Inspired by a view on yesterday's hike around Mt. June
In every part of the forest of the Cascades I’ve been in so far, whether it’s old-growth, young forest, or clear cut, as soon as I’ve gotten high enough on a hill or mountain to see the landscape from a slightly removed perspective, the history of logging on the land has immediately become obvious. Wherever I’ve been, I’ve seen the patchwork of forest at different stages of maturity-as well as some patches of bald, raw earth, not yet re-grown.
Here, in front of our eyes, is the story of so much of what is made of wood all over the world-so much of what is built with the straight, tall Douglas firs. Here is the story of Europeans coming to this land and living here and making the land part of the worldwide civilization.
Most of the land at Lost Valley is forest. But hike up a little way and you come to a clear cut. Actually, by now it’s a very young forest-but so young that you’d hardly recognize it as a forest.
Before Lost Valley was the intentional community that it is now, another community lived on the land-a Christian group called Shiloh Youth Revival. They built most of the structures that are here now. The land is beautiful, and it’s said that they loved it.
Sometime in the ‘70s, Shiloh got in trouble with the IRS. Apparently, exactly what happened is still unclear. What’s known is that the group received a lot of unpaid labor that they didn’t really document (that labor was part of their program-teaching youth about work as part of a Christian life), which the IRS didn’t like. Separately, one of the leaders of the group did some fishy bookkeeping, and didn’t really communicate with anyone else about it. Apparently he was in touch with the IRS for several years, and by the time they gave Shiloh a bill for several million dollars connected with his activity, he had left town and broken off contact. His departure and the chaos he left behind apparently split the group apart; Dianne, one of Lost Valley’s founders, told me that in the Eugene area there are hundreds of people who didn’t speak to each other for much of the past 25 years because of that rift.
To begin to pay off the IRS bill, the community logged some of the forest-and stopped, according to Dianne, when they just couldn’t take it anymore emotionally, because they did love the land. The IRS took the land from them, ignored it for seven years while the whole affair was being worked out in court, and then auctioned it off. Dianne and her friend Kenneth bought the 87 acres for something like $80,000 and founded Lost Valley.
When Dianne first told me all of this, I felt that the land must be haunted by the sad story-by what happened to Shiloh, and by the desperately-carried out logging. I was surprised to realize that I’d never felt any of that sadness walking the land-even on the clear cut. Dianne told me that she and others who have lived here have spent a lot of time trying to clear the energy. My judgment is that they’ve been pretty successful. Or maybe it’s just that life is resilient; where a forest has been cut down, it will grow back, vibrantly. (It may not look like a forest at the beginning, but the clear cut is certainly full of life, and on its way to being forest again.)
The clear cut is actually my favorite place to walk at Lost Valley because, being on a mountain, when you get up there you can really see the landscape. Being able to get that perspective-removed enough to see a little bit of the big picture-has been an important aspect of my experience of living on this land. The fact that I can do that-the fact that the forest on part of that mountain was cut recently enough, and is young enough now, that I can see the landscape and get that perspective (since, in an older forest, the trees would block the view)-is directly related to the sad story of what happened with Shiloh. It is that story. This fascinates me.
The fact that I’m here at all is also directly linked with that story. If things had gone differently for Shiloh, that community could still be here-and Lost Valley could be somewhere else and have a different name; or perhaps it never would have been born at all.
Lost Valley is a big experiment. Its two decades of life have, from my understanding, been a period of intense, constant change. The community is always trying out new things, and the population is generally transient. In fact, I think that the population may be more transient right now than it’s ever been. Yet in some ways it seems very stable. People here are more committed to getting along with each other than most people I’m aware of, and they’ve developed a lot of tools to help them do so. There’s such unsustainability of personal finances here (many people here don’t make enough money to meet their cost of living, and most don’t make enough to save much of anything; the ones who make it work best seem to be the people who are employed both at Lost Valley and elsewhere) that most people can’t afford to stay here for more than a few years-hence much of the transience. At the same time, the community is paying off its debt faster right now than it ever has before. It simultaneously appears to be thriving and on the brink of collapse. Perhaps it has always appeared this way. (The complexity of the financial situation is due largely to Lost Valley’s unique combination of being an intentional community and running a non-profit organization-AND, I think, not really having anyone who seeks grants. Hopefully that last part will change soon.)
In the midst of all the chaos, this community is constantly developing a creative relationship with the land-learning to work with it (not against it), take from it and give back to it, and transform it in small ways helpful to a range of life here much wider than just humans. If the community can exist here for a long time, I think that it has the potential to discover, create, and nurture more and more complex, beneficial relationships among the range of beings here-and, I hope, create more means of making a living that can better sustain the people who live here.
But if Rick and others are right, as long as human beings have lived in this part of the world, this land has always been a gathering place and a place of transience. Perhaps seeking anything else is fighting against something in the nature of this place.
As ugly as the history of logging in the Cascades may be, it’s ultimately only a small ripple on the water; at least, it’s not as terrible as some of us might fear sometimes. It is part of the great wave of destruction of diversity and beauty that this civilization has caused and is causing. But where life is cut down, it springs back . . . and out of terrible destruction or disturbance explodes new life, diversity, and beauty. In terms of all the new species that will arise in the world, none of us will see much of that in our lifetimes, though it will happen. But we can watch forests grow back-and take part in making that growth happen, and care about it. If our eyes and hearts are open to it, we can see-and create-that kind of explosion in how we human beings live, in the future and right now. It’s happening.
