In the pale glow I drifted down the empty alleyway, filtering through nondescript trashcans searching for the pot of gold.  A well used pair of jeans with twenty bucks in one of the pockets, discarded and forgotten along with the remnants of a hasty departure.  A dumpster full of secrets that no store owner would want found, credit card transactions provided an easy entrance to the local jails and were easily overlooked as I sifted to the real source of my wealth.  Bags of unused groceries easily removed from the shelves and written off for the deduction amounted to more than I could carry home in a shopping cart.  Magazines and books which, with the proper research and knowledge, could be resold to any of a dozen used bookstores in the morning after a healthy explanation as to why none of them had front covers.  CD’s and tapes, clothing and leather jackets were piled into garbage bags, awaiting delivery to thrift shops at daybreak. 

 

And home at four in the morning to an abandoned block of forgotten mansions, slowly decaying into the neighborhood, culturing blackberry vines three stories tall, hiding behind the shadow of spiffy new apartment developments.  After several years of bitter fighting with the city government and remote landowners we were granted the opportunity to inhabit these buildings until they were destroyed, a period of several months.  Every wall was covered in spray painted graffiti, tagged and marked as our territory by the dozens of transient roommates lying strewn about on salvaged furniture.  Only a few were awake at this late hour playing cards and shooting the shit, scheming strategy to ward off the inevitable end of our paradise. 

“Hey, any one hungry” I’m taking orders.”

“I want mangoes, tropical fruit, kiwis and strawberries” 

 “I want cheese, like imported expensive stuff.”  “I want chocolate, lots of it.” and “I want salad, no dressing”

“OK, coming right up” I replied, heading back out into the great misty unknown straight towards the discount grocery outlet.

I propped up the massive dumpster lid and plunged into the darkness, twisted my forehead lamp for some brilliance, and proceeded to dig.  Within minutes I returned with a full shopping cart of goodies.  Five hundred dollars worth of cheese from around the world, a box of strawberries, a few boxes of salad greens, a huge bag of assorted bulk candies, and fifty pints of yogurt.  We ate like kings in a dawn buffet in the backyard, stuffing ourselves with as much food as we could.  We wasted nothing and gave thanks for the plentiful supply, and off we were to spare change the busy breakfasting blue collar executives.  Hours later we returned to a barren wasteland, machinery crunching wood and plaster into powder, chewing our houses into pulp, ripping our gardens out by the roots.  Taking what we had on our backs with us, we tried to forget all the hard work and accomplishments those buildings held.

 

Desiring nothing more than a home we couldn’t be removed from we roamed the forgotten timberlands of western Washington, scattered with clear cut lands for sale countless miles from the public eye.  In the farthest point of the map, down the oldest neglected gravel road in the area, was our paradise; twenty acres of freshly logged forests.  The only areas with trees were so swampy we had a hard time walking the perimeter of the property, stumbling many times on the slick logs strewn about like giant toothpicks.   This was perfect, a land we could nurse back to health, a land that would provide, from the mountains of waste wood, an adequate source of money to rebuild it into a forest, a home and a garden.  Within hours we had signed the agreements and moved our school bus into the only cleared area on the property, the loading area and log deck.  I viewed the masses of trees lying on the ground, sticking half out of the mud and moss with new eyes.  Armed with an ancient axe and a pair of heavy duty branch clippers I proceeded to fight with the cedar and fir branches, slowly clearing a path between the ruts left from the massive logging machinery, one foot at a time. In anxious excitement I wandered the land, following worn animal trails through huckleberry bushes over twenty foot tall, evergreen trees battling for sunlight in the dense overgrowth from repeated and careless fly-over seeding.  I had found what looked like a proper spot for our house to be built on the far side of the property next to an ancient trail, only move a few stumps from the centre of our floor and voila, a quaint setting for a relaxing new life.  One would think sixteen miles of unused logging roads and twenty acres of forest was plenty enough to keep the rest of civilization away from our front door.  Now just to make that squirrelly last three hundred bucks for the down payment.  I knew it existed, just waiting for me to come over and pick it up.  Fallen waiting under the checkout counter disguised as a wadded roll of twenty dollar bills, destined to a distinguished future as nothing more than a very expensive dust collector until my shopping bag snagged on the counter corner and broke open.  I leaned down to pick up the bruised apples, noticed the faded numbers, and slipped that roll right into my pocket, unnoticed.  There is an almost guilty feeling that trails money like a lemming follows its fate, the acid rush, the jump into a moment of carelessness, and the crushing end.  Hard earned cash seems overrun with worry soon before delights crescendo, but when the money is found, the spell is broken.  I summoned the guys and we threw a four keg party, a massive home brew keg-a-thon.  Only the finest of handmade ales were used for the endless shindiggery of that night.  We gathered college kids from the campus only two blocks away, a good jaunt for the staggering masses to stumble home at sunrise, packed them all in tight, and proceeded to pitch beer.  The tip jar was a one gallon jug, and intermittently I would shout out the call for change, bills, and credit cards, to pay for this event, and to make up the needed remainder of the down payment.

