THE DEATH OF A TIMBER TOWN : A COURT BAN ON CLEAR CUTTING TOPPLED THE TEETERING LOGGING INDUSTRY IN FORKS, WASH. NOW, TOWNSPEOPLE ARE MAKING ENDS MEET, MOVING ON AND MOURNING THE END OF A WAY OF LIFE.

DAVE WEAVER LIKES TO BRAG ABOUT HOW HE GOT HIS FIRST JOB IN Forks, a tiny timber town on the Olympic Peninsula, the “thumb” of Washington state. There were no formalities, no paperwork. He asked around and headed for a plywood mill he’d heard was handling lots of logs. His interview was short and to the point: The boss asked if he knew how to pull veneer--thin layers of wood peeled from a log with a giant lathe, which are glued together later to make plywood. “ ‘Give me your gloves,’ I said.” Pulling veneer is aerobics run amok. Panels of peeled Douglas fir careen from the lathe at a breakneck pace. Some men pluck and grab the unwieldy panels with the confidence of a big-league shortstop making a routine catch--others with the fluid motion of a dancer. Weaver, who looks like an athlete, stepped to the line. “And about 30 seconds later the boss said: ‘Be here tomorrow morning. You start work at 6 o’clock. We’ll fill out the application whenever we get time.’ ” A big man with an enormous chest, beefy shoulders and an Elvis haircut, Weaver tells this story as he stands in line at the Express Lane, a gas-and-go place where coffee costs a quarter if you bring your own mug. Parked out front in the pre-dawn darkness are a few battered pickup trucks, their beds loaded with fuel cans and logging gear. People around here call them “crummies.” “There used to be a lot more crummies at the Express Lane,” Weaver says as he strolls, coffee in hand, through the parking lot toward Tillicum Park. He rode them to dozens of jobs in the woods, jobs he could land anytime he needed them on the strength of his skill and reputation. Like a lot of loggers and millworkers, Weaver never finished high school. His father, a full-blooded Cherokee, had moved the family so frequently that Weaver “never knew the same school more than two years in a row.” But with the way Dave Weaver handled himself in the mill, he could take home $20,000 a year and make a good life for his family. In 1990, though, they closed the mill where he’d spent his days cutting giant logs into perfect planks. The nearby Olympic National Forest surrounding Forks still has great stands of fir and Sitka spruce that were already old when Europeans got here, unbroken stretches of Christmas trees 200 feet tall and 50 feet around. But the U.S. Forest Service estimates that more than half of the old-growth trees in the 632,000-acre forest have been cut, and America has decided that what remains should be saved. That has left towns and men like Dave Weaver, who supported themselves by laying the tall trees down on vast, unrestrained clear-cuts, struggling to survive. Forks was one of the first to feel the pain.

Weaver leans sleepily against a signpost as the sky lightens, awkwardly trying to ignite a corn-cob pipe as he holds his coffee. It’ll be a 55-mile bus ride into Port Angeles and the job it took him 11 months to find: fixing pinball machines and video games at Diamond Vending for $5.75 an hour. He doesn’t complain about the commute or his long hours. So many of his friends are out of work that he’s glad to have any job at all. The ability to do the job, to be self-sufficient, is what defines men here. And when the job is lost, sometimes the man is, too.

DRIVE IN ANY DIRECTION FROM FORKS AND IT WON’T BE LONG BEFORE YOU HIT a clear-cut. From a distance, some look like small patches of freshly shaven scalp. But others, like the enormous tract along nearby Burnt Mountain Road, cover miles--devastation as far as the eye can see.

During the peak years of the late 1970s and early ‘80s, loggers from the Forks area cut enough ancient trees every year to build about 30,000 three-bedroom, 2 1/2-bath suburban homes. If logging continued at that pace, environmental groups feared, the last remnants of forests filled with 700-year-old trees would disappear, and a variety of rare species would be threatened with extinction. So the groups filed injunctions to preserve the ancient forest that remained. The result: In 1991, fewer than 2,000 of those “typical” homes could be built.

