Free The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan Page B

trying to climb The Brothers, a twin-peaked mountain of just under seven thousand feet which rises between the Duckabush and the Hamma Hamma valleys. I come up through the Hamma Hamma, which means “stinky stinky” in native parlance. The river does not smell, but it used to be so full of salmon that their rotting, spawned-out carcasses filled the shallow riverbed in early fall. Not now. Most of the drainage is outside the national park boundary, and logging has shaved many of the low-elevation hillsides dry. In a short trip from the salt water of Hood Canal, a natural arm of Puget Sound, to the head of the Hamma Hamma, the salmon pass through several war zones.
    After the Press Expedition of 1890, it didn’t take long for the new residents of Puget Sound to get over their fear of the Olympics and get on with the business of making something of the newly mapped place. The old-growth forests around the new cities were fast disappearing. The Olympics were virgin. However, it was still tough to get in and get out with the monster trees. World War I changed all that. When a Serbiannationalist assassinated Austrian Archduke Francis Ferdinand, he set in motion a series of events that remade the national boundaries of Europe—and the landscape of America’s only rain forest. By the time the United States entered the war, many of the crucial battles were being fought in the air by planes made of spruce, a wood that is both light and sturdy. The best spruce in the world is grown in the Olympics. Overnight, the forests that started rising when gunpowder was first invented a thousand years ago were leveled to help fight an incomprehensible war across the Atlantic.
    The most abundant spruce forests were in the northern part of the Olympics near Lake Crescent, the site of my Uncle Hank’s disappearance, thick with ocean mist. Boeing was then still a garage operation run out of a red barn on Seattle’s Lake Union. But the factories of Europe, and later America, couldn’t get their hands on enough Olympic Peninsula spruce to fight the war. An Army Signal Corps detachment, eight thousand men strong, began work on a spruce-hauling railroad on the north side of the peninsula. The United States Spruce Production Division worked at a frenzied pace for more than a year, clearing the forest and blasting two tunnels to lay out forty miles of track from Port Angeles on the Strait of Juan de Fuca to the woods. They finished on November 30, 1918—nineteen days after the war ended. A private timber company bought the railroad and, having hooked the world on Olympic spruce, proceeded to drain much of the area of its trees.
    From an elevation of about five thousand feet on The Brothers, I can see the patchwork of logging below in the Hamma Hamma region. Planes are built of aluminum now, but the Olympics, on national forest land all around the park, continue to give up their forests; in the last fourteen years, almost half of the remaining old trees have been cut, leaving only 90,000 acres of virgin timber in the Olympic National Forest, which is now little more than a 600,000-acre tree farm for private industry subsidized by American taxpayers. For most visitors, this devastation is not always evident; by state law, the timber companies are supposed to leave a “visual corridor” of trees along the road. Behind this thin illusion are the big swaths of ripped-up ground, streaking mud and slash—one of many reasons why the Washington State Department of Natural Resources, or DNR, has long been nicknamed the Department of Nothing Remaining. During the recession of the early 1980s, when many of the logging towns were turned into welfare camps, the state and federal government continued to sell off the trees, practically giving them away in some sales concluded despite low demand. The state forests are soldto pay for new school construction, an archaic setup designed to ensure that teachers and parents root for clearcutting of ancient trees.
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