Witness Trauma

I lived for the first half of 1989 in a tiny cabin in the heavily wooded mountains of Southern Oregon, a mile or so by well-rutted dirt road and footpath above a ghost town called Golden and a cold stream known as Coyote Creek. The nearest town with a post office was another three or four miles away (and I didn’t know anyone there or particularly want to, so I didn’t hang around much[1]).

I needed a place to go where I could be still for a while. I’d lost two friends the previous year and was at a bit of a loss for what to do, where to go. After finishing college I’d taken a ride from Portland to Alaska to work in the fisheries of Valdez, Prince William Sound (which were more or less intact when I was there, until an incompetent swindler let 12 million barrels of oil drain out of the tanker he nominally controlled that following spring, as I stewed in my canyon), and come back without any plan to speak of.

Ecstatic moments and grim moments swirled into a tangled knot, though not necessarily a tight knot. In fact there was a good deal of looseness in the uncertain antics of those days.

For lack of a better plan, and because I was distrustful of plans at that point, I let myself follow the pull toward the anti-industrial protests of the so-called timber wars of the Northwest. We came from everywhere, true, but this is where we belonged: in the woods, willing to sacrifice comfort and safety to hinder the twisted intentions of junk-bond liquidators and petty tyrants as best we could, by legal means or otherwise.[2] One friend whom I met at a small gathering, and then at the road blockade that followed, invited me to stay at his place above Coyote Creek. By the middle of January I was ready for a place where I could unravel.

The dirt road snuck in through shady mixed conifer and second-growth Douglas fir trees (this south slope had been logged in the 1950s), and crossed a small wooden bridge at a level spot along a year-round stream fed by clear springs higher up. From here a narrow path wound its way up the small bowl-shaped canyon. My cabin was about halfway up the slope, a half-hour walk from the bottom, in a small clearing with a plywood platform to one side and the steep drop into the canyon at the back. The view from cabin and deck was immense, multidimensional, deeper than practically anything else I’ve encountered. The entire west and north slopes of the canyon were alive with a quiet stand of the original forest, the ancient trees that once blanketed the entire region, of which only scattered islands remain.

There was snow on the ground when I arrived. I had never set foot in this place before but it all felt familiar and right. I had no trouble finding my way up the winding path. When I stepped between two trees near the top, I sensed that I had passed through some sort of barrier, into a set-aside zone, a sanctuary, where everything was somehow more present than in the outside world. In one sense I’d come here to hide, but from the first moments it was clear that in this place, in my grieving and uncertainty, I would also be greeting someone or something with a fullness I might have barely glimpsed before. Certainly not with the intensity I would soon encounter.

No electricity, no phone. No running water to my cabin, though a two-minute walk brought me to an old bath house, where a spigot piped water down from the steady spring.

Removing myself so completely from the world of social interaction and technology[3] gave me an opportunity to tune in to the rhythms and beings of the place, to sharpen my senses. To live deliberately (as an old surveyor from the Northeast once said), though not really free of the ebb and flow of intense yearning—which would, however, subside more or less of its own accord, tiresome to the point of irrelevance, after a few hours or days. I learned to meditate, forced by necessity (though I would have benefited from the sort of training I later received in Thailand), learned to discern the varieties of breezes and degrees of agitation or calmness they inspired.

I stayed at Golden for six months, broken up by some trips to visit friends but mostly alone in my canyon. During those months I would walk or catch a ride into town (really little more than a stagecoach stop) a few miles away for supplies every few days, sometimes not for a week or two or three. I spent my hours walking, reading, carving faces in small scraps of wood, just watching the trees or the hawks, making a fire, foraging for edible plants, cooking rice, dismantling fences, writing, gardening. I left after the place was destroyed by logging, after I determined I had learned as much as I was able to from solitude and desolation.

The presence of that forest was indescribable.

I would go for days, sometimes weeks at a time with no human contact. The dimensions of loneliness were unfathomable. Yet somehow, within a couple of weeks after returning from any excursions into more inhabited zones, I would awaken to a presence in the place. A Presence. Really. A pervasive experience of communion with a vast ancient being contained in that physical canyon, a moody jealous majestic empress,[4] a non-human non-animal life whose intense demand for attention sharpened all senses. Comfort and discomfort intermingled. No spite, no judgment, but deep sorrow and yearning as well as ticklish whispers and giggles.

Yes, the human mind concocts fantastic visions when stressed by extreme solitude. Yes, she was real. Yes, she was there. And then mercenaries of absent industrialists killed her.

It’s not as if the place had been untouched by humans, even by possibly inconsiderate, self-serving humans in the past. For a few thousand years at least the area had been within the wider hunting and fishing grounds of peoples who were displaced and largely destroyed between 1803 and the 1950s, including through an official, recent policy of “termination” which stripped tribal status from most groups in the region, essentially to impoverish and demoralize the people whose ancestors had been there, and who were the legitimate inhabitants of the place.[5]

Coyote Creek had been mined by Euro-Americans since the 1850s, and the town of Golden was incorporated in 1890. At some point this spot on the creek had a population of two hundred or so, and was known for having two churches (one of which still stands) and no saloons.[6] Gold mining continued to be the mainstay of the small settlements here well into the 20th century.[7] By the 1950s logging had surpassed gold mining economically. But it was not until the late 1980s (and particularly May 3, 1989) that some of the steeper slopes of the original forest were cut.

I’m not opposed to cutting trees. As a carpenter and woodworker, I acknowledge my complicity in the practice, and that using wood can be reasonable and justifiable, often preferable to other alternatives. But cutting trees is vastly different from destroying forests, or damaging otherwise living places. Most of the pressure to mine timber lands (as opposed to thinning or selective cutting, which need not be so destructive) is of course economic, and intertwined with national and international market dynamics. It has much more to do with the insane overdevelopment of speculative housing sprawl that paved over so much farmland and otherwise disrupted formerly living places in the past 40 or 50 years—now revealed as the land pollution that it is—than with any interest in preserving local jobs (or really anything else local), as the conflict was unfortunately framed during much of that era.

One aspect of the construction industry that needs to be addressed in any discussion of sustainability—which has direct relevance for the process of acquiring[8] material resources—is the financial pressure of project funders, whose demand for timeliness can take on a deterministic role, forcing builders to cut corners, use materials that have the lowest dollar price without reference to true ecological costs, engage in wasteful practices simply because the cost of labor outweighs the price of the materials, and—perhaps most crucially—build too many identical, lifeless units (don’t call them “homes”) at once, because economies of scale increase the profit potential of a project.[9]

On a smaller scale, it is truly possible to work more deliberately and considerately, in a way that is less destructive of places and resources, with attention to the origins of the materials and to better ways of using them. This is interrelated with designing particular structures that integrate the needs of the users and the place, that have a feeling of aliveness, that provide a sense of refuge—that can truly become homes. In short, the crafting of dwellings.