A Way Of Life Loggers Had Died For Seemed Itself To Be Expiring

Jun 5, 1992

Bill Dietrich

Last of four excerpts from the new book by Times science reporter Bill Dietrich, "The Final Forest" (Simon & Schuster).

In a chill dusk of the winter that followed issuance of the Jack Ward Thomas report that called for millions of acres to be set aside for the spotted owl, the million-dollar sawmill completed by Larry Mason is still.

Its muddy yard is mostly empty of stacked logs now, depressions in the mud marking where the trees once lay. The few fat cedars still left behind are like fossil remnants of Mason's hopes for the future. Their girth is a remarkable contrast to the wall of dense, pencil-like second growth surrounding Mason's mill. It is as if the two kinds of trees came from different worlds.

No one was in more direct competition with the spotted owl than Larry Mason. He had starting building his mill in 1987 specifically to take advantage of the fine-grained old growth the Forks area boasted. "Virgin Timber from the Heart of the Olympic Peninsula," the company slogan on a truck door read. Mason bet a lifetime of work on Forest Service promises that he could get a sustained supply of old growth timber from Olympic National Forest. Then scientists said the trees Mason needed were the same ones the bird preferred.

"It's over," Mason says by way of weary greeting. As usual he is wearing a billed cap, dirt-stained jeans, hickory shirt and suspenders; missing this evening is the button he sometimes wears that reads, "People count, too." He explains that the banks have already forced the auction of one forklift for half its real value and Mason has signed up for unemployment. "We're shut down. I've lost the mill."

The crazy thing was, before the owl battle began he was making money. He was selling finished wood products around the world. He was providing work, paying taxes, and lowering the trade deficit. Larry Mason was doing all the things the government had claimed it wanted Americans to do. Then the government took his wood supply away.

"For us to lose everything, that's not what is really the worst," Mason said. "To have a whole way of life destroyed, that's the worst."

As night falls a logging contractor named Rick Hurn comes into the office. Both men pop a beer, Mason collapsing each can as it is emptied and putting it into a recycling box.

In September 1990 Mason and Hurn were among several Forks residents who went to Washington, D.C., to lobby Congress. Both men hated the city. Rick was initially intimidated by the capital's subway system, but he soon felt more comfortable in its tunnels than in congressional offices. He remembered one Washington congressman jabbing his finger at a group from Forks, heatedly lecturing them on overcutting. Rick, who has a reputation for a quick temper, shouted back, but it did no good. The congressman took pause for breath and then went back to lecturing, jabbing that finger. Everyone in D.C. seemed to want to save the trees and no one seemed to have any idea what would happen to the people who had been cutting them.

"What you see there is just ludicrous," said Mason, with a note of wonder in his voice. "It's a let-them-eat-cake psychology back there. Nobody in the place makes anything. They're all working for government, and they all seem to lead this extravagant lifestyle."

Mason is a dinosaur, urban environmentalists would argue. Magnificent in the way he works hard, noble in his ingenuity, but doomed by changes in the economic climate. The United States has entered a post-industrial era. We are in the information age. Production is measured in electrons that blip through wires. The era of the big trees is over, a 19th-century occupation trying to carry itself over into the 21st. People like Mason need to adapt, environmentalists argue. The future of Forks is in catching up to the present.

But Rick Hurn feels as though lunatics have seized control of forest management. Everything that has been learned in the last half century about the sometimes brutal necessities of managing a tangled and unruly forest is being thrown out. "Twenty years from now, people will look back on this and think this one of the biggest scams ever pulled on the American public," Hurn said.

Rick is the eldest son of Dean Hurn, arguably the most important businessman in Forks. Dean runs timber purchasing and milling companies that employ about 100 people directly and probably a couple hundred more indirectly, and is often one of the most generous donors to both community projects and timber-issue lobbying efforts.

