Author: dave

It was dawn, and the street was empty. That was half the appeal of it. No cars, no people, just me on a bike with a canvas bag over my shoulders and a stack of papers wrapped tight enough to throw. The Contra Costa Times dropped them in our driveway early, before anybody else in the neighborhood was up, and my sister and I would stuff the ads inside, wrap each one with a rubber band, and fold it down to a size that would fly.

Most customers were fine with the paper tossed onto their driveway. Some liked them porched. A well wrapped, well banded paper could be thrown from the street, off a moving bike, and land right up on the porch, and those were the customers who tipped. So I learned to throw, and if the toss was on target but a bit long it would thud on those wood front doors with a satisfying sound. Over the years I got pretty good at it. You learn fast from the misses, because a miss means you stop, lay the bike down, fish the paper out of somebody’s shrub by hand, and walk it up to the door. That costs time, and time was the whole game. The faster the route, the better. When you had customers on both sides of the street, papers were flying both directions and you had no hands on the handlebars.

One morning I had just landed a good run of throws, both sides, feeling it, and I looked up to see a pickup truck parked dead in my path. No hands on the bars, going at a good clip, almost no time to react. I got my hands back on just before I slammed straight into the front bumper. Me, my papers, and the bag all went up over the cab and into the bed of the truck. I wasn’t hurt. Shaken up good, but not hurt. The bike was another story. Broken frame, not rideable. So I walked over and borrowed my neighbor Curt’s bike and finished the route.

The funny part is my sister Kim ran into a station wagon on her bike a few years later. I still don’t know if that’s a family thing or just a rite of passage.

Here’s what I didn’t really see at the time. The route was a business, and I was running it. Once a month I’d sit down with the coordinator, hand over the money I had collected, and we’d go through it like any account review. New accounts. The rubber bands I had to buy for packaging. The rewards you could earn for hitting certain distribution targets. I was collecting receivables door to door, hoping for tips, before I knew a single one of those words. Growing up in the sixties and seventies provided a kid that kind of schooling without ever making a big deal out of it.

Years later, when I was bringing new traders into the lumber business, I started handing each of them the same book. It is called Rain: What a Paperboy Learned About Business, by Jeffrey Fox. It’s a parable about a kid on a paper route, and it lays the whole thing out: take care of your customers, own your territory like it belongs to you, go get new accounts, plan around the weather, handle the money. Fox makes the case that running a paper route can teach you about as much about business as a fancy degree will. I believe it, because I lived the front half of that book before I ever lived the back half. The kid on the bike and the guy doing the trades turned out to be the same person. The book was just the string that connected the two.

And there is one more thing I never thought about back then, throwing those papers onto those porches. The paper started as pulp. The pulp started as a tree. Even then, before I knew the first thing about any of it, I was already in the wood business.

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.

There is an old question people like to chew on. If a tree falls in the forest and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound? The scientist says yes. The tree hits the ground, it shoves the air around, and those waves are real whether an ear is there to catch them or not. The philosopher says no. A sound is something that happens inside a head, and with no head there is just air moving in the dark. I have spent my whole life on the scientist’s side of that fence. A falling tree makes a sound, and if you do it right it makes lumber too. But I am going to tell you about the weekend that gave me a little more perspective for the other guy.

When I was in high school I spent some time down on the Northern California coast, cleaning up the old Rule Ranch for my dad, who managed the place. The Rule Ranch had been a working ranch since 1867, a few thousand acres of grass and timber and fog up on the headlands above the town of Jenner, right where the Russian River runs out into the Pacific. My buddy Bruce Nikolai would come along, and between the two of us we made a fair clean-up crew. One winter dad set us to burning rubble, a hundred years of broken-down everything piled around the barns and the outbuildings. We spent weekend after weekend feeding fires.

I will say this for the job. The view was hard to beat. We worked three, four, five hundred feet above the ocean, and on a clear day you could see twenty miles out to sea. Up on the hill above the barns sat the original farmhouse, tucked behind an old cypress hedge gone wild. It was a tall Victorian, prominent, the kind of house that looks down on everything around it. The grounds ran better than an acre. Folks in town told stories about that house. There were ghosts up there, they said. Somebody had even written it up, the haunted house on the hill above Jenner. Bruce and I did not know any of that, and would not have cared much if we had. We had fires to feed.

Once the outside was clean, Dad turned us loose on the contents of the house itself, on a part of it that had been shut up and abandoned for years. We burned what would burn and hauled the rest to a dump a couple miles away. One Saturday afternoon we were digging out a room that was packed clear to the ceiling. There was so much junk you could not even swing the door open, so we passed most of it out through the window. And down at the very bottom of all of it, under everything, was a coffin.