Timber workers knew their way of life was dying. Mills were being automated, lumber companies sent raw logs overseas for processing, and every year jobs disappeared. Thousands of jobs. But loggers clung to the idea that the old-growth forests would support them, if not forever, then at least for another generation as the U.S. Forest Service gradually reduced the tree harvest. The injunctions changed the equation. Then, last May, U.S. District Judge William Dwyer of Seattle, responding to what he called “deliberate, systematic” violations of environmental laws by federal agencies, put a temporary ban on new sales of old-growth timber in 17 national forests containing northern spotted owls.

Dwyer gave the U.S. Forest Service until next week to come up with a permanent plan to ensure that the bird, one of several species threatened by unrestrained logging, does not become extinct. In the interim, about 66,000 acres of old growth throughout the Northwest that had been slated for sale were taken off the block. And, it seems, that was just the beginning. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the agency charged with protecting endangered species, has been proposing that 6.9 million acres of old growth forest in Northern California, Oregon and Washington be permanently preserved for the spotted owl. That number, profoundly affected by politics, fluctuated as the Dwyer deadline approached. Environmental groups have been seeking to increase the acreage set aside, and the timber industry wants to reduce it. Government officials estimate that 20,700 people will lose their jobs if the 6.9-million-acre plan is approved.

From Yreka, Calif., north through Medford, Ore., Darrington, Wash., and on to the Canadian border, the spotted owl and its environmentalist protectors have become hated symbols of hard times. All the problems facing the Northwest’s forest products industry--the recession, exports of logs and fierce competition--are seen by much of the general public as inconsequential next to the economically devastating restrictions put in place to protect this threatened species. They reject the claims of those who say the owl’s peril is simply one indication that the entire ancient forest ecosystem is disappearing.

They even reject the attempts of environmental groups to help shape solutions to their long-term problems. The Sierra Club, says Northwest Regional Director Bill Arnold, has supported a series of economic packages that include prohibiting log exports and reforesting timber lands, which would begin to yield trees ready for harvest in 40 years. “These packages are not welfare because this is a community of people who are proud of working hard,” says Arnold. “The long-term goal is to create investments strategies for a viable rural community in the Northwest.”

But with an anger fueled by the fear and denial that pervade their dying towns these days, the loggers won’t hear it. All they want, they say, is to return to a quiet life in the woods. They want the owl to go away. They want Congress to gut the Endangered Species Act or, as many will tell you, to expand it to include loggers as another endangered species. They want the big-city environmentalists and their lawyers to leave them alone. Yet even as they bemoan their fate, the people in Forks can look around and see that there will be no returning to “life as usual.”

On Forks Avenue, the only commercial street in this community of 2,862 people, the newest building stands vacant--three storefronts adorned only with a sign reading “For Sale, For Rent.” Uncut grass marks the homes of loggers who have left town to look for work. Everywhere, there’s a sense of making do.

Dave Weaver has turned the dank living room of his house, just off Forks Avenue, into a pinball arcade, hoping to cull a few quarters from neighborhood kids. Fifteen antique machines his boss no longer wants line the decaying floor of the empty room, and next to them is a rack of cheap earrings--a buck apiece to arcade visitors.

Thirteen-year-old Danny Weaver stands alone at Defender, showing the kind of wizardry that could only come from hours at the flippers. Today is his birthday, but it’s not likely his father will be around later to celebrate. “It’s kinda hard with nobody around to look up to but your older brother,” he says as he racks up points. Even when his father is home, no one can pretend things are the way they used to be. “My Dad, when he’s around, well he loses his temper a little more,” Danny says. “He doesn’t always have the money for the bills. So sometimes we are a little short on water or the lights go off for a little while.”

Those are problems many families in Forks are familiar with. Social services people rattle off the most recent statistics they have to document the distress: welfare grants to families with children up 64% from January to December, 1990; the number of food-stamp recipients up by a third; reports of sexual assaults up 113% and domestic violence up 96% between September, 1990, and September, 1991, at the Forks Abuse Program; a 66% jump in the number of people getting food from the Forks food bank between 1989 and 1990. The worst is yet to come. There were jobs in the woods last summer. In a frenzy of cutting that some say has been environmentally devastating, private landowners rushed to harvest for fear that the government will soon stop them from logging at all. On federal land, loggers cleared the timber they’d bought before harvest limits were imposed. New timber sales in the Olympic National Forest for 1991 plummeted to less than 10% of those made in 1990, and as the old sales are logged off, there just won’t be much left to cut.

