Drugs, Heroes and Blindness

A promising young man recently committed suicide up here. According to town rumor, it's because the army decided he was "overweight" and he'd "disappointed his uncle." These are only rumors. 

I saw this kid at graduation. If the rumor is true, it's a lie. Supposedly, the army yanked away his future, and he shot himself. Again, the family is torn to pieces, and not sharing exact information - but it's all over town, through one rumor or another. 

A grandmother up here was furious about recruiters at the high-school job days. The army acts like one of those bad religious groups, looking for the suffering and dead-end to lie to and suck into the machine. I'm explaining "pension rank" to everybody - the fact that, in order to guarantee s/he'll retire as a general and not a colonel, a general really needs a war. And recruiters have quotas, and will commit suicide themselves, if they can't meet them.

While delivering food-bank food to a dying man, I saw a group of kids clustered near his door, in the parking lot. They were discussing something that had upset them. They were also waiting for their drug dealer (from the looks of them, probably the locally-produced meth). 

These kids, waiting for a pain-killer, were hurt by the death of a school hero. 

Hoquim recently put together a block watch. What are they most concerned with, about kids? Cleaning off graffiti. Not why the kids are suffering and hunting paint, alcohol and meth. Not why they're in pain and need help. They have pretty new uniforms, but where is the outreach to the suffering, and the kids already on the streets? These kids all know each other, regardless of how they try to cut them up into us vs. them. The "us" and "them" is actually by generation - and the "us" isn't doing a very good job helping "them."

The old guard up here is disgusting. Loggers are clear-cutting in a wildlife/wetland area right next to the dead boy's town. They hit their jake-brakes when going by campgrounds in the Olympic National Park. The people from the 1950's are gleeful that trees are going down. All they can see is a football game - not just cash, but the domination of the Enemy, Nature. And guess who they call "eco-terrorists?"

Wildlife and trees and tourism, that can offer so many working positions - not just jobs - for all the kids for the future. These people raise money for scholarships for kids, but how will those kids get to stay here if there's nothing?

The Clallam Bay Comicon may have to be witness to what the old guard does to the community. The place may be wrecked for our generation - but the only thing that really stopped wholesale whaling and overfishing of cod were the collapses of populations. So maybe the west end needs to die before it can live. 

But why do we always have to go through a resurrection?

We need to reach out to all the kids, because all the kids know each other. And they're asking what we're doing with their planet, and why we're only leaving them scraps and mud. That look in a sad kid's eyes? That's blame - and helplessness.

Or is it? A kid up here is going to be building an anti-bullying website. Whenever we go hiking or to the beach, there's very little litter, and since kids are the ones who run farthest, they're the ones keeping it clean. Kids who love nature and know it's the future are stewarding now. They're cleaning up water and woods. They want modern logging techniques, not just ones that pay for the machinery, in a cut pay cut pay vicious circle. Fewer and fewer people are fishing except for food. The old paradigm of animals as toys and something to play with, for trophies (training for war) or catch and release (tormenting animals for the fun of it) is beginning to fade. The horrible 20th-century myth that only humans can feel and hurt is being hunted down and dispatched for what it was and is - an industrial excuse for treating our fellow peoples on this planet as so many tools and cash bags.

The old guard calls people like us "wimps." This is another word for "meek." Only the green will survive - and who do you think will inherit the earth?

(And why am I bothering to write this? Because it's the only weapon I have against the spoilers. And so nobody can accuse me of not trying, and for turning a blind eye. I don't want to be the one to stumble in surprise on the tattered remnants, and claim I never knew. And the more I can spread this, the less able others will ever be able to say, "But we didn't know!" I don't want to have to say, "I told you so!" again - but I'll probably have to. I really hate looking this prescient, every single time, when past lessons should have taught us better. And we're still testing animals to see if THEY can learn? What was the definition of insanity, again?)

Logger Covers His Face

Behind county facility, in watershed

I'm not making any judgement comments, but here's today's report:

In the Quarter Store today, a worker was poking fun at her sister-in-law as an activist.

Another woman said, "I saw 18 logging trucks on the road today."

This is basically a photo essay. The cutting is going on right behind a town that is trying to revive a tourism/media/entertainment industry. The cutting probably has not taken wild-life repercussions into consideration, near a town.

The driver said, "I wanna know why you're taking my picture!"

I answered, 'Don't have to." This is an unpaid photo essay, by an American citizen.

The company is cutting on either cheaply-purchased land, or forestry land. The driver said this company was Rayonier. Rayonier has worked to recover other riverside by the Clallam River. But - Rayonier's Real Estate offices are in Florida.

Does that look like selective logging?

