Interviewed by Beth Bosk – New Settler Interview, Issue #21, June 1987
Beth Bosk: One of the reasons this is such an interesting interview for me is that both of you are homesteaders as well as loggers and your lifestyles so closely resemble that of the new settlers[1]who have reinhabited what are known as the Sherwood Road subdivisions (but which could as well be called forestland settlements). You’re much the same age, and of much the same prior ‘60’s experience. Except when you came here, you were coming back home. What does it mean to be a gyppo operator?
Kenneth Smith: It’s basically being a contractor. We contract to take an area of standing timber and deliver saw logs to a mill.
Walter Smith: [no relation] And it’s by the board foot. We’re not getting paid by the hour. There’s no hourly rate set. The rate is set by the amount of dollars per board foot. That’s pretty crucial to the term gyppo.
BB: As compared to what?
KS: Company loggers. Years ago the timber companies would have their own logging crews and their own equipment. That’s pretty much a thing of the past in this area.
BB: Where did the word ‘gyppo’ come from? It sounds so sinister. [Laughter]
KS: I don’t know where it came from. And it has become broader than just referring to a way of doing business. For instance, we refer to gyppo parts. If we’re buying parts for a piece of machinery, it’s anything that isn’t quite up to standard—like a piece of junk...
Walter Smith: [laughs] Ronald Reagan is a gyppo president.
KS: If you buying parts for a Caterpillar and you didn’t buy Caterpillar brand parts, you bought something that was made in Brazil, for instance, and it was 20% cheaper than Caterpillar parts, that would be a gyppo part. And to gyppo, the verb—you hear fallers say, “We’re, going to gyppo this strip,” meaning they’re going to get in and hit things hard, and pair up on it.
WS: Again, it’s working by the piece. Because you can also pay fallers by a day rate too, so when they gyppo, it means they’re going to go in and do everything by the piece in a go-get-it way; meaning, they’re not going to waste any time.
KS: And traditionally that was fundamental to gyppos in general. That you took as many short cuts as possible and you did things as quickly and efficiently as possible…
WS: Which is also one of the reasons you don’t see company logging operations much anymore. Gyppos proved they were more efficient and did it cheaper.[2]
BB: What exactly is the work of men who work in the woods? The techniques of removing trees and getting them out? The mitigations? Not even talking now of the multinational corporations out there, but essentially, of the neighborhood feud we have amongst ourselves—all of those of us who want to remain in this place and make a living from it.
The new settler looks at the local logger and feels he looks at the timber and fails to see the process. That he is insensitive to the effect of the logging trucks on their frail roads. I won’t go through the laundry list of ascertained watershed grievances. How do you see it? What do you do to make it as gentle as possible for the surrounds while you are taking out the timber? You are in charge of your own work. How is the work done?
KS: We are what is referred to as CAT loggers. We have tractors. There are two basic skidding types in Mendocino County, commonly, and that’s yarder logging and cat logging. In terms of disturbance of the soil, CAT logging probably has a greater impact on the country side, but it’s also cheaper than yarder logging and it’s more suited to the kinds of timber stands we have, especially inland, in Mendocino County.
BB: Why is that?
KS: Because they are scattered. A yarder requires a fairly dense stand of timber to operate economically, and you just don’t find dense stands of timber around here much because of the site quality. You don’t find any site “1” inland—site “1” being the highest growing site possible. Commonly, we work in site “3”, even site “4”, which is pretty scrungy stuff.
BB: You’re like the scavengers of the timber industry?
WS: Scavenging has become pretty much the norm. It has to do with the logging that is going on now. We’re going back into places that have been logged one or two times already.
BB: And how do you do it?
WS: The first process is to fall the trees. That requires a chainsaw and a man with some pretty high skills. First off, Ken and I will come to an area that needs to be logged and we will divide up the area into what are called strips for fallers to fall. And the faller will go in and will start it at a certain point that is the safest place to start, meaning that if you have a hillside, obviously logs roll, so you’re going to start at the bottom of the hillside and work your way to the top.
The faller has with him besides the chainsaw (with usually a 36” bar), he has an axe, and wedges, sometimes a jack, fire extinguisher, gas, oil, his lunch, a few extra parts [laughs] and he starts his business. He makes what you call an undercut which directs the tree to where he wants it to hit, to lie—he does that in the direction it is going to fall—and he has to choose the lean of the tree, and if it is against the lean, he has to use his plastic wedges or hydraulic jack to make it go against the lean.
BB: How does the faller determine the lean of a tree?
WS: With a plumb ball, just like you would for plumbing your fence post to make it straight. You put a plumb ball up to it and decide which way the tree leans. And there is a lot of directional falling. If you want to do a good job, you want the trees to fall in an area that the equipment can get to them easier, without having to push anymore dirt than possible, make anymore skid routes than you need to.
So, he makes his undercut—he takes that little piece of pie out of the tree, and that allows the tree to fall and to bend and break the remaining wood after he makes his back cut. And then he measures it (after the tree is down he measures log lengths that are preferred for certain species to a certain mill. Around this area here we have a stud mill which basically takes 8’ multiple log lengths, and usually 40’ is the maximum log length he makes. He makes all the multiples of eight under 40 ft. That would be for a fir or a redwood going to a stud mill. A multi-dimension mill that makes all kinds of different length lumber, then it’s two foot multiple, usually from 10’ to 40’.
BB: And you know beforehand where you are going to send this timber?
KS: Generally, on every sale there are two or three sorts. The logs will go to two or three different mills…
WS: Depending on the diameter, because we also have large-diameter mills and small diameter mills for efficiency.
BB: Is the faller out there by himself at this point?
WS: It’s one faller working on his own, but he’s paired up with someone else who is within hearing distance.
BB: A Willits nurse told me that in the summertime when everyone is wearing shorts, you can always tell if a Willits man was right handed or left handed depending on which leg he’s got the gash scar on.
WS: [laughs] That’s probably true. So the faller works by himself. And he’s a real independent person. I guess the epitome of a gyppo would be the timber faller who goes in there—almost all are paid by the thousand. A lot of them don’t work for anyone person very long—maybe one season. Some do, but at least 50% or more will work for more than one contractor even in the season.
BB: Have either one of you ever been a faller?
WS: Both of us. That’s how we started.