We did not open it. We looked at it, we left it sitting there, and we quit for the day and went to dinner. Then we called my dad to ask what in the world a person does with a coffin. He did not miss a beat. Take it out of there, he said, and if it’s empty, burn it.

Now a coffin is just a wooden box, and I came up in a family that knew wood. So Sunday morning we drove back up the hill and got the burn pile going, and mid-morning we worked up the nerve to look inside. Empty. Just one old red sheet, some linens, nothing else. We carried it over and threw it on the fire. It burned hot, the way good dry wood does. We finished out the day, drove home, and I did not give it another thought.

Not for a while, anyway. Later that year, off at college, I heard the house on the hill was not haunted anymore. The ghosts were gone. And a few weeks after that, I heard the big Victorian had burned right down to the ground.

Coincidence? Maybe. But I do not think so. I think two kids dug a coffin out from under a hundred years of junk and set it on fire, and in the doing we let something loose up there. And whatever it was came back and did to that house exactly what we had done to the coffin. Lit it up.

Those headlands are still there. You cannot build on them now, or buy a lot, or run a ranch across them. In 2009 the Sonoma Land Trust and a long string of partners put together thirty-six million dollars and bought the whole place, all five thousand six hundred and thirty acres. The biggest piece of land ever set aside in that county. Now it is the Jenner Headlands Preserve, wild and open and protected for good. The haunted house is gone. The hill it stood on will be there forever.

If a tree falls up there today, I suppose it still makes a sound. I just would not bet my life anymore on who is doing the listening.

Stewed tomatoes, 4 to 6 cups or more.  Fresh roasted in oven for 45 min or canned. Put in large chili pot with a can of chicken stock.  Cook 1 to 2 lbs ground buffalo till brown and cut to little pieces with spatula as cooking.  In same pan with remnants saute two large onions and some bell peppers diced and sweat till translucent.  Season with pepper, salt & garlic.  Add to pot.  Add chili powder about 5 tablespoons.  Add salt pepper and a small can diced chilies.  Drain and rinse 1 or 2 cans red kidney beans.  Add after pot has come to boil and reduce heat to simmer.  Check taste after 1/2 hour and add spices as you desire.  If too soupy add tomato paste.

If you like add dark chocolate and cinnamon.

This gets better over time. Usually the next day I pull the pot out of fridge and slowly reheat.

Serve with avocado diced fresh sweet onions and sour cream

My college roommate Jim Crystal spent his summers as a river guide. For years I heard the stories. The rapids and the wildlife and the people who came off the water a little different than they got on. I loved every one of them. I just never found the time to go myself. Not until I was fifty.

Some years back the company Jim guided for was headed for closure. Jim had the chance to buy it and keep it alive, so he did. It is called OTT, Orange Torpedo Trips, named for the little inflatable kayaks you ride down the river.

Around the same time Jim bought OTT, Brad Mehl came on as my partner at Patrick Lumber. Brad grew up on the Rogue River, rafting it with his dad and his brother, and he had guided for OTT himself back in college. He loves that river the way some people love a hometown. We had just clawed our way out of the bottom of the great recession, and we were looking for ways to pull the trading group back together. Brad suggested the Rogue lodge trip OTT ran. We booked our first one in 2014. Some piece of the Patrick crew has been on that river every year since.

Here is the thing about the Rogue. It is a cold plunge whether you signed up for one or not. You hit that water and your whole body wakes up at once, and the first thought through your head, every time, is that you wish there was a sauna waiting at the other end.

When I picture that sauna I picture the one at my health club. A few years back Finlandia Sauna redid it in vertical grain red cedar. The first month it smelled so fresh and clean it stopped me at the door, because it smelled exactly like the mill when we are sawing western red cedar. That bright, aromatic cut you can taste in the back of your throat. After a few months it faded the way those rooms do, settling into the mix of smells a sauna picks up when it is bolted to the showers down in a giant basement locker room. Still cedar. Still worth heading to. Just a little less of that fresh cut magic. The river and the mill, the same wood, the same smell, sitting at opposite ends of the same good day.

In the summer of 2017, after our good friend Jimmy Mac passed away, six of us ran the Rogue and then went straight onto the lower Salmon, seven days on the water back to back. Jim calls that one the Hostage Crisis. I did not really understand the name until day six, when Cris Schureman looked over at me and said, at least in jail you get a phone call. He was right. No phone works down in that canyon. You go with the gang or you do not go at all. A few came from Patrick, but most were OSU Beavers, and Jimmy’s son came along. We shared the old stories and built a few new ones, which is about all you can do and pretty close to everything you can do.

