Converse in the North Cascades: Making a Living in the North Cascades Part I

I don’t actually know how one would go about making a living in the North Cascades, especially not these days. All I can provide is my working history here and some of my ideas about the economy in eastern Skagit County, much of which I know about through my experience of making a living here for just about my entire life.

The following is the story of how I have managed to make a living in the North Cascades over the last 30 years or so to this point. Some might find it long and rather tedious for which I apologize. I know I tend to be overly wordy but you can’t cover 30 years very well in a few paragraphs. I will break the story up into several different posts.

First though, and a bit off topic, an update on the Christmas calves and the rest of the herd. The Christmas calves seem to be doing just fine. Though the calf shed didn’t work for its intended use when the second calf was born on Christmas Eve, it has worked quite well afterward.

I have been giving Grapeleaf, the calve's mother grain to help supplement her diet because she has two calves to nurse. Grapeleaf isn’t the dominant cow in the herd so, if I just set the grain out in the open, the dominant cows would run Grapeleaf off and she wouldn’t get any. I use the calf shed to feed Grapeleaf. It didn’t take much to coax her in with the grain the first time and now she almost runs me over on the way in. Once she is in and eating, I can close the doors and keep the other cows away.

Gigi has had a solid black calf and Racer has had a solid red calf. Both are doing just fine. We have been lucky with the weather this year in that it is mild. Having calves at this time of year when their survival could be jeopardized isn’t really how I would like to do things and it is a sign of poor animal husbandry on my part. At some point in the future I hope to build a pen for the bull to keep him out of the herd until the time is right and start having calves in the early spring when there is a better guarantee on calf survival. Calf pics at the end of this post.

Back to the story at hand: I was born in Sedro-Woolley but I have lived my entire life, except for six years in the U.S. Navy, in the Marblemount/Rockport area. My very first memories are of this place and it was literally my world until I left for the Navy at the age of eighteen, just out of high school. I had read a lot about other places and I had access to a television so I wasn’t completely ignorant about the world but I hadn’t traveled much. To the north I had been to Vancouver, B.C., to the south, Northern California and the farthest east I had ever been was Idaho Falls, Idaho.

A friend of mine talked me into joining the United States Navy right out of high school. He thought it would be easy. It wasn’t. At that age, I was still extremely prone to homesickness. Boot camp drummed that out of me but it didn’t kill my sense of attachment to Marblemount and the North Cascades. Mentally I learned to make home wherever I hung my hat and wasn’t homesick after the first couple weeks of boot camp but no matter where I was, it always felt like I was marking time until I could get back home to Marblemount.

I was in Hawaii on Oahu the first three years of my enlistment. “Paradise” everyone on the mainland called it but I wasn’t there on vacation. I was working, often long hours, and all that nice tropical heat just made me sweat profusely when I was working. I was also scrimping and saving my money the first nine months there so I didn’t get out much when I had some time off.

Hawaii certainly was pretty but there was a lot going on under the surface that you didn’t pick up until you had been there a while. There was a lot of poverty among the native Hawaiians and local people (local referring to someone born and raised there but not of original Hawaiian stock). The whole time I was there, there was a steady stream of local people who would have loved to stay in Hawaii where they were born but they were leaving for the mainland because they couldn’t get adequate work. Tourism, a huge employer in Hawaii, provided many jobs but it didn’t seem to be enough to help a lot of the local people I saw heading for the mainland for better economic opportunities.

I finished the active duty part of my enlistment and headed home. When I got home, I spent about a month unemployed but there was a lot going on. There were lots of logging outfits and mills operating and it wasn’t too hard to find a job. The first job I had was helping to build a shake mill, employing some of the metal working skills I had learned in the navy. The pay was something around $7.00 and hour, which was decent for 1987.

When the job building the mill petered out, I got a logging job as a chokerman, setting chokers (if that wasn’t obvious from the title). This work was hard and very dangerous. Growing up in the area, I had known a lot of people who had been hurt or killed in the woods so I wasn’t exactly ignorant of what I was in for. I am named after an uncle who was killed in the woods.

My very first day we were working off a road that a man had been killed on the previous year and the crew talked about it all the way to the job site. It felt like I was going to my doom. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, while we were working, one of the guys accidentally stepped on my hand. He weighed over two hundred pounds and was wearing cork boots with soles studded with spikes to add traction for walking on logs. My eyes watered from the pain but I didn’t yell or cry even though I wanted to. You are under intense scrutiny when you are the new guy and it isn’t a good thing to look like a wimp.

I stuck it out. The starting pay was about $7.50 and, in a couple of months, I got a raise to over $10.00 and hour. A couple more months and I was making $12.00 an hour. This was a very comfortable income for the time and, this, coupled with the savings I had from my time in the navy, allowed me to buy my property, or at least get a huge head start on buying it. The work was fairly steady, only a few short layoffs for fire season, snow and road frost. And the communities in the area, while not wealthy, were at least robust and vibrant.

It was at about this time that I got the kernel of the notion of my high lake project, to systematically go to every high lake from the Canadian border south to the Suiattle River and from the east side of Baker Lake to the crest of the Cascades. I started to systematically plan trips to lakes that I thought might have fish and walk into them.

But my time in the navy had seeded in me a curiosity to see more of the world, the Pacific, in particular. I had been on shore duty in Hawaii but had heard a lot of stories from people and had been exposed to a lot of different Asia/Pacific cultures. So I re-enlisted and, after a short time in Florida, was sent to Guam for three years.

From late 1988 to late 1991 I was on the USS Proteus, a submarine tender. I improved my metal working skills quite a bit and did three WestPac (Western Pacific) cruises, visiting Hong Kong, Thailand, Korea, Japan and the Phillipines. Ironically, Guam, where my ship was stationed, is considered a WestPac stop for ships stationed on the west coast and in Hawaii.