BB: Would you talk about the psychology of that—I mean when you are a faller is that like a burst of gonadal energy …
KS: Gonadal energy? Come on!
BB: I can always tell the salmon fishermen at the start of the season. You don’t even have to smell them. All you have to do is look at them. It bristles.
WS: I don’t know what to say about the fallers, it’s not just that they are the most skilled—the others take as much skill. It’s definitely the most dangerous job…
KS: And it’s the highest paid too. You have the most opportunity for making money—you also have the least opportunity. It depends entirely on your ability and your drive; and your self-discipline. You have to be self-disciplined to be a faller.
BB: And when you were a faller, what did that feel like?
KS: Well, I was poor most of the time. That gives you an idea of what kind of a faller I was … It’s a real thrill. It’s adrenalin about every third tree—heavy doses of adrenalin—and that is part of the appeal. I think any faller, deep down in their soul, will admit that that is what keeps them going.
That they like the thrill of it. There aren’t too many jobs in the world where you have to live by your wits.
It’s unpredictable work. Even though the longer you are at it, the more you can predict certain situations, there’s always some quality of uncertainty about it.
And you do feel as though you are the first one—the phrase about being the ‘point man’ is good, because aside from the forester who set up the timber sales, you’re the first one there. You see it both ways. You see it cut and uncut. And you make the kind of decisions that affect logging all the way down the line.
Right now we’re fortunate to have some real good timber fallers, and they’ve made an incredible difference to us this year just in the way they fall their trees. The direction they fall them; how they save the timber. You feel pretty important being a faller and being· able to make the kinds of decisions that are going to help everyone else.
BB: In terms of before the cut, and then afterwards—are the newer settlers imposing remorse on you—yet—about this process? What is your feeling? You go into a forest certainly it is not primeval, but in the interim has struggled to come back, and when you go, there is a devastation you could not be totally unaware of…
KS: I don’t think it has taken an environmental movement to make loggers feel at least a degree of remorse. That has been forever: But apparently it is outweighed by other feelings.
WS: I was just thinking of what Ken wants for this land. I don’t think he would go out and do to his back yard what we’ve done to some of the land we’ve come to. There are feelings we have about what is done in the woods and we try to do as good a job as we can given the parameters of big equipment and making the skid roads. But you can’t repair the trees. The trees are gone at that point.
Don’t mistake me. We have a feeling for the place we work. We have a feeling for the land and the forest as a whole—as a place where we like to work because it is enjoyable to be there, because it is the forest. And in the hopes what our children will be back there doing the same work some day.
On the other hand, there are ramifications we have no control over—the land owner. The landowner owns it, and he tells us how he wants it done. Of course, we have the option of not doing it. Then it becomes an option economics: Do we want to work or do we not want to work? We complain sometimes about the fact that we don’t think the best job is being done, but we do it anyway and we try to do it as well as we can under the Forest Practice Rules that are in place at the present time.
BB: When I was deciding what photograph to use—with this interview I decided to go for the most intimate portrait of logging I could find. The portrait is of one of your crew struggling up a mountain—struggling up steep slope—to grab hold of a tree [not shown]. He’s pulling up his choke setters with him; what is the job of the choker setter?
KS: We think of them in terms of a team; the CAT skinner and the choker setter. A choker setter ideally, is the man on the ground. He’s the eyes for the tractor or the skidder. He finds the logs (because the faller is long gone by the time the choker setter arrives), and decides how to get the tractor to them. And usually he directs the CAT skinner to either build a road or get around the existing stand of logs—whatever is necessary to get the CAT closer to the logs. And a CAT doesn’t need to be right to the logs; we have a 100’ winch line on our machines.
The choker setter really needs to have a good sense of—Walter’s phrase is ‘the physical world’. That’s a very good phrase. He has to know what the CAT is capable of, what the terrain is capable of supporting, and has to have a grassroots sense of the engineering.
But the back-breaking part of it is actually setting the choker; We use 16’ long pieces of cable that have an eye at one end, and a nubbin on the other,’ which is just a little glob of steel and a slide with a choker bell in the middle, and he has to get those around the log and then hook them to the winch line on the tractor and get them out in a way that makes it easy for him, easy for the CAT, and he also tries to save the leave stand.
BB: Does the choker stay with the tree as it is pulled down?
KS: No. He’s as far away as possible.
WS: In the woods, everything is unpredictable. You start pulling on one log and it might hit another log that will hit another log, and it can be an incredible chain of events happening. He has to be out of the way of anything that might possibly move. That usually means uphill.
BB: How do you know if a certain terrain can slide? And are there any grade restrictions as to what you are not permitted to slide a tree down? You say the choker is very much aware of the physical world. What kinds of things does he look for?
WS: That’s more in terms of the engineering of the road for the CAT—whether will give away while the CAT is on it; not if it will give away ten years from now or two years from now because of rain saturation. We leave that up to the people who are supposed to know that. There are geologists and the CDF forester who comes out beforehand on a pre-harvest inspection, who look at the land.
BB: Do they provide you with a detailed map?
WS: That’s right we get a harvest plan map, and on it, it says “this is an unstable area and you have to go around it.” And they’re flagged. If there is an unstable area, according to the geologist, that road would have to be flagged, and the company forester will flag the roads we are supposed to stay on. They also give us very specific instructions around slides. Where we can go. What they want it to look like when we’re gone. What they want us to do with it could even include seeding it or putting culverts in it.
BB: Does this repair work, this rehabilitation work happen that often?
WS: Every sale, almost.
BB: When the log is skidded down the skid road, how much of its foliage has previously been removed?
KS: Hopefully everything has been removed by the faller.
WS: He takes all the limbs off while he’s there. He can do everything on top of the log. Anything underneath he can’t get to, so there’s stuff that comes in, and at this time of the year the bark slips so we end up with an accumulation of junk on the land. But all the limbs and the top have been taken off, and hopefully, only the merchantable logs come to the landing.
BB: Last month I was driving Highway 20 behind a truck carrying logs, and the bark was just flying right and left behind him at me. I couldn’t remember that happening before. Are certain times of years more hazardous in the woods as well as on the road?
