Life and logging with author Bob Heilman

Robert Leo Heilman has lived and worked in the woods of the Umpqua Valley since the 1970s. As a writer, logger, community member and activist, Heilman has chronicled the life and struggles of rural, working class Oregonians since his first essay about logging was published in the 1980s. Fleeing the apocalyptic vibe of 1970s Los Angeles and the Vietnam draft, Heilman ended up on a few acres of land outside of the small logging town of Myrtle Creek, Oregon. After felling timber and planting trees in the heyday of old growth logging, he began to write about and for the people of his community. “Bob is a gifted writer who shines a light on the oft-misunderstood people and culture of Southern Oregon,” says Megan Monson, a longtime community member who volunteers with Heilman at the Myrtle Creek Library. “All of his work has the unmistakable ring of authenticity, from the viewpoint of a writer who lives in the community he writes about.” His work celebrates the pride of people who live by their labor, reveals the way they relate to the forestland they live and work in and warns of the dangers of human greed.

You’re known as a voice for labor, blue collar values and timber country culture. Where did you, and this voice, come from?

I dropped out of high school in the spring of 1970. I wasn’t interested in being a junior citizen of tomorrow, and I refused to sign up for the draft so I was off on the lam. Bumming around, hitchhiking, just doing the hippie thing. In ’75 my wife and I loaded our stuff up into a beater truck and ended up in the Umpqua Valley. Once I got here I found out they don’t hire hippies for construction work, so I had to go to work in the woods. Tree planting, logging, mill work. This whole time I just kept reading books. Thousands of books. Eventually I decided to give writing a try myself, and got a used manual typewriter and a ream of 500 sheets of paper. I thought, by god, by the time I get done with that stack of paper, I’ll be a writer. After 41 years I’m not really sure if I’m ever gonna be a writer or not.

Well, you’ve written three books, hundreds of essays, and run your own publishing company. How did that happen?

I sold my first piece, a logging story called “An Occupational Disease”, for a hundred bucks. And then I resold it to a magazine in North Carolina and they paid me another hundred bucks. And I thought, hell, this is some easy money, man. With the freelancing thing I was getting a dime a word. And coming from a blue-collar background, I know how it is. You have to work your way up. It took me six years to get paid for the first time. Now I’m a high school dropout that lectures at university writing classes. I have an honorary degree from Umpqua Community College, the first one they ever awarded.

Why literary nonfiction?

At the time, people were starting to push the boundaries of personal experience essays and memoir ­ introducing more and more literary techniques borrowed from fiction. And that appealed to me. Art is about provoking an emotional response. Literary nonfiction marks a line between craft, and art. Journalism is about craft. It doesn’t allow much for the emotional end of things. Literary nonfiction is where those two worlds meet: You’re dealing with facts, but at the same time you’re provoking an emotional response from the reader. That’s the appeal ­ to exercise both craft and art in the same piece.

NEPA, the listing of the spotted owl as an endangered species and the resulting reduction of old growth logging, caused a huge controversy in rural timber communities that is still around today. Your first book, “Overstory: Zero”, deals with the fallout of this. Could you say more about the controversy?

The spotted owl is like the canary in the coal mine. It’s an indicator of ecosystem health ­ they can’t survive without old growth forest habitat, and if they’re going extinct then a lot of other things are as well. The whole ecosystem is dying out. It was tough for people to understand that it wasn’t just about a bird ­ they wanted to send that old growth to the mill so they could have jobs and feed their families. Between 1950 and 1990 we averaged a billion board feet of timber a year out of Douglas County alone. It wasn’t sustainable and everyone knew it, but the government and the timber corporations were making a lot of money and didn’t want to stop doing so.

Can you explain the literal meaning of “Overstory: Zero” and what it means to you?

