Big Dreams (10 page)

The forests in Siskiyou County where Abner Weed established his Weed Lumber Company had some towering groves of Douglas fir. The tree grows in every western state, and it was destined to replace white pine in terms of importance and would eventually account for about one-quarter of all the standing saw timber in the country.

A Scottish botanist, David Douglas, had identified the trees while on a scouting trip in the United States for the Royal Horticultural Society. He was astounded by their size—one tree he measured was 227 feet long and 48 feet around—but the size also worked against
his attempt to gather specimen seeds. He couldn’t fell a fir with his hatchet or hit any of the high-up cones with his buckshot.

Douglas fir proved to be ideal for lumbering. It grew rapidly, was long-lived, large, and yielded a wood that had superior physical properties. It could be used in many ways—for railroad ties, telegraph and telephone poles, structural beams and trusses, and as a sturdy form for pouring concrete. Carpenters liked it for its nice grain and its ability to withstand warping. When the technology evolved for making plywood, the Douglas fir became a principal element in its composition.

The captains of the timber industry in the West had apparently learned very little from the leveling of the eastern forests. They practiced clear-cutting, but they rarely did any reseeding. Their unwieldy donkey engines damaged sprouts and seedlings and killed off the future crop.

So outrageous were their abuses that in the 1890s a Board of Forestry was instituted in California to exercise some control. The first forest rangers went to work in 1919, but they were in the hire of individual counties, and the counties were often too broke to meet the rangers’ paychecks.

Gradually, the U.S. government acquired more and more western timberland, preserved it as national forest, and accorded it some protection under the law, but the Forest Service did a poor job of enforcing any safeguards on the public’s behalf. Its record in timber sales was equally abysmal. In a recent year, 76 out of 123 national forests lost money in their dealings with the timber industry. A tourist could buy a Forest Service map for a dollar, the same price that a timber firm paid for a hemlock one hundred feet tall.

As for Abner Weed, his timing was perfect. He had access to the Scott Bar, Trinity, and Klamath mountains, and to all the trees on Mount Shasta. He created an economy in the wilderness, and a town sprouted around it and showed its appreciation by taking his name. Weed went on to be a county supervisor and later a state senator. He quit the timber business in 1913 and severed ties with
his businesses—a box factory, a sash and door mill, and a plywood plant, the second on the West Coast.

Long-Bell Lumber acquired the complex in 1924 and owned it for about thirty years before merging with International Paper. In 1981, International Paper sold everything to Roseburg Forest Products, the largest privately held timber corporation in the nation.

T
HE MILL IN WEED STILL STOOD AT ITS ORIGINAL SITE
, on a hill at the edge of town. Its founder had chosen the location for the breezes that blew there most afternoons and helped to dry the freshly cut wood. Some scabs were operating the plant at half-capacity when I pulled up in the late afternoon, and I could smell a characteristic odor in the air, a sharp, bitter, chemical stink of pulp and sawdust that defines the processing of lumber, just as a billowing smokestack defines the processing of coal.

The IWA pickets were hanging around a shed across from the main gate of the plant. An old Chevy with a cracked windshield was parked by the shed, and the black millworker at its wheel was talking to his daughter through an open window. She was playing in the dirt with a wigless Barbie that somebody had donated to the cause. There were other donations, too—stacks of canned goods, some firewood, and some paper for printing leaflets. The strikers had also held two rummage sales for families in need.

About six men were on duty. They had none of the distress that comes at the start of a job action. Four months was a long time to be out—a long time to have your hands idle—but they seemed to have adapted to their situation, much as they’d adapted to the stink of the mill.

Rich Fulkerson was trying to make the best of things by relaxing in a lawn chair in the sun. He was a big redhead from Michigan, and his face was as bright as a firetruck. He had fallen in love with a woman from Weed after he’d got out of the army in Los Angeles, but life was too hectic for them in the urban south, he said, so they
had come back to her hometown. Now they owned a house, and though Fulkerson knew he could lose it to the bank, he wasn’t worried.

