City people think they are being clever when they dump animals off in the boonies and drive away. “Clever” wouldn’t be the word I would use. What an asshole thing to do! I got a taste of the consequences of animal abandonment one year when some jerk dropped off a cat at the bottom of our driveway. This black and white male cat was a beast. He wouldn’t let anyone come near him and sightings eventually became as rare as Bigfoot. As a year or so rolled by, we weren’t sure what had happened, but eventually we would spot the cat farther up our driveway, closer and closer to the house.
The time for action came when the feral feline started to get into epic fights with my domestic cats. That’s when I drew the line. My number-one cat, Carpenter, had been messed up and I wouldn’t stand for it. To motivate myself, I named the cat Perkis, after a jerky producer I worked with once and formulated a plan of attack. The cat was mostly just hungry, so I knew food would work. I put a fresh bowl of cat food at the ass end of a have-a-heart trap and caught the bastard in twenty minutes.
My trusty Forest Service truck was running and ready. I threw the trap in the bed of the truck, drove to the edge of my local city at dusk, found the nearest park and set Perkis free. Two can play that game, city folks!
Aside from annoying abandoned kitty cats, my property has been a crossroads for wild creatures great and small.
“Hey, there’s that severed deer leg you were looking for,” I said calmly to Ida one day while walking our driveway.
Ida skidded to a halt, staring at the severed leg in front of us. “You think a mountain lion did it?”
“Or a really pissed-off squirrel.”
Ida and I pondered the image of death on our property and its implications. If a wild animal can rip the leg off a healthy, strong deer, surely they could mangle either of us unrecognizably.
“Hey, so, maybe we should pick up the pace,” Ida offered cheerily, and marched off with one eye fixed over her shoulder.
Not long after this, I saw a mountain lion run in front of my car at dusk. When deer run, they’re very stiff – they tend to jab into the ground as they run. This creature, roughly the same color and size as a deer, was very fluid as it crossed the driveway in one leap. Deer also don’t have long tails.
According to Wilderness Survival 101, if you are attacked by a mountain lion you are supposed to fight back. As opposed to a grizzly bear protecting her cub, mountain lions have been known to cut and run if you make a serious effort to equally mangle them. So they say. Frankly, I don’t want to test anybody’s wildlife theory by fighting any large predator. I’m gonna do my best to stay out of their way and let my walking stick do the talking.
Living in the country, you do have your vandals. Smashing rural mailboxes with baseball bats has been a bored local teenager’s favorite pastime for generations. Looking at the trash strewn about the bottom of my driveway one morning, I assumed that the local kids went crazy and had an impromptu party.
When I got closer, I realized that the damage wasn’t caused by humans – this was done by a big ol’ bear. My metal trash can had been upended like a Big Gulp and shaken empty for a hundred feet up the driveway. The bear had sampled a little bit of everything along the way – boxes were shredded and large bite marks ringed a smashed tuna can. I knew this was the work of a bear because when it got to the end of the garbage/food it promptly squatted and took an enormous, berry-dense crap in the middle of our driveway. Does a bear actually shit in the woods? This one sure did. You needed a high-clearance vehicle to get over this load.
As a kid, I watched all of the Walt Disney Daniel Boone outdoor-type TV shows. Invariably, no matter what the show, a cute skunk would waddle onto the scene and cause lighthearted mayhem until it was removed safely and set free back into the wild. You had to have it.
I guess it was time for our own skunk adventure. As I was watching television downstairs with Ida one night, we heard what sounded like an animal trying to force its way through our cat door upstairs. Most confrontational affairs, particularly ones involving animals, I leave to Ida – who rolled her eyes at me and began up the steps. Before she could get halfway, a skunk stopped at the landing above her. Both froze. Then the skunk spun around to tail-first mode and started to slowly retreat. Ida eventually grabbed a few pots and the ensuing clatter chased the skunk back outside.
When I was recounting this to a neighbor, he laughed but also felt that some schooling was needed.
“Son, funny story. Funny as a rubber crutch. But why didn’t you just shoot the damn thing with your .22?”
