The National Parks Are The Next Target

Here's my prediction:

Once the H.R. 1526 allows the Olympic Peninsula to be clearcut, the next step - by Republican lawmakers - will be to introduce a law - using precedent - about "forest health and communities" that demands the opening and clear-cutting of the National Park.

The Elwha better fight this because the river they fought so hard to free flows through it. 

The Makah and other fishing tribes had better fight it - carbon levels in the oceans will weaken the shells of copepods, one of the most important base planktons of small feeder-fish populations. 

The white population - with our evil history - well, there's no hope for us. A religion based on dominion has us by the throat, and we'll choke on it before we change. And then there will be whining, whining, whining, because the other half of that religion is dependence.

Once again, we have to say - if another nation had attacked our country like this, we'd be bombing their capitals, accusing them of "terrorism."

We know who to blame.

Speaking of "terrorism," the logging culture has turned the term "eco-terrorism" into meaning defending the ecosystem, leaving us nothing but words to fight them with.

No, wait, it hasn't - we have words, pictures and social media to reveal and report. Take photos, of everyone and everything, including mere workers. They're no less guilty than the soldiers given orders at Wounded Knee.

Your National Parks, no matter what State you're in, will be the next target. Wherever thoughtful ancestors set up a future for your grandchildren, the short-sighted will be unable to see what they're doing. They have no idea their own children will be threatened by the lowering oxygen rates. 

Think of them as Sylvester sitting on a branch, sawing it off as he licks his chops after Tweety Bird. Yeah, just that smart.

Oh, and look at what they call "old growth," in this last picture. What? Sixty years, maybe? They really do think that's a long time.

The Big Forest Lie

Harvested like corn - how long will it be here?

This is the biggest lie for the title of a law I've ever seen (Click to link):

H.R. 1526: Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act  Introduced by Rep. Doc Hastings [R-WA4] on April 12, 2013

This law promotes neither forest health nor better rural communities. It simply allows chemical and fiber companies to slash down what remains of our depleted "forests," that have been broken to the condition of little more than scrub and plantations.

Forestry has long ceased to be about wood. The actual wood harvested is poor, thin and increasingly expensive. Forestry is about "value-added product." Buying a natural product at hunger prices, tearing it to pieces, and reselling it at hugely inflated prices - and none of the communities being robbed receiving the profits. The resulting products are invariably poor-quality and toxic; for example, corn is a comparatively healthy food when consumed cooked by humans; high-fructose corn syrup turns it into a substance deleterious to human health. Chipboard and thin veneers and knotty plywood are poor construction materials.

Corn is a huge sucker of nutrients - so are forests. But corn is fertilized. And even now, it is becoming more and more difficult to grow both these products, with its huge demands on nutrients and water. Corn results in rivers full of toxic levels of nitrogen, repeated clearcuts result in smaller, weaker, ultimately failed environments. 

H.R. 1526 will lead to the future collapse of the local communities, because it will falsely lead them to continue to think they can live as they did in the 19th century or the 1950's - making them ignore what they really have to do to save their own future. These people hate the national parks and forests, because they've been fed propaganda, and believe in a terrible history as good. They want to be able to take the national heritage and turn it into personal products. They can't see what they're doing, they can't understand what they will lose.

I suspect the hatred for the national forests and parks up here has been jump-started by the Elwha getting their river back. The tribe was treated like dirt in the 19th-century. Like wolves here, and bison on the plains, they were supposed to disappear to make way for a "superior race." They've struggled for decades to get their river and their homeland back. They're telling the true story today. 

The "history" about conquest and genocide, human, animal and environmental, is still presented as noble and admirable - in this day and age, as the reputations of Custer, Buffalo Bill and Columbus are revealed for what they actually were, genocidal monsters and even a slaver.

But gradually, people like the Elwha are telling what really happened, reminding us of weeping elders, driven families and destroyed graveyards, of ruined rivers and shattered land. If we're going to grow and become a mature people, we need to relegate our past to the shelf of shame where it belongs. We have to face it, apologize for it, and reform our future behavior. And truly understand what the future has to be. 

The forests are not a field of corn. Treating them like corn will ultimately destroy these communities, within a generation or two. And, because forests produce what we breathe, along with the oceans, it will destroy all of us. Ignoring what this bill is doing to America is suicide for us - and for the planet.

Fairy Tales of the Peninsula

You've all heard about the usual sylan legends. Bigfoot. The guv'ment is poisoning the forests (with the addition that we need to cut them down to Save The Wildlife).

Here's a couple more:

1. Clearcuts are good for wildlife. 

Poke these people a bit, and you find out it's good for deer and grouse - deer and grouse - deer and grouse. They quickly prove they want flat grass, with stags and game birds on it, and nothing else. It's like English Lord wannabe.