KS: Statistically, most accidents seem to happen either in the spring or in the late summer. The middle of the season isn’t as bad, and it’s usually because people are in better shape. In early spring, people have been off for several months and they have accidents because they are out of shape, and they’re flabby, and have forgotten a few things. Late in the season, we’ve all been working six-day weeks, ten hours a day, and everybody’s tired and rushed, and that’s when accidents happen too.
BB: What about the nature of the woods itself? For instance the bark that slips off, is that a more dangerous condition? Are there other seasonal changes that make the job more difficult?
WS: Slipping bark is dangerous. Wet ground is a hazard, and then also when it’s real dry. In the summer we have fire, danger problems.
BB: Are you allowed to move those big trees around in wet weather under the Forest Practices Act?
WS: In certain cases. That’s another CDF advisory—in wet weather, when the ground gets to a certain saturation point, then they shut off the logging. And it’s the same way in the dry weather: when it gets so dry and the humidity is so low, they shut us off then. And we have our own feeling for it when the tractors won’t move because they are stuck in the mud; we know the soil is saturated.
KS: You can’t just log anywhere in the winter. Generally speaking, harvest plans run from April ‘till November, and it takes a special clause in the plan to operate in the winter, and if you are obviously in an area that is going to be damaged by winter operations, they won’t approve it.
BB: We got the choker setter high out of the way. Then who is working with the log?
KS: After the choker setter has done his job, it’s up to the CAT skinner. He operates the tractor or skidder (for some reason they don’t call them skidder skinners, but they are skidder operators—they’re rubber tired machines; they look a little like farm tractors, but bigger, more powerful.) and his responsibility is just getting the logs to the landing. You come out of the woods with anywhere from one log to six or eight or ten logs behind a piece of equipment. The landing is the last destination for them before they are put on the truck.
WS: The CAT operator also builds the skid routes or cleans out the old skid routes. That’s really where his expertise comes in. The choker setter’s expertise is how to get the logs out. He’s basically the boss. He tells the CAT skinner where to go, where to sit, and when to pull; and where to put the road. And the operator just operates the machine. The CAT skinner’s expertise is how much strain the line will take when he’s pulling the logs; how much the machine will take. But his bigger responsibility is to push the roads, and to make the roads.
BB: When you say “roads”, what are we talking about?
WS: Skid trails. They’re probably not roads in the same sense as the roads you drive home on.
KS: It’s something wide enough for a CAT and flat enough to keep it from tipping over.
BB: One of the major criticisms of any kind of logging is the roading involved. The meatball and spaghetti effect that is so adversely effecting our rivers—the streamlets, the ephemeral creeks. Is this the kind of roading you are talking about?
WS: Yes. And that is very true too. That’s exactly where the problem lies. Though in the last fifteen years, I think there has been as much improvement as there was damage in the previous hundred years, just because they have been enforcing the Forest Practice Rules.
KS: And they are becoming tougher. Both Forest Practice Rules and the inspectors are becoming tougher, because it’s an issue people can see and realize. We were talking earlier about making us feel remorse. The ecological movement has brought about those changes, and right now, especially with the streams, that seems to be one of their main focuses. They are really watching how we make our roads; how we put the roads to bed when we are through to make sure they are not going to cause erosion.
BB: Specifically, how do you put those roads to bed? What are you doing with them after you’ve used them as skid trails?
WS: We put water breaks in. Most of the skid trails are steep—they’re just for a tractor to go up. A lot of times the skidder can’t get up, and that’s a four wheel drive tractor with great big tires. So, obviously, the trails are water-catchers, because we’ve taken all of the vegetation of an area, and what’s going to happen is, the water is going to channel down those roads seriously.
During the ‘50s and ‘60s when they didn’t do any repair work, you made new streams out of what were road beds. The water would get in a track—maybe where the log skidded, because the log will leave a little channel—and the stream would start in one of those channels. As it gets down further, it starts cutting on its own, in some places making slips on the road and in other places just making new streams. And that’s what was silting up the streams and destroying the fish populations. So now what we do is we make ditches across the road to catch the water.
And it varies how many times you have to water bar, and how far apart, with how steep the road is, so that you catch the water and channel it off the road and get it back into the vegetation before it has a chance to build up speed to wash the gravel and the sediment down to the stream.
Also, you try to out-slope the roads. Before, they used to like to slope the logs in so the logs stay on the roads. You’re going around all these corners and you’ve got 40’ logs behind you, and they’re not going to go around the corners with the CAT, they’re going to try to cut the corners. So a lot of times they’d build up berms and slope the roads in so that they wouldn’t lose their logs over the edge.
But now, when you get through, if in fact you have that situation, you want to slope the road so that the water won’t get against the bank and be able to channel itself. You want the water to diffuse itself as much as possible, so you keep everything sloped out, so that some of the water, before it gets to collect, will just wash itself off into the vegetation.
That’s one of the things you do with the roads when you’re finished with them.
BB: Who’s doing this part of the job?
KS: Ideally, the cat skinner that logged the area because he’s familiar with the road system.
BB: He drags the logs to the landing. What is this landing?
KS: It’s an area (and its size is also prescribed by Forest Practice rules) large enough to hopefully get a truck and a loader and a CAT with a turn of logs behind it all there at the same time. Sometimes that doesn’t always work, but that’s the idea.
This year we’ve been using a hydraulic loader which doesn’t actually move around at the landing. It’s just a hydraulic boom. It’s called a heel boom. It picks up logs and sets them on the truck. It’s pretty common to use a front end loader which is another big tractor-type machine with forks on the front. It looks like a glorified fork lifter. And that travels around the land. But the landing’s just a flat area on the truck route, obviously, where the trucks can be loaded.
WS: And it is cut out of the hillside, usually. And usually, you try to pick a spot that is already somewhat flat to build your landing on. It’s not only to move the minimum amount of dirt; it also helps the whole situation, of building it. Some ground is so steep you just can’t build a landing anywhere. And if that’s the case, you just skid your logs further, and you keep skidding them until you can find a place.
BB: And then you just leave the wood and your job is done? I’m curious about the landing because of the recent tree spiking on the Cameron Road which resulted in the maiming of a mill worker. Apparently the timber was spiked at the landing, not while it was growing in the forest. By the depth of the spike and the size of it, and how far up the log it had been driven, it appeared it was a tree that had already been felled and was apparently spiked at the landing in retaliation to the cut rather than spiked as an attempt to prevent the cut in the first place—the tactic described in Ecodefense. You must have feelings about tree spiking.
