on the cover / By Heidi Walters

Save the Trees!

A plan to build a water tank in Rohner Park Forest has awakened the Friendly City’s inner treehugger

(July 17, 2008)  Engineering consultants to the City of Fortuna have recommended that a new, 2-million-gallon water tank be built in the city’s Rohner Park Forest. It would mean cutting at least 69 trees — many of them towering, 100-year-old second-growth redwoods and firs — and 18 gigantic old-growth stumps that have become raised islands of hoary forest themselves over the years, populated with leather ferns and huckleberry.

The consultants say building on the forest site is the cheapest, most practical option for replacing two old storage tanks on Stewart Street — which serve an area including downtown — one of which is 102 years old and has been leaking for at least a quarter century.

GALLERY >

The proposed new tank is just one of many much-needed improvements to the town’s aging, leaky water system. And nobody disagrees that the water system needs improving. But a surprising outcry from Fortuna’s residents — a hundred of whom packed a workshop on the project in May, and 800-plus more of whom (including some visitors) have signed a petition to keep the tank out of the park — has made the city pause to consider alternatives to the forest site. Now, the city’s staff, and ultimately its council, will be forced to weigh the value of cost-savings — always a point of pride in frugal Fortuna — against something less tangible: the intrinsic biological and, yes, emotional value of live, standing trees and historic, life-giving stumps.

Right away you might think you sniff an irony here. Fortuna, mill town. Fortuna, rodeo town. Dairy town. Resource-appreciation town, and hardly the land of the earth-muffin treesitter. Ah, how little you know of the Friendly City.

First of all, how many of you even knew that Fortuna has a community forest, similar to Eureka’s Sequoia Park Forest and Arcata’s Community Forest? That it has marked hiking trails, and broad dirt roads now closed to automobiles except those driven by city staff? That, as in those other community forests, people used to be able to drive right on into the woods to set up camp or spread out the picnic blanket? That there used to be a Boy Scout camp up in there? That in the spring the leafy floor of the Rohner Park Forest is alight with the three-petal faces of Trillium flowers — white in their youth, deep pink in old age? Of course, many Fortunans know these things.

The redwood sorrel is in bloom now, pink flowers staring up through the green mingling of poison oak and ferns, beneath the shading canopies of dark-trunked grand firs, Douglas firs and redwoods. The blue-bead lilies, too, are profuse — later this summer, their spiky red flowers will have become topknot clusters of gumball-blue berries, wondrously fake looking. And everywhere you look there’s a sprig of inside-out flower, tiny inverted white blooms provoking a re-examination of accepted truth.

And so it is with Fortuna. Lo-and-no-kidding, people here love their trees — but not just in the lucrative horizontal. That isn’t to say their love will save the Rohner Park Forest trees. In the end, Fortuna’s practical nature may very well choose to side with a money-based decision on that water tank. But not without a fierce re-examination of Fortuna values.

For 48 years Marian Perry has lived in a neighborhood halfway up a hill in Fortuna that blends into Rohner Park Forest. She and her partner, Mary, have walked the forest’s trails almost daily, until recent years. When Perry, a retired College of the Redwoods physical education professor, learned about the proposal to cut trees and build a water tank in her park, she raised a stink. Neil Palmer, the pharmacy manager at Redwood Memorial Hospital, joined the cause. Together they raised a wave of dissension. Palmer put a big sign on the back of his truck that spread the alarm, and he and Perry wrote guest columns and letters to the editor in several newspapers.

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