Clear-Cut Guilt

Listen, I grew up in Oregon.  I've lived here most of my life, and about 3 years ago I revisited my home town in the Cascade foothills for the first time in many years when I was working on a video project.

It was an appalling sight.  As my collaborator and friend TC drove us into terrain in the lower Cascades above my town I realized I'd  taken too much for granted when growing up in the area.

I was born in Cascadia. Look it up at Google, examine the scars around its belly.

Along the mountainous road that Spring, clearcuts were visible at every turn in the highway.  That was not the way I remembered my old turf.  I was devastated, affected in a way that I could not even describe to TC as we sat in a logger's bar late one evening after our shoot.

I'm from a family of loggers, settlers in the Linn County region of Oregon.  My father logged, his father logged, and his father logged; my older brothers toiled in the wood-products game, everything from green-chain puller to log truck driver to management in the plywood industry.

For my part, I went into the woods for two summers during high school and thinned trees.  My weapons--an ax and a bottle of poison. It was hard work, scaling ridges all day, humping gear up and down, a sack lunch in the crummy parked at the end of the road, cutting notches, spraying the overgrowth, surviving.

All of it geared to the future, when the tall firs would burst through to maturity and be cut down by the man-created standards of harvest.

I was already in my sixties that season, a witness to ugliness.  I'd done my part and so had my family.

Take a close look at the map.  Google the Earth.

TS