I grew up in the Northern California Bay Area, surrounded by redwood, the trees and the lumber both. We had coastal redwoods in the backyard, young ones, fifty years old maybe, and I could climb them sixty feet up, way above the houses, where you could see a long way. Our fence was redwood, four-by-fours and split pickets. The siding was redwood plywood with a clear finish. The trim inside the house was redwood. My dad was a forester, so the wood was not just around us. It was the thing we talked about, the thing we hiked through on the weekends, the thing growing out of little cut burls on the kitchen table.
When I was in high school a lumber company was in the news. Palco, up on the Eel River, one of the old family redwood companies. A Texas outfit called Maxxam went after them in a hostile takeover. My dad was involved with the Oakland forestry firm that Maxxam hired to cruise the timber, Hammon, Jensen and Wallen and he shared the volumes with me. At the rate they would have to cut to pay for the deal, he figured the fine vertical grain redwood, the clear heartwood the whole trade was built on, would be gone in commercial volume within twenty years. I went off to college and into the lumber business, and by the late eighties Maxxam had doubled the cut. This won’t last, my dad said. There isn’t enough timber.
If you want the whole story of how Palco came apart, a journalist named David Harris wrote about it in a book called The Last Stand. It is the best account I have read of that fight, Wall Street against a hundred-year-old company over the last of the big redwoods.
He was right about the timber. When Maxxam finally sold off the Headwaters ground, about seventy-five hundred acres of it, the run of vertical-grain all-heart redwood was finished as a volume product. The square the redwood had always filled went empty.
I had seen it coming, because my dad had shown me the numbers years before anybody else was looking at them. The company I was working for had the answer ready to go. KD Cedar, down in Hayward, was the right arm to move vertical-grain western red cedar into the gap the redwood was leaving, and I knew the place from the ground up. One summer in college I had worked in that yard, sorting the vertical grain out from the flat grain by hand. Back then the mills in British Columbia were not even cutting for vertical grain. They ran it all together and sold it mixed. A decade later I got the chance to run KD Cedar myself, from 1992 to 1997, with exactly that in mind. It landed with the yards that knew the difference, Beronio, Melrose, Van Arsdale, Channel, Truitt and White. A lot of them stocked the cedar in the same bins the redwood used to sit in. It was a natural fit. Some of them kept right on calling it red wood, which works fine if you hear it the right way. Western red cedar wood.
When I started at Patrick Lumber in 1997 we had a stronger hand. Patrick’s supply relationships up in British Columbia let us push the cedar harder in California, and we spent the next decade widening both the customer base and the supply base. Brad Meeker was our first vertical-grain cedar supplier, cutting it at his mill, Errington Cedar, which his partner Albert Orcutt ran. Boy did that mill smell good. In the 2000s we got down into Southern California, where the yards had been sold thin, low-grade flat-grain cedar and had never seen full-sawn vertical-grain stock. Once they did, they did not want to go back.
My father planted the seed for the whole thing. He had the data and the long view, and you can see that same thing playing out on a bigger scale today, information itself turning into the most valuable thing a person can hold. But it was my grandfather’s company, Tumac, that had the connections to make it real. The volumes are smaller now than they were twenty years ago, but the builders and architects in California still write cedar into the plans where redwood used to be the standard. Others saw the same opening we did. We hold a significant share of that market because we got there first and we were straight with people.
A lot of the cedar we run now was never a fresh harvest at all. Some of it is fire salvage. Some of it came down decades ago and just lay there in the woods. I have a supplier on Vancouver Island who hunts the big logs, the long moss-covered ones back in the timber, and he told me his crew once found a half-carved canoe up over three thousand feet, left by a First Nations carver and forgotten for centuries. Cedar takes forever to rot. That is the reason it holds up on the side of a house and the reason it could stand in for redwood at all.
The land outlasted all of it. After Palco went bankrupt, its ground and the mill in the town of Scotia ended up with the Fisher family, the one behind the Gap, who run it now as Humboldt Redwood. We still buy from them, mostly Douglas fir and a little redwood. It is the same ground my dad once put a number on, still standing, still growing trees, still selling lumber. And redwood does not stay gone for long. One of the Thompson Timber guys told me it is the fastest-growing tree in North America, and that they have put thousands of coastal redwoods in the ground on their own timberland, right here in Oregon.