Loggers Long for Days of Plenty in Old-Growth Forests

FORKS, Wash. —  Joe Gaydeski’s wandering days are long gone, faded like the wild woods he used to roam.

After 93 years of hard use, his legs are weak and his eyes are dim. But shout a few questions his way, and Joe will talk for hours about the grand old days in one of the world’s great forests.

There were trees so tall they poked the clouds. Rivers so thick with salmon you could hardly see the water. And loggers--oh, the loggers!--big men with big saws, bucking up logs the size of silos.

“The stories I could tell, you wouldn’t believe,” Joe says.

Believe him. Joe Gaydeski was born into a land that lived up to the tallest of tales. He worked as a timber cruiser, counting trees from the redwoods of California to the spruce of Alaska.

Wherever he went, the loggers weren’t far behind.

They came from the cutover woods of Maine and the Great Lakes, migrating as a nation hungry for timber chased the forest across the continent. In the Pacific Northwest, they found the tallest, fattest trees they’d ever seen. They thought they could never exhaust nature’s bounty.

Not that they didn’t try.

After a century of cutting, a fraction of the Northwest’s old-growth forest remains--some studies say as little as 10%. Loggers now must compete with those who value the forest for other amenities: its wildlife, its beauty, its contribution to the ecological balance.

The result is a more complicated place, where conflict grows as tangled as the trees.

When Joe Gaydeski was young, this was the frontier, a straight-ahead place where God grew timber for men to take. Two generations later, Joe’s grandnephew Larry may be the last Gaydeski to earn a living cutting trees.

Lauded as folk heroes, vilified as nature rapers, loggers always have loomed larger than life. Now families like the Gaydeskis wonder if there’s room for them in a world that seems to shrink ever smaller.

*

The Gaydeski clan arrived on the Olympic Peninsula in 1897. They were farmers escaping Nebraska’s droughts, and here they found relief by the bucketful.

Up to 200 inches of rain falls annually on the peninsula’s western hills, nursing a rain forest where ferns grow tall as a man and moss drips from the limbs of tall evergreens.

When Joe Gaydeski was young, Forks was too remote for commercial logging. Trees were considered a nuisance by homesteaders chopping, burning and cursing the forest to clear a few stump-studded fields.

By 1925, though, railroads were pushing around the peninsula, and Joe went to work in the woods.

Logging camps sprouted, and valleys echoed with the ring of axes and the crash of timber. It was an era of purpose and power; a sweaty, swaggering time when loggers toiled all week, then hit town to drink and brawl.

Given the dangers they faced, a little rowdiness was overlooked. In 1925 alone, 100 loggers died on the Olympic Peninsula and in the hills to the south.

Wood was even cheaper than a logger’s life. As a cruiser, Joe was told not to count trees less than 2 1/2 feet in diameter--good timber by modern standards.

“They didn’t put any value on the wood,” Joe says. “When you have so much of everything, you forget there could be a shortage.”

*

Like his uncle, Lawrence Gaydeski saw plenty of big timber. He also saw big changes in the woods.

Lawrence started logging the summer after high school, in 1948.

“I hated it with a passion,” he says. “The old-timers would tell me, ‘Hang in there, kid. In six or eight years, you’ll get used to it.’ ”

And he did. Now 62, his callused hands and blackened fingernails tell of a life of hard labor: 25 years logging, then 10 years running a sawmill on the family homestead.

Timber afforded Lawrence a decent living, but over the years he chafed at the growing restrictions on federal lands holding most of the Northwest’s old-growth forests. He watched Congress repeatedly remove lands from timber production to meet public demand for wilderness, parks and wildlife refuges.

Lawrence took the changes personally.

He is proud to have performed a tough, dangerous job that society wanted done. But now he sees the TV news portray loggers as monsters scalping the land. Are loggers any more villainous, he asks bitterly, than Sierra Clubbers living in houses built of wood?

He holds up a carton of milk. “The public has lost sight of the fact that to drink a glass of milk, someone had to smell cow manure. And to make that carton, someone had to cut a tree.”

In 1982, Lawrence got so angry he ran for public office. Elected a Clallam County commissioner, he’s now midway through his third term.

His position gives him a platform to champion the loggers’ cause, but not much power. Federal land-use decisions are made in Congress, not in Forks.

So there was little he could do in June, 1990, when federal officials declared the northern spotted owl a threatened species, saying the bird might become extinct if its old-growth habitat was not protected.

That decision, and later court rulings supporting it, have hog-tied the Northwest timber industry. In the Olympic National Forest, annual timber harvests plunged to just 14% of their 1970s peak.

President Clinton promises to seek an owl-protection plan that won’t drive loggers extinct. But Lawrence Gaydeski says there’s little room left--in the woods or his heart--for more compromise.

“We’ve compromised for years,” he says. “Now we’re fighting for the survival of our heritage and culture.”

*

It’s 7 a.m. on the mountain. A cold rain is blowing sideways, and Larry Gaydeski, chain saw in hand, is not thinking about politics.

He leaves that to his father, trusting his own survival to a few simple rules: “I keep my ears and eyes open, and I keep looking up. That’s where it’ll come from, if it’s coming.”

It is a dangerous morning to be cutting trees--the tops of the 100-foot-tall hemlocks are swaying in the wind--but Larry bends to his work.

Hemlock after hemlock crashes down, falling precisely where he wants. But then one tree catches another as it falls. The second tree’s top snaps off and drops toward Larry like a spear.

He sees it coming and steps casually out of the way. “Just another of the day’s hazards,” he says.

His escapes aren’t always so clean. A knotted scar reminds him of the time he fell and his chain saw gouged a hole in his arm. Eleven stitches in his left hand show where he once blocked a saw from ripping into his face.

But at 39, and after 21 years in the woods, he is alive, and that is something. Logging accidents have killed more Forks men than Larry cares to dwell on.

He’d rather show off his photo albums, filled with snapshots of his biggest trees: 10- to 14-foot diameter giants that each took half a day to cut.

Because of spotted-owl restrictions, he seldom works in old-growth anymore. This spring, he’s cutting a 70-year-old stand of trees 18 to 32 inches in diameter--timber that Uncle Joe wouldn’t even have counted in his day.

But Larry is lucky to be working at all. Last year he was unemployed nearly three months, and he’s better off than most. An estimated 70% of the loggers who once worked in Forks are unemployed, have moved away, or have taken other jobs.

Larry talks of quitting, too. “I’m getting too old,” he says. Then again, he says, there are worse jobs:

“You know what scares me? The thought of driving through traffic, sitting behind a desk in some office building and punching buttons on a computer. I’d go buggy.”

His heroes are the Old West cowboys: rugged individuals who rode tall and owned their own minds, if not much else. That describes what Larry likes about a logger’s life, too.

Or it did, anyway. While logging still offers enough toil and danger to satisfy the cowboy in anyone, the glory has faded, he says.

He has three sons, not one a likely logger. Steven, 15, wants to be a fisheries biologist; Michael, 13, an architect; Joseph, 11, a veterinarian.

Family tradition aside, Larry approves.

“I don’t want any of my kids to be loggers,” he says. “When you get old, there are no benefits, no insurance. All you’ve got to show for it is aches and pains.”

*

As long as the rain grows trees, logging will be part of the Northwest. But its swagger is gone, and towns like Forks--the self-proclaimed “Logging Capital of the World”--mourn the loss.

During a century-long boom, an army of loggers mined the wild forest of its ancient giants. In the future, a lesser contingent will tend a tamer land, growing smaller trees as a crop to be harvested every 70 to 100 years.

How much of the remnant old-growth should be converted to such tree farms? How much preserved? That’s where the current debate spins, as society ponders what to make of a diminished thing.

*

Joe is spinning more yarns about a more abundant time. Of the compass man who couldn’t find his way back to camp. Of loggers’ hygiene: “When it got too slippery to stand up in your shoes, you knew it was time to wash your socks.”

He’d go on all day, but his visitor is restless. So Joe Gaydeski grows quiet at last, his head slowly nodding, his memories drifting down some long-lost trail beneath the trees.