifetime the nation's need of trees will become serious. We of an older generation can get along with what we have, though with growing hardship; but in your full manhood and womanhood you will want what nature once so bountifully supplied and man so thoughtlessly destroyed; and because of that want you will reproach us, not for what we have used, but for what we have wasted.

~ Theodore Roosevelt, 1907 Arbor Day Message
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Its funny the ways a man's life can go...

I've heard it said that men have two choices in life... work or prison. When it gets down to it thats about right. Basically. If it were that simple. But its not. Life provides quagmires, dichotomies, predicaments and downright challenges to any human that ventures beyond their front door.

As a thinking, working, adult male I've often found a particular line of work... unfulfilling. I've had those jobs. As a teen I worked at McDonald's. And for the trivia minded among you, this particular unit (at PCH in Lomita, Ca. just west of Western Ave) was owned by Warren Dobbins who by marriage to his wife Dorothy was an in-law to Ray Kroc and his wife Joan, founders of the McD chain. I did good. At 18 I was an assistant manager and making fair money for a teen and the times. But oh no... we don't want to be completely professional and actually get to go to Hamburger U. Once in a while we still need to vent our boyish enthusiasm and fall prey to spontaneous capers and career damaging situations... late one nite before closing up we emptied the ice machine into the parking lot, as we often did for cleaning.

Well, that big pile of crushed ice was great for making snowballs and therefore it wasn't entirely inconceivable that a bunch of young males, left to their own testosterone driven wiles, would figure out that a snowball fight would be a great idea at 2am.

Wrong. Again. The neighbors turned us into to the boss and Allan lost any possibility of a career as a professional burgerflingen' manager. sigh...

But when I started selling lumber I enjoyed it. Sure I knew that it took trees getting cut to provide the wood I was selling but wood is good stufff. Handling quality beautiful lumber is rewarding. So after brother Marty gave me the chance to get hired at JE Higgins Lumber Co. in Santa Maria I was selling wood. Loading trucks, pulling orders, driving trucks for deliveries, getting awesome slivers.... A job which moved me out of Fresno and back to the central coast. And it was from Higgins in Santa Maria that I moved to Oregon and Jawbone Flats.

From lumber whore to defender of forests in one fell swoop, one 1000 mile drive... and then... after learning all the ways in which old-growth forests were so necessary, so worth saving, I end up selling redwood lumber for over a decade. Just up until last year in fact.

And now, here I am, once again, speaking for the trees. Speaking for those with no voice in our modern world. Such speech will get you labelled by the way.

You will bear the burden of such apellations as "tree-hugger" or "eco-freak" (this one I'm fond of because it is sooo inclusive... so many ways to be a nuisance to the puckered amongst us) or you might even be known as an *gasp!* "enviroh-mentalist." So...? Am I a hypocrite? Am I not an environmentalist? Am I a victim of circumstance? A rogue among lambs or a warrior among rogues? Or, as I suspect, am I a multi-faceted individual with bumps, warts and no clue as to where the hell I am or what I'm doing but putting on a good face so I don't look too silly among my neighbors? There are just too many choices to really decide... kinda like the ice cream or beer sections at a big grocery store. Or the shampoo aisle! Now there's a topic for a rant...

From trees and the hugging of to rogues and from rogues to shampoo... dang... I digress again... sigh...

Next time I will stay on topic. I swear... really...

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Trees are sanctuaries. Whoever knows how to talk to them, whoever knows how to listen to them, can learn the truth.

~ Herman Hesse

Sweat...

You have noticed that everything an Indian does is in a circle, and that is because the Power of the World always works in circles, and everything tries to be round..... The Sky is round, and I have heard that the earth is round like a ball, and so are all the stars. The wind, in its greatest power, whirls. Birds make their nest in circles, for theirs is the same religion as ours....

Even the seasons form a great circle in their changing, and always come back again to where they were. The life of a man is a circle from childhood to childhood, and so it is in everything where power moves.