Here, in front of our eyes, is the story of so much of what is made of wood all over the world-so much of what is built with the straight, tall Douglas firs. Here is the story of Europeans coming to this land and living here and making the land part of the worldwide civilization.
Most of the land at Lost Valley is forest. But hike up a little way and you come to a clear cut. Actually, by now it’s a very young forest-but so young that you’d hardly recognize it as a forest.
Before Lost Valley was the intentional community that it is now, another community lived on the land-a Christian group called Shiloh Youth Revival. They built most of the structures that are here now. The land is beautiful, and it’s said that they loved it.
Sometime in the ‘70s, Shiloh got in trouble with the IRS. Apparently, exactly what happened is still unclear. What’s known is that the group received a lot of unpaid labor that they didn’t really document (that labor was part of their program-teaching youth about work as part of a Christian life), which the IRS didn’t like. Separately, one of the leaders of the group did some fishy bookkeeping, and didn’t really communicate with anyone else about it. Apparently he was in touch with the IRS for several years, and by the time they gave Shiloh a bill for several million dollars connected with his activity, he had left town and broken off contact. His departure and the chaos he left behind apparently split the group apart; Dianne, one of Lost Valley’s founders, told me that in the Eugene area there are hundreds of people who didn’t speak to each other for much of the past 25 years because of that rift.
To begin to pay off the IRS bill, the community logged some of the forest-and stopped, according to Dianne, when they just couldn’t take it anymore emotionally, because they did love the land. The IRS took the land from them, ignored it for seven years while the whole affair was being worked out in court, and then auctioned it off. Dianne and her friend Kenneth bought the 87 acres for something like $80,000 and founded Lost Valley.
When Dianne first told me all of this, I felt that the land must be haunted by the sad story-by what happened to Shiloh, and by the desperately-carried out logging. I was surprised to realize that I’d never felt any of that sadness walking the land-even on the clear cut. Dianne told me that she and others who have lived here have spent a lot of time trying to clear the energy. My judgment is that they’ve been pretty successful. Or maybe it’s just that life is resilient; where a forest has been cut down, it will grow back, vibrantly. (It may not look like a forest at the beginning, but the clear cut is certainly full of life, and on its way to being forest again.)
The clear cut is actually my favorite place to walk at Lost Valley because, being on a mountain, when you get up there you can really see the landscape. Being able to get that perspective-removed enough to see a little bit of the big picture-has been an important aspect of my experience of living on this land. The fact that I can do that-the fact that the forest on part of that mountain was cut recently enough, and is young enough now, that I can see the landscape and get that perspective (since, in an older forest, the trees would block the view)-is directly related to the sad story of what happened with Shiloh. It is that story. This fascinates me.
The fact that I’m here at all is also directly linked with that story. If things had gone differently for Shiloh, that community could still be here-and Lost Valley could be somewhere else and have a different name; or perhaps it never would have been born at all.
Lost Valley is a big experiment. Its two decades of life have, from my understanding, been a period of intense, constant change. The community is always trying out new things, and the population is generally transient. In fact, I think that the population may be more transient right now than it’s ever been. Yet in some ways it seems very stable. People here are more committed to getting along with each other than most people I’m aware of, and they’ve developed a lot of tools to help them do so. There’s such unsustainability of personal finances here (many people here don’t make enough money to meet their cost of living, and most don’t make enough to save much of anything; the ones who make it work best seem to be the people who are employed both at Lost Valley and elsewhere) that most people can’t afford to stay here for more than a few years-hence much of the transience. At the same time, the community is paying off its debt faster right now than it ever has before. It simultaneously appears to be thriving and on the brink of collapse. Perhaps it has always appeared this way. (The complexity of the financial situation is due largely to Lost Valley’s unique combination of being an intentional community and running a non-profit organization-AND, I think, not really having anyone who seeks grants. Hopefully that last part will change soon.)
In the midst of all the chaos, this community is constantly developing a creative relationship with the land-learning to work with it (not against it), take from it and give back to it, and transform it in small ways helpful to a range of life here much wider than just humans. If the community can exist here for a long time, I think that it has the potential to discover, create, and nurture more and more complex, beneficial relationships among the range of beings here-and, I hope, create more means of making a living that can better sustain the people who live here.
But if Rick and others are right, as long as human beings have lived in this part of the world, this land has always been a gathering place and a place of transience. Perhaps seeking anything else is fighting against something in the nature of this place.
As ugly as the history of logging in the Cascades may be, it’s ultimately only a small ripple on the water; at least, it’s not as terrible as some of us might fear sometimes. It is part of the great wave of destruction of diversity and beauty that this civilization has caused and is causing. But where life is cut down, it springs back . . . and out of terrible destruction or disturbance explodes new life, diversity, and beauty. In terms of all the new species that will arise in the world, none of us will see much of that in our lifetimes, though it will happen. But we can watch forests grow back-and take part in making that growth happen, and care about it. If our eyes and hearts are open to it, we can see-and create-that kind of explosion in how we human beings live, in the future and right now. It’s happening.