“You can bring up a family on the minimum wage if you have to,” he asserted, in the happy-go-lucky way of big, freckled redheads. “I’m thinking of trying a more artistic line of work, anyhow.”

“What might that be?” I asked him.

“Oh, I don’t know. Maybe writing stage plays or scripts for the movies.”

Robin Styers, a shop steward, sat on a log near Fulkerson. He was shy but intense, and his jaw had the firm set of a person given to moral convictions. He was a Weed boy, born and bred—his father had driven a logging truck there. In his only foray away from town, he had gone to college in Chico, but Chico didn’t suit him and he’d left without graduating. He understood the timber business inside out and probably had always suspected that he’d wind up in it someday.

Styers was not the type to instigate a strike, but there was an outrage simmering in him, a pain at being slighted. He gave me an overview of the conflict. The old International Paper mill had been shut down when Roseburg had bought in, he said. That mill was outdated and harkened back to an era when most mills handled lots of old-growth timber. It had saws capable of cutting a log that was ninety inches in diameter, and equipment that could debark a log that was eighty feet long.

Roseburg had retooled the mill, installing new machinery for dealing with smaller logs from clear-cuts. The machines were speedy and efficient. Clear-cutting was more common than ever, Styers said, since the timber industry had gone corporate. When companies were independent and often family-owned, they tended to manage their holdings for a sustained yield, guaranteeing both wood and work.

Sustained-yield forestry was not as profitable as clear-cutting, though. By Styers’s estimate, it might bring you a profit margin of 16 percent annually, while clear-cutting—taking all the trees from
a stand in one fell swoop, without much thought for tomorrow—could net you a margin of between 25 and 40 percent. Roseburg had earned a profit of about $6 million the previous year, he said.

Styers didn’t hold the profit against Roseburg. He was not unsympathetic to the problems that a corporation faced. The devastated forests were overly protected now, he believed. Lumber companies had to deal with so many regulations in California that some of them were looking to the American South instead, where the laws were more lenient and there were plenty of softwood trees to harvest.

“Those environmentalists, they’re too pure,” Styers complained. “They haven’t read their Darwin. It’s natural for some species to go extinct. Even spotted owls.”

What angered the strikers about Roseburg was that so little of the $6 million profit had trickled down to them. They felt that their employer was being greedy. Everything for Roseburg and nothing for them—that was how they saw it. When the IWA first tried to organize at the mill, in 1985, management had begged for a chance to prove its sincerity, but the effort had apparently not satisfied the millworkers, who had voted in favor of a union shop two years later.

The current job action had arisen when Roseburg had demanded an across-the-board rollback in wages, arguing that the employees had to share in the losses that it was supposedly absorbing. But the mill in Weed had a very good record of productivity, Styers told me, and a very low rate of absenteeism. If Roseburg had really taken some losses, the losses had to do with a bigger picture and not with the performance of the men in Weed.

In all, fourteen Roseburg mills were out in Oregon and California, Styers said. He pushed his cap back on his head and tossed a wood chip at the ground in frustration. There was nothing the men could do, regardless of how disgusted they might be. Roseburg had them by the balls. Good jobs were as rare as prima ballerinas in Weed. You couldn’t make a new start elsewhere, either, because you couldn’t sell your house. Every block in town was cumbersome with realtors’ signs.

The men hoped that the strike would end soon. It had to end soon, they felt, because spring was a busy season at the mill with lumber needed for new construction.

In the meantime, they would sit around the shed and rail about the MBA accountants who didn’t know diddly-squat about millwork, and about the Japanese ships anchored in the ocean that were milling trees that could have been milled in Weed. Then, when their shift was done, they would get up to go home, brushing the dust from the seat of their pants as Robin Styers did. He smiled for the first time that afternoon.

“Damn!”
he said, touching his butt again. “That was a
hard
piece of wood.”

I
N THE EVENING GLOW
, I climbed into the bleachers at a playground in Weed to watch a tee-ball game of baseball. Two half-pint teams, the Mets and the Astros, were contending on a gritty diamond absent of all grass and echoing the rough, intractable, bare-bones character of their town. Millworker families applauded the boys from the stands, cheering pop-ups and triples with equal enthusiasm. The men sipped from beers in paper sacks, while the women munched on popcorn that was not store-bought but brought from home.