2. Environmentalists want to live in big houses in virgin forest and travel by helicopter. 

You wonder what they're on when they make this stuff up (not that there's not plenty of choice; Forks is the meth capitol of western Washington). Want to see how an environmentalist lives? Come visit me. You'll see me using less, trying to make it last, trying to repair it. It's not easy to live in a society that, top-to-bottom, is based on resource rip-and-crash, but using less is a big first step.

Yes, we use firewood - but the other option is electricity, and the cluttered, overstretched grid, that will need to be replaced with steadily-improving in-city small-grid systems. And whomever I buy it from talks how to get Greener (not greener wood, smart-ass), in a system that makes it hard for them. Yes, we're on grids ourselves, but we try to use as little as possible and recycle what we use. We don't go to Walmart or Costco, we try to support the local businesses, what few there actually are. We try to consolidate auto trips, use public transit, and lower the yard-care impact. As far as helicopters go - we could use one or two up here, for a community taxi service. 

3. We can log forever if we just burn slag and replant trees.

I only have to use their own argument against them - that a forest is like a crop of corn: how long would you be able to keep harvesting crops of corn with no fertilizer except burning the stalks? The Mayan calendar was probably a schedule for moving a community once the corn had sucked the ground dry. Want to see someplace that kept harvesting and harvesting? The middle east. Really nice forest recovery there, isn't it?

3. Taking down the National Forest would rescue the rural economy.

I'm not even going to get into how these pulp-paper-and-cheap-building woods people have cut off their own future. I've already gone into toxic products, antique production and use methods, and ultimate soil exhaustion. But we should stop here and take a look at a truly evil bit of legislation that is being used right now to tear the heart out of the State Trust lands, and cheat landowners of their trees: H.R. 1526: Restoring Healthy Forests for Healthy Communities Act Look who voted for it. Any surprise? If only from an economic standpoint, the use of trees for pulp is the dumbest thing that can be done with wood. There are a million other sources of fast-growing waste products that can be used for pulp, or re-worked to replace the toxic pulp products - and everything made from tree pulp has residual toxins.

Fine wood prices in Seattle.

Here's something any landowner with trees should know: real wood, used AS wood, treated with respect, attracts a lot more money than ripped-out stands of pulp trees. Take a look at this sign on a Seattle street tree. The tree is valued at $8000 - and the fine for taking it out during construction is $16,000. Why? Because trees aren't corn, and shouldn't be sold like corn. The fact we've been treating them like corn has led to wood products that, well, in the words of Dan when we were trying to find some decent wood for a house project, "My grandfather wouldn't have used this for firewood."

Local people and landowners have been scammed out of billions of dollars since logging and pulping began up here. Wood has been bought on the cheap, chopped up like cheap corn, and sold for whatever the industries - often based in distant states - could get away with. What do companies based in Florida care about the Olympic Peninsula, or anybody who lives here?

That doesn't have to be. True planning, care, patience. And yes, people will need help in rural communities until the scarred land and forests - and yes, the fish - recover. And help getting into new, clean industries, like the tourism - ecology and entertainment, just for a start.

Subsidize the people of the rural towns until the forests heal - not the companies that will ultimately turn the whole peninsula into just another bunch of failed logging towns.

Please Don't Shoot the Company In The Head

"Olympic National Park Closed;
will log to pay off National Debt."

I'm perfectly aware the editor of The Forks Forum posted this photo to set off controversy. They haven't had a good Logger vs. Somebody/Anybody fight since the glory days of Twilight.

The man has a name, but do we care who he is? Not really. Who he is isn't important; he's just a cipher employee of an industrial logging company, most of which have their corporate headquarters someplace across the country. I have his name, but why bother with him?

However, if I were a corporate lawyer for any of these companies, I'd be sending down a memo to maybe school the serfs about talking out of turn - or getting them themselves published doing it in the local newspapers. Yes, we all have freedom of information on our side - it's why I can use this photo, under the allowances of Fair Use. 

But if you were a corporate lawyers, and you saw - or knew about - the growing connection of what seems to be intent between the shutdown and finally destroying the hated national parks - wouldn't you want to ask your own people to be a little bit more careful about what they said or how they said it? Right out in public, where anybody could Chelsea Manning you?

If this photo doesn't show anything else, it shows intent. Then again, the Forum's earlier editor did hint that the last time Forks was flush was when the Park burned down and Forks loggers got to clear the wood. 

If nothing else, the information is here. Public. Available. Traceable. Maybe I can't prove anything - but somebody paid to do so, and very well paid, would be able to track the details. I'd be happy to help add nails to that coffin.

And so would this guy, evidently.

Right In The Pocketbook

How morons manage a forest.

Welp, if nothing else gets through to a population where they still believe in Christian Dominion (oh, yes, they actually SAY and BELIEVE that), here's a point:

The logging industry has screwed everybody up here out of billions of dollars.

