By Lynne Dahl – Anderson Valley Advertiser, July 11, 1990[1]
Born and raised in Mendocino County, Rick Evans has worked in the woods for the last 17 years.
Lynne Dahl: What would you call yourself—a logger?
Rick Evans: Well, a logger’s really the owner-operator. I’m a lumberjack, a jack of all trades, a master of none. [laughs]. That’s what an old, old-timer, who’d worked in the woods all his life, told me one time.
LD: When you first worked in the woods, what were your wages?
RE: $5.35 an hour. I started setting chokers when I was 17. Now I mainly run the equipment, running cat [caterpillar, or crawler, tractor]. I’ve made as much as $14.00 an hour, but I’m making $10.00 now. I started working for Erickson in Ukiah and then moved up quickly to running the cat.
LD: What did your dad do for a living?
RE: He was a grocery clerk in a store for 30-odd years.
LD: What made you decide to work in the woods?
RE: I had a girl friend whose brother was doing it. Her brother taught me how to set chokers. I was real energetic young kid. He taught me to really run, to be fast. So I did it like that. That’s one of the reasons I didn’t have to set chokers for very long. People like it when you really hustle, so I got to run the cat.
LD: How long did you work for Eastman?
RE: About three years, and then he had an auction and sold off his equipment. Eastman had some legal problems and had to come up with a lot of money, so he sold out and Anderson kept the yardcr and cat. I kept with them for a year.
LD: How was Mike Anderson to work for?
RE: Probably one of the best companies around here to work for. You couldn’t ask for a nicer guy, than Don Anderson [Mike’s father] as far as being fair to his employees. They always pay real good, especially in rigging. I just heard yesterday from a guy living in Tahoe [where Don Anderson is logging] that Anderson’s paying the best wages over there, too. They do a pretty good job in the woods, too. Mike Anderson said on the radio that he’s against clear-cuts.
LD: After that you worked for Iverson logging?
RE: Right, for ten years. I was hired on to run the skidder and then the cat.
LD: Skidders don’t tear up the ground as much?
RE: They’re both used to transport logs from the woods to the landing. You can carry between 2 and 10 logs at a time, depending on the size of the logs. Skidders aren’t feasible on steep ground; you can only use them on flat land. If you log right, you can bunch and skid everything downhill for the skidder.
LD: What’s “bunch” mean?
RE: When you’re on real steep land, the cat pulls the logs out to the road and the skidder picks them up.
LD: You’ve run the feller-buncher. What, exactly does it do?
RE: It’s like a backhoe with a feller-buncher head. It goes up and grabs the trees, and either saws or pinches them off. The one I ran had a saw.
LD: What does it leave behind?
RE: It depends on the size of the tree; but if you take the trees the way you’re supposed to, you get them pretty close to the ground.
LD: I thought they pulled the trees out of the ground.
RE: I have seen people run one like that, over in Potter Valley and on Greenwood. With the pinchers, if the trees are real little, they’ll pull the trees out of the ground before it pinches them.
LD: What do you think about all this flack concerning feller-bunchers?
RE: It’s the operator. It’s a lot, too, how they want the logging done. I ran one and didn’t tear everything up. You could look at that job I did in Greenwood and there’s still hundreds and hundreds of little trees where I cut with it. I took my time and tried not to kill them.
LD: What is it about feller-bunchers that upsets people? The mess they leave, the damage to the forest, noise?
RE: lf the operator wants to take the time to pick around little trees, he can do that. But you have to move around a lot more and you don’t get near the production you do if you take everything. The noise is, well, you can hear them a ways away. I think what upsets people is that they take everything out with them. You can totally demolish the woods if that’s the way you want to do it.
LD: Why did you stop working for Iverson?
RE: He fired me. I was making $40,000 a year with a lot of overtime and 16-hour days—and some guys working for me wanted my job. I used to push them pretty hard and they wanted me out of there. They told this forester that I was doing drugs on the job, and he wrote a letter to Ron Iverson. It was an anonymous letter, actually, that said I may be doing drugs. Ron called me down to his house and gave me that letter and asked me to resign. Then he wanted me, to take a drug test. I told him I would if he made everyone else on the crew do it. But he wouldn’t do it. Look, I was the safest person working there; no one was ever hurt working with me. I worked there for 10 years, but he fired me. He didn’t want to bring out his dirty laundry—just get rid of me as quick as he could.
LD: You’re married with 3 kids. You were in the middle of paying off a house in Fort Bragg. You lost the house when you lost the job. Where did you go from there?
RE: We moved to Point Arena and started to work for Bert, my step-dad. He’s a gyppo logger who works for L-P. He’s got 3 cats and a skidder. I’m still with him.
LD: With those experiences in the past, what do you think about unions?
RE: I think unions take advantage of people. They serve themselves, really. They don’t care about the individual worker. When they first did the unions in the ‘20s, they were necessary; but these days the unions are just too greedy.[2]
LD: Would you say that’s a pretty common sentiment of guys in the woods?