KS: It’s got to be pretty obvious how we feel about it. I suppose both Walter and I in our past would have been considered radical—I’m not sure, we would have been considered anything worse than that.
WS: [laughs] The Jerry Rubins of the logging industry.
KS: And we can’t condone that kind of reaction to logging from anyone. Environmentalists have some excellent points. A lot of what they would like to see done should be done and will be done soon. But I think tree spiking is counter-productive.
WS: You can have both feelings. You can put it down as a terrorist act, especially now, where someone has been hurt by someone else’s actions. I’m pretty much of a pacifist myself. And there are things I would protest, but I would not hurt somebody else to do that.
BB: You’ve said that you have participated in logging jobs that you thought were ruinous. That’s my word, but your facial expression. How do you propose these kinds of jobs be stopped from being bid out in the first place?
Let me bring up an example close to home. There was a logging operation out Timber Road that was so bad one faller put down his chainsaw and refused to work, He called me to tell me that. As far as I know, that cut wasn’t spiked, but for awhile that kind of talk was not uncommon.
Now, L-P orchestrated that cut—jobbed it out to various gyppos. And it was a cut so extensive that it would have increased the trucks going in and out the main dirt road of the nearest subdivision from 6 to 70 logging trucks a day during the season. The subdivision went to court and got a restraining order. The issue is still in Superior Court and perhaps on its way to establishing some new law in Mendocino County—whereby rural residents are granted the same rights to reside as spotted owls; and the rules change on lumber companies one people move in on the land they’ve already timbered and sold off. “Reinhabitory law” I call it.
From all accounts that was a really tortuous cut going on down there. At one point it was felt that it had befouled the Fort Bragg water system, causing Fort Bragg to switch to a stream that had so much tannin in it that for a time city water looked like tea. You were there. I would like you to talk about it.
KS: [wryly] I agree it was tortuous, because we lost a lot of money down there. It just about ruined us as a company.
WS: But I can’t call the logging operation itself ruinous. You and I would be talking about two different versions of ‘ruinous’. I would say most operations look pretty horrible, even if done anywhere near the rules, to someone who is not accustomed to looking at logging operations. Much of it is in the eye of the beholder.
When you’re getting siltation downstream, it doesn’t mean it’s coming from that show; it could be coming from another one down further or another one down further—and I’m not denying that that might be the source, I’m just saying that when we’re looking at logging operations, I could show you one that I would be real proud of that you would probably think was the most horrible thing in the world. But neither my observation of yours is scientific. It’s just about how we felt about how it looked like.
KS: Actually, we feel that under the circumstances we did a very good job underneath Eagle Court. It was a real difficult job to log. It was extremely scattered—steep, rocky ground.
WS: And in fact it was extremely unstable ground.
BB: Should it have been logged?
KS: Well, it had been logged twice before we got there. CAT logged—and maybe even a third time; we weren’t quite sure whether it should have been logged. I think in retrospect we would have said, “No. It should not have been logged.” But that is almost more of a monetary judgment than anything else.
WS: And maybe it should have never been logged period. We were talking about what it does to the soil in that kind of area. I don’t know how many slides we went through on the truck road to reestablish the truck road that had been there before, but there were a lot of them. And that’s a judgment I’m making not as a geologist, but just observing a lot of slides. And it’s possible you are going to get more sedimentation from that particular job because of the land type that is there.
KS: It’s not the kind of job that anybody wants to do. You don’t feel any sense of satisfaction about it. It was what we would call a salvage job. Basically, it was the last entry which a lot of jobs in the last few years have been—an entry being going into an area for logging.
WS: Makes it sound as if we’re mining.
KS: And that is a phrase that’s used a lot: ‘Mining timber’. We don’t feel that way. We couldn’t sleep at night if we felt that way. And I think the places that we’ve logged, and gone back to look at are growing lots of trees. The redwood trees that are coming out of stumps of trees we cut last year are already more than three feet high. That is encouraging to us. Even on that terrible place out on the headwaters of the Noyo. That was the same thing. Whether it should have been logged? We were hired to do it.
BB: Is there anything left for gyppo loggers to do if you are not permitted to do salvage logging? Is your industry really that moribund?
KS: It’s a matter of degree. That job on Hayward Creek was probably the worst we’ve ever done. What we’re working in now I don’t think is nearly as bad. It doesn’t look like the forest primeval when we arrive, even before we start cutting.
WS: And it’s still not salvage in our language. Even Eagle Court was not salvage. It was supposed to be a production logging job. Meaning that you go in there and take the merchantable trees and leave. Salvage would be going in and taking the merchantable trees that are left and the hardwoods and snags and dead and dying trees.
KS: ‘Salvage’ usually has something to do with a diseased stand.
WS: And ‘production logging’ would be just going after the saw logs that would go to the mill and not doing any of the other things. But all the jobs—we look now at a variety of jobs—and the volume per acre is low. That particular job was less than 2,000 board foot to the acre. The one we’re on now is 4,000 to the acre, and we’ve done a lot in the 5,000 to the acre, and we’re looking at other jobs that are 8,000 to 10,000 to the acre. But these are places that are still bad sites. When they were virgin, they were 50,000 to the acre. Over on the coast in the Class “1” sites, it’s 100,000 board feet to the acre, and who knows what it was when it was virgin. A lot of it is in Jackson Forest. A lot of it is privately owned. I’d say L-P and G-P still own a lot of that land over there.
BB: It was while bringing timber out of the site at Eagle Court that a 16 year old kid on a motorcycle was killed by a logging truck in a head on collision at a bend where there is zero visibility. This is a county which throws kids with skateboards off the sidewalks because they pose a danger, and continues to give logging trucks permission to use these tortuously narrow now—rural (meaning people live along them) dirt roads.
Do you go out of your way at all to make sure there is down wood left and left in particular orientation when you leave?
WS: We try to leave some—those which are no good. We basically have to take everything that is merchantable.
KS: And there are laws that dictate what you leave. Snags that are within certain distance of a major ridge or a truck road have to be felled for fire protection—unless they have a nest in them. That’s another thing about the spring of the year, aside from the slipping bark, you always run into a lot of nests.