Merrill and Ring has already accidently exposed their intentions toward the scenic route. An expensive sign campaign for "working forests" MIGHT be a real-estate scam, but I have no further information; it just looks like monkey business. Merrill and Ring cut down all the timber on the highway in Pillar Point, a State Park.

The whole operation has a real "Get it Before It's Too Late, as fast as possible" feel to it. It's cutting directly into tourism-viewing areas, seeming to concentrate on it.

Cutting toward the stream and swamp

Local children feel hopeless up here about their future, but are launching anti-bullying campaigns, especially in view of the recent suicide of a child who - according to local stories (not verified, but repeated) felt his future was blocked. 

The generation that supports clearcut logging isn't helping the future generation, nor do they seem to care. The do collect large scholarships for the kids - but it's almost as though they're massaging their consciences. High school graduation classes are down to a handful of kids, while the parking lot of a local apartment complex is the center of kids waiting for their drug dealer - and drug use is about repressing pain.

If they have a future, a real one, that isn't just selling off the place and moving to condos in Arizona, as a developer would offer, the kids will have to do that themselves, with help from the better among our generation.

Selective logging based on a 500-year cycle - and it has to be 500 years, because forests aren't corn fields - must be the future. They're down to producing chipboard, and if you've ever had to deal with wood, you'll know how bad it is, now.

These trucks are very expensive, take a lot of tree money

As the English said, after WWII, trying to rebuild with their forests gone: "You can't get the wood, you know.

Why would the driver be reluctant to show his face?

Transition Port Angeles is trying to rescue the local communities and make life better and more sustainable - but ARE they addressing the resource crash? And it is crashing, or will, if these practices continue as they are. 

It's not 1895, folks. It's not even 1954. It's 2013 - and don't let it become just another place that ate its resources and turned into more concrete or empty grasslands. 

Scotland had a forest. The Middle East and Greece were forested. Easter Island were forested. But not any more. We can destroy forests, and they don't come back, or if they do, they're ghosts of themselves, and their wildlife is gone.

And I'm from Everett/Mukilteo. Let's just say that what happened up there gave me a case of PTSD that makes me unable to ignore a place where I see the same practices - where I once saw the large park tree a couple of truckers stole to try to get on the tv show "Axmen." This place has eagle habitat - including nests along the cliffs, rivers and roads. The eagle may not be an endangered species any more, but taking away their habitat would be a good way to jump-start the status. Silver lining? Or 30 pieces of silver?

We can live in a forest - or we can live on Easter Island.

Letter I just wrote to Rayonier Hunting:

"Hi! I'm contacting you because the Rayonier Timber doesn't have an email contact, only phone, and this might be a message more along your line.

Rayonier Timber is clearcutting right into a stream area, right behind a town, with eagle habitat along the river. In the past, clearcutting near towns has driven out the resident cougar, with subsequent human/animal interactions that proved lethal to the animal.

The town is Clallam Bay. A photo the area can be seen at http://www.sekiu.com/

The point you see on the left of the picture, on the cliffs has at least two live eagle nests, and is a nesting area for other base population predators, especially along the Clallam River and another wetland stream, where eagles regularly fish and share the area with other fishing birds and animals, including otters, both river and sea.

With timber sales to Japan up in the area, just checking to make sure Rayonier knows about the habitat, and the repercussions involved in cutting that close to a town. Use lines get fudged when there's cash to be collected; a major park tree was stolen up here by unaffiliated loggers to try to get on the tv show "Axmen."

And I do fish, and enjoy a bit of venison now and again - but no hunting or fishing can survive habitat collapse, especially along a wildlife stream. This is also an Audubon area, which holds out a future for local kids in tourism, which benefits from the same forest conditions as hunting. We've recently had a suicide of a promising young man, and other kids are using drugs to repress pain. They need help for a real future.

I write as growing up in the tree-pulp industry in Everett/Mukilteo - that didn't pay any attention to its resources.

Donna Barr
CC to Transition Port Angeles"

Come Help Us Save This Place

"There will always be logging!" Blurted out by one of the librarians the library ONLY hires from logging families (yes, they do). Then again, one of them not only told me Douglas Fir couldn't survive against salal - and was totally boggled when I told her salal was a native plant. Then again, another one of these people claims the native alder is an import. It's not only a nitrogen pump like peas, but the ancient firewood tree of the Pacific Northwest; it falls and shatters and kids can pick up pieces. Then it rots quickly into fertilizer.

But this person also told me a tree is like a stalk of corn. She seemed confused when I told her the growth cycle of a forest is 500 years, not 50. I'll be none of these people know about the 40-tree fungal root connection in a forest. But as another person - becoming enlightened, by the way, as some of them are - told me, "Well, they were just told to get in there and get the wood." Yes, we've all heard a version of "We were just following orders."