If the forests had been managed like wood, instead of corn and wood pulp, they would be healthy, beautiful, and growing for a better future for everything that lives here.

Instead, the forests are whipped down as fast as possible, sold to the logging companies for pennies on the board foot, and then sold at higher prices. Taken from State lands, subsidized out of all our pockets. 

The only thing that explains why the people up here have been serfs since the beginning of logging is - that's where they came from. Serfdom eats into the bone, and punishes for use of the head and heart. After awhile, serfs try to be proud of being the support of the king.

But since we're talking Americans, think about what would have happened if they had worked with the parks system in compromise and real land management; the trees would be getting bigger, instead of smaller, every generation, tourism would grow, property values would rise. 

But to do that, the brain has to be stronger than the back. Work smarter, not harder. That's where the money is. And that's where the money is going - into the pockets of middlemen, who work with nothing but their brains. The industries piddle a little back in the form of taxes or scholarships - but it's nothing to what they're making off the people here.

These people have been cheated, and their kids know it. Billions of dollars. Whole futures. Whole lives. The reckoning is coming - but it's probably come to late for resource workers.

And because the forests of the planet are the producers of 1/3 of our oxygen, it may be too late for us all.

Ready for the Big One?

Clallam Bay just opened up the back of the town to the next tsunami or typhoon, with nary a tree buffer in sight. Basically, they've recreated the conditions for the 1700 tsunami (recorded in Japanese records) that came down the Wyaatch river valley and hit Neah Bay from the back. There was nothing to stop it, or at least buffer the force.

Evidently some "American Logger" show is spreading their "forest science," which is basically 19th-century excuse-making. Helping wildlife, my ass. Look,  you can tell when a forestry "scientist" is lying - his mouth is open.

As for helping wildlife - somebody posted a picture of a pileated woodpecker in her feeder. That's right, this secretive deep-forest bird was driven out of its home and hungry enough to approach humans. A woman photographed one of these birds eating sunflower seeds out of her feeder. Another refugee, with nothing to eat and no home. 

Thanks to her for feeding it - but now how or where does it nest and find enough food for the family? These birds eat grubs and other insects in trees. It's eating sunflower seeds like your cat eats dry food pellets; because it can't get anything else. This reminds me of the scene in that movie with Peter O'Toole as the SS general, telling his men to carry food for the children of a bombed-out town. 

Anyway, I'm going to go cover the senior class tsunami drills Thursday - and I think I might hint that it may very well be a good idea to re-think putting the town refuge at the top of the hill south of town, in the expresso-stand parking log/storage. Not only would a tsunami meet no trees to take the brunt of the force - but it would be channeled right through that valley into town. It's going to be bigger and stronger and hit harder where it hits. And we won't even talk about the next typhoon winds through that valley; they'll deepen and speed up like the narrow mouth of a river. What goes around comes around.

Then again, everybody in America seems to have a death wish. I'm getting tired of eating popcorn, watching the rising weather smacking down all over the place. Oh, well. Bad DNA will just have to get cleaned out. It always does.

You heard it here, first.

Worms in the Head

Slip Point - for how long?

Oh, you gotta hear this - the latest malarkey at least one of the locals is telling herself to excuse the clearcuts:

"And the loggers are cutting due to the alleged tons of chemicals being sprayed, drying and infecting them, and are in a hurry to raze it, but the gov't agencies who would be in charge, are."

A lot of kelp makes gulls happy.

I THINK I know what that sentence structure is, but, it's a TAD confused. The-Guvment-Is-Spraying-Chemicals gang is like the Sasquatch bunch up here - a few flyerovers by test planes from Boeing or some condensation trailes are blown up into Attack like a couple of run-together big dog prints becoming bigfoot proof.

And I finally realized the biggest worm in their heads. I didn't even make the connection until now. Americans who have never been taught any different in the last hundred years are like Scottish Lairds or German Junkers - they want a landscape to look like this: stags, salmon, grouse - and nothing else, not even songbirds, because they might eat something the grouse eat, like ranchers killing prairie dogs, and complaining about pronghorn being brought back. In their minds, the seals are eating "all the salmon," and the seagulls are eating "all the herring."

I had a woman complain about the seagulls when I had just picked up four nice herring flipped onto the beach in heavy surf and took 'em home to Jim cat. A young man, here - whose family is going to survive because he's a Green, not a Greed - told me his dad had said to always kill the mergansers, because "they ate fish." He said he stopped the day he saw the mergansers eating lampreys. 

That's right - these nitwits were killing the very birds that were controlling one of the worst threats to the fish. I swear, the ignorance about wildlife and actual forest and river systems is massive. They might know how to find the fish - and clean them out to the very last one, while blaming the hell out of each other ("It's the Indians! The Sports Fishermen! Bigfoot!" Everybody but ME, in other words) - but they have NO CLUE how an actual river system works in the lives of fish. NONE.