I assumed he meant a .22-caliber gun, like the one I used for target practice at camp as a kid. “I don’t have a .22,” I said.
My neighbor looked at me, his smile quickly fading. “What guns ya got?”
“I don’t have any guns.”
“You don’t have any guns?!” the man exclaimed. “Lord, son, you’re four guns shy of a plan.”
“What plan would that be?” I asked, genuinely curious.
“A plan. For everything. You need a .22 for small critters (like skunk), you need a rifle with a scope for distance, you need a shotgun for ‘close work,’ and you need a handgun for personal protection.”
I nodded my head as he sped up in pace and conviction. “Four guns shy of a plan,” I muttered. “Four guns shy. Okay.”
“Welcome to the country, son.”
Before I could buy a .22 – or any gun – I handled the problem the Detroit way. Coming home one night during the ongoing Cat Door Wars, I was about to turn into the driveway when a skunk waddled right in front of my SUV. I made an honest effort to avoid impact, but it was too late – the skunk was destroyed.
My gun-toting neighbor collared me at a function a few months later. “Hey, Bruce, did that .22 solve yer skunk problem?” he asked, smiling assuredly.
“No, my Ford Explorer did. I haven’t seen him since.”
WALK THIS WAY
Whenever I tell people where I live, they tend to nod their heads and say, “Or-e-gon. Sure looks beautiful.” Being a snotty person who doesn’t want any more humans invading, my response is always the same: “Oh, you’d hate it up there. It rains every day.”
Even though it does rain in Oregon, the amount varies greatly, depending on where you live. My area, unbeknownst to me when I moved here, is known as the “Sunny Applegate Valley.” Geographically, it’s in a “rain shadow,” protected by the mighty Siskiyou Mountains, which run east and west – thereby blocking a ton of crappy weather coming north from California.
I always wondered why a retired airline pilot would live in my neighborhood. The answer came in what he saw from the air during the winter months: the entire Rogue Valley – including the airport – was fogged in solid, while the Applegate Valley, being elevated and protected, was clear as a bell. The bottom line was that we had a lot of clear days to get outside and I took full advantage.
A pleasant discovery was literally in my backyard. The Sterling Mine Ditch Trail, a little-used recreational gem dating back to 1877, runs across BLM land. Gold was discovered in nearby Sterling Creek in 1854. Hydraulic mining became all the rage, whereby you channel water downhill and force it into smaller and smaller tubes, until the subsequent pressure of water becomes powerful enough to rip entire creek beds and hillsides apart.
A very pleasant discovery.
For the Sterling Mine, water was diverted from the Little Applegate River along an earthen ditch, then diverted down to Sterling Creek, where the destruction began. The area is very lovely now, but twenty-foot-high piles of river rock, randomly stacked up during the mining process, are still evident.
The Sterling Ditch was in use until the thirties and now humans can enjoy the fruits of some very obvious labor. Around four hundred workers, mostly Chinese, dug a three-foot-deep ditch at a 1 percent grade (just enough to move the water) that weaves in and out of serpentine hills for about twenty-five miles. It was quite a feat and I thank the ghosts of the workers every time I take a pleasant jaunt on
the almost level trail.
Exposure to the elements comes with inherent risk. You could fall off a cliff or be attacked by a wild animal. On a really bad day, you might be mistaken for a leaping deer and shot dead by a drunk hunter. Or – perhaps worst of all – you could get Poison Oak.
I grew up exposed to Poison Ivy, the Midwest version of this dreaded plant. Let me tell you, Poison Ivy can be annoying, but Poison Oak is nothing to scoff at. By some grace of the Almighty, I am barely susceptible to it, but I have seen my wife, daughter and brother suffer the tortures of the damned from the three-leafed menace. “Leaves of three, let them be,” is what the almanacs say. No shit. If Ida even gets a small amount on her skin, it will boil and fester for weeks.
Brother Don and I finished an epic walk one day. Don, with no prior exposure to Poison Oak, proceeded to jump directly into the Jacuzzi. Poison Oak spreads through its oil, and if you want to avoid getting a bad case of it you need to lather up with a product like Techu before and after hikes to keep the oils from settling.