WS: Everything is reproducing.
KS: We try to stay away from trees that have nests as much as possible.
WS: I think that a lot people often see loggers as being pretty heartless, go-getting people. They’re really hard working, that’s for sure. And I find that when it comes to wildlife, loggers will go out of their way to protect or avoid hurting forest animals. I don’t know too many loggers who would squash a squirrel on purpose or squash a fawn.
I’ve seen logging operations stop and go someplace else because they’ve found a fawn or some kind of nest on the ground. That’s more common than people think it is.
There are the times that they run over something; because they don’t even know it is there. They haven’t seen it. It hasn’t made itself visible. But if it has, they do try to avoid the area until they feel whatever it is has moved away (because they hear him coming—and that’s usually the case.) Whatever is there, if it’s big enough, old enough to move, will move but they pretty much have a heart for the wildlife in the woods.
We were talking about having a feeling for other things besides just the logging when you’re there. I notice that at least a couple times a week someone will say they saw something that has to do with wildlife, or something unusual. They’re seeing the things that are under there, although it is not stopping them from doing their job in the long run.
BB: One of the more bizarre rumors surrounding the spiking at Carmeron Road was that a series of animal mutilations preceded it. Dead animals left in vacant CATs. But another version has it that the dead animals were road kills caused by CAT activity, and someone was saying, “Be more careful” in the most graphic way possible.
For it to be a sane occupation, a more sensible occupation, a more sensitive occupation, what do you think needs to be changed in order to also allow you to have it be the way you continue to make your living?
KS: You have to assume first that it is insane occupation. There is certainly room for improvement. We can still log and still make money even if the Forest Practice rules and Water Quality rules were strengthened.
BB: But specifically, Ken, what would you have the companies and people who contract you, who hire you on, not be able to do where? Not be able to instruct you to do?…Both of you have said that you were sometimes given instructions that as loggers you didn’t approve of.
WS: For us it is more general…[long pause] I guess it’s that feeling—and I can’t really describe it—of over-logging. And I hate to put it that way.
KS: [laughs] Kiss off L-P now, Walter.
WS: I guess there can be some ramifications for that. [laughs also]
BB: And I really do appreciate the honesty, with which we are talking. Before there can be honesty there has to be a certain sense of fearlessness, if not a lack of fear … What is ‘over logging’ in your own sensibilities? What would you like to see stopped—as loggers, as men who do not want to see the industry totally curtailed?
WS: Rather than put it: What we wouldn’t like to see, I’d like to talk about what we would like to see—How about that? We did a job out on Highway 20. They called it the Pleiades—it was a small million-foot job …
KS: It was supposed to be the first in a series of experimental sales. We felt real fortunate to be able to do it. And I think if you walk through there, even the untrained eye would recognize a good logging job. We did a beautiful job in there.
BB: How so? What are the criteria?
WS: Because we left most of the stand there—to begin with. We only took out 30%. And that took skill. There was a lot of pride in doing this logging. We did all the little special things—choking the log in the right way, falling the trees I very accurately so as not to knock down any other in the grove.
BB: What does ‘choking the logs in the right way’ indicate?
WS: Making them roll out so they don’t scrape the bark off the other trees—which can kill them. And it took some skill on the part of the skid operator not to knock down the trees, not to scrape up the trees with his blade, staying on the skid trails, eliminating as many skid trails as he could, even the ones they allowed you to have. It was a challenge in that respect.
And that’s another thing. We like to do the work. It’s not just the money. We were talking earlier of bridging this gap between economics and living in Willits. I think Ken and I are smart enough to do something else if we wanted to make a lot of money, but we probably wouldn’t be able to live in Willits.
BB: Who hired you to do the Pleiades job?
KS: L-P.
BB: You’re kidding! And was it a profitable operation for them?
KS: I’m sure it was. We bid it so darn low; they had to make money on it. [laughter] … And we made money on it. That’s the interesting thing about it. Which proves you can do that kind of work and make money.
But, it was site “1”. High volume—30,000 per acre. There were no oaks. There was nothing other than redwood and fir, and on fairly decent ground.
BB: But that is not unusual along the coast where you have fairly pure conifer forests. Inland, where the forests are mixed and the soils already shoddy, what would you perceive of as a decent logging operation?
KS: It would depend on the site and depend on the trees. We just looked at a job today they selectively cut five years ago, and now most of the trees are dying. And I don’t know why they are dying (they’re getting bugs in them and stuff) because they did a good job there.
WS: This is part of the Pleiades question. They are trying to determine, how many trees can you take—how much must you leave—to make the other trees grow faster, and keep them healthy. And I don’t think they have come up with an answer.
KS: It’s so variable. Every site is so different. It’s not just a matter saying Site 1, 2, 3, or 4. There are subtleties that change with each hillside, with each little contour.
WS: Many environmentalist think that when the Federal government puts up a sale and they go in and clear cut it, that they haven’t really looked at it. But it takes seven years for a sale to come up while they go through it with a fine tooth comb. And they have all these experts come look at it (and then they just go and clear cut it anyway.) But a lot of times, the companies are doing what they think is forestry. There’s been accusations against L-P and accusations against Harwood and accusations against G-P and everyone else of just going in and making it a dollar situation.
In fact, most cuts are under what they feel is a forestry plan. So it’s an argument of Forestry philosophy vs. Forestry philosophy. It seems ridiculous. Because if you are going to look at these sites, there needs to be more research done as to what you should be looking for. There needs to be more people out there ahead of time finding out what a particular site needs. Obviously, the site, with the dying trees, whatever they did was the wrong thing.
KS: And it’s possible they were dying before the last cut.
WS: Yes. And we don’t know that. And somebody needs to know before it gets cut. So now you have to say that basically, it’s taken four years to do the clear cut. Because when it’s done this time, it will be all cut and they’ll go back and plant it. Significantly, with the last leave, there were very few seedlings—the regeneration was very poor.
BB: The spring after a selective cut done in the Coastal Zone up Road 409, there were fairly strong winds, and the leave trees there were dropping right and left across that road. It wasn’t even a question of they had taken out the sentry trees at the perimeter—they hadn’t.
KS: That’s the big problem with selective cuts, especially in heavy stands. They depend upon each other. It’s a unit rather than a cluster of individual trees.