The families had the cheerful camaraderie of people who are down but not out, who have lived through difficulty more than once and rest assured that they will live through it again. I took from their ragged, assembled presence a memory of my own Little League days, when the world and all its importance was confined to a ball field three blocks from our house.

The ball park had a PA system, and a droll announcer, Weed’s own Red Barber, doled out comments and statistics with an orotund grace. To the plate came Marcus Applewhite, whose batting stance was fierce but peculiar. He had no pitcher to face, just a tee with a baseball perched on it. He took a mighty swing and smacked a grounder that skittered through the arched legs of the shortstop into
left field, where it once again eluded capture, and here was Marcus Applewhite rounding third, digging for the dish, and easily avoiding the tag of the catcher, who, in point of fact, had not yet received a throw.

“Way to go, Marcus!” a father-manager shouted, patting the lad on the back. “Now pull up your pants.”

While Applewhite followed orders, I looked toward the outfield with Mount Shasta looming regally behind it and saw that among all the advertisements pasted to the ball-park fence—the courtesy gestures of cafés and optometrists and auto-body shops—none had been placed by the leading employer in Weed, Roseburg Forest Products.

W
HEN JOSIAH WHITNEY’S
geological survey team arrived at Mount Shasta in September of 1862, William Brewer was filled with expectation and noted that climbing the mountain had come to seem the “grand goal” of the expedition. His camp at Strawberry Ranch, a sort of public house where hay was sold to travelers, gladdened him. The site abutted a cold, clear stream and backed onto a slope with tall pines, and cedars almost as tall.

So little was known about Mount Shasta then that even its height had yet to be fixed correctly. The guesses ranged from thirteen to eighteen thousand feet. Its name was assumed to be of Indian origin, but a case could also be made that it came from the Russian
tshastal
, meaning white or pure, or from the French
chaste
, also meaning pure. Locals just called it “the Butte” as an understated, western way of appreciating its grandeur while appearing to be unimpressed.

Brewer got conflicting reports about a possible ascent of Shasta, hearing from one source that the hike was easy and ended with a view of all creation, and from another that nobody had ever scaled the summit because the conditions were too harsh. The team engaged a guide, Mr. Frame, who convinced them that the climb could be
done. Mr. Frame had done it once himself. His only caution to the men was that they would have to provide their own muscle.

It was a bit late in the year to be starting out, but the team had no problems on their first leg and camped for the night at 7,400 feet. As the terrain became steeper, however, the party had to alter its pace. Professor Whitney’s fingers were frostbitten, while Brewer’s had turned deep blue, as had his lips. The men wore colored goggles to protect them from the sun glaring off the snow and trudged panting through drifts, sometimes slipping on hardened lava and loose rocks, until they reached the summit at last.

Once they were there, they complained about being sleepy. Some of them got sick after lunch and vomited severely—an effect, said Brewer, of the “rarified air.” The day was cloudy, so the team didn’t have an unobstructed view. They looked out upon a “perfect wilderness of mountains” in every direction, stretching to the Pacific Ocean. Their descent went smoothly, although Brewer passed a rough night wrapped in blankets, still in his heavy clothes, sleeping in the snow and noting “ugh! how cold it was.”

Snow would not have bothered John Muir, who climbed the mountain more than once, the first time in the spring of 1875. He seemed to relish extremes, to be drawn to the
wild
in wilderness. One November, as he curled up at his base camp on Shasta and got ready to enjoy a big storm, he had the misfortune to be rescued by some do-gooders, and he saw in this, rather bitterly, how difficult it was becoming for anybody to evade the embrace of civilization.

Another writer, Joaquin Miller, a Hoosier who came to California in a covered wagon, had also celebrated Mount Shasta in his work. Born with the unlikely name of Cincinnatus Hiner, he changed it on the advice of a friend after he had published a poem about Joaquin Murietta, the Mexican bandit. The only person he disappointed was his mother.