Oh, I'd better say real quick, that the lampreys feed the mergansers and guarantee a future lamprey-cleaning patrol, or these morons will go out and try to kill all the lampreys. I wouldn't put it past them; I thought I knew how stupid humans could be about the environment, but it's a daily moment of my jaw hitting the ground. Jesus, are we REALLY that stupid as a species? The only way we - and I say that as a White Person, because I'm not going to pretend we really didn't get it going - see any way to solve anything is to destroy what's there. We can only work from a desert.

One old guy, snarling about "this guv'ment and this president" said "It used to be better." Well, if he means the time when he remembers the river so full of fish "You could walk on 'em," he and his were working overtime to make that go away - yeah, he's right about that. Although I suspect there's an awful lot of the Pap Finn whine of "Why don't somebody put this white-shirted free nigger on the block?" (Huh. And Obama DOES strip off the jacket and show the white shirt a lot, don't he?)

But because they have no more clue about how a democracy works, especially one this size, than a serf under King Richard, I suspect what the old guy actually means is that the Indians are quietly saying, "Give us back our fish - or we get your town back."

That's right - it's Bartolomé day, isn't it? Named after a Catholic Priest who spent 50 years fighting what was being done by the Spanish to the Natives. It used to be named after a white guy - but he was basically just another 15th century proof that, at one time, Hitler would have been a perfectly normal guy. Adolf the Antique didn't look that way by the 20th century, but those poor Natives who went out to trade and feed and help when those three ships sailed into the beach - yeah, they were basically facing the Nazis; genocide, slavery and all.

So... if it "Used to be better" or different than that time - good. It can just keep getting worse, then, while the people who caused it start facing what they did. And learn to act like grown-ups on this planet, instead of greedy, stupid children.

By the way, Slip Point has eagle nests. Just sayin', in case they try for it. And if that hill, logged, falls onto houses, I get to do juicy news coverage. And say, "I told you so." 

I used to hate having to say "I told you so," but now it's starting to feel good. Why should the environment - and my heart - be the only thing broken? Pride can be broken, too - and usually is. I guess in the case of a slip hill, "cometh before a fall" is horribly literal. 

Apple Juice -and - The King Was In The House

Apple cider!

Apple juice squeezed at the annual apple fest. I have a nose infection because our cat, Fearless, showed me affection with a love bite. So I'm stuck having to help three gallons of fresh-pressed apple cider. Oh, poor me.

Elvis impersonator in Sekiu, same day, evening.

Yup, I get to cover the fun stuff. And for free. That's nice.

If you want to see the full articles, you'll probably be able to get them at the Forks Forum by this Thursday.

Rockin' the picnic table.

In the house!

Autumn eats

Autumn goodies

Just a day's harvest around our mini-farm. You don't really need a lot of space to at least start feeding yourself.

Upper left, clockwise:

1. Blue eggs from our four little Easter Egger (Amaracauna/something-else crossbred) hens.

2. Raspberries that took over the sunny side of the shed.

3. Red Flame grapes from the greenhouse.

4. Chanterelles, cleaned, and simmered with butter.

Dinner and desert, for at least a couple of days. Remember, hunter-gatherers worked about 3-4 hours a day. Which is about how long an artist working color can do before the eye perception grays out. The Work Ethic was invented by the people who wanted to do nothing themselves, so they could work everybody else do death. Yes, it was.

If you don't have to kill yourself getting the necessities, you can work all day on what you really want to work on - and working on what you want to work on makes everything work better. There is plenty of food and surplus for everybody, including the young, the elderly and the ill. PLENTY. Enough to go to "waste" and rot back into the earth to feed the plants. I've seen it happen, if we just let nature work. 

Watch the animals in the autumn - they've pretty much done raising the young, and now it's time for food and fooling around, before courtship kicks in. They get vacation, as much as a couple months. They weren't put on the earth to work themselves to death. 

(If you mention honeybees, the workers are clones of the Queen; the Work Ethic works for HER. But you're not a worker bee.)

A Slap In The Face

After Rayonier came in and clearcut a neighborhood of this town, the library put up a pride stand about the Glory Days of Logging. What have I said about the library system being in the hands of the logging industry (and the newspapers, but we've already gone there).

Why don't they just put up a display about how we cleaned out all the bison? Or put all the natives on the reservations? Or drove the wolves up here to extinction?

Some other proud moments in our country's history. At least Germany has the decency to mourn what they did in their country.

Note: Almost all displays about logging brag about "taming the virgin forest." Can we say "Freudian Slip?" 

"Look! A long round thing - tree or whale, because that was the same attitude - bigger than my penis! I must humble and enslave it!"

They always brag about the girth of the tree they took down, too. They don't seem to know what they're displaying, there, do they? Whip it out and wave it around, why don't you?

