Light on the Devils: Coming of Age on the Klamath

Where It Ended

1 Where It Ended in a town called happy camp, beside a river that he had known all his life, a man drove into the deserted parking lot of an abandoned lumber mill,sat for a while in the cab of his pickup truck,and then blew his brains out. I had known him for thirty years, and he had worked in that mill from 1965 until the mill closed.And when I heard the news, far away in Idaho, when I learned how he died and the circumstances of family and community that had led him down to the riverside that evening, I knew that the world in which we had both grown up, the world of logging and lumber that my family had also followed as long as they could, was really, really over. The mill had closed in September of 1994;it had operated in that far northwestern corner of California for over forty years.For much of that time, it was just one of four or five mills within a twenty-mile radius. But by that year,the timber harvest on the Klamath National Forest had dropped to half of its peak in the 1980s, when 196 million board feet of timber had been dragged from the woods every year.The spotted owl, a drab and reclusive bird scarcely heard of two decades before, had at last been listed as a threatened species, and a new set of timber harvest guidelines now superseded all the old forest plans, wherever the owl lived. For many people in Happy Camp—and all over the Pacific Northwest—this sudden new reality was like hitting a wall at sixty miles an hour. Over the next decade, even the lowered timber harvest target was seldom met.The last great surge of logging on the Klamath National Forest had, in fact, come years before, in the wake of the lightningcaused conflagrations of 1987. Those salvage timber sales would be the last big ones.After that, even though the early twenty-first century would bring huge and almost uncontrollable fires, the old days of logging and road-building were gone.The rules had changed. Having lost its greatest source of revenue, having lost its usefulness as a tool of the forest products industry, the U.S. Forest Service—the agency that Light on the Devils 2 manages the National Forests—was unable to compete for congressional appropriations.As the years passed and the foresters who knew how to “get out the cut”retired or moved,they were not replaced.The mill and the Forest Service had been two halves of the same whole,and with one gone, the other would never be the same. The last eighty workers at the Happy Camp mill lost their jobs on the same day that workers at Oregon mills in Springfield and Albany, also owned by Stone Forest Industries,lost theirs.And despite the rather desperate optimism displayed in the local newspapers by economic development councils and other public servants, most of the region realized the game was over. Stone Forest Industries was headquartered in Chicago,Illinois,and people in Happy Camp,isolated on their stretch of the wild Klamath River,wondered if the men in the skyscrapers even knew about them.They knew,of course.They may even have cared.But this was, after all, just business. I watched the drama unfold from another National Forest, central Idaho’s Salmon-Challis, where in 1993 the federal listing of various species of Pacific salmon as endangered and threatened had done to its timber cut what the spotted owl listing had done to the Klamath’s.The spotted owl was threatened by the loss of its old growth forest habitat. The salmon of the Snake and Salmon river basins had been nearly extirpated by erosion from roads, clear-cuts, and livestock grazing; by irrigation diversions; and by dams on the Snake and Columbia rivers. But like the mill in Happy Camp, the lumber mill in Salmon required millions of board feet of timber a year,and once the allowable cut in the surrounding area dropped to single digits,it also was doomed.What had happened to Happy Camp was happening all over theWest. After the Happy Camp mill closed, the men and women who had worked there moved on. Some left. Some went back to school at the nearest community college, three hours away. Some, whose wives had jobs in town, commuted weekly to Oregon lumber mills.The...