Families are separating as the “gyppos”--independent loggers who work on contract--follow jobs to Alaska or Idaho or Georgia. A lot of folks are packing up children and belongings and leaving town. And already, Californians, most of them retired and drawn to the Twin Peaks atmosphere and low real estate prices, have started to move in.

Dr. Robert Lee, who specializes in the sociology of timber country at the University of Washington College of Forest Resources in Seattle, says there’s no question that the people of Forks are suffering. “The loss of that small-town way of life is very stressful to them,” he says. “People who have lived in these small towns have learned to appreciate honesty, trust and personal relationships. Personal reputation is everything. A good worker--that identity is gold. Someone who works hard, is efficient, independent and versatile--who cannot only run the equipment but fix it--that person embodies the whole notion of the work ethic.” But when the jobs disappear and the town is lost, “there is nothing to pull people together. All that is left is the disintegration of their lives.”

MASON LUMBER PRODUCTS IS THE MILL WHERE DAVE WEAVER USED TO WORKwith 39 other men. Once it was a huge, prefabricated metal building surrounded by a yard full of ancient Douglas fir logs nicknamed “old girls.” Now all that is left of the mill is the iron superstructure. Everything, down to the walls, has been auctioned off or sold for scrap.

Larry Mason, the 42-year-old owner, came to Forks 20 years ago from New England and the Massachusetts College of Art. Long-haired and bearded, he looked like a hippie, thought like a businessman and had the heart of a logger. “I came out here with nothing,” Mason says. “I worked hard, saved my money, started with a small mill on leased ground and expanded it little by little over the years. Isn’t that the idea? If you work hard, you should be able to make a life for yourself. That’s the American dream. Then, boom--overnight our economy has been ruined. You’ve got sawmills going down all along the West Coast right now.”

Mason and his wife, Liz, built a beautiful little two-story home from salvaged lumber. But Mason has defaulted on the federal Small Business Administration loan he obtained to renovate his mill. “The bank and the government are looking at the house,” he says as he hammers new flashing under the eaves of his barn. “I have no idea what I’m going to do. But this is where I’m staying. My children were born in this house. We cleared this land with our own labor, my wife and I. This is our home. Nobody can take this away from us. Any sheriff comes here to try to kick me out of this house--he’s going to get a bullet between his eyes.”

A wind chime mingles with the distant laughter of Mason’s two daughters as he sits on the porch and describes how the government “betrayed” him. In 1987, when Mason wanted to expand his mill, he went to the Forest Service, where he and the Small Business Administration were told that there would always be a supply of logs to fuel the mill. The SBA guaranteed a loan. But when the old growth harvest restrictions were imposed, Mason could no longer get the giant logs that the mill was designed to cut. The mill finally closed in October, 1990. It was the same story across Washington, Oregon and Idaho: 26 saw and panel mills closed during the first six months of 1991, and 2,428 jobs were lost.

Mason used to wake up every morning at 5:30. By 6:30 he was at the mill bucking logs--sorting them by length and quality. He handled all the sales. “And I worked at any of the jobs in the mill when someone was absent. I loved it. But I was shocked when the environmentalists filed injunctions in 1989. They went to court and the world stopped. But the environmentalists have underestimated the resources and stamina of people like me when they are riled. People like myself are becoming politically educated and politically active.”

Mason has become deeply involved in the Washington Commercial Forest Action Committee, an industry organization. Last fall, he traveled to a St. Louis meeting of 125 organizations from mostly rural areas around the country of people who rely on natural resources and public lands. Mason says the coalition they formed, the Alliance for America, hopes to save rural American communities from “being picked off one by one” by supporting multiple uses of public lands and resources and “balancing the needs of people and the environment.”

“We’ve got Americans who think that you can throw away the logger and still live in the huge wooden house in the hills. The environmentalists get their money from that guy on the hill. When that SOB’s lifestyle is threatened, the checks are going to stop.”

The same splenetic tone came through clearly in a letter Barbara Mossman, a logging-truck driver, sent to the Forks Forum, a weekly newspaper. “Maybe it’s time we started acting like our lives depend on the outcome, because that is exactly the situation,” she wrote. “If civil disobedience, terrorist activities and destruction of property captured the media’s attention for the (militant environmentalist) Earth Firsters, would it not also work for us?”

