Mad River: Hard Times In Humboldt County

Oh I'll say bye. I'll say bye. See you. Hey... Am І fellow, are you informed of this... At North Coast of California, 300 miles of rugged coasts stretching from Pointerina to the Oregon border. Not much in the way of population up here, just wild rivers, timber, fish, crabs and rain, mostly tempered. Cumbled County is in the middle of the richest timberland in the world. If we make it through December, got plans to be in a warmer town, come summertime, maybe

even California. If we make it through December, we'll be fine. For the past 15 years, people have been fighting over Humboldt County, timber. All started on the government established the Redwood National Park here in 1967. On one side, you've got environmentalists dedicated to saving the Redwoods. On the other, you've got timber companies, determined to protect their businesses. We have a responsibility to run a profitable operation, and we have a limited amount of resources in this area. We come along in the space of 100 years and cut down and alter what's taken literally thousands of years to develop. The logging practices were bad, and the reforestation or restocking was terrible.

Caught in the middle of thousands of timber workers had depend on the trees for jobs. They say, yeah, we need to spend more money on the environment, as long as you spend it. Don't you take any more out of my check? It's been a decade and a half of nonstop turmoil and confusion up here. The only thing you can count on, for sure, is that the mills keep closing. People go on losing their jobs. We're looking at a massive layoff in this area of all kinds of fields, where there's already 500 other guys, you know, knocked out of their jobs. 1800. 1800 in this in Humboldt County. That closures play home with people's lives. When you lose your job, you stand to lose everything. Your family, your future, your home, your self-respect, and even your life. Alcoholism, family violence, and divorce are all on the upswing in Humboldt County.

We'll decide as twice the national average. The Mad River Plays is owned by Simpson Timber Company, the largest private landowner in Humboldt County. The hills worked at the Mad River Playa Wood Mill for 11 years. It was in my mind that I really didn't want to be in a mill in the first place, and so through all of them 11 years, I've always had the idea of, uh, 25 miles, and it's just kind of weird that all of a sudden, it does happen. The dream is neat, the reality is monster. About a month back, Simpson told a 300 mill hand that they've ignored and closed the mill

permanently. Why? Same old problem. Not enough timber. The pioneers who came here in the mid 1800s found trees as far as the eye could see. They used to well wouldn't have them the old time as used to say. Coast redwoods over 300 feet, 400 tons, and 2000 years old. The world's never seen timber like we had here. The trees were so big it took pioneer loggers a couple of years to work up enough courage to try to cut one down. That was in 1854, and we've been cutting ever since. Well, Numbering hitful swinging on bulk during the 1950s housing boom, the man for Timber was

high. Humboldt had the trees and there was plenty of work. By 1960 the Timber started to run out. Got labor costs and keep up production, the big companies began to automate their mill. Smaller local outfits couldn't compete anymore. Mills of men closing here ever since. From 500 operating mills in 1959, we're down to 25 today. The unemployment rate has twice the national average in climbing out of sight. Why there isn't enough Timber is the hottest political issue in the history of Humboldt County. Mill and most Timber workers say it's because of the Redwood National Park. A government just expanded the park by 48,000 acres. There was an up-old growth Redwood in fur in the park expansion area to keep the local

mills like Mad River Gorg another five years. Well, I don't know about this. The expansion of the park costs 6,000 Timber workers their jobs. Bill is one of the six thousand. After 11 years of Mad River ply, he's got a couple more weeks on that side. Call me up on Karen, news time, news weather. Goal puts down November 2nd, permanent. He's going to just kick back for a while, I guess, and go from there.

