Holdfast: At Home in the Natural World

Traveling the Logging Road, Coast Range

m 59 Traveling the Logging Road, Coast Range I’m driving between banks of forest duff, through a leafy tunnel lined with sword ferns and foxgloves. Morning fog spreads through the trees and along the narrow road, like milk poured in water. I turn on the windshield wipers and swerve to avoid a salamander. Huckleberry bushes and rhododendrons grow thick under cedars reaching over the road. I’m not sure how tall these trees are; their top branches have disappeared in the fog. I don’t know how old the forest is either, but along this road, I have seen scars on the uphill sides of cedars, where Siuslaw people peeled strips of bark more than three hundred years ago. In the undergrowth, in the fog, these are trees without beginning, trees without end: an eternity of forest. The road has only one lane for most of its length, but every mile or so there’s a wider space where a driver can pull over to let a log truck past. There are pink plastic ribbons dangling from branches here and there, and sometimes a mileage number on a plastic post. Thickly paved with asphalt and built to last, the road follows its fogline around the shoulders of mountains and along ridge tops in Oregon’s Coast Range. It’s surprisingly well built for a one-way road that, as far as I can tell from my topographic map, ends on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere. 60 m Holdfast Milepost 19 I crest a hill, startle, and hit the brakes. Bare hillside falls away on my left, bare hillside rises sharply to my right, nothing but mud, acres and acres of steep hillside stripped and sodden. A few blackened spars fall across the hill at odd angles, a few more stand upright— each a stake burned to its base. Far up the hillside, a bulldozer is working slowly. I can hear it shifting and wheezing and powering in low gear, gouging into the earth to tear at a root ball, then shoving the broken end of a tree into a pile of slash. A single strand of smoke rises from a smoldering slash pile and spreads out brown against the bottom of the clouds. I pull off the road onto a landing littered with tree bark. The tracks of heavy equipment have cut the ground into muddy stripes. Through the clear fans of my windshield, everything has been reduced to shades of gray except, far away, the dull orange smudge of the bulldozer. I have seen a landscape like this before, but it takes me a minute to search my memory. It isn’t Central America; nothing I have seen in the slash-and-burn agriculture of third-world countries comes close to this kind of devastation, on this scale. Eventually, I pull back to mind a photograph of a scene from Europe—a cloudshrouded moonscape of burned and broken snags, where even the ground is churned into craters and thrown into pressure waves of mud and slash. In the foreground, a burned-out tank, and below the photograph, the label: “The Forest of Ardennes, 1945.” Fog turns into rain and within minutes gullies are channeling gray water into larger gullies and digging ditches that spill a slurry of mud onto the road. The mud runs under my car, drops off the roadbed, and slides down a ravine toward the river where salmon are pooling up, waiting to move onto spawning beds. Before I saw the effects of clear-cutting the great Northwest forests, I imagined a romantic picture: lumberjacks come in and cut down trees, everyone has clean, sharp-smelling lumber for homes Traveling the Logging Road, Coast Range m 61 and schools, families have jobs and, where there had been a forest, there is a flower-filled meadow, which is nice for the deer and thus for the hunters; and after a time, the forest grows back and the lumberjacks can cut it again. Then I came to Oregon and saw clearcutting with my own eyes. Do people know about the bulldozers? Do they know about the fires and the poison sprayed from small planes to kill whatever brush may have survived? Do people know about the steepness of the bare hills and the crumbling edges of eroded ravines, the silt in the spawning beds? Do they know about the absolute...