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| The Rotterdam Shopping Mall was once my Great Grandfather's home |
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I don't celebrate the forest festival by paying homage to logging. I reject the foolish heritage of the destruction of the forest that my ancestors left for me, and I hope to leave a different legacy for my descendants.
My earliest known ancestors on my paternal line, were French Huguenots who fled to Holland. Their children became Dutch Merchants and two generations later, in about 1650, they fell off a boat in New York City. At the time, NYC was known as New Amsterdam. My ancestors went on to be original settlers in the cities of Albany and Schenectady. They even survived the burning of Schenectady by the "French and Indians". The Rotterdam shopping mall now sits on the family home and a remnant of the family cemetery still sits at the front entrance to the mall. According to the sign my Grandpa Harmen Albertse might be buried there.
Two hundred years later, in 1845 some of my paternal ancestors came over the Oregon trail, they were part of the famous "lost Meek" party of '45. My Great-Great-Great grandma died during the journey and she is buried near the Dechutes river in Oregon. ( See her grave here: http://www.rutnut.com/nwocta/graves/butts/grave.html)
My earliest known ancestors on my paternal line, were French Huguenots who fled to Holland. Their children became Dutch Merchants and two generations later, in about 1650, they fell off a boat in New York City. At the time, NYC was known as New Amsterdam. My ancestors went on to be original settlers in the cities of Albany and Schenectady. They even survived the burning of Schenectady by the "French and Indians". The Rotterdam shopping mall now sits on the family home and a remnant of the family cemetery still sits at the front entrance to the mall. According to the sign my Grandpa Harmen Albertse might be buried there.
Two hundred years later, in 1845 some of my paternal ancestors came over the Oregon trail, they were part of the famous "lost Meek" party of '45. My Great-Great-Great grandma died during the journey and she is buried near the Dechutes river in Oregon. ( See her grave here: http://www.rutnut.com/nwocta/graves/butts/grave.html)
Later her grandson, who is my great grandpa, brought the first car to Nehalem Bay Oregon. We have pictures of my great grandparents sitting in that car with their kids, the road that the car is sitting on is made of wooden planks.
Grandpa also owned a shake mill. Sadly, his shake mill was used to turn old growth cedar trees into stumps and shingles. To our foolish ancestors the trees may have seemed limitless, but the greedy capitalists knew better, they had already razed all the trees in the east and the midwest and were forced to move west on their path of destruction. When the logging companies finally reached the Pacific ocean they knew it was all over. The continent had been logged and the indigenous people had been "displaced", from sea to shining sea.
Grandpa also owned a shake mill. Sadly, his shake mill was used to turn old growth cedar trees into stumps and shingles. To our foolish ancestors the trees may have seemed limitless, but the greedy capitalists knew better, they had already razed all the trees in the east and the midwest and were forced to move west on their path of destruction. When the logging companies finally reached the Pacific ocean they knew it was all over. The continent had been logged and the indigenous people had been "displaced", from sea to shining sea.
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| My great-grandparents who owned a shake mill |
I honor my ancestors, and their will to survive, but I do not honor what happened to this land and what happened to the people who are indigenous to it. I wish that Shelton could learn to do the same thing. The forest festival could and should be a celebration of the forest that used to sustain us, not a motorized, pollution spewing celebration of timber barons and their destructive logging practices. In other words, a deforestation festival. Every year they bring in the biggest trees they can find and haul their carcasses through town on a logging truck. Every year the trees are smaller. Will they ever learn?
The forest festival should be a celebration of nature and the little piece of it that we saved in the form of Olympic National park and the few odd trees that survived outside the park. The forest festival should not be a celebration of the past, it should be a dire warning. Never again! We must honor the land and not our destructive past. We should cringe when we see the old pictures of idiots standing so proudly on giant stumps with saws in their hands.
We can't ignore what we did to the land, the old growth stumps have not even finished rotting and the water and air are already poisoned. We need to pull our heads out of the sand and try to rectify the situation, stop the capitalist class and reverse our course, before it's too late. Paul Bunyan is no hero of mine.
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| Old growth cedar stump hidden in what passes for a forest these days |
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| Old growth cedar tree, there are very few of these left. Most people have no idea what has been lost. |
I find this post and the personal story contained within intensely interesting and sadly disturbing. It is, however, a bit unfair to criticize those who lived in a world when prospects of deforestation were unfathomable. My own father used to wonder at my lamenting the ruination of an entire species of animals when compared to his own childhood, some of which was spent sitting at a grade school desk in a New York City counting the number of lice on the head of the girl sitting in front of him. All things are relative to the times in which they occurred and there is plenty of blame to go around. But one should always remember that it is because of our ancestors we are able to ruminate on the shape of our belly-buttons instead of scratching in the dirt for our next meal. Admittedly, I am at times at odds with my own opinion, but it is good to remember that we live on the graves, the achievments and the failures of those who came before us. And like raising childen, we do the best we can and hope they will do a better job still.
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