By Greg King – Country Activist, December 1986
Somehow I did not care that we had been caught trespassing on what is today one of the nation’s most closely scrutinized timber tracts, a huge virgin redwood forest, representing 25% of all remaining old-growth redwood—about to fall fast.
In early November, a group of EF!ers hiked Maxxam-Pacific Lumber property for a first-hand look at forests that we could not imagine still existed. Our motley group drove a wicked dirt road into the misty clouds that make this region ideal for growing 2,000year old trees. We cruised past an area logged four years ago by the old PL. It was decidedly logged yet spaced every 20 to 40 feet were “small” old-growth trees left to regenerate the forest. Although tract looked logged, it also looked like a viable forest. It today’s world of Nazi logging, the old Pacific Lumber was a gem.
Soon we came upon the beeping sound of a D-8 tractor backing up across muddy, slash-strewn soil, accompanied by the scream of a chainsaw. The tractor mowed small redwood sprouts into the mud while carving layouts throughout the terrain. The odds of coming across an actual logging operation were infinitesimally slim (although Hurwitz has reportedly tripled the number of logging crews employed by PL to quickly bring in logs for milling or for direct shipment to Japan and other countries), yet there they were, two fallers and a small (about five feet in diameter) oldgrowth redwood tree about to die 2,000 years prematurely.
We photographed the unconscious loggers I crept quietly down a steep, muddy, tractor torn hillside to within 50 feet of the roaring chainsaw and a 250-foot falling tree—and then we moved on toward the untouched roadless virgin forest that we were told stood just over the next ridge.
Walking across a landing at least a half-acre in size, we slowly approached what I knew then to be a legendary forest: steep, classic California coastal ridges, flowing for miles into the far distance, divided by year-round pure water streams, and choked with huge redwood trees that sprouted before Christ’s birth. This particular area was approximately 8,000 acres—never logged, rarely even walked upon, one of as many five such tracts owned by Pacific Lumber that may not exist (except as wasteland) in five years.
They were grand, these free-flowing trees, huge dancing branches in the wind. I absorbed their peace, their energy, their life that supports so many wild animals, including a few humans. I stood, stared, breathed deeply, and felt their power. I was unabashedly awed. Yet concurrently I felt tragic, forlorn, as if embracing a friend, a lover, moments before what I know will be her brutal torture, rape, and destruction.
It was ironic that two of Hurwitz’s henchmen would accost us for trespassing just as I was trying to figure out how to save this dear friend that I had just met from a fate that no living being deserves to suffer. Pacific Lumber forest manager Robert R. Stephens and a sidekick the size of a refrigerator wanted to know what we were doing on PL land. After giving the truthful answer that we were “hiking,” Stephens concocted the brilliant comparison of our stroll and his “walking through your front yard.”
Stephens was serious and to the point. He said we were trespassing, that we could be prosecuted. He looked us each in the eyes, glaring, and said, “Don’t come back, OK?”
Each of us met his glare. No one answered.
“OK?”
Still no answer.
We followed the private security team to the road where our car was parked, only to be met by two more large men who also never smiled, sitting inside two bright orange Pacific Lumber pick-up trucks. We again were ordered not to return, and proceeded to follow the Brownshirts out of the area.
It was a slow ride down the hill.