Grays Harbor: A County In Limbo -- With A Spotted Owl Perched On Their Shoulders And A Log-Ban Waiting In The Wings, Timber Towns Feel They're At The End Of Their Rope

CUTLINE: ABERDEEN SITS UNEASILY AS TIMBER SHORTAGES THREATEN THE MILLS AND BANS ON LOG EXPORTS LOOM OVER THE PORT OF GRAYS HARBOR. (UNCREDITED PHOTO)

CUTLINE: TOM REESE / SEATTLE TIMES: THE LYNCH FAMILY PROUDLY DISPLAYS ITS COLLECTION OF SAWS AND OLD LOGGING PHOTOS IN THE LIVING ROOM.

ABERDEEN - In the warm days of late summer, apprehension shrouds the timber towns of Grays Harbor County.

Since the decision on June 23 to list the northern spotted owl as a threatened species, this misty, forested county on the edge of the Pacific Ocean has existed in an uneasy limbo.

United Way postponed setting a campaign goal here because volunteers didn't know what to expect in the way of donations, or need.

In restaurants and stores and employment centers, people talk of toughing it out one minute and of leaving town the next.

And in many of the county's small, worn homes, families already feel how their lives are changing but don't know where it all will end.

Renee Lynch is now a solo parent to three small children. To find logging work, her husband had to go to remotest Alaska, an airplane trip away from the nearest phone.

Pat Perry, a laid-off mill worker, thinks he might have to leave, too. When he was out of work earlier this year, he made ends meet with his wife and their two kids by picking up aluminum cans along Highway 101.

For them and many more, the summer of 1990 has become a season of unpayable bills and unanswerable questions.

Timber is the lifeblood of Aberdeen and Hoquiam and the tiny communities nestled farther up in the woods, and most of that timber comes from the fertile slopes of the Olympic National Forest. Less will be coming in the future. Already, the U.S. Forest Service has announced plans to reduce the Olympic harvest by more than half, starting in October.

And by the end of this week, the Bush administration is to announce a plan to protect the spotted owl on federal forest lands that could halve the harvest again.

That prospect sends a chill through towns where prosperity is a long line of log trucks loaded high with fragrant, fresh-cut trees. It is the daily parade of dusty logging-crew buses, or crummies, getting soaped down in the car washes and the men (and a few women) in hickory shirts and cork boots coming home from a long day in the woods.

Nearly every person with a manufacturing job in these towns makes logs into lumber. Nearly every dollar the Port of Grays Harbor earns comes from log exports. Nearly every house displays a fluorescent yellow sign in the window declaring ``THIS FAMILY SUPPORTED BY TIMBER DOLLARS,'' and yellow ribbons flutter from pickup-truck antennas.

For now, Grays Harbor County waits.

``We don't know what we'll end up with in September - and that's the problem,'' says Don Clothier, director of the local economic development council.

Harborites, which is what county residents call themselves, fear that if the log trucks stop carrying their load of prosperity, the rest of the world will forget them. They're afraid that these small towns will be left to bear alone the economic brunt of an entire nation's decision.

Some are bracing themselves for a future they can barely imagine and for the end of the only way of life they've known. Others are leaving town.

``Right now, I think there's a strong sense of malaise,'' says Ken Taylor, director of a local mental-health center. ``People are both depressed and angry.''

``It's like hearing over the radio that you're going to have a tsunami,'' says food-bank coordinator Marscha Irving. ``But you don't know how high it's going to be.''

The strain is tearing at people's lives. A year ago, the local mental-health counseling center was looking for business. Now, center director Taylor says wryly, ``Business is booming.''

More than 100 clients are waiting to get in and the people seeking help have more serious problems, or multiple problems.

Recently, a counselor received a 3 a.m. call to talk a despairing young man out of jumping off a Hoquiam bridge. It's the kind of case the center didn't used to see, Taylor says.

Most people still have jobs but the future is coming into focus: At the state employment office in Aberdeen, job openings are down to about half of what they were a year ago. Some food banks, especially in tiny neighboring timber communities such as Oakville, are regularly running out of food.

``At some point or another, when the last can of beans goes out the door, the next person gets nothing,'' says Irving, the food-bank coordinator.

Though the timber cutbacks will be a blow, some say one federal government solution, intended to keep mills in business, may be worse. To keep logs coming into mills once the timber supply falls, log exports will be banned from all Oregon and most Washington state-owned lands.

That move may batter the Port of Grays Harbor, an economic mainstay.