BB: Do you want to talk about anything I haven’t accused you of yet? [laughter]
WS: It’s good to address as much of this as we can.
Some people get upset about a cut because of the way it looks; other people get upset about it because they may have scientific information that doubts the premises of a philosophy.
BB: Fishermen are very upset about cuts now because of what they see it has done to the breeding streams of the salmon, how it’s blocked the runs.
WS: And justifiably. But since the real awareness, and the Forest Practice rules of the ‘70s; there has been some thoughts in Forestry of how to go about the regeneration, how to get the trees to grow faster and satisfy all these other concerns. It’s not necessarily 100% money. If you go to forestry schools—whether it be at Berkeley or Humboldt—on the forestry staff, people are arguing with one another about forest management. And that goes on in the medical profession whether it is dealing with AIDS or cancer, people have their ideas.
BB: But with forests we are talking about the respiratory system of the planet. These may be scrubby little rain forests, you go into here, but who knows to what extent these redwood forests of the north coast contribute to our atmosphere—certainly to the weather. Old timers talk about how the weather has changed as the cuts have proceeded … Which brings me back to the fact that you are both “old timers”, gentlemen. In that you grew up around and about Willits.
KS: Both our families were involved in the timber industry, and so I guess we come by it naturally, although some-what circuitously. Neither one of us started out in this direction when we became adults. I guess we were doomed…
BB: Your father was a forester?
KS: He had a degree in forestry. Didn’t actually practice forestry.
WS: My dad was a timber faller. He was pretty much your average, everyday, hard-working logger. He was able to make enough money and have enough security that I was able to go away from home when I graduated from high school and I went to college for awhile.
And there it was, the late-60s and early `70s, and we became aware of a lot of other things besides just what was in Willits. That’s something I wouldn’t change for anything. But it is also true that ignorance is bliss, and there is a lot of conflict in us about what’s going on.
Anyone who has lived through our generation and has gone through the Viet Nam war and the spraying, the stream pollution, and watching the Great Lakes, Ralph Nader—all this beyond just our little local scenario—that’s how we got to know about what’s happening here, through those other things, the bigger picture.
Before that—I didn’t have any thoughts of ‘ecology’ when I was a kid. And I talked to my dad who was a logger, and it was just something that didn’t dawn on them either. Logging was logging and there was always more logs than was needed … and if not here, somewhere else. In Willits there were 20 mills in the ‘50s and nobody seemed to worry about that.
So then I bring my awareness home to my dad, and having a good relationship with my family (even though we argued several points as to how the establishment ran) it made an awareness for them too.
As far as bringing back this awareness to Willits, I came back basically the same as a lot of new settlers did, as a back-to-the-lander. And I met my wife, Karen, working in Willits. She came from the city and she came here and bought a piece of land. She ended up owning forty acres which she bought for a little down.
That you can thank the logging companies for. That’s how all this land got opened here. They logged it off and it was worthless, so they sold it off cheap to a lot of people—$1,200 down and $140 a month and she had 40 acres.
But we came back to live that kind of life. We figured it was a good life; it was a place you wanted your children to grow up.
KS: And Walter and I felt that it was natural for us to plug into the existing economy. We didn’t look for other ways to support ourselves. This was something we understood and it was easy for us to slip into that.
WS: And we had an inside track. It’s a “it’s not what you know, but who you know thing”. It was easy for us to start because we had people here to help us get started.
BB: Claudia Smith, the editor and one of the owners of the Willits News is your mother, Ken. Is there an intergenerational difference that goes on between yourself and the position the Willits News takes. Aerial spraying? Garlon?
KS: Often. And I don’t feel as if I have to battle my mother or people who don’t feel the way I do. I’m not combative. I allow them to think their thoughts and I think mine…I think any journalist has almost a theatrical image of themselves, and it’s necessary to project that image in public and in print. And sometimes it is quite different from their private image. Their real personality.
BB: How do you deal with sprayed timberland? Do you refuse to go into areas that have been sprayed? Do you consider them to be personally dangerous to your health?
KS: We’re working in one right now. It was sprayed ten years ago. And the one we just finished had been sprayed.
BB: Last year I interviewed a union logger active in the Brotherhood of Woodworkers in Fort Bragg. He told me he wouldn’t take men into a fresh-sprayed area; that if there were a fire in a sprayed over area they were working, the chemical release would be even worse than the fresh spray itself because at that point it would be so distilled…
KS: Who knows? We’re not qualified to answer a question like that. Intuitively, I think we both think it is a dangerous thing. How long it lasts, who knows? There are dead madrones on that hillside which we might make fire wood out of one of these days…We’ll see.
WS: Neither of us would work in an area that was being actively sprayed. I think that is where the buck would stop. I would probably be a very heavy protestor if any of my crew or any of my operations were sprayed while I was there.
BB: It feels to me as if you are in a tentative stage in your thinking about your profession. As if you haven’t decided in your own mind how far to let it go…
KS: We’re fairly committed to being loggers. We started out this little company with some fairly high ideals, and we’ve probably compromised quite a bit the last few years just to keep the company afloat.
And I don’t think we’re kidding ourselves, but we feel that at some point we’ll be able to choose the jobs that we want, not only on our ability to make money, but also our gut feeling about a job. We bid almost every job now. We bid against other contractors. And we bid very aggressively on jobs like the Pleiades that we feel are good jobs. Jobs that are done with a lot of careful forestry and a lot of thought in mind. We’re doing another one on the south coast of the same type.
BB: Do you think you’re going to be in a position ever to influence the industry itself?
WS: I think we will, simply because we are who we are. We are young, and we have a young crew—all about the same age, not necessarily all holding the same political thoughts as we do, but all of them are careful loggers interested in doing good work. Certainly it couldn’t hurt having us in the logging industry.
We can’t influence L-P at this time. We’re just ants on a big ant hill. We can give them our opinion, but that doesn’t really go very far. And as a matter of fact, a lot of times our opinion is held back because they do hold the strings. Not just L-P, all the timber companies. If you want to work, if you want to even sell the timber—we could get a job with, a private land owner, say someone who wanted to do some tree thinning and a little forestry and we like the job and went to do it. If we’re on the shit list, that person isn’t going to be able to sell their logs if they know that we’re working for them. The timber industry can come down on people. Mr. Bosco’s been accused of that too.