A Jacuzzi has just the opposite effect – it spreads the oils. Don was having the time of his life, unwittingly coating his entire body with Poison Oak – and getting it deep into every fleshy crevasse. I’m not sure if it was the positioning of the Jacuzzi jets or the poorly timed placement of his hands (only Don knows for sure), but for whatever reason the rash appeared to be worst around his groin. In years to come, whenever the subject arose, which was often, I referred to it as “the day Don got Ditch Dick.”
Don would have much preferred looking for Bigfoot. There is a trail about forty-five minutes from my house, off of which the Forest Service built an enormous trap in the seventies to catch him. That’s right, some joker approved my dad’s taxpayer dollars (hopefully not much) to catch the elusive Sasquatch. Today, it’s nothing more than a tourist oddity off Collings Mountain Trail, near Applegate Lake.
The design, a wood and chicken wire “elevator” of sorts, was supposed to descend on a not-very-elaborate pulley system and trap the big fella inside – should he choose to enter the completely uninviting, undisguised device. To my knowledge, no Bigfoots were ever captured or killed in this trap. It was a fun, if slightly whimsical, idea, but the Forest Service was much more likely to catch a lawsuit from this rusting liability than a new species.
“WHAT’S A BLM?”
My introduction to the Bureau of Land Management came at about 9:00 one Saturday morning when a helicopter, hovering shockingly close to my house, began a heli-logging operation. I could have hit the thing with a rock it was so close.
This startling reality made me get acquainted with this heretofore-unknown government agency, lickety-split. Who was BLM and what were they up to?
The Bureau of Land Management administers 264 million acres – mostly in twelve western states. On land ownership maps, BLM areas are usually shaded in yellow. Look at a map of Nevada – it’s about 75 percent yellow. Oregon is about 50 percent federal land. BLM tends to administer lower-elevation lands while the Forest Service assumes stewardship of higher elevations.
What can be done on BLM-administered land? Plenty. They oversee timber extraction, mining, grazing, fracking, road building, et cetera. About the only thing they don’t currently allow is human habitation beyond two weeks of squatting.
BLM was my neighbor on three sides, so I started to attend meetings, symposiums and lectures on land stewardship, a subject that had always interested me. “How to use land” is also a divisive topic. Show ten people a landscape and you’ll get ten different opinions about what to do with it. The answers will range from “do nothing” to “take it all.”
Southern Oregon is an AMA, an Adaptive Management Area, something that was designated in the nineties with a revision of the Northwest Forest Plan. The AMAs recognized that not one size fits all with regard to land use, so eleven “adaptive” areas were designated to allow local and federal land managers more flexibility on approaches and decisions. The residents in our area have always been very vocal about land use issues, so our AMA focused on the ability of the public to give input and to influence decisions on the land around us.
I was thankful for this designation. It meant that locals could get on a list of proposed federal actions and we would then have ninety days to respond with what are called “Scoping Comments.”
As citizens, we aren’t scientists and we aren’t hip to how many board feet can sustainably be removed from a given slope, but just fly over Northern California, Oregon and Washington and you’ll see that some extraction policies should be revisited. Patchworks of clear cuts slash across the landscape – like a chainsaw was given to a kid with ADD and told to “go crazy.” The West has wide-open spaces and vast vistas, but it also has wide-open strip mines and vast denuded landscapes.
I like to quote a neighbor of mine, Richard, who said, “I’m not against logging; I’m against bad logging.” We all wipe our butts with toilet tissue. That redwood deck had to come from somewhere. Most of us still use an array of paper products every day. The trick is, how do you get the needed material out without wrecking everything for generations to come? We have tried a lot of different extraction methods over the years and most of those since the industrial age have been very destructive.
Back off, Mother Nature, we got this!
I decided to submit my first Scoping Comments about some upcoming actions the BLM proposed. I was loath to use any kind of “boilerplate” language offered up by local greenies and I knew that a long, bullet-listed, know-it-all letter might never be fully appreciated, so I upped the ante and submitted a short film called Shed Talk.