The next summer, in 2018, I took my boys down the Rogue. Nick, Jack and Zack. I think they loved it as much as I do. Watching the three of them build their own thing with each other, brother to brother, was worth the whole trip ten times over. Good food, big water, the best company there is.

One thing I notice when I look back at all of it. Jim, Brad, Tom Brugato and Cris have been on every single one of these trips with me. That is no accident, and it is no small thing. You want to know a man, put him in a boat for a week where the phone does not work. Thank you, my friends.

 

 

 

On Friday, the 20th of July, 2018, we gathered for John Jayne’s celebration of life. He had been my boss at Disdero Lumber from 1986 to 1997, and a good chunk of who I am in this business came from those years standing next to him.

Tumac ran deep in my family before I ever showed up to work. My grandfather, one of the two Macs, founded it in 1959, and my mom was the first employee Tumac ever hired. First one through the door. Disdero was a Tumac company, so when I came on full time in 1986, after a summer there in ’85 and my senior year at Oregon State University, I was already inside the house my family helped build. John was the man who ran it.

He was about the most personable guy I knew in the business, and that was no small thing in a trade that lives and dies on relationships. People liked being around John, and so did I. He was also a tremendous golfer. He carried a 2 handicap. Dave Menkens and I would pair with John and a fourth in the industry tournaments, and we cleaned up. There was a ten year stretch where we brought home at least one trophy every single year. A lot of good times on that course, and a lot of business done between the tee box and the green.

Under John, Disdero grew from a Northwest outfit into something a lot bigger. He brought in Lockdeck with Gunnar Brink, opened distribution yards in Washington and California, and found the profitable lines and pushed them. When it came time to divide up the pie, he was generous about it. Upright and fair, every time. He gave me a long leash too, at a younger age than I should. When he made general manager he put me on his quasi executive committee alongside Perry, Loren, and Coop. Those were good years. We worked hard, we had fun, and I figured it would just keep going like that.

It didn’t. My run at Disdero ended in 1997. I had been pushing too hard for quantitative compensation for some of our people, the kind of defined structure that pays a person for what they actually bring in. The final straw was a book. I had shared it with our Seattle branch manager. Gunnar told the story his own way years later, in a speech in December of 2017, and he embellished it the way a good storyteller will:

“He was also strong willed, confident, and didn’t always agree with management. Young, aggressive, and not yet politically savvy, he pushed things a little too far. He loved books, and he loved to share them with others, but when he gave the president of the company a book titled ‘How to Fire Your Boss,’ one chapter ended and another was about to begin.”

Mike Blanchet was the Tumac president, and he was the one calling the shots. Paul McCracken, the chairman, let him run the company with plenty of rope. So the decision came down from up top, and John was the one who had to carry it to me. I have never held that against him. I was thirty three, very aggressive, not very political. I rubbed some people the wrong way and it came back to bite me. I didn’t leave. I was let go.

It was tough. I thought hard about getting out of lumber for good and going to do ceramics instead. But here is the part I couldn’t see, standing in that room in 1997. I think John knew, in his heart, that I would be better off out of there. The man who handed me the worst news of my career may have understood, before I did, that he was opening a door instead of closing one.

I started making phone calls. Three out of the first ten turned into job offers. One of them was to Jim Rodway at Patrick Lumber.

Sometimes life works out in the hardest of times, and you don’t get to know it while it’s happening. There’s a kind of knowing that runs out ahead of the facts. You feel it in someone before they say it, and you only recognize it later, looking back from the far side. Faith is believing in that. The unknown, the unseen, the sense that the thing breaking your heart today is pointing you somewhere you couldn’t have walked to on your own.

Standing at his celebration of life, I wasn’t thinking about any of that. I was thinking about the long leash, the trophies, the good name he kept. I will always remember John for his good nature and his golf game, and for being the man who let me go and, somehow, set me free.

A prune tree gives you three completely different things, and most people never meet more than one of them. The wood smokes meat better than almost anything, low and slow, that particular sweetness working its way in. The fruit comes off the branch fresh, plump and oh so sweet. And dried down it becomes those wrinkled purple-black nuggets your grandmother kept in a bowl on the counter. Same tree, three reference points, three completely different experiences. I know all three because in the summer of 1984, when I was twenty, I worked on my dad’s Uncle Bill’s prune farm in the California valley.

We always called him Uncle Bill, my dad’s uncle, my grandpa Halsey’s brother. He grew prunes and walnuts in Colusa, on what was left of the Oakland Prune Company property that the family had been part of a generation back. Bill had been at it for decades and knew every acre, and he was also an inventor. After the war he bought a lot of surplus military planes off the government, not to fly them, but for the wooden crates they came in. He turned those boxes into housing for the crews who came to bring the prunes off the trees.