Soon to be gone.

Sometimes I think they're from other planets, and breathe ammonia. Why else would one guy say, "I hate trees!"? Evidently he doesn't breathe oxygen - or perhaps he thinks his children or grandchildren won't need it. I wonder what his wife thinks of that and his claims that as long as the earth is here for him, it's fine. "We have grandchildren!" has gotten the smug, short-sighted husband slugged, at least once.

Well, they're clear-cutting by our road. I'm thinking about putting the company on notice for damages when I have to protect the homeless cougar from slavering rangers - unlike the 3 young ones the owner of Triple Nickel Farm CLAIMS a ranger shot and buried on his property (did he think he was bragging to me? Or just want to get a ranger into trouble?). AND lose property values. Look, logging is over; we're down to chipboard and wood our grandfathers wouldn't have used for kindling. It's over, people (and don't get smart, fishing resources - you're down to shipping slime eels to Korea. Buy a clue). And I'll bet a Chinese dinner these guys' idea of legal forest space around the Clallam River is one tree deep. If at all.

Meanwhile, there are only a handful of kids graduating from school, the biggest town is panting after its park trees because they've run out of anything else this size, and one promising young man just shot himself because:

This is an awful thing I'm going to do - use his story to blockade against future misery. I don't know the family, but I do know at least one of his friends, and I've seen the other children. Hearts have been torn out and crushed by this. They can't talk about it. The local newspapers don't want to run the story because it may set off more suicides. 

But suicide doesn't just show up out of nowhere. Some of the kids I saw were sharing the story - while waiting for their drug dealer, who cruised by as I was delivering food to a man who was dying after a lifetime of drug use. The little old ladies who twitter, "It's so nice up here!" just don't have a clue. That, or they're putting up a brave front, which I'll give them credit for. They've been alone so long, they have to make do with what they have, and they're blamed when they need help. 

The dying man's care-giver sneered, "Oh, he doesn't need extra food!" The heartlessness expressed toward the miserable shocked both me and Dan, my husband, who was helping me deliver the food. The man is dying. We can't share out a few mouthfuls of food? What's wrong with that kind of mind? That kind of mind killed a promising young man.

This is only 2nd-hand; the army said the poor young man who committed suicide was overweight, and yanked his whole remaining future (other family details buttress the story, but these are very private, and again, I'm not going to approach these poor people about this terrible moment).

Overweight? In the '70's, they just sent such people to the Fat Camps and got 'em into shape. If the story is true, what the army said is a goddamned lie, because I have photos of that class. Then again, it might be a cover story. I'm not verifying here; nobody can. Remember, the armies are so desperate for volunteers for their wars they've said women, gays and Germans can join the boy's club.

I covered the graduation ceremony for the local papers. I remember wincing when I heard someone at the graduation had a military scholarship (details bad, I'm afraid; I think I'd gotten to the point in the ceremony when I was scribbling "Kill me now" on the program, and was only trying to get nice photos. Oh, YOU go to ever graduation in the place for the past 8 years and see how you feel). Anyway, I remember shaking my head and thinking, "Damnit. Someday the army they're handing their kids to is going to get one killed." I am so sorry for thinking that, and I'm not using the opportunity to say I'm right. It's just what went through my head.

How do I know why these kids join? Because I've heard one say he joined to get a bonus to buy a truck, as though any military is just a job. I was the same kind of forest-ravaging-industry kid who just HAD to get out of town in 1970. Same damn fool reasons, same lies and bait. Yeah, and two friends dared me, and we all joined up together. But - 3 girls? Preferring the ARMY to a life at home? Really? I was so desperate not to end up on the factory line - a factory that had crippled my father and later injured my sister - that I went into the Green Machine.

But I learned stuff. I said "Pension Rank" to a Marine Brat at Photosynthesis Festival, and he fell over laughing. Remember this: generals don't get Pension Rank unless they can have a war. A peace-time General could be a retired Colonel. Your kid could pay for his extra star - and that extra condo in Florida. It's all they care about, no matter what comes out of their mouths. 

Now come to the (links here) Clallam Bay Comicon, and help SAVE this place before it ends up like MY home town: Everett, Washington. That was a pulp-mill town. Tree paper, that is destroying the Library of Congress as the high-acid material flakes apart. Paper can be made out of anything, including corn stalks - but then, these people think a tree is the same as a stalk of corn, don't they? 

Or do they? More and more, when I talk to people - especially young people - it's like they've been dying in a desert, and what I'm telling them is fresh water; they want more. I had to stop and ask one of them, "Am I horse-shitting you?" Eyes glowing, she shook her head, and kept listening.