Go from there, huh? Yeah, interested in that there. Hey, yeah, how's it going? Pretty good. If we make it through December, I'd say right around the 1st of November. Everything's going to be all right, I know. It's the coldest time of winter. And I shiver when I see the fallen snow. Unless Bill leaves the area, he doesn't have much chance of finding work. That's leaving will be hard. Bill was raised in Blue Lake, married Kerry, high school sweetheart, and went to work in the mill at 18. Maybe even California. If we make it through December, we'll be fine. I think what mostly Bill and I think about when we think about the recession

and the lack of being able to get what you might need, is you're just going to have to think about what you can do at certain times to prepare for a head. Humble County's always had a high rate of unemployment. I think that a lot of it has to do with the timber industry going down just in Bill's mill, there's how many 400 and some that are going to be off. And you know, you have to figure, though, that you knew this was going to happen. Because red retreats just don't grow as fast as they've been cutting them down. What is it? It's a telemetry. Why are there so many lights in here? Gosh. I don't know what's going to happen.

I try not to think too much about it. What are they going to do but go on welfare or try and find some other type of job which there aren't any. You know, what else is there? They would have replanted maybe 30, 40, 50 years ago, there would be second roads could be harvested right now. So in the past, the general government didn't really take care of the responsibility as far as jobs for the future were concerned. Anytime you reduce the workforce and the amount of jobs, then you definitely hurt the union. The amount of union, the amount of people in the union, the involvement is a strength of the union. One of the workforce is reduced and the jobs are gone. I've been asked questions pertaining to unemployment and replacements. I was going to work whether we're going to have 300 people over to the unemployment office on Monday after the flat blows down.

Most of you people I know have already registered for unemployment, but I think it's any audit. 300 people having to go over there and all report there one day just mass-confusing at the unemployment office. We'll see what we can do about getting something done in all of those lives. Used to be the ups and downs in Humboldt didn't seem so bad because you were all in it together. And you could always count on the trees. They'd always been here and it seemed like they always would be. It's been like that on the North Coast for over 100 years. For a long time life didn't change much. But the big trees are mostly gone now.

Cut down or preserved in the park. And people are scared. Without timber and jobs is there a future for working people in Humboldt County? Like right now my job is threatened and now I think about it a lot and what I can do. What can I do? I mean this is what I'm doing now. This is how I make my living. Because it comes down to a thing if I got two kids and I divorced enough. And if I didn't have that I'd be on welfare or something. Susan Fisher is one of three women working in the woods for since in timber.

Powder monkey is somebody that works with explosives. We drill holes about 24 feet deep, stuffing with dynamite, blow up the rock, crush it and put it on the logging road. It's just a network of roads all over up behind Corbell where I work. There's just no way you're going to go in and put roads in there. And moe all these trees down like that and not have it make a difference. Of course it's going to cost some erosion. It has to. There's just no way it couldn't. There's no more trees to hold the dirt there. I mean the rain's going to come and it's just going to wash the whole hillside down. And then within three to five years the foliage will start growing back up again. But by then the soil erosion is pretty bad. I feel kind of guilty a lot. You know, because guy right about logging. I think about it a lot and the moe when I get up I go, God I'm going to go out there and log. And I know that I'm told certain things on one hand like the trees are going to be gone in ten years.

And then on the other hand, oh well you know darn well those trees are going to be gone in ten years. Right I was going to be you know how they're reinforced and you know how they're doing this now. You don't know what to believe you just go to work in the morning. And hope for the information you have is right and you're doing the right thing like trying to keep working. Fire the hole! They don't select it because they don't do anything like that. But they just go in there and they moe it down and it looks like shit. They get done and there's nothing left. The rape is done and it is rape. In the old days it took time and a lot of men to cut haul, mill and ship timber for market. A crew of eight men working twelve hours a day took up to a week to chop down one giant redwood.

The work was back breaking, dangerous and slow. And cutting down one of the big trees was the easy part. How did you haul out 400 tons of tree after you cut it down? Even cut into sections the giant redwoods were too big for auction teams to handle. In the 1860s a man named John Dober invented a steam machine for pulling off. Called it the Dober donkey. And the days of horse and oxen logging on the north coast were gone forever. The man were replaceable too. The chainsaw came along and one man could cut more timber in a few hours. And it had taken an entire crew days to do. Some old time and say that was the ruin of the woods right there. If it weren't for the chainsaw there'd still be temper and job. Wasn't long before the tractor hit the wood.