So I saw quite a few places in the Pacific. I also saw places where people were truly impoverished. The Phillipines and Thailand stand out in my mind. I didn’t see a lot of malnourished people in those places but nobody seemed to have much beyond their basic needs. There were poor people in the other places we went but they weren’t as visible as in the Phillipines and Thailand where the majority of people were in this situation. When I came back to the states in late 1991, I had a completely different perspective on what it was to be poor.

I had planned on getting out of the navy in late 1990 but about that time Operation Desert Storm happened. It seemed kind of cowardly to me to get out of the service right when there was a war going on so I stayed in for another year. My ship wasn’t really involved in the operation other than playing some minor support roles. We did participate in the relief effort in the Phillipines after Mount Pinatubo erupted later in the year.

I entertained the thought of joining the Merchant Marine and sailing part of the year while spending my time off at home working on my high lake project. I took some steps toward that goal while I was still in the navy but it didn’t come to anything.

I also briefly entertained making a career of the navy but quickly abandoned that. Fresh out of the navy again in late 1991, I got the idea that I would write a book and make a living as a writer. I spent a couple months cranking out a fiction novel about sasquatch, a subject that had fascinated me since I was ten. Not surprisingly, that didn’t come to anything either. So I went back to work in the woods logging.

The second time around in the woods was about the same as the first, hard and dangerous. The wages were good, $14.00 to about $18.00 an hour in 1992, and the work was steady. There were interruptions like a week or two off for fire season, but I didn’t get hassled about unemployment benefits because I still had a job, it was just stopped momentarily. There was almost always work that needed to be done and there were always funds available to pay me and my work mates to do it. I paid off my place and started making plans to build a house.

I still entertained ideas of doing something other than logging, selling photographs of all the beautiful places I was going to in the mountains was high on the list, but it also seemed like I was traveling path I had seen a lot of others go down in the timber industry, work on the ground until I got too worn out, then work into a machine of some kind.

You could still get killed on a machine and the work was still hard on the body but it wasn’t as physically demanding as working on the ground. I had known of many others who had taken this career path. They weren’t rich by any stretch of the imagination but most appeared to lead a comfortable existence as long as they had been wise with their money. I was also fortunate enough to work for an outfit that was big enough to have health insurance, retirement and two weeks paid vacation, almost unheard of in the world of mom-and-pop, also known as gyppo, logging outfits that were the norm in those days. The gyppos didn’t have the benefits but they often paid better wages.

Then the Northwest Forest Plan happened. Bill Clinton, who enacted it had been elected in 1992 but nothing happened right away. The company I worked for had several year’s worth of federal timber sales and was doing a lot of contract logging on private land. But by the end of 1994, the federal sales were running out. I wouldn’t pretend to know about the finances of my particular outfit but I suspect the margins weren’t good enough on the private land for them to keep operating. They quit logging and I lost my job.

I evaluated my options. The remaining logging outfits around all paid living wages but most didn’t have any benefits. I figured this was as good a time as any to pursue my idea of making a living from photography of my high lake project. One of the provisions of the Northwest Forest Plan was to provide some education for displaced timber workers, Timber Retraining Benefits or TRB. I signed up for it.

The choices for TRB were somewhat limited and I didn’t have a choice for photography classes alone. Since Marblemount was surrounded by a lot of federal land, and the government seemed to be going to place less emphasis on resource extraction, I decided to go for a degree in environmental science. I was only allowed two years training but there was a two year program, Environmental Conservation Technology (ENVCT) at Skagit Valley College, a local community college, which trained people to work as technicians in the field of environmental science. This seemed to be a perfect fit and I also managed to get into a couple of photography classes.

The ENVCT program was one of the hardest at Skagit Valley College at that time. I learned about geology, geomorphology, biology, ecology and ecosystems and forestry among other things, along with plant and animal identification.

I did pretty well in the program. And, while I learned a lot, I was also familiar with a lot of the subject matter, having spent almost my entire life running around hunting and fishing and exploring and observing. This made the learning process a lot easier. I remember learning in wildlife biology, one of the tougher classes, that ungulates like deer and cattle have all sorts of adaptations to deal with the toxins found in the plants they eat. I recalled, long before ever taking this class, seeing a deer scarf down a bunch of elderberry leaves which I had learned, as a child, were poisonous. At that time I wondered why the deer didn’t die. The ungulate class provided the answer and it was easy to remember for a test.

I was also introduced to the concept of a watershed and decided to expand my high lake project to include the entire Skagit River watershed. Along with this, I developed an interest in amphibians and started making observations and taking notes on what I saw during my travels.

I earned my Associate’s Degree in 1997 and got a job with the Aquatics crew at North Cascades National Park. I had actually worked a couple months for the park during my summer break from school the previous year and this made it easier for me to get rehired.

We worked in the park surveying high lakes and streams and also did a lot of contract work surveying streams for the U.S. Forest Service. The work was fun but it didn’t pay very well. I think I started at about $8.00 an hour. And it was seasonal. I only worked about four or five months that year. On top of that, even though I lived near Marblemount, right at the edge of the park, I often had to drive to headquarters in Sedro-Woolley, nearly 50 miles away, in my own vehicle and at my own expense because that was my duty station. Historically low gas prices helped but this was still a big expense.

Over the years I had known a lot of folks who worked for the Park and Forest Service on trail crews and in other areas but I had never tried to get any of this work myself because it was so seasonal. Ironically I now found myself doing work that I had spurned before.

At the end of the summer I was laid off from the Park. To make ends meet during the time I was laid off, I got a logging job. It paid $14.00 and hour and was only 28 miles from where I lived. I stayed at it until the following summer when I went back to work for the Park.