Buffalo Bill Cody bragged about killing over 4,000 bison in a year. A German named Huelsdonk - back before Germans got a clue - up here was just proud as punch about helping destroy every last wolf up here - and taking government money to do it.

Well, this is being done near somebody who can connect the dots, and won't just hang her head and mutter about how bad this is.

America - you want to be the City on The Hill? Then straighten up. This is NOT good enough.

I asked one of the Librarians if she knew that the logging industry is heading for the same kind of lawsuits that straightened out tobacco, and that oil and coal deal and nerve gas deal with. Her reply, "I don't watch television."

I guess even when they don't watch Fox News, they think that's the only source. 

(New note: there must be some kind of backlash against the insane clearcutting, because all of a sudden the local papers are full of pro-logger events and "histories." And we all know from "Oh Brother Where Art thou," when white folks start talking about their "culture and history," they are usually up to no good, because we all know THOSE histories. Yup; they're having to propagandize in reaction. Including having somebody speak at the library about the Conservation Corps. I will bet you a Chinese dinner they work in how State Trust Lands are part of "conservation").

Wiping out Animals and Humans for Fun and Profit

Well, well, well. Thank you, 9th Life Hawaii.

It's official - the wiping out of wildlife, just because they're inconvenient to our every little spoiled-brat wishes. Check out this report. Warning; there are photos.

Here's who to contact:

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack's Email.

Deputy Administrator William H. Clay USDA APHIS - Wildlife Services - Email.

And never be afraid to contact The White House. Remember, this is a Squeaky Wheel Government - don't bitch about lobbyists if you won't stand up.

9th Life Hawaii wrote: "705,468 birds and mammals were murdered by the federal government in Hawaii from 2006-2011. No state is exempt from this massacre."

So get on your stick horse, look up Fish and Game or whatever we call these creatures we use and abuse, and find out what they're doing. Send emails. Send them the address of this blog, if nothing else. Cockroaches run from the light. Light a fire.

And it's "just" animals? Let's examine that.

Now for the daily chaos and screaming button:

To my Jewish friends; don't get your panties in a bunch, but what happened to you came from practice in this country, along with our eugenics studies, because we needed the excuse to do anything to anybody for commercial reasons. Those piles of buffalo skulls? You were next. If you were an animal in the eyes of your persecutors, we'd already warned you how we treated animals.

You Syrians gassed by your government (or wanna-be government)? You were just coyotes to people like us, who want a desert with no life in it, with no mouthful or movement or drop or breath or thought they can't control every single moment. We taught everybody how - hell, we SOLD everybody the nerve gas! And if not us, the Russians. Somebody out to make a buck with a mound of bodies, human or otherwise. The American Dream.

If you're Christian, Joshua ben Josef recited a formula: "I will be with you in my lifetime." + "I am in all things." + "As you do to the least of mine you do to me." = Everything on this planet is Jesus. According to this formula - and it's in your own holy book - that's Jesus in a leg-hold trap.

You're next.

Africa Comes To The Olympic Peninsula

First of all, this page is why I used that title for this post. This has been going on a long time. Newspapers are slow on stories up here, especially any that may blame the logging industry. But the younger generation is beginning to ask: "Why are you destroying our future?" as an out-of-state logging company rips up the area of the upper west end of the Olympic Peninsula. Newspapers are making buggy whips badly enough as it is - they need to be talking to the younger generation, not going to lunch with old farts from the '50's (I'm an old fart from the '50's, but I know why what my generation built is such a growing catastrophe).

The book Tall Timber, very popular up here, is a kind of Mein Kampf  for what logging industries intended to do to our forests - turning them from carbon sinks, oxygen pumps and wildlife homes, among a few of their many purposes, into something on the level of GMO corn - but without fertilizer, care or concern. The science is antique, the ideas utterly out of date, the results toxic on so many levels.

My letter to the Washington State Fish and Game:

"Good morning.

Forks Outfitters makes all my arguments for me.

To let you know some background, ASPCA directed me to the local humane society, who directed me to you.

From rough observation and experience, may I ask this question: are hunters who work in the logging industry using clearcuts to have access to displaced, hungry and confused predators?

In Africa, logging operations often work illegally in conjunction with bushmeat operations to harvest as many homeless wild animals as possible.

After living here for ten years, I'm very much aware of a local predator-hunting culture based on a 19th-century tradition of extermination, coupled with the trophy mentality (as opposed to basic, proper food needs). Mountain lions, especially, are seen as something to be wiped out, along with wolves, and displayed as mere trophies. Local newspapers support this culture, without reference to modern understanding of territorial predator behavior.