Cat could cut more road in one day than twenty men with pick and shovel and cut in a month. All that and all off. There wasn't much a cat couldn't do except ask for a raise. The machines kept getting bigger and the trees got smaller and smaller. Now the spindly second growth is harvested by giant loaders that tossed the trees around like toothpicks. Pecker pole sluggers call them. All that machinery in the woods and mills was good for the companies because fewer man could cut and mill more trees for less money. The trees couldn't grow anywhere near as fast as we cut them down. Well okay we still got, I walked that ground out there on the a-line this morning.

There's still quite a bit to cut out in there. Heck they missed a whole bunch. Almost everywhere. All over they went through there like a scalded dog instead of taking a clean. Land Sherman is an independent. Up here that's a gypo or timber beast. Like most gypo's, Glenn started out with nothing but a chainsaw. Now he's got his own company. Sherman logging was about 40 people working for him and a million dollars worth of machinery. Yeah Chris go ahead. As far as Glenn is concerned the park and regulations are two sides of the same coin. They're both government interference. He's worried about losing everything he's worked for in the last 30 years. This is in spite of how it cuts real business. Very very competitive. And so you cut all the corners you can and then early going when there were no rules, no regulations, no controls. Hell it was an accepted practice, nobody cared.

Now all of a sudden everybody's gotten into the act. We've got to protect this and protect that. It wasn't protected the first time through. It blocked clear to the cricks and up to cricks and down to cricks and across to cricks and everything else. And funny part of it is the salmon are still here, the deer are still here, the bear are still here and by God even man is still here. There were no regulations before and in spite of what man has done, in spite of what man has done, God only knows they didn't try to help these trees grow. They did everything in their power to display them and they're still here. They can cuss the big corporations but with the rules and regulations that are being applied at this point in time, only a big corporation can live up to it. Woodhills got the backing the finances to do all this monkey motion that we're going through.

It's counterproductive or nonproductive and these people so far have gone along with it, which is really amazing to me. So I was ahead of one of these big companies, I wouldn't even let them on my property. And I wouldn't. The first one that came through it caught people first. I bet you the second one wouldn't come, I might go too but that's just the way I feel. And it's the same way with the Redwood Park. You can't take the finest timber producing ground in the world and lock it up into preserve and continue to grow trees. It's just a massive land grab. A lot of people will have to leave the area. Well, will they leave?

You might have another apple in here. Yes, the controls and regulations don't stop the cutting completely. The controls and regulations will run the cost of that board so high that nobody will be able to buy and we're to that point now. But I just don't think that people can continue to exist the way to grow the way they're growing without some kind of breakdown somewhere. Where is it all going to end? We have to find some kind of, you know, and I don't know what's going to happen. We're out of gas, we're out of oil, we're out of minerals, we're out of timber, we're out of everything. And yet all this vast acreage is set aside that nobody uses. I don't think it's just logging that they're against. I think what they want is just to have a portion of the land untouched, you know. Just to be there to have people go, you know, and experience the land.

It's like, it's hard to say, well, here it is, this is our national park. When I'm sitting here, you know, getting ready to lose my job. And when a thousand people that I know have lost their job because of the same thing, I mean to me they're trees, right? And they're dying and they're going to fall and wash away and rot and return to the soil. But I don't see all the big hoody do that was made over the tall trees where they had connections with the Redwood plant. Well the thing is it would have been in about five years that they would have had to stop logging here. Anyways, yeah, that 9600 acres could have only provided four or five more years worth of logging. This is the Redwood Park expansion area. About 39,000 of the 48,000 acres have been clear cut logged. It's hard to believe that the biggest political battle in Humboldt County history was fought over an area that's mostly stumps and bare ground. Why would the Redwood Park even want this logged over land?