The 45-year-old trucker-turned-activist walks into the Vagabond cafe wearing blue jeans and a zippered gray sweat shirt over a yellow T-shirt. Mossman’s hands, perfectly manicured with clear nail polish, are most at home on the wheel of her International Harvester S-series rig. She, her husband Dick and their truck moved across the state to Forks six years ago after having spent time salvaging timber felled when Mt. Saint Helens erupted.

“Every time you turn that key in the morning might be your last time,” says Mossman to underscore the danger being a stick hauler involves. “The mental strain is phenomenal. You know if that truck gets away from you, 80,000 pounds of trees and metal going down the road can do a lot of damage. I’ve had an air line go out on me coming down a 28% grade, and by the time the maxi-cans (brakes) came on, I was looking down a 1,000-foot canyon. That’s when my butt turned loose of the Naugahide.”

In the first six months of 1990, the Mossmans made about $36,000 hauling logs. In the first six months of 1991, they made about $15,000. Those kind of figures have forced many of the Mossmans’ fellow stick haulers to sell their trucks. She and Dick haven’t reached that point yet, but Mossman nods her red head toward a 4x4 pickup with a bumper sticker that reads “I vote jobs, not owls” and says, “We can sell that if we have to.”

The Mossmans don’t want to leave Forks. “The old pioneer spirit of watching out for your neighbor is alive out here,” she says. Besides, it would cost $10,000 to convert their truck for use on the open road--money they don’t have.

“We couldn’t see this coming,” Mossman says. “We couldn’t believe the audacity of it. That they would take a bird and say it is worth 40,000 jobs in the Northwest; we couldn’t comprehend it. It’s still flabbergasting to me.”

The clear feeling of anger and vulnerability in Forks has attracted predators. Last summer, the Aryan Nations, a neo-Nazi group with a history of violence that wants to turn the Pacific Northwest into a white homeland, announced that it would be coming to town to support the loggers in their protests against environmental restrictions. It fell to the Mossmans’ group, American Loggers Solidarity, to organize a public meeting warning them to stay away. The second-floor banquet room at the Vagabond was full of people indignant at the notion that they would be vulnerable to a Nazi recruiting drive. Aryan Nations apparently got the message; they never showed up.

“They say that we are going to turn into child abusers, drug addicts and alcoholics,” Mossman says. “No. We will pull together. We will help each other. And we will prove them wrong.”

ACROSS FORKS AVENUE FROM THE THRIFTY MART SUPERMARKET IS THE RE-EM-ployment Support Center, one of Forks’ lifelines. It’s not fancy--one room with three desks with partitions between them. Ernie Reed set up the storefront operation in 1990 with money appropriated by the state Legislature to help dislocated timber workers. Reed works like an expediter, directing people to sources of aid and doling out a few bucks here and there to help with the rent or to pay for the gas for a drive into Port Angeles to look for work. The center handles about 100 clients a month and is adding an average of 25 new clients to its rolls each month.

“The level of frustration is increasing,” Reed says. “It hasn’t reached the point of hopelessness yet. But a couple more decisions like Judge Dwyer’s and it will rip away everyone’s self-esteem. The timber supply would have run out eventually. But we just all of a sudden slammed on the brakes and everything in the car went flying.”

Reed says when people walk in for help the first time, they invariably ask, “ ‘Do you have any jobs for me?’ That’s the question they keep asking.” Dave Weaver asked, too, but when Reed couldn’t help, he decided to get new training. Because Weaver’s old employer, Mason’s mill, had been hurt by foreign competition, Weaver was eligible for federal funds for retraining. His American Indian heritage also allowed him to get about another $50 a month while being retrained. And when Reed found out that Weaver was supporting a family of 10 children, he immediately sent Weaver to the state welfare office for food stamps and Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The state employment office hooked him up with Peninsula College in Port Angeles, where he would learn to become an electronics technician.