Note about me: I'm a writer, but as a commercial sideline, I'm the West End North Correspondent for the Forks Forum. In the course of covering stories, I must say that I've noticed a correlation between clearcuts near neighborhoods and almost immediate lethal (for the predator) interaction between frightened humans and a disoriented animal whose prey source has been driven away. It's hard to mistake the chain of events. Recently, when hearing loggers talk about "killing cats," the evidence became clearer.

I will continue to address this question, whether locally or internationally. To quote a local woman with whom I was discussing the situation, "State Trust Lands, my ass."

Thank you for your attention.

Donna Barr"

Money - The Ultimate Weapon

Okay. Now we know. I called the communities up here a bunch of cowards, wimps and fools for putting up with the logging companies, especially Rayonier.

Ghost trees - going away

I take it all back.

Yesterday, for the local newspapers, I was out covering the Great Strait Sale on Highway 112. Everybody puts out items for sale,  from shops to garage sales to special ed classes trying to raise funds for school supplies (that's a whole 'nother ball of worms, thank you very much, Tim Eyman, NOT). 

I was still shaking over the latest clearcut right beside our neighborhood. This one is right down the wind tunnel and on the flood plain. I didn't expect anybody to be on my side. Too often I'd heard how the logger was the hero up here. I wasn't ready for what I ran into.

The town is furious. People in churches are furious. People who make a living off mature woods and tourism are furious. They're stressed, traumatized, sickened. That's right - they're getting health problems. They face floods and wind damage because the protecting walls are gone.

All over the world, the storms and damage are happening, because our forests and wetlands are no longer there to protect us. Huge industries, unmerciful and bloated with cash, slash through the resources of the world as though they're invading aliens. In many cases they are; Rayonier, for example, is based in Florida.

To tell you how much we're hurting, a beloved neighborhood dog just died in his yard, with his family around him. When his "Mom" discovered I couldn't leave the house during the destruction, and so didn't discover the dear dog was passing, and so couldn't come support the family and say goodbye, she was in tears. 

Riven with grief by the destruction, an entire community could hardly move. The way the animals are being treated after these gigantic slashes - the triumphant hunting down of frightened, starving, displaced mountain lions and bears - makes them sick. One woman was angered because a yearling bear, "Not doing anything, just walking near here," was shot just because he was something to slaughter. She reported that the wolves that the State had tried to replace were shot, "And those hunters were all, 'Oh, we didn't know it wasn't legal!' " 

Logging industry, and the hunting industry attached to you (oh, yes, Rayonier has a hunting RENTAL page, as well as a real estate page!); You're damaging the hearts and minds of entire areas. You're attacking their livelihoods. You're ramming your machines through their lives like airliners into towers. They're waking up. And they're on Facebook, now. Not alone, not isolated, no longer unable to talk to each other, hunkering down in pain and fear.

There's a hungry lawyer out there who wants you. There's a class-action suit, based on your reckless endangerment of anybody who lives near your forest, and flat-out animal cruelty, that this lawyer knows s/he can harvest you with. You know who the most dangerous sharks in the American sea are - because they built the place. Go ahead, line up your own lawyers. Because anybody who does come in on your side will be next in line, for supporting an abusive industry. It's coming. It may not be today, or tomorrow, but you've treated the earth, its people - human and animal - and its breathing forests like garbage for too long.

This isn't a threat. It's a warning. And a promise.

And the paper I freelance for, the Forks Forum, isn't off the hook. Every time I send in an article, it is published near the stories of how animals are something to kill, and the latest piece of vomit-on-paper is a triumphant series of hunter-porn about the ONE wolf "attack" that ever was known up here. Some boob wandered into a wolf territory, and the writer is practically staining his pants about how the Big Bad Alpha Wolf was" exterminated." Yup, that's the word. The guy doesn't even know how Final Solution that sounds.

Now, why do I think the paper is in trouble, too? Because if any of these idiots hear there's a predator in the area - or even, in one case up here, a loose cow - they're out womping through the woods looking to kill something. I'm REALLY getting sick of being told I have to look out for stray bullets while mushrooming or berrypicking or just getting some forest time. I imagine the paper can at least be taken for Contributory Negligence, or something else the lawyer/s will dig up.

My last editor offered this idiot writer a large payment for going to observe salmon-fishing grizzlies - at night. 

"WTF?" I thought "Is he trying to get him killed?"

Then again, this editor also left a crazed story about a mythological Japanese airfield up here, which he told my last editor (or this one, I get 'em mixed up) was "A bomb in the system." It's bad enough having to see my decent articles published in the same rag as crazed paranoids who fear the woods and wild animals - can you imagine being the editor for this chop-shop logging blatt? No wonder these people don't last.

The paper also runs a series called "The Real Forks." Now, I read this thing and think it's hilarious - but it's just some woman doing the little nicey-nice stories. You want the REAL west-end stories - you come here. I don't give a fuck any more.

Rotting Heads - But Not Zombies

Respect? Or White People Values?