More than a quarter of the logs going through the port come from state-owned lands, a disproportionately high share. Exports kept Grays Harbor County going during the early '80s, when the timber industry suffered through its latest recession.

``We're taking a double hit,'' says Clothier, a big, bearlike man who these days carries an air of barely controlled desperation. ``The medicine is killing the patient.''

The problems go further than reduced work in the woods or mills. The trouble with the timber industry, says Clothier, is that it doesn't leave any buildings behind.

So as the industry withers, there's hardly any place in the county to put new industry except for closed-down Safeway stores, Thrifty Marts and the barnlike buildings where log trucks formerly were maintained and repaired.

Clothier would like to attract a big manufacturer, but knows the odds are long. Meanwhile, tourism won't provide the $16-an-hour jobs residents are used to.

People eventually may need retraining programs, he says, but as long as there are no jobs here, ``we don't know what to retrain them to be.''

In the cold, bare, linoleum-tiled room of an employment retraining center in Aberdeen, Rick Hall, 33, slumps in a hard chair and tries to talk about his future.

Tall and broad-shouldered, Hall wears a plaid flannel shirt and inch-wide suspenders with the name of a local logging firm stenciled in big block letters down each side.

Lately, he hasn't been logging, though. When he can, he catches $15-an-hour longshore jobs at the port, but there's not much work and it's a job without security or benefits. When Hall works these days, he usually mows lawns.

``I'm scared of what's going to happen,'' he says, looking at the floor. If he doesn't retrain or find a steady job soon, he says, ``I think I may end up in the streets.''

Most of his working life has been in the timber industry, where he cut trees with a chain saw and pulled lumber off the line at a sawmill.

About a month ago, the future looked bright. Hall was going to be retrained to be a radiology technician, taking medical X-rays, and was set to enroll at Bellevue Community College, the nearest school with such a program. He was excited about the prospect of working in a field with plenty of jobs, decent pay and the chance to do something worthwhile for other people.

Then the bad news came: There would be no money for living expenses while he attended school.

Already broke, and barely making his $180-a-month rent payment, Hall says the obstacles now seem too great.

``I'm stuck,'' he says, with a dejected shrug.

He's drifted into the anomie of the chronically unemployed. Day after day, he goes through the motions of looking for work, but there's little work to be had. So he watches TV, rides his bike, fights boredom.

``I'm just tired of living this way, not knowing what's going to happen tomorrow,'' he says.

He ponders moving in with his parents and studying something at the local community college. But his heart's not in it.

Pressed to think of his future, he starts to say something, stops, slowly shakes his head. Then, leaning back in his chair, he cocks his index finger and presses it against his head.

``So give me a gun,'' he says, his voice a mixture of sarcasm and hopelessness.

He says he's not planning to kill himself. But in the next breath, he says people are putting the welfare of the spotted owl ahead of the lives of people like himself, and that's not right, for human beings to take second place to some bird.

Someone wishes him good luck.

``Thanks,'' he says quietly. ``I'm going to need it.''

Grays Harbor County has grown used to the vagaries of the timber economy. This area has seen hardship so often that some people treat the latest development as little more than something new to weather.

That's denying reality, says Robert Lee, a University of Washington forestry sociologist. But it's understandable. Communities going through this kind of crisis suffer grief similar to what slowly dying people experience, and denial, anger, bargaining, depression and - finally - acceptance, are all part of that.

This is not a cycle small-town loggers and business people can wait out, Lee says.

``This is the end, it's like death,'' he says. And, for the business people and loggers who have loved that way of life, ``a part of themselves will have to die.''

Economic theory holds that displaced workers can be retrained and relocated and put to work in other jobs, Lee says. But for logging employees, who identify strongly with their work, the theory may not hold up.

Larry Morrison lets the world know where he stands. The T-shirt he wears declares, ``I (heart) spotted owl . . . boiled, BBQ, fricasseed, stir fried,'' and his billed hat, which he wears even inside the building, sports a patch saying, ``My Family is Supported by Timber Dollars.''

But when Morrison, 45, a log and chip truck driver, a Vietnam War veteran and a former cop, looks at his likely future, he sounds subdued.

``It's just scary,'' Morrison says.

The timber industry has been his life for 18 years. He says he can't go back to being a cop because of a back injury that sidelined him years ago. He scheduled employment counseling three months ago, and came in for a couple of appointments. But everything the counselors suggested required at least two years' schooling and Morrison, who graduated from college in police science, can't see hitting the books again.

