The Final Forest: Big Trees, Forks, and the Pacific Northwest

17. Sanctuary, II

284 Many of those who are most deeply affected by the final forest originally come from someplace else. The stolid trees are mute, inanimate, and yet they have a power to draw people, to promise sanctuary. Bonnie PhillipsHoward came from Wisconsin, and Larry Mason from Massachusetts. Mitch Friedman and ranger Fred Harnisch and Lou Gold, an aging activist who was drawn to an Earth First! demonstration near Oregon’s Bald Mountain, are from Chicago. Karen Hobbs of Forks is from Texas. Hobbs is a businesswoman and exporter. She doesn’t send truckloads of raw logs thundering down Highway 101, but she ships more from Forks via the United Parcel Service than any other merchant in town. Her steeland -wood warehouse is crammed like a queer squirrel’s nest, stuffed with mosses and reeds and funguses and stalks, the shadowy flowerings of the temperate rain forest. There are papery hornets’ nests, bundles of dried yellow yarrow, twisted driftwood, and dried kelp strands wound around on themselves. There are pine and fir and spruce cones, lichens, dried bear grass, horsetail reeds, and river roots. All this is shipped to florists across the United States who use the novel material in floral arrangements. Accordingly, Hobbs prefers the natural forest over a managed tree farm, where the clumsy and reforming hand of man often eliminates the sancTUary, ii SanCtuarY, ii 285 woods’ most beautiful products. She reads the trees, maps in her mind the likely locations of different plants, and hires retirees, transients, or the unemployed at low wages to reap their bounty. She teaches her workers how to take only enough so that the source plants remain. Hobbs, who had worked in the floral business, came to the Olympic Peninsula as a tourist in 1979. She arrived with friends at the ocean beaches of Kalaloch in a night fog. Their intention was to drive the next morning to the Hoh rainforest about thirty miles to the northeast, but when Hobbs woke to fog drip, she was stunned by the lush, riotous green on the coast. “I was just going gaga that things that were shipped on a regular basis to floral shops were here just growing by the side of the road. I’d never seen more than one or two varieties of moss in my life. Here I was seeing all these varieties. I could hardly even register all the textures I was seeing.” She followed a trail that led up from the beach into the big trees. The ground was a sponge squirting mushrooms, funguses, huckleberries, and sorrel. Vales were carpets of ferns. Logs were moss-shrouded nurseries, baby trees sprouting out of the decaying wood flesh of their ancestors. Alder and maple trailed rags of moss. “I fell in love with the flora though I couldn’t name any of it,” Hobbs recalled. “By 3 p.m. I sat on a log and I was about ready to max out. We went to Ruby Beach and stared at the sunset. My head was hurting. I hadn’t been that excited for a long time.” She returned to Texas but the following year came back for a month, taking a job at the Kalaloch Resort near the campground. She picked some of the foliage and sent it to florists to test the market. After a while, a check came in the mail. Opening it, next to the rumble of the ocean, Hobbs thought, “This is a way for me to make enough money to stay out here.” By the end of 1980 she had bought a small house and four acres in the forest and was asking people if she could pick on their land. They agreed, but were puzzled. Hobbs wanted things that grew like weeds. “It has helped me to be from somewhere else,” she reflected. “People who live in this environment don’t see the uniqueness of the product.” Brush pickers had harvested evergreens for floral designs and Christmas decorations for a long time on the Peninsula, but Hobbs was the first to look not just at the obvious plants but to appreciate the sculpture of the unlikely, such as a twisted root or a sun-dried strip of kelp. “There’s 286 the final foreSt no question in my mind that there’s nothing else like it on the market,” she said. She doesn’t suggest that her kind of business, with its low-paying...