Okay, I'm giving my neighbors the benefit of the doubt. The house always has teenage boys running in and out. The person in charge has a laid-back attitude about kids. Yeah, I had to tell them their kids were jumping out of the ditch to run at a car; I really don't want my insurance rates raised when I make red paste out of a little boy. Which is a TAD too laid-back for me, thank you. I'm not paid to raise other people's kids (and I have a contract for that).

So - you tell me what this photo says:

1. Is it an old symbol of respect for an animal people who die - a lot - so we can eat? As in: returning the heads to the woods?

2. Is it trying to get the skulls clean (and I have no idea if respect was shown or not, beforehand).

3. Or is it kids defying the game warden, as one passing biker suggests?

At Ivar's Salmon House this year, a little girl was asking her mother what the First Nations art meant. I asked her mom if I could explain. It went sort of like this:

"Those are spirits."

Her eyes bulged. "EVIL spirits?"

I took a moment to remember what modern religion has done, and said, "No, powerful spirits. See that one? That's a salmon. That one's a bear. If you go into the woods and show respect, they'll feed you. If you disrespect rivers and forests, someday they'll go away, and they won't come feed you. You'll starve. Do you understand?"

She did. Her mom didn't look happy; in our religion, we have a god and a demon (although the western god was originally just one person in a good or bad mood), and one is loving and the other is mean. But when people really live close to nature, if you disrespect nature, the food goes away. This is true. Unfortunately, we've brought in our own selfish beliefs and spread them around.

People up here think they're living "close to nature," but they're what Dan says: "Industrial workers in the woods." Every year they're buying all the things they need to survive while short trips into the woods. They're pretending.*

The woods are full of food, fuel, shelter, medicine, time and quiet. I'm not afraid of them. I circle if I'm "lost," with the natural instinct to find my troop. If I'm hungry or thirsty or need shelter, it appears. I don't run or panic or scream or threaten. It took me ten minutes to make one of those little rock-splinter knives that have been found at a camp on the Hoko River, out of what I found lying around. I'll eat fern roots, if I have to.

Disrespect is death. We've treated the Earth like dirt for several centuries, now. Soon, we shall be reaping our harvest of pride and short-sightedness, and returning to the dirt, ourselves.

Dust to dust, ashes to ashes.

*First Nations people are trying to get their old ways back, mostly realizing we're about to shoot ourselves in the feet. With the clearcut next to our neighborhood, cutting right into the flood and wind tunnel, there will be whining and wailing to their godlet about "WHY?" next typhoon season. Rather than sniffing, "I told you so," I should be getting business cards from a hungry lawyer, for the class-action suite? Hey, the logging companies harvest everything and everybody else - so it's their turn. What goes around, comes around. Call it recycling.

Latest note: evidently somebody must have read this and missed the point entirely, because they've stuck a hunting permit around one of the antlers of the more lifelike of the two rotting heads. Yeah, making sure we all know it's legal - that's the point of how to treat animals. In some states, cock- and dog-fighting are still legal, too. 

Pickin' in the Heart of Evil.

We have a favorite spot for picking chanterelles. We got this nice little haul from areas that would usually be too damp, but this year it's been dry, so we're picking 15 feet to the left or right, beyond the wood sorrels and in the moss.

But like everything else we've loved for years up here, Rayonier is tearing the heart out of it. We were witness to the Heart of Evil as we walked through this usually quiet spot in the woods (well, sort of skinny, stick woods - but Rayonier is panting to put the toxic boiled-down result into your body and lungs).

Because Tim Eyman ripped out the ability of a State to support itself, the State is forced to sell off its timber as fast as possible, in a manner that will cripple it for decades, if not finally make this just another Failed Timber Town area (with the feeling-sorry-for-themselves you always get from resource towns). You can see the desperation in the logging trucks ripping through town. So the trucks were roaring up and down the road by the woods. One driver, stopping to "secure" his load (they're overloading, so don't drive too near them), even stopped to kick the beer cans I'd tossed out into the road, until I could get a bag, back into the woods. He didn't even think of picking them up. To him, the woods are just cash and a garbage dump.

Chanterelles, Hen of the Woods, Oyster Mushrooms. 

I was picking up the usual garbage in the woods. The kind of people who are loggers and hunters throw beer cans and beer bottles around the elk trails. They even shatter window glass where an elk might step. Think about that. 

Dan called me back in from poking around in a thin patch. Usually, I'd have come right out, but this isn't really a bear or mountain lion area. So I said, "Why?" He said, "Just come."

So I did, slowly and carefully. if it WERE a large predator, running and panicking is the dumbest thing you can do. And if I'm in somebody's living room, I don't want to look like I'm wearing a stocking over my head. I don't carry a gun because I usually can't, in most situations, and stupid happens with guns. So I'll rely on my head and moves and mouth, thank you, as I have, so many times before. 