Standing out from the cluttered corkboard of posters and half stained from uneaten pizza, the paper plate leapt into my hand from the top of the trashcan as I fumbled to draw an easy map to the middle of nowhere, a bold invitation declaring freedom to the questioning youth.  “Work Party in Paradise – Help build an amphitheatre in the woods!”  To this day I am not sure how they made it there at all.  First, hippies don’t like rednecks, and Aberdeen was everything they didn’t want to see.  Secondly, hippies don’t like clearcuts, and I was leading them to the smack dab center of the oldest clearcut on the west coast.

Behind the site we had chosen for our house was the beginning of the county forest, immense second growth cedars dwarfing the prickly woods we were in.  A trail well padded with fir needles wove its way back into the brush, between swampy sinkholes and pools on the mossy slippery skin of ancient cedar trees felled a hundred years ago.  Eventually the trail opened up to a wide gravel road hidden beneath several inches of moss and debris, ending on an abandoned county road well rutted from thrill seeking 4x4 jeeps and pickup trucks full of salal picking, mushroom hunting, fern gathering Mexicans. 

The more I explored, the history of the area was revealed to me, bare trees laid across the trail perfectly buried in the ground, level and true, spaced with 7-8” gaps between to allow oxen to step in unison without slipping on the greased logs.  Harnessed to thick leather and chain they pulled trees wider than a man stood tall, then whipped into a stampeding frenzy they split boards and rails with eight foot wide blades, fastened behind the oxen and held by a half dozen men.  Slowly these methods were replaced with manual pit saws where, with teams of oxen the logs were slowly raised to a platform about seven feet off the ground.  A man would stand underneath and push the long blade of the saw up; one man would stand on top and push it back, evolving into giant rotary saw blades powered from the swiftly flowing Copalis River. The hard worked small lumber producers eventually were bought out by well funded East Coast companies venturing into the Wild West by fables of the massive trees and cheap land.  In the late 1880’s the Carlisle Logging Company began a exhaustive effort to build a railway from Aberdeen to the upper Quinault, and in many places this was achieved by building a raised railway track up to 50 feet from the forest floor, so the track was pretty much level the entire way enabling longer trains and larger loads.  Still, any logs that had knots closer than 3 foot apart, had an area of hollow in the center of the tree or were not perfectly clear grain were dragged to the trestle and left behind.  This amounted after fifty years to a pile of rejected logs level with the track, more than a mile wide the entire length of the rails.  By the early 1920’s the area was host to an incredible lodge and hotel boasting the finest entertainment, dining and working conditions in the region as a true company town, complete with a mile square lawn where the majestic forest used to stand.  Structured in tightly inhabited rows, every worker and his family was given a small 10’ by 10’ shack usually built by the man who inhabited it, raised from the ground several feet with platforms and paths so the swamp would not creep in.  Shortly thereafter, at the height of its greatness and success, the entire town was reduced to a pile of ashes in a devastating and mysterious fire. All except for the solitary cabin I stumbled across while exploring a pile of swamp seasoned bog cedar logs that were leftover from creating an oxen trail over a century prior, its sides melting into the forest floor, the roof lifted irregularly by branches that had grown through the old boards.  Inside I found a rubber boot, some logging chain, and several empty gallon cans rusting in the damp darkness.  I was studying the pile of logs, trying to figure out the most appropriate method to dissect it when I found the other boot.  I looked up from the ground and noticed many cedar trees with rough scratches in the bark.  The hair bristled on my arms and neck as I realized I was playing with fire standing in the marked territorial area of at least one cougar. 