The reason is the clear cut cat logging the companies were doing here. It was eroding the soil off the hillside so fast that it was killing the tallest trees in the world in the Redwood Park a couple miles downstream. You were seeing like the water erodes the soil away from the roots of the Redwood or it gives too much moisture to the Redwood. But isn't a natural erosion going to happen anyway with the trees such as the tall trees that are growing along Redwood Creek? Regardless of the logging that was going on. Well, there is going to be some erosion but there's an increased erosion because of the logging. The slopes are now so bare that there's nothing holding them together. No shrubs or anything. And a lot more sediment is being taken down into the creek. On this slope over here is two examples of the type of clear cut logging they were doing in the last ten years. The upper slope is where they did high lead logging and here is where they had a tower at the top of the hill and they would move the logs up along cables. So the only way that you had on the land was from the logs.

If that at all sometimes they could raise it actually off the land and move them up that way. It's much better for the land to do high lead logging except for it's more expensive. That's why cat logging is more popular. This involved heavy tractors coming in and dragging out heavy logs when there's like two to three thousand miles of those tractor scars all throughout the park expansion area. So when it rains here it's going to be following those pathways down into the creek. It rains heavy in Humboldt County, 60 inches a year and more in places. But cat logging heavy rains and steep hills together and you've got terrible erosion. Mud and debris in the millions of tons washing to the streams and creeks and clog them up. The tallest trees in the world grow along the banks of Redwood Creek.

The park was expanded to save the giant redwoods from destruction by flooding. Redwood Creek used to be clear and deep and filled with salmon and steelhead. Now it's filled with mud and the fish are gone. Clear cut logging ruined Redwood Creek. Since jobs here depend on trees and fish, logging that destroys creeks and trees is economic suicide. Come on you guys. Oh yeah, nobody's here.

Oh yeah, nobody's here. Look at it above your head. Look at it, it's almost... Wow, it's huge. Hey Todd, you got to get out of there so we can ring your socks out. How are we to know that it wouldn't have happened anyway, even if they wouldn't have taken all of them away. And said that they don't cut them down anymore. How do we know that they wouldn't have cut them all down and they would be gone anyway?

I don't know what I thought of it. You know, I'm too undecided because I've worked in the woods too long but I think it should be under more government control as far as the logging. And that way it slows the companies from coming in and stripping the land like they did. I mean, thinning and sure thinning is more expensive operation economically but that's the problem today is all the big companies think economically instead of for the future. Alright, they think about that book right now. Trees are a renewable resource. They can grow back again. But the trees can't grow back and the ground that supports them has been washed away. Redwood National Park is spending $33 million to try to restore this eroded land in the park expansion area.

With anti-park feeling still running high, not many timber workers are rushing out to apply with a small number of park jobs available. So most of the work has gone to college students and young people have come to Humboldt in the last 10 years or so. Jim Adams works in a cooperative that has a contract with Redwood Park to rehabilitate and reinforce the expansion area. Go for it. This is a chainsaw wanch and we have this cable hooked up to the bucket here. Fasten it to a stump. This is called a Fresno Drag Bucket. And essentially what it does is pull sediment off the slopes that would otherwise and heavy rains fall into the creek. This area, it's been logged and consequently in the real big flood a lot of the soil could be just sort of melt down the hill and end up in the creek. I've seen figures that in Redwood National Park they've lost up in some areas up to 50-60% of the top soil in a matter of five years.

That is a complete, I mean that's a devastation. The work on this drainage as well as the copper creek drainage which is going on right now and emerald creek are all attempts to keep the sediment out of Redwood Creek so that regeneration of trees is more likely. Damaged land can't grow healthy trees. Without trees there won't be jobs. But only so much can be done to repair past damage. Even time won't heal all the scars. Count forest practices and pines, Guy, Pacific lumber company, a local asset, has been selective cutting that sustained yield rates since the 30s. The day it's still got old growth Redwood, maturing second growth and made a profit in Humboldt this year.