Weaver’s days are long. He’s up at 5:30 every morning for the long drive to work in Port Angeles. Until recently, he spent almost three hours a day on the bus that winds through the Soleduck River Valley. But recently he was promoted to the job of top video- and pinball-repair technician at Diamond Vending. Besides a raise to $7 an hour, he gets the use of a company car so he can tend machines at taverns around Clallam County.

He puts in about three hours doing repairs in the morning, then heads over to Peninsula College for classes in electronic trouble-shooting and computers, returning to the shop to tinker with the arcade games before he heads out on repair rounds that can take him along 70 miles of serpentine roads. On an easy day, he’s home by 9 p.m. Often it’s more like midnight. Maybe that’s why there always seem to be bags under Weaver’s blue eyes.

Echoing the same refrain of denial, naivete and hope that one hears everywhere in the troubled timber towns, Weaver says he simply did not see the hard times coming. “I didn’t know about the spotted owl. I didn’t know the environmentalists were trying to shut down this end of America.” And he was stunned to have to go to the government for help. “Let’s say you’re a man. You’ve always found the work. You live by your muscle. You live by your courage. Then, all of a sudden, you’re told that you have to go in on your hands and knees and beg for food. I tell you something, if it wasn’t for feeding the kids, I’d rather die than beg some pencil-pushing slob for food.”

Those first few months before he landed a job at Diamond Vending were hard. “Last year we still had babies going real cold,” Weaver says. He glances at his wife Nancy. “I cried because she was in there cuddled in blankets with the littlest baby two feet from the wood stove and it was still cold as hell.”

The next big challenge will be completing his education. He’s doing well--and even earned a medal last year for academic achievement--but his retraining aid has run out and he now has to pay for his classes. What scares him, he says, is that he can’t handle school and his job at the same time.

Weaver lets loose a long sigh. “OK, we’ve made a lot of mistakes in the past, but we’ve learned. There has been a lot of senseless cutting. But the entire nation as a whole didn’t stop to think. You can’t put it on the loggers. If somebody wants his $300,000 house, they don’t stop to think about preservation.”

LAWRENCE GAYDESKI’S FARM, JUST OUTSIDE TOWN, HAS BEEN IN THE FAMILY for five generations. On the porch of the two-story, whitewashed, wood-frame farmhouse, 91-year-old Uncle Joe sits in a rocker with a baby on his lap. Joe was a timber cruiser in the 1920s, traveling the Peninsula’s vast wilderness and beyond with a pack on his back for weeks at a time, surveying stands of forest for future harvest.

Lawrence, 60, is in the fields, perched on his 1968 Brown model tractor, bringing in the hay. Before taking over the family farm in 1972, Gaydeski had spent 25 years as a logger, as a high-climber, hanging rigging and setting chokers, the woven cables used to control the tree and drag it out of the woods. His brother Darrell is a stick hauler. And three sons make their livings as a logger, millwright and timber trouble-shooter. Five generations of Gaydeskis--sons and daughters, nieces and nephews, grandchildren and great uncles--have played on the lawn below this field, and somewhere along the line, they have all depended on the timber industry.

Lawrence pulls the tractor up by the barn and stops for a break. It’s usually raining around Forks--the nearby rain forest gets 145 inches a year--so the Gaydeskis are following the old farm adage of making hay while the sun shines.

“I want to show you something,” Gaydeski says, climbing aboard an old jeep for a tour of the farm where four sons, a daughter and a son-in-law, all with families, live on 170 acres of good, fertile bottom land along the Soleduck River. “Uncle Joe, this uncle of mine, is 91 years old. And we are looking after him. He could be in a nursing home. But we take care of our own. That’s how we do it out here. And that’s in jeopardy. This isn’t just Forks. It’s rural communities all over the Northwest. Once that heritage, that lifestyle is destroyed, I don’t know if we’ll ever get it back again. These people back in D.C. don’t have the foggiest idea what’s going on out here. They’re talking about extended unemployment benefits. That’s like treating a hemorrhage with a Band-Aid.”

If Gaydeski were to trade his straw hat, work boots, soiled blue jeans and green suspenders for a three-piece suit, he could easily pass for a politician with his shock of white hair, pale blue eyes and lanky, powerful body. So it doesn’t seem incongruous to see him four days later wearing a tie and chairing a meeting of the Forks Timber Task Force. For the past nine years, Gaydeski has been a Clallam County commissioner, representing the Forks area at the county seat of Port Angeles.