In the ’70s I was planting trees for Roseburg Lumber. As a company crew, we were doing replants on the rough logging units ­ the rocky, brushy, bad ground ­ where the seedlings had died before. I got curious one day and picked up my foreman’s data sheet for the unit we were treating. It was originally cut in 1956 and we were trying to replant it for the third time. And on the data sheet there was this little box that said, “Overstory.” And next to it was a zero with a line through it. It cracked me up. So, there is a forest here, but it just happens to have an overstory of zero inches, right? I got into the semantics of forestry terms, like, “We’re doing a harvest on this unit.” It’s euphemistic. The epitome of that is the idea that there can be an overstory of zero. Like how they talk about all the reforestation they do, but that logging ­ it’s not deforestation. Some New York Times reporter came out here in the ’80s and he called Roseburg, Oregon “ground zero in the old-growth forest debate.” I read that and said, ground zero is the area below an atomic bomb blast. What’s really going on here is overstory: zero.

How has your time in the woods influenced your views on all of this?

I’ve walked up to the big trees, felled them, bucked them up, set the chokers and hauled them out. I know what it takes to do it all and I have tremendous respect for the people that do that. I don’t have much respect for the corporations who claim that what’s going on is okay. And what a lot of people don’t seem to understand is that originally, it was the old time loggers that were telling the Bureau of Land Management and the Forest Service that what was going on was wrong.

The book portrays your life as a blue-collar timber worker, but it also has themes of conservation. How was that received by your community when it was published in 1995?

Really well. My attitude towards this whole controversy was, everyone is at fault, but the workers the least. Old growth ecosystems are gone because Oregon State University said that you could cut at much higher rates than were sustainable and Congress set the allowable sale quantity at unsustainable levels. We all knew this in 1976, well before the controversy ever hit. Some of that was due to lack of information, some of that was due to tweaked data and some of it was due to sheer greed. And it wasn’t the loggers who did that, it wasn’t the millhands who did that and it wasn’t the truck drivers that did that. And they’re the ones who got screwed. Average timber wages are now 20% lower than they were in the late ’70s. The poverty rate in this town is 25%. One in four of the people here are living in poverty.

To me, “Overstory: Zero”, is about labor, pride and connection to land. What felt compelling about those themes to you?

A big chunk of the book was written in reaction to rural stereotypes that come from television and magazine articles. There are these hillbilly, redneck stereotypes and the notion that if you do manual labor, you must be stupid. It’s still a prevalent thing. But these things deserve to be understood and honored. The attempt to help show my neighbors that their lives are important and interesting and worth writing about is what helped drive all of that in the book. It’s important. You write what you care about. That’s what I did then, that’s what I do now. And since it’s literary nonfiction it allows me to dive into that while carrying an emotional attachment to a place I live and the people I live among. This is my way to maybe do a little bit of good for this place.

Your book helped a lot of folks understand the values and struggles of the people living in timber country. Was the idea of creating understanding part of your process for writing?

A lot of it had to do with trying to explain. I’m a big believer in complexities and I wanted to explore the complexities of the situation. Simplistic thinking has done so much harm to our world. Trying to reduce things down to this-or-that gets dangerous. Trees or jobs! Trees or jobs! If you’re in favor of trees, you’re not in favor of jobs! The reality is way the hell more complex, isn’t it? I want the owls, and I want the jobs. And there are ways to do that, but you would never guess that based on the rhetoric coming from both sides. Complexity is a hard sell. If you’re trying to sell ideology you don’t go around saying, “Yeah, but.” There’s this avoidance of complexity because people are uncomfortable with ambiguity. They reach out for sureness. But it is important to portray complexity. We should be opposed to simplistic rhetoric, because that’s how divisiveness comes about.

“Overstory: Zero” is a must read for anyone claiming residence in an Oregon logging town. Since I first read the book I was captured by Bob’s ability to see the bigger picture in an old and still bitter debate. He told me his story on Thursday, Aug. 20, on the back porch of his single-wide trailer overlooking the Umpqua Valley with the checkerboard of clear-cut logging units in the distance. If you want to know more you can find Overstory: Zero at Bob’s publishing company, Sylph Maid Books, and at the Myrtle Creek Library, where Bob volunteers.