~ Black Elk

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I love living in the west. I pretty much doubt I'll ever live east of the rockies and there is slim chance I'll ever travel much east of the Mississippi. Everywhere I've gone in the west I've touched time. We still have real cowboys, real indians, water wars and argue over grazing and other uses of our land here. I've met descendants of Kit Carson and Daniel Boone. I've found pot shards, arrowheads, petroglyphs and pictographs... it is a genuine enrichment of my world to have these associations. To have those connections across time and to think perhaps that somewhere along the line I may do a good thing or two for folks in my life.

In my doings with tribal folks I've done sweatlodge with many people of many tribes and colors, I've sat through all-night teepee meetings (peyote ceremony) and seen the firebird as it was born, flared and was consumed to coals and then ash while prayers were made and songs sung.

In California I hung out with Grampa Semu a lot off and on over the years and had many friends in the local Chumash community. I remember first meeting Grampa at the Santa Ynez Reservation at the home of two of the last speakers of the Chumash language, Uncle Cheecho and Aunt Tita. I have the negatives for some excellent black and white photos from those days at the rez(mid 70s). I went back many times to that old house as various brothers stayed and took care of the elders until they passed on.

I even did my first subversive act (on US soil) there. There was a dispute about building a massive rest stop with a fancy bathroom for the tourists (this was way pre-casino days) and my friend Two Jays asked me to take my camera and take pictures of certain people and tell them I was with the Santa Barbara newspaper. I did, it was easy to do and man... did I find myself in the middle of a tribal dispute! One of the tribal council members, a woman, let me know in no uncertain terms, that my presence was unwanted. Gack! But it was all good... TJ was a big jovial guy and he saved me from the mob... eh...

Anyway... I'm digressing again... I've managed to stay at least peripherally involved in the Native American world. Sometimes it was the present folks, sometimes it was those who had come before, who had used the omni-present grinding stones I keep coming across.

(photo - Wendy Martin, from Forest Voice, Summer 2002)

At Jawbone I had the great pleasure of meeting Calvin Hecocta who had started coming to Opal Creek most springs to do a land blessing and help us open camp up for the year. In a good way, with songs and prayers and good food and company. And of course, sweatlodge... Woohoo!

Calvin runs a beautiful sweat, he is masterful in his presence with - and concern for - those with him. He is funny and big hearted and accomodating without bending tradition. I've run the fire and carried many rocks for Calvin's sweats at Opal Creek. And hope to carry many more stones his way through the coming years...

The sweatlodge is one of those things that I wonder about. I mean I know folks, professionals, who are scientific minded. Science can explain anything. There is a scientific explanation.

But how do you measure appreciation? How do you measure the change that can come in a human heart when they find the strength to not get out of the sweatlodge; to sit and let go because the voice telling the body "get out! Its HOT in here! We can't take anymore!" is overridden by that hidden power that keeps people in charge of their senses when all about them scream "flee". The sweatlodge is old and crosses all continents and has no color barriers. I've heard it called the first and oldest ceremony.

People sweat everywhere, whether in saunas, temescals or in hidden mountain hot springs... there are traditions of medicine on every continent that involve making people perspire for the benefits to their health. One of my favorite things to do is build a sweatlodge in some remote location next to a creek and spend a few days, do at least a couple of sweats. Down in Central California we did sweats for years east of town off of Hwy 166.

Powerful stuff. I'm hoping to get one in tomorrow down in Blachly with the folks at Nanish Shontie. I hope to, it'll be my first chance to meet these folks. Otherwise I probably have to go practice my lines for my work on an AM radio program debuting soon here in Eugene. But thats a surprise, so don't tell.

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Leave it as it is. The ages have been at work on it and man can only mar it.

~ Theodore Roosevelt

Standing together...

You must not know too much or be too precise or scientific about birds and trees and flowers and watercraft; a certain free-margin, and even vagueness - ignorance, credulity - helps your enjoyment of these things.

~ Henry David Thoreau
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When I arrived at Jawbone, knowing little of the old growth debate here in the NorthWest and having spent the last 3 years selling dead trees (lumber), I was ignorant. But only in the sense of not having the facts.

