Timber Country : Towns Fall Victim to the Stilled Ax
Ask one of the regulars down at the Turf Club bar about the troubles in the timber industry hereabouts and you’re likely to get the same sardonic reply heard all over this tiny seaside mill town:
“What timber industry?”
Timber has taken a tumble throughout the Pacific Northwest, and nowhere is it felt more sharply than in remote Del Norte County, the last stop before Oregon on California’s majestic North Coast.
Battered by a combination of inexpensive Canadian imports and (until recently) anemic demand, the industry in northwestern California still has not fully recovered from the 1982 recession--and few people here expect it ever will.
Poignant Contrast
Hard times in the all-important timber industry have made Del Norte County a particularly pointed, poignant contrast to the state’s overall robust economy. Automation and the practice of exporting uncut logs add to the problem for mill workers.
Del Norte is, in a way, an unusual paradigm of poverty in rural California. There are no starving children evident--public assistance sees to that. There also is no obviously squalid housing--a 1964 tidal wave ensured that few buildings are more than 21 years old.
But while the county lacks such obvious signs of poverty, it also lacks any obvious signs of prosperity. On the contrary, government auditors in this tiny county of 18,450 residents recently cleared out the files of more than 160 failed businesses.
Faced with this kind of news, residents say that they and a great many of their neighbors have little faith that things can get better any time soon. There is good reason for pessimism.
Between 1978 and 1984, the value of timber cut in this county decreased by more than 50% because of a glut on the market, uneconomical prices for timber from national forests and the creation of the Redwood National Park.
Two of Four Mills Close
Two of four big mills closed, idling 500 workers. This prompted the demise of several other local businesses, including the county’s last new-car dealership and one of its three banks.
Unemployment averaged 14.9% in Del Norte County through the first 11 months of 1985, more than double the statewide average of 7.3%. One in every six county residents receives food stamps, also more than twice the state average.
“What can we say? We’re desperate,” said Kathy Catton, executive director of the Crescent City-Del Norte County Chamber of Commerce. “Right now our big hope is a new correctional facility. We are one of the few areas begging for a prison.”
“The logging industry is a dying trade,” said Leslie Moore, an unemployed mill worker who was born in neighboring Humboldt County and still resides there. “I don’t care what President Reagan or anyone else says about the economy, we are in serious trouble here.”
Indeed, several neighboring timber-dependent counties suffer even more than Del Norte in terms of unemployment. In Siskiyou County, for example, 16% of the labor force on average was idle during the first 11 months of 1985. The figure was 15.1% in nearby Trinity County.
A diversified economy and greater dependence on redwood, which is not grown in Canada, held Humboldt County’s jobless rate to 10.5%--although that still is well above the state average.
In his State of the State address, Gov. George Deukmejian acknowledged the need to help “those regions and residents in our state whom recovery has left behind.” He promised $30 million for a “rural renaissance.”
But it may take years for such programs to make a difference, and the crisis in the timber towns is already 4 years old.
Crescent City Suffers
While the pinch is felt acutely in all of the region’s big timber-dependent counties--the biggest producers are Humboldt, Siskiyou and Mendocino--it has had its most profound effect in Crescent City.
For decades, the 3,100 inhabitants of this tidy little town based the local economy primarily on the redwood and fir trees cut in the nearby mountains and reduced to lumber in the mills just a few blocks from their homes.
And for decades, the timber industry provided a good living. Union workers could start out earning $10 an hour, providing comfortable paychecks for single people in this inexpensive corner of the state. Contract workers with special skills said they earned $200 or more for a single shift.
Fishing was the next-best source of income, but it was seasonal and subject to the whims of weather and government regulators. Quirky ocean temperatures, for example, led regulators to forbid commercial salmon fishing this year.
Other endeavors, such as tourism, were hampered by geography. Crescent City is 350 miles from San Francisco and Portland, and 80 miles from any city with 10,000 or more people.
Although there is a beautiful rocky seashore, redwood forests, good fishing and other tourist attractions, there is no rail service, little commercial air traffic and just one two-lane highway.
Some Are Doomed
“With a lot of little towns like Crescent City, this timber is about the only industry,” said Tim Skaggs, an officer in the International Woodworkers of American Union Local 3-98 in Arcata, about 80 miles south. “When you take that away, these towns have a hell of a time getting back on their feet. Some don’t.”
Despite the reverses, a considerable amount of timber continues to be cut in Del Norte--more board-feet of timber per square mile than any other county in the state.
A board-foot is a standard measure of volume equal to a square foot of wood an inch thick. A standard eight-foot framing 2-by-4 contains 5.3 board-feet. More than 100 million board-feet were cut here in the first six months of 1985.
But fewer and fewer of the logs being cut in Del Norte are milled there any more. And while current production may sound high, it is actually down sharply from what it was just a few years ago, much as the entire state has slipped in production from its 1950s peak.
In 1955, for example, California produced more than 6 billion board-feet of timber; Del Norte County alone boasted 52 sawmills. In 1984, the cut had decreased 42%, California slipped behind Oregon and Washington in volume and only three mills remained in Del Norte--one of them a small family concern.
Mills Vanish
The mills in Del Norte County have not only closed, they have disappeared--dismantled, boxed up, and shipped off to more profitable timberlands in Idaho, British Columbia, even South America.