Around the table are psychologists, social workers, welfare officials, educators and a representative from the governor’s office. They started meeting in September, 1989, in response to social problems brought about by the timber crisis. Gaydeski tells the task force about three days in June he spent in Washington, D.C., asking politicians to help Forks and similar towns all over the Northwest through this painful period of transition.

He told the congressmen that he had come to accept that limitations will be placed on the harvest. “Let’s say they over-cut,” he says. “They should never have done it, I concede. But the people impacted here are not the ones who made those decisions. Those were made either in a corporate boardroom or in Washington, D.C. And all these people were doing was trying to make a living for their families.”

Gaydeski is a realist and knows the political clout wielded by the other side: The environmental lobby is strong in Congress. Scientists have backed it. So have the federal courts. Congress is considering several bills dealing with preservation of old growth. Passage of one that will achieve the environmentalists’ goal of preserving old growth forests and the life within them is likely to pass this year. But it’s not clear how much relief for displaced workers Congress and the President will approve.

When he asked the Washington congressional delegation, including staff members for Speaker Thomas S. Foley, what they planned to do to help the timber towns, Gaydeski--who is not prone to long-winded explanations--says he was told “we don’t have any money.” In fact there has been some help from Northwest congressmen--Rep. Norm Dicks of Tacoma pushed through a $1-million grant for retraining workers, and Yakima Rep. Sid Morrison added language in the 1990 farm bill to provide assistance to suffering timber communities. But a Foley aide who deals with timber issues affirms that while “the Washington delegation, including the speaker, wants to help the displaced workers in timber towns, under our budget constraints we don’t have a lot of extra money to go around. We’re going to have to meet the pay-as-you-go requirements of the budget act.”

Washington state’s current budget proposal calls for spending about $16 million to help dislocated workers. But Forks would only get a small piece of that--not enough to fill the city’s needs. The talk becomes emotional when the discussion turns to using some of their scarce dollars to build a family-service center in Forks.

“I am not going speak as Grays Harbor County coordinator,” says Renee Lynch, “but as the wife of a dislocated worker. I would have some serious problems if we took $400,000 and built this wonderful little center where we could all go. When I need to pay my light bill, when my husband needs gas to get to college, we can’t. The needs right now are food, clothing, housing. And we do need to have those kids that are looking at suicide taken care of also, so that if they need counseling, they can get it.”

For Lynch, it’s a 104-mile drive home to the distressed timber town of Hoquiam, where she lives with her 38-year-old husband Larry, an unemployed logger. For a year, the couple lived apart while he worked near Ketchikan, Alaska. “But that was ludicrous,” she says. Finally, the family had to file for bankruptcy. “It was either that, or not eat, or lose the house.”

It was tough for Larry Lynch to become a house husband after 17 years in the woods. And it was a hard adjustment for their three children as well to have their father at home all the time. They sent their 7-year-old boy to counseling.

Larry Lynch is in school now, working toward becoming a registered nurse. But his cork logging boots still sit in the bedroom. The Lynch living room is a logging shrine lined with cedar shingles and antique cross-cut saws. Lynch sits in that living room, all 250 pounds of him.

“I still think like a logger,” he says. “So I still wear rigging clothes. That’s all I wear.” Suspenders. Hickory shirt. Blue jeans. Boots.

“There’s a couple of guys at the college--we just sit there talking logging until we got to go to class. I love logging. I’d be doing it right now if I could”--being outdoors at 3,000 or 4,000 feet, laying the tall trees down.

AT THE END OF A VERY LONGday, Dave Weaver gets off the bus near Tillicum Park and trudges through Forks on his way home. Like Lynch, he speaks of pride--pride that comes from having been a logger and then a millworker; pride that comes from once having worked with machines that “can cut a man in half in the wink of an eye” and still having all his fingers.

“You stick me on a desk pushing a pencil and I’m dead. Out here, I’m breathing the fresh air.”

Weaver walks home past the Express Lane where a couple of crummies are getting gassed up for tomorrow, past the Vagabond cafe, past a sign painted in 1977 on an enormous tree-stump cross section by the Forks Lions. It reads: “Logging Capitol of the World.”