But that’s just the political facts of living in the USA. You got to take some. Hopefully someday we will be influential enough, or someday there will be enough people like us who will stay in the industry and not say, “Well, because philosophically we can’t align ourselves perfectly with everything that’s being done, we’ll just get out, and just leave everyone in the industry who wants to go out and make a fast dollar and do a shitty job.” That’s the choices you have.
KS: The nature of who is the industry has changed before and it can change again. As I mentioned before, a lot of the areas we have been going into were the sort of the final blow, the last cut. So you can assume that a lot of these pieces of ground won’t be logged again for 40 years. And 40 years in this industry is a long time. It is possible the larger companies will move on.
WS: We saw the same thing in the south and the northeast. As the timber there got depleted they moved to the west. And now they’re moving back. G-P’s moved their offices back to the east, and there’s being more new mills being built in the east than out here. The mills are being torn down here and being built in the south and the east because the timber is coming back again, so it’s “Bye, bye,” for awhile. As for how long this can go on?—How long can they deplete that timber and come back and get this timber? I don’t know.
BB: But what you’re saying is that in the interim, that does leave the industry in the hands of small bands of indigenous men like yourselves.
KS: Hopefully, but not necessarily. It’s anybody’s guess. So many things change, but we see it that way. We’re kind of in a stage now where we feel like we have to hang on. We’re not obviously judging from our surroundings, making a fortune at this. But we feel there’s more to it than just making money. And we hope to hang on long enough to be in a financial position to be influential and to inherit the business more or less. We’ll see … [long pause] I don’t see that there is going to be a big vacuum. This has happened before here. From the coastal mills, everything up to the ridge, just about. In the ‘20s, ‘30s, and ‘40s they all pretty much disappeared. Well, there wasn’t a big vacuum.
The land didn’t just vanish. The trees didn’t just vanish. Caspar Lumber Company gave up most of their timber holdings to the state. Union slipped in and bought a bunch of Caspar’s and Rockport’s and other mills along the coast. There’s always going to be somebody who wants timberland, whether it has merchantable trees on it or not. If it has the potential to grow trees, there is always going to be somebody who wants it to grow trees. So it isn’t just going to be a bunch of 40 acre parcels out there. Who these people are, they may be from Manhattan and it may be circling investment time. Who knows?
WS: There’s going to be logging on a different scale than is happening now.
KS: It’s already happening. We’ve noticed just in the years we’ve been incorporated that the sales have gone from 12 million foot sales down to a situation where it is rare to see anything over 5 million feet now. The sales are smaller. The loggers seem to be smaller—they’re all scaling down. Those who had fifteen employees are going down to five or six, and a lot of the contractors are doing a lot of the actual work themselves now, like we do.
BB: How fast does your technology change?
WS: This is a real archaic industry. We’re still pulling logs on the ground. And that’s how it’s always been done. That hasn’t changed. It’s just with machines rather than with animals.
KS: The last big change in technique was in 1948…
WS: When we went from hand saw and axes to chainsaws. And when we went from steam yarders to gas and diesel tractors. And as far as getting the logs and how we’re getting them to the mill. Instead of putting them on train cars, we’re putting them on log trucks.
KS: There are subtleties though—because of the rules. You asked what changes we had seen, and you were hinting at the weather. I think the biggest change I’ve seen around here since I was eight, is the quality of the water in the streams. It still looks to almost everybody who is in Willits during a heavy rainstorm, like the streams are swollen and muddy. But they are nothing compared to what they were when we were kids.
BB: You’re saying it’s gotten much better.
KS: Much. The technique was to skid logs down all the draws. That’s a very fast way to get logs to a landing. You just go up on the ridge with your CAT, and go straight down the hill, picking up logs as you go. You hit the creeks and you take them right down the bottom of the creeks where the salamanders splash right to the landing. Obviously that had some pretty damaging effects on the watershed. That’s not done any more and it’s made a drastic difference.
WS: My dad moved to Willits and worked for Willits Redwood Products, and then they bought timber in Humboldt County and I lived up there during the late ‘50s and early ‘60s. During that time—in the years 1955, 1962, and 1964—we had floods. Floods that actually wiped out our house when we were living up in Humboldt on the Eel River. Since that time, we have not had a flood anywhere near that intensity—even though two years ago we had the kind of rainfall that in 1964 would have wiped out the lower Eel River.
1955 was the year the most board feet were taken out of Mendocino County. The logging was going on just crazy. And, of course, there were absolutely no rules about anything. That was when the CATS started coming in their own and they had the blades and the power to push roads anyplace they wanted to get logs.
And that was your first flood in ‘55. From ‘55 to ‘64 is only ten years and we had three major floods on the Eel River in those ten years.
KS: But I don’t think people really made the association in those days. Nobody understood that the floods were because of the logging. And that’s probably one of the reasons the old-timers say the weather has changed. “We used to get these hellacious rain storms, and we’d have these terrible floods,” Well, the rains are no different now than they were then, but we just don’t get the hellacious floods.
BB: Redwoods do draw water—it’s even thought by some that they attract fog. It’s part of the sprinkling system of this region, that redwood trees draw a wetter atmosphere and in addition, add moisture to the ground through a drip irrigation system that starts with their foliage and extends to their roots. In the extreme situation of desertification, you plant water-grasping trees. The trees distribute atmospheric moisture—what little there is of it—into the surrounding soil.
KS: But second growth redwoods don’t draw any less water than old growth redwoods.
BB: I’m not sure. Second growth is so much different than old growth in so many other ways—in terms of the tightness of the grain.
WS: It’s possible that they draw even more.
Kenneth: We load logs by weight, and the second growth logs are just as saturated, if not more so than the old growth logs.