Dean Hurn and his wife, Elaine, grew up in the Cascade Mountain town of Concrete, Dean's father running a shingle mill so remote it had to generate its own power. The couple married in 1958 and by the early 1960s the family began looking for a new source of wood. "We came here in 1964 because cedar was getting scarce in Skagit County," Elaine explained. "When we first came out it was February, and it was snowing. I thought, `My God, this is the end of the world.' "

On paper, at least, Dean Hurn was a millionaire in business assets. In person, he doesn't fit the stereotype. He has the build of a longshoreman, the blunt manner of a crew boss, and the habits of a laborer. He typically goes to work at 6 a.m. and comes back 13 hours later. After going through the mail and returning telephone calls he will devote a good part of the day sorting logs by driving a fat-tired log loader across the mud of his log yard.

"There's a lot of people depending on Dean," noted Ingrid Dahlgren, whose family is Hurn's primary logging subcontractor.

Hurn's operation fuels the economy in other ways. Of $2.9 million he paid for 128 acres of timber in Olympic National Forest, $875,320 went for state and local taxes.

In a business where many go broke, Hurn has survived a quarter century. The battle over old growth and owls is making it far tougher, however, causing prices to fluctuate unpredictably.

In September 1990, Hurn was so desperate to ensure a future wood supply that he bid $1.6 million on the sale of 6.3 million board feet of timber on the Olympic National Forest that the Forest Service had conservatively appraised at only $353,900. The next closest bid was only $828,144. In effect, Hurn had bid nearly $800,000 more for the wood than he had to, but he had expected ferocious competition for that kind of volume. Ironically, wood prices plunged shortly after the sale was made.

There are other costs as well. Hurn noted that he spent $250,000 in campaign contributions and lobbying costs in the past year fighting the lockup of the woods. The owl controversy was eating him alive.

Elaine is frustrated at the squeeze this puts on her family. "We don't know who these people are," she said of environmentalists who file lawsuits in Seattle and Portland. "They are just `They.' We have to follow all these rules, but then they change the rules, so that whatever we've done is always wrong. What I want to know, if they tie up all the trees, what are they going to use for all this stuff?" she said, rapping her wooden kitchen table and the newsprint and stationery heaped upon it.

It is not that couples like the Hurns could not foresee the danger and sorrow and uncertainty of their trade. "I kept telling the kids, `Can't you get into something else?' " Elaine said. "They wouldn't listen." All three of the Hurns' surviving sons have gone into logging - two work directly for their father and Rick has his own firm - and both daughters have also worked for the company. "That's the problem," she said, gesturing to the green rolling hills outside her kitchen window and the gray, rushing Sol Duc River. "They were raised in an environment that's so nice. They want to stay out here in it."

While the Hurns have been economically successful in the woods, the trees have extracted a bitter price. Everyone in Forks, it seems, knows someone who has lost someone to the forest. Part of what links the community together is the web of shared tragedy that living on the edge of a wild place seems to weave. In February 1976, one of the couple's sons, 14-year-old Roger, went hunting on Dead Man's Hill, a ridge north of Forks. Becoming disoriented, he died of hypothermia shortly after being found.

The following year (the same year the Hurns learned their youngest daughter had leukemia, from which she later recovered) a log fell on Dean as it was being loaded onto a truck. The log flattened him, stretching out his body as if it were hit with an iron. Hurn's eye was torn out of its socket, his cheek was crushed, and a key nerve in his leg was elongated, temporarily destroying the use of the limb. He was back at work as soon as he could limp, but the leg still pains him.

The tragedies went on. Two daughters of one of Hurn's partners were killed by a logging truck on their way to school. Two friends of another son were also killed by a truck.

Elaine Hurn likes to take long, morning walks with Vicky Queen, a young widow whose husband, Wayne - the third son of his family to die in the forest - was killed by a falling tree while working for the Hurns. A network television show featured the Queen family in a story about the terrible odds loggers face. When Vicky was asked about her own sorrow, she spoke for the peculiar bond to the forest that persists around Forks. "I don't have any hate for the woods," she told the cameras.

The reality was, the loggers had paid, and paid dearly, for their life in the woods. That was one reason the old-growth fight hurt so much. The work that some of their friends had died for seemed itself to be dying.