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

5. The Town

94 “Trees! Such monsters, all crammed together as thick as corn stalks,” wrote pioneer Amantha Sill of Oregon’s coastal forest in 1861. “God put them there, he must know what for. It is a great cave for animals to live, and Indians to come up on you so sudden. . . . Every day and night, I pray to be taken back to Indiana.” How different the forest must have seemed when it was unbroken. It affected the women in particular, often left alone in cabins set in a dark clearing hacked near the bank of a river. The wall of surrounding conifers whispered in the wind and stretched two hundred or more feet high. The men would leave to hunt or fetch supplies or log for a few dollars, and the women would stay behind, often with young children, sometimes miles from any neighbor and any help. Dora Huels-donk, wife of a prodigiously strong pioneer known as the Iron Man of the Hoh, used to wonder what would happen to her toddlers if she had an accident during her husband’s treks to hunt cougar for bounty. The forest is glorious in the glittering sunlight of high summer, of course. It is glorious in winter too, but in a darker, lonelier way. “You drove here down a tunnel of trees,” recalled Lorraine Maris, who came to Forks from the east side of the Olympic Peninsula in 1954 and who used The Town the town 95 to run the Forks newspaper. She remembers not being able to see the stars, so narrow were the gaps of sky. She recalls electricity going out for as long as five days because of the rain of limbs on the line. The shade would cause the black ice that formed on the roads to persist despite winter sun. It was claustrophobic until the big logging started. “Most women hated it here,” she said. “The biggest cause of divorce was that forest. You felt like you were buried alive. Until you’ve been where you don’t see the sun, you don’t know what it’s like.” Those who had lived in the forest inevitably had a different view from those who would later visit. It seemed inexhaustible in size, overpowering in structure, and a danger in its threat of fire or windfall. Robert Lee, the forestry sociologist at the University of Washington, has been researching the origins of these conflicting attitudes between rural and urban residents. Lee, a self-described political conservative who grew up in a backwoods home and worked in a redwood mill in California before going to college, argues that the rural view is the more realistic one, that rural residents understand that all life lives on the death of other life. “Rural residents can live with the ambivalence of loving nature and cutting trees,” he said. “It’s an acceptance that that’s life.” They see a cycle. City dwellers, he argued, are more likely to feel guilt toward nature and thus be more in favor of trying to preserve some of it unchanged. “Urban people are more disconnected with nature, and are very likely to regard trees as a symbol of immortality, of continuity.” The split, he said, almost takes on religious overtones. Part of the explanation of attitudes in Forks comes from its difficult history. In the earliest days Forks’s prairie was like an island, connected only tenuously to the outside world. Only slowly were corridors punched through the woods. Supplies those first years were infrequent. In a strange three-way commerce, the Indians brought seal pelts and fish to traders such as the Pullens in exchange for store goods, and then traded some of those store goods to the white farmers for vegetables. Only the smallest vessels could breast the breakers at the mouths of such rivers as the Quillayute and Hoh. In the 1890s a thirty-foot ketch called the Surfduck run by a Captain Hank brought supplies over the river bars until it disappeared in a storm. From the beginning, Forks struggled to overcome the limitations of 96 the final foreSt its own location. After Merrill Whittier homesteaded the present site of downtown Forks, he and several settlers started a hops-growing operation, building a large drying shed. But the only transport was at the river mouth at La Push, where storms across the bar could keep vessels from entering or leaving...