Anyway...

I've talked before about going out for donuts in the morning... There was a lot of that, all year. Firewood was our heat and we were surounded by trees and had our priorities. Warm and dry ranks high on the priorities list. We always had work to do. There were buildings needing rehabilitation and repair, there were groups to host and hikers to greet. Because we used a hydroelectric system for our power needs we had to maintain the flume line that runs from the source creek to the generating station.

In winter when the water can come hard and unending, the screens at the flume mouth always needed cleaning. And of course getting to the head of the system meant going for yet another hike in the woods! Damn!

So, off we'd go in the Green Pig (more on that later) bumping up the rocky Forest Service road past Opal Pool and up the road a ways to our flume line and then follow (more or less) the line to the creek (Flume Creek oddly enough) where we'd have to get pretty wet sometimes cleaning leaves, sticks and stems (no seeds) and lots of hemlock and fir needles off of our screens. And we'd get cold, very wet and probably be laughing as we did it. We knew we could go back and get warm and dry.

We made our own hours. I mean daylight, thats obviously working hours, but when the power would start dropping at night after a new storm came in we'd hop in the truck with our flashlights and rain gear, drive to the trail head and have to hike in the dark and do it all again. This job, this maintaining the water supply was as old as camp. Higher up on the hill there are still remnants of an old log flume that fed the original mill site on Battle Axe. One of George's tales is about getting in trouble as kids when they'd get caught riding the flume line. But what kid could resist? Here is this open air water slide that was made of wood, slick as all get out... thru a beautiful forest... better than an "E" ticket at Dizzyland!

But when I was there, as it is now, the flume line is a large PVC pipe that follows the terrain down to camp where it meets the Pelton wheel which in turn drives the generator. The same system more or less is in operation today. Caretakers still have to go and clean screens and repair sections of pipe. Which for them means another hike thru the woods. Damn!

When I took on this job access to upper Opal Creek was a trail, lovingly known as the "bear trail" because by golly it must have been the bears who made it. I mean, gosh, there are rules and regulations about trail construction, permits and surveys and archaeological investigations that need to be done and by golly none of my precessors in camp would go against government policies.

Those darn bears...

So in those days we directed people to the bear trail. Also known as the Bart Smith Trail for another former miner who had passed on.

And because we had become the lightning rod for the NW old growth debate we became advocates for visitors. Where once the camp was rarely visited, strangers were mostly shunned and privacy was fiercely protected, in my time we wanted folks to visit. We needed visitors. Paul and Hoos (my other friend and the one who had brought Paul to Jawbone) had to buck tradition and make nice with strangers. Former miner, now passed on, Billy Baumgarten (RIP) had a good story about how private it was and how the public had to adapt in certain situations:

I had been swimming (skinny dipping) at the pool under the Battle Axe bridge [seperates upper camp from lower camp] one summer day and when I was done I just put on my boots and hat and threw my clothes over my shoulder and walked down the road back to my cabin. Well... as I'm walking down the road in my... natural state... here comes a family walking up the road thru camp. I just smiled, tipped my hat and kept walking.

heh... welcome to Oregon...

For those not from Oregon... we do like our skinny dipping here. It is one of those inalienable rights that while not explicitly stated in code is understood as having historical precedent. In fact it is a good thing to remember if you do ever visit here and especially if you decide to try one of our remote hot springs. Oregonians get naked. Especially around water.

Anyway... I was talking about the old growth debate (well, I intended to talk about it) and how I was a bit undereducated on the topic. There were excellent books in camp and we had plenty of people visiting who were well educated (or were educators) on the subject and willing and able to educate. And because of the efforts of the logging industry we had ground to make up. They had painted us as the bad guys and demonization of enviroh-mentalists was accepted and encouraged. The spotted owl became a big player in the debate and led to actual owl murders. But the owl was just a player in this drama. The trees... the forest, that was the real issue. And... an issue that follows me to this day.

God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods. But he cannot save them from fools.

~ John Muir