He says he's too old to make a change. He can't imagine how he and his wife could survive for two years on her income as a logging-company secretary, assuming that she has a job in the future. If he trained for a new job, he'd be pushing 50 by the time he emerged, a rookie.

He'd like to get into business - maybe a sporting-goods store, he says - but doesn't have the money. Besides, when there's work driving a log truck, he can make as much as $25,000 a year, and it's a union job with good benefits.

But there hasn't been much steady work since March. He was called back a couple weeks ago, after being laid off a month. Before that, it was one week on, one week off and he never knew if he was going to work tomorrow. Several times, he's been called back for just one day a week - just enough to keep him from getting unemployment compensation, not enough for a decent living.

He is nagged by the knowledge that any timber-industry job can be gone in a flash. He says there's no work for him in Grays Harbor County outside of the timber industry. But he says he can't leave because he owns a home here and can't sell it for what it's worth.

Asked about his future, he swears he's going to ``get off my rear here one of these days and do something.'' He talks with forced optimism of waiting for ``the right spark to get it going'' and then, suddenly, in mid-sentence, the pretense falls away, he falls silent, his head drops, his hands rise and spread in a gesture of utter helplessness and despair, then drop.

``Oh gee,'' he says softly, shaking his head slowly. ``I don't know.''

Hoquiam Mayor Phyllis Schrauger remembers the last recession well. The town's largest sawmill went into bankruptcy and the streets were dotted with abandoned houses where grass and weeds grew tall in the yards. The city was so strapped it had to borrow money to make its payroll. Over at the parks department, the secretary took the place of the director and ended up mowing lawns herself.

Schrauger was teaching school then. She especially recalls one student, who came to school early one winter day and huddled gratefully near the furnace. It was the only heat she knew - her father was out of work and the family had no heat in the house.

Out-of-towners who suggest that Harborites move to Seattle or somewhere else where there are jobs make Schrauger's blood boil. The people who make those suggestions, she fumes, don't appreciate the fact that Harborites have businesses they can't abandon, homes whose values are plummeting, friends and relatives they don't want to leave behind and a slow-paced, small-town way of life they cherish.

``They don't want to live in that rat race you've got up there'' in Seattle, she says emphatically. ``It's a zoo up there.''

That view of urban living is common here and underscores one reason why some loggers and timber-town workers may not end up working on Boeing assembly lines. At a food bank, a young man who has left his job as a restaurant chef because of low pay says he can't imagine going to Seattle, though there are many restaurant jobs there.

``Too many gangs,'' he says, his eyes widening at the suggestion. ``Too many crimes up there. You can see it on TV.''

Nonetheless, some people are leaving. At the state Employment Security office in Aberdeen, director Johanna Robbins-Standish says fewer people are in the labor market than in the recent past. Over at the local Ryder Rental outlet, the manager says the phones have been ringing off the hook with calls from people who want to rent trucks to move out of town.

Everyone knows someone who's moved, or plans to.

``They don't want to be here when it happens,'' says Lynn Kessler, the county's United Way director.

One who thinks of leaving is Pat Perry. A former shake mill and veneer plant worker, Perry is thinking of moving to Idaho to work in construction.

Big, blond and heavily bearded, Perry looks like a Viking or a Hell's Angel except for his Mickey Mouse T-shirt. This day, he's sitting, pencil in hand, applying for unemployment payments after being laid off from his job at an Aberdeen veneer plant.

The veneer job is the kind of work state economists and planners say timber-dependent counties should turn to as the timber supply declines, because the work creates more jobs in this country than does exporting raw logs.

But making veneer takes wood, too. And Perry's company couldn't get enough wood.

Now Perry, 39, the sole support of a wife and two children, ages 5 and 9, is again among the unemployed, for the second time this year.

His wife is a full-time housewife. Perry won't have it any other way, even though the family is half a month behind in rent payments and the bills are piling up.

``I've got the old male chauvinist attitude,'' he says, pride swelling in his voice. ``I'll do something. I'll work.''

His first bout with unemployment this year came in the winter. Starting in February, he spent three months without work after the cedar-shake mill where he worked shut down for good, laying off about 50 employees.

``The mill was there ever since my daddy was a kid,'' Perry says, cocking his head with an air of disbelief. ``Everybody and his brother worked there.''

After the shutdown, Perry's family tried to make ends meet by doing what city kids do to buy baseball cards or video games: They collected aluminum cans.