Picking prunes by hand is brutal, slow work, so Bill built a machine to do it. The harvester came in two halves, a shaker unit and a receiver unit. Two gas-powered rigs you drove down either side of a row. The shaker would reach out, take hold of a tree, and shake it until the ripe fruit came down. On the early models a canvas rolled out to catch the prunes and spooled them back into the receiver. Later he reworked it so the canvas dropped its whole load straight into the receiver bin. Every two or three trees you had a full wooden bin. They built the machines right there in Colusa, next to the dehydrator. A working farm that designed and built its own equipment.

For part of that summer, my job was the field lift. You ran out into the rows, forked up two of those bins at a time, and hauled them back to the truck. All day, every day, for about a month, until everything was in.

From the field, the bins went to the dehydrator. They held French plums: green on the tree, prunes once they are dried. Ripe, they run almost forty percent sugar, about as sweet as fruit gets. The plant laid them on drying racks, stacked the racks high, and ran them through long tunnels until they came out the far end as prunes. The whole idea is a leftover from the gold-mining days, a way to put fruit up for the winter when there was no other way to keep it. You can still buy them at Costco. Sunsweet calls them dried plums now, because somewhere along the line the word prune picked up a reputation, the thing your grandparents ate at breakfast with a little cream to keep things moving. Same fruit. I loved that summer, and everything I saw there about manufacturing and drying stuck with me. A lot of it carried straight into the wood business I am in now, the drying especially. Green wood and green fruit are not so different. You are managing water and time.

My mom’s dad, Bill McPherson, was a lumber broker, and to a kid he was something close to magic. A big, happy, generous man with a great smile. We lived in the Bay Area, and in the summers I would come up to stay with him in Portland, where he would set out berries and cream for breakfast and then head off to spend the day buying and selling lumber. It looked like the coolest thing a person could do, and he had built his whole career on handshakes and relationships. He was one of the founding partners of Tumac Lumber back in 1959. I worked two summers for companies Tumac had picked up over the years, KD Cedar one summer and Disdero the next. When I graduated I went to work at Disdero in Portland; which meant I saw him a couple of times a week. My grandma had passed years before, and he had retired to Charbonneau, just south of Portland. I would drive over, cook him dinner, and sit out on his back porch mostly to hear what he had to say. I was there the afternoon the World Series turned into something else, the A’s and the Giants at Candlestick, when the ground let go and the broadcast went from baseball to the Bay Bridge coming apart. We watched it together.

He gave me a lot of advice over those years, but one piece stuck harder than the rest. I was complaining, which I am capable of, that my sales territory ran from Eugene down to Ashland, all of southern Oregon, a stretch with more sawmills than lumberyards. Hard country to sell lumber into. He asked who our biggest customer was. A spa outfit called Pacific Marquis, I told him, a hot tub maker. He asked where they were. Up in the Willamette Valley, I said, over near Salem. Then he said: wherever your territory is, there is plenty of opportunity. Don’t complain about it. Do something about it. Not long after, I got a stack of phone books from my dad and started working the route south, out of southern Oregon and down into northern California, calling on customers nobody had bothered with. Grandpa passed in 1994. I still miss him.

A few years after Grandpa died, word came in that Uncle Bill’s old prune ranch in Colusa was available. It was a working farm, still producing. There was some money we all had together, not a lot but enough for a downpayment on a loan that had come from my grandpa’s estate. We put it into the prune farm, reinvest, get into land. My grandpa’s Tumac money went to work growing Sunsweet prunes. That felt right to all of us. It was the first real step into farming we ever took as a family.

Eventually a federal farm bill created an incentive to remove old orchards. We took it, pulled the prune trees, and paid off the loan. After that we crop-shared the acreage with a local farmer and shifted to row crops. Our primary go-to ended up being lima beans. Not glamorous, but the ground liked it and the numbers penciled.

Then came 2008. The Great Recession hit and the Colusa milling operation could not find a buyer at a reasonable price for our dried and bagged beans. We held them in storage and waited. Same story in 2009. The pile grew and we waited some more.

Late in 2009 my dad called. He had a buyer.

When the receipt came through, I looked at the broker line. It said Tumac.

The same Tumac my grandpa helped start fifty years before. His old trading company, the one that built the money we used to buy the farm, was now closing the sale on our lima bean harvest.

The prune trees at Colusa were gone by then. We bought land of our own up in Newberg to carry it on, and in 2002 I planted twelve French prune trees there. I wanted my boys to know that taste, the fresh fruit and the dried fruit, and the smoke. Some things you can only understand if you’ve done all three. And some things you can’t plan. They just come back around on their own.

My grandpa would have liked knowing that.

Welcome to Halsey Sites.  My blogs will vary in length, content and timeliness.