LETTERS FROM HOME: OMENS ALONG THE HIGHWAY, WAR IN THE REDWOODS

Dear Melina,

Last week, a patient who'd driven an hour and a half to the clinic told DC a presence had visited her on the way. The presence told her a great calamity could occur on June 16. This upsetting news apparently affected the patient's driving, which caught the attention of a highway patrolman. When she explained why her car was behaving erratically, the officer let her go. Turns out she was the sixth person that day on that stretch of road who'd had the same experience.

So DC, who habitually searches the sky and strangers' eyes for portents anyway, had more reason than usual to worry. So far, the sky has not fallen and the patient is still alive.

What's brewing in Humboldt County this summer is an eco-war. If you read your Time magazine, and I know you didn't, you know the battleground is the Headwaters forest, 3,000 acres of primordial redwood trees owned by the Pacific Lumber Co. PALCO is the company's increasingly ironic nickname.

Once upon a time, PALCO was known as the environmentalist timber company. It held to the highest logging practices, was very selective about which trees were cut, and took very good if paternalistic care of its workers. Then the company was bought in the 1980s by a corporate raider named Charles Hurwitz. Bought with junk bonds insured by the infamous Michael Milken. Big debt.

Hurwitz has been repaying the debt by dramatically increasing PALCO's timber harvest. A third shift has been added at the mill at nearby Scotia. Hoping to thwart the big rush to cut down 2,000-year-old trees, environmentalists have tried every trick, from Endangered Species Act lawsuits to tree-sits.

The guy who's helping lead the crusade, Doug Thron, was in town last week. He doesn't fit the environmentalist stereotype. Clean cut, built like a linebacker. A 24-year-old warrior with a camera, he regularly trespasses on PALCO land to document clearcutting in the Headwaters. for the past four months he and his wife have been driving across the country presenting their free slide show and passing the hat afterward. PALCO is suing to try to stop them.

In Garberville, he showed these pictures of desecrated land and soaring trees to a silent audience, people who did not hoot when a photo of the bumper sticker "Save a logger. Eat an owl" appeared. They know endangered species are ancillary to their core belief: a devout conviction that the land and the Earth no longer can be treated this way.

The original redwood forest covered 2 million acres from Big Sur to Southern Oregon. After 130 years of logging, more than 96 percent of it has disappeared. The local congressman had introduced a bill that would preserve the Headwaters, the largest remaining old-growth redwood grove still in private hands, and additional tracts along with another 40,000 acres of second-growth trees as a buffer. PALCO doesn't mind selling the old trees at a whopping price but wants to hang onto the rest and is proceeding with timber harvest plans already approved by the state.

When the cutting starts in Headwaters, many people from Garberville will go there to try to stop it. Peacefully I hope. Earth First! is involved, and they aren't exactly Martin Luther Kings. A few years ago in Oakland, somebody tried to blow up some Earth First! activists. One of them can barely walk now. The other one slips in and out of Garberville from time to time, guerrilla organizing.

Sunday, DC and I drove about 30 miles west to the Sinkyone Wilderness Area, a trip that takes an hour and a half because of the winding roads. Since we'd had a little 4.9 earthquake that morning, she insisted on bringing along jugs of water and a sleeping bag just in case her patient's timing was a little off, the big one hit, one of the one-lane dirt roads collapsed and we became the Swiss Family Robinson.

The Sinkyone is part of the King Range National Conservation Area, an expanse known as the Lost Coast. The mountain ridges along the Pacific are so steep here they have defied roadmakers. Only one road, gravel that eventually becomes dirt, goes in and out at this end. Beyond the trailhead lie nearly 40,000 acres of wilderness.

We went in only a little way, past groups of Roosevelt elk resting beneath trees only yards from the road, and between hills piled with sweet peas and daisies, to a spot called Bear Harbor. A painter was setting up an easel next to the water. We just sat and listened and watched as the world turned.

At the slide show, someone observed that people come from all over the world to see these trees. She said we ought to write to Time magazine to plead with others to help us save these last remaining behomeths, these dinosaurs.

I think of Thoreau and other nature-revering writers and wish I knew which words would convey how necessary to our souls these ancestral trees and this wildness are. How perilously close we are to losing them. But like the audience at the slide show, I fall silent.

Love, Sam

(Sam Blackwell is a staff writer for the Southeast Missourian and is currently on a leave of absence in Garberville, Calif.)