WS: I wonder if the tan oak provides the same service as the old-growth redwood, because it grows prolifically when the redwoods are taken out. Have you ever read Ray Raphael’s book, Tree Talk? There is an excellent description of how the forest does regenerate itself with the pioneer species, and you can see that really obvious here. That even here, where it almost looks like pure tan oak: forest, would eventually, if left at the state that it’s in, eventually be conifer. If you look you see there is a lot of redwood saplings coming up under the tan oak.[3]
BB: Ray Raphael refers to situations where Nature sends out its own pioneers—groves of alder which fixes the nitrogen in the soil next to a river bank after a cut. But what happens on company owned lands after a clear cut is they don’t wait for nature to take its course. They kill off the brush, they kill off the hardwoods with either fire or phenoxy—herbicide like sprays—and then they plant one strand. And so what has happened in places like China where they have tree cropped longer than we have here, after the third crop you don’t have forest soil. You no longer have what we know as ‘timber land’. It’s something else on its way to becoming a desert. Which is what North Africa is. North Africa at one time was forestland.
Kenneth: There were also climatic changes that took place.
BB: But the changes in climate are now being blamed on the changes wrought by civilization.
KS: I think that makes us sound more important than we are.
WS: My thoroughly off the wall theory is that it is natural for man to manipulate his environment and ruin it. And it may be natural that we are going to go through the process of ruining the land and we are going to die and there is going to be nothing left. That will be the end of it. And that’s going to be a natural process, simply because man came on this earth with the ability he has.
And I’m not saying that’s going to happen, because man also has the ability to change. And there are people trying to change that trend. We can foresee and we can change our direction. And the best thing that can happen is that those who are in the business of watch-dogging out for the rest of us keep doing what they are doing. They’ve got to keep doing that, and those of us who are doing our everyday life thing, need to take in the information and do our smaller parts, and that’s how it’s all going to happen.
BB: Before we began the interview, you asked me why I started New Settler. It’s because I think the people I cover are extremely valuable folks in a wider picture—including yourselves, scions of Willits that you are. In this issue is an interview with a resident anthropologist up in what is known as the Mateel.
What she has found is that if you change anything in a culture, everything changes. Once you change the technology or you change the pace of the technology, everything else changes to come to fore—including, as it turns out the nature of the watch dogging.
The best watch dogging in California has come out of the Mateel. More Timber Harvest Plan appeals are filed there. The Sally Bell Grove is only the tip of the iceberg. Mateelians hammer away at the Forest Practices especially with regard to accumulative effects. The same folks are also the ones bringing back the salmon with their hatch boxes and their cleansing of their own privately owned deltas.
Anyway, Jentri uses almost exactly the same words you did in her telling of why the Mateelian lifestyle rooted there—the land was cheap because it had been lumbered, and sloppily so, that was the key. That was the key to the region.
WS: And the loggers, didn’t realize they were cutting their own throats, bringing in all the hippies ... [laughter]
BB: Bringing in their own solutions, actually. Earth First! in Southern Humboldt have started a “Save the Loggers League”. You spoke of clean-up operations: water barring etc. You sound very conscientious, but how much inspection is there? Is someone from Forestry out there checking every water bar?
KS: The inspections are very frequent—even for us—and although not frequently, it has happened to us where we will have to go back and re-water bar a specific road that they thought was not up to snuff. It’s not just a turn you lose and at the end of the job they say, “Oh you didn’t do that right.” It’s an ongoing thing.
WS: But, it really comes down to you’ve got one guy and we’re dealing on 500, 600 acres, and we’re talking about all the skid roads on 500 acres, all the streams. He could spend practically every day with us there if he really wanted to watch us arid watch what’s going on. But he comes once every two or three weeks—and more likely, once a month—and tries to cover 600 acres. You can’t do it.
So I think they’ve been doing a fair job. I think they can be doing a better job. New realizations are coming to us in the industry all of the time. For instance: The State of California has to conform to a Federal water quality law that was passed ten years ago. At that time, Governor Brown appointed a commission to look into water quality from the vantage of nonspecific point water pollution—meaning you can’t say it’s that particular road or this particular spot that is causing a problem. It’s by drainage—the whole hillside has problems here and there. So they were trying to decide how they were going to monitor these places they found that 60% of the sites they went to see had violations that weren’t recognized by the CDF and weren’t written up as violations. That’s pretty much upset the logging world at the present time and I suspect the inspections will become more frequent and tougher.
KS: Part of the problem is that where we feel we have a fairly decent grasp of the laws, and also we have a feel for what is damaging and what is acceptable; but though we call ourselves contractors (and basically we are contractors—we hire our company to another company), there is no overseer as to whom can and who can’t. We’re not like building contractors who have to pass an examination and go through a lot of apprenticeship before being licensed by the State. We are licensed by the state, but you could be licensed by the State if you just sent in $75.
WS: You just fill out the form.
KS: Exactly. And I’ve argued this point with foresters. Because there are laws to be obeyed; because we are contractors, there should be something—something a little bit more formal than the State requires. And that’s probably coming. The Forest Practice Rules are about a foot thick, and I’d say there’s not a handful of loggers in California who know them backwards and forwards.
WS: And then, people have slipped into what is actually logging without calling it logging. Getting into doing a pickup worth of fire wood once a week to make ends meet: “Gee, if I bought a ton and a half truck, I could sell this for $200 in the city,” kind of thing, and pretty soon they’re cutting away.
KS: And they think it’s a matter of scale. But if you go out and cut down one redwood tree, technically that’s logging.
And a lot of what isn’t called “logging” has the same effect ecologically. A lot of what is going on the ridges is every bit as damaging as logging will ever be. Permanently opening up the roads. Denuding some of the hardwood stands—and I mean denuding—for a long time you could go take out a whole leave stand of hardwood without any regulations. There are some pretty barren hillsides because somebody moved up and decided to go into the firewood business. Putting in ponds at a flat place, having them fault and cause a slide on contingent slope. And this is damage that comes about, not from logging—as it is spelled out—but from living, from being here.
Footnotes:
[1] A New Settler is a recent resident of the area, in many cases, a “back-to-the-lander”, often a person with progressive political leanings and a strong green and local self-sufficiency ethic. Many of the individuals in this story have been interviewed by the New Settler Interview and fit the description of a “New Settler”.
[2] The growth of gyppo logging has been encouraged by large timber corporations for the primary purpose of undermining unionization. In three years, Walter Smith would speak in favor of unions, including the concept of One Big Union. See, “An Interview with Walter Smith”, by Bruce Anderson—Anderson Valley Advertiser, July 4, 1990
[3] For more information on Ray Raphael, see “A Different View of the Timber Industry”, Mendocino Beacon, April 1, 1982