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Not long after the Lighthawk flight, for perhaps the 30th time in two years, Thron broke the law by ignoring a no-trespassing sign in the tiny town of Fortuna and hiking up one of Pacific Lumber's logging roads. It was 10 p.m. and misting when he started, and 3 a.m., with a light rain falling, when he set up his tent. Two hours later, before first light, Thron was standing outside the tent, rain running down the back of his neck. After perhaps five minutes, he heard a short, musical, descending call -- the "keer" of a marbled murrelet. Huge, dark shapes began to coalesce in the lightening gray: the enormous trunks of redwoods and Douglas firs. By full light, Thron had tallied 23 calls from murrelets. In this April nesting season, these smallish, fast-flying seabirds trade chores in a quick exchange at dawn. The parent freed of egg-sitting duty arrows off at 55 m.p.h. for Humboldt Bay to fish for breakfast. Thron was pleased; the murrelets are endangered because they need redwood canopies to shield their nest sites from crows and ravens. He had not checked his birds since Thanksgiving because he had been touring the U.S. with his slide show, buying gas and burgers with freewill offerings, often camping in the truck with his fiancee and co-lecturer, Lucy Ingrey.
The great redwoods here, 300 ft. tall and more, would have been cut five years ago if a local group, the Environmental Protection Information Center (EPIC), had not used the Endangered Species Act to entangle Pacific Lumber in a web of lawsuits. The web may be fragile; Pacific's executives were crowing over the recent "Sweet Home" decision in the U.S. Court of Appeals in Washington that could weaken U.S. rules on the modification or degradation of wildlife habitat.
For now, the Headwaters forest has an astonishing presence, and whatever city meaning there is to the notion of anyone's owning such a place loses force among the trees. Here the concept of unregulated private property, much admired by logging outfits, is an empty legalism.But the fact is that Headwaters and miles beyond it are owned, as is Pacific Lumber, by Hurwitz's Houston-based Maxxam company. After he grabbed Pacific in a 1986 hostile takeover, paid for largely with junk bonds issued by Drexel Burnham Lambert's Michael Milken, Hurwitz visited Pacific's mills at Scotia. "There's a story about the golden rule," he told employees. "He who has the gold rules." Then he drained $55 million from the firm's $93 million pension fund and, with the remaining $38 million, bought annuities from an insurance company that collapsed. (The U.S. Labor Department is suing; so far, Pacific has made good on retirees' pensions; two weeks ago, Maxxam agreed to a $52 million settlement of a suit by shareholders dissatisfied with the takeover of Pacific.) Hurwitz also boosted the rate of old-growth logging; as Congressman Pete Stark, a California Democrat, put it, "looting the forest, meeting monthly interest payments by cutting thousand-year-old trees." Is there a moral issue here? A Maxxam spokesman dismisses the question, saying, "Our position is that sufficient redwoods are protected and that our trees are private property." (Redwood National Park, 50 miles to the north, has 38,000 acres of ancient redwoods.)