Most submissions about how to manage our watersheds and our wildlife are very solemn. I picture women with long, straight gray hair, tearfully drafting heartfelt suggestions on their grandfather’s manual typewriter. Shed Talk had me, dressed as Joe Local in my shed doing gags – and plenty of them. Why shouldn’t spit takes and double entendre be used to make a serious point? People can be very bitchy and preachy in the world of environmental protection – maybe a little sugar will help the Scoping Comments go down?
I was told after-the-fact that my Scoping Comments were shown to a meeting of some seventy-odd land managers at the Medford BLM Headquarters. The gathering wasn’t to honor how amazing my cheap jokes were – and they were amazing – but it was to exemplify to the managers that different people are living in the backcountry now: people with cameras and Web sites and Twitter accounts. Citizens are now armed – not with pitchforks or shotguns – but with the ability to communicate quickly, easily and effectively to the outside world.
Most people have never heard of the BLM. Local greenies here in Oregon call them the Bureau of Land Mis-management. Others dismissively wave them off as “Feds.” Opinions vary wildly about whether the BLM folks are saints or sinners. I suppose they are a little bit of both.
In my personal experience, I find the BLM to be a decent bunch of local folks who are ultimately going to do what the bureaucrats in D.C. want them to do. If the current administration is very resource-extraction friendly, you can bet the BLM will be there to facilitate the removal of trees and they’ll “frack” themselves blue.
Conversely, under the Clinton administration the Northwest Forest Plan they introduced pretty much changed the way BLM had been doing business for decades – and it caused a stir in my community. The issue was and is that small hamlets in rural Oregon and elsewhere in the West are virtually landlocked – surrounded by federal land – and can’t grow like traditional towns. Because they can’t expand, they rely heavily on subsidies from timber and other extractive industries for schools, roads, fire/police.
The Northwest Forest Plan removed a large portion of “harvestable” land from the chopping block and provided for a ten-year subsidy to replace lost timber revenue, thereby encouraging rural communities to adapt and diversify their local economy.
I’m not sure if it’s human nature or not, but precious few of these towns used the deca
de to reimagine themselves and now they are in an even worse financial situation. The solution? Cut more trees, of course! Sheesh! As long as there is an overabundance of humans on this planet, we will not soon see the end of these use/conserve debates.
Shed Talk II is already in the works.
12
WHAT’S MY NAME?
After shooting out of the country for what seemed like a decade, I was desperate to work stateside again. I didn’t want to travel for work ever again. B movie globe-trotting had almost cost me an arm and I was eager for a return to the tetanus-free valleys of southern Oregon.
Fortunately, state governments across the country had gotten sick and tired of American movies being shot in foreign warehouses and had instituted various incentive packages. My home state of Oregon was offering a 10 percent rebate incentive to entice prodigal productions to come back home. Better than a sharp stick in the eye.
Mike Richardson, the founder and president of Dark Horse Comics and Entertainment (The Mask, Hellboy), was another Oregon resident and had already taken advantage of the rebate package. We’d known each other since his company produced the first Army of Darkness comic books back in 1992 and we were eager to work together – particularly on a homegrown project.
Mike had been friends with a writer named Mark Verheiden since high school and the two collaborated on several projects going back to the very early days of Dark Horse. After the Army of Darkness comic, which Mark wrote, Dark Horse and Verheiden joined forces with Renaissance Pictures (i.e., Sam and Rob) to produce the movie Timecop in 1994. You see how Hollywood works? It’s really just a big, tangled web of schmoes who keep running into each other over and over.
I hadn’t been directly involved with Mike and Mark on a film project yet – until Mark remembered The Adventures of Alan Ladd.
Alan Ladd was a well-known radio and movie actor in the forties and fifties, best known for playing the hero in the classic Western Shane. He’s not as well known for the nine-issue DC Comics series that featured Alan Ladd as himself in a variety of adventures.
Hail to the Chin Page 11