RE: Yeah, I would. G-P was union, and their employees liked it, but that’s because they didn’t have to do much underneath it. That’s why they got rid of their woods crew. G-P thinned it way down because they weren’t getting any production done. They had too many lazy people they couldn’t fire because of the union. That’s the reason why loggers don’t want to see the union come in: They can’t get rid of the bad workers.
LD: Are you getting the pay and conditions you want? Have you no need of unions?
RE: No, we’re not getting paid decent wages for our work. Part of the problem right now is the amount of Mexicans working in the woods and doing it too cheap. They’re the best choker-setters there are because white guys don’t want to work doing that. It’s hard physical labor and very dangerous. $100 a day to a Mexican is good wages, and they don’t realize how dangerous it is. For falling trees you should make at least $200 a day, risking your life like that. But the Mexicans won’t squawk; $100 is plenty for them. The main part of the problem is that the big companies are making everyone bid too cheap. The big companies are controlling the rates: So the gyppos have to get the jobs done as cheap as possible and can’t pay all that well.
LD: Have you heard any talk about the upcoming counter-demo [counter to Earth First!’s July 21 demo] in Fort Bragg?
RE: Just in the papers. But the big companies will make sure everybody hears about it. They’ll push it, go to the job and make sure all the gyppos know about it. There’ll be a good turnout.
LD: Do you think the Redwood Summer rally will also have a good turnout?
RE: I hope so. I think things ought to change. The environmentalists are getting somewhere with all this publicity. I even heard Philbrick [a local gyppo] say that he’s not for clearcuts.[3] Maybe he’ll put enough pressure on the big boys so they’ll stop doing them.
LD: If the Redwood Summer people and the loggers are saying essentially the same thing, why are they having separate rallies?
RE: Redwood Summer is composed of mostly, well…
LD: Go on, say it, Rick: hippies, right?
RE: [laughs] Yeah. I’m not saying that’s necessarily what they are; but the media pictures sure make them look like scuz-bags to me. I know it’s not all people like that, but it’s the way the press is putting across Redwood Summer. I know there’s a lot of people in that movement who are good folks who just don’t want to see this disaster continue.
LD: Isn’t that all the more reason for folks who work in the woods to show up for these rallies and see for themselves who’s protesting?
RE: Right. It would certainly be more accurate than the media picture. But you risk your job showing up at these rallies. The loggers do have to speak up and state their own side so people in the community know that we do care about what’s going on. So it’s a good thing that the rally for the workers is being organized in Fort Bragg. A lot of the loggers—and the big companies promote it—think of Earth First! as a bunch of radical hippies. Especially with that bomb incident; that only gives fuel to the fire. The majority of guys I’ve talked to think that Earth First!ers were transporting explosives. I’m waiting to see what the police come up with. I’m not saying all Earth First!ers are violent. There are a lot of radical loggers who would love to go to an Earth First! meeting and raise all kinds of havoc.
LD: You’re defining radical as what?
RE: As getting violent.
LD: Have you any ideas on how to improve what’s going on in the logging industry?
RE: First of all, quit clear-cutting. They did selective logging for years and years. They had sustained yield—words you don’t hear anymore. After the state started allowing clear-cuts, about 5 years after I started working, it spread like wildfire. They make a lot more money that way. The big companies are not going to listen to the loggers. If you don’t cut the way they want you to, they will just get someone else to do it. Most loggers are in debt up to their eyeballs. Even if a company wanted to give a big company an ultimatum, they could lose everything they own. The big companies would just bring loggers in from the areas, like Oregon, They have in the past. I probably feel more strongly about what’s going on in the wood than most. Most loggers don’t care—well, they’re starting to care more. Earth First! is waking people up and making them wonder a little bit.
Notes:
[1] At first glance it might seem that Don Nelson’s position of union representative meant that union workers saw the “green” camp as the enemy and that Judi Bari’s goals of worker-environmental alliances were hopelessly utopian. However Nelson’s supposed mandate was largely fictional. For one thing, his former ally, Roanne Withers was solidly in the green camp, and even some of the loggers were hostile to Nelson’s posturing and were not so solidly in the “yellow” camp. Evans is far from an ideal spokesperson, as he buys into the anti-union mentality fostered by the most extreme elements of the capitalist class, but Evans’ views hardly conform to that overall ideology
[2] Evan’s views here go a long way towards explaining why the IWA declined so precipitously during the latter half of the 20th Century. While the actual blame should be laid at the feet of the employing class (whose pressure and influence caused industrial collaborationist unions, such as the IWA to adopt increasingly conservative, “labor aristocracy” positions on many matters of class struggle (as often pointed out by the IWW)), Evan’s views are shared by many in the industry. The business unions sewed the seed of their own destruction.
[3] Indeed, by the end of Redwood Summer, Jerry Philbrick had begun to more publically take mild stands against GP and LP.