The California Forest Practices Act of 1974 is an attempt to make good logging practices standard in the industry. But there's almost as much controversy on the North Coast about state regulations as there was about the park. The only way we're going to make money off this land is by cutting the wood and we're going to cut the biggest trees and we're going to cut as many as we can as quickly as we can because we want to make the bucks this year and we want to make the bucks next year. These cooks are wandering the streets at all times. People spend millions of dollars to go through the permit system. Fight for years to get a project going and all of a sudden it is said, okay, go ahead. And some hippie drives down our road and his Volkswagen and he doesn't like the looks of it and for 50 bucks he files the suit and stops you. We have to worry about what are my great great grandchildren going to do for a living here. Maybe you can say big corporate greed, but they still supply jobs. I'm both counties first lumber barren was William Carson. The trees made him a multimillionaire. The mansion he built is a monument to himself and his fortune still stands in downtown Eureka.

From the tower with its windows facing the four points of the compass Carson could look out across his redwood empire mills porous fleet of lumber scooters a railroad or two electric glide company and a couple bags. Most of what he could see he owned. At the days of the lumber barren and so gone during the 1950s the big corporations started moving in. Since September company one of the biggest outfits to move into homeboat runs its five million acre operation from its headquarters in Seattle, Washington. The decision to close mad river ply was made here. We like to be profitable. We think that certainly helps the community. We like to provide full employment for our employees a good safe workplace.

We like for them to you know have jobs that are rewarding and enriching to them and we want to be good citizens of the community. As far as the Reagan administration and the attitude towards regulation I applaud the fact that there is a recognition of over regulation and that many people are more capable of handling some of their own affairs than government. The corporation being primarily interested in profit has no consideration or concern for the social consequences of the community itself. We believe that corporations or companies are going to have to assume some of that social cost because when they abandon the community they leave the social costs behind for the workers and the community to suffer and to bear. I think we have been responsive to people that have asked questions but many of the decisions though hard are unpleasant for many people.

Like in my case I have no say rather Simpson shuts this mill down or not even though I've been here a long time like a lot of other people have been here. I've lived in Blue Lake for 25 years but I have no say rather they come in and turn a forest area into a clear cut area and should I have the right to say that you know that's pretty hard because it's their land right. Now I'm still a firm believer in the fact that private grounds, private ground and if this is their best management techniques and in this particular case I think it is then I think it's their right is the interest of the company and management compatible with the interests of the local community. Are they two different things? Does the company worry about itself first and the community second? It turns on to a greedy thing. It's the money thing. Money talks and that's the only thing to talk. It's all about money.

Let me propose that we ought to abolish the idea of private timberland ownership. It is inconsistent with the public interest for there to be any such thing as private ownership of timberland because there are too many public values involved. Now if a state official got up here and seriously proposed that to you, what would have happened to your pulse? I submit that there is in the notion of unregulated use of private timberland, a state religion full of unexamined assumptions from the moment the ink dried on our constitution. There has been an interest, a public interest and what happens on private timberland? Why does a metropolitan so-called metropolitan border feel that we as possibly as private landowners should in fact supply aesthetic value, save the streams, the buffer or whatever for free? Who's paying for this? Does a landowner absorb all that?

Yes, the landowner absorbs that. That's the short answer. And the landowner is going to continue to absorb that. And the sooner we face it and the sooner we find out how to deal with it, the sooner we'll be able to get down in that hot tub together. I mean, a red one hot tub, you bet. The concept of private property is no longer, really, I think this is what the issue is all about. It's not what kind of a job you're doing out here or what you might possibly produce or do for society. It's total control of everybody that's out here, including private property. Now just how long would San Francisco, Los Angeles, or any other big cities survive if we weren't pumping the products into them? Two days? We already own the country and we're letting them take it away from us. There are, of course, always people in the industry who complain about regulation. They'd rather go back to the old ways when they could do what they wanted and to hell with the consequences.

What they're really saying is an emotional statement about an age when life was much simpler. And I share a great nostalgia for that age, too. But it's gone. It's an illusion. It's a fan. More than a billion-board fee of timber was cut and milled in Humboldt County every year from the end of World War II until 1978. But the rich virgin timber is gone. Second growth is coming in now, but most of it is a long ways from maturity and the quality isn't as good. The main cause of hard times in Humboldt isn't the bad economy or the drop in housing starts. That could improve tomorrow and would still be in trouble here because of the short supply of timber. When you cut like there's no tomorrow, one day tomorrow comes.

