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the REDWOOD EMPIRE |
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Searching out family roots
among giant redwoods
By JOYCE KIEFER
of TheColumnists.com
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From about 100 miles north of San Francisco to the
Oregon border lies a part of California that hardly seems part
of the state or, for that matter, the 21st century. This is the Redwood Empire,
a place that has fascinated me since I was a child listening
to tales told by my Uncle Danny Hughes about life in the first
part of the 1900’s in the small town of Freshwater in the
woods near Eureka.
His father was a blacksmith there. When my parents and I took vacations in the redwood country I was awed by the way people lived as much as by the trees and the tourist kitsch. Everything seemed larger, more rugged, and closer to nature than anything I knew growing up in a peninsula suburb of San Francisco. This summer we had a family campout that my daughter Jane set up at Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park about an hour north of Eureka. She remembered the delight of our family trip there when she was a child. Now she wanted to bring her own family down from Washington to enjoy the place. My husband and I took along our son’s two daughters, Allyson and Savanna, ages 9 and 7. I was in their age range when I first visited the Redwood Empire. I wanted them to share the sense of wonder and fascination that I had. I took along a copy of
one of the letters Uncle Dan wrote to me about his memories of
life in Freshwater and its nearby lumber camp. I also brought
his photo album with pictures to prove that he did indeed maintain
a contraption called a steam donkey and help build a huge trestle
to handle the felled trees. When the girls were tucked in bed
in the Eureka motel where we spent the first night, I read Danny’s
letter, showed them pictures, and read from the “Freshwater
Chronicle & Cookery” which Danny and others put together
in 1976, long after he and my mother’s sister had settled
in Santa Rosa. That night the girls tasted
the flavor of the north woods. We went to dinner at the Samoa
Cookhouse, which used to serve the workers at the huge lumber
mill next door. While we waited to be seated at long tables covered
with red checkered cloth, we examined a display of the curved,
toothy saws that the lumberjacks used before chainsaws. I spotted
a large oil painting of the guys standing around a steam donkey
very much like a picture in Danny’s album.
Allyson looked at me and said, “The poor trees. How terrible to have a great big redwood turned into toothpicks or shingles.” I had exactly the same feeling the time I toured a saw mill and watched a huge tree get stripped and cut into boards amid terrible noise and smells in about 15 minutes. The “Freshwater Chronicle” notes dispassionately that in the early 1920’s “Forty-eight (rail) cars of logs rolled out of the valley every day, bound for Pacific Lumber Company’s mill at Scotia. This was an average of 24 trees per day. It would usually take a two-man crew a full day to fall the average 14’(in diameter) tree. . . Aino remembers one tree was stubborn indeed. It took his partner and him a whole week to fall a giant 22-footer.” But Allyson quickly accepted
the culture of these lumberjacks when she sat down to platters
of soup, salad, fried chicken, roast pork, corn, potatoes and,
of course, apple pie. Our plump waitress said, “We want
you to eat until you’ve had enough”. We could ask for
seconds and thirds. The next day we went to Freshwater. We stopped playing the
endless tapes the girls brought along of “Harry Potter and
the Goblet of Fire.” They grew quiet as the pasture land
narrowed into a small valley guarded by tree-covered hills. Scattered
among the apple trees, blackberry vines, and climbing roses were
the small wooden houses of Freshwater. Perched at the edge of
the narrow road was the bright red one-room school house where
Danny and his classmates posed when the building was still painted
white. The more modern 5-room school house was set behind the
building like an extension of the past. The school is the only
business in town. The Freshwater Store still stands but appears
to be an art gallery that has recently shut down. In its heyday
with a population of 300 people, the town featured a hotel and
seven saloons. It never did have a church.
In the Freshwater Chronicles Danny wrote: “On Saturday night the loggers would come into our seven watering holes. The cowboys . . . also came in on Saturday, tied their horses to the rail by the water trough and rushed to the bar to soothe their burning tonsils. Now here is where the ugly cognomen of Wrangletown was born. The cowboys and the loggers were natural enemies and each felt that the other was representing himself to be the more masculine. …So, on any calm Saturday night when less than four fist fights were going on at one time, folks got bored and went to bed early.” Danny was known to exaggerate but he was around to see some of the action. I still have the fiddle he played in some of those saloons. As we walked the roads that pass for the streets of Freshwater, Savanna befriended an old beat-up tom cat. The sun sparkled; roses draped the picket fences; Thomas Kincaide would love the place. Its industry vanished in the early 1940’s when Pacific Lumber packed up Danny’s lumber camp after most of the old growth forest was cut down. But not all. I read on the web that two tree sitters had been extracted from a 1,000-year old tree they named “Jezebel.” About 15 tree-sits continue in the woods near town. One woman locked her arms with a metal pipe and chains to a large branch but lumber company climbers sawed her out. Freshwater still earns the nickname “Wrangletown.” As we drove north out of
town, crossing Ole Hansen Road, the girls had become aware of
the distinct world of the Redwood Empire. They looked forward
to spending the next three nights in our own “lumber camp”
with their cousins Amri and Gwynne. I couldn’t think of
a better place for their cousin’s mom–my daughter Jane–and
I to celebrate our mutual birthday.
The first thing all the
kids discovered was the colony of banana slugs that lounged on
the faucet on our campsite. When they took the slugs to the creek
for a bath they got their clothes wet. I hung everything out
and foolishly I thought the socks and pants would dry out in
a few hours. But I should have listened to Uncle Dan to learn
how wet clothes can become a hot issue. He wrote that his fellow
lumberjacks wore wool underwear day and night. Soaked to the
skin after a day in heavy rain, the men draped their long johns
around the wood stove in their four-man cabin and put on their
spare pair. The underwear was still wet in the morning. Since
the stove was cold all day nothing dried then, either. I had to tear the kids away from the banana slugs to take them for a hike in the woods. But it was worth it when we walked the Lady Bird Johnson trail in Redwood National Park. The redwoods are enormous there. When you look straight up, the tops disappear in a vanishing point. The girls loved the place. They ran off-trail to explore the “goose pens”–the bases of living trees that have been hollowed out by fire. They ogled the huge burls and had me read the trail guide to explain what caused the tree to produce such shoots.
Some burls have a Bunyanesque quality. Danny wrote, “Axel Olsen’s buckboard attempted to drive across a burl growing on the side of a stump and got tangled in it and it grew so fast it turned his buckboard over and he was lucky to get out with his life and horse.” He adds that this amazing burl and its parent stump were wiped out along with the town of Pepperwood when the Eel River flooded in 1964, so I couldn’t show it to the girls. They wanted to return to the Avenue of the Giants on the way back. We stopped along the way to find the Dyerville Giant--the world’s tallest tree at 360’ until it fell over in 1991. I wondered what kind of sound it made when its shallow roots ripped out of the ground as the tree hit the forest floor. Did anyone yell “timber”? If no one was in the forest to listen, did the tree make a sound when it fell? The fall of the Redwood Empire has not happened yet. I’m glad I was able to show its spirited past and present to my grandchildren. Our family has cherished its character for a hundred years now and I think it has become part of our own timber. |
©2003 by Joyce Kiefer. The photos are from the family archives. All rights reserved. The top illustration is from IMSI's Master Clips Collection, 1895 Francisco Blvd. E., San Rafael, CA, 94901-5506, USA.
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