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

12. The Candidate

204 The Ides of March of 1990 was a sunny spring day in Portland, the kind that seems especially sweet after the long gray winter. The barren trees along a causeway had taken on a watercolor wash of fuzzy green, and the sky was a scrubbed blue. To the east, the white crumpled cone of Oregon ’s Mount Hood stood up on the horizon like a marble sculpture. The warm breeze was nature’s promise to eventually dry the soggy Northwest out. It was kite weather and hike weather, the kind in which you can just about hear the streams filling with snow-melt—except here, in this place, the primary sound was the roar of jets taking off overhead. Four visitors to Portland’s International Airport were paying little attention to the bright sunshine outside. The directors of the principal land agencies of the United States—the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the Park Service, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service —were meeting together outside Washington, D.C., for the first time in memory. The gathering was indicative of the seriousness they gave to the threat that spotted owl protection posed to the region’s biggest industry . Dale Robertson of the Forest Service, James Ridenour of Parks, John Turner of Wildlife, and Cy Jamison of BLM closeted themselves in a windowless room at the airport Sheraton to listen to scientists brief them on the likely result of a Fish and Wildlife study that would determine The candidaTe the Candidate 205 whether the northern spotted owl was a threatened or endangered species under the Endangered Species Act. They also heard about the tentative contents of the still-unpublished report by a committee chaired by Jack Ward Thomas that would recommend designating 7.7 million acres of habitat for the northern spotted owl. When reporters were invited in at mid-afternoon, the assembled bureaucrats declined to discuss directly what they had been told, since nothing had been officially released yet. But they did their best to drop repeated hints that the timber industry should brace for the worst. The clear impression was that the owl would be listed as a threatened species and that, as a result, millions of trees would be protected. Behind the reporters clustered a gloomy knot of timber industry executives , lobbyists, and community representatives. “We’re disappointed and fearful,” the federal agency directors were told by Valerie Johnson, chairwoman of the Oregon Lands Coalition, a pro-industry group. Outside in the sunlit parking lot, about two hundred loggers and their wives rallied to protest the portents of the new research. Most were from Oregon towns similar to Forks, such as Mill City, Stayton, and Detroit. The assembly was bright with bobbing yellow signs, looking in this weather like a cluster of yellow daffodils: jobs and owls—we can have both science and responsible environmentalism equals balance. managed forests produce oxygen. oregon’s future depends on timber. farmers for responsible environmentalism. The mood was feisty, the crowd hoping against hope that the government scientists would recognize the economic catastrophe their research implied. “We didn’t ask for this war,” a saw shop owner named John Kunzman told the crowd from the bed of a maroon pickup truck. “But we stood up to it and will continue to stand up to it,” the resident of Sweet Home, Oregon, said. “Rural America is what’s being attacked. Forks, Washington, is the first casualty.” It was true that Forks was already in trouble, but it was probably 206 the final foreSt in better shape this spring than Sweet Home, where twelve stores were boarded up, six mills had shut down, and the population was dropping. Kunzman himself was modifying his inventory to include outboard engines and other marine supplies in hopes of making up in sales to recreationists what he was losing in sales to loggers. Forks’s plight was sharper and more immediate, however. Three mills had shut down in December of 1989, putting two hundred people out of work, and the food bank had run out of protein and fruit. To highlight Forks as an example of what could happen to the rest of the rural Northwest, the assembled demonstrators brought cases of food for the Forks food bank. To present the food, Kunzman leaned over to give a hand to an attractive blonde woman who gamely hitched up her skirt to clamber...