Spooked by an Owl, Town Fights Its Future

There’s no such thing as anonymity in Happy Camp. Not only does everyone know everyone else. Everyone even knows everybody else’s pickup truck. There’s no place to hide, and you can’t get away with anything.

But the people who live in this endearing lumber town near Oregon are Happy Campers in name only. They can cope with the down market for lumber; that happens every time there’s a recession. What’s got Happy Campers spooked is the knowledge that, this time around, their way of life may soon come to an end.

“The spotted owl’s what’s killing us,” says unemployed millworker Tony Dupret.

Almost everyone else around here believes the same thing. Federally designated as “threatened,” which is not quite as bad as “endangered,” the owl’s presence in the ancient woods of the Klamath National Forest, where Happy Camp is located, has sharply limited how much of this federal timberland is available for logging. Along with the environmentalists who are seen as exploiting the species, the owl gets blamed for threatening the future of this almost claustrophobically close community.

Hardly any place in California better expresses the tension between conservation and commerce than Happy Camp. And no place reveals more graphically the human cost of doing the right thing in the natural environment.

The right thing, to environmentalists, is saving old-growth woods, whose huge conifers, often hundreds of years old, shelter a richly varied ecosystem on the forest floor.

Whether that is the right thing is subject to debate, but the sad fact is that no matter how much logging is permitted around here, Happy Camp’s days seem numbered. Like most communities, this Klamath River outpost is a creature of commerce. The old growth Douglas fir hereabouts, prized for construction, is running out, and technology, fortunately, will increasingly make it unnecessary in the years to come.

Happy Camp’s death would not be unprecedented; the West is dotted with ghost towns, and America’s cities and towns seem unrivalled in the rapidity of their rise and fall. But the demise of every Happy Camp is tragic in an age when television and highways work to homogenize culture. There are mighty few places like Happy Camp left in America today.

Many residents have lived in town for decades, if not generations. There are no chain stores or bus service, and Janeen Snopl, owner of Larry’s Market, says she and her staff will notice if someone hasn’t been in for a week or two. Happy Camp seems like the only place in the world without a McDonald’s.

Aside from the odd gold miner, the men are built like, well, lumberjacks and mostly work in timber. The lone sawmill and U.S. Forest Service are the main employers; everything else depends on the business they generate.

Timber made Happy Camp, but right now you’d think the place was full of bird-watchers. The town is obsessed with the owl, and last December, 450 distraught Happy Campers--nearly half the town--descended on Yreka, the far-off seat of Siskiyou County, to let the Board of Supervisors know that, as Snopl puts it, “the spotted owl doesn’t need the whole forest.”

Happy Campers see the bird as an excuse used by affluent outsiders to curtail the logging necessary for building homes--and, not incidentally, sustaining Happy Camp.

“They’re not really environmentalists,” logger Tom White says angrily. “They’re preservationists. We’re environmentalists.”

But if environmentalists are using the bird as a kind of Trojan Owl to save the remaining old-growth forests of California and the Pacific Northwest, Happy Camp has seized upon a scape-owl for problems that threaten to strangle the town sooner or later anyway.

Robert Ewing, who runs the state Forest and Rangeland Resources and Assessment Program, says California only has another two or three decades of old growth left on federal lands and perhaps only 10 years’ worth on private lands. Overall, he says, there are perhaps 5 million old-growth acres statewide, mostly in the north.

Happy Camp’s future thus isn’t bright, at least as a logging town. George Harper, who heads the local office of the U.S. Forest Service, says the 350,000-acre Happy Camp district of the Klamath National Forest typically yielded 50-million board-feet of logs annually, but in the current fiscal year, which began Oct. 1, the Forest Service hasn’t had a single timber sale there.

Stone Forest Industries, the last mill in town, is still in business, but it recently laid off its night shift and expects to run out of timber by September, says Jim Waddell, a timber manager at the facility whose forebears in Happy Camp go back to l851.

Lacking timber sales, the whole town is hurting. Charlotte Attebury, who’s watching “Geraldo” over at Evans Mercantile and who looks at the world literally through rose-colored glasses, says business is down. She’s cut inventory orders to $7,000 a month from as much as $30,000 previously. More people are asking for credit, too.

“We decline,” says Attebury, whose father-in-law helped found the store in 1911. “We’re already carrying all the credit we can.”

George Chambers, a contractor in Happy Camp active in a residents’ group called Klamath Alliance for Resources and Environment, says 40% of Happy Camp workers are already unemployed.

“The town was quite a bit bigger some years ago,” he recalls. “When I moved here in 1960, there were five mills in operation and a serious gold mine.”

Aside from logging and mining, there’s not much within commuting distance, and people have already begun to leave.

Dupret will likely join them. He’s been in logging and mill work since he was 14, but at 27 he can’t find a job. “I’ve been looking from Eugene to Sacramento,” he says.

But Happy Camp is not without hope. The town survived a previous extended mill closing that lasted perhaps two years but was partly offset by employment from a large gold mine. And there’ll always be lots of second-growth, younger trees grown from seedlings when older trees were cut.

Logging aside, the Klamath River is great for rafting, salmon and steelhead fishing, and healthy forests yield other benefits. Waddell, a talented amateur photographer, is thinking of selling pictures, and so many morel and other pricey mushrooms grow wild that he hauls them away in pillowcases.

At the Indian Creek Cafe, Ray Lohn’s great home cooking includes sauteed shiitakes. But they don’t grow wild. Perhaps looking ahead, someone in the area cultivates them.