I noticed the paths cut through the brush, no taller than chest high and consistently parallel to the ones I used.  Of course I was walking the game trails, a sitting duck in a vast swamp.

 

The people came in groups, usually following each other in constant bewilderment, stepping gingerly in foot thick mud.  I would hear them from the end of the quarter mile long driveway screaming into the twilight, lost and deflated, contemplating the eight mile walk to the closest telephone as they unavoidably stepped in the numerous hip deep potholes.  By the time I reached them, they were undoubtedly in disbelief at my greeting “welcome to paradise, but watch out for the swamp.”  Poor city kids from Seattle, how the hell did they find out about this?  Clad in black leather and looking extremely out of place, I wondered how they would ever be able to manage.  This was not for pansy apartment dwellers with no muscle or calluses.

I put those boys to work shedding layers of black leather coats and delicate gothic capes to pick up shovels.  “See that puddle”, I pointed to one of many deep watery holes in the path we were building on top of the skidder tracks to walk through the clear cut, “Fill it in, I want to walk on that.  We can’t move any wood out of here at all if we are tripping over this shit, and falling in the water.  Let’s go!”  A good pep talk did wonders for the morale of malnourished, rain soaked volunteers, and drove the uninterested away like bug spray to a swarm of gnats.  But if that didn’t work, the camp cooked meals sure would.  Night after night of the same soggy grain soup.  The boys staggered into Aberdeen in search of food stamp subsidies, bringing back bags of perishable goodies which seldom lasted long enough to spoil.   

 

The driveway was a well used 4X4 trail, well known for destroying transmissions and breaking axles, as well as the oldest unused logging road in the area.  Too thin to drive a logging truck down, snaking through the brush and built on top of the swampland mush, the edges were clearly defined by water and reeds.  If there ever was a road not to drive off of, this was it.   One good day’s rain washed our access away under several inches of steadily flowing water and it was foolish to think of driving, when a few inches from the deeply trenched ruts laid certain doom in four feet of muck.  Chance had a hand in providing us with the only possible solution.  There was no way we could put out even a couple hundred bucks, let alone the thousands it would take to build the road up to dry pack, without talking to the gravel yard at the beginning of the logging road.  We were greeted by a bald Santa Claus, who proceeded to call up the dump trucks for back to back loads of gravel later that day.  I ecstatically gathered up all the tools we had to level out the mounds of gravel as they were dumped, what a sight for those drivers to look in the mirror and see a dozen guys urgently shoveling and raking the mound of gravel before the next truck arrived, and “I’ll be darned”.  At the point of exhaustion Santa came driving up with the grader “go home boys, we got it from here.” 

By morning we had over a quarter mile of nicely leveled road.  Not bad for thirty seven hundred bucks in debt. “Now work on paying that off and I’ll do the rest of it.”  Unfortunately the worst part of the road, right where the ruts dissolved into reeds and brush was still untouched, where our school bus home sank up to the front steps in organic goo, where the tow truck planted his brakes and let the cable out as far as he could to reach us without sinking in itself.

A couple weeks of axes and brush clippers brought chainsaws to the woods, easily splitting ominous mountains of debris into manageable lengths, devouring fiber with the voracity of 92 cubic centimeters of smoking hot power.  Baptized by a chainsaw, covered in the oily soot of two cycle gas and bar oil, exhausted in a literal sense.

 

The skidder tracks left densely compacted paths through groves of spindly yew, bent over to provide a solid footing for the ravenous claws.  The incredible tight grain of these ancient yet scrawny trees sank beneath peat moss to cure for generations, a bank of rare and valuable treasures for only the wise and curious to recognize.  We could make bows and shoot us a deer, build a cabin and forget about the chaotic external reality.  Harvest herbs and roots from the bountiful landscape and remain unaffected by the tumultuous events of the outside world.

 

Change is the only constant; opportunity taken is transformed in a whirlwind of unforeseen events, resulting in the tragic loss of innocence.  The virgin stereotypical ideal is crushed under weight of responsibility, birthing an expanded, agile understanding.  Territory is forged from minds in chaos, unwittingly breathing life into newly evolved principles where instinct is habitual and adaptation is king.