Tom Hirons Courtesy of the Hirons family

The Logger Who Saved Opal Creek
Tom Hirons brought a peerless perspective to the Northwest’s timber wars.
By David Seideman

In 1989 I took the first of many trips to Mill City, Oregon, a small timber town in the foothills of the western Cascades, to report on the spotted owl conflict. On that trip I met a prominent logger, Tom Hirons, owner of a small contract logging company called Mad Creek (“You know, like a pissed-off stream,” he’d explain to people) whose story and eloquence informed much of a book I wrote two years later, Showdown at Opal Creek. Hirons’s untimely death this past November at 66 prompted me to reflect on those turbulent times and the legacy he left.

The idea that we have to choose between saving a magnificent ancient forest and the livelihoods of loggers and mill workers was always a false one, because overcutting and industry modernization in the woods and in the mills spelled the end of the timber industry’s heyday. But tensions ran deep in timber towns across the Northwest, pitting neighbors, friends, and even family members against one another.

Hirons was caught in an especially difficult bind. As a successful, articulate logger—with a bachelor’s degree in history, no less—he was once named Oregon’s Logger of the Year and emerged as an industry spokesman, testifying in Washington, D.C. “[Hirons] was the best-read man in town,” I wrote. “The thinking man’s logger, he can cuss the wallpaper off the wall with the best of them in one breath and quote Thomas Jefferson on the rights of man in the next.”

In the early 1970s he also lived at Opal Creek for 18 months with his wife, Marlene, and their small children, Debbie, Vickie, and Wes—all of whom looked back fondly at how this magical place nourished them in their younger years. Although he was a spokesman for the logging industry, Tom Hirons never supported cutting Opal Creek, which became a battleground in the timber wars. And though most logging issues drove a wedge between him and his best friend, George Atiyeh, Opal Creek’s number one champion and the other protagonist in my book, he cared deeply enough about him to respect his principled position. “I hate the idea of causes, and if I had to chose between betraying my country and betraying my friend,” E.M. Forster observed, “I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.”

Even as I came out strongly in favor of protecting Opal Creek, my admiration for Hirons and his honorable profession grew. I spent many days with him out in the brush observing his salvage operations, as he and his eight-man crew performed the herculean feat of bringing behemoths down mountain slopes to logging trucks, which transported them to nearby mills.

In Showdown, I wrote, “There is a modicum of ironic truth in the bumper sticker on pickups across the Northwest, EVERY DAY IS EARTH DAY FOR A LOGGER.” As much as office-bound environmentalists are loath to admit it, the average logger probably does enjoy a deeper affinity for nature than most of them. He spends his entire working life in the great outdoors, earning his livelihood from the land. To observe Earth Day, Hirons shared his thoughts with students of Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon, where he attended school on the first Earth Day in 1970, and with readers of the newsletter he wrote for the local chapter of a logging group.

I’ve had my nose in the dirt for the last 25 years. You just don’t get closer to it than when you come home filthy, with muck all over you, splinters sticking out of your shins, your shins scraped, and your hands full of slivers. I celebrate Earth Day on those days at 4:30 a.m. when it’s pouring down rain and I’d be just as well off if I got dressed and took a cold shower, because that’s the way I’m going to be all day. I celebrate it on those days when I’ve laid awake until 3:00, too hot to sleep, knowing that 4:30 was coming soon and that the southwest slope was going to be 90 degrees as soon as the sun hit it.

I’ve celebrated Earth Day on those days when the weather was just right, the air was cool, but not cold, the sun was shining, but not hot, the ground was good and not steep. The logs were high and the wood moved good.

I’ve seen Mother Nature’s awesome hand at work, lightning strikes, windstorms, bug kill, disease, gully washers, and the hand of man, for we are part of nature, too.

Hirons often reminded people that when it comes to logging, there are no free lunches, making it his mission to bring the urban and suburban public back to the land’s harsher realities. “They think milk comes from cartons, beef from the beef case. There’s a few of them that think pigs lay bacon. If you’re gonna build a hot tub or a house, a tree is going to fall.” In essence, he was challenging society to square the trade-off between saving wilderness and providing lumber.

In 1991, a year after expressing these sentiments, Hirons buried the hatchet with Atiyeh and forged a bold compromise plan with him to save the larger biologically viable remnants of ancient forest, such as Opal Creek, while using the lesser ones to ease the economic transition for mill towns. Much of their plan was later mirrored in the Clinton administration’s Northwest forest plan. Hirons, who kept close ties to the Republicans in Oregon’s congressional delegation, also gave them and Democrats political cover to permanently preserve Opal Creek, which Senator Mark Hatfield did in 1995 as one of his last acts before retiring.

At the same time, Hirons gave voice to the forgotten men in the woods who do so much to sustain this nation. “By force of action more than emotionally charged rhetoric, Hirons appears at once a conservationist and a logger,” I wrote at the height of the spotted owl controversy. “Whereas Atiyeh seeks to save Opal Creek, Hirons strives to avert the extinction of a noble way of life. In his outdoor office beneath the trees Hirons exudes a love of labor’s excitement and danger. By and large, the American consumers in cities and suburbs take their yeomen farmers, and woodsmen for granted. Besides friendship, two basics Atiyeh and Hirons provide society—wood and wilderness—bind them together in their competing missions.”

Note: In Mill City, a memorial scholarship has been set up in Tom Hirons’s honor to help one senior each year attend an Oregon college of his or her choice. Contributions can be sent to the Tom Hirons Memorial Scholarship, c/o Santiam High School; PO Box 199, Mill City, OR 97360.

For more information on the Opal Creek Ancient Forest Center, go to www.opalcreek.org.

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