Summary
This is an old logging road - this gnarled, overgrown greenway deep in Oregon's Coast Range. Only one thing sets it apart from the rest of the ravine: There are no tall trees. Not yet, anyway. When Kim Erion last walked the road eight years ago, log-laden trucks could still rumble down it. Now she claws back salmonberry groves and sidesteps foxglove spires. Compact and kinetic like a wrestler, her ever -braided brunette ponytail pulled through her cap, Erion spots a log and shouts, "This is my log, and so is this one," then hugs the wood and calls it "my baby."
The job contract didn't include the hay, but Erion believed the road needed it to heal. Her contracts also never require that she lose sleep if she doesn't place a fern just so - but she does. Knowing where a rock or log should go is sensual for her, part of a deep intuitive awareness of the forest. "I could hear where the logs wanted to be placed in the stream cutbanks," she says. "I could sense where and when to replant existing rhododendrons."Erion grew up in a dying timber town outside Portland, where her father logged Mount Hood's forests and taught her to run the heavy rigs she now uses to decommission his old logging roads. He was the type of guy who would flick cigarettes into the forest, Erion says, then toss the pack after them. She was the type of 6-year-old who yelled at him for it. Her mom eventually divorced Erion's dad, moved to Portland and opened The Goddess Gallery, where she sold Roman, Egyptian and pagan idols, crystals and Mother Earth icons.See the full content of this document
Extract
Nirvana On a Backhoe
Name Kirn Erion
Age 39HometownWashougal, Wash.She saysAbout the green jobs movement: "The whole thing makes me sick! It is giving Johnny Backhoe Sewer-LineExtraordinaire a ticket to change his name because he failed at busi...See the full content of this document
Sponsored links
