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Bill Boak
Photo by Bob Doran

by JIM HIGHT

by JIM HIGHT

ON A FORESTED HILLSIDE NEAR BIG LAGOON, BILL BOAK'S $400,000 logging machine moves across swales and brush with the agility of a deer. An operator sitting in an enclosed cab swings the boom to place a gray rectangular device on the trunk of a Douglas fir. In a few seconds the slim green giant falls neatly on top of a pile of downed trees.

It happens so fast Journal staffer Bob Doran and I wonder aloud if the machine is pulling the trees up by their roots. "There's a saw underneath, a big chain saw," explains Boak. "Look at the sawdust coming out of that," he says when the machine grabs another tree. "It's just `zip,' and they're gone."

A couple hundred yards away, another big machine works through a pile of downed trees, clipping off their limbs and sawing them to lengths prescribed by an onboard computer. Before the day is done, the two machines working together will have turned about 150 young-growth trees into logs, ready for trucking to a sawmill.

Boak, 76, has spent millions of dollars in the last 10 years on equipment like the dangle-head falling machine taking down trees and the processor spitting out logs -- and he has more of these machines on order. [Photo below right shows machine at work]

A blunt-spoken man who is fond of making a point with a joke, Boak talks about how little sleep his wife Betty gets every time they spend a half-million dollars; how readily he drives his bankers around when they want to see their collateral at work; and how he keeps a handkerchief in his pocket to cry in if one of the machines wears out before its time.

But Boak gets serious when he explains why this kind of logging is better than the old kind.

"To do this much work, I'd have to have the woods full of people, all of them in harm's way," says Boak, who once lost a crewmember in a fatal accident. "We're trying to get rid of as much of the [manual] cutting as we can and pawn it off on the machines, although some falling is still done with chainsaws."

The mechanized gear also allows Boak's crews to work faster and more efficiently than logging outfits using older equipment and methods -- and that's one reason Boak Logging is surviving and employing 30 to 40 people in what has become a very tough business (see "A Dying Breed," May 6).

"[They're using] obsolete technology," says Boak, with a note of sympathy for the logging outfits that have failed. "God help me, in five years all this may be obsolete. Or maybe we won't need anything larger than this. Or maybe it'll all be helicopter logging in a few years. Then nobody but a huge corporation will be able to do it."

Aside from being safer and more competitive, Boak says the mechanized logging in action here at Big Lagoon, along with the cable yarding systems his crews use on steeper ground, are better for the environment. "[The machines] travel this country and they don't dig it all up," says Boak, pointing to where the dangle-head falling machine had gone. The ground was still covered with forest litter, the sword ferns rumpled but alive.

"Tractors [dragging logs] would make roads through this ground," he says. "[The timber industry] did tractor logging when we didn't know better and didn't have the equipment to do better. Now we know better and we have the equipment to do better.

"I think it's too darned bad that the world doesn't know the effort and money we're putting out to do things the right way," he says.

Boak's assessment of the ecological impacts of mechanized clear-cutting will be less than persuasive to many. Even if the forest floor is not torn up as in the old days, clear-cuts still eliminate the overstory, or canopy, and leave open ground vulnerable to erosion, which can damage fish habitat in nearby streams.

Streams may also be polluted from the herbicides sprayed on hardwoods and shrubs after a clear-cut. Biological diversity is diminished when forests are replanted as conifer plantations. And forest vistas enjoyed by residents and tourists are degraded.

After 60 years in the logging trade, Boak has answers to these and almost every other objection to industrial logging. His viewpoints won't settle any arguments, but as a survivor in a struggling and changing industry he's certainly worth listening to.

[Photo above left: Aaron Hooven repairs dangle-head while Bill Boak looks on]

Destructive logging

A third-generation logger from Washington, Boak went to work for his father, Theodore, in 1941 at the age of 13. His first job was tending a wood-fired steam donkey, a device used to pull logs from the woods.

After serving in the military, Boak rejoined his father's business and soon moved with the family to Oregon, where they logged for various companies.

Arriving in Humboldt County in the winter of 1952-53, the Boak family was shocked at the state of the industry here. "We thought Oregon was a little backwards, but when we got to California everybody's checks bounced," he remembers.

Many timber companies cut and ran, went bankrupt or just wouldn't pay. And sketchy financial practices weren't all that was wrong. "There was a lack of care of the land and lack of care of the timber," says Boak. "They were wasting it like a blind dog in a butcher shop, taking a bite out of everything. They figured if they saved 60 or 90 feet out of an [old-growth] tree, that was fine."

Yarding felled trees with cables -- a common practice farther north -- was rarely done here. Instead, tractors were ripping up the hillsides. "The Gulf War [of 1991] was not as devastating" as what occurred on some North Coast forests, says Boak.

Reforestation methods were also primitive, Boak says. "Ten or 15 years before then, the state of Washington was planting trees two-feet high," Boak says. "California was aerial seeding or hand seeding." And these methods were improvements over what California timber companies had done before, leaving the least valuable trees as seed trees. "That just breeds you another bad tree," says Boak.

The Boaks worked for a series of companies, eventually contracting for more than 20 years with Louisiana-Pacific Corp. "We logged in Crannel (near Little River), we did Forest Service sales, Big Lagoon, the McKay Tract (near Eureka), wherever their holdings were," he says.