I get to the road, and I see a couple of guys, and one with a deer rifle (I don't know guns, and I don't care to, unless I need to ask my gun geek friends), but Dan says it's what it was. THIS is the thing I need to get out of the woods for? Well, I start to fume. I needed to stop picking because there were testicles with bang-bangs in the area?

Between the garbage and the roaring logging trucks, my hackles really started to go up. I am so goddamn god-vomit tired of men telling me, as a woman, I need to stay out of the woods because I might get shot. Yeah, I mean you, Mr. Forest Ranger who told me that one day. Just try it, boys. The day of the hunting accident is over - you need to be up for manslaughter with reckless endangerment. 

On the one hand, Mom pounded manners into me. I find it extremely hard to be rude to people. So when the hunters said, "Seen any grouse," I just joked, "The last bunch of grouse hunters up here admitted they were just exercising the dogs."

I thought they'd think it was funny. Hey, some of their own had said it, right? But Dan - as a guy able to sus the guy twitches - said they were NOT happy with that. What? I was putting down their hunting prowess or something?

Then, as we were getting into the car, another logging truck stopped. The two hunters immediately got into a conversation with the driver, all excited about the timber sale jobs up in the clearcut. Well, that explained that: loggers. Scared to death of the woods, descended from clerks and European farmers, and out to grab theirs. If they can't be cutting it down, they want to make it bleed.

Then the driver said, "Somebody got a cat up here! 150 pounds!" The guy with the gun joshed, "I"ll bet it's 300 pounds by now!" 

And that's when it hit me. Finally. After ten years up here. D'uh. We're talking facepalm. 

When Dan's dad would clean the garden - with a tractor - the rats would run out, and Dan would run around with a shovel, sharing rat-killing duties with the red-tailed hawk his dad wouldn't let anybody kill. 

The loggers are using clearcuts to drive predators out of their homes, and shooting these starving, disoriented, homeless refugees. 

As we pulled out, I leaned out the door, and said, "So, going to go shoot some more refugee animals?" They waved and looked confused. I hope so.

Even the Masai have stopped killing lions to prove how brave they are, and have become the Guardians of the Lions. But up here - bravery is based on a man named Huelsdonk, who, according to this family, read too many cowboy stories back in Germany. He came out to the Peninsula and lived off government money in the form of bounties (yes, we were really stupid back then), destroying all the predators he could line up in his sights. This crazy Kraut helped drive the wolves to extinction, and called the lions forces for destruction. Evidently, he didn't even own a mirror.

Then I realized who the "cowboy story" writer must have been. A German named Karl May. Who never saw America while writing the stories that, later, would be the model for the Lone Ranger and Tonto. 

Now, can anybody else name another huge fan of Karl May? Who had all his books? And thought the idea of conquest and a place to live for his people, regardless of who stood in the way, was a good idea?

With people like Heulsdonk and Hitler lapping up his nonsense, May may be one of the most destructive writers of all time. 

Since we're talking Germans, one of my best friends, a very enlightened German professor, once told Dan, "In Germany we have the village idiot. In America, you have idiot villages."

(As for shooting cats: go into the local liquor store and see the picture of the kid holding up a dead bobcat. OH, he's so proud of himself. I've seen a grandmother shown a picture of a dead bobcat on a cell phone, and she's cooing over her granddaughter for killing the cat. Why? They're not going to eat it, and we don't need the fur. This must explain the guy in Forks who is trapping and shooting his neighbor's cats, while they whimper in protest and do nothing about it. I think I'm done writing about this area. These people are either monsters or wimps).

Forks might have been accused of having vampires, but what they all have up here is zombies.

(NOTE: One woman who has been reading my blogs says, YES, she KNOWS catch-and release is bad, but she loves to fish so much! I said, I do too, but I don't fish EXCEPT to eat. She said she'd work on it. Look, I boycott beef. Will never buy it; if you swallow the DNA of cows, you want the whole world to be grass. But if I'm at a cookout, I'll have a hamburger. No use being rude. I suggested she gift herself a couple catch-and-release days a year, and she nodded and said she should. At least she means to try. Credit where credit is due.

Re fishing on catch-and-release days, and why sport killers are just stupid: if you fish on a catch-and-release day before a keeper day, and you want to know WHY the place is full of hungry seals on the keeper day, maybe you should deny yourself the nasty pleasure of filling the fishing area up with wounded, bleeding, face-and mouth-ripped fish. I mean, where do you THINK seals get their food? FORKS OUTFITTERS? The border patrol would stop them, along with the Hispanics the Forks mayor is out of his mind scared of.

The other day, I heard some people up here talking, without being able to quite catch their words - and I swear to god, it really DID sound like "hyuk hyuk hyuk." I am so sick to my teeth of the Stupid and Proud of it.)