the town dandy / By Hank Sims

Armistice Day

(Feb. 8, 2007)  Hardly anyone seems to be paying much attention, but these are re-markable times in Humboldt County. For at least the last 17 years - maybe more like 40 years - there’s been one single overarching theme in our small, isolated, island-like society, and that’s been the fact that the hippies and the rednecks have always seen just about everything completely differently. They never got along. They couldn’t get along. They came from different worlds, and by and large they stayed in different worlds.

They segregated themselves by town, assuring themselves and each other that they’d never have to cross paths in day-to-day life. About 30 years ago, Arcata was ceded to the students and the back-to-the-landers. (Liberators? Occupiers?) The old guard retrenched in the Eel River Valley. And there each of them lived, separate but equal, lobbing rockets at one another from a distance whenever tensions ran high.Vietnam. Roadside spraying. The marijuana industry. And, off and on the Timber Wars. Forest policy is still the single greatest social fault line in the county, and its painfully unsettled nature manifests itself in all kinds of ways, from Redwood Summer to Paul Gallegos.

That’s a thumbnail sketch. It’s always been a bit more complicated than that, but not much more. Yes, Darryl Cherney could write hollerin’ paeans to the Fortuna Rodeo, or set down a funny and true sketch of an unemployed logger who takes up marijuana farming, and mean every word. Yes, the hippies and the rednecks have achieved a sort of truce in Southern Humboldt. But the cultural divide in Humboldt County has been very real ever since the first day-glo VW bus pulled into town, and ever since it has been the master narrative of the place, the big story from which all the smaller stories derive.

As I said, though, these are remarkable times. Suddenly, a startling new feature has entered the political landscape: Just about everyone in Humboldt County - old guard and new - despises, detests or is just plain fed up with Maxxam, the Houston-based financial conglomerate that took control of the Pacific Lumber Company in 1986. This is a big, big change.

For the last couple of months, I’ve been occasionally talking with a former Pacific Lumber employee. This guy was one of the 90 people the company laid off in December, one of the people who had been promised a generous severance package to help him get back on his feet. I gave him a call earlier this week, after the Times-Standard reported that those 90 severance packages had been suspended following Pacific Lumber’s declaration of bankruptcy.

The man, who asked that his name not yet be used “out of respect to the people still there,” was more than pissed. He was livid - outraged. He’d been at Pacific Lumber for over 10 years. Now he was hiring an attorney, and thinking about taking his fight public and encouraging his colleagues to do the same.

Last week, he said, he was called to an exit interview at PL headquarters in Scotia, where he was given the expected news. From here on, he was on his own. There would be no severance package. All the good press last month, all the commendations that the company had received for taking care of its people - it was all bullshit from the beginning, he figured, and they must have known it was bullshit at the time.

“Those fuckers knew,” he said to me. “They knew. Maybe not the rank-and-file workers, but people like Mr. O’Brien [Pacific Lumber’s president]. And if he didn’t know, he’s not any good at his job.”

1 2 3 NEXT PAGE >SHARE