Up and down blustery Highway 101 they went, father, mother and kids, stooping to pick discarded pop and beer cans from the road. They practiced a pragmatical division of labor - the wife and kids picked up the cans while Perry crushed them and stuffed them in a garbage bag. A 40-pound garbage bag full of cans fetches all of $12.

They were never alone. Always, Perry says, there was somebody else on the side of the highway, picking up cans.

Perry is reluctant to move. But, ``A man's going to do what he has to do to support his family,'' he says.

Renee Lynch might tell him just what difficulties that can mean.

In Lynch's home, 5-year-old daughter Jamie slides into the kitchen, executes a wobbly turn on pink-and-orange plastic roller skates and clatters off toward the front door, blond braids swinging.

In the next room, Tony, 7, is a blur of activity as he races around, getting into everything. And Al, 8, has just been shunted off to his grandparents' house so he won't drive his mother nuts.

``It's hard enough raising three kids anyways and all of a sudden, you're doing it yourself . . . '' says Lynch, 27, her voice trailing off wearily.

Lynch's husband, Larry, a logger, left for Alaska two months ago to find work after his last job ended.

Now he's working in Margarita Bay in Southeastern Alaska, a place so remote that he has to fly to Ketchikan - a $240 round trip by chartered plane - just to call home. Mail arrives once a week, weather permitting, by bush plane.

But someday soon, the sound of chain saws in Alaska's Tongass National Forest will nearly cease. Congress is deciding on a management plan for the Tongass, and the only thing for sure is that there will be far less cutting than before.

Renee Lynch is well aware of the risks to her husband's livelihood. In the bare front yard of her worn house on the highway, a yellow-and-black sign the size of a scatter rug is angled toward oncoming traffic.

It warns: ALASKA LOGGERS ARE ENDANGERED TOO.

Lynch hopes to join her husband in January. Since he left, the loneliness, the lack of money, the uncertainty of her husband's work and the strain of taking care of three lively kids by herself have taken an emotional toll.

But most difficult to bear, she says, is the popular perception of the logger as a villain, a greedy despoiler of the land. Her husband is a gentle man who sings to his children, raises roses and loves the outdoors with a passion.

Yet, she says, her voice rising in bitterness, its seems that as far as the rest of the world is concerned these days, ``the only real environmental problem . . . is, we've got to get rid of the loggers.''

Amid the change and uncertainty, not everyone is able to simply wait.

Jim Gold, ruddy, built like a linebacker and looking much younger than his 47 years, used to run a logging operation. He had 14 full-time employees and millions of dollars of logging equipment.

He loves logging, despite its dangers, despite having to get up at 3:30 in the morning to go to work in the cold and snow.

In the glove box of his truck, sometimes in his wallet, he proudly carries a couple of well-worn photographs of the biggest tree he ever logged. It was more than 10 years ago, but Gold still shows the pictures as proudly as a new father.

The old spruce, which was about 10 feet in diameter, yielded seven truckloads of logs.

Logging the tree ``was a privilege,'' Gold says, calling it a once-in-a-lifetime event.

The business has been downhill for him since the the first designated areas for spotted-owl habitat were announced two years ago. He was idled this year from mid-April to early August and has only one part-time employee now.

Recently, the bank took back a piece of timberland Gold bought several years ago as a long-term investment.

``That was to be my boy's education,'' Gold says. ``But I don't have it anymore.''

Now, Gold has used some of his free time to start an organization of local timber people called Northwest Coalition, whose motto is ``Families First.''

Gold wishes fervently that he could find some common ground with preservationists, though he knows they'll never see eye to eye.

When he heard that an environmental group planned a picnic in the area soon, he wondered how he could reach out to them. He wants to make them care about what happens to the families that depend on timber for a living.

``I'd love to get them to see my kids,'' he muses. And he believes that if the city people on ``the other side'' can see the timber workers and their families and talk one-on-one, surely they wouldn't try to ruin their way of life.

``Let's save a viable timber industry here,'' he says. ``We know it'll never be the way it was.''

THIS WEEK IN THE TIMES

While the timber issue has proved emotional in Washington, in California it has provoked violence and statewide ballot proposals. Times reporter Keith Ervin reports in a series:

TOMORROW

Northern California's ``Redwood Summer'' has turned small communities upside down.

TUESDAY

Timber owners who have found spotted owls in second-growth redwood forests are dismayed to find more, rather than fewer, restrictions on logging.

WEDNESDAY

Forestry might have to be reinvented if voters OK a proposition that supporters call Forests Forever and detractors, Lawyers Forever.