A friend of mine tells me that most people don’t share my enthusiasm for logging because they never got to beat their brains in on a logging show. I agree with Ralph. There is a lot of the male bonding stuff going on in the woods that intellectuals now say modern Western culture lacks, the type of experience men need to feel whole. At least loggers don’t feel that depravation. When a man makes it on a logging show, he enters a brotherhood that not every person can belong to. However, a man gets to know a lot more than himself when he dissects a forest. Being in the high ground, surrounded by the woods, soothed me. To this day I can find more peace in the middle of a clearcut than I can anywhere in the city, even in a park at sunset, especially then, for then I am looking west at the Olympics. It is like looking out from behind the bars in a cage. As much as I enjoy Seattle’s green spaces, they also remind me I am confined. I need the deep woods to survive, and sometimes I have to go back. Sometimes this need builds up until I feel like I’m going to explode, this feeling that I’m still a part of it, still connected, that living in the city is killing me and that I better get out. Perhaps it is just too much espresso in this juiced-up town but I cannot accept the notion that human beings are meant to live bumper to bumper on Aurora Avenue. When I finally get the chance to leave town, I have to fix my truck first and I don’t get the Fauntleroy Ferry Dock until 5:30 p.m. Then I have to sit and stare at the Olympics for another half-hour while waiting for a boat. My destination, the Wynoochee River, flows due south out of the Olympics into the Chehalis River near Montesano. At its upper end, two forks of the river encircle a mountain named Three Peaks and high upon the mountain, three puddles of water lay hidden in an island of old growth that escaped our chain saws. When I worked on the Wynoochee at Grisdale, the last logging camp in the Pacific Northwest, I always meant to find Klone Lakes but never did. Since then, I’ve read a couple of times that we ruined those hills. Simpson Timber’s thick stand of second growth between Shelton and Grisdale insulated us from the rest of the world, but then my old employer began feeding it to their mills. They abandoned logging old growth in the National Forest in 1985, not because of the spotted owl but because of the economics, and Grisdale disappeared, so that is perhaps why I don’t like the new clearcuts in the lowland. To avoid them, I drive to Belfair when the ferry docks, skirt the south shore of Hood Canal, cross Highway 101, and head up the Skokomish River. Five miles in, the road rises out of the bottom land into the hills and weaves over passes between the Skokomish, Satsop and Wynoochee drainages through country I helped scalp. These clear-cuts don’t bother me, although they are just as ugly, so I guess I’m a hypocrite, but to think that this ground will be shaved again in the same manner, right when the forest has restored itself and is functioning as a forest again, depresses me as much as thinking that it will be “preserved.” By the time I find a camping spot on a gravel bar along the Wynoochee, the sun has already set. I turn the truck off, let the dog out, and breathe a sigh of relief. People fly over this portion of the Olympics and proclaim it is ruined, and I admit it is the brownest spot on the satellite picture of the Olympics taken from outer space, yet here I am sitting amongst big trees in complete solitude. Wojo, my dog marks the perimeter while I build a fire and sip a beer. I spread out my sleeping bag on a foam mattress by the fire, and he curls up next to me. Three thousand vertical feet of timber separate me and the lakes I want to find. I fall asleep watching the fire and stars. When I open my eyes, it is almost daylight. Dew soaks the outer skin of my sleeping bag but I am warm inside the cocoon of down. The spur I drove in on skits the eastern base of Three Peaks and theoretically I could find Klone Lakes by hiking straight up hill. Theoretically there is an easier way to get there, but I need to sweat. The road climbs a couple hundred feet up the mountainside to an exhumed culvert, allowing the stream it once carried to flow unobstructed across the grade and thus conceding another victory to natural processes. By the time second growth gets big enough to log, most of the roads up here will have disappeared. I turn around and park. The dog jumps out and starts running in circles. He knows the fun is about to begin. I put on my cork boots and throw my lunch, notebook, map and sweatshirt into my nosebag. The sky is clear, and the last weather report I heard claimed the day will be warm. Wojo waits for me on the other side of the ditch, and once he sees me start to scramble across, he turns and sprints a hundred yards up the road then turns and sprints back. As I begin walking, I start to feel as good as he does. The ground cover starting out consists mostly of well-established, replanted firs. Deciduous trees and a smattering of cedar and hemlock have survived the logging or else intruded to compete with the fir. Someday this going to be a great forest again. The Forest Service didn’t allow the timber on the mountainsides adjacent to Wynoochee Falls, which is somewhere, to be cut at the same rate as the rest of the drainage. Corridors of old growth connect the timber on Three Peaks to that across the river on Chapel Peak and Mount Church. The company never did encircle those mountains with logging roads and the trees that blanket their slopes are still lined to the South Fork of the Skokomish, and through that the National Park. While living in the city and observing the fight over old growth, I have scrutinized my memories without ever feeling guilty. Having worked and lived in the woods, I am convinced that there is an equation that will enable human beings to derive both physical and aesthetic benefits from the woods while at the same time allow the forest to keep functioning as a forest. There are other things that I want to say about this subject but the words seldom take shape when I have the time to write them down. For months I’ve imagined that I’ll sit next to Klone Lakes and it will all come out. As to confirm my faith in the resilient power of this forest, the last stretch of road is choked with baby alder trees that have broken through the truck packed dirt, and I begin to weave along a game trail that used to be a logging road. This path ends at a stream called Clark Creek at the edge of clear-cut. Another trail climbs into the old growth. A little way up the hill in the trees I come to a big fir that