A Logger’s Lament A Former Forest Laborer Brings An Important, Overlooked Perspective To The Debate Over Timber Harvesting

“Overstory: Zero/Real Life in Timber Country” By Robert Heilman ($21.95, Sasquatch Books, 221 pages)

That writer Robert Heilman knows the woods, there is no doubt. He’s spent much of his adult life among the trees - more specifically, the stumps spread across massive clearcuts - trying to make a living.

Heilman lives in Myrtle Creek, Ore., and has worked as a logger, tree planter and mill worker. Now, he’s written about life as a blue collar worker in a collection of essays - “Overstory: Zero.”

The title of the book comes from the logging industry where the forest canopy is referred to as overstory and clearcuts are described as areas of zero overstory. And the title really sets the tone for the book.

If lines are drawn, Heilman clearly falls on the environmentally sympathetic side of this issue. But the fact he’s lived on both sides of the logging road is the real strength of this book. His writing is raw both in form and image, and filled with sadness.

The following excerpt is from an essay about working as a tree planter in the Oregon Cascades: “I thought of the hardscrabble canyons of Rock Creek, of the old units logged twenty and thirty years ago that we’d replanted all winter long, trying for the fifth or sixth time to bring back the forest on land whose soil had been muddying the river for decades. Something sad and ugly rose within me. I stood up, leaning on my hoedag to straighten my sore back, hitched up my tree bags to ease the chafing of my hips, and turned to face my foreman.”

Readers of this book will need to be sturdy in the face of the language of loggers and others who do manual labor day after cold, rainy day on the ruined, muddy slopes. But despite literary missteps, obscenities and some essays which don’t stand alone but do work when teamed with others, Heilman’s book has power. For it seems those who worked for a day’s wage cutting and decking and hauling big trees out of the mountains have borne the brunt of anger and frustration about how we reached this impasse in the old growth/logging issues.

Heilman tells the stories of those workers, of their frustrations, their efforts to simply make a living and their anger at being made the bad guys in this mess.

This book won’t likely change people’s minds about where they stand on managing forests or preserving old growth. It will, however, serve as lesson in empathy for a hard-working people who have seen a way of life slide away and don’t know where or how they will go to work now.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Photo

MEMO: Robert Heilman will read from “Overstory: Zero” Monday at 7:30 p.m. at Auntie’s Bookstore.