Well, you don't want to say profit because when you say profit, that's a dirty word. When you say profit, that takes care of everything. You're a raper of the ground only to make a profit. In the whole outlook, all there after is the almighty buck. And if the government and if us people or the government will let them strip the land and make the buck, you know damn well they'll do it. One of the problems with Simpson is they have too big of a picture. They're thinking about Simpson operations in all of Northern California, Oregon, Washington, Canada and all the other places they have holdings. So if it goes an operation in Humboldt County goes belly up, they can take the bucks from this operation. They've been making out of here all these years and put them into operations in Canada.

You know, any time a plant shuts down and 300 people are put out of work or 5,000 people are put out of work in a steel mill or this and that, I'm very definitely concerned about that because I know what they must be going through. And I often feel that the decision to shut down that mill was made without consulting the workers at all. And that is a problem and that is a problem in the lumber industry and that's a problem in the oil industry and the nuclear industry and automobile and rubber and on down the line. There should be legislation which makes it mandatory for the industry that is contemplating a plant closure to give advanced notice and as much advanced notice as possible to the workers and to the community so that they can early on start making the necessary adjustments. To take care of their lives. I have found that there is no good time to tell anybody this, whether it's two years notice, two weeks notice, two hours notice. It's a traumatic situation to anybody.

I'm sorry that we couldn't give more notice but I think when an operation is not profitable sometimes you have to move rather quickly. God laid off down at the factory and their time is not the greatest in the world. Heaven knows I've been working hard on a business to be right forward at a school. If we make it to December, God plans to be in a warmer town on summertime, maybe even curling. If we make it to December, we'll be fine. Only about half of the 6,000 workers have lost their jobs because of the park qualified for the Redwood employees protection program. While the lucky ones are qualified, benefits include income compensation, job retraining and relocation. But everyone faces big changes.

Already people are worried about what they'll do when benefits run out and for the half it won't get benefits the worry begins now. So it's going to be something new for us being out on the streets not working. People are used to working. They're not used to collecting unemployment insurance or RIPP benefits. They don't want to do it. They want to work for the living. The other thing is it's a real tragedy as far as the area is concerned to have another mill go down. God laid off down at the factory and their time is not the greatest in the world. I don't mean to hate December. It's meant to be the happy time of year. And my little girl don't understand. Why daddy came for no business here?

I'm workers at Mad River Playa have an idea they think can save the mill in their jobs. They organize a rally to drum up community support for a plan to buy off the mill. If workers could buy Mad River Playa from Simpson the mill would stay open and the workers in community would own and run it themselves. So in fishing through all the different possibilities the two we've come up with are hardwood operation and a finger joint operation. And they both look like they might be economically feasible. Hardwoods have always been trash trees on the north coast. Timber companies like Simpson spray chemicals to kill them off. A hardwood operation at Mad River would save jobs that might actually help the environment.

I think hardwoods have a lot of merit. Make some excellent boards. I've seen some cabinet work out of a ten oak that's just absolutely beautiful. I think it could be done. I think it should be explored. We've got a cooperative community worker control cooperative is a way that it could be done. Is that a way to raise money and get on with it? Well I'm not sure that that might be a good way as any. But right now it's up to us to move in here and hold our own patch to get economics of this area moving again. So that's one of the reasons I'm here today is to try to push you all into helping us get this thing off the ground. It's a definite possibility. We have the skills in the area. We have the natural resources in the area. We have the will to do it. We just need some help.

People who haven't been talking to each other for years are in the same room trying to figure out ways to save jobs at Mad River Plot. It's hard. We've been in there trying to get them interested in the co-op idea and they're scared to death right now. They're losing their jobs after being in this place for 10 to 15 years. And a lot of the people are talking about leaving the whole community moving to Oregon and we really do need to help to convince these people by going that they've grown up in this area and that they need to stay here and help the community develop. This is a rape of the environment right here and there's a rape of the economic environment. There's a rape of the ecological environment. I would think that they want to organize a corporation right away for the purposes of being addressed in an issue where the Mad River private workers period. I see us buying the mill from Simpson right and then redeveloping the whole machinery structure on the inside in order to keep this thing going. It's a terrible cause. Somehow it isn't a capital mainstream for workers to own their own plan. The conglomerates required a 20% rate of return and they have to get rid of the subsidiary because it was only making 5 and 10.