has been notched and used as a tailhold, which is an anchor for a cable. The fir appears green and healthy although it has probably been at least a decade since its trunk was partially girted. There is a good chance it will outlive, or at least out-stand, every human alive today. Eventually, slowly it will die and become a snag. The trail I have found appears on old maps, but it hasn’t been maintained in a long time. From my contour map I can see that if I follow it, I will walk over a hogback to the lakes and gain more elevation than needed. It seems more clever to gain altitude at a steady rate and traverse uphill along the side of the feature. The trail starts out following the same logic but the ground becomes brushy and the path gets difficult to pick out. Wojo, who normally travels 20 yards or so in front of me, drops to my heels. The brush is wet, and after wading up a steep slope I lose the trail completely but come out on a wide, flat bench. From here I can still hump to the top of the ridge, but if I sidehill any farther I’ll lose that option. Up ahead there are cliffs. My instincts tell me to get up the ridge, but the forest covering bench lures me. Giant cedars, fir and hemlocks battle for the honor of dying on their feet. Crowned by wind, blown apart by lightning, rotted from the top down or the inside out, sometimes snags are massive shells of bark and worm-eaten pulp, pocked with woodpecker holes and clawed apart by bears, or they are bleached white buckskins of solid wood the bugs have ignored simply because of the abundant food. Long and lean poles that have been growing in the shade of giants are bulking up, racing to plug holes in the sky. The bench itself is almost a clearing. Three huge windfalls lie end-to-end across the flat. Did they fall like dominoes during a windstorm? Whatever, they now create a bridge several hundred feet long that no ex-logger at loose in the woods in a pair of cork boots can resist crossing. I have forgotten the feel of the nails sinking into a log, attaching me to the wood, and how a logger’s skill and well-being begins with his feet. I stop in the middle of the middle log and sit down to rest 8 feet above the ground. My dog has gone on ahead, jumped off the end, and now is rooting through the underbrush like a hog, breathing in big snorts of wild animal smell. I could sit here for hours, but I want to get to Klone Lakes. At the end of the third log, I jump back down to the forest floor and run into a wall of blueberry brush 6 feet high. A big drop of water sits on every tiny leaf, and the ground gets steeper. I can see the top of Three Peaks, and if I had a compass, I could orient myself. But like an idiot I figured the map was enough. It dawns on me that I might not find the lakes. I finally decide to turn straight uphill and head for the ridge. Wearing my corks proves to be the one smart thing I did this day as I claw my way up the near vertical slope. The brush in this direction coupled with the steep terrain also becomes too much of a barrier, so once again I change course and switch back to my left. But as soon as I escape the brush, I come to a rock cliff. Miraculously, a 2-foot-wide ledge cuts across it right in front of me. Small yew trees serve as handholds. There is plenty of room to walk safely without them, but I don’t want to become a search-and-rescue story on the news. I used to work on ground like this every day. A little further up I run into the trail. That’s a relief. It leads directly along the ridge line. Although it fades in and out like before, Wojo resumes his position at the point, scouting out the way as the crest of the ridge sharpens and knifes through the forest. At the top of the hogback, the trail squeezes between a wind-tortured tree and the edge of the cliff. It is downhill to the lakes now, not very far. I descend into a sea of wet blueberry again, and plow straight ahead. When I see water, my spirits lift, but every article of clothing I have on is soaking wet. Trees and more brush encircle the lake and reflect their images off the water, the only distortion being that of growing circles of tiny waves generated by rising trout. Fish tails slapping water are the only sounds. Pristine is the word that comes to mind, and even Wojo falls under the spell. Instead of jumping into the water as is his normal practice he wades out to his ankles and laps up a few tongues-full. I too stretch out prone along the shore and drink. As soon as I quit perspiring, I start to get cold. Not taking my heavy wool shirt was perhaps the dumbest thing I’ve done in a while. At one time I knew better than to go into the wilderness without carrying some wool, but here I am at 3,000 feet in the rainforest on a sunny day – freezing. The only way to stay warm is to keep moving, so I resume wading through the wet brush in search of the other lakes. The next one isn’t hard to find, and when I get there, I see a meadow in the sun on the other side of the lake. Working around to it I discover an old hunter’s camp. I sit down on a log and eat my sandwich. Wojo gets a couple of biscuits. I take out my notebook and scribble a few lines, but no profound thoughts hit me. My mind is a blank. The climb up here has calmed me down. There is nothing to say. Nothing to do but enjoy the solitude of this primitive spot. My opinions about old growth and the spotted owl, along with the opinions of everyone else, seem trivial compared to the timelessness of the forest that appears to have just emerged from the winter snowpack. There are no other footprints, but unlike the Garden of Eden, the sunlight here doesn’t pack enough intensity to keep me warm. Begrudgingly, I am forced to get up again and move on. I walk all the way around the two larger lakes and kiss off going over to the third. I take another drink then head for the road. The high leather uppers and the nails on the soles of my boots allow me to run downhill. It’s a lot of fun, like pounding moguls, especially when the duff is thick and there aren’t any obstacles, but after a while I lose control. I grab brush to slow down and careen off trees and the ground. Every so often I stop and walk but eventually I let off the brakes and go again. By the time I reach the road I am beat. It is a long slow walk from there. Dry clothes and a beer await me at the truck. As I sit on the tailgate and drink a bottle, Wojo falls asleep. A shower would feel great right now, but that is several hours away. The soreness is actually pleasure. I feel lucky to have logged up here, to know of a place like this far from the crowd where I can be alone in a forest, to be a part of it, for it to be a part of me.