Speaking for the industry

With fellow loggers, mill workers and local politicians, Boak opposed the expansion of Redwood National Park. In 1977, he helped organize a caravan of log trucks bound for Washington, D.C. Boak helped carve the caravan's symbol -- a huge redwood peanut -- as a jibe at President Carter, a former peanut farmer whose Interior Department favored the park's expansion.

Boak recalls that the convoy nearly broke up partway across the country. Log truck drivers and their families were falling behind the faster passenger cars and having trouble finding the scheduled stopping places. "And we had politicians more worried about how they looked," recalls Boak.

Boak argued for a 45 mph speed limit and more attention to the regular folks. "I said, `We're going to get these truck drivers and their wives up there and let them say hello to the people,'" recalls the logging boss. "And so we did."

The high point of the protest for Boak was being escorted to the Capitol by local Teamsters and carpenter's union members. Government officials and the media were less receptive. "Walter Cronkite said, `I'm an environmentalist, the hell with you.' That's been the story of the timber industry." The park's expansion by 48,000 acres was authorized by Congress.

Boak sat on advisory committees and testified before legislative bodies to influence forest policies. His general view of the process: most forestry legislation was based on "things that came out of a book that somebody wrote that they got out of a book that somebody else wrote. Lord knows whether the first person saw the woods or not."

At one hearing in Sacramento or Washington, D.C. -- he can't remember which -- Boak lampooned the legislators' ignorance.

"This was when we were just getting into leaving the snags for the bugs and for the woodpeckers and different birds," recalls Boak. "I [told] them that we were having a problem. The birds were getting in the bug trees and the bugs were getting in the bird trees. I went on and on, and the committee sat there so interested, [thinking] `What are we going to do to keep the birds out of the bug trees?' Well, the birds live off the bugs."

But despite his contempt for book-schooled legislators, Boak acknowledges that bad actors in the timber industry also set the stage for California's tight Forest Practice Rules. "You can't lump the timber industry together and say they're all good," he says. "Someone put the `damn' in front of `damn logger.'"

In 1998, Louisiana-Pacific offered its Humboldt County timberlands for sale, and the land was purchased by Simpson Timber Co., which soon became Boak's main client. "Simpson wasn't the only company bidding on it [and] I'm glad that Simpson bought it," he says. "They're a timber company, not a junk-bond outfit."

Doran and I prod Boak for more of his thoughts in this vein, but he keeps his counsel. "I could say things that I don't want you to quote," he says.

Bully on clear cuts

Standing in the middle of a pitchy sea of logs and slash, Boak has plenty to say about the best ways to harvest and grow redwood and Douglas fir.

"The name of the game in the timber industry is to produce as much wood per acre as we can," he says, describing how his mechanized equipment yields more wood than manual methods: The cutting machine saws the trees lower than a human being could manage a chainsaw, and the processor scales and cuts logs for minimal waste.

"It's like eating a chicken," he says. "You don't just eat the drumstick and throw the rest away. We want to utilize everything we can."

And while environmental advocates, many citizens and some foresters advocate selective logging, Boak insists that clear-cutting followed by reforestation is the best way to produce redwood and Douglas fir. "Thinning seems to be the political way to do it, but it's the worst way in the world to grow fir and redwood," he says. "You create a tree that starts growing more limbs down low. It grows shorter instead of taller and wider at the butt. You create an expensive logging job."

As for the appearance of clear-cuts, Boak acknowledges that "Harvesting is rough work, and in the end it looks bad.

"But should we expect landowners to leave as much timber on their land as they can [so there's] a view that we can call beautiful as we drive down the freeway?" he asks. "That's a pretty selfish way of looking at forestry, isn't it? You're looking at it in your own time, you're looking at it personally.

"Should I try to move my program to something that wouldn't produce as much wood just because it doesn't look good?" he adds. "Looks has no place in forestry. You don't prune your orchard for looks. You take care of it in a manner to produce more apples."

Despite his anti-government rhetoric, Boak seems reconciled with forestry regulation in California. "I like it all," he says, with what might be construed as a cheeky edge to his voice.

Boak also seems somewhat confident that Simpson will continue to make the environmental trade-offs it needs to log at its chosen pace: several thousand acres annually -- virtually all young-growth timber -- on a land base of more than 400,000 acres.

"[The company] has shade canopies, wildlife corridors, sections set aside for owls. They've been doing it for quite a while, and they're improving it." (Simpson is currently negotiating a multi-species Habitat Conservation Plan with federal resource agencies. See story below.)

A target

What bothers Boak, though, is the anger and hatred -- fueled by misunderstanding, in his view -- expressed by many people toward him, his family, his crew and his industry. Boak's logging equipment has been vandalized several times, with losses exceeding $100,000.

"For three generations, I've been in the forest," says Boak. "It's the only life that I've ever known. And my children, unfortunately, that's all they've ever known, and now I got grandkids in the business."

Boak had spoken often of his two sons, John and Bill, who co-manage the operation with him, and this was the first time I'd heard him express any regret about their coming into the business.

"Well, in a way it is [unfortunate]," he says. "They already had a logging outfit, you might say. With the girls it was a different story. All the girls worked in our office, then went on to do their own things. The boys were just hung up with logging and they loved to log and were born to log, I guess. So they're there, but there are a lot better opportunities.

"There is a lot squeezing you in the timber industry. You've got people breaking your windows, calling you names," he says.

"I hope to see the day when people will say `Thank you for growing this timber. Thank you for growing the wood that we need to build our houses and schools and businesses.'"

Jim Hight is a freelance writer based in Arcata. He can be reached at