You're willing to operate on a 1% or break even because it pays your salaries. One of the things with cooperatives is that people probably work harder and longer and they do essentially the same kind of jobs that are done and and and. Right. By Simpson or L.P. But under the co-op system, we were me as a worker that has a voter share. I have a little bit of say in what they have goes on. If they don't listen, you can fire them. But every penny if you put in a hundred bucks and everybody did that with enough people organized that we would build the capital after a while. The strategy we've employed up to date is to try and consider the buyout by the community of that particular operation.

It's not been successful today in our industry, but we think that that's still a viable alternative to having the plant closing down. But see, there isn't a real basic conflict between cooperatives and unions. They can work together. It's clear that community control can be a solution for saving jobs only when the unions take the leading role. I think though that larger than that, the state itself has got to get involved. The state has got to be a responsible party and this thing rather than just the small community that the plant itself is involved in. Because they have the capital in order to make that kind of investment. People don't realize that the unions in this country, the working people, are sitting on top of the single biggest source of private capital in the United States. Their pension funds. Right now, millions of dollars of that pension money is being invested in conglomerates that are actually shutting down firms, shutting down jobs in this country and investing overseas.

So one of the biggest single tests in the future of whether a worker or a community ownership is going to be a solution to some job problems, is whether the unions are willing to invest their money in plants that they, the workers, own and control. Well, see, that's what happened when you first developed. They got strong around here, right? They forced an organ and that's what happened. That's what started the union was the strength of the people pulling together to keep the union there. Now what's happening is the reason the polls show that the union is declining is because all you damn people out there, you're union damn people, you know, they're not sticking together. That's the only way the United States is going to make it is if the American people unite together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. One more minute, one more minute, one more minute.

We have all this. Don for part of tomorrow, number. One nineteen, thank you, Mr. Bowling. Trust next. In spite of all the hard work and eye hopes, the mad river ply co-op failed. Money was the main problem. The workers and community didn't have enough and Simpson, banks and the government wouldn't help out. Union pension fund was a good idea, but ahead of its time. We're workers. We know how to run a mill. But as far as buying the machinery, going to the bank, it's not our training. It's just not our world and have those skills. Or to be able to develop those skills overnight. We didn't have a strong enough union so that people had a form to go to. Third and last call. Is it at 13? 13 is bad. 13, but 13 is fine. 13,000 wants. 13,000 wants. 13,000 wants. 13,000.

Third and last call. And John, 13,000, five of her. With the emotional impact of the whole thing was much more devastating than anyone could imagine. When the co-op failed and they couldn't find work in Humboldt, they'll run to Oregon looking for work. It's marriage to carry and it. We talked about this. We talked about that. We don't talk about really the reason why we're even out and doing what we're doing. Going from place to place, person to person, and there to bear. I mean, I'm out of work and I'm just trying to get by with what I got. What I can do. I mean, I have to make money. I'm not going to lose my home. I'm not. But there's going to be a lot of the small towns all over the country. It's belly up in the water. It has to be that there was always another hill to go over.

You cut this one out, go over another one. I always counted on forever. I didn't think that it would not be that way. Until the whole bottom dropped out of Humboldt County. So what happens in Humboldt County is sort of leading up to what's going to happen. Nationwide, everybody's in the organization. We're always, we're society always have them. It's a land of pundits. Gold in the streets, you know. They thought it was going to go on forever. I don't know how anybody could think that. I don't need it. You know, because when the last tree is ever thought that that virgin timber would never run out when they first came here, it was a magical place. Tree. Trees. It was the rain forest. And they were looking at us and now cut, now cut, now cut, now and take, now. Why didn't, didn't that happen a lot sooner that we cared about our future for our children? I don't know.

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.