These people are in deep trouble. Their kids know it - and are beginning to ask what they did with the natural treasures up here. The place needs a generation to heal and recover, or be lost forever. I lost my home town. Maybe that's why.

Note: CGI is expensive. If Vancouver doesn't have to paint out clearcuts, and has built their infrastructure from the hobby level, they're going to get the films. Responsible film-makers understand that bribing companies with no or low taxes is a fool's bargain. We have to start small, with indie films. 

Speaking of responsible indie film makers, I just reminded Johnny Depp he made Dead Man with people from Neah Bay, up the road. That's what his agents get for posting their fax number. I was very delicate and only gave contact info to them. I was trying to be a GOOD fan. I dunno if he'll ever see it, or they'll just wad it up and basket it (And don't get in a huff about his movie "The Lone Ranger." He was reprising the role Gary Farmer had in the Jim Jarmusch's film, of the overdressed rejected outsider. Yes, Farmer would have been nice - but the company wouldn't have hired him).

Frontier Street, looking West

Port Angeles actually has a website about a future. They're a lot less brutal than I am, there. But I'm kind of on the front lines, here, whether I want to be or not. Wrong metaphor? People are dying, immediately and day-by-day. I think that counts. 

Frontier Street, looking East

One last note: When the Scenic Byway was opened on Highway 112, I was covering it for the Peninsula Daily News and the Forks Forum. Mr. Gregory, of Merrill and Ring, evidently considered me an employee of papers which - as I've discovered - are an arm of the logging industry, even under their new Canadian owner. Should I say "especially under the new owner?" Don't get me started on the ignoramus wildlife stories they've been publishing. Oh, do - write and ask if that last one in which the guy doesn't know a hungry wolf from one protecting territory let those wolf pups starve - or went back and skinned them for the bounty. 

And if they continue to accuse wolves of eating people, yes they do - when you leave a battlefield or a plague village full of free meat, or native villages full of disease dead. Basically, IF any wolves in this country ever ate humans, they'd gotten the taste from genocide. I wouldn't be bringing that up any time, soon - especially not up here. Where the natives are getting a bit tired of the Beaty Eye ("Blame the Indians" every time the other towns can't get every little thing they want or think they're entitled to - and to ME! As though I wouldn't be insulted when they do that!).

Mr. Gregory didn't not realize I'm a freelancer - and Green. I'm not even a professional freelancer - my Indian Name might as well be, "She who saves the papers gasoline."

Mr. Gregory smiled and said, "We're going to show these city people what a working forest looks like."

I'll swear to that in court.

I don't know where Merrill and Ring owns property (or rents for shoddily cheap from you and me), or who's in on it - but Highway 112 has been butchered, and they're continuing all up the road. Including the big maples of Pillar Point State Park. I have a photo of who signed off on it in Port Angeles. That will come back to haunt somebody in county government, someday. Yes, it will. Just ask.

Basically, Mr. Gregory said his company was going to destroy part of the tourism industry. Oh, tell me what else he meant, considering the aftermath? The only other option is, he's clueless, and thinks everybody else is, too. It's either he's Big Mr. Greedy Meanie, or he laughs like Mortimer Snerd. Hey, I didn't twist his arm and make him say it! I'm just the messenger. Don't Bradley Manning ME.

Cancer rates are extremely high, here. Poisoning after logging isn't as bad as it used to be - but there are still poisons in the watershed. It's worse than Bremerton (those idiots put a golf course in their watershed - one with nary a weed).

I've been a member of a lot of class action suits, for bad actions from bad businesses, and I'm now part of the class action suit involving Anniston, Alabama, and everybody who served in Fort McClellan going back decades, who were poisoned by the nerve gas our country later sold Saddam Hussein to poison the Kurds. These gears grind slow - but exceedingly fine. If I were in the logging industry, I'd be doing research into forest tourism - including working tourism to help with the recovery (yes, city people WILL pay to come to hard work, just for the fun of it), retraining my people to take advantage of the Audubon areas, and generally not ending up like the Tobacco Industry. They - and their kids - live here, too. And those kids want a real future, not one based on an imaginary past where nature was an enemy to be - as Ann Coulter put it - raped as we choose. 

NOBODY has to be locked out of the future. If there's one thing I know from long experience, it's that gatekeepers, sooner or later, lose the battle - and end up the only ones locked behind the gates. Join the future while we have the chance. And we still have one.

I had a perfect title for this posting, but it was too horrible as a pun. Let's just say it had to do with an old method of fighting pain. Even I'm not that clueless. Or mean. 

Maybe I should have called it, "It's a long worm that has no turning."