on the cover / By Heidi Walters

The man from Alabama

(June 14, 2007) 
How Tyrone Kelley’s roots influence his forest management

Photos by Heidi Walters

Six Rivers National Forest Supervisor Tyrone Kelley

GALLERY >

Laramie, Wyo., summer 1985. The bus shuddered along at a crawl and then stopped, brakes exhaling sharply — whshhhh . The driver pulled a lever, folding the door in with a thud, and stumped down the steps to the ground. A passenger, a black person, also got up and walked off the bus. And kept walking, away into that high-plains Western cowtown.

Now there was just one black person left on the bus, a college student on his first trip West. When the young man had got on the bus a whole day earlier in Tuskegee, Ala., to head across the country for a summer job with the Forest Service, the bus had been filled with black people. As the bus moved West, stop by stop all of those folks got off, and the white folks got on. The young man just sat there in wonder, watching that other guy disappear. “Why are you getting off in the middle of nowhere?” he silently asked him.

A day and a half later, of course, he was doing the same thing. The bus pulled into La Grande — propped in the high desert of northeast Oregon — and young Tyrone Kelley, son of tenant farmers from a small, rural black community, got off and walked for the first time into a small, rural white world — a setting that would become the nearly constant backdrop of the next 20 years or so of his life.

Not that he knew that, yet. It was summer. He had one more year to go at Tuskegee University for his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering. And he had come West just to see something new and earn some money counting trees for the Wallowa-Whitman National Forest’s silviculturist.

Orleans,*May 31, 2007.* The air inside the multipurpose room at Orleans Elementary School was stuffy and somebody had opened doors and windows to let the breeze in; outside, the early evening sun still held enough heat to soak the walls and earth, and a sunbaked spiciness mingled with the wet smell rising from the nearby Klamath River. A bright green canopy suffused with yellow light hung over the schoolgrounds, and the reclining hour was drawing out the birds. All around, the mountains — a densely packed diversity of alder, fir, madrone, maple and more — crowded close. Other than the birds and occasional passing cars, it was quiet — this far down Highway 96, on a weeknight, not much went on.

About 40 people had gathered inside, where sunlight slanting through windows and natural light from skylights illuminated walls covered in children’s paintings — mostly studies of birds, trees, mountains, rivers; things a kid would know best, growing up in this steep, green, isolated world. Several members of the Karuk Tribe were there. The rest of the faces were mostly some version of Caucasian transplant — aging back-to-the-landers, young farmers, loggers, foresters, retired and current Forest Service personnel, teachers, artists, environmentalists.

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 NEXT PAGE >SHARE