The results have knocked the wind out of Del Norte County.
Where once not long ago the hulking McNamara-Peepe sawmill stood near the center of Crescent City, today there is only a collection of bare, litter-strewn concrete foundation slabs behind the Safeway supermarket.
Even at the Safeway itself--”the biggest and best store in town,” according to newspaper editor Steven L. Yarbrough--officials recently talked publicly of leaving. The store decided to stay when its employees agreed to lower wage demands.
Local radio stations frequently play the mournful Bruce Springsteen ballad “My Hometown,” with the painfully appropriate lyric:
Closin’ down the textile mill
Across the railroad tracks .
Foreman says, ‘These jobs are goin’, boys,
‘And they ain’t comin’ back . . . .’
Walt Keever, local manager for the state Employment Development Department, said he can offer little encouragement to the jobless mill workers and loggers who file into his office each month.
Little Alternative
“If anyone asked my opinion, I’d say, ‘Move,’ ” he said. “That or shift over to welfare, and a lot of them have done that.”
“People have given up hope that it (the timber industry) will ever be what it was,” said Catton, the Chamber of Commerce director. “It will always be here, but no one expects it will ever go back to what it was.”
Many former workers have indeed gone elsewhere in search of jobs, residents say, even though economics forces them to leave their families behind in houses they cannot sell.
“Houses here aren’t selling--nothing’s selling,” Catton said. She should know. Her own husband, after a prolonged stretch without work, accepted a job two years ago in Yreka, Calif.--a four-hour drive away. He lives there now.
Other former workers remain in the area, bound by family or determination, frequently subsisting on welfare or low-paying temporary jobs. It is not something of which they are proud.
“You can tell when the welfare checks come out--business picks up some,” said John Stanley, owner of an appliance shop. “It used to be that business picked up on Fridays, when the mill workers got paid.
Businesses Fade
“I’m not a gloom-and-doomer, but . . . for a while, it got so that you would come to work every Monday, look out the window, and see that someone else had gone out of business.”
There are still far more active shops than empty storefronts in town, but many civic leaders wonder aloud how long that will be. Some believe business can only get better; some are not so sure.
“Things aren’t leveling off; they aren’t getting better,” said Yarbrough, managing editor of the twice-weekly Del Norte Triplicate newspaper. “Things are getting worse. Month by month, they are getting worse.”
“We’ve lost a lot of goods and services. There is nothing here to support them,” said James Wright, past president of the Crescent City Business Assn. “Unless something drastic happens--the prison or something--I don’t see how that can change.”
The prison proposal is the most conspicuous local bid for economic revival. It is also the most controversial. A significant number of retired people have moved to Crescent City recently, taking advantage of the low housing costs and beautiful scenery. Some of them have led the opposition to the prison plan, citing the danger posed by escapes.
“I’m not sure everyone’s in agreement,” Wright said, “but we have to go after those (prison) dollars because there are no other dollars available.”
Prison Jobs
The Chamber of Commerce estimates that a new maximum-security prison would create 500 to 700 permanent, year-round jobs. If 400 of the jobs went to local people, the unemployment rate would be cut in half.
“The only salvation for this town is the prison,” said Yarbrough, who has written columns pleading with state officials to bring a correctional facility to the county. “I was born and raised in this town, and I’m not happy to have 5,000 convicted criminals here. But I really see it as the only way.”
County supervisors, however, are exploring an additional possibility. Using the governor’s “rural renaissance” development program, they want to help a local fish-processing company exploit untapped schools of hake, a type of cod, found in abundance off the Crescent City coast.
“They (state officials) want us to make the jobs here, and that is what we want, too,” said Glenn Smedley, chairman of the county Board of Supervisors. “We want to . . . take care of our own. We don’t want to be a handout county living on money from Sacramento.
“We’re not giving up. We just have to keep going.”
However, even with such efforts, Crescent City and the rest of the region’s timber towns face a wrenching adjustment to life after the mills.
Money Isn’t There
“You may be able to find them another job, but it will only pay them $4.50 an hour,” said Skaggs, the union official. He did not need to elaborate: Even here, one cannot raise a family on less than $200 a week.
“Even if I got a job as a skilled mechanic,” said Moore, who has taken a number of night courses at a local junior college since leaving the mill, “I can only get eight bucks an hour. I can’t feed my family on that.” Moore, 37, has a wife and four children.
“It’s sad to see people who invested their whole lives in an area and then see it pulled out from under them,” Skaggs said. “A lot of them have planned their whole lives so that at 60 they could retire and live a good life.
“But here they are, not even 40, their savings are gone, they’ve lost their jobs, and they don’t have a prospect of getting another one anytime soon.” UNEMPLOYMENT BY PERCENT
COUNTY 1983 1984 1985* 1986 DEL NORTE 19.4 16.9 14.9 15.1 HUMBOLDT 13.3 11.4 10.5 11.1 MENDOCINO 13.3 12.8 10.7 12.9 SHASTA 15.5 13.9 13.1 14.0 SISKIYOU 19.7 16.5 16.0 15.4 TRINITY 16.8 16.5 15.1 15.5
* Through November. Projected figures
