On the Oregon Coast, awaiting the hurricane-force winds that are supposed to smack Astoria sometime today, I was awakened at 4 am from a dream of playing centerfield for the Orioles by loud metallic noises, thinking that part of the roof of the old motel had been shredded off. Well, the winds hadn’t arrived yet, but about 25 log trucks had queued up right outside my motel room door, their engines rumbling like flatulent bears in the fog, waiting to enter the log export docks, where they were being loaded up, one by one. I grabbed my Gore-Tex jacket–which is missing either the Gore or the Tex because I was quickly soaked–and my iPhone and stumbled out into the rain, and snapped a few photos of the malign art of log-loading in the dark until security chased me off the site under threat of either arrest or being loaded along with the logs and sent to a pulp mill in South Korea. Most of the logs were thin, almost emaciated-looking, another grim indication that the big trees in our temperate rainforest are mostly gone, and all that’s left are pecker poles and piss firs that log truck drivers 30 years ago–who prided themselves on driving three-loads–would have been embarrassed to haul. Perhaps that’s why they do it at night: to hide their shame.

